King's Man by Tim Severin

was not so different from my own.
    'Does Araltes trust you?' the eunuch asked abruptly.
    'I don't know, your excellency. He is not someone who gives trust easily.'
    'Then I want you to win his trust. When he arrives back here, you are to assist him in any way you think will earn his con fidence.'
    When I told Pelagia about my new assignment that evening, she was apprehensive.
    'Thorgils, it looks as if you can't untangle yourself from affairs of state, however much you try. From what you've told me about Harald, he is a remarkable man, but dangerous also. In any conflict of interest between him and the Orphanotrophus, you will be caught in the middle. Not an enviable position. If I were you I would pray to your Gods for help.'
    Her remark prompted me to ask if she knew anything about the older Gods who were worshipped by the Greeks before they began to follow the ways of the White Christ.
    'Theodore, the Greek captain I sailed with,' I told her, 'pointed out to me a ruined temple up on one of the headlands. He said the old Gods were like a family. So I'm wondering if they were the same Gods we worship in the northern lands.'
    Pelagia shrugged dismissively. 'I'm not the right person to answer that. I'm not devout. Why would I be when I am named after a reformed prostitute?' She saw she had to explain herself and continued wryly. 'St Pelagia was a streetwalker who took the faith and became a nun. She dressed up as a eunuch and lived in a cave on the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land. She's not the only harlot to have done her bit for the Christians. The mother of Constantine, who founded this city, previously ran a tavern where she provided her clients with more than cheap wine and stale bread. Yet she was the one who found the True Cross and Christ's tomb in the Holy Land.'
    Seeing that I genuinely wanted to know more about the older beliefs, Pelagia relented.
    'There's a building called the Basilike on the Mese, close to the Milion. It's stuffed full of old statues which no one knows what to do with. Some of them have been stored there for centuries, and among them you may be able to find a few statues of the old Gods. Though whether anyone can identify them for you is another matter.'
    The following day I located the Basilike without difficulty and gave the elderly doorkeeper a few coins to let me look around. My intention, of course, was to discover who the old Gods were and why they had been replaced. I hoped to learn something which might save my Gods of the North from the same fate.
    The interior of the Basilike was dark and depressing. Hall after hall was filled with dusty statues, placed with no sense of order. Some were damaged, others lay on their sides or had been leaned casually against one another by the workmen who had brought them there. The only sunlight was in the central courtyard, where the larger pieces had been dumped. All were crammed so close together that it was difficult to squeeze through between them. I saw busts of former emperors, sections of triumphal columns, and all manner of marble odds and ends. There were heads which lacked bodies, faces with broken noses, riders without horses, warriors missing shields or holding broken swords and spears. Every few paces I came across inscribed marble panels which had been prised from their original locations. Cut in different sizes and thicknesses, the panels had once identified the statues to which they had been fixed. I read the names of long-dead emperors, forgotten victories, unknown triumphs. Somewhere in the jumble of statuary, I imagined, were many of the originals to which the inscriptions had once belonged. To reunite them would be impossible.
    I was standing in front of a marble panel trying to decipher the worn letters when a wheezing voice said, 'What size are you looking for?'
    I turned to see an old man who had shuffled out from the maze of figures. He was wearing a shapeless woollen mantle with a frayed hem.
    'The best pieces go quite quickly,