“Damned soldiers think you can do whatever you want, don’t you? Why aren’t you out fighting the Saracens instead of trying to butt your way in where you’re not wanted?”
Without a word I turned my horse and went to a farther hitching rail, tied her there and walked back to the grizzled old sourpuss.
“I’ve left my life’s possessions on that flea-bitten nag,” I said to him, “except for this.” And I pulled my jewel-pommeled sword halfway out of its battered old scabbard. “This blade had taken the lives of more Seljuks than you have hairs in your mangy beard, old man. If anyone so much as touches my horse or my belongings, it will take your life next.”
His eyes blazed with fury, but he held his tongue. I turned and went into the cathedral. It was strangely chill inside, and dark except far up in front, by one of the side altars, where a small group had gathered for a wedding. The people whose horses the sourpuss outside was watching, I reasoned.
Kneeling on the stone floor, I could barely make out the huge mosaic of the risen Christ that filled the interior of the main dome. Dim light filtered through the high windows of stained glass, dust motes drifting through the slanting shafts. I half expected to see my own breath frosting in the air, it was so cold inside the cathedral.
Here by the main entrance, next to the massive marble baptismal font, stood a statue of Santa Sophia. I gazed at it, in the shadows, and thought the face that the sculptor had carved looked familiar. I had seen it before, on another statue, in Athens. That other statue had been the work of an ancient pagan, the statue purported to be of Athena, the patron goddess of that old, decrepit city.
And here was the same face on Santa Sophia, decked in soft folds of cloth rather than armor and bronze helmet. Offering prayers for the faithful rather than holding a spear and bearing an owl on her shoulder. But the same face. She seemed to be smiling at me, a beatific smile that warmed me deep in my heart.
I did not stay long. Just one swift prayer of thanks for my life, then I limped back into the sunlight, worried that the sourpuss might take it into his head to steal some of my possessions or all of them and disappear into the crowds of the city before I could stop him. But he was still by the rail with the wedding party’s horses, and my horse still stood alone farther off. I had to admit, my mount did indeed look very shabby.
The old man grumbled something at me as I passed him.
“I suppose soldiers don’t tip a man who’s watched their horse, do they?”
“Soldiers don’t have any coins until they’re paid,” I said to him, over my shoulder. “And none of us have been paid since we first left the city, months ago.”
“Pah!” He didn’t believe my word.
I was billeted with a family that lived outside the walls. They were hardly overcome with joy to see me. I would be an extra mouth to feed, an extra horse to care for, as long as I stayed with them. They seemed to be having enough difficulty making ends meet, with five youngsters in their brood, the oldest a lad barely into his teens.
The man was a metalsmith; he eked out his living by repairing pots and copperware in the bazaar. The army would pay him a pittance for housing me, but he made it clear that my upkeep would cost him more than the government would pay.
The youngsters clustered around me, bursting with questions about the war and the lands I had seen. They stared at my face curiously, and I realized that it was my scars that fascinated them.
Their mother had been taken by a fever that had swept the city half a year earlier. The old man had a young serving girl to cook and take care of the children. A sturdy, redheaded lass from Muscovy, from the looks of her. She was pretty, with clear white skin that had not been roughened from hard work as yet. I wondered if the old man made her sleep with him.
The two eldest boys helped me unpack my meager belongings and dumped them on one of the beds in the upstairs room; then they took my horse down the street to the stable. During the evening meal the boys wanted to hear tales of battle and victory; all I had to talk about was battles that we lost and retreats in the face of the relentless enemy. Their father ate his barley soup and black bread in dour silence, except to cast dark looks at the serving girl whenever she smiled at me.
“How many of the heathens did you kill?” asked the eldest boy.
“Too many,” I said. “And not enough.”
The serving girl asked me, “What is it like to take a man’s life?”
I replied without thinking, “Better to take his than let him take yours.”
She shook her head. “I know they’re heathen Moslems and the Church has condoned warring against them, but still, the Christos taught us that it is wrong to kill, didn’t He?”
Her disapproving frown nettled me. I wanted to tell her what the Seljuks did to Christian women when they captured them, wanted to describe the villages we had seen where the women had been raped and then put to the sword hideously, where babies had been spitted alive and used as footballs, where fire and knives were used for torturing helpless children.
But I said nothing. Because I was ashamed. My own troops had done much the same to the Moslem villages we had sacked.
“They’re heathens,” the old man snapped. “Servants of the Antichrist. Killing them isn’t the same as killing a Christian. The Patriarchs of the Church have told us so. They’re not even human, really.”
“Their blood’s as red as ours,” I heard myself mutter.
“Good! Spill as much of it as you can.”
Leave as quickly as you can and return to the wars, he was telling me. And I resolved to do exactly that. This was not my home and never could be. As soon as my leg healed properly, I would go back to the fighting, I told myself.
After dinner, the two boys offered to share their bed with me. I laughed and told them that I had been sleeping on the ground for so long that a bed would probably keep me awake. So I unrolled my sleeping blanket and stretched out on the floor next to their bed in the upstairs room.
Just before I drifted to sleep, the older of the two boys said, “Next year I’ll be old enough to join the army.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Stay here and help your family.”
“There’s no glory in staying here.”
“There’s no glory in war,” I said. “Believe me. Nothing but pain and blood.”
“But fighting the Seljuks is doing God’s work!”
“Living is doing God’s work, son. Killing people is the work of the devil.”
“But it’s all right to kill the Seljuks. The priests have blessed the war.”
Yes, I thought wearily. They always do.
“The emperor himself—”
“Go to sleep,” I snapped. “And forget about the army. Only a fool goes to war when he doesn’t have to.”
That shut him up at last. I turned on my side and went to sleep, dreaming of the distant future when ships flew among the stars.
Chapter 27
I awoke in my quarters aboard the Apollo with Frede shaking my shoulder roughly.
“You’d better look at the imagery from our last navigation check,” she said, once I had opened my eyes and sat up in the bunk.
Blinking the sleep away, I pointed to the display screen set against the bulkhead. “Put it on the screen.”
There had been a pair of Skorpis warships among the stars.
“Did they detect us?” I asked.
Frede shrugged. “They had to. We were only at sublight for thirty seconds, but their sensors are as good as ours or better. They picked us up, all right.”
“Did they make any move to stop us?”
“In thirty seconds?”
I studied the alphanumeric data at the bottom of the screen. The Skorpis warships had been drifting along on minimum power.