CHAPTER XIII
THE MOST MAGNIFICENT
{{di|THEODORE LASCARIS, the Comnenus, the Augustus of the world and inheritor of the last of the realm of Constantine, had been greatly cheered by the visit of his Arab physician that day. Although there were skilled doctors among the Greeks in the palace, Lascaris trusted the disciple of Avicenna more than his countrymen. And the Arab hakim had told him that the fever had left him. The long illness that had kept him on his couch for nearly a year would soon be at an end.
“Ehu!” The emperor raised himself weakly on his arm. “Three hundred gilt candles I vow to Hagia Sophia. Eh, Rusudan?”
The girl who sat among the slaves bent her head. Her hands moved over the embroidery stretched on its sandalwood frame.
“What sayest thou, Rusudan?”
“God gives.”
“Aye—aye.” Lascaris crossed himself hastily on forehead and breast. “Exalted be His name for the ages. But the worthy Saracen is a truth-speaker. Recovery is sure.”
Rusudan bent lower her dark head so that the sick man could not read her face though he tried. The other women, who were not allowed to divert themselves with embroidery when they were in attendance on the emperor, whispered among themselves.
“Bring me wine—a little, cooled by snow—Rusudan.”
The supple hands of the Georgian ceased their task, and she stuck the needle upright in the cloth, rising to go to an inner chamber where the chief of the eunuchs sat. She returned with a goblet of Venetian glass and knelt by the couch of the sick man.
“Taste!” he ordered.
As she had done many times before, she sipped a little of the wine and held the goblet so that Lascaris could watch her face until he was satisfied the wine had no poison dissolved in it. He could see her very clearly because it was near the hour of vespers when the sun, sinking into the sea, filled the long gallery of the palace with a ruddy glow.
Even the carpet, woven by the silk looms of Persia, was tinged by this glow, likewise the heavy canopy of Tyrian purple over the couch. The head of Lascaris, bloodless in its pallor, was faintly flushed. The skin lay in folds under his eyes and his thin mouth showed no lips at all; the flesh had fallen away from the bone so much that the aspect was that of a skull, for his hair had been clipped close.
“Eh, Rusudan,” he murmured, “thou dost hate me, without doubt. A self-willed barbarian, an unwilling captive and a scornful attendant. Thou hast mocked the worthy strategos until I do believe he was moved to make thee a gift to me. I bear with thee because no one would give thee gold to do harm to me.”
The downcast eyes of the girl gleamed resentfully.
“A daughter of the Lashas accepts no reward for service.”
“Then surely the Lashas are descended from Olympus! Hmm. The eunuchs all complain of thee for good reason, I doubt not.”
Something like a smile wrinkled his lips. Rusudan had all but knifed to death an Egyptian eunuch who had tried to punish her. The incident delighted Lascaris, though he had the dagger taken from her.
And he noticed that the Arab physician talked with her, but would not speak to the slave-girls.
“Many Lashas have died in defense of the Lord emperor,” she made answer quietly.
He motioned for her to give him the goblet, and drank slowly, taking no heed, apparently, of her words. Lascaris was resourceful and utterly merciless, and these qualities had kept him safe from assassination for twelve years. Even his distant cousins, the Comneni of Sinope and Trebizond feared him, though he did not doubt they plotted against him. As for Choaspes, he fancied the strategos of the Khaukesh was too indolent to be unpleasantly ambitious and, besides, had been absent a long time from the court.
His informers reported that Choaspes did nothing but hold revels in his galley and row from villa to villa along the coast, squandering money among his intimates.
“Yet Choaspes,” he remarked suddenly, “is not wont to give away anything he cherishes.”
He leaned back on the mass of cushions considering her. A girl, innocent still, too slender for perfect proportion—too wide in the lips and chin for perfect beauty—her dark tresses contrasting charmingly with her fair skin; too impulsive to hide her likes and dislikes, and inclined to weep when she was alone, though not before others. She had nursed him faithfully, and understood the Arab's instructions easily.
And when she sang she could drive away this weariness that came on the heels of the fever.
“Take thy cithara, Rusudan,” he said, “and sing.”
Obediently the girl put away the goblet and picked up the instrument, seating herself on the threshold of the balcony at a distance from the couch. Her clear young voice soared within the chamber, rising to the dome of mosaic-work that pictured angels grouped under a gold cross.
“Arg, my falcon, is quick to see
Quest and quarry and fly back to me—”
The Greek slaves, trained to the lute and to gentler harmony, fidgeted and smiled, wishing to show their disapproval, but Lascaris relished the savage undertone of the gipsy song.
Many times had Rusudan repeated the song, and when she had finished she half closed her eyes, leaning her head against the marble pillar, thinking of anything but the whispering women and the glow of sunset on the yellow marble. It was months since she had quieted Hugh in his fever with that same song.
As she meditated she was aware of another singer, a man with a lusty voice, and none too sensitive an ear. For a while she could not catch the words; then she remembered that it was an Arabian air, and one she knew very well, though the singer improvised the words.
“Ask for the stars,
O Miriam!
I will pluck them for thee.
For Miriam.”
Some of the Greek slaves heard it too, and went out on the balcony to look down at the sea.
“It is the young Bokharian,” one of them whispered.
“The slave dealer?”
“He rows all around the quays and even dares come near the palace itself. Hark to him!”
“Ask not the moon,
Sweet Miriam,
For that I have pledged—
To Zuleika!”
When the other women had gone in, Rusudan stood up, tossed the dark mass of her hair back from her throat and sauntered out on the balcony as if seeking the cool air that came off the sea in the evening.
A hundred feet below her a small barge rowed by negroes was making the circuit of the promontory on which the palace stood. On the cushions in the stem was visible a figure in a striped khalat and a broad turban of gleaming blue silk.
Rusudan thought she had seen such garments on a horse trader who used to come to the castle at Tphilis, but when the singer looked up she knew this was not the man. He had round cheeks and no beard at all. The little thrill of hope that had risen in her at the familiar refrain and the Moslem garments died.
The barge went on its way with even strokes of the oars, keeping its distance from the rock because it was forbidden any craft to approach near the promontory.
Upon this great mass of rock the palace of the Chersonese had been built, its walls of yellow marble rising sheer from the slope of the stone. Here and there towers peered above the many roofs of the miniature city. Rusudan had heard from the Greek slave-girls, who seemed to know everything, that the rock under them had been honeycombed by the waters of other ages, and passages descended into its depths—passages that led to store=houses and other chambers where the torturers of the emperor kept their instruments.
She had been told that long ago the ship of Jason and his Argonauts had sailed under this promontory, seeking Colchis. Others said that Mithridates, the lord of the Boshphorus, had been wont to sit in a throne carved in the summit of the rock, to review his fleets of galleys. She noticed that some of the columns of the porticoes were Roman work, and that the yellow marble was certainly very old.
Many times she had thought of trying to escape; but any one who leaped from the balconies would be dashed against the jagged slope of rock. Besides, at night the guard boats of the Genoese and Lombards patroled the promontory.
As for trying to make her way to the shore, that was impossible. Eunuchs guarded the quarters of the women, and Greek spearmen every corridor and wall that led to the one gate of the palace. From this gate a narrow path ran along the ridge to the shore, in places not wide enough for a man to pass a horse.
At the far end of this neck of land was a massive wall flanked by towers rising from the steep cliff of the shore. This wall was a citadel in itself, always held by several companies of archers and men-at-arms under a trusted officer. No one could come out to the palace or leave it without being scrutinized.
Rusudan knew every detail of the shore, with its wide half-moon harbor filled with galleons from Genoa and clumsy craft of Constantinople, with swift little caiques plying among them, and the pleasure galleys and barges of the Greeks drifting from cove to cove.
Beyond the masses of painted wooden houses that lined the waterfront were rolling hills—white villas seen through the cool green of plane-trees and poplars, and here and there the glint of running water—gentle hills, beautiful in the half light of evening. But they were utterly unlike the giant Khaukesh, and they did not comfort the lonely Rusudan.
Now that the sun had set, the glow left the marble walls. Rusudan shivered, listening to the drone of the swell below her. The palace, with its spearmen in silvered mail, its barefoot slaves and throngs of whispering men, seemed to the girl to be a gigantic prison, and he who lay on the couch under the purple canopy in the dusk appeared to the girl to be not its master but one of its multitude of slaves.
Rusudan really felt sorry for Lascaris. She could hear him now, talking low-voiced to some one—a slender Lombard in hose and damask doublet, who knelt on the carpet, shielding his eyes with his arm as if from a dazzling light.
Because Lascaris must have forgotten her presence on the balcony, she kept very still and listened. The emperor was asking for news of the city, and the Lombard surely was an informer.
“No furs have come in from the northern trading posts, our agents say, may it please your august Majesty. There has been fighting on the Dnieper.”
“So near? The tribesmen?”
“May your clemency be enlightened! The savage Russians of the northern forests were slaughtered and scattered by the pagans from Cathay—the Horde, as it is called.”
“Ah.” Lascaris was silent a moment. “I remember Choaspes described them to me.”
“Some say they are the spawn of Gog and Magog, the soldiers of Antichrist come out of the deserts.”
“They will not leave the steppes. But send Kallinos to me.”
To Kallinos, commander of the mounted archers, the girl heard Lascaris give orders to station outposts in the hills and to arrange a beacon where the highroad from the north came within sight of the Chersonese five miles distant—this in case the pagans should send raiding parties down toward the sea.
Then Rusudan heard him berating the Genoese merchants who demanded more and more privileges. She slipped away into another corridor, past the guards of the women's quarters to her chamber that was next the apartment of the Domastikos, the chamberlain who was charged to watch over her.
An oil-lamp burned near her pallet—she must always have a light in the room —and a wrinkled Scythian woman, with the marks of slave-bracelets still on her arms, glided from the shadows.
“Come, Kyria, I have prepared rose-sweetened sherbet and stuffed olives and rice with—”
“But I am not hungry.”
“Kyria, if you do not eat sweets you will not become plump and beautiful.”
Rusudan took up the bronze mirror on the ebony stand by her bed and looked at herself for a moment. Then she went to the window, throwing herself down on the floor and resting her head on her arms.
She could still see the port with its anchored ships, and for a while she watched a curtained galley that moved slowly seaward. Lanterns were hung about the deck of the pleasure craft, and she heard the lilt of a woman's voice and the clear melody of a harp.
“That is the boat of Choaspes the mighty lord,” observed the woman behind her. “He sends daily to ask of your health.”
“He has a sheep's heart and a lying tongue,” declared Rusudan suddenly.
“Ai, he is not a hard master.”
Rusudan watched the boat move away toward the villa of the strategos and heard the chant of men's voices, rhythmical and sure—of men indolent and happy and full-fed—and the chant was an invocation to the gods that had once been worshiped when Greece ruled this shore, seeking forgetfulness in its paradise.
But Rusudan, remembering many things, buried her dark head in her arms. The Scythian, watching her covertly, began to eat the dainties prepared for her mistress.
ARSLAN flung a handful of silver at the blacks who had rowed his barge, watched them scramble for the coins, and swaggered away down the stone jetty, one hand on his simitar hilt.
He sniffed the reek of fish frying in oil in a cook-shop, but hastened on without pausing until he dived into the dark alleys of the Genoese quarter, and came to a mud house without windows but with a spacious courtyard where a group of hawk-faced and turbaned warriors lay in the sand around a fire.
They greeted him with growls, and he grinned as he answered them.
“What! Ye have eaten—there is wine! Sleep and grow fat!”
Still, they were not content and said so.
“Then take service with the Greeks.” Arslan chuckled. “Nay, it is not ten days that we came hither over the sea, the Swooping Hawk showing the way. Before then ye made moan because the boat went up and down and sidewise, as is the manner of boats. And before that ye were weary of waiting. But he is not weary.”
“Is there word yet?” asked one.
“In this place is the talk of many lands. Kai, I have learned the price of Cyprian wine and of men with black skins.”
The warrior cursed, and another rose up to stretch and spit. Arslan had chosen his followers from among the Uighurs and the Almalyk Turks, and the result was a fair resemblance to Muhammadans in dress and bearing, but he dared not trust them in the streets and he found them less patient than steppe wolves.
He had come to the Chersonese by night and had rented the house near the waterfront without much trouble, having gold as well as silver. A Bokharian bringing slaves from the Khaukesh might readily desire secrecy.
“We be weary of sitting on carpets,” another warrior complained. “Let us go to the horse market.”
“And be sitting on stakes for the Greeks to stare at. Only the nobles ride in this place.”
It irked Arslan that he had to make his way around on foot, and that he could not pick a quarrel.
“Detachments of cavalry have gone forth,” he observed thoughtfully, “and there is talk of guarding the roads. The time appointed is not distant.”
When they would have questioned him more, he went into the house, stepping over three Circassian women asleep on the carpet. They were young and not ill-looking, but as yet Arslan had made no effort to sell his stock-in-trade.
Behind the curtain of the inner room he confronted Hugh.
“It is true,” he said, “she is in the castle, out in the water. Yesterday I talked with the fruit sellers at the gate and learned nothing. Today I rowed around the kurgan and saw her face among other women.”
“Beyond doubt?”
“She sang of the falcon, as in the Khaukesh.”
“Did she know your face?”
“How can I tell? It was high, the balcony. Wai-a! Twenty javelin lengths and impossible to climb.” Arslan appeared to meditate on other balconies and other women. “A guard shouted at us to go away. At night there are boats with lanterns.”
“You have done well.” The eyes of the crusader brightened. “Tomorrow you must go to the outwork of the palace and say that you wish to tell the young nobles about some new Circassian slaves. Give silver, but do not let the Greeks see gold. Ask no questions, but if you can get within the palace itself, look at everything and count the guards. Fail not to salaam to all the servants and kiss the ground before the amirs—the nobles.”
Arslan grunted, but the prospect seemed to please him.
“And have a skiff brought to the garden of this yurta,” added Hugh. “A small skiff with two oars.”
“Why?”
“It would not be safe for you to be seen around the rock again. I have watched from the roof. Few go near it. But I will take the skiff and go alone at the same hour.”
“Nay, too many in the kurgan know your face.”
Arslan scrutinized his companion shrewdly. Hugh's red-gold beard had been shaved and his long hair clipped. His gambeson and mail had been discarded for a wadded robe and a sheepskin shoulder cloak with a hood that could be drawn up over his head, but the poise of the long body, the stride of a man accustomed to spurs and authority, were not to be concealed, or the scar of the sword-cut that ran from eye to chin.
“Nay,” he said again, “in a boat there is no hiding. Have we come to the Chersonese to free a single woman or to prepare the way for Subotai? It is our task to open a road, and that was the yassa.”
“It is my task to open the gate—yours to obey.”
“That may be—” the broad face of the short Mongol grew stubborn—“but if you are slain how am I to finish what is barely begun?”
For answer Hugh drew the falcon tablet from the breast of his robe and Arslan nodded.
“The paizah of authority—aye, so. But it is no part of our duty to go out in a small boat under the eyes of a hundred Greeks for a word with a captive Georgian.”
“Harken and remember this,” Hugh said quietly. “If Subotai can seize the Chersonese he will have silks and ivory, red leather and precious stones, horses and gold and other things past counting. But I will find Rusudan and she will be mine.”
Arslan yawned and stretched his arms, and looked around for his blankets.
“It is all one to me. But it is useless to try to trick the Greeks. Even an Armenian could not to that.”