Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [135]
“I noticed,” he said wryly. There was still enough light reflected up from the water to see the sheen on his skin, the faint pucker around his eyes. “But the emperor has sworn his loyalty to Rome. Doesn’t that end some of your freedom to argue?”
“Not as much as an invasion would,” she said dryly. “There’ll be another crusade, sooner or later.”
“Sooner,” he said, a sudden tightness in his voice.
“Have you come to warn us?”
He looked down at his hands resting on the rough wood that formed a kind of railing. “There’s no point. You know as much of its coming as anyone does.”
“We’ll still argue about God, and what He wants of us.” She changed the subject. “Someone asked me the other day, and I realized I had never seriously considered it.”
He frowned. “I think the Church would say that nothing we could do would be of much value to Him, but He requires obedience, and I suppose praise.”
“Do you like to be praised?” she asked.
“Occasionally. But I’m not God.” The smile flickered across his face.
“Neither am I,” she agreed seriously. “And I like to be praised only if I have done something well, and I know the person speaking is sincere. But once is enough. I would hate it all the time. Just words? Endless ‘you are wonderful,’ ‘you are marvelous’ …”
“No, of course not.” He turned around, his back half to the sea, his face toward her. “That would be ridiculous, and … unbelievably shallow.”
“And obedience?” she went on. “Do you like it if people do what you tell them to, never because they have thought of it themselves? Not because they care, and want to do it? Without growth, without learning, wouldn’t eternity be … boring?”
“I never thought of the possibility of heaven being a bore,” he said, half laughing now. “But after a hundred thousand years, yes, terrible. In fact, maybe that’s hell….”
“No,” she said. “Hell is having had heaven and then let it slip from your grasp.”
He put his hands up to his face and pushed the heels of his palms hard against the skin. “Oh God, you are being serious.”
She felt self-conscious. “Should I not be? I’m sorry….”
“No!” He looked at her. “You should be! Now I know what I missed most when I was away from Byzantium.”
For a moment, tears filled her eyes and her vision swam. Then she took one hand in the other and twisted her fingers until the pain reminded her of reality, limits, the things she could have, and those she could not. “Maybe there’s more than one hell,” she suggested. “Maybe one of them is to repeat the same thing over and over again until you finally realize that you are dead, in every sense that matters. You have ceased to grow.”
“I’m tempted to joke that that is pure Byzantine, and probably heretical,” Giuliano answered. “But I have an awful feeling that you are right.”
Forty-seven
OF COURSE, HELENA HAD TOLD ZOE OF GREGORY VATATZES’S return from Alexandria. She had stood to the middle of the glorious room overlooking the sea and said it quite casually, as if it were of no more meaning than the price of some new luxury in the market: entertaining, but of no matter. How much did Helena know, or worse than that, was there something Zoe did not know?
She stared at the great gold cross. Poor Eirene. She had sought refuge in her intelligence and her anger, instead of using both to win what she wanted.
And Gregory was on his way back at last. He would arrive any day now. Zoe remembered him as vividly as if he had gone only a week ago, not more years than she wanted to count. Would his hair be gray? But he would still be as tall, towering even over her.
Perhaps it was as well they had not married. The edge of danger might have gone; they could have become bored with each other.
Arsenios had been his cousin in the elder branch of the family. He had kept the money and the gorgeous stolen icons, sharing nothing, so his sin had not tainted Gregory. In fact, Gregory had hated Arsenios for it. If he hadn’t, Zoe could never have loved him.
But he was still