if you’d prefer, say, John the Baptist, I can easily change—”
“I already have a room full of saints. Every morning and every evening I pray to Saint Paul and Saint Stephen and all the rest: ‘Please let my lodger the painter of icons pay his rent, Amen.’ And look what it’s got me.”
“Maybe the Lord means for you to have this new image, rather than a few paltry coins?”
Macedonia laughed. She sounded like a starving gull. “And you think I shouldn’t question the will of the Lord? Do you know what I heard about that earthquake a few weeks ago? The ground started shaking at the exact moment the workmen put their hands on that statue up by the amphitheatre – the one everyone says is Empress Theodora.” She lowered her voice, as if we might be overheard. “Really, it’s some pagan goddess. Athena, probably. Been there forever. She likes looking out over the sea. Didn’t like the City Prefect trying to move her; the fellow who repaired the crack she put in my kitchen wall told me. That’s what a thousand-year-old goddess can do. Your painted saints can’t even find my rent.”
4
As I left the apartment building a figure leapt up from the doorway and lurched off out of sight.
Only a beggar, I told myself, to judge from the man’s rags. I could feel my heart leaping against my ribs. Why should I be startled at a beggar who’d taken shelter? If I was going to start being alarmed by beggars, I’d be jumping out of my skin every time I turned a corner.
I was gutless was what it amounted to. If I had any courage I would have acted by now. Then again, if I had any courage, would I be making my living by lurking in my room painting saints on boards?
I had always thought of myself as a Christian. I even went to church sometimes. And where had it got me – or any of the thousands of other good Christians trapped in the rotted carcass of the empire?
It started to rain. Black clouds rubbed their bellies against the countless crosses bristling from Constantinople’s rooftops – a view of Calvary multiplied a thousand times.
And here I am imagining I’m being crucified, I chided myself. Macedonia was right. Icons wouldn’t put a roof over my head or food on my plate, or even supply me with a plate.
Not the icons I painted, at any rate.
Now that I didn’t even have a room to shelter in, maybe the time had come to take the chance I’d been holding in reserve for weeks. What choice did I have?
I cut through a square I crossed almost every day – a deserted place surrounded by boarded-up shops – and went towards a sculpture that stood under one corner of the square’s colonnade.
For once, the stylite who lived atop the granite column rising above the two-storey brick buildings was silent. Probably he was too cold to cry out to humanity or heaven, or both. If it got much colder, with the rain coming down, he’d be covered in a glimmering sheen of ice, like the gold leaf I put on my images.
Living in the city, you learn to ignore holy men the same way you ignore stray dogs, gulls, and beggars. Not to mention I was busy looking over my shoulder in case those clerks – or whoever they were – had followed me from the tavern.
Which is why as I ducked under the colonnade I ran smack into the girl. She would’ve ended up on her backside but she grabbed two handfuls of my cloak and clung to me, radiating warmth and exotic perfume.
“Sorry,” I said, disconcerted. “I was thinking.” As if I couldn’t watch where I was going and think at the same time.
The girl smiled faintly. There was just a touch of red on her slightly parted lips. Beneath a sodden blue wool cloak she wore a stola of faded green silk. Not a whore. A servant wearing household hand-me-downs who’d stolen a couple of dabs of her mistress’s make-up and perfume.
Her triangular little face was nothing special except for the enormous brown eyes. They were outsized, their gaze piercing.
An icon’s eyes.
I’d seen her before. How could I forget a face like that? But where? It came back to me. At Florentius’s house. Yes, the last time I’d futilely tried to sell him one of my icons.
I kept the knowledge to myself.
The wind picked up, blowing rain under the