Swan took it all in.
The crossbows didn’t waver. ‘Prove it,’ said the big man, in Greek.
‘How?’ Swan asked.
The man looked confused.
‘Look, I’ve come a long way. I thought I was coming for some books, but it appears I’ve been sent to get you lot. I have an escape plan, and all I need is a boat. If you don’t want to come, that’s fine.’ The whole time Swan was speaking he was looking at the reliquary.
It was . . . incredible.
First, he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so much gold in one place at one time.
Secondly, the workmanship was . . . exquisite. Divine. Amazing.
Thirdly, it was covered – almost vulgarly so – in jewels. Swan wasn’t a jeweller, but he was pretty sure he was looking at diamonds. And rubies.
Large ones.
One of the dancers stepped between him and the reliquary. ‘We stole it,’ she said. ‘It’s ours.’
Peter fell on his knees.
So did Swan. He couldn’t help himself. He was twenty years old, and he’d been a devout Christian for every minute of the time – his mother had seen to that. He didn’t make a conscious decision to kneel. He just did.
Apollinaris grinned.
‘It really is the head of Saint George,’ he said.
‘May I . . . touch it?’ Swan asked, filled with the same vague piety that infected him when he was around Cardinal Bessarion.
The woman smiled. ‘Yes. I suppose.’ She stepped back. ‘How are you getting us out of here?’
‘How long have you been here?’ Swan asked.
‘Since the siege.’ Apollinaris shrugged. ‘Eventually we’d have abandoned the head and left the city. There’s no getting it out.’
‘The Turks know it is missing. And they’ll stop at nothing to get it.’ This from the older man.
Swan felt foolish, but something made him approach the object on his knees. He shuffled along until he reached the low table, and he opened the reliquary – it had a magnificent door, like the door to a miniature cathedral.
Inside was a brown skull. A cross had been inlaid into the smooth bone of the forehead. Otherwise, it was just a skull, and a very old one.
‘They say that whoever has the head of Saint George cannot be harmed by monsters or demons, by weapons, even by torture,’ said the prettier of the two dancers. She bowed. ‘I’m Irene.’
‘And I’m Andromache,’ said the other. ‘We are acrobats. And actors.’
Swan smiled and stood. ‘You’re the old woman at the gate.’
She smiled back. ‘And you are the Turk.’
The giant bowed. ‘Constantios, at your service,’ he said, stiffly.
The older man bowed as well. ‘Nikephorus,’ he said. He smiled bitterly. ‘Nikephorus Dukas.’
Swan tore his eyes from the relic. ‘Of the noble Dukas family?’ he asked.
‘One small branch, devoted to learning. We cannot all be busy ruining the empire.’ He shrugged as if his words were of no account. Then he pointed at the skull. ‘Familiarity will make you more comfortable with it,’ he said. ‘I confess we were silent for days after we . . . took it.’
‘It is like living with a gate into heaven,’ said Irene. She laughed – but softly, as if she was in church. ‘I am too much a sinner to be comfortable living with such a gate.’
Swan reached out and touched the skull.
Just for a moment, the world went white. Blank. Nothing – no noise, no sight.
He found he was on his knees again.
‘Oh my God,’ he said.
Nikephorus nodded. ‘Exactly.’
If the head was spectacular, the library was staggering.
‘This is all Bessarion’s?’ Swan asked, as he unrolled a scroll that seemed to have six plays in Greek all lined up together. He lacked the true connoisseur’s knowledge, but the scrolls seemed to be very old. The first play was entitled Taxiarchoi.
Taxiarchs were the archangels, in Greek.
‘Not all of it, by any means,’ Nikephorus said. ‘Some of it was mine. And some—’
Apollinaris laughed. ‘Most of it we stole. Or borrowed. I prefer to use the term rescued.’
Swan read a few lines. The main character was the god Dionysus, so that the play in question wasn’t about archangels at all.
After a moment, he guffawed.
In the scene he was reading, a weapons master was trying to teach the God of Wine to be a soldier. Swan had no idea how ancient the play might be, but just for a moment he had an odd, almost haunted feeling, as if the author of the play might be watching him. It was funny – deeply funny.
Nikephorus nodded. ‘That was mine. I collected all the plays I could find from the ancient world.’ He shook his head. ‘I used to fear that the Patriarch and his monks would find out, and I would be prosecuted.’
‘Who is this Eupolis?’ Swan asked.
Nikephorus bit his lip. Then he smiled. ‘I don’t really know,’ he admitted with a grandiloquent gesture.
Irene laughed and clapped her hands. ‘I’ve never heard you say that before, old man!’
Swan looked at another scroll. ‘And who was Heraklitus?’ he asked.
‘A philosopher,’ Nikephorus said. ‘I haven’t even read that one.’ He sighed. ‘The Suda – you know the Suda?’
Swan smiled. ‘Not at all, I fear.’
Nikephorus brightened. ‘While your ancestors were living in mud huts in Hyperborea, my dear young man, our monks were writing detailed encyclopedias of classical learning.’ He shook his head. ‘Classical learning comes and goes in fashion and tolerance,’ he said, somewhat peevishly. As if continuing his train of thought, he said, ‘I feared all the wrong things, and now my whole world is gone.’
‘Heraklitus was a philosopher like Aristotle? Like Plato?’ Swan asked.
‘Earlier, I think,’ Nikephorus said. ‘Not my field.’
Swan looked up at the scrolls. Hundreds of them. ‘Are any of these Aristotle?’ he asked.
‘All this,’ Irene said, smiling. Twenty scrolls sat in niches under a small marble bust. ‘This is an ancient statue of the man himself.’
Swan had that haunted feeling again. He took a scroll down.
An hour later, a dirty Christian beggar stopped a small Jewish beggar on the street.
‘I need to get a message to King David,’ the Christian said.
The boy nodded. ‘Sure, boss,’ he said, in Greek.
‘Just knock it in,’ Peter said.
Swan didn’t like waste. He prowled around the wellhead, because if they knocked it to pieces, it would be obvious to everyone how they’d escaped. And Swan liked to leave mystery behind him, when he could. It made for a better prank. A finer jest. And practically speaking, while he wasn’t sure who would be following him, he had a feeling . . .
On hands and knees, he found the deep crack that ran around the heavy marble block that held the cast bronze and stone wellhead. Under the dry-sink, he found a pair of holes in the marble, cut in at an angle.
Even better, leaning against the wall, he found two iron bars which fitted into the wellhead block.
It took four of them to lever it up. When they were done, they had an opening the size of a small cart, leading down into the darkness.
After dark, a wagon rolled up to the gate. Peter and Constantios watched it with bows drawn, while the two dancers covered the street and Swan went out the door into the courtyard.
Isaac slipped off the wagon box. ‘A boat?’ he asked. ‘It’s not even illegal to get a boat. You summoned me to get you a boat?’ He glared. ‘You know who I am?’
‘Simon means to sell me to the Turks,’ Swan said. ‘You?’
Isaac froze.
‘I find that sometimes this sort of talk saves time,’ Swan said. ‘There are more plots here than in the Bible. I want to make a straight deal. I will give you some very valuable items and some information, and you will provide me with this boat and take a single message to the Venetian quarter. And we’ll part friends, and be available to help each other another time. Simon won’t ever get to betray me, which he’ll live to be glad of. And I’ll survive to take your letters back to Venice.’