the looting of the city on the last crusade. It was the doge Enrico Dandolo who had been personally responsible for taking the four great bronze horses that now adorned St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. He also had taken first choice among the holiest of the relics stolen, including the vial of Christ's blood, one of the nails from the Cross, the gold-encased cross that Constantine the Great had carried into battle with him, and much more besides. Yet Enrico had been his great-grandfather. He was part of Giuliano's history, good or bad.
As he had stood by the tomb, another person had walked past and spat on the plaque inlaid on the floor. This time Giuliano had come determined to clean it, even if only for a few moments, until the next violation.
The person who had watched him today had awoken a different feeling in him. He had seen eunuchs before, but they still made him uncomfortable. He had recognized without question what he was. It was nothing of the man's gender that disturbed him; it was the pain in his eyes and in the lines of his mouth. For a moment Giuliano, a complete stranger, had looked inside him at a raw and terrible wound.
Why did Giuliano clean the plaque over the tomb? He had never known his great-grandfather; there were no memories, no personal stories. It was only because the name on it was Dandolo. It was someone to whom he could belong, a tie to the past that had nothing to do with the Byzantine mother who had not wanted him.
He left the church and walked rapidly, as if following a known path, yet he had no distinct idea except to climb upward to where he could look out over the sea. Always he went toward light on the water and the limitless horizon, as if in looking at it, he might free his mind.
What had he expected to find when he came here to Constantinople at last? A city alien to him, too Eastern, too decadent, so he could hate it and return to Venice having exorcised it from his heart. That was it. So he could think of his mother with indifference and recognize nothing of her in himself.
He came to a small place, a side turning off the path, just large enough for two or three people to stand and stare at the shifting patterns of current and wind as the tide swept through the narrows between Europe and Asia. It looked like the brushstrokes of an artist, except that it moved. It was a living thing, as though it had a pulse. The air was a breath on his skin, warm and clean, a little salt.
The city below him was like Venice and yet so unlike. The architecture was lighter in Venice, yet there were echoes in it of this. There was the same teeming vitality and trade, always trade, the eye for a bargain, the weighing of value, buying and selling. And there was the same knowledge of the sea in all its moods: subtle, dangerous, beautiful, boundless with chance and possibility.
Yet the similarities were superficial. He did not belong here. No one really knew him except in brief friendship, such as Andrea Mocenigo, who had allowed him to become so much a part of his family. But that was kindness. They would have done the same for anyone. Being a stranger in Constantinople gave Giuliano a freedom to grow, to change if he wished to, to embrace new ideas, no matter how wild or foolish.
Belonging was safety, but it was also constriction. Not belonging was boundless, as if his feet knew no weight and his horizons were endless. But he had no roots, either, and at unexpected moments there was a loneliness that was almost unbearable.
He could not clear from his mind the passion and grief on the face of the eunuch who had watched him in the Hagia Sophia. There was a tenderness in it that haunted him.
He must finish collecting and assessing his information for the doge and return home.
When finally his first officer returned, Giuliano was ready to leave. He had all the information he needed. At least he thought so, although even as he said good-bye to Mocenigo and his family and carried his chest out to the waiting cart, a doubt stirred in him that again he was escaping. Did the feeling of completion come from his finishing his task here for the doge? Or was