Felix began to breath again.
The donkey snorted uneasily.
A lightning bolt struck close enough to make Felix’s ears ring and shook his bones. The donkey let out a bray of terror and ran. Felix clamped his hand shut but there was nothing there but a raw welt where the reins had been. The donkey might have been ridden by Satan himself so quickly did it vanish into the storm.
There would have been plenty of room on its back for a rider because the courier’s body had returned to the street, one hand resting against the toe of Felix’s boot.
Felix kicked it off in revulsion.
“Mithra!”
Just his luck, the street here was brightly illuminated, this time by a torch in front of a perfumer’s shop. The light reflected from the opaque eyes of the ashen face which had been uncovered in its most recent fall.
Would he never be rid of the cursed corpse? It pursued him like one of the Furies.
As the thought crossed his mind, the corpse laughed rudely.
No, Felix told himself, just noxious gases escaping as the thing started to decay.
He felt a sudden impulse to simply run, leave the corpse where it was. But that would be like fleeing the battlefield. Felix refused to flee. He must finish what he had begun, somehow.
He wiped rain out of his own eyes with a shaking hand and looked around. His attention was drawn by the perfumer’s statue of Aphrodite, an exceptionally inept copy of a classical Greek work. The legs were too short. The breasts were almost those of a child’s, but even though the amateur sculptor had apparently whittled first one then the other, he had never got them anywhere near the same size.
Nevertheless, at that moment, she was the most beautiful woman Felix had ever seen thanks to the recess behind her, large enough to conceal a body.
Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He dragged the courier under the colonnade. The roaring rush of rain turned into a hollow thudding on the sheltering roof.
“Let’s get you ready for the goddess!” Felix began stripping off the dead man’s soaked garments. Beggars who died on the streets were invariably found naked, picked clean. And with no garments, the body would probably not be identified quickly, if at all. There was nothing remarkable about it that he could see. A well fed young man whose muscles had not been taxed with labor. The packages he had delivered had never been very heavy.
Just another man murdered in the street. How could anyone link the captain of the excubitors with a naked corpse discovered far away from the palace?
He carried the man’s garments back to the public lavatory he remembered passing. The foul weather had kept people off the streets and the long marble bench was deserted. A beggar jumped up from a corner and fled, perhaps mistaking Felix for the urban watch.
Felix stuffed the garments down a hole then relieved himself after them, thoughtfully.
John might have come up with a better plan. But he wasn’t here-for the time being.
Given Justinian’s whims, his friend would doubtless be returned to favor soon. It wasn’t as if John were dead.
DAY THREE
Chapter Seventeen
John knew what it felt like to drown.
The gusting wind whipped rain and blinding, stinging sheets of salt spray across his face. Opening his mouth to gulp in air, he inhaled water instead. He gasped and choked. His boots slid on slick planks as the deck tilted. He grabbed blindly at the rail to avoid falling. A splinter dug into his palm. He didn’t loosen his grip. The Leviathan continued to roll.
It was going to capsize this time.
But again, at what seemed the last moment, the ship righted itself.
He kept a death grip on the rail and stared out into a chaotic, nacreous twilight of roiling fog and rain. It was past dawn but the storm which had kept him awake all night had not abated. The wind had picked up and the waves increased.
In summer the winds usually came from the northwest, assisting the prevailing currents to hurry ships out of the Sea of Marmara, but the night before they had shifted to the south. It was peculiar, almost inexplicable, as if the hand of evil were upon them. Or so John had been told by one of the rustic fellow travelers he had taken to be a farmer.
Even farmers knew more about sailing than John. He knew only that he dreaded traveling across the bottomless pit of the sea.
Why the captain had decided to leave their overnight mooring was a total mystery.
John had passed the night pressed against Cornelia’s back, listening to rain clattering against the deck above, hearing the mingled moans and cries of the Leviathan and her restlessly dreaming passengers. Cornelia’s even breathing told of the calm oblivion he only wished for. How could she sleep when he could not? In the time they had been together, wounded though he was, she had come to seem a part of him and he part of her.
In the dark sour-smelling hold, battered by the sea, John found himself staring into the abyss he had confronted so often as a younger man during his first years in Constantinople, when he had still been a slave.
He was on a voyage to nowhere. An estate in Greece? He couldn’t imagine it. He had lived on the move, on the borders of the empire as a mercenary, had existed as a captive in Persian encampments, and lived in Constantinople as both a slave and a high official in turn. Through all the years he had fought to survive, battled steel and political intrigue to go on living. Was there truly anything else?
He had dreamt often enough of settling down in the country but now he realized if he did he would be no better than a shade, wandering Hades without purpose.
When the rain and wind let up for a time, John could here the occasional nightmare-induced cry or groan from a fellow passenger and the low prayers of the aged pilgrim on the other side of the thin partition. She mumbled on tirelessly to her god and the mother of her god. To some of these Christians prayer came as easily as breathing.
The pilgrim was convinced-or trying to convince herself, judging from the way she kept repeating her prayers-that the Lord would save her, as he had saved Saint Paul. She counted on her Lord’s steadfast love. Or so she said repeatedly.
So far as John had observed there was no steadfast love in this world except between two human beings and that was rare. To throw oneself on the mercy of some imagined, invisible god of love was nothing more than surrender. Mithra demanded His followers battle the darkness, not meekly await salvation from it.
And wasn’t John battling the darkness by working for Justinian, who imposed law and justice on the empire? Wasn’t Justinian on the side of the light? Or was the emperor part of the forces of darkness, as many supposed?
Would John ever be certain?
Finally he had risen quietly, letting Cornelia sleep, and gone out on deck.
Captain Theon, a short, rotund man with a fiery red face, was speaking to a sailor who was taking soundings. John overheard bits of the conversation.
“I expected this to blow over by now,” the captain was saying.
The other made what must have been a disparaging remark, judging from the captain’s scowl.
“I’m not throwing out the anchors. If we can’t see the shore we’re not in the shallows. Keep testing the depth.”
The rattle of wind-driven rain obscured most of the sailor’s reply.
“…besides we’re well past…Yes, I know when the wind shifted. That’s why…you think I’m a fool? Who’s captain on this ship?”
John told himself to be calm. Theon obviously did not consider their situation to be as dire as it seemed. This was a normal squall, terrifying only to a person unfamiliar with sailing.
The crew were doing whatever needed to be done, whatever that might be. It made John furious to be rendered helpless by his ignorance, dependent on these strangers.