In fact I could, after a fashion. By now, I had long been part of the fencing games that Dimitri insisted upon every fine day. Some of the men were skilled indeed, others just very vicious. There was much to learn from all of them. Pavlos, who with his Varangian schooling could probably have cut the whiskers from a flying moth, had shown me many subtleties of wrist and posture. From Horst, on the other hand, I had learned how to smash the pommel into the enemy's face while mashing his stones with your knee. And I already knew how it felt to kill a man. In that baleful way at least, I was the equal of any man aboard, and even of the woman who now stroked sparks from the edge of my sword. We'll see,' I answered.
In a half-hour we would go ashore and make our procession to the shrine of the saint. It would be our scouting trip. Then later we would go back and do what we had come to do. Now we were dressed in our finest. Anna's hair was caged in its golden net, and she wore the gown I had seen first in Bordeaux. And I was draped in the finest Venetian silks. I hoped I did them justice: Dimitri had been busy with his needle and thread, and whoever they had once belonged to, they now fitted me as if cut by the Emperor's own tailor. I retrieved my sword, now sharp enough to shave with. It hissed into its sheath. Anna's own blade was well hidden: why would a lady go armed to a shrine? Why would any of us? I felt a little hollow inside, and not with fear.
Anna had been watching me. You have moped around since I woke up,' she told me. Why?' I muttered something about my guilty conscience.
'This is our work now,' she shot back. 'So do you believe in this Saint Tula all of a sudden?' 'No, but…'
'But habits die hard, is that it? Well, let them die. These people… they are my people, Petroc! These people are full of life: they brim with it. And yet you worry about stealing something dead from them. I will tell you something. When they told me how the Franks sacked Byzantium and stole the holy relics, I was happy. I have always hated priests and their spells and mumbles, and their old bones most of all. They keep us in the shadows. We are not doing an evil thing. We are delivering these folk from being in thrall to an old corpse.'
Well, if everything goes properly, they won't actually know the old corpse is gone, so I don't think that is true.'
Anna waved her hand as she always did, swatting away annoying words. 'But… but we know, and their precious Saint Tula will actually be gone, and that's all that counts.' There was no point in arguing. She was an armed princess, and as such was under no obligation to make sense. And at least she was talking to me.
As the honoured guests, we rode up to Tula's shrine on two knobbly, fly-bitten donkeys, the finest the village could supply. The saddles were wooden and fitted on the beasts like little roofs. I had to straddle the ridge, which was only slightly less than sharp, as if the maker, proudly introducing a note of luxury, had given it the once-over with his bluntest file. The path was long, twisting and steep, and before we had even left the village I felt like Saint Simon the Zealot, sawed in two up the middle. Christ alone knew how Anna managed to keep such composure perched side-saddle. But the donkeys were an honour it would have been suspicious of us to refuse, so we toiled up and up, led by the jovial priest with his cross-crowned staff and followed by ten of the most presentable of our crew and what seemed to be the entire village of Limonohori done up in their finest.
The day was beautiful, and infernally hot. The track ran between high stone walls that hid orchards and gardens, and many vineyards. Vines heavy with unripe grapes hung over the grey stone. We stumbled over rough cobbles and up wide steps cut – who knew how long ago? – into the mountain itself. The insect noise blazed. Often we were bombarded by grasshoppers, bigger than any I had ever seen, whose dull brown armour hid wings of vivid red or blue. Flies had laid siege to our donkeys' ears, and soon turned their attentions to us, nipping at our sweat-beaded flesh. I had drained my water flask too early, and watching Anna sip sparingly at hers piled on the torture. More than once it occurred to me that by the time we made it to the shrine I would be well and truly martyred myself. Perhaps they would accept my donkey-mangled corpse as a substitute for Tula.
The track was steeper now, and the donkeys' hooves rang on stone. For the first time that morning I was glad I was not on foot. Up ahead, the priest looked on the point of apoplexy as he floundered in his long black robe. And then the walls on either side opened out and we were in a wide open space, circled by more walls. In the centre, surrounded by a grove of cypresses whose narrow trunks were contorted with age, was a tiny domed chapel hardly bigger than the cabin on the Cormaran. So old that it seemed to have sunk into the ground, it had been freshly whitewashed so that, like most buildings on Koskino, it hurt to look at in the bright sunshine. Two steps led down to the blue-painted door. The priest signalled for us to wait, staggered down the steps and opened the door. I noticed it was not locked. He disappeared into darkness. Around us the villagers were spreading rugs on the hard earth and laying out food and drink. How had they managed to lug all that up here, I wondered as I swung my bruised carcass down from the diabolical saddle. It was agony bringing my legs together and I prayed my stones had not been pounded flat, as I could no longer feel them.
I was just hobbling over to Anna with as much Flemish nobility as I could muster when the priest emerged from the chapel, planted his staff in front of him and began to sing. It was a liturgy of some sort, swooping, quavering, echoing from the walls around us. The man had a voice that seemed to flow up through him from the roots of the mountain. The villagers left their picnics and began to gather around us, crossing themselves in the backwards Greek manner. The song paused, and a murmur of ameen drifted up. The priest was beckoning us. It was time.
I took Anna's hand and we made our way on stiff legs towards the door of the chapel, which gaped like the mouth of a cave behind the priest. Gathering his robes about him, he stepped down and went in. I hesitated for a moment. The doorway was black as the darkest night, and framed by the sun-blasted white of the chapel wall it seemed to me like a hole cut in the day itself. Then a gentle tug of Anna's hand and I was inside.
It took an instant or two for my eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom. All around me was a glimmering, and as my eyes came into focus I realised we were surrounded by hundreds of candles, narrow tapers that each gave out a minute flame of light. There was more space in here than seemed possible from the outside. We stood on a well-worn floor of black and white checkerboard tiles. Around the walls, pews of dark wood flowed with carved vines and snakelike dragons. I looked up. There was a skylight, but the glass was so smoked from centuries of guttering candles that it let in only a dull amber glow. There were faces up there, angels amid a wreath of entwined wings. And ahead, in a halo of candlelight, lay the coffin of Saint Tula. I sucked in my breath with surprise.
Tula lay in a reliquary as rich as any in the great cathedrals of Christendom. It was a rectangular casket clad in hammered silver, into which a skilful hand had inlaid a tracery of leafy branches where birds perched and little animals played. In the centre was a Greek cross in relief, four arms tipped with emeralds radiating from an immense garnet. It was the work of the old Romans, so much finer and lighter than anything of our age. And surely this was the coffin of a Roman noblewoman, not some hedgerow saint. So Adric had been right. The scholars in Cologne had been right. Someone of importance had fetched up here in this out-of-the-way place, and instead of a great cathedral and a cult that brought pilgrims from all corners of the world, she had sunk into obscurity: just another village guardian. And Will had died for her.