Emperor's Winding Sheet Read online

  The Emperor’s Winding Sheet

  the Emperor’s

  Winding Sheet

  JILL PATON WALSH

  namelos

  www.namelos.com

  Copyright © 1974 by Jill Paton Walsh

  Published by arrangement with Boyds Mills Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  First namelos edition, 2009

  This work is licensed only for use by the original purchaser.

  Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized

  person by any means, including without limit email, file transfer,

  paper print out, or any other method is a violation of

  international copyright law.

  This Library of Congress CIP Data refers to the hardcover edition

  Paton Walsh, Jill

  The emperor’s winding sheet

  p. cm.

  I.Title.

  PZ7.P2735Em [Fic]73-90970

  for my mother and father

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  JILL PATON WALSH

  Chapter 1

  From where the boy was, precariously perched in the bending branches of the little orange tree, a wide and lovely landscape could be seen. The orange tree stood in the garden of a great church, built at the foot of the steep little town, a town all of pink brick and rosy red stone, with narrow winding streets, steps all the way, that clung to the top of a precipitous conical hill, a foothill of the mountains through which the boy had come, in pain from hunger, in pain from cold, and driven by the terror behind him. The garden on its terrace hung suspended over the valley, a wide valley, like a great round dish, with the spacious plain shimmering all over with silver-green groves of trees, and rimmed by steep circling mountains capped with shining snow—oh yes, the snow was fair enough to see from here below, out of its biting grip! On the valley floor, some way away, sunk among the trees, were the white walls of another little town. Over it all a pale and fitful winter sunlight coolly shone. A fair prospect, though the boy was deaf and blind to it.

  It was the bright fruit that had tempted him into the tree. He had seen the like before, and his belly ached to remember them, for he recalled his mother having made a fragrant sweet preserve from some of these very orange-apples, that had come wrapped and crated in a cargo Uncle Norton had brought safely home to Bristow haven, out of some port of Spain. Clinging now desperately in the unsafe boughs, he could not tell if it was the moving branches that made his head swim, or his hunger—or he was indeed half dead from starvation—or the homesick yearning for his mother’s quiet kitchen in far-off England, with the smell of preserves boiling away thickly on the fire. It was most likely of all to be the hunger, yet he did not stretch out for the fruit, but tried mightily to remain still and quiet; for he had not known, when he scrambled up the garden wall from the street, when he clutched the branches of the tree, and wriggled into them, that there was anyone beneath; and now that he could see the purple-coated gentleman, the purple-coated gentleman might at any moment look up and see him; might especially look up if the boy tried to get back over the wall; so now what was he to do?

  Sooner or later, he knew, he would have to beg somebody’s charity, throw himself on somebody’s mercy. He needed food, clothes, a little money, a chance to find a passage on a ship. But fear had taught him that he must see the face of the one to whom he surrendered, to make sure there was kindliness there. The gentleman beneath the tree looked splendid enough; surely he had the means to help, if he had the heart for it. But the boy could not see his face; and it’s a hard matter to judge a stranger’s kindliness when all you can see of him is the high-buttoned crown, and wide brim of a tall and curious hat. If only he would move enough for the boy to catch a glimpse of him!

  The stranger continued, however, steadfastly to bend his gaze downward, and neither moved nor looked up. He was seated on a marble bench, with a carpet spread out before it in the shade of the tree, reading in a large volume laid open upon his silken knees. The pages of this book were of lilac-tinted vellum and the letters were written in palest, purest gold. But the beauty of the book, like the beauty of the landscape, was as nothing to the boy in his misery and his ragged hunger. Wretchedly he decided he had best wait till the man departed; but how long might a man not continue reading, who read in such a book as that? So at last his hunger overcame him, and with his spittle gushing in his mouth, he reached out and plucked an orange, and sank his famished teeth in it.

  Bitter! It dried his teeth, it dried his tongue, it stung and burned the roof of his mouth and brought tears to his eyes. The tears dissolved the landscape and the tree, laden with its bright thankless fruit. His head began singing, droning on a single note, and his hands relaxed their hold on bending bough. Slowly at first, he slipped, and fell fainting, and landed in a ragged dirty heap upon the carpet at the purple-coated gentleman’s feet.

  WHEN HE CAME TO, NOT ONE, BUT THREE MEN WERE standing round him, looking down at him. Their elaborate robes rose like columns from where he lay, face upward, blinking at the light, and he could not at first make out their features, against the dazzling brightness of the sky. There was a plump smooth young man, with a beardless face, a stout looking man of middle age, wearing a belt with a fine cup fixed to it on a golden chain, and the interrupted reader himself, clad in his fine purple silk. And as the boy’s eyes grew used to the light again, he saw that they were all dark; dark-haired, black-eyed, olive-skinned, so dark in deed that with a spasm of terror he thought for one moment they were Turks, till he saw swinging above him a golden cross, set all with jewels, hanging from a chain round the purple gentleman’s neck, dangling as he bent down looking at the boy.

  The three of them spoke together in a strange tongue, and pointed at him, at his eyes in particular, which were an honest English blue, and at his fair hair, dirty though it was, and called him Frank.

  “I am not!” he said, weakly indignant. “I am not! I am an English merchant, come through sundry perils and disasters, and right glad to fall in at last with Christian gentlemen!”

  “Inglis?” said Cup and chain man. “Nai, Frank.”

  This made the boy so angry, he sat up, and with head swimming declared again, “I am not French! I am an Englishman, an honest luckless merchant out of Bristow!”

  “Vrisko?” they said. “Vrisko! Vrethiki,” and they laughed.

  The boy jerked his emaciated frame into a kneeling position, and frantically glanced from face to face, looking for that spark of pity he might be willing to trust. There was curiosity and amusement in the eyes of Cup and chain man. There was something in the eyes of the plump smooth man, but he had the careful guarded look that servants wear. Nothing for it then but to trust the inscrutable dark eyes of the richly clad reader; the boy thrust a bony arm out of
his rags, and grabbed hold of the golden cross on its chain. “In the name of Christ Jesus,” he said, pointing first to the cross, and then to his mouth and belly, “give me food or I die!”

  The purple-clad man clapped his hands at once, and a monkish servant came running. He was given an order. Kneeling on the carpet before the marble bench the boy released his hold on the man’s cross of gold, and waited. Back came the servant with a dish in his hands, which he gave to the boy. There was a round of crusty bread, a little cake of soft white cheese, and a handful of olives. “Thank you,” he said, but seeing their grave faces blank at that, he managed “Gratias ago” and saw that that had been understood.

  Someone—the smooth plump young man—began at once, talking rapidly in Latin, asking questions. But the boy scarcely understood. In the first place he was eating, cramming bread down his throat, while his agonized belly glowed and rumbled with relief and pleasure, and that took his attention off case endings and parts of speech; in the second place, though he had spent a good part of his child hood in the new grammar school, being beaten for mistakes in Latin, and beaten again for speaking English in the play hour to his friends, all that was both long ago and far away, and the man who questioned him spoke very elaborate Latin, and with a heavy unfamiliar accent.

  But as the worst of his hunger was assuaged, the boy tried harder. To “Who are you?” he managed to answer that he was Piers Barber, and to “How did you come here?” that he had set out from England in the Cog Anne, a ship belonging to Richard Sturmy, the Bristow merchant.

  That luckless ship had come to grief on some storm-beaten rocky shore, holed and foundered, and many good woolen cloths went with her, and many good English souls. The boy thought he was the only survivor; certainly he had clung to a spar in the water a whole day and a night and half a day again without seeing any other.

  “But here, how did you get here?” the man insisted.

  “A ship came. They pulled me from the water. But …”—a blankness shuttered the boy’s eyes, and a muscle twitched in his cheek—“they landed to take fresh water, and I slipped my fetter and ran … and ran … I came over those mountains,” and he pointed to the black tall steeps of the Taygetus, topped with snow.

  But this explanation brought a flood of incredulous questions. They babbled to each other, gestured, looked toward the mountains, spoke to the Latin-speaker, who questioned the boy. How had he eaten? How survived the cold? Why had he been fettered? What had made him flee through so harsh a country?

  The boy gazed up at them with empty shallow eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

  The Latin-speaker crouched down to him, and took the boy’s hand. “Why were you fettered?” he asked gently, framing the words slowly. “Who were they who rescued you from the water?” But the boy flinched back from him, jerking his hand away. His voice rose in a panic-stricken cry. “No!” he wailed. “No! I can’t remember!”

  The three strangers looked at one another. They spoke in their own tongue. “That sounds like pirates, Sire,” said the cupbearer.

  “This is only a child, surely,” said the nobleman.

  The boy tugged at the hem of the Latin-speaker’s robe. “Tell me where I am,” he said, “and into whose hands I have fallen.” And he pointed at the purple-coated gentle man whom he had first seen, for about him he sensed the greatest dignity.

  “This is the province of Morea,” came the answer. “The town of Mistra. And the lord is Constantine Dragases Palaeologos, who is Despot here.” The boy felt, and looked, none the wiser.

  “Well, where’s that, then?” he asked, pointing to the other town across the plain.

  “That’s Sparta,” he was told. And, “Sparta?” thought the boy in astonishment, switched back in a moment to a distant classroom wherein he had sat upon a hard bench and conned his lines of Latin, telling of Helen there.

  Just at that moment a distant clamor, that had been beating faintly in their ears, grew louder—the racket of men and horses, as though they had been riding up the hillside for some time, and now had turned the corner into the street of the garden; trumpets sounded, and the three men looked at each other meaningly. Cup and chain man ran out into the street. Looking up, the boy could see a procession of plumed tall hats moving along over the top of the wall. When Cup and chain man returned there was a trumpeter with him. The beardless man made an urgent gesture to the boy to withdraw, and he needed little telling, for the trumpeter was a lad no older than himself, clad all in scarlet with wide embroidered sleeves, raising a silver trumpet proudly to his lips. Torn to tatters as he was, and clutching his charity dish of bread and olives, the boy was shamed into slinking behind the tree at once. There he crouched down behind the marble bench and watched.

  It looked like a pageant, or a masque. The sudden fullness of his belly was making him feel drowsy, and through the courtyards round the great church, marching through the scalloped shadows of its nestling domes, the newcomers moved with dreamlike ceremony. Through one courtyard and another, and out into the garden beyond, they came, and stood stiffly rank by rank on either side of the arch, like the rows of saints and seraphim that flank a cathedral door. Last came two gorgeous armed and embroidered men who, seeing the Despot, came and knelt on the grass before him. And now two pages advanced, carrying an ornate box between them, and set it before the Despot on the grass. Then one of the kneeling lords threw back the lid of the box, and brought out of it a shining crown. It was a domed crown, like a helmet all of gold, thick-set with jewels and enameling, with an encrusted cross standing upon the crest of it, and pendant strings of huge pearls hanging from the rim. The sunlight flashed upon it in a dozen different colors.

  There was a silence. The agonized silence made by many men holding their breath. A hundred eyes were bent upon the Despot Constantine; they watched, they commanded. The boy shivered. He could feel the tension in the sunlit afternoon air, something fateful happening, some terrible bond being forged. Then the Despot reached out his hand, and lightly touched the crown. Voices rang out.

  “By the wish of the Lady Empress, and of the people of the City, and all their governors and demarchs,” intoned the Lord Alexios Lascaris, “we bring you this.”

  “God give me strength to wear it!” said the Lord Constantine.

  The boy did not understand. But he knew that he had tumbled into something far out of his scope. Out of his depth altogether. “As soon as they all remove from this garden,” he promised himself, “it’s up over that wall again, and out of it for me. I’d be better begging in the streets, or trying my luck in that other little town.” He remembered as clear as daylight his Uncle Norton saying grimly, “It’s always dangerous to deal with kings.”

  But they weren’t all going yet. Someone else came through the arch from the courtyard, an old man dressed in black, with a grizzled beard, who leaned upon a stick to walk. The boy sighed. “Yet more of these fantastical for eigners,” he groaned to himself. For certainly the new comer was a strange and striking figure. His face was wrinkled and creased as an old man’s should be, but yet all lit up and shining from within, like the face of a child at a market sideshow.

  He came forward, and spoke. “I have been sleeping over my books these very minutes past,” he declared. “Till trumpets roused me. I never drowsed thus when I was a young man … ah well, time brings us all to such shifts in the end … what was I saying? Ah yes! My dream. I was visited, my Lord, by an unusual dream. Hear it, good Constantine.”

  “You dreaming, Plethon?” said the Lord Constantine. “We will hear it indeed.”

  “I have dreamed, my Lord, that I saw an eagle, flying in the zenith of the heavens, with many lesser birds flocking around him. And he flew through a dark cloud, whereupon many of the lesser birds fell back, and left him. Still he flew, till only one small bird remained beside him; and they two flew through the dark cloud to the light beyond. Who can interpret this?”

  “Who indeed!” said the Lord Constantine.
He spoke gravely, but there was a tremor of something in his voice—fondness? amusement?—that the listening boy heard, and strained to understand. “What is going on? What are they talking about?” he wondered, baffled, longing for them to go away. “Dear friend,” the Lord Constantine was saying, “what did your great Plato think of dreams and auguries? Since when did you dabble in such foolishness?”

  Then another spoke—a churchman, for on his shoulders black crosses were embroidered on white bands. “Not foolishness, my Lord. God speaks to us in dreams. Did not Pharaoh dream, and Joseph auger it? Did not the blessed saint …”

  “Let the saints rest in peace, and auger my dream for me, good Father,” said Plethon.

  “The black cloud is the power of the infidel Turk,” said the priest confidently. “And the dream means this. That as long as any, even one, is at the Lord Constantine’s side, who is at his side at this moment, no harm will befall, and the City will not perish.”

  “My Lord, who could stay always at your side—which man now present could remain day and night beside you?” Plethon asked eagerly.

  “Come, Plethon,” said the Lord Constantine. “Can I spare my soldiers and diplomats, that I should make them into slaves of the bedchamber?”

  “But I, my Lord, could be spared to go with you …” the old man said.

  “Ah,” murmured the Lord Constantine, “now I understand. Dear friend, I thank you,” he said gently to Plethon. “But I would not uproot you from your peaceful life, and your dear books of Plato, to share what lies in store for me.”

  At that the Lord Iagrus spoke. He was the second of the two who had brought the crown. “Have a care, my Lord. As to the truth of dreams …” He shrugged his shoulders. “But it is true indeed that the people believe in them. They are swayed by every idle prophecy. Should it be known you have defied one, it will do little to your standing with the mob.”