He kicked at a sharpened stick in his path. “To think that I have been searching for the murderer of two men, and now this. Half the city dead and no doubt at all who killed them.”
“What choice was there, John?”
“There’s never any choice, is there?”
He was having trouble breathing. His chest suddenly felt constricted. The shock of seeing the carnage had driven everything else from his mind, but now he recalled why they had come here. To find Julianna.
Suddenly he did not want to continue the search.
Not here, where there was nothing left alive.
He walked amidst the dead, hardly seeing them. Afraid that his gaze would be caught by a lithe, familiar figure.
For some inexplicable reason he kept seeing Cornelia in his mind. But it wasn’t Cornelia he was looking for. She had been lost to him long ago, vanished into the countless masses of humanity, alive and dead, of whom John would know nothing until the day he died.
For the dead were all knowing.
No, he was searching for Julianna, a young girl who meant nothing to him at all.
Felix caught at John’s sleeve. “We can’t look everywhere. If she were here….” He let his voice trail off.
They were halfway down the track, approaching the huge box of the kathisma. There was no emperor to gesture imperiously at his audience of two far below. A hawk rose up from inside the enclosure, bearing away whatever dangled from its talons.
John narrowed his eyes as he scanned the tiers of seating “There,” he finally said. “Up there.”
It took an eternity to climb the tiers.
Julianna lay at the base of the kathisma wall. She wore the iridescent green robes she had worn in John’s garden. The wall was high, designed to keep the masses safely away from the emperor. An athletic young woman might have been able to climb it, using the ornate carvings for hand-holds-or she might have thought she could.
There was no blood. Her head rested on her hands as if she had laid down to go to sleep, except that her eyes were still open and staring.
“She fell, trying to get up to where her father was crowned.” John spoke quietly, though there was no one to overhear their conversation.
“Better that than her being trapped down there,” Felix said, “or sent to the gallows with the rest of her family.”
John bent down and pulled a wisp of green silk over the still face.
Epilogue
January 22, 532
John’s house was empty. All the furniture had been carted away. There remained only whispers and shadows.
John and Felix passed through the atrium, conducting a final inspection.
“If I were you I would miss this place,” said Felix. “Usually when people are promoted they request a larger house, not a smaller one.”
“It will be more convenient. I will only need a couple of servants, and neither of them will be slaves either.”
“It’s fortunate you were able to give the emperor an explanation of the matter of the missing Blue and Green, otherwise you would be residing in a very small house indeed.”
“A tomb, you mean?”
“Indeed. As for myself, I’m happy just to be back in the excubitors’ barracks. Though I am sorry Gallio was relieved of his head as well as his command. He was nothing worse than a coward, in my opinion.”
“Most of the court is grumbling Justinian didn’t carry out more executions alongside those of Hypatius and Pompeius.” John’s gaze was caught by a shaft of light falling from the compluvium, past the marble Aphrodite in the atrium’s fountain. The light sparkled on the water in the basin. “It’s rumored their bodies were thrown into the sea. The first time I saw Pompeius he was sitting in the basin there, soaking wet, and now….”
He broke off, scanned the atrium a last time, and turned away. It made him shudder to think of the dead men who had been his guests floating in the lightless depths.
Felix followed him into the corridor. “I hear Narses took great delight in pointing out how much time you had spent investigating the death of your friend Haik instead of carrying out Justinian’s orders. I suppose he was angry enough to spit lamp oil when you were elevated to Lord Chamberlain.”
“Narses had a right to be angry. His efforts bribing the factions probably influenced events more than anything I did.”
“The emperor is as unpredictable as Fortuna. But at least the city is returning to normal. It wasn’t just poor Hippolytus who went mad. The whole capital did. A colleague was telling me about the strange sights he saw during the riots. There was one fellow who was gathering up tesserae. Scrabbling around in the street after bits of glass with all the gold and silver there was for the taking!”
“Bits of glass can be turned into mosaics depicting stories more precious than any silver goblet. The bits and pieces gathered during an investigation may not seem valuable, but when assembled into a solution, that’s a different matter.”
“Your mind is still on your investigations, isn’t it?”
John peered through the open door of a deserted room as they passed. It was as bare as the rest of the house. “When you mentioned Haik I couldn’t help thinking that although I was obligated to look into his murder since he was an old comrade in arms and brother in Mithra, as it turned out he posed the most serious threat to the emperor.”
“Because of the document he brought with him, by which Justin was to adopt Chosroes?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you suppose he was entrusted with the document to help overthrow Justinian? If so, by whom? Was he working with the Persian emissary, Bozorgmehr? Or did he come by it some other way?”
“I’d like to think that Haik came by it quite by accident and decided it might be sold for a good sum in the capital. When he told me he was here on business, he was telling me the truth.”
“But even if that’s the case, why would anyone buy it, except for political reasons? He must have seen the implications.”
“Again, I am pleading on behalf of a friend, but it may be he thought he could sell it to someone who would buy the document to make sure it was destroyed. We’ll never know that or establish where it’s gone. My belief is someone had a good reason to destroy it and did. But before that, talk of the document, by its very existence, probably helped set off the riots.”
“That’s a startling assertion.”
“And like almost everything else about this whole affair, one that can’t be proved now that most of those involved are dead. But my speculation is Hippolytus started the trouble for which he was hung after he overheard Haik talking to Porphyrius about the attempted adoption. He might have decided the time was ripe to depose Justinian, having realized that Julianna’s father would be the most likely successor to the throne.”
“Being married to the emperor’s daughter would be a good job and Julianna was certainly interested in him,” Felix said.
“Haik and Porphyrius gave me conflicting accounts of why Haik went to the Hippodrome to see him, but Haik said they were interrupted by a visitor whom Porphyrius identified as Hippolytus. I am guessing Hippolytus lingered outside Porphyrius’ office long enough to learn what was going on before making his presence known.”
“Then do you think the hangings were deliberately botched?”
“No. The preparations were rushed, the executioner was nervous because of the mood of the spectators.”
“You told me Hippolytus killed the Blue after they were taken to Saint Laurentius, and then escaped. Was that, at least, part of a plot?”
“Not one against the emperor. Hippolytus was deranged from having been nearly strangled to death during his hanging. I imagine he hardly knew what he was doing. He wasn’t capable of reasoning. He saw a Blue. An enemy. So he killed him.”
“But if he was so impaired how did he escape?”
“Julianna freed him.”
They had come to the dining room where Hypatius and Pompeius had spent most of their time. Sunlight poured in from the garden through the gap left by the half opened screen.