Chira then submitted to a body cavity search, which was unpleasant but brief. Once they found nothing on/in her, Basina ordered the four of them out of the room. They protested, shocked and angry, but she grunted at them and they left.
When Basina and Chira were alone, there was a long pause. “I detect some glamour,” said Basina at length. “Who has Sent you?”
“Nobody you know, milady,” said Chira. “A company of good men and women who seek your aid. We are from far away, in every possible sense.”
Basina listened, took a moment—in general her movements and words were slow and languid—and then said, in a bored and long-suffering tone, “What is desired of me?”
“A clandestine introduction to a member of the court.”
“It is a rather large court, girl, can you be more specific?”
“There is a court apothecary who is also responsible for the maintenance of the herb gardens.”
“Let me guess,” Basina said with a throaty laugh. “Somebody wants kalonji. It’s always kalonji.”
Chira suppressed surprise and asked, “Who else wants kalonji?”
“Everyone. Every witch I’ve ever met, especially Franks, since nobody can seem to make it thrive in the north. Cyril Arcadius—the apothecary—would be a very wealthy man if he sold it. Then he could buy himself as many ladies’ favors as he liked.”
“He prefers the barter method,” guessed Chira.
“He finds it romantic.” Basina laughed.
“I’m prepared to barter,” said Chira. “This should be simple.”
“Honey-bee,” Basina said in a knowing voice, “nothing is ever simple.”
Although she was already fairly certain of what was coming, from her experiences on the first three Strands, Chira kept a blank look of innocence on her face and asked, “What isn’t simple about Cyril Arcadius?”
“He likes a witch to be performing magic—any little spell, nothing dramatic—while he is taking her. Makes him feel like he’s somehow part of the magic-making. It’s pathetic.”
This is not what Chira had expected, as on previous Strands Basina had simply alerted her to various peccadillos of the apothecary’s, none of which fazed her. This variation posed a serious problem, however:
“I am not a witch,” said Chira. “I can’t offer that.”
Basina shrugged. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose I could be your proxy. If you will be my proxy for another matter.”
“Meaning?”
“I am expected in His Majesty’s chamber this evening,” said Basina.
Chira knew from DORC-prep that the Emperor—Alexios III Angelos—was married to Euphrosyne Doukaina Kamatera, a first-class Alpha Bitch who, despite being famously adulterous herself, would eviscerate anyone found fiddling with her wussy husband’s tackle-box, especially since she’d only given him daughters. That is not what surprised Chira about the news of this dalliance. Rather it was this: “Aren’t you . . . a kinswoman . . . of his?”
“Honey-bee,” said Basina, “it’s the imperial court, we’re all each other’s blood-cousins. Why do you think everyone fights so dirty? I would prefer to be in someone else’s bed tonight, that’s all, so I need somebody to distract His Majesty, and I need it to be a stranger so she can vanish before Euphrosyne hunts her down and gouges her eyes out.”
“Is the Emperor expecting you?”
“I was summoned by his cupbearer, so somebody is expecting me,” she said. “But it might be his wife trying to entrap me.”
“Ah,” said Chira.
“Yes,” said Basina. “If you open that wooden cabinet over there, you’ll find my summer gowns. Help yourself to any but the purple one. I’ll have the maids oil and dress your hair to resemble mine, but I will not trust you with my jewelry.”
“Very well,” said Chira, wishing DORC’s curriculum included a mandatory anti-assassin workshop.
“Spend the day in here. You’d be underfoot anywhere else.”
Chira dressed herself in the most modest of the several gowns—all garish by modern standards, with tremendous amounts of small garnets and turquoise sewn onto the fronts, as well as decorative stitching in silver and gold thread. She then received (grudging and ungentle) ministrations from Basina’s attendants, who attempted to goad her into revealing her identity until Basina told them to shut it. Chira was left alone in the chamber for approximately five hours, until Basina and her entourage returned, the entourage tittering, Basina looking pleased with herself. In her hand Basina held a black silk drawstring bag, half the size of a human fist.
“That was painless. Here are your kalonji seeds,” she said, and tossed them onto Chira’s lap. “Keep them tied to your belt, or better yet, your wrist.”
“When am I to go to the Emperor’s chambers?” Chira asked.
“After nightfall,” said Basina. “One of his eunuchs will come with a summons. Have you eaten today?”
When Chira said that she had not, Basina sent two of her retinue down to the kitchens to bring up fruit and nuts and cheese, further cementing the attendants’ resentment. A mediocre lute-playing eunuch came in to entertain them, until Basina got tired of him and sent him away, and finally after the sun had set, Basina excused herself to go to her other lover’s bed.
“Do not abuse her,” she ordered her sulking retinue. “If I hear of any bad behavior on your part, I’ll have you flayed by that Genoan His Majesty keeps in the cellars.”
She departed, leaving Chira alone with the seething attendants. All efforts on her part to gather intelligence from them met with complete failure as they were barely able to contain themselves from tearing her garments off her à la Cinderella’s stepsisters.
Finally the Emperor’s eunuch came in search of Basina. When the attendants presented Chira in her stead, he blinked a moment, then sighed, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and lugubriously gestured her to follow him. The attendants were pleased by this response, and one of them whispered, “Surely he is leading you straight to what should have been Basina’s death. Ha!” Followed by a Greek term with no perfect translation but meant in essence, “Sucker!”
The eunuch led her through such a maze of torch-and-lamp-lit stairwells, corridors, halls, and yards that she became disoriented and is not able to reconstruct the route for us (shown as, literally, a gray area on the DORCCAD rendering). But eventually, she was brought to a grand set of copper-faced double doors with intricate gold chase-work as decoration. The eunuch rapped on one of these with a particular staccato rhythm, and in response the doors swung outward toward them. Ahead of them was a very small vestibule, candlelit, with one door to the right and one to the left. (We know from old maps—digitized and cleaned up in DORCCAD—that these led to the Emperor’s and Empress’s respective bedchambers.) The eunuch, giving her a mournful look, literally shoved her into the vestibule and turned his back. As the door began to swing shut, a smooth, strong hand grabbed Chira’s arm and she felt a slender blade press against her carotid artery. As her self-defense skill set is of the flight-not-fight variety, she froze.
“Finally, Basina,” said a woman’s voice, harshly happy. “Finally I have caught you in the act.”
“I am not Basina, Your Majesty,” said Chira. “I am simply an entertainer obeying a command from my Emperor.”
There was some cursing, the knife blade was removed, the hand loosened its grip, and she turned so that her back was to the wall and she could face her assailant in the candlelight. The Empress Euphrosyne was considerably older than her but still, in a ravaged, cougar-esque sort of way, definitely pretty hot.
“Who are you? You can’t go in there,” said Euphrosyne. “I know what happens when a whore gives an emperor a son. If he doesn’t get one from me, he doesn’t get one from anyone. Nobody is going to rob my daughters of the throne.”
“I’m Jewish,” Chira said. “No son of mine would ever be allowed on the throne, no matter who his father is.”
Euphrosyne looked surprised. “He would never
bed a Jewess,” she said.
“He saw me dance at a feast a fortnight back and made inquiries. We’ve never spoken in person, but he has already paid a great deal and I am tardy. Given I am no threat to Your Majesty, may I attend to my Emperor’s wishes?”
Everything about Euphrosyne’s demeanor changed as this sank in. She gestured to the door that led to the imperial bedchamber. “Go on, then,” she said. “I don’t care if you fuck him. In fact, fuck him thoroughly so I don’t have to worry about his fucking anyone else tonight.”
With these words of encouragement she opened the door herself. It was a very large room, marble floors, and panels of marble for walls, ceiling of glassed gold-leaf tile looking burnished in the flickering light from a dozen beeswax candles. One entire wall opened on to a balcony that overlooked a garden.
In the middle of the room was the single piece of furniture: a large bed that appeared to be carved out of solid turquoise, and on this sat a sickly pale, dark-haired man who did not look at all what Chira expected of an emperor. He was wearing a nightshirt, which was thick white silk with gold thread sewn into the collar, cuffs, and hems. He looked up expectantly when he saw her, and then pulled his head back like a surprised turtle.
“Where’s Basina?” he demanded, standing nervously.
“Basina was ill tonight, Your Majesty,” said Chira, with a reassuring smile. “She sent me to entertain you in her absence.”
“You’re an assassin,” said His Majesty.
“Of course not, Your Majesty,” said Chira pleasantly. “I am here entirely for your pleasure.”
“No, you’re an assassin, you must be an assassin, I’ve never seen you before and you came in here without my eunuch.”
“Your honored wife sent the eunuch away in the antechamber,” said Chira. “She wanted to speak to me in private before I came in to you.”
“Did she tell you to assassinate me?”
“Your Majesty,” said Chira, looking graciously shocked. “Of course not. She herself is so solicitous of your safety that she would not allow me in until she had reassured herself of my benign intentions. She has deigned to allow me to enter your bedchamber.”
“Prove that you are not an assassin,” he said, not moving from his defensive stance by the side of the bed.
Chira continued to smile at him, adjusting the tone of the smile to try to reassure and calm him. She shimmied easily out of Basina’s long royal-blue robe, which she had not fully secured specifically so that she could remove it easily. Because of all the jewels and stiff metallic thread, it landed inelegantly, but she stepped out of it with a sinuous grace, presenting as much of herself as possible directly to him. She slipped the drawstring of the kalonji-seed bag over her wrist and palmed it. Entirely unclothed, she smiled invitingly at him, crossed to him, and took his hand with her free one. He stared at his hand in hers as if this was an experience he had never had before. She examined his face. He seemed on the verge of a panic attack.
“Would Your Majesty like to examine my person himself, to see that I have no weapons?”
She ran his hand across her breasts, and then down her belly and between her legs. “Please inspect as carefully as you would like,” she whispered into his ear, and closed her lips over his earlobe. He began to tremble.
“If you’re not an assassin, you must be a spy,” he said, pulling his head away. “You are from that navy of so-called Pilgrims that are wintering in Zara, aren’t you?”
“I do not know what you speak of, Your Majesty,” she said, and squeezed his hand between her thighs. He made a confused moaning sound but tried to pull his hand away.
“You’re from Montferrat, aren’t you?”
“I have never heard of Montferrat, Your Majesty,” she whispered, and again closed her lips upon his earlobe. Then she licked the back of his ear.
A moment later he was naked atop her, bucking away, and a few moments after that, with a loud sob of relief, he finished and lay panting on top of her.
Immediately the door to the chamber pushed open, and Empress Euphrosyne stormed in with two large Varangian Guards behind her. The Emperor did not bother to raise his head.
“Thank you,” said Euphrosyne briskly. “Alexios, get off of her, we’re sending her home.”
Without further acknowledging Chira, the Emperor rolled over on the bed and lay staring up at the gold-tiled ceiling with a morose expression. The Empress picked up Basina’s blue gown and Chira held her hand out for it. “I don’t think so,” Euphrosyne said with a laugh, and tossed it into a corner. “Alexios, I’m giving her your nightshirt to wear.”
The Emperor was already asleep.
Euphrosyne picked up the garment and tossed it to Chira. “Put that on quickly, Jewess. These men are taking you back to Pera.”
This was convenient enough, as the second part of Chira’s task was to get across the Golden Horn to Pera, to leave the kalonji seeds with another witch (KCW from previous Strands, but still a stranger in this one) in the Jewish section of the city. Getting an armed imperial escort was not how she had done it in previous Strands, but this would take less effort on her part.
One of the guards offered her a woolen cloak and she wrapped it round her shoulders. She allowed them to take her down various flights of stairs and across yards and gardens and halls and down corridors, until she was once again disoriented. Eventually the smell of briny water began to waft past her nostrils, so she was not surprised when they came to an enormous wooden gate that opened onto a street at the edge of the water. There was a boat with two oarsmen who wordlessly rowed them across the Golden Horn—the deep protected harbor, less than two bowshots wide, that led to the hilly northern suburb of Pera, in the shadow of Galata Tower.
Upon landing at the foot of the steep hill (not an official dock, although there were several in either direction), the oarsmen secured the boat, and the two guards got out and then hoisted her directly to the shore. Throughout this she had maintained her firm hold on the kalonji-seed bag and now was mindful not to let the harbor water touch it.
“Where’s your home?” asked one of the guards, with the clumsy, angry-sounding accent of the Britons who made up such a large percentage of the Varangian force.
Suppressing a mischievous urge to address him in modern English, she responded in Greek. “It is directly behind the synagogue,” she said. “My father is Avraham ben Moises. I will show you.”
The three of them marched up the steep hill along the street, which was not very broad but paved with stones and well maintained. About halfway up was the synagogue, a large building with a fenced garden. Chira directed them to the rows of neat wooden homes behind this, all dark as it was now about midnight. In the middle row of houses, set on leveled-off stone foundations, Chira pointed to one house in particular.
One of the guards took her by the shoulder and the other pounded on the door.
After a confused moment, there were voices within both this house and the surrounding homes, and candlelight appeared in windows. Eventually the door opened and a man barely old enough to be Chira’s father opened the door. He sported a long beard, longish hair covered by a felt cap, and dark robes. A woman, obviously his wife, stood behind him, and behind her were the shadowy forms of several children ranging in age from approximately seven to full-grown.
“What do you want?” asked the man in Greek, fearful, staring up at the Varangian Guard.
“We’ve brought your daughter back,” said the guard, sounding bored.
“Our what?” the man said, amazed.
“Your daughter,” repeated the guard, in a warning voice.
“All of our daughters are here with us already,” the man said, looking alarmed and confused.
The guard took a step forward to tower over him in the doorway. “To disown your daughter because she has been with the Emperor is to disown the Emperor himself,” he said warningly. “Either you receive her into your home or I will bring you back to answer to His Majesty for the insul
t directly.”
Looking mystified, and a bit spooked, the man stepped back into the house and somewhat robotically held his arm out in a gesture of welcome. The other guard pushed Chira through the doorway.
“Abba,” said Chira in a happy voice, throwing her arms around him. And then turning to his equally mystified wife, “Eema!” The woman very woodenly put her arms around her.
Then Rachel, the oldest of their daughters (late teens?), and Chira’s connection, gasped as if remembering or realizing something, and said, “Oh, my dearest sister, I’m so glad to see you safely home!” She threw her arms around Chira with a bear hug. To her younger siblings, she said emphatically, “Is it not wonderful to have our sister home again?”
They gave her strange looks.
“Pretend you know her, and welcome her home,” Rachel whispered fiercely in Hebrew.
The children immediately surrounded Chira and hugged her with feigned enthusiasm.
“The Emperor thanks you,” said the senior guard to the father. “But the Empress requests that you keep your daughters closer to home from now on.”
“Yes, of course, sir,” stammered the father.
The other guard added, “I’d marry this one off as soon as possible. If nobody in Pera wants her, I’ve got some connections in town who would be happy to take her off your hands. Get a great price with those tits.”
“I . . . I’ll take that into consideration, thank you,” said the father.
This man pulled back his helmet to give Avraham a clear view of his face. “Name’s Bruno. Bruno of Hamlin,” he said agreeably. “You can ask for me via the imperial kitchens, the head cook’s a kinsman through marriage.” He winked at Chira and then turned his attention back to the father. “I’ll take fifteen percent commission. Think about it.”
The guards left.
As soon as the door was closed, the younger children pulled away from her and scurried behind their mother, as Chira turned to face the family. Rachel looked delighted, but the father and mother were frowning unhappily and the younger children took their cues from this.
“Thank you,” said Chira in Hebrew, in her most winsome smile. “I apologize profusely for the alarm and confusion I’ve just caused you. Please allow me to explain the peculiar circumstances of our meeting.”