The Belt of Gold by Cecelia Holland Page B

end of the whole complex stood the Pharos, with its tossing head of flame.
    Down there also was the Bucoleon, the little old ramshackle palace that Prince Michael occupied. A screen of tall cypress hid it from Theophano’s view, but she imagined she could see the faint flicker of torchlight, and hear the sounds of laughter and music.
    Her spirit leapt. She needed that, some amusement, some respite. Her intertwining hands parted. Gathering up the skirt of her gown, she hurried down past the cypress, down toward the lights and joyous sounds of the party.
    Hagen saw her go. He stood near one of the fountains on the level above her and watched her, light-footed and graceful in her white gown, running away through the line of cypress trees.
    He drank some water from the fountain and wandered off, looking curiously all around him. There were few people outdoors now, in the full night, but the rings of torches that lit up every garden and courtyard still blew like red-gold rags in the wind off the sea. He found a tiny pavilion of white columns, half-hidden in the middle of a garden whose voluptuous waxy flowers were wide open to the wind, casting a perfume so thick and sweet it rolled his stomach. Inside the little pavilion was nothing but an overturned chair, and near the way out, a glove too small for a man’s hand.
    He drifted away across a broad pavement, studded with strange trees in stone pots, and went down three steep little steps onto another walkway. No one stopped him; no one challenged him. As he walked through the darkness, he saw a few other people, a servant climbing up from a fountain, a girl who darted out of the bushes, giggled, and raced away on bare feet. Apparently, anyone who wished could roam at will through the palace complex. He opened doors and peered into dark hallways, saw empty rooms full of things worth stealing, but there were no guards.
    Were they so trusting, or merely sure of themselves? Carefully he shut all the doors behind him.
    Twice the walks he followed led him out unexpectedly on to some parapet that overlooked the sea. The second time he leaned against a railing of stone and looked west.
    In Rome he had seen the wreckage of buildings like these, huge archways, walls, broken columns, monstrous remnants of an age of heroes. The current occupants of the Holy City lived among them in smoky hovels and were chopping up the marble to burn for lime. King Charles had said, “This was the real Rome, what’s left of it, and not—” and waved away toward the Lateran palace, the Pope’s residence, with a sniff of contempt. Hagen had not understood it then. Now he understood.
    She had mentioned Rome, and other places he had never heard of. Troy, and some place whose name he had forgotten. He imagined suddenly that once the whole world had been ordered within the walls of cities like this one, where the people lived like this; but it had gone now, all but Constantinople, because—
    He did not want to think about the reasons why. The people here thought the barbarians had ruined it all, and he was a barbarian, to their eyes.
    To his own, now. He knew himself a different man from this, a creature from the outer darkness, whose clumsy hands could only break, not build.
    In the west the twin stars, the Gateway, as his people called them, were disappearing into the mist along the horizon; soon they would be washed in the limitless sea. Here, he supposed, they called them something else, the right name, a name lost to him, or never known. He felt alone and out of place here, less than a man.
    That feeling drove him on, walking along the narrow, steeply descending walk. The sea had splashed it, making the stone slippery under his feet, but he did not slow; he plunged through the gap in a hedge, and came out on a windblown lip of rock below the lighthouse.
    The flames in their brass bowl hissed and thundered above his head. He went by the lighthouse, plowing through a tangle of