John spoke again. Despite the rage in his eyes, he spoke in his normal level tone, rendering his words the more shocking.
“Then let me speak plainly,” he said. “It was you, Michael, who ordered the murder of those unfortunate stylites as well as the death of the girl Adula. Those first deaths you predicted in a letter to Justinian. The death of the girl, in the house of a wealthy citizen, you prophesied in a sermon you gave here on the very evening the deed was committed.”
“Is this true, Lucretia?” growled Balbinus.
She flushed with anger. “Why do you question me? I was not here on that particular evening!”
Michael shook his head wearily. “Does a prophet command the events he foretells? Of course not! Likewise, I but sounded the warning. It was the hand of God that smote those deluded stylites and a woman corrupted by the foulest of sins.” He traced the ritualistic sign that Peter often made but, John noticed, used all four fingers of his right hand to do so.
“I do not believe it was the hand of any deity,” John replied, noting by Darius’ expression and the rigid setting of his shoulders that he did not care for Michael’s characterization of Adula. “It was the very human hands of your accomplices, who soaked certain clothing in a mixture ignited by water. A heavy rain, for instance.”
“Is not a human hand animated by the Lord’s will His hand?” Michael asked, apparently heedless of the implied confession in the words.
“He must be very careless in the details then,” John said. “Your letter predicted four deaths, but only three stylites died. Joseph was spared, but that was only because the inflammable tunic placed in his offering basket was stolen by a beggar. And so it was he who burnt to death in an alley a stone’s throw away when drenched by the same storm that immolated the others. Was that beggar’s thieving hand also carrying out heavenly will?”
Michael abandoned the religious debate. “I repeat I am not a murderer, Lord Chamberlain. I am a healer. You yourself saw that I cured Senator Aurelius.”
“A coincidence, nothing more. You ordered him murdered also. Nor we should overlook another victim, a harmless old philosopher.”
A shadow seemed to pass across Michael’s pale features. “A philosopher?”
“A former tutor of mine, not one of those exiled philosophers whom you met in the east. They were traveling around, studying incendiary weapons, weren’t they, looking for a tool to take revenge on the emperor who had so badly wronged them.” John pressed the attack. “And is it not true that when they heard you preaching and more importantly saw the followers you were attracting they recognized in you another weapon just as powerful as fire, one that could be harnessed to it to wreak even more havoc?”
Balbinus, glancing from one to the other, looked astonished.
“I see by your expression you do not deny that part of it at least,” John went on. “That’s why Aurelius died, isn’t it? He taught at the Academy years ago and they were afraid he recognized them when we visited the shrine. Afraid their plan might be revealed before it could come to fruition.”
“We senators strongly counseled Justinian against letting those men return,” Balbinus broke in hotly. “He called them toothless old thinkers, as harmless as doves.”
“You are implying that I have been used, Lord Chamberlain?” Michael said sharply.
Balbinus gave a bitter laugh. “Isn’t it obvious? Of course you were. The philosophers were creating an opportunity for invasion. Who knows, perhaps they were even being paid to do so. What a sweet revenge that would have been!”
“The moment Justinian’s grip was loosened sufficiently Khosrow’s army would have been at the gates,” agreed John.
“I have never raised my hand against any man.” Michael’s spoke in little more than a whisper. “You accuse me of murder, yet I have never approached the walls of your accursed capital.”
“But at least one of your philosophers has been to the city every market day, visiting a house such as you say you intend to shutter,” John pointed out. “And I am willing to wager that while in Constantinople he also gathered information from Khosrow’s spies as well as dispensing further instructions to them, just as others had done throughout the years. Nor should we overlook the fact that such visits would afford the perfect opportunity to place fatal robes in offering baskets.”
“How could any of this possibly not have occurred to you?” Balbinus asked in an amazed tone.
“I am a simple person,” Michael replied, sounding suddenly tired.
Lucretia finally broke the ensuing silence. “John, these accomplices, these spies, whom do you suspect?”
He had no chance to answer.
With a sweeping blow of his huge arm, Darius leapt away from John’s side, knocking Balbinus out of his way. The senator shouted outraged protests, his dignity compromised more than his person injured.
The pair of unarmed excubitors on guard outside stepped uncertainly into the doorway. They had not expected a threat to come from this side.
“There’s no point attempting to flee,” John’s voice was tinged with sadness.
Darius paused for a moment to speak quickly in his native tongue. “I had to do it, John. It was for my family. Tell Isis I’m sorry.” Then he whirled around and bolted out of the room, knocking the unarmed guards aside.
John followed him into the nave as Balbinus lumbered behind, shouting “Stop him!”
But the sea of startled pilgrims had parted to allow passage for Darius, whose wild-eyed charge as he escaped through them resembled the bull to which he had so often been compared.
From behind him, John heard a woman’s screams.
Crouched in a dark corner of the cellar, heart hammering an anguished tattoo, Darius rummaged through the chest of clothing. From the nave above he could hear the excubitor captain shouting orders to his men to seek the Persian outside, his voice rising above the screams and cries of pain from roughly handled patients and pilgrims being shoved aside.
Would Michael’s followers manage to delay the pursuit long enough to allow him to make his escape? They owed him that much, at least, Darius thought wildly.
At last his hand found the unnaturally stiff fabric it sought. He yanked the garment out and threw it over his broad shoulders.
He had already left the waking world. Now as he burst out of the cellar, he moved through a dream landscape where white-robed acolytes fell away from him like wisps of mist.
The grassy field outside the shrine was the dry, sandy earth of his native Persia. The sounds that trailed him were not the shouts of imperial pursuit but the wailing lamentations of his poor family, the family he had failed, whom Khosrow would surely now order put to death, if he had not already done so.
Wavy hair streaming behind him, robe flapping, Darius ran madly along the embankment where the field sloped down to the dark waters of the Bosporos. As he fled he wept.
A momentary vision of Adula passed through his thoughts. What choice had he had? If only it had been one of the other girls who had worn the fateful robe he’d been given along with orders he had tried to refuse but, reminded of his family, could not…And all the years of spying, the deaths for which he was responsible, the lies he had choked on even as he told them, his terrible betrayal of Isis’ trust, in the end it had all been for nothing!
Breath laboring, he glanced back over his shoulder. The excubitors were gaining on him.
He stopped. He was a soldier as much as they. A soldier did not run away. His hands moved to discard the robe he wore. Then he remembered the justice Justinian meted out to spies unfortunate enough to be captured alive.
Turning his bearded face to the sky, Darius shrieked the terrible curse of a man about to die, calling down the gods’ vengeance upon Khosrow, demanding it for the innocent blood he had been forced to shed and his dear, lost family.