"About leaving?" Niklos asked.
"Yes." She stopped and turned back toward him. "You are always such a sensible man, Niklos, and there are times I wonder how you deal with me." Her expression grew distant. "The clothes I mentioned?"
"I have them."
"Buy three more horses. Make sure they are swift but ordinary looking. Saddle horses, mind, not chariot horses. If we are to leave here on… short notice, we will need saddle horses as well as chariot horses." This last was for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, and Niklos caught her gesture that indicated her intent.
"Three horses. Very well." He cocked his head. "Do you anticipate needing to leave soon?"
"No, but anticipation means little in such circumstances. I will have to find a way to judge when it is best to act." She shook her head. "There was a time when I would have thrown it all away and simply headed out of trouble without a second thought. But that, my friend, would be folly. If you leave a place under suspicion, you must live with that suspicion for a very long time, and there's no telling when it might—" She stopped. "We had trouble enough in Carthago Nova. I would prefer not to have such problems again."
"I won't argue," said Niklos with feeling. "But who would have thought that smug little bureaucrat would travel so far, or remember so clearly?"
"Precisely," Olivia agreed. "And I do not want to spend another twenty-five years in Pictavi or some other equally dreadful place posing as a sybil and living in a cave. That taught me a lesson I do not need to learn twice." She attempted to make light of this. "And you would not have to spend a quarter of a century pretending to be a mute."
"Spare me that," he said with feeling. "Horses. Anything else?"
Olivia gave a warning gesture toward the doors. "Not now, not until I have spoken with my sponsor. In the meantime, I will want to have a word or two with Zejhil. Find her and send her to me, will you?"
For the benefit of anyone who might be watching, Niklos made a deep reverence. "Immediately, great lady."
She waved him away, but did not leave the vestibule at once herself; she stared at the door and wondered, as she had wondered often in the last three days, where Drosos was and what he was doing.
* * *
Text of a letter from Olivia to Sanct' Germain, written in Latin code.
To my dearest, oldest friend who ought to be in Trapezus now, Olivia sends her fond greetings.
I am sending this to your house in Trapezus in the hope that you will have returned there, or that if you have not, your servants will know where you are to be found and will send this along to you. You have been traveling more in these last several years, which is inconvenient for both of us.
But it appears that I will be doing the same thing. For some reason I have not yet discovered, I have aroused suspicions here in Constantinople and from the way things are going, I will have to leave soon or face consequences that would be unpleasant. What a simple word that is—unpleasant—when I am trying to say that I fear for my life; the life you returned to me when Vespasianus wore the purple. Was it really almost five hundred years ago? You will have to forgive me if I find that hard to believe. Five hundred years seems so long, looking at the numbers, yet how swiftly those years have gone.
I have not yet determined where I will go when I leave here, but leave here I must. I hate abandoning my house and goods; I have already left so much behind in Roma that I know I will never see again. And leaving my friends—although there are precious few of them—is more difficult than I can tell you. No, that's not true, is it? You, of all people, know how hard it is to leave friends.
Assuming I have time enough for adequate preparation, I think I will try to move toward the edges of the Empire, or to go to those parts that are Coptic. The Copts are not as eager to question the faith of everyone around them as these damned Orthodox Christians are. Of course the Orthodox regard the Copts as heretics, which might account for some of this; so long as I have the opportunity to live and move about without constant surveillance, I will be—satisfied?—content?
Niklos is making several sets of arrangements for our departure, some of them more obvious than others. He is a treasure, and when I think of him, I think also of your Rogerian, since they are the same sort. Is it their method of restoration that creates such loyalty?
When I have established myself at wherever-I-am-going, I will send you word, and I trust you will write to me from time to time. Your letters are always so welcome, so consoling. There are times they are sad, as well, for they remind me of how you brought me into your life. There are times I miss those years, and your love, so intently that my bones hurt with it. Yes, yes, do not say that it is past and that the bond continues unbroken. I know that, and I cherish it, but that does not rid me of the longing.
I am not going to apologize for the last, incidentally. I know that our love cannot be what it was before I came into your life, but that does not mean I have to deny that I miss it.
Perhaps, when the worst of this is over, there will be time to write more fully, to tell you things that I cannot yet put down in words. Until then, have care, my precious friend, my old love. This world would be far drearier than it already is if you were no longer in it.
With my enduring love, and you alone appreciate my meaning,
Olivia
in Constantinople
4
Panaigios was more nervous than the last time he had spoken with Simones. His fingers moved almost constantly, now at his pallium, now at the hem of his sleeves, now at the large, pearl-encrusted cross he wore around his neck. He indicated a small, unpadded bench and waited while Simones sat, then cleared his throat. "You have said that you have made a discovery?"
"Yes," Simones replied without any aggrandizement to the secretary of the Censor. "I sent you word of it three days ago."
"I have your note somewhere," Panaigios said, leafing through the sheets of vellum and parchment that lay on his writing table. There were even a few sheets of Egyptian paper which Simones found surprising. "Here it is. You say here that you"—he held up a strip of vellum—"have found material that would be of great value to me and to the Censor and the Emperor. You say nothing more about what this material is. Since you describe this as material, I have assumed that you have come upon a document of some sort that has some bearing on the investigation the Censor has been pursuing in regard to your master. Have I erred in any of these assumptions?"
"Not very much, no," said Simones.
"I have also assumed that you have some reason for withholding the material itself—would it be missed?" He braced his elbows on the table and leaned forward. "If that is the trouble, it is possible that a writ to search the house of Belisarius could be obtained from the Emperor. He is eager to learn of anything bearing on the conspiracy that Belisarius claims he has not participated in. Would this material be related to that question?" He was speaking fast and in breathless little spurts, and when he finished, he coughed once.