"Only person a wood pecker'd do any good is a eunuch," Myakes said.
I glared at him so fiercely that he subsided, mumbling apologies. Pointing south toward the aqueduct of Valens, I said, "The channel there does not bring water into the imperial city these days, nor has it for eighty years or so. But it still goes into Constantinople. God willing, so shall we."
"What if they have guards in there, Emperor?" Stephen exclaimed.
"Then we'll fight them," I replied. Then they'll kill us, I thought. "But I never remember guards being posted in the aqueduct. Do you, Myakes?"
Where a moment before he had been good for nothing but making crude jokes, now he sounded surprisingly thoughtful. "No, Emperor, I don't, not ever. Nobody thinks about the aqueduct, not these days."
I was thinking about it, thinking about the prospect of making my way through several hundred yards of pitch-black pipe. I wondered how big around the pipe was. Would I be able to stand upright in it, or would I have to crawl all that way? If I did have to crawl, finding guards there was less likely. But who could guess what might have denned there in the many years since water had stopped flowing?
"Who's with me?" I asked, deliberately not thinking of any of these things.
Faithful Myakes spoke first, I think, but he beat out my followers from Kherson- and also Leo- by only a fragment of a heartbeat. None of the other Romans who had joined me since I came down with the Bulgars said a word. Neither did Tervel. I tried to make out his expression in the fading light, tried and failed. Was he discomfited at seeing what he had reckoned certain failure suddenly sparked with another chance at success?
If he was, he was not so discomfited as to keep me from making the effort. On the other hand, he did not offer any aid, either. He simply stood aside and let me and my backers do as we would- washed his hands of us, so to speak, as Pilate had done with our Lord. All the risks were ours, and all the planning was ours, too.
Not, I must say, that much planning was involved. We had to get up into the opening, go through the pipe, and get down into the city. It would be simple- or it would be impossible.
"Torches," Stephen said, "so we can see what-"
"No." I cut him off. Pointing toward the aqueduct once more, I continued, "We have no way to tell whether bricks have fallen out or mortar come loose, or whether the pipe itself has cracked. If the usurper's soldiers see light in the aqueduct, whether everything has been dark and quiet since my great-great-grandfather's day, they'll be waiting for us inside the city, and that will be the end of everything."
"All that way in the dark?" Theophilos shuddered.
Though dreading that myself, I told him, "Stay here, then." My voice, I daresay, had a lash to it. Having seen what might be a way into the city, I was wild to try it.
"A pry bar," Myakes exclaimed. "No telling what we'll have to move."
"I know where to get one," Leo said. That, I confess, made me raise my eyebrows. This was only the third day on which he had been in the neighborhood of the imperial city. But he hurried away with every sign of confidence. My new spatharios was proving a man of no small resourcefulness.
"Rope, too," Myakes called after him. He waved to show he had heard. To me, Myakes said, "Rope'll give us a way down where we might not have one otherwise."
Leo came back a few minutes later with a coil of rope around one arm and a stout iron crowbar about a cubit long in his other hand. "Excellent," I said, and then turned to Tervel. "Have we a ladder tall enough to let us climb up into the water channel of that aqueduct?"
"I don't know," he answered. When he seemed inclined to say no more, I folded my arms across my chest, making it plain I should not be satisfied without his giving me a more responsive reply. Grudgingly, he went on, "I will see. If we do not, we can make one by lashing two or three shorter ones together."
"Good enough," I said. "Now, I have one more favor to ask of you."
"What is it?" He did not sound happy. What he sounded like was a man who felt what he had thought to be a puppet jerking his arm.
"When we go up into the pipe, I want your men to attack the wall," I told him. "I want them to make an enormous din, so any noise from us goes unnoticed." When he simply stood there, saying neither yes nor no, I added, "By this time tomorrow, you will be revealed either as my son-in-law or as a Caesar of the Roman Empire."
His face did not show what he thought. It seldom did. Up in the country he ruled, he had seemed hopeful about my prospects, but that hope must have faded when few Romans came over to me, and faded again when the garrison of the imperial city held it closed against me. Maybe hope revived in him. Maybe he simply thought he would be rid of me. "I shall do it," he said.
The ladders the Bulgars had were not long enough. When they lashed two of them together, the resulting contraption still had a bend in the middle on being forced more or less upright, as a man's leg has a bend at the knee. My followers examined it with doubts that, had they been applied to religion, would have amounted to wicked atheism.
Although having those same doubts myself, I suppressed them. "It will serve," I insisted. "It does not have to hold us long- only long enough to get us up into the aqueduct."
I wanted to wait until midnight to enter the aqueduct, but was persuaded to begin earlier, around the start of the fourth hour of the night, because I had no way of knowing how long the journey through the channel would take. I hoped to drop down into Constantinople while it was still dark, so as to be able to pick for myself the way in which I would first confront the soldiers and people of the city.
Several grunting Bulgars carried the spliced ladder to the base of the ruined aqueduct and raised it high. I wonder if they should have joined three, not two, together, it being barely long enough for its required purpose. Changing matters at that point, though, would have taken time I did not wish to spend.
I started up the ladder. It did flex at that joint, as a man's knee might have done. I climbed as fast as I could. If it broke under my weight and sent me tumbling to the ground, drama would turn to unseemly farce in the blink of an eye.
It held. Gasping, I got to the top. I reached into the opening of the channel, which was something less than a yard wide: a tiny thing, seemingly, to have supplied the imperial city with so much water. My fingers closed over sticks and twigs. I threw the bird's nest away and scrambled up into the pipe.
It was too narrow for me to turn around in it. "I'm in!" I shouted, almost as if I had entered a woman. I had to hope they would hear me down below.
The ladder scraped against the broken end of the aqueduct: someone else was on it. I scuttled farther down the pipe, to give whoever it was room to climb in. "Don't put more than one man on this cursed thing at a time." It was Myakes' voice. I might have known he would let no one come between me and him. Cursing, he made it into the pipe in the same ungainly way I had used. "You there, Emperor?"
"I'm here." His bulky body cut off what little light had come from the opening of the channel. "We'll both move down now."
That came none too soon, for someone else was already climbing toward us: Barisbakourios, followed by Stephen, then Leo, then Moropaulos, with Theophilos last of all. By the time Theophilos joined us, I was some distance down the pipe, moving ahead in utter darkness.
Some men, I have heard, suffer a deadly fear of being enclosed in a small space. Had any such sufferer been among us, he would without a doubt have gone screaming mad. Not only were we literally in a space of small compass, again and again banging our heads or barking our backs when we rose up more than the pipe would permit, but it seemed even smaller than it was because of the utter lightlessness there. It would have been easy to imagine the pipe closing in on us until it squeezed us as an Aesculapian snake squeezes a rat. Fortunately, none of us was afflicted by this sort of morbid imagining.