but my life was at stake.
By the time my pursuers clambered out into the square I was a distant figure in dishevelled clothes, head bent, half leaning against the railing.
The men rushed straight past the pillar.
Nobody notices stylites.
14
I would have been out of the city before nightfall if a guard hadn’t been left beside the iron hound. No one notices stylites, but a guard wouldn’t miss seeing one of those holy men sliding down a rope off his pillar.
Before dark the watchman was relieved by two more who set up torches along the colonnade. Perhaps they hoped I would return to try to hide myself in the underground maze.
I was in a bad spot. Sooner or later somebody was going to check the pillar. But at least I had time to think and I’d always survived by my wits.
Admittedly I’d made a few errors in judgement the past couple of days. It was obvious now but could I have known then that Arabia was waiting for me that morning near the hound?
In retrospect I was able to piece the story together. Arabia and Philokalas had been working together. Arabia had seen me at Florentius’s house and knew I could help her and Philokalas sell the icon, something they couldn’t do themselves – one being a servant, the other a lowly labourer.
She probably met Philokalas when both worked at the Patriarch’s residence. Philokalas must have come upon the hidden image while in the course of repair-work in the Patriarch’s cellars following the earthquake. In fact, the earthquake might well have revealed the icon’s hiding place.
Had Arabia and Philokalas carted it together to the underground hiding place where I found it, and she pretended to see it for the first time? She could have let Philokalas into the Patriarch’s house at night; the only way to get the icon down underground was through the door I had been so happy to find. Or had Philokalas’s other accomplices helped him move it? Were there others? Perhaps the men following me had been all my imagination and the fellow who asked Macedonia about Philokalas was simply a worried friend to whom he had unwisely let drop a word or two about an icon-painter he was seeking?
At any rate, once Philokalas vanished, Arabia began looking for the useful icon-painter herself. And now she’d double-crossed me. Not only was she running off with my share of Florentius’s payment, she also had whatever the rival collector had paid her.
How could she? It didn’t seem fair. I would never have killed her. Even if I’d had the chance. I swear I wouldn’t have killed her.
There had to be a rival collector, the way I saw it. Despite what they said, the guards and the man who had killed Florentius weren’t sent by the Patriarch – who was well known to be violently opposed to icons. That was why Leo made him Patriarch. He wouldn’t be concerned if the image were damaged when transported, as his supposed men had carelessly indicated he would.
Not everyone would have noticed that little slip, but I did.
It could only mean those men were sent by someone else who had heard about the icon’s survival or been informed about it by Arabia. Doubtless she’d managed to get the collector’s name from Florentius, who’d evidently been taking advantage of her by his own admission.
I was exhausted, but there wasn’t enough room on the pillar’s platform to lie down, so I leaned against its railing and looked out over the city. The glowing dome of the Great Church seemed to throw orange sparks along the streets and into windows and on ships in the harbour. I could almost feel the gaze of monstrous eyes staring down out of the black vault of the heavens, but there was nothing to see up there except the glittering cold points of stars, and ragged wraiths of cloud fleeing before a rising wind.
People say Hades is underground, but I found it up there in cold loneliness.
And it was the iron hound who guarded the entrance to the path I took that led me there.
I wouldn’t have killed Arabia. When I wasn’t looking up I looked down at the piece of brick beside my feet, the unused symbol of my mercy.
15
At dawn I began to cry out for Patriarch Anastasius.
People pay no attention to stylites, but then most stylites don’t demand to see the Patriarch and shout about stolen icons.
I’m not certain what I expected. After days down there in the