Glykeria secured Triton’s former lodgings behind them. Having taken several uncannily sure steps down the hallway, motioning John to follow, she rapped a staccato summons on a door at the far end.
After some time a muffled screech came from within. “I told you, my husband’s sick, you old crow. We’ll pay the rent as soon as he’s up and around and can get back to work.”
“I’ll have what’s due, or you’ll answer to the City Prefect!”
“Why not bring the Patriarch along with the Prefect while you’re at it?” came the shouted reply. “Or how about Justinian? I am sure the emperor is as anxious about your rent as you are! Go away and stop bothering a sick man!”
“I’ve got someone here prepared to take you away now,” Glykeria claimed. “If you don’t believe me, look out and see.”
The door opened briefly and shut again with a loud click. Not long afterwards the door opened a second time and several coins clattered onto the floor near Glykeria’s shoes. She bent nimbly, her fingers explored the boards, found the money, and scooped it up in an instant. “Thank you for your assistance, sir. I’ll be happy to give you a discount on that room.”
“Perhaps you might have waited until your tenant resumed working?” John suggested as they clattered back downstairs.
Glykeria snorted in derision. “The fellow won’t see sunrise tomorrow.”
“What makes you think so?”
They were halfway across the courtyard. Glykeria stopped and turning toward John tapped her nose. “I can smell it, sir. Take the clerk on the second floor. He’s afraid it’s the plague, but he’ll be back to his accounts next week. He just ate something that had spoilt, that’s all. However, the potter next door to him will be clay before he touches his wheel again.”
“How do you know this, Glykeria?” He almost expected to hear that she kept an oracle in her kitchen.
“I smell it on them.”
“Ah, I understand.” It was becoming obvious that Glykeria’s blindness was less an impediment to her than her mental faculties. Which perhaps explained how she had transformed John so quickly from one of Tritons’ creditors to prospective tenant.
She must have sensed the doubt in his tone. ”Let me prove it, sir.” She wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “What a strange thing. You have been to a farm recently. A gentleman like you in the midst of the capital, I agree it seems unlikely and yet it is unmistakable. Let me advise you, bulls can be dangerous beasts.”
John remarked that she had an amazing gift.
“Gift? You call this a gift? Can you imagine what it is like to live by one’s nose since the plague arrived? Be glad you don’t possess my sensitivities, sir. Now, about the matter of Triton’s old room…”
John explained yet again that he did not intend to rent anything. He pressed a coin into her hand, stifling her vague murmurs of disappointment. “For your help, Glykeria. Is there anything else you can tell me about Triton before I go?”
“I didn’t know him as well as some, I admit. However, I make my daily rounds, to collect rents, to clean, to make certain all is in order. I noticed things from time to time. He imbibed heavily, for a start. He was often sick from too much wine.”
Her face crinkled with displeasure at the recollection. “His father visited once. They argued. Such blasphemous language. I’ve rarely heard the like! It’s no wonder Triton died horribly. Many of my tenants have left this life since the plague arrived and it’s always a dreadful death, but his was the most terrible of all. I could hear him at the end, bellowing with pain, even down here in the courtyard. Heaven is just, sir, if not always kind.”
She tilted her head toward the courtyard which they had just left, as if the paving stones still vibrated with echoes of Triton’s last agonies.
John asked what Triton and Nereus had argued about.
“A woman, of course. What else? She insisted on calling herself Sappho. She thought I didn’t notice, but I always knew when she sneaked in and out of the building. She smelled of cheap wine, expensive perfume, and garlic. A very stupid and low girl.”
Glykeria leaned forward confidentially. “One day she brought in a piece of fox-fur one of the furriers over the way had discarded. I had a tenant who sewed, and I allowed her to conduct business in her room for a small weekly consideration. Apparently Sappho imagined she would look quite the aristocrat, with this nasty scrap of fur sewn along the bottom of her tunic. Still, the job provided my tenant a extra nummus or two, so she could pay her rent on time for a change, until the plague claimed her.”
She pursed her lips. “My tenant described the woman to me in great detail. Sappho always wore saffron-colored garments, of a most indecent style I may add, and boasted endlessly about how she would one day wear golden silk. Well, to cut a long story short, she eventually moved in, but when she left him she took the nasty thing with her. I mean the fox-trimmed tunic, not Triton.”
John asked, without harboring much hope, if Glykeria could remember the date of the woman’s departure. Unfortunately, she could not. Nor could she say where this particular girl had come from. She’d really been no different from the others who stayed with Triton occasionally, except she’d stayed longer than the rest.
“But then what do you expect? She was an actress, sir, and very flighty in her ways. Decent folk use other words for them that follow that particular profession.” She compressed her lips. “Have you talked to the bear trainers by the Hippodrome? But no, it’s a bull you recently visited, not a bear. She claimed to work with them. Bears, I mean.”
“And Triton, what profession did he follow?”
“He was like her. Had all sorts of notions, but rarely worked. Fancied himself first an actor, then a bear trainer. The girl knew some of the trainers, as I said, and got him a job with them. It didn’t last long and no wonder, if he mistreated the bears as badly as he did her.”
She hugged herself suddenly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’s bit of a chill in the air. I need to warm up inside and then I’m off to the Great Church. I spend as much time there as I can.”
John remarked that one’s faith could be a great comfort in such trying times.
Glykeria gave another cackle. “It’s the incense that draws me there these days, sir. Yes, the blessed incense. It’s the only thing that banishes the stink of death from my nostrils.”
Chapter Nine
Anatolius loped through the high-ceilinged halls of the Baths of Zeuxippos, exchanging hurried greetings with one or two of the scanty number of bathers availing themselves of the facilities. It was remarkable, his poetic nature noted, how even as the shadow of Thanatos lay across the city, some residents still clung to their everyday routines.
What was even more remarkable, his practical side immediately asserted, was that there was still enough manpower and fuel to provide enough hot water for the baths to continue to operate.
The corridors were eerily deserted as he made his way toward the private baths. His footsteps, slapping against an uncharacteristically dry marble floor, sounded far too loud.
He remembered a dream he’d had more than once. In the dream he arrived at the baths only to find himself alone. The water was cold, the corridors all empty. As he wandered the lifeless labyrinth panic began to swell in his chest. Suddenly he knew, without question, he was the last person left alive and that when he emerged from the impossibly deserted baths, Constantinople would be just as empty, and all the towns beyond its walls, and all the lands beyond the seas-all would be empty. He could feel the emptiness inside him as well as all around him.
Had that recurring dream been an omen?
He had begun to form the uneasy feeling that perhaps he was dreaming again when he arrived at a semicircular area graced by a platform facing a number of empty benches.
At least this lecture room was occupied, if only by a single person, the glum-faced Crinagoras.