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.” He turned away from the gate and went off down the street.“Let’s go get a drink.”“I think I undervalue her,” Hagen said.“Can you beat Michael this time?”“I’m not going to try,” Ishmael said.“What?”Avoiding the big Frank’s eyes, Ishmael turned into the tavern and made for his favorite table in the front of the room by the door.At least he still had credit here.It made no difference if he raced; they would not pay him anyway.Sitting down, he buried his head in his hands.How false the world was, how full of sin and disappointment.Constantine murdered, lying there in the straw while mad old Folly stamped and beat and kicked him to a pulp.All false, all sinful; he could bear it no more.And time was coming to an end.The Heavenly City would descend, and take all those chosen of Christ up to Heaven, and the sins of the damned would drag them down to Hell.Hagen put a cup in front of him and poured the pale red wine into it.“What do you mean, you won’t race?” He sat on the bench with the corner of the table between them.“Oh, God, Hagen—” Ishmael ground the heels of his hands into his eyes.“Yesterday—did you see it? In the sky?”“I saw nothing in the sky but clouds.”“Your eyes are blinded with sin.”“One of us is blind, if you saw anything in the sky but clouds.”An unaccountable rage mounted in Ishmael’s heart, red and hot as a flame.“What would a barbarian know about God?”Hagen smiled at him, uninsulted.“You think this Daniel is bringing with him the Heavenly City.You know he is in the power utterly of John Cerulis, who is as wicked a man as any I have ever seen—”“God chooses His instruments as He will.”“What sense does it make to choose John Cerulis?”“You belittle God—you try to fit God into the puny human frame of reason! No! God’s way is beyond our knowledge—” As he spoke, Ishmael felt mounting in his heart the almost unbearable longing for that wonder, a place where the iron claws of time and consequence mattered not.He shut his eyes again.“We are whatever God wishes of us.”Hagen snorted at him, sipped his wine, and pushed the cup at Ishmael.“Drink.You are too sober.”“God’s day is coming!”“You people here—you glorify everything.”“What does that mean?”“Ishmael, listen.My grandfather was not Christ’s man.He sacrificed horses on the solstice and prayed to oak trees.My father used to say, ‘Leave a little for the old gods.’ You people here, you have given up everything to Christ—”“You blaspheme.Christ is all, we owe all to Christ.”“Maybe, but it strikes me that if Christ were everything, there would be no reason for Him to be jealous, and yet He is jealous.”Ishmael’s temper burst like a blister.“You pitiful creature.You blasphemer—you want me to spend my soul on horse-races, when the end of the world is at hand! Some devil sent you—some devil speaks through you, to seduce me from the right way.Get away from me, Satan!”As he spoke, he put Hagen away from him, by getting up, by running out the door.In the street, it was no different; people bustled here and there, on their trivial daily business, all unseeing that the day of the Lord was at hand.He ran away down the street, the air itself an irritation, running away to the Heavenly City.Michael knew who had killed Constantine, and he understood why.He sat down beside his uncle’s body, laid out on the floor of the stable, there in the straw with the dung and the mud.The horse had beaten Constantine’s bones to bits, inside the bruised casing of his flesh; his head was all misshapen.Michael put his thumb down on each of his uncle’s eyelids and firmly pressed them closed.It was unjust, somehow—she had taken advantage of the purge, of the horror in the City, to slip one more body in; nobody would care, so many were dying.Unjust and pitiful.And yet had he himself not cast out this kinsman? Constantine had violated what was sacred—his honor, his reputation and the reputation of the races, the only thing that mattered.Michael had given up his bond with Constantine; he had no right now to be angry that she had punished him.He thought, In a world more like the Hippodrome, such things would not happen.He wished she had not thrown the body into the stable.Wished she had not used mad old Folly to do her dirty work.Yet there was a certain roundness to it, a fitness.He knew why she had done it.He told himself again it was no business of his, not anymore.Getting up, he walked away through the stable.25If the Empress spent her days in ritual and procession, Nicephoros her minister spent his rushing from one place to another, meeting with other officers, working out practical ways of meeting the demands of life in Constantinople.Hagen escorted him through the streets to a palace or a public building, and then lazed around outside for hours, half-asleep in the sunshine, bored and low of humor.He supposed this was a fit punishment.If he had not given John Cerulis the list, people would not be dying now all over the City, and Nicephoros would not need protection.He brooded on that, how it was his fault these people were dying, and his grey mood turned black.He felt John Cerulis like a poisonous vapor that was slowly spreading over the City.The Empress with her empty babble of God and doing what God intended could not stand against this infection; in the end it would destroy them all.One afternoon, while Nicephoros met with other officials inside, Hagen stood outside on the steps, wondering if he ought not to kill John Cerulis at once, and tell the Empress later—thinking, too, of Theophano, who had sacrificed herself without hesitation for the greater good of all—and a woman passed by on the street.She slowed; she gave him a warm look.He smiled at her, and she stopped at once and beckoned to him, nodding toward the narrow alley between the square two-story building where Nicephoros worked and the low flat-roofed warehouse next door to it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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