The Fatal Tree Page 4

  The enshrouded corpse was placed in the large stone box and the lid secured once more. Raising his hands to shoulder height, Turms intoned a brief prayer for the soul of the deceased, saying:

  “O Great of Heaven, Creator of Life, Your children come forth at the dawn of life; the wise among them worship You and give thanks. O God of the Creation, You shower high and low alike with the blessings of life; those who are deserving of favour rejoice in Your presence. You alone, O Lord, give light and warmth to those who dwell in the House of Life.

  “We come forth today, justified in Your presence, for we have conquered our enemy who invaded our lands. His chariot is broken, his spear blunted, his dagger sheathed. His army is destroyed, and those who run with him have fled into the wilderness.

  “Hail, Great of Might, Guardian of the People, grant us divine protection, for we are Your followers and provide sustenance in Your temples.

  “Hail, All Wise, Architect of the Universe, who creates life by dreaming it. Hail, Supreme and Eternal One, Creator of Time, Ruler of all that is and is yet to be. We bow in homage to You and receive the blessing of Your mercy, and ask that You receive into Your company the soul of Duglos who stands before You now.

  “King of Truth, Creator of Eternity, Prince of Everlasting Glory, and Sovereign of All Gods, You give life and receive it. Blessed be Your name forever. So says Turms the Immortal, justified and eternal, by Your will King of these Velathri and Chief Priest of the People.”

  The ceremony concluded, the king and his entourage exited the tomb but did not close the door. The lintel and doorposts of the tomb were painted blue and garlands were hung to festoon the entrance to the burial chamber. In accordance with tradition, the tomb would remain open for three days to allow mourners and well-wishers to leave gifts of food and wine for the deceased and his family.

  Then, his obligations fulfilled, Turms and the group of priests, courtiers, and hired mourners departed, leaving two young soldiers behind to guard the grave site. As soon as the funeral party had climbed up from the Sacred Road and was once more on the trail leading to the palace, the king sent the others on ahead so that he could have a little time and space apart. His thoughts turned to his long friendship with Arturos and the strange events surrounding the arrival and death of his great-grandson. There was a mystery here, a deeply unsettling secret he had yet to penetrate. He turned his eyes inward and sought a sign or a word that might illuminate the darkness that was Duglos.

  Arturos, the friend of his callow younger self, had a son, Benedict, whom Turms knew well—he had aided the birth of that child when other physicians had despaired of saving either mother or infant. Both Arturos and his son had been good and upright men; Duglos, however, was far from either good or upright. A venal and degenerate soul, the man possessed none of his forefathers’ virtues. What Turms had done, he had done out of respect for his old friend and to honour the memory of that friendship—not, he confessed, out of any obligation owed to the dead man himself.

  Burdened by these thoughts, Turms the Immortal arrived at the path leading up to his hilltop palace. He turned and placed his foot on the road, but had not yet taken his first step when his eye fell upon a small splotch of dark and light gleaming dully in the shadow of a cypress tree at the very bottom of the path. Ever alert to omens, and with the keen sight of a true seer, Turms glimpsed the object and halted in midstep.

  Resting his hands on his knees, the king bent down for a closer look. It was a tiny hatchling bird—bald, covered in black pinfeathers, still damp—fallen from the nest somewhere in the branches above. The poor little dead thing was newly born; there were fragments of eggshell still clinging to the wet, translucent skin with larger pieces of broken shell around the miniature corpse. Turms regarded this unfortunate tableau for a moment, then raised his eyes to heaven and breathed a sigh of gratitude for being granted the sign he sought. Then he bowed his head to contemplate the meaning.

  The bird had hatched out of season; it was late summer, long after all the other birds had fledged and flown. The little thing had begun the process of birth, but that progression had been interrupted and the bird consigned to death. Indeed, it was doubtful the creature had even lived long enough to take its first breath. Before it could open its beak to drink of life, Nature had decreed that it should not live. This happened sometimes, as Turms knew only too well. When the parents have been unlucky in raising a brood, they will try for a second one, but the hatchlings are most always born too late in the year and cannot grow strong enough to survive the coming winter. In such cases, death is a mercy. Fallen from the nest, the poor, doomed creature had landed at the very first step of the royal road—Turms’ road, leading to Turms’ house. Therefore, the king himself was implicated in some way. This was yet another death he must own.

  Accepting this judgement, the king knelt in the dust of the path and scooped up the little corpse, carried it to the side of the road, and, using the edge of a stone, scraped a shallow grave in the dirt. He placed the baby bird in the hole and covered it with soil and put the stone atop the tiny mound. Then he gave thanks for its life, and as he rose to continue up the road to his palace, the full meaning of this sign broke upon him.

  It was a portent given in response to the mystery posed by Arturos and Duglos. Here was the answer that had so long eluded him. He saw it all so clearly now—all the figures present, himself included—spread out on a shining path that represented time. He saw again the arrival of Arturos and the heavily pregnant Xian-Li, and remembered how he had helped save the life of the mother and her son when all the other physicians had given up hope; he saw the infant Benedict and heard him draw his first breath and cry.

  Oh, but like the tiny nestling bird fallen from the nest, that was a birth that never should have been!

  Turms saw that now. While it is never wrong to intervene in saving a life, his action had allowed a train of events to continue that never should have occurred. Heaven in its infinite wisdom had decreed that individual life—and all the events and interactions that would flow from it—should not be. Turms the Priest King of the Velathri, in his feeble, limited wisdom, had determined otherwise.

  Now, behold: Heaven had stepped in to restore order once more. With Duglos’ death, the matter was at last concluded. That the end had taken place in the very room where the misadventure had first begun was not lost on Turms. It was a chastisement and one he humbly accepted. It had happened this way so that he would learn from it and be reminded, yet again, how mysterious were the ways of God and how just.

  Turms shook his head in wonder at the intricate design of Heaven. It was beyond human comprehension. All he could grasp was a single thread or two of a patch of tapestry being woven on a scale to span the entire cosmos.

  There were yet more lessons to be learned from this, and Turms would learn a few of them in the days to come. But there were other lessons he could not know that were yet equally important. What other events had arisen from Arturos’ meddling that should not have come to fruition?

  That was a question for others to answer. For Turms, just now, there were more pressing commitments and protocols, more funerals to conduct, more burials to attend. The season of sorrow and mourning and deep contemplation throughout Etruria had begun.

  CHAPTER 5

  In Which a Final Destination Is Reached

  Lady Haven Fayth had heard of Constantinople, of course. No student of either Latin or history could travel very far into their books without arriving in the fabled metropolis spread upon the shores of the Bosphorus. Her education, while fairly patchy in most respects, had at least included a mention or two of the place where so much of Western history had been wrought. In her wildest flights of fancy, she had never so much as imagined visiting the city, much less seeing the great domes of the Hagia Sophia gleaming gold in the early-morning light. Yet life is stranger than anyone can imagine, and there it was: the great church of Emperor Justinian, a poem in painted stone, a towering psalm of praise to las
t the ages, rising proud on its hill overlooking the silver-sparked expanse of the blue Marmara Sea.

  Haven filled her eyes with the sight, luxuriating in waves of relief and gratitude. At last, the long travail was over. “Oh, Giles,” she said a little breathlessly, “have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

  “Never,” agreed Giles from his customary place beside her. “Nor as big. It must be the size of three Londons together.”

  “It would be wonderful at half the size.”

  For Haven, the journey out of the steppes had been an awkward blend of fascination, fatigue, and mind-numbing tedium—ingredients impossible to combine with any degree of satisfaction. The day-to-day toil of travel was so drearily monotonous that most days it was all she could do to put one foot in front of another without screaming. Lightening the weariness, like black currants in a stodgy pudding, were occasional insights into the largely alien culture in which she was submerged and that flowed all around her.

  Caught between warring armies, she and Giles had been captured on the battlefield and brought to the attention of the ruler of the marauding invaders: the Bulgars, as they called themselves. He had determined that the two foreigners were to accompany him—as slaves? envoys? pets? Who knew? While being kept as royal accoutrements was not ideal, Haven comforted herself with the thought that at least the khan, or king—an educated and enlightened fellow named Simeon—was a cultivated Christian and not a brutish, godless lout.

  The Bulgars themselves seemed a contradictory race in almost every way. Capable of heroic acts of kindness and largess, they could be bloody-minded and brutal, even to their own. While professing a fierce devotion to honour, they could be savagely treacherous and wildly unreliable in even the smallest undertakings. A warrior might pledge blood and bone to the protection and defence of his comrades, and yet abandon the field at first whiff of a losing battle. Conversely, they might fight to the last breath though all hope of winning had long since fled.

  Taken as a whole, they were clever without being boastful; cheerful when hardship rained down upon them; simple in their appetites and pleasures and vainglorious in appearance; undemanding and content in whatever circumstance Fortune’s Wheel sent their way, but fascinated by wealth and tales of riches; modest in person, yet proud in tribal unity; small of stature, yet mighty as giants in the strength of their limbs; humble in demeanour, yet haughty in attitude, assuming they knew best in any circumstance they might meet. A more contrary people Haven was certain she had never seen.

  But as she got to know them better, Haven discovered that in one area, at least, they seemed to be completely without guile or duplicity: their deep and abiding reverence for religion. Christians all, they were docile, worshipful, obedient sons and daughters of Mother Church and, from infant to elder, along with the baptismal waters they were soaked head to toe in a kind of rough chivalry, holding faith and honour above petty personal interest. They also exhibited unstinting affection for their khan. As an individual, Khan Simeon shared many of the characteristics of his people, but tempered with a greater grace and sophistication, as demonstrated by his treatment of his guests. The king himself had made thoughtful provision for them: he had given them a place in the royal entourage and assigned his chamberlain to shepherd them along; he presented them with new clothes—long, belted robes similar to his own and soft leather boots; he arranged for a family to look after them so that food and basic necessities could be provided and so that they might learn something of the culture and language of the people.

  In these things and others, the khan took an interest in their welfare. In manner, word, and deed, Simeon was a true nobleman. He was also, Haven quickly came to appreciate, a leader steering a very tricky course through treacherous waters. He was a king at war with a more powerful and numerous enemy. Yet, owing to greater intelligence, skill, and determination, he had prevailed against the greatest empire the ancient world had ever known. Simeon had fought his way to the very gates of Constantinople to issue terms of peace to the emperor himself.

  All this and much more she had gleaned during the long trek from the empty plains of the Istros Valley to Constantinople. Like a wool picker gathering bits of fluff from the brambles and thickets where sheep had passed, Haven collected whatever intelligence came her way, adding it to her store. Her primary source of stray information was the khan’s chamberlain, Gyorgi, a busy fellow with a weakness for camp gossip. But the most reliable source was the king’s chief advisor, a bald-headed barrel of a man named Petar, who spoke Latin and Greek, as well as Bulgar and, apparently, several other languages. Khan Simeon’s travelling company also included several priests, dour fellows with long black beards and heavy black robes. For all she knew they might have been willing to share in her education, though as they only spoke Greek, they were of little use to Haven, who possessed only a basic, workmanlike Latin.

  But where Gyorgi was a fountain, Petar was a pump. Every drop had to be extracted with an effort. Gyorgi would prattle on endlessly about this and that whether anyone was listening or not; Petar had a maddening tendency to part with his words as if he were parting with his money. Each tiny scrap of information was weighed and assayed like a gold coin before being dispensed—so much and no more—and Haven soon learned she had to be happy with whatever she was given.

  Always, she relayed what she learned to Giles. As they followed the sprawling army over the seemingly endless hills, they discussed what they learned and gleaned from the life they observed around them, and gradually a picture of the world and their place in it emerged. Gradually, too, Haven began to sense in Giles a ready mind to go with his steady temperament. She undertook to teach him the rudiments of Latin—at least, as much as she knew—and they practiced together over endless miles beneath a burning sun. In return, to better protect her from the merciless rays, Giles made her a wide-brimmed hat from the dried leaves of rushes that grew along the river. He also obtained a waterskin for her and filled it every morning so that she would not forget to drink.

  Thus, as the days passed, so too did the rigid class division between them; the brittle artifice of nobility and servility could not stand up to the rigours of their current circumstance and bit by bit simply crumbled away.

  Making sense of their curious position consumed them. Endlessly, they circled around the question of how they would find their way home, or at least to a ley line that might start them on their journey back. In this, however, they were frustrated; lacking a map or guide of any sort, there was nothing they could do to advance the cause, and neither had so far discerned any of the subtle visceral signs—the slight tingling on the skin, the quiver in the gut—that often signalled a nearby ley line or portal. But in other areas their efforts at discovery were well rewarded. They learned that the Bulgars were at war with the people called Rhomaioi who, as Haven eventually deduced, were known to her as the Byzantines. The conflict between the two peoples had been simmering for a generation or more, flaring up from time to time in ferocious but largely indecisive and costly conflicts. Apparently, the emperor, or basileus, had unwisely prompted the rapacious Huns to raid into Bulgar lands. Enticed by promises of grants and trade routes, the Huns—who needed very little prompting—embarked on a reckless invasion, which Khan Simeon had not only decisively crushed but carried to the very walls of Constantinople before which his central force now stood.

  Such were the upheaval and turmoil caused by this disastrous campaign—Haven and Giles had witnessed some of this firsthand—that Emperor Leo had capitulated while Simeon was still some distance away. To minimise looting, pillaging, and the displacement of his subjects, Leo had sent an escort to conduct Simeon to the capital. Thus, the fighting had ceased, the elephants had been sent home along with a large portion of the mounted bowmen, and the last hundred miles had been in the company of Byzantine soldiers. And now, as they stood outside the sprawling Bulgar encampment on a hilltop to the north of the city, they were waiting to be met by the emperor’s personal troops,
the palace guard.

  “Do you think they will let us go down there?” wondered Giles.

  “I dearly hope they do,” Haven replied without taking her eyes off the splendid display before her. There was something about the place that enticed; the mere sight of it aroused something in her she had never felt before—a longing, or a sense that before her lay the answer to a question she had never known to ask. If the first glimpse of an unknown place could awaken a desire, then this glittering city had done that. She felt it as keenly as a desert thirst, and Haven knew she would not be able to rest until she had drunk her fill.

  “Here they come,” said Giles. Haven stirred herself and glanced around to where he was pointing. Down on the stone-paved road, a body of men was moving toward them, spears and helmets gleaming in the morning light. Soon they could hear the rhythmic thump of their marching feet. Two men on horseback accompanied the troops, and as the greeting party drew nearer, the riders sped on ahead to announce their arrival.

  The troops had been sent to conduct Khan Simeon to the place where Emperor Leo would meet with him and his advisors to hear terms and negotiate a peace settlement. “What will happen then?” Haven asked Petar as they stood watching the khan’s bodyguard form around Simeon for the final approach to the imperial palace.

  “The emperor will agree to our blessed khan’s conditions,” replied the chief advisor.

  “You are certain of this?”

  “The sun will rise tomorrow. Of this, I am certain.” He looked at her, then turned his face to the sun newly risen in the east, and walked away.