Ninety
ANNA WALKED INTO THE ROOM AND STARED DOWN AT the body of Zoe. She saw the blue face, the bitten lip, and the blood on it. She bent down beside her, pushing back a stray lock of hair off her brow. Gently she lifted one eyelid. She saw the tiny pinpricks of red and knew what had happened. She stood up slowly and faced Thomais.
“Lay her out,” she said. “Make her look beautiful.” Her voice strangled in her throat. It was not only Zoe who was dead, it was Constantine also, and in an infinitely more terrible way.
Anna went outside into the rising wind and the first spots of rain. She walked alone to Helena’s house to give her the news. She did not want to do it, so it was best done quickly. Now the weight of what Constantine had said lay increasingly heavily on her. He would claim that Zoe had taken back all her support for union with Rome and died in the bosom of the Church. He would make pomp and display of it.
Helena took a long time to appear. The servants had admitted Anna only with great reluctance, but she had told them why she had come, and not one of them wished to tell Helena of Zoe’s death themselves. Anna waited, grateful for the wine and bread she was offered. She was cold through to the bone now, and her eyes stung with tiredness and with sorrow.
Helena came across the room, and Anna rose to her feet.
“What on earth have you to say that cannot wait until morning?” Helena said irritably.
“I am very sorry indeed to tell you that your mother is dead,” Anna replied.
Helena’s dark eyes widened in momentary disbelief. “Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Really? At last.” Helena straightened her back and held her head a little higher. A slight smile touched the corner of her mouth, and one might have thought it was superb courage and dignity in the face of loss. Anna had the ugly thought that in fact it was an attempt to contain her victory.
She felt the tears for Zoe welling behind her own eyelids. Something of Byzantium was gone. It was more than an age that was past, it was a passion, a fury, a love of life, and its leaving took something irreplaceable from the world.
Ninety-one
PALOMBARA LANDED IN CONSTANTINOPLE WEIGHED DOWN by the bitter news he carried. The fleet of Charles of Anjou had sailed for Sicily, and from there it would leave for Constantinople. They could count the time until invasion in weeks.
Back again at the house he shared with Vicenze, Palombara found him busy in his study, writing a pile of dispatches. Vicenze, secretive as always, turned them upside down the moment he saw him in the doorway.
“Good voyage?” Vicenze asked politely.
“Good enough,” Palombara replied. He held out the letters the pope had sent Vicenze, still sealed.
Vicenze took them. “Thank you.” He looked at Palombara. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard yet, but Zoe Chrysaphes is dead. Had an apoplexy or something. Bishop Constantine said a requiem Mass for her in the Hagia Sophia, the hypocrite. Said she died reconciled to the Orthodox Church. Damn liar!” He smiled.
Palombara was stunned. It had seemed as if nothing could destroy Zoe. He stood still in the middle of the floor and was overwhelmed with loss, as if Byzantium itself had begun to die.
Vicenze was still staring at him, still smiling. Palombara had an almost overwhelming desire to strike him so hard that it would break his teeth.
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said as calmly as he could. “Charles of Anjou has set sail for Messina. At least she will be spared knowing that.”
He went to see Helena Comnena to offer his condolences. She had moved into Zoe’s house, and she received him in the room that had once been her mother’s. The view was the one Palombara remembered, but the colors were already different. The new tapestries were pale, intricately detailed. There were blues and greens, no warmth of the earth tones.
Helena’s perfectly balanced face, with its winged eyebrows, almost like her mother’s, was lovely. But he had no sense of the steel within. There seemed to be in her a hunger without joy.
“I am grieved to hear of your mother’s death,” he said formally. “Please accept my condolences.”
“Personally?” she asked. “Or do you speak for Rome?”
He smiled. “Personally.”
“Really?” She regarded him with dry, rather sour amusement. “I had not realized that you were fond of her. I rather assumed the opposite.”
He met her dark eyes. “I admired your mother. I enjoyed her intelligence and her infinite capacity to care about everything.”
“Admired her…” Helena repeated the words curiously, as if she found them inappropriate. “But surely she was nothing that Rome approves of? She had no humility, she was never obedient to anything but her own desires, and she was certainly very far from chaste!”
He was angry with her for not defending her mother. “She was more alive than anyone else I know.”
“You sound like the eunuch physician Anastasius,” she observed sourly. “He mourns her, which is stupid. She would have destroyed him without a thought, if it had been worth her trouble.” There was contempt in her voice and a sharp edge that Palombara recognized with surprise as resentment.
“You are mistaken,” he said icily. “Zoe admired Anastasius greatly. Quite apart from his medical skill, she liked his wit and his courage, his imagination, and the fact that he was not afraid of her, or of life.”
Helena laughed. “How quaint you are, Your Grace. And how terribly innocent. You know nothing.”
He forced himself to smile. “If you have your mother’s papers, I daresay you are aware of a great deal that others are not. Some of it will be very dangerous. But you must already know that?”
“Oh yes, very dangerous indeed,” she said in little more than a whisper. “But you are foolish to pretend that you know of what you speak, Your Grace.” Her smile was bright and hard. “You don’t.”
What was it that obviously pleased her so much? She was looking at him and gloating. Why?
“It seems not,” he agreed, lowering his eyes as if he were crestfallen.
Helena laughed, a shrill, cruel sound. “I see my mother did not share it with you,” she observed. “But she discovered that your precious eunuch, whom you admire so much, is actually the most superb liar! His entire life and everything about him is a lie.”
Palombara stiffened, anger swirling up inside him.
Helena looked at him with derision. “Or to be accurate, I should say ‘her whole life.’” She went on, “Anna Zarides is as much a woman as I am. Or at least legally she is. There must be something repulsively wrong with her that she would masquerade as a man all these years, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you say it was a sin? What do you think I should do, Bishop Palombara? Should I assist in her deceit? Is that morally right?”