Chapter 81: The Scent of the Second Dawn

The road out of Constantinople ran west, rutted by the hooves of pack mules and the carts of farmers who had fled the night before. Leo walked it with the crown pressed against his ribs, wrapped in a cloth that still smelled of the chapel's incense, and the empress at his side.

Theophano had not spoken since they passed the city walls. She had ridden through the gate of the Deuteron with her veil drawn low, her hands steady on the reins, and the guards—men of the Scholae who had known her face for years—had let her pass without a question. That was the power she carried. Not the purple. Not the diadem. The simple, terrible fact that no one could imagine her as anything other than what she was.

They left the horses at a monastery three miles down the via Egnatia, in the care of a monk who owed Theophano's family a debt from before the days of Romanos. The empress paid him in silver and silence, and he asked nothing.

Now they walked. The sun had climbed high and pale, a white coin behind the autumn haze, and the land stretched flat and brown toward the hills. Leo's shoulders ached. His feet had blistered somewhere in the night. He did not stop.

"You are bleeding," Theophano said.

He looked down. The cloth at his side had darkened. He had not felt the wound. Somewhere in the chapel, or the vault, or the sea gate—a blade had found him without his knowing.

"It is nothing."

"It is not nothing. Sit."

He sat on a milestone that had been set there when Justinian was young. The empress knelt in the dust of the road and pulled back the cloth, and her hands were careful, unhurried, the hands of a woman who had dressed worse wounds in darker rooms. She tore a strip from her own under-robe and bound him.

"You will need a physician," she said.

"I will need many things."

"Begin with the bleeding."

He almost smiled. "You sound like Basil."

Her hands paused. "Do not say that name to me."

"He is alive."

"I know."

"He was in the chapel. He saw everything."

"I know." She tied off the bandage and sat back on her heels, and her face in the flat light was unreadable. "Basil has been alive through four emperors, Leo. He was alive when Romanos was dragged from his bed. He was alive when Constantine the Porphyrogennetos died of a fever no one could name. He will be alive when Tzimiskes is dead and forgotten. That is what he is. He is not a man. He is a weather."

"And what am I?"

She looked at him a long time. A farmer's cart creaked past, and the farmer did not look at them, because a man and a woman on a roadside were not worth the trouble of looking.

"You," she said at last, "are the thing he has been waiting for."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer I have."

Leo stood. The bandage pulled tight against his side, and the crown shifted against his chest, and he thought of the vault beneath the palace, and the ledger he had left in Basil's hands, and the name he had written into the plan that even now was closing gates and turning loyalties in a city that had crowned a murderer.

"Then we find out what that means," he said. "Where does the road go?"

"To the Blachernae."

"The Blachernae is in the city."

"The land gate is in the city. The commander of the land gate is not."

Leo stopped walking. "You knew."

"I know many things." Theophano drew her veil across her face, and her voice came muffled through the linen. "You wrote his name into your plan, Leo. You wrote it in the chancery, in your own hand, and you sealed it with a seal you borrowed from the eparch's office. Did you think I would not read it?"

"You went through my—"

"I go through everything." She began to walk, and after a moment he followed, because there was nothing else to do. "Andreas of Blachernae. He commanded the gate under Nikephoros. He owes Basil a debt from the Bulgarian campaign. And he has a brother in the Tagmata who hates Tzimiskes for what happened at the chapel."

"He does not hate Tzimiskes. He fears him."

"Fear and hate are the same road, Leo. One runs uphill, the other down. Both arrive at the same place."

They walked in silence for a while. The hills drew closer. Somewhere ahead, a monastery bell rang the ninth hour, thin and distant, and Leo counted the strokes without meaning to, because that was what he did—he counted, he measured, he weighed—and the habit was the only thing that had ever kept him alive.

"Andreas will not take the crown," he said.

"No."

"He will not take it to Tzimiskes either."

"No."

"Then what will he do?"

Theophano stopped at the crest of a low rise and pointed. Below them, in a fold of the hills, a small fortified house stood among olive trees—a place of no importance, a country estate of some middling family, the kind of place an emperor would never think to look.

"He will bring it here," she said. "And he will bring the men who will decide the next emperor."

Leo looked at the house. Smoke rose from its chimney, thin and blue. A dog barked once, twice, and fell silent.

"You planned this," he said.

"I planned many things. Some of them have survived."

"Tzimiskes will find us."

"Tzimiskes has a city to hold. He has a coronation to arrange, and a patriarch to bribe, and an army to pay, and a hundred men who watched him murder his uncle in a chapel and are now wondering whether they will be next. He cannot chase one scribe and one empress across Thrace. Not yet."

"Not yet."

"No." She turned to him, and her eyes above the veil were dark and steady. "So we have until not yet. And in that time, Leo Anatolius, we will decide what the purple throne is for."

She started down the hill. Leo stood a moment longer on the crest, the wind cold against his face, the crown heavy against his heart, and the city behind him burning still in his mind—its churches and its cisterns, its eunuchs and its generals, its ten thousand rooms where men wrote history and called it truth.

Then he followed her down.

In the house among the olives, a fire had been lit. A man he did not know stood at the door with a sword loose in its sheath and a question in his eyes. Behind him, in the shadows of the hall, Leo saw other men—the hard, tired faces of soldiers who had marched too far and been paid too little.

Andreas of Blachernae came forward. He was older than Leo had expected, gray at the temples, with the flat stare of a man who had spent his life doing ugly things for other men's glory.

"You are the scribe," he said.

"I am."

"And that is the empress."

"It is."

Andreas looked at Theophano for a long moment. Then he looked at the cloth bundle pressed against Leo's side, and something moved in his face—not greed, not fear, but something older and stranger, the look of a man who sees a thing he has spent his whole life pretending not to want.

"Bring it in," he said. "We have much to discuss before the second dawn."

Leo stepped across the threshold, and the firelight closed over him, and somewhere far behind, in the city he had left behind, the tenth bell began to ring again.