John asked for a description of the boy.
“He was a child and children all look the same. I don’t pay much attention to them. They aren’t important at court. Strange that he said his name was John.” A sly smile flickered over his face. “There was nothing to his claim, but he had been searching from one end of the palace grounds to the other. The empress would doubtless hear about it so I wished to tell her first. To my surprise, she ordered me to send him to her at once.”
“That must have suggested to you that his story was genuine?”
“Not necessarily, given Theodora’s strange humors. I thought it was possible she was bored and looking for amusement. Afterward I knew the boy was not her son.”
John asked how Kyrillos could be certain.
“Because…” Kyrillos paused and dabbed his suddenly bright eyes, unable to control his emotions like all of his kind. “Because no mother would slaughter her own child, Lord Chamberlain.”
“Theodora killed the boy?”
“Not with her own hands. But…I heard about it later, you understand…I was not present. My slave escorted the boy off to a private audience with Theodora and that was the last I saw of him. No one knows what passed between empress and child. After a short time, she summoned a favorite of hers, a rough, illiterate brute. No better than a beast, but as loyal as a cur. She placed the child in this monster’s hands. John has never been seen again.”
“And you believe Theodora ordered the boy killed?”
“What other conclusion can one draw? The brute, Theodoulos, could be trusted to carry out the task. It is well known he had done so on other occasions.”
John suppressed an oath. “And Theodoulos?”
Kyrillos shook his head and stared at the floor. “You doubtless expect him to have been executed? But no, there was no reason to do so. He would no more betray the empress than a dog betray his master. And, as I told you, he was her favorite, a pet, like that bear she used to keep caged…
“Theodoulos is a dwarf and you know how she dotes on them. Why would she destroy a plaything like that? No, she merely had his tongue cut out. I doubt a beast like him even misses it.”
And yet the grim story had traveled on other tongues from the palace grounds into the city, thought John.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
As he strode through the narrow white-washed hallways of the servants’ lodgings, John’s head throbbed with pain, more, he suspected the result of his infuriating confrontation with Kyrillos than any lingering effect of the street ambush.
No splendid tapestries, mosaics, or frescoes decorated this dimly lit palace warren, only crosses provided by a benevolent empress as a reminder of the greater riches waiting in another world.
There were as many eunuchs here as in Theodora’s own quarters. They made way nervously for the tall man with a military bearing and a dark look in his eyes.
“Where can I find Theodoulos?” John demanded of one servant after another.
He was directed this way and that and eventually upon turning a corner nearly tripped over a bow-legged, barrel chested little man with massive arms.
The dwarf’s coarse features contorted when he saw John. Theodoulos must have been warned by someone who had made a swifter way through the maze of corridors ahead of John.
Theodoulos put his shoulder down and plowed it into John’s stomach, then barged past and raced down the corridor, scattering eunuchs as he went.
“Stop him!” John ordered. The eunuchs, useless creatures, merely gaped and cried out.
Cursing, John set off in pursuit.
The clamor brought more servants into the hallway. Theodoulos dodged and ducked between them. John shoved bodies aside and increased speed.
He closed ground, flung a hand out, and almost grasped the back of his prey’s tunic.
Theodoulos veered through a doorway.
John followed and burst into a kitchen.
Theodoulos scrambled onto a table and kicked a covered wicker basket toward the long brazier. The lid flew off as the basket and the chickens it contained tumbled onto the hot coals.
There was an explosion of feathers and flaming fowls, accompanied by a cacophony of screams from the cooks and the outraged cackling of prematurely roasting chickens. John knocked one of the burning chickens out of the air. Another flapped against his legs and scrabbled at his robes, shedding sparks.
John loped across the long room but it was too late.
Theodoulos had already exited via a door leading into the kitchen gardens.
John raced across herb beds to a covered walkway and down to its end.
Theodoulos was nowhere in sight.
No doubt he was familiar with every part of the grounds of the Great Palace, a vast, bewildering confusion made up of paths, plantings, buildings, courtyards, pavilions, colonnades, pools, and fountains laid out on terraces descending to the sea. A beggar had once got into the grounds and managed to elude guards for two months while living off scraps of food and an occasional loaf stolen from an unattended kitchen.
If John did not locate Theodoulos immediately he would never find him.
Glancing around, John saw an opening in a high wall of bushes. It was the way Theodoulos must have taken.
The gap led to a sculpture garden, a frozen crowd of deities, in which stood every god and goddess imagined by the classical mind.
There was no time to catalog the collection.
Movement drew his gaze to the back of the garden.
Theodoulos was creeping away between Mercury and Jupiter.
John went after him, narrowing the distance between them as the two emerged from the garden and began pounding along a wide mosaic walkway depicting mythical wildlife.
Theodoulos suddenly left the path and plunged into a stand of thickly interlaced bushes pruned into domes.
John lunged after him but whatever opening beneath the bushes Theodoulos had found was too small to accommodate John. Branches ripped at his face as fought his way forward.
His foot came down on air.
John grabbed at the surrounding branches as he started to slide over the edge of the parapet. He felt his hands sliding down, ripping off twigs and skinning his flesh.
His forward motion stopped and he pulled himself back from the edge.
Some distance below leaves fluttered toward the flag stoned courtyard on the next terrace.
Theodoulos scrambled along the low parapet over which John had almost fallen and leapt onto the steep stairway at its end.
Cursing, John followed.
His prey had increased the distance between them.
The pain in his head had become almost unbearable. Every footfall as he ran down the stairs communicated itself directly to his skull.
By the time he reached the lowest of the terraces Theodoulos had already crossed most of the equestrian field laid out there and had almost reached a line of yews through which the sea glittered.
He intended to throw himself into the sea.
The realization hit John with a sickening, hopeless certainty.
He tried to call out, to promise protection.
As if anyone could be protected against the wrath of Theodora.
The dwarf vanished between the trees.
Blackness flickered at the edge of John’s vision by the time he had followed Theodoulos to the path between the yews and the parapet wall.
He stopped.
Impossibly, Theodoulos stood in front of him. His coarse features, wide lips, and squashed nose were scarlet with rage as he strained futilely to escape from the grasp of the two excubitors who held him.