I unlatched the front gate and stepped out onto the street as if I were walking to meet some friends. Which I did—Harkan and Batu were still beneath the olive tree.
“Time for us to leave,” Harkan said. “The whole neighborhood is waking up.”
I agreed, but held him up long enough to show him the two boxes of coins.
Batu’s eyes went round. “I could return to Africa and live like a prince with that much money.”
Harkan merely grunted. “You make a fine burglar,” he said, “for a pilgrim.”
Laughing, we left the slave merchant’s house burning. He will never know he’s been robbed, I thought. Even if he suspects it, he will have no way to know who did it. We could see the smoke even from the docks, once the sun came up.
CHAPTER 28
We found a ferry about to cast off from the dock and, after a quick haggle with its captain, all eleven of us trooped aboard. The captain was a good-sized man, his skin nut-brown from long years in the sun, his hair and beard just beginning to show flecks of gray. He eyed us suspiciously, but he hefted the bag of coins I gave him and gave the order to weigh anchor.
It was a fat little tub with a single mast and an open deck. The captain barked orders from a raised poop at the stern. Pens of goats took up most of the forward deck space, their smell overpowering until we got the wind behind us. Our men sat on the deck planks, resting their backs against bales of cloth and coils of rope or the boat’s gunwales.
Slaves rowed us out into the channel, then the wind filled the boat’s triangular sail and we cut through the harbor and out into the powerful current of the Bosporus. The boat began to bob up and down like a cork and most of Harkan’s men began to turn various shades of green. The sailors laughed as their passengers moaned and staggered for the rail.
“Not into the wind, you fool!” roared the captain as one man after another emptied his guts into the churning water.
I went to the rail also, but well away from the seasick, vomiting men. I stared out at Europe across the way, the brown mud-brick buildings of Byzantion basking in the morning sunlight. Somehow I knew that this undistinguished collection of drab buildings would one day become a mighty city, a center of empire where palaces and churches and mosques would dot the skyline with magnificent domes and graceful minarets.
For now, though, Byzantion was little more than a strategically placed seaport, part of Philip’s Macedonian hegemony.
“We’re not getting any closer,” Harkan murmured in my ear. I turned to him, surprised. He looked grim.
Batu came up beside me on the other side. “We seem to be turning around.”
It was true. We were heading back toward the harbor of Chalkedon. The rest of Harkan’s troop was too sick to notice or to care, sprawled on the deck or draped over the rail. The sail flapped uselessly and the stench of the goats washed across the deck, making matters even worse. Harkan gripped the rail with both hands, knuckles white, face pale green.
I looked up at the captain. There were signal flags flying from the stern. He was staring intently at the docks we had left barely half an hour earlier. Signal flags were fluttering from the pole back there. Then I saw that the sailors had all armed themselves with swords. Even the slaves had tucked clubs into their belts. Our weapons were stacked up forward, next to the goat pens, and none of our men was in condition to use them.
I headed for the captain’s perch on the poop deck but two armed sailors stopped me at the ladder.
“Captain!” I called up to him. “What are you doing?”
“Returning a pack of thieves to justice,” he said, with a laugh.
“What makes you think we’re thieves?” I shouted.
He pointed to the signal flags. “Someone burned the house of an important person during the night. And you paid too much too easily for your passage this morning.”