Helena spun on her heel and left.
The eunuch busied himself putting more ointment on the burns, then binding them with cloths, but lightly. He was right; it took the heat away, and gradually the fearful pain subsided.
Helena returned with the wine. The physician took it and eased Zoe up gently until she was sitting and could hold the wine in her own hands. To begin with, her throat felt raw; but each mouthful was easier, and by the time she had drunk half of it, she could speak.
“Thank you,” she said a little huskily. “How bad will the scarring be?”
“If you are lucky, keep the wounds clean, and the ointment on them, maybe there will be none at all,” he replied.
Burning always scarred. Zoe knew that. She’d seen other people burned. “Liar!” she said between her teeth. Her body was stiff again, resisting his arms around her. “I saw the crusaders sack the city when I was a child,” she told him. “I’ve seen fire burning before. I’ve smelled the stench of human flesh roasting and seen bodies you wouldn’t recognize as having once been human.”
There was pity in the eunuch’s eyes as he looked at her, but Zoe was not sure whether pity was what she wanted.
“How bad?” Zoe hissed at him again.
“As I told you,” he replied calmly. “If you look after the wounds properly, and use the ointment, there will be no scarring. You must take care of them. The burns are not deep; that is why they hurt so much. Deep ones don’t, but often they don’t heal, either.”
“I suppose if you come back in a day or two, you’ll want paying twice,” Zoe snapped.
The physician smiled, as though it amused him. “Of course. Does that trouble you?”
Zoe leaned back a little. Suddenly she was desperately tired, and the pain had eased so much, she could almost put it from her mind. “Not in the slightest. My servant will attend to you.” She closed her eyes. It was dismissal.
Zoe did not remember much of the next few hours, and when she awoke in her own bed, it was the middle of the following day. Helena stood beside her mother, looking down, and the light through the window was clear and harsh on her face. Her daughter’s skin was blemishless, but the sun picked out the hardening line of her lips and the faintest slackening of the flesh under her chin. Helena’s brow was puckered with anxiety. She smoothed away all sign of it as soon as she realized Zoe was awake.
Zoe looked at her coldly. Let her be afraid. Deliberately Zoe closed her eyes again, shutting her daughter out. The balance of power between them was changed. Helena had caused her both pain and terror, and the terror was worse. Neither of them would forget that.
The burning in her legs was no more than discomfort now. The eunuch was good. If he was right and there was no scarring, she would reward him well. It could also be profitable to cultivate his acquaintance and his gratitude by finding him other patients. Physicians found themselves in places others did not. They saw people at their most vulnerable; they learned their weaknesses, their fears, just as this one had learned Zoe’s. He might also learn their strengths. Strength was a good place to attack because no one expected it. People did not realize that their strengths, if nurtured, praised, carried to excess, could also become their undoing.
She was intensely aware that she could have been crippled by the burning, even killed. If she waited any longer to begin her revenge, it could be too late. Something else might happen to her.
Or there was always that other unwelcome possibility-her enemies might die naturally, in their own beds, and she would be robbed of the victory. She had waited so long only that the full flavor might be realized. Before her foes had returned from exile and gained power and wealth in the new empire, there would have been no point. If they had nothing to lose, no riches to hold on to, vengeance would have no sweetness.
She breathed out slowly and smiled. It was time to begin.
Six
ANNA LEFT THE HOUSE OF ZOE CHRYSAPHES WITH A SOARING sense of achievement. At last she had been able to use her hard-won skills in the treatment of serious burns, which without the ointment from Colchis would have left lifelong scars. Her father had brought back the recipe from his travels in the Black Sea and the home of the legendary Medea, from whose name and science the very word medicine had sprung. Healing Zoe could bring more patients, if she was fortunate, among them those who had known Bessarion and therefore Justinian, Antoninus, and whoever was really responsible for the murder.
As she walked home in the warm night air, she thought of the house she had just left. Zoe was an extraordinary woman. Even when she was injured, terrified, and in pain, the intensity of feeling in her charged the air with the kind of tension before a great storm that makes the skin tingle.
What had caused the fire in that gorgeous room with its wrought-iron torch stands and its rich tapestries? Something deliberate? Was that why Helena was afraid?
Anna quickened her pace, her mind exploring every possible use she could make of this opportunity. As a eunuch, she was invisible, like a servant. She could overhear, piece together, make sense of odd threads of information.
She returned to see Zoe every day for the first week. The calls were brief, simply enough to ensure that the healing was continuing as expected. It was obvious from the texture of her skin and the rich color of her hair that Zoe herself was skilled in the use of herbs and unguents. Of course, Anna never mentioned it; it would have been tactless. However, on the fourth occasion she found Helena visiting her mother, and she had no such qualms.
Anna was sitting on the edge of Zoe’s bed when Helena observed, “That smells disgusting.” She wrinkled her nose at the sharp odor of the unguent Anna was using. “At least most of your other oils and creams are pleasant, if a little heavy.”
Zoe’s eyes narrowed to agate-hard slits. “You should learn their use, and the value of perfume. Beauty begins as a gift, but you are rapidly approaching the age when it begins to become an art.”
“Followed by the age when it is a miracle,” Helena snapped.
Zoe’s golden eyes widened. “Difficult for someone with no soul to conceive of miracles.”
“Maybe I will, by the time I need them.”
Zoe looked her up and down. “You’ve left it late,” she whispered.
Helena smiled, a slow, secret satisfaction oozing through it. “Not as late as you think. It was my intention that you should think you knew everything-but you didn’t. You still don’t.”
Zoe hid her surprise almost instantly, but Anna saw it.
“If you mean about Bessarion’s death,” Zoe answered, “then of course I knew it. The poisonings, and the knifing in the street. They had your hand all over them-they failed. Misconceived, and stupid.” She sat up a little, pushing Anna aside, her attention fully upon her daughter. “Who did you think would take his place, you fool? Justinian? Demetrios? That’s it-Demetrios. I suppose I have Eirene to thank for that.” It was a conclusion, not a question. She sank back against the pillows, the pain showing in her face again. And Helena walked out.
Anna tried to keep her concentration on the slowly healing skin, but the thoughts raced in her mind. There had been other attempts on Bessarion’s life. By whom? Apparently Zoe thought by Helena. Why? Who was Demetrios? Who was Eirene? Now she had something concrete to seek.
She finished the bandages, willing herself to keep her fingers steady.
It was not difficult to make the initial inquiries. Eirene was a woman of great note, ugly, clever, of ancient imperial family both by birth as a Doukas and by marriage as a Vatatzes. Gossip had it that she was responsible for the steady increase of her husband’s fortune, even though he had not yet returned from exile, for most of which he had been in Alexandria.