“The emperor’s physician,” Palombara observed. “You look young to have attained such responsibility.”

“I am young,” she responded. “Fortunately the emperor has excellent health.”

“So you practice on the palace eunuchs?”

“I make no distinction between one sick person and another.” She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t care whether they are Roman, Greek, Muslim, or Jew, except as their beliefs affect their treatment. I imagine you are the same. Or have you ceased to minister to ordinary people? That would explain your perception of the monks who do not wish to be driven into union with Rome.”

“You are against the union,” he observed with faint irony, as if he had known she would be. “Tell me why. Is the issue of whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father only, or the Father and the Son, worth sacrificing your city for-again?”

She did not wish to concede his point. “Let me be equally direct. It is you who will sack us, not we who will come to Rome and burn and pillage it. Why does the issue mean so much to you? Is it enough to justify the murder and rape of a nation for your aggrandizement?”

“You are too harsh,” he said softly. “We cannot sail from Rome to Acre without stopping somewhere on the way, for water and provisions. Constantinople is the obvious place.”

“And you cannot visit a place without destroying it? Is that what you have in mind for Jerusalem also, if you beat the Saracens? Very holy,” she added sarcastically. “All in the name of Christ, of course. Your Christ, not mine-mine was the one the Romans crucified. It seems to be becoming a habit. Was once not enough for you?”

He winced, his gray eyes widening. “I had no idea eunuchs were so savage in argument.”

“From the look on your face, you have no idea about them… us… at all.” That was a bad slip. Did he anger her because he was a Roman or because he could not take the gender for granted and made her so aware of her lie and the loss of herself as a woman?

“I am beginning to realize how little I know about Byzantium,” he said softly, laughter and curiosity at the back of his eyes. “May I call on you if I need a physician?”

“If you fall ill, you should call one of your own,” she responded. “You are more likely to need a priest than someone skilled in herbs, and I cannot minister to a Roman’s sins.”

“Are not all sins much the same?” he asked, amusement now quite open in his face.

“Exactly the same. But some of us do not see them as sins, and it is the healing I am responsible for, not the shriving-or the judgment.”

“Not the judgment?” His eyes widened.

She winced as the barb struck home.

“Are the sins different?” he asked.

“If they are not, then what have Rome and Byzantium been fighting for over the centuries?”

He smiled. “Power. Is that not what we always fight for?”

“And money,” she added. “And pride, I suppose.”

“Not much is hidden from a good physician.” He shook his head a little.

“Or a good priest,” she added. “Although the damage you do is harder to attribute. Good day, Your Grace.” She moved past him and walked down the steps toward the street.

ZOE HAD SEEN THE NECKLACE WHEN IT WAS ALMOST finished. She had stood in the goldsmith’s shop and watched him working the metal, heating it slowly, bending it, and smoothing it into exactly the shape he wanted. She had seen the stones because he had had them out in order to make the shapes to hold them: golden topaz, pale topaz almost like spring sunlight, dark, smoky citrines, and quartz almost bronze. Only a woman with hair like autumn leaves and fire in her eyes could wear this without being dominated by it and made to look eclipsed rather than enhanced.

The goldsmith would be flattered that she wore it. It would advertise his art and earn him more customers. Then everyone would want his work.

She arrived at his shop at midmorning, gold coins ready in a small leather pouch. She would not send Sabas for this because she wanted to make sure the piece was perfect before she passed over her money.

She was irritated to see someone already there, a gaunt-faced middle-aged man, his graying hair prematurely thin. He was holding coins in his hand. He closed his fingers over them, smiling, and passed them to the smith. The smith thanked him and picked up Zoe’s necklace. He laid it on a piece of ivory silk, wrapped it gently, and passed it to the man, who took it and folded it away until it was concealed by his dalmatica. He thanked the smith, then turned and walked away toward Zoe, his face alight with satisfaction.

Zoe’s fury overtook her. The man had taken her necklace, and the smith had allowed it.

It was only as the man passed her that she recognized him, even after all these years-Arsenios Vatatzes, Eirene’s cousin by marriage, the head of the house whose crest was carved on the back of her crucifix.

It was his family who had robbed Zoe’s father in 1204, promising to help in that terrible escape, then betraying them by keeping the relics, the icons, the documents of history that were uniquely Byzantine. They had fled to Egypt and sold them to the Alexandrians to finance a fat, comfortable exile, while Zoe’s father, hideously bereaved, a widower with one small daughter, had had to labor with his hands in order to survive.

Now Arsenios was rich and back again in Constantinople. The time was right. She turned away, in case he might recognize her also.

She arrived home with her mind racing. There were a dozen ways of achieving someone’s ruin, but it depended upon circumstance, the person’s friends and enemies, their family or lovers, their hungers, their strengths, the weaknesses through which they were vulnerable. Arsenios was clever, and it seemed he had wealth, which these days meant power. The Vatatzes had ruled Byzantium in exile from 1221 to 1254. Arsenios’s brother Gregory was married to Eirene, who was also of aristocratic descent from the Doukas dynasty. Only a disgrace so clear, so blatant as to be unarguable, would work.

What kind of disgrace? She paced the floor of her room, walked over to the great cross, and stared at it, seeing in her mind’s eye the other side with one goal achieved, one of its fourfold emblems meaningless at last. The Vatatzes must be next.

Whom was the necklace for? Someone Arsenios loved, but whom?

It did not take long to find out that he was a widower and had one daughter, Maria, who was soon to make a fortunate marriage into a family with not only wealth, but immense power and ambition. Her beauty and her lineage were her strengths, and therefore Arsenios’s strength also. That was where to strike.

The plan took shape in her mind. It would avenge the humiliation she had suffered in Syracuse all those years ago. Arsenios would pay for that, as he would pay for betraying Byzantium.

Anastasius Zarides was the perfect vehicle. But with a peculiar mixture of emotions, she remembered their last encounter. At first she had thought his saving the monk Cyril was just one of those random pieces of good fortune that happen from time to time to anyone. But then she had seen something in the healer’s eyes that made her believe he knew she had tried to poison Cyril and had himself worked out exactly how.

She could see him in her mind’s eye, and it was almost as if she had caught half an image on some polished surface: herself and yet not herself. The clothes were different, the shape of the body, no lush curves of bosom and hip. Yet the turn of the neck, the refinement of the jaw, just for half a second, the blink of an eye, were the same.

It was a delusion, of course. It was the fire in the mind that was the resemblance, the steel inside.

Of course, Anastasius had serious flaws. He forgave, and that was a weakness that sooner or later would prove fatal. He overlooked faults. Such a defect infuriated Zoe. It was like a chip on the face of an otherwise perfect statue. The mutilation of his manhood was a shame, but he was too young to be of any interest to her, although it was difficult to be accurate about the age of a man who was not a man. A human being without the spirit or the fire to hate was only half-alive. That was a waste. She liked him-apart from that.