Chapter 88: The Bell at the Blachernae (II)

The twelfth bell would not stop ringing.

Leo counted the strokes from the gatehouse shadow, one hand pressed flat against the cold iron of the crown beneath his tunic. Twelve. Then twelve again. Then twelve once more, the same number over and over, as if the city had forgotten how to count past its own doom. Somewhere in the dark beyond the walls, a bell-ringer who should have been dead was pulling a rope with the stubbornness of a man who had already lost everything and had decided to lose it loudly.

“He is calling them out,” Theophano said. She stood beside him in the narrow throat of the gate, her violet cloak drawn tight, her face half-lit by the torch on the wall. “Every soldier who hears that will know the Blachernae was closed against the emperor. He means to make an example of us before the sun clears the roofs.”

“No,” Leo said. “He means to make us visible. A bell is not a sword. A bell tells everyone where the trouble is.” He turned from the gate and started up the stone stair that spiraled into the gatehouse tower. “Which means he does not yet know how many men I have inside.”

Theophano followed him, her sandals whispering on the steps. “And how many do you have?”

Leo did not answer. He had one gate, one commander whose debts he had purchased with Basil’s stolen ledger, and one empress who had ridden through fire at his side. He had the crown, which he could not spend, and a torn decree that might or might not be genuine. He had the twelfth bell, which was not his, and would not stop.

At the top of the tower, the wind came off the Golden Horn and struck him in the face. Constantinople lay below like a body on a surgeon’s table: the sea walls to the south, the land walls to the west, the dome of Hagia Sophia rising above the smoke like a skull above the wound. Fires still guttered in the districts Tzimiskes had sacked, and beyond the Forum of the Ox, torches moved in columns. The new emperor was not waiting for dawn. He was coming now.

“Two hundred lances,” said the man beside the parapet. His name was Romanos Drakon, and he had commanded the Blachernae Gate for eleven years, and he owed Basil a sum of gold so large that the ledger entry alone had made Leo’s hands shake. He had a face like a weathered quern-stone and eyes that had seen too many claimants to too many thrones. “Maybe three, if the tagmata of the Scholae turn out for him. More, if the Varangians come down from the palace.”

“And for us?”

Romanos spat over the wall. “Forty of the gate watch. Those of us who would rather answer to a scribe than a murderer.”

“That is not a comforting number.”

“It was not a comforting offer.” Romanos glanced at the crown-shaped weight beneath Leo’s tunic. “You want me to hold a gate against an emperor for a piece of iron you stole out of a dead man’s vault.”

“I want you to hold a gate,” Leo said, “for the man who holds the ledger that says your name.”

Romanos’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. The bell rang again, twelve and twelve and twelve, and on the walls below, the forty men of the gate watch shifted their spears and looked out into the dark.

Theophano drew Leo back from the parapet, into the shadow of the tower stairs. Her fingers closed around his wrist, and he felt the hardness of her rings through the linen. “You cannot hold this gate,” she said quietly. “Not with forty men. Not against Tzimiskes. He took the city with less than that, and he took it in one night.”

“He took it because Nikephoros was alone in his chapel and no one came to his aid,” Leo said. “Tzimiskes is not alone now, but neither is he loved. He has not been crowned. He does not have the crown. Every hour he lacks it, men ask themselves why.”

“And what will you do with those hours? Talk him to death?”

“No.” Leo pulled the torn decree from his sleeve. The dead emperor’s seal dangled from one half, the purple ink cracked where he had ripped it. “I will do what I have always done. I will write.”

He descended the stair to the gatehouse chamber, where a brazier burned low and a writing table stood against the wall. The chamber smelled of oil and old leather and the sweat of soldiers who had spent the night waiting for a war. Leo sat, set the two halves of the decree flat, took up a pen, and began to copy.

Theophano watched him from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“The decree names Tzimiskes as heir,” Leo said, not looking up. “That is why I took it. It is proof that Nikephoros intended him for the throne — and proof that Tzimiskes killed the man who wrote it, which is a different matter. But proof is only useful if it can be read by the right eyes.”

“You cannot forge the emperor’s seal.”

“I do not need to.” He finished the first copy and set it aside, then began a second. “I need two versions of the same lie. One that says Tzimiskes is the lawful heir, and one that says he murdered his way to the purple. The same seal, the same hand, the same words — except for a single clause. Whoever reads the first will believe it because they want to. Whoever reads the second will believe it because they fear it.”

Theophano came closer, and in the brazier light her face was sharp and beautiful and utterly unreadable. “And who will read them?”

“The tagmata commanders,” Leo said. “The Varangians. The bishops who have not yet blessed him. Everyone who has ever sworn an oath and wondered whether it would survive the night.” He set down the pen and looked up at her. “You told me I should take Basil’s place. Basil did not win wars with swords. He won them with letters, and with the knowledge of which letters to send to whom.”

“You are not Basil.”

“No,” Leo said. “Basil is still alive. Which is why I need to know what he is doing, and I need to know it before Tzimiskes reaches this gate.”

He took up the two decrees and went out into the cold. The bell rang again overhead, twelve strokes, and the sound rolled down the hill of the Blachernae and out across the sleeping city. Leo stood in the gateway and looked up at the tower, where Romanos and his forty men waited, and beyond it to the golden horn, black and still under the stars.

Then he saw the rider.

A single horseman, coming up the Mese from the direction of the Forum of Constantine. No banner, no torch, no escort. He rode slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and the bell rang over him, twelve and twelve and twelve.

Leo stepped out from the gate, the two decrees in his hand, and waited.

The rider reined in ten paces away. He was a eunuch, round-faced and soft-bodied, wrapped in a plain brown cloak that had been cut for a larger man. Leo had seen him before, in the corridors of the Great Palace, carrying Basil’s correspondence and saying nothing.

“The Parakoimomenos sends his greetings,” the eunuch said. His voice was mild. “He asks whether you have finished the lesson yet.”

“No,” Leo said.

“He thought not.” The eunuch smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had been told a joke he did not find funny. “He bids me tell you that the emperor is at the Forum of the Ox with three hundred men, and that the Varangians have not yet decided. He bids me tell you that the gate will hold until the fourth hour of the morning, and not a moment longer.”

“Why would he tell me that?”

“Because he wants to see what you will do with the time,” the eunuch said. “And because he says the ledger you stole is incomplete. The last page is missing. He has it.”

The bell rang again, twelve strokes, and the eunuch turned his horse and rode back down the Mese without another word. Leo stood in the gateway with the torn decree in his hand, and the crown cold against his chest, and the twelfth bell ringing out over the city like a countdown to the end of the world.