The Torc Part Four Waggle Dancer

By Gordon M Burns

In Waggle Dancer, the nature and meaning of Arianwyn’s life through the purpose of Grainne clarifies - horned upon misogyny, perfection cannot be realised yet what alternative can femininity provide? Questions which, Arianwyn - increasing idolised by a close band of mainly young women - fights to answer in her emergence from a from a weak and dumb-struck past marked by disappointment, neglect and interference. In reply, she kindles a vestal feminine-force within her and tunes it into a love-inspiring instrument, joyous in its pleasure in challenging a world ruled by unpredictable men. All of who are unsurprisingly decipherable through greed, lust, a yearning to be worshiped and a wary condemnation of womankind. However, must that be and can she really believe she is unimpeachable?

Perhaps, Grainne inspired, Arianwyn can overcome the essence of an Empire that summons powerful forces to act against her through the emperor’s fascination for her. The empress and she are drawn emotionally together and more people, again young woman, are willing to entrust themselves to her vision of an utopian Pictavia in the north where woman can excel. Arianwyn proves herself to be a masterfully strategist against men, yet not all goes well. Secretly she wonders how she and Talorcan can find love now that the intimacy growing between her and Grainne is providing her with all the physical and emotional fulfilment she requires. In the dim of the midsummer night’s ever-grey, Arianwyn becomes unfocused. Further questions arise concerning her assumption of her own purity and piety. Is she a Silver Queen or just another plain and eternally flawed female, empty of fortitude, downtrodden in vision, tied to the life-cycle of her blood and unable to rise for long above male domination? Reliance on that myopic mastery - where the mystery of meaning is only to set seed that shall, like all women, wither and die without her petals ever being held in tenderness at flowering - is not for her. However, as war and plague stalk the world, from whence will come her strength to win beyond this turmoil?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon M Burns
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311141729

Gordon M Burns

Writer living in Abernethy Perth Scotland. see my website for more details.

Book preview

CITY OF WORLD’S DESIRING

A.D. 545

One night Grainne asked Arianwyn. All this wrestling the dim of midsummer night’s ever-grey, do you not think people hear and wonder what goes on with us here?

1

GUESTS OF THE EMPEROR

Sighing and hissing, Justinian wondered if the world was full of those that sighed for love of him and those that hissed in spite. Peering from under hooded eyes, the emperor frowned because at that moment the spirit of his will upon the room had, like a stutter, experienced a range looks or interpretations which cast themselves awkwardly to the side. He audibly stammer-sighed an utterance between an ‘I’ and an ‘ahh’, fully expected something helpful to come his way surrounded as he was by many ahs. Standing behind him were the accepting-ahs of Theodora’s servants - Domarina, Elfrida and Sahdina - whose ‘ahhhs’ were, as one had been, beneath him but sadly, given the debris of mosaic chippings cluttering his mind, would not be again. Then there were the two clipped-ahs seated at his table. These were Theodora’s guests and though distracting in rich endowment gilded brighter than the palace, not likely to ‘ahhh’ for him because these ahs had all but sapped his spirit’s will and jaded his appetite. However, this situation had not been achieved by his disapproval of any of the youth-possesssed-ahs that crowded in on him within this room. Soft and soothing were their whisperings, immediate were they in their fleshy-presence and their efflorescent was a fresh-sparkling joy full of promisings for him. Moreover, there was at the table and by his side, she who all were lesser to, the sigh-sublime above them all, his empress, Theodora.

The ahs had not brought this drooping feeling directly on the emperor - a mood seared with a sharp sound sizzling his mind - although they had served it up as a course for him to chew. It lay plated before him now and as he wrestling to swallow it, he felt unsure how to spit it out to discretely leave it at the side. He felt all-ahs now watched him from out the sides of pleasantries about nuptial natters, baby blethers and personal matters such as that family-ah, the empress’s daughter, Hekaterina, who simpered as if allowed to stay up late. That teenaged-girl sat casting her ever-hopeful-furtive glance at him from a face that held no trace of him, learning from her mother how to spin the man who refused to see her as a daughter. All talked loudly as a screen for him to half-catch their meaning through, presenting a blurred vision of the lusciously alluring world-of-ahs, that, through his fussy picking of the problem at the table, defied his senses entering. He loudly hissed a ‘sss’ - they took no notice - and he cursed the sss that brought his disposition - Belisarius.

Hardly a complication, this dinner time challenge should have had the shine taken from it back in Italy when General Belisarius had his hands on it. Now Theodora’s interest had been aroused with something that should never been allowed to reach the subtle, cushioned sanctum where only sighs and women’s’ thighs were there to sway away the woe-besetting worries that heaped the stout broad shoulders of Justinian, Emperor of Rome, both East and West and not leave him dejectedly alone and not knowing how to act.

Further to this, the hot day had brought a night of little ease and feeling heat-weary despite the breeze worked up by slaves-sss - all men with hisses ending in their names - and fans-sss, he found himself carefully weighing the words he would wield before his guests. A stuttering effort had stumbled him to a halt mid-word on a lost thought, in a quagmire of a sentence and now they were at last, silently, holding him in their attention. Smiling on his misguided wandering that his wife did not care to promote and the others in the room dared not, it was he that now avoided all eyes. The emperor’s gaze fell before him as if hoping from inspiration from the hands by his plate and found it to be the wrong place.

Blotched, old, pox-marked and as time-weary as he, they spoke their tale to him. Once he had possessed great energy, determination and vision to work through the day and night with only a few grudgingly snatched hours of sleep taken. Not now, though - accepted - he was still able by force of routine to officially stamp the motions of his days but he knew, disguise it though he did, his verve waned like a plant without water.

At his side, and closer to his heart than was his own, Theodora his wife, who had as a flower wilted in the heat of day, perked a little in the evening cool but refused to help him out. Almost twenty years her senior, he long ago accepted that her age brought the light of spring days without the need of creams and masking potions to disguised the winter pallor that occationally set its mask of grey clay across his face. He acquiesced, as he wandered his own paths, that sometimes she should run a race to leave him puggled or apart and such was her mood that day and, therefore, he had not forced her to give advice. Content that she would return and radiate again for him, he knew that without her, his judgement would be error ridden but he had made a choice. The wrong one, gauging tonight’s joyous company’s reaction and Theodora’s flickered glee in the glow in late-night lights of sparkling devilment. All the same he was glad to see it because some momentary puck had blighted her in the day - pray it not be plague, its visitation on him, by grace of God survived - but whatever had stilled the animation of her beauty during the day, her natural resiliance and courtesan-culturing had returned to him that jewel which God should not remove from him as yet another test.

God may have had good reason to try him with personal concerns as constant as dark news from around the Syrian Sea, pressing the emperor to check the hardness of his grip and iron on what he held for the Lord. The time spent ensuring the torque was not excessive in extracting blood he left with his sss-of-generals - Narses, Mundus and Belisarius. For the emperor, the wisdom of his grasp on matters - insuring good’s promotion over evil’s - needed focusing in on treasure, its acquisition and employment in praise of Christ. This he proclaimed in the Sophia Hagia, a basillica accessible in its rising and in light, hid from no ones eyes above this city by the Golden Horn. He had desired to visit cool Sophia Hagia that hot day but had not because and the empress had not been herself and Justinian had to make a choice all by himself and he could not be sure the right one had been made. His brow furrowed, the thought felt familiar as if he had thought it before.

The confusion of the day had spilt his mind into shards of light as through a rose glass window constant yet moving ere he could fixate a point, creating despersal within his very being of certainity to worry that, on this day of spring, he has seen mortality in his wife. Yet now, as he squeezed a pinch of skin between his fingers and studied the reforming skin slowly shrink back to shape, his empress glimmered in defiance of withering and perishing, coaxed him with her twinkled words passed the stalled shutter that had interrupted his sentence and thought - ‘come, Justinian, your answer for the lady’. The question, which asked by the pretty patricain lady though prosaic, demanded some reply, if only politely civil. He lifted his eyes from his hands. He opened his mouth to speak and gave an answer no one expected. I have ordered the return of Belisarius to Constantinople.

They saw little of their journey and less of the great city to marvel at on arrival in Constantinople. The brief reunion on deck immediately halted as the men went one way the women another to their own cramped cells suspecting little of the coming winter that would be spent awaiting the emperor’s pleasure. The women’s jailer, a man of opportunity, similar in height to Grainne though twice the girth of both women put together, smelt as foul as he looked. It was perhaps a false notion that he draggled his knuckles along the ground as he eyed for them a vacant place in that low ceiled passageway, but it seemed that he did. Less fictional was the way he rubbed his thumb over his fingers and then up and down his thigh as he measured them. The golden torc was valuable but his roving eye, too easily attached to the new range of possibilities bothered him remorseless and as the restless a mover in the night, he sought to catch them unawares and put his eye to rest.

However, what apart from past experience made him think this would satisfy his cravings and not like all other cell doors, become a gateway to a blank dissatisfation? A terrible place to cast his mind back over where he left, in the corner, a rag-doll-like thing limp and lifeless, stone-frozen in the muck, wreaked in gape towards him. For most women, young or old, beautiful or plain, falling into that dank of despair prison run by Cosmos invariably it meant they gave up any conviction that they could escape torment, only praying of it would not be too violent or everlasting in its nature. Most knew it would be and resigned themselves that, in their fall from grace they were beyond all hope, bit on the lip and hoped that the jailer’s need would come before their brains spilled out crimson on the black-clammy straw.

Secure in his deep, vast, convolution of cells from which few escaped, Cosmos felt content that he was unimpeachable and beyond all judgment. Most locked in by him would not be asked after and in the darkness, the light of those that would be sought later, he recognised. For these fortunates, again of all ages, his appearance far from being salacious was painfully accommodating and regretful of the conditions he worked under to make their stay one of comfort. Cash would help and, apart from the torc which he would take, these two possessed nothing that indicated they had a future hereafter, so he locked them in that foul fetor of a cell and marked them down for his attention.

Few find it easy to fall asleep in a strange place but on hard floor composted in years of stinking straw, this red-eyed task becomes a challenge when, in an up-turned basket of a cell, stretching out was impossible. Then, that one small opening set deep in a high, narrow crevice designed to keep you awake on the one thought - how to survive and not go mad? Anxious to let himself be known and initiate the woman in to the duties of their stay, Cosmos made a mid night call not the least concerned they might be disturbed or rudely awoken by the heavy, swollen block of his wooden door of such misshape and ill construction that it fitted no purpose other than to stay stuck, rammed in the jam until, after great effort and much pushing and panting, it sprung on in with spine-jarred screeches fit to wake the dead. He went for Arianwyn first.

Spitting and scratching as a wildcat encountered, she presenting no hardship in his task other than to kneel at the door tto try and grasp the feet that pummelled his face. Eventually, blind rage and one crashing fist into her solar plexus winded and splayed Arianwyn below him and with all prepared he lifted his tunic only to catch a promise gleaming at him in the corner. Back on his knees again, Cosmos sat rubbing the stubble of his beard to understand the invitation, give it name and in exchange do what had never been his ever, reach out and receive that which many had thought to wrench off, found they could not or if they had, wished that they had not. As if a grain sack, he kneed way across Arianwyn and came within a finger tweak of ownership of all but found it husk-like and unable to pinched between his fingers. Ruffled, he plonked back on his rear. Arianwyn gasping under the pressure as her stomach, providing him a seat, halted the complete unbalancing of a distraught man if not an all-inspiring story from Grainne.

Now that your are sitting comfortably, Cosmos, let me tell you a story about that that comfy seat you’ve found. The comfy-seat tried to wriggle out but only managed to free her arms which, though an ineffectual backrest for Cosmos, put other near at hand things in focus. It’s all a bit of a myth that it took a whole durma to capture this strawberry she-cat. She had the help of two others and me; but that did take two durma or is it durmas; I never could tell. However, which ever way you look at it, they were not a patch on you. Flapping at something at his flighting at his waist, he gave his full attention to Grainne as on all fours she purred up his chest. However, if they could not take it, do you think you can? The itchy irritation at the waist fled before his cuff and Grainne smiled such a smile that he knew enough was now enough and rolled her back with such grim firmness that Grainne enquired - ‘Reviewing our relationship with such harsh haste are we, my dear?’.

A sharp alteration swung a balance change. In part caused, he considered, by his seat jangling a smirk at him as it pressed its back into the wall, and partly by his own sword pressing its point from an unexpected angle where he rather it would not. This now permitted Grainne to set out pre-nuptial interconnections for non-negotiable adherence. Terms to his favour were, as it was his place, he could come and go, day or night, when he so chose. He could invite friends aroundin any time , if that is what he really wanted, but the little room for exercise meant they, the ladies, might loose a bit of muscle tone that may disappoint him. Cosmos may invite those friends but they need not like them or ask them in because tenants had rights also. They had tenure until the emperor called for them and, who knows, he might befriend them. Cosmos would always be welcome pop a head in to check his property - item one, sword, naught else - held safe but as the place was so tiny they agreed that no more than two could fit in at any one time, which ran the risk of one of the young women losing themselves it the warren of corridors without. The ladies would endeavour to keep fit. And finally Cosmos, be assured if you come through that door one more time, you’ll find yourself leaving a little parting gift behind. They found agreement on the terms and Cosmos left them to it.

The maze of incarceration the men inducted to, was less personal. The jailer ran his eye over his lot and finding nothing to his interest and left them to rot with a gruel of one meal a day. This gave much time for thoughtful reflection. There has been just one thing that’s niggling me, Artiur told them, How did Petrus know we would be at Turraco? It puzzled him the whole winter and beyond into the spring.

2

IMPRISONMENT

What hope to survive within that narrow barrelled darkness? To keep the soul alive within a dimming body deprived of all from Cosmos but irregularly granted crusts in cold, thin pottage and little fresh water. Grainne kept Arianwyn corded to the simple awareness that her body could and must survive this ordeal. Arianwyn’s body hungered to eat and, accepting anything to fill the pain of wanting, she gnawed and licked the slime from off the walls. Yet, even so, she shrunk into herself and wasting as an end of winter cow, the ribs stuck through her skin and all female trace dissolved into her frame so that only a high voice, cracked and crackled, kept alive that essence which lay dormant. She pawed the wall to make it sing.

Those are not strings to play, Grainne told her, listen to the music beyond our cell.

Indeed there was music and Arianwyn heard. It lifted her head in hope higher than the hard, bean husks that floated in the stockless soup could do for her. Those notes abounded all around from unexpected places in that dark place. A whistled tune from Cosmos on his rounds, his chinking keys, the regularity of his shuffling feet. The feet of starving rats that scuttered through the cell. The screaming one with constant rhythm in the night, the base replies that cursed her eyes to let them sleep in hope and within a harmony of grunts and wheezes set to the background beat of opening doors that might be someone’s freedom. Though possibly as the pleas and scrapes, curses and cracks, whipped another piteous rondo conducted out of ear shot. The music of the prison was a melancholy lament and one that would bring despair to expectation.

No, Arianwyn, you must survive, listen beyond the walls.

Why must I? The white of her eyes became weak, yellowed and streamed with deltas of red.

It’s song tells that others are in need of you, so listen hard From outside, occasional faint whispers twined in like briers of heart-barbed songs into the cell and half-mouthed in the he-droom-ho-droom-ochone-drum-drum doubt of what came first and what will follow next. This city, built on shaking stone, is grieving and wallowed in a deep sorrow, even now a dark death stalks these streets with hunger. The fangs of hunger lurked to nip the heels of those faint clips of hooves and feet she detected high above. Cries of voices, whistled down the winds and pit-pattered with the rains which, though the long and narrow crevice, penetrated a shaded dimension into that hive-shaped incarceration for outside, Constantinople the imperial city, fell in upon its self. Pestulated by a faith-testing disease, the population, now halved by the hot swill of vomit, chills and boils, declined. For those left, sealed within in that mighty city struggling to find food to eat, their hope could only turn to the emperor and the holy wisdom he furnished with fine gold leaf and marble in honour of the one true salvation-granting God. In truth, Arianwyn, we could do worse. This death-so-dark will spread far and wide ere it burns out, right to the gates of Pictavia and enter in. Those towns and cities, places and its peoples we have seen shall be brought low and those left will run in streets or be devoured by packs of feral dogs.

And that is happening outside? Then let me die in this deserted cell.

No you must not for you are needed by those people, you must prevail. Then like a haloed lamp, Grainne encircled her in arms as soft as wings and kissed her. Within Arianwyn the hunger dimmed, her corporeal need diminished and she felt bathed in a growing warmth of silver light."

I will do as you wish of me, the princess said.

Some time later, Cosmos forced open the door and came before them. His need to prove his point was ever strong within him but he still held back, wary of the dark one, he hoped to coax the light one to him.

Well whose the lucky little lady then? he asked. It seems the emperor doesn’t want you starved and that though the city cries to heaven for bread to fill its empty belly, I must keep you alive. He knelled at the doorway and sought to tempt the small one out. Divide and conqueror, take his prize he thought to work and smiled a mock pity on Arianwyn. Yet, you could do better than what you have here with that one. I have bread to eat while others starve. What do you think she can give you; except less than half the scrapings that I send you? Look how she thrives as you wither. He shuffled on his knees towards her emboldened by the charity he offered; secure within the blade he held ready towards the dark one’s throat and the slither of his tongue. Come with me, my poppet, sing openly for me and melt my heart of stone to give you bread.

She held his eye and though shadowed-rimmed and grey they lay set within her sockets, the whites were pure, the hazel clearly sparkled. My mouth does need your stale bread, the taste of honey in my mouth, her lips are all I need, she told him. Misunderstanding and cursing them as unnatural women, he scrapped his knees backwards, pushing shut the door and locked it. Though each day the bread would come, he left them to their hidden ways where Arianwyn did not decline.

3

THE EMPEROR’S EAR

‘Oh, Justinian, tell me why? Did you not think it wiser to have consulted me first on this. I swear by St Mark, if doors weren’t held for you, you would smash the handle into pieces with your fist for its dumb insolence to you."

Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus Augustus, the Emperor and unresting fashioner of one visible world empire for the one immortal God all wise, was not himself invisible nor astute enough to have kept quiet on his day’s matters and now all could see his glower, silent as dark, un-hid from their eyes. As yet, the room still did not displease him though it remained hot and the company unchanged. Above, high on a wall, the mosaic head of a man, serene of face and crossed within a circled light, looked down upon those seated at the table and held to them two fingers of his right hand as if in blessing.

And after all Belisarius has done for us, my dear. Did you not think?

From the massacre of the uprising in the Hippodrome to the charred devastation of the empire, Belisarius had and still was, burning both sides of the Roman sea - Africa, Sicily, Spain and Italy - and had more than proved his loyalty and worth and today the emperor had made to degrade him. Others might recognise the emperor’s decision as rock-like resolve and learn to fear him more but Theodora he knew his mistake. He had allowed the general to become an eye-dust irritation because of the constant petitioning of him by his dinner guest this last month and more. Requests ignored until, Theodora amused by her husband’s vexed positioning, they ended up at table where she found she they met with her approval. None which would have happened, in Justinian’s mind, if it Belisarius had sorted out Italy last summer something, which was now rotting, several layers of history below him.

Really, Belisarius and Narses rub together well enough but how will he react to Justin being promoted over him, tell me? Justinian, sometimes I wonder about you.

Inflexible as any mortal man of moral conviction, in his drive to champion wrongs wrought as truth, the emperor had one weakness - his growing reliance on Theodora. The empress, some might sniff, was an extravagant indulgence which, in truth, had been born of a desire for a translucent creation wrought eighteen tears after his peasant mother birthed him. However, these unseeing sceptics chocked as his devotion blossomed to a level beyond erotic entertainment and flourished on the spin of her tales about Macedonian heroes such as himself and Alexander. Created at birth as a joyful delight, crafted to provide in looks, voice, acts and songs beguilment for older men, Theodora was an instrument for his playing which, though many men had plucked there before, was now solely for his touch and ear. This unlikely female form pressed his heart as a sponge when everyone else formed of it rock.

A Greek beauty, her father, a bear trainer, her mother, an entertainer with whichever act the coin flipped her for, taught Theodora the craft from knee-high age to lap so ably that, in her early teens she hand-bagged her way around the Roman Sea. Such as persons are attracted to the opportunities in the great cities there such as Alexandria and Antioch.

In Alexandria, she met a man who turned her from her wanton ways to spin wool and follow Christ. A sinner now repentant, she moved to Antioch and a life that led to trouble best suiting a return to Constantinople to there, chance on a meeting with Justinian. This time her usual causal capacity with men took on a permanent feature and askance rejection of her by the ruling class of the city. Undeterred, Justinian, rewriting the rules, married a prostitute from Cyprus and all awaited either his payoff to her or his age fail to catch the flighty young thing and tie her down.

Nonetheless, Theodora, despite their high prayers and profound wishes, possessed a passion-vim within equal in proportions to that of Justinian’s. When rival parties, Blues and Greens, rose in Constantinople against them, she held him firm - ‘royal purple is the noblest shroud’, she told him and after Belisarius - with no thought of doubt - depriving the life of thirty thousand citizens, on that tortuous slaughter they built Byzantium’s golden city together. A one time drunken Greek fishing village beside the Golden Horn where woman trawled a catch of men, rose in their united godly purpose into a holy city spread open before the horn, welcoming unto itself the wealth of all the world. Constantinople, a city built for God’s throne on the world, expanded east and west reuniting the Roman Empire by desire of Justinian and for Theodora, who bore a love designed of no one’s will.

The room was hot and Justinian felt heat-weary and maybe that was why he found himself carefully pondered the words he would use by searching his hand set by the plate in hope of inspiration. Blotched, old, pox-marked and timeworn as he, they spoke their tale to him and he frowned thinking that he had been here quite recently. This distrubed him as evidence of his failing. Once, possessed of great energy, determination and vision, he could work through day and night with only a few grudgingly snatched hours of sleep sufficed but not now. He was still able, by mean force of routine, to officially stamp the motions of his days but he knew, disguise it though he did; his verve was waning like a plant without water.

Refreshing restoration could always be given by simply gladdening his eyes upon the resplendent display of beauty set before and around his table, but when he turned to look at the flower amongst them all, he felt his heart swell and a tear well for this time, he imagined, a hint of mildew ran across its petal. Is everything alright. he asked.

I’m perfectly alright, why do you ask? Theodora sharply countered. Her hand placed itself below her throat in flutter upon the golden necklace until; it managed to pat a smile back on her lips. Did I tell you I bumped into Narses today? Literally bumped into the man as he rushed round a corner. He dropped this. From below her gown, she brought a folded paper. Silly man seemed flustered and wouldn’t tell me about it so I took it away from him. She slid the paper to him. Stop blinding yourself with thoughts of Flavius, did I tell you I intend to visit Antonina tomorrow, does that make everything alright? Now, eat and give our guest some of your attention.

Despite this instruction, he offered nothing to his guests for now a heaviness as undigested dough burned below his heart. Darkened by the night, the rose window no longer let in light and no splendour did he see with the food on his plate, his lack appetite a sickness of deep worry, his lack of communication a concern. Theodora would talk with Belisarius’s wife and all would be right again but if she were not here to help, what then?

Justinian our guests you overlook. Theodora spoke again, this time as if to a child. He looked at her, smiled and turned to the two other women at the table whose look attracted interest though he felt little.

So, Triduanna how was Rome when last seen by you? He asked.

Bereft of any pity your hand could bestow for hunger, war and pestilence is its close friend as it in all of Italy.

The emperor felt his praise in those words lauded at him by the young lady soured his day further. Such words are not well made for one who would wish to win my ear. He warned.

You asked. You wish I lied? Why then everything fine, is that not so Sophia, my dear?

All must be perfect for in not your brother, Petrus, and General Belisarius nothing if not diligent in their wish to serve the empire as decreed? Though, it will sadden you Caesar, to learn that Petrus has ruined his body and mind with all his efforts. A suffering for the greater good and in that he does so hurt then, in our pity for him, do also we. Is that not so, my Lord?

Justinian twitched in close held anger; these women dared to mischief with him. Theodora spoke. Be calm, Justinian, these women only speak their mind, troubled by grief and trusting in your understanding which, I know you have wells deep to draw upon. He bit roughly on a fig he had no stomach.

Theodora assized Sophia and knew her for what she was, a courtesan and lordly-pregnant, for no matter the disguise of fine clothes and talk, like for like could recognise the other. Sophia shimmered like a Greek harlot for whom Theodora held respect and who would ger support because Sophia touched her as fellow hired-woman looking for another life.

Justinian, you know this of women, we are but fearful in this world of men. Willing we allow ourselves to be guided by the wishes of and obligations to men and though willingly acceptant, sometimes we fail to understand your ways when they seem so ready to be rough with us. If we weary you with our female foibles, be forgiving.

He placed the fig down on the plate before him.

These people imprisoned. What are they to you?

One is my husband, I carry his child as you see. You also hold his friend.

And as I have tried to explain before, you have imprisoned my confessor and two dear friends, young women, who have done nothing to be so treated. The difficulties we have had, and the worries, in finding them. We thought them slain by thieves and who knows what until, finally, we learnt you hold them as your prisoners. Again what is the reason?

There was no clear answer to that question, no incitement, no revolt, no violent attack, robbery or assault, only suspicion - and of what? - something that Belisarius thought he saw once upon a panic-day. Apprehended on suspicion.

Suspicion? Triduanna exclaimed. Really, suspicion of what?

Justinian could not answer.

Well? Theodora asked quietly. Of what? He felt her foot play on his calf, her hand