Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [3]
Twice she turned around to make certain Leo and Simonis were both still with her.
She had grown up knowing that Constantinople was the center of the world, the crossroads of Europe and Asia, and she was proud of it, but now the babel of alien voices in among the Byzantines’ native Greek, the teeming, anonymous busyness of it, overwhelmed her.
A bare-chested man with gleaming skin and a sack across his shoulders weighing him down bumped into her and muttered something before staggering on. A tinker laden with pan and kettles laughed loudly and spat on the ground. A turbaned Muslim in a black silk robe walked by without a sound.
Anna stepped off the uneven cobbles and crossed the street, Leo and Simonis close behind. The buildings on the landward side were four or five stories high and the alleys between them narrower than she had expected. The smells of salt and stale wine were heavy and unpleasant, and the noise even here made speaking difficult. She led the way up the hill a little farther from the wharfside.
There were shops to left and right and living quarters above, apparent from the laundry hanging from windows. A hundred yards inland, it was quieter. They passed a bakery, and the smell of fresh bread made her suddenly think of home.
They were still climbing upward, and her arms ached from carrying her medical supplies. Leo must be even more exhausted because he had the heavier boxes, and Simonis carried a bag of clothes.
She stopped and let her case drop for a moment. “We must find somewhere for tonight. At least to leave our belongings. And we need to eat. It is more than five hours since breakfast.”
“Six,” Simonis observed. “I’ve never seen so many people in my life.”
“Do you want me to carry that?” Leo asked, but his face looked tired and he already had far more weight than either Simonis or Anna.
In answer, Simonis picked up her bag again and started forward.
A hundred yards farther, they found an excellent inn that served food. It had good mattresses stuffed with goose down and was furnished with linen sheets. Each room had a basin large enough for bathing and a latrine with a tile drain. It was eight folleis each, per night, not including meals. That was expensive, but Anna doubted others would be much cheaper.
She dreaded going out in case she made another mistake, another womanish gesture, expression, or even lack of reaction in some way. One error would be enough to make people look harder and perhaps see the differences between her and a real eunuch.
They ate a lunch of fresh gray mullet and wheat bread at a tavern and asked a few discreet questions about cheaper lodgings.
“Oh, inland,” a fellow diner told them cheerfully. He was a little gray-haired man in a worn tunic that came no farther than his knees, his legs bound with cloth to keep him warm but leaving him unencumbered for work. “Farther west you go, cheaper they are. You strangers here?”
There was no point in denying it. “From Nicea,” Anna told him.
“I’m from Sestos myself.” The man gave them a gap-toothed grin. “But everyone comes here, sooner or later.”
Anna thanked him, and the following day they hired a donkey to carry their cases and moved to a cheaper inn close to the western edge of the city by the land walls, not far from the Gate of Charisius.
That night, she lay in her bed listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the city around her. This was Constantinople, the heart of Byzantium. She had heard stories of it all her life, from her parents and her grandparents, but now that she was here it was so strange, too big for the imagination to grasp.
But she would accomplish nothing by remaining in her lodgings. Survival demanded that in the morning she go out and begin the search for a house from which she could establish her practice.
In spite of her tiredness, sleep did not come easily, and her dreams were crowded with strange faces and the fear of being lost.
She