Every now and then the boy leans forward and uses a widemouthed jug to bail water from between his bare feet. Behind them the great towers of the Portus Palatii are lost in the fog and there is only the faraway boom of surf against rocks and the knocking of the oars against the boat and her simultaneous terror and exhilaration.
When they reach a gap in the breakwater, the boy gestures with his chin toward the heaving blackness beyond. “When the tide is wrong, a current comes here that would sweep us straight out to sea.” They keep on a while longer and he feathers the oars and hands her the sack and the rope. The fog is so thick that at first she does not see the wall and when she finally does it seems the oldest, weariest thing in the world.
The skiff rises and falls and somewhere inside the city, as though on the far edge of the world, bells toll once. From the catacombs of her mind leak horrors: blind wraiths, the demonic chamberlain on his throne of bones, his lips dark with the blood of children.
“Near the top,” whispers Himerius, “can you see the drainage holes?”
She sees only a towering crumble of brick, encrusted with mussels where the wall rises out of the water, striated with weeds and discolorations, rising higher into the fog as though into infinity.
“Reach one of those and you should be able to crawl through.”
“And then?”
In the dark his enormous eyeballs seem almost to glow.
“Fill the sack and lower it to me.”
Himerius holds the bow as close as he can to the wall; Anna gazes upward and trembles.
“It’s a good rope,” he says, as though the quality of the rope were her objection. A single bat flies a figure eight over the skiff and departs. If not for her, Maria’s vision would be clear. Maria could be Widow Theodora’s most skilled embroideress; God would smile on her. It is Anna who cannot sit still, who cannot learn, who has made everything wrong. She watches the dark, glassy water and imagines it closing over her head. And would she not deserve it?
She hangs the rope and sack around her neck and scratches letters across the surface of her mind. A is ?λφα is alpha; Β is β?τα is beta. ?στεα are cities; ν?ον is mind; ?γνω is learned. When she stands, the boat wobbles dangerously. By pushing first one oar, then the other, Himerius holds the stern against the base of the wall, the skiff scraping as it falls, shuddering as it rises, and Anna grabs a hank of seaweed growing from a crevice with her right hand, finds a little shelf for her left, swings one foot off the boat, and brings her body to the wall, and the skiff falls away beneath her.
She clings to the brick as Himerius backs the skiff away. All that remains below her feet is black water flowing Saint Koralia knows how deep and Saint Koralia knows how cold and alive with Saint Koralia knows what terrors. The only way is up.
Masons and time have left the butt ends of bricks sticking out here and there, so finding holds isn’t difficult, and despite the fear, the rhythm of climbing soon absorbs her. One handhold, two, one toehold, two; before long, the fog erases Himerius and the water below and she climbs as if ascending a ladder into the clouds. Too little fear and you don’t pay enough attention; too much and you freeze. Reach, cling, push, ascend, reach. No room in the mind for anything else.
Rope and sack around her neck, Anna rises through a stratigraphy of rotting brick, from the first emperor to the last, and soon the holes Himerius spoke of are upon her: a series of ornamented scuppers shaped like the heads of lions, each as big as she is. She manages to pull herself up and through the open mouth of one. As soon as she has weight beneath her knees, she twists her shoulders, and crawls through a cradle of muck.
Damp and streaked with mud, she lowers herself into what, centuries ago, might have been a refectory. Somewhere ahead rats scrabble in the dark.
Stop. Listen. Much of the timbered ceiling has caved in, and in the fog-scattered moonlight she can see a debris-littered table as long as Kalaphates’s workshop running through the center of the room with a garden of ferns growing on top. A rain-ruined tapestry hangs on one wall; when she touches the hem, invisible things behind it go flapping deeper into the shadows. On the wall her fingers find an iron bracket, perhaps for a torch, badly rusted. Could this be worth something? Himerius had conjured visions of forgotten treasures—she imagined the palace of brave Alcinous—but this is hardly a treasury; everything has been corroded by weather and time; it is an empire of rats, and whatever chamberlain once watched over this place must be three hundred years dead.