Theodora indicated that the audience had ended. John bowed and began to back away towards the door.
'Wait, slave! You have forgotten to pay your respects. Justinian may be careless about these matters of etiquette, but I am not.'
For an instant John was not certain what she meant. Then he recalled his initial audience with the pair. As his face grew hot, he prostrated himself in a perfunctory manner, hardly touching the floor before he began to rise.
He felt the toe of Theodora's slipper on his shoulder.
'Don't be in such a hurry,' she murmured. The smell of her heavy perfume did not quite mask the more common smell of sweat. 'Slaves who are required to speak to their superiors sometimes forget their proper place. That can be dangerous.'
The slipper left John's shoulder, moved roughly along his cheek, and came to rest on the carpet directly in front of his face. It was as small as a child's slipper, purple and decorated by tiny flowers formed of gold stitchery with amethyst centers.
'Why are you hesitating?' Theodora asked. 'I should think the lips of a eunuch would rejoice to touch any part of a woman.'
***
John welcomed the clean, cold air of the garden outside the Hormisdas Palace. He tried to calm his rage by concentrating on the task facing him. He wished now that he were working for Justin or for that matter anyone other than the insolent actress who appeared destined to be empress. For it seemed to him he was working for her as much as for Justinian.
He forced his mind away from his recent humiliation, towards the knotty puzzle with which he was wrestling. Was Victor indeed the murderer ...?
FOUR FOR A BOY
A John the Eunuch Mystery
Mary Reed & Eric Mayer
Constantinople, 540 and 525 AD
The Frisian shook himself like a man waking from a dream.
'This land is old, very old. It was old before the Romans came. Everywhere you go you find signs that somebody has been before you: mounds and barrows, the grassy rings of ancient camps, tumbledown field walls, stones arranged in rows and circles. The woods and streams and hills are full of spirits, of little gods and big, of ogres and elves and shades. If one of those ancient powers had clothed itself in human flesh and walked amongst us, then I think it might have been like him, like Arthur.'
'Yet he fell at the end,' said Wicga, his voice sounding petulant.
'Is that not the Weird of all men, to die? Is it not better to win fame before death, so that one's deeds may live on?'
'You were there at the end? You were at Camlann?' somebody asked from across the fire, eyes eager in the hungry flames.
'I was. But that was fifteen, twenty years later, and I was on the other side.'
'Tell us first how you came to save one of the Emperor's warriors.'
[...]
'Be still, and you shall,' said Garulf. 'For soon I was to meet with him, one of the greatest of Arthur's men, though it was a long while before I knew who he was.'
'There is more.' Anna had kept silent while we argued our theories, but now she gestured back to the corpse. 'Help me turn him over.'
Our joy at the discovery drained away as Sigurd and I rolled the body onto its stomach. This time we needed no guidance from Anna, for the mark was plain to see, and familiar as our own faces. It had been carved, not painted, and though there must once have been blood it was now long gone, leaving only glossy pink scars. Two cuts had been made, lines of awful precision, one from the nape of the neck to the small of the back, the other straight across his shoulder blades: a giant cross of flesh.
'That would have hurt,' said Sigurd quietly. 'I hope his God appreciates it now.'
I breathed deeply, and wished I had not. I had occasionally seen pilgrims cut such marks into their cheeks or shoulders, once even into an Abbot's forehead, but never so large or so deep.
'He was lucky the wound did not fester,' Anna said. 'More than one man has died from similar pieties.'
Suddenly I was overwhelmed by an onslaught of sensations: the stench, the blueing skin. [...] I choked for air and staggered towards the light at the end of the cave ...
