ached from carrying her medical supplies. Leo must be even more exhausted because he had the heavier boxes, and Simonis carried a bag of clothes.
She stopped and let her case drop for a moment. "We must find somewhere for tonight. At least to leave our belongings. And we need to eat. It is more than five hours since breakfast."
"Six," Simonis observed. "I've never seen so many people in my life."
"Do you want me to carry that?" Leo asked, but his face looked tired and he already had far more weight than either Simonis or Anna.
In answer, Simonis picked up her bag again and started forward.
A hundred yards farther, they found an excellent inn that served food. It had good mattresses stuffed with goose down and was furnished with linen sheets. Each room had a basin large enough for bathing and a latrine with a tile drain. It was eight folleis each, per night, not including meals. That was expensive, but Anna doubted others would be much cheaper.
She dreaded going out in case she made another mistake, another womanish gesture, expression, or even lack of reaction in some way. One error would be enough to make people look harder and perhaps see the differences between her and a real eunuch.
They ate a lunch of fresh gray mullet and wheat bread at a tavern and asked a few discreet questions about cheaper lodgings.
"Oh, inland," a fellow diner told them cheerfully. He was a little gray-haired man in a worn tunic that came no farther than his knees, his legs bound with cloth to keep him warm but leaving him unencumbered for work. "Farther west you go, cheaper they are. You strangers here?"
There was no point in denying it. "From Nicea," Anna told him.
"I'm from Sestos myself." The man gave them a gap-toothed grin. "But everyone comes here, sooner or later."
Anna thanked him, and the following day they hired a donkey to carry their cases and moved to a cheaper inn close to the western edge of the city by the land walls, not far from the Gate of Charisius.
That night, she lay in her bed listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the city around her. This was Constantinople, the heart of Byzantium. She had heard stories of it all her life, from her parents and her grandparents, but now that she was here it was so strange, too big for the imagination to grasp.
But she would accomplish nothing by remaining in her lodgings. Survival demanded that in the morning she go out and begin the search for a house from which she could establish her practice.
In spite of her tiredness, sleep did not come easily, and her dreams were crowded with strange faces and the fear of being lost.
She knew from her father's stories that Constantinople was surrounded by water on three sides, and that the main street, named Mese, was Y shaped. The two arms met at the Amastrianon Forum and continued east toward the sea. All the great buildings she had heard him speak of were along this stretch: the Hagia Sophia, the Forum of Constantine, the Hippodrome, the old imperial palaces, and of course shops with exquisite artifacts, silks, spices, and gems.
They set out in the morning, walking briskly. The air was fresh. Food shops were open, and at practically every corner bakeries were crowded with people, but they had no time to indulge themselves. They were still in the web of narrow streets that threaded the whole city from the calm water of the Golden Horn in the north to the Sea of Marmara in the south. Several times they had to stand aside to let donkey carts pass, piled high with goods for market, mostly fruit and vegetables.
They reached the wide stretch of Mese Street just as a camel swayed past them, high-headed, sour-faced, and a man hurried behind it, bent double under the weight of a bale of cotton. The thoroughfare teemed with people. In among the native Greeks she saw turbaned Muslims, Bulgars with close-cropped heads, dark-skinned Egyptians, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and high-cheeked Mongols. Anna wondered if they felt as strange here as she did, as awed by the size, the vitality, the jumble of vibrant colors in the clothes, on the shop awnings-purples and scarlets, blues and golds, half shades of aquamarine, wine red, and rose pink, wherever she looked.
She had no idea where to start. She needed to make inquiries and learn something about the different residential areas where she might find a house.