The Golden Horn Read Online Free Page A

and as deep
in as the Deuteron on the other side of the Middle Way.”
    “What of our people? Where were they?”
    He shrugged. “They fought. Drove off the Franks,
thanks mainly to the Varangians. But the Emperor turned tail and bolted. The
mob dragged old Isaac Angelos out of his hole and put the crown back on his
head, and the Franks brought in the young pup Alexios and crowned him, and now
there’s two Emperors, father and son, as pretty as you please, with the Franks
pulling the boy’s puppet-strings and the old man roaming about looking
for his poor lost eyes.”
    “If I had been Emperor,” Sophia said fiercely, “this
would never have happened. The shame of it! All the power of the empire laid
low by a mere handful.”
    The captain shrugged again. “It’s fate, some
people say. Fate and sheer gall. The traders’ leader, what do they call
him, the Doge; he’s ninety-five if he’s a day, blind as a bat, and
there he was in the lead ship, giving his men what for when they wouldn’t
let him off first. They say he fights better, blind as he is, than most young
sprouts with two good eyes.”
    “He ought to.” It was one of the passengers, a
wine merchant from Chios. “I’ve heard that he masterminded the
whole affair for revenge, because his city had been slighted when the Emperor
was handing out favors.”
    “If that were all it was,” the captain said, “he’d
have stayed home and pulled strings. The way I’ve heard it, he was in the
City twenty years ago when the mob burned down the Latin Quarter, and he was
blinded then by the Emperor’s orders. Now he’s making us pay for it
in every way he knows how.”
    “With Frankish help at least, that’s certain.
They’re barbarian fools, but when they’re up on those monstrous
horses of theirs in all their armor, they’re impossible to face. A troop
of them, I heard once, could break down the walls of Babylon if they were
minded to try.”
    “If the Emperor hadn’t been a coward, they’d
never have got into the City. They were in terror of Greek fire and of the Varangians’
axes.”
    “But not in such terror that they turned and fled.”
Sophia glared at a galley moored among a hundred lesser vessels near the sands
of Galata, its sides hung with bright shields, its lion banner snapping in the
breeze; and turned to glare even more terribly at the walls that loomed out of
the sea. “The City could have held forever if there had been men to hold her.”
    The men shifted uneasily. After a little the captain said, “You
should have been a man, Lady.”
    “Such a man as sold my city to the Latins?” She
tossed her head. “I’m better off as a woman. At least my sex can
claim some excuse for cowardice.” She stalked to her seat under the canopy,
to cool slowly and to begin to regret her show of temper.
    Alf remained by the rail, unconscious of aught but the sight
before him. The wind had borne the barge into the teeming heart of the empire.
Warehouses clustered all along the shore, thrusting wharves into the Golden
Horn; steep slopes rose beyond to the white ridge of the Middle Way, clothed in
roofs as a mountain is clothed in trees.
    Even from so far he could hear and smell the City: a
ceaseless roar like the roar of the northern sea; a manifold reek of men and
beasts, flowers, spices, salt brine and offal, with an undertone of smoke and blood.
At the far end of the strait he could see the battered walls, and beyond them
great gaps in the roofs and towers, or charred remnants thrusting blackly
toward the sky.
    He hardly noticed when Sophia spoke to him, until she tugged
sharply at his sleeve. “Come. Up. Into my litter.”
    With an effort he brought himself into focus. A litter stood
on the pier, its bearers waiting patiently. None of the many officials standing
about, inspecting cargo, peering at lists, interrogating passengers, seemed at
all interested in him, although one bowed to his companion.
    “Come,” she repeated. “It’s all