“The Factor, though, is demanding a frontal assault. Forty men marching to the gates of the Church of St. Nicholas, armed with spathion and paramerion, sword and saber, paying off the guardians handsomely or holding them at sword tip, taking the body in broad daylight and casting off as soon as possible.”

  “That,” said Nicephorus, “does not seem…tactically wise?”

  “His people favor frontal assault. Corfu. Dyrrhachium. They are a hungry, but not a subtle people.”

  “Has Tyun agreed?”

  “Unhappily. But we do not have forty men. Not even thirty who can be spared. Do you also wish some crawfish? The scent of good food, after the long tyranny of Musarat’s brutal and impoverished assays, distracts me.”

  * * *

  —

  The Factor wandered through the streets with one of his bodyguards, irritable at the open suspicion of the populace. “I do not trust this Tyun at all,” he said. “Methods. He is a thief. He will sneak in by night. Snatch. Steal. Leave us behind. Is that a man?”

  It was a question about Tyun; but also, as soon as spoken, he wondered about the shape behind them that skulked in the cornered shadows of late-slanting sunlight.

  He murmured to his guard, “Followed.”

  * * *

  —

  Tyun returned full of news. When the Turks had ridden into town and seized the region, the citizens of Myra had fled up into the mountains. The city had been empty except for the proud (few) and the wretched (many), who stayed on to witness the plunder.

  The Turks had settled uneasily in the hills just outside of town, grazing their flocks and watching over the city with a sharp eye. Some of the Myrans had returned after a few weeks, when they saw they would not be massacred. Others in the mountains gave up on their homes and set out to the west and the north for the cities of Ionia, the Cyclades, and the Troad. The Turks were indifferent to who came or went, so long as there was no resistance, and they could graze their flocks.

  The old Byzantine militia still kept peace in the town, overseen by the Turkish garrison. They had heard a rumor, delivered by a merchantman coming from Bari, that a shipload of Venetians planned to steal the Blessed Nicholas. When the Venetian ship arrived, the harbormaster had gone aboard, and indeed, he had found tools for breaking and entering: crowbars, pickaxes, grappling hooks. The Byzantines had set a guard around the ship and would allow only one or two men off the ship at once. The Venetians did not seem pleased. (The Turkish soldiers laughed, one toothlessly. Tyun laughed harder.)

  Nicholas? His shrine was outside of town. The Christians no longer came so often from far away to visit it. They seemed worried about the Turks. The Turks had agreed to spare the sanctuary, so long as the priests paid double the jizyah tax on unbelievers. This Nicholas, peace be upon him, was a holy man, and it would do no good to offend him. He flew through the air. He helped the fishermen and merchants. The sea looked wide; who did not want a name to call out when the swells grew tall?

  Nicephorus asked Tyun, “Where did you learn to speak their language?”

  Tyun looked at him curiously. “I lived in the Great Seljuk Sultanate for twenty years,” he said. “I was sold there when I was eight or nine.”

  At this, Nicephorus said gently, “I have not heard your story.”

  “I haven’t told it. It’s the usual story of a handsome rogue.”

  “A small village in the hills,” Reprobus explained for his friend, “peaceful, cows lowing, butterflies landing on the ivy. And then the raiders, the reavers, coming through with fire and sword. You have heard the epics.”

  “The barbarians,” Tyun agreed. “The night of the raid, my parents and my brother died. They were old enough for the sword. I was seized. Sold, I don’t know where. I didn’t speak any language but our own. I assume it was Kashgar, maybe Khotan. I remember the high ramparts of earth. I was eight.” His voice was light, conversational, glib. This was a bit that he and the dog-man did.

  “I am sorry,” said Nicephorus. He wished to say something consoling. He tried, “The cruelty of conquest.”

  Tyun grinned, delighted. “No—no. You misunderstand me. We were the barbarians. We came down out of the hills. A whole army. My father was a soldier. My mother, my brother, and I were in the army’s train. We were on a border raid.”

  “You? From what kingdom?”

  “Why ask the name? It will mean nothing to you. For a Latin, it will just sound like a name from legend.”

  “You are right. I will not know it. But your concealment means something.”

  Tyun shrugged. “We called ourselves the Great Empire White and Lofty. Help?”

  Nicephorus nodded solemnly. “To know you.”

  “I don’t want to be known.”

  “I know.”

  “In our country, you could be put to death if you did not shave the middle of your head. In the neighboring country, you could be put to death if you did not shave the sides of your head. So we were always at war. We crossed their border. My father rode down out of the hills screaming on his horse and firing his arrows. I don’t know what happened to him. My mother and brother and I were at the camp when we were seized. They were killed. I was sold. I ended up in Khurasan, the chattel of a small-time trickster.”

  “And that is where you learned your trade?”

  Tyun smiled. “As soon as I could be taught to speak again. I remember our first score. I was sent crying and sobbing into a stranger’s house. I ran through the rooms wailing about how my father had beat me and also taking note of what was there to steal. I hid behind some woman’s legs. It was not acting, that first time: My boss had actually pounded the shit out of me. He ran in after me, screaming and yelling that his damn son this, his damn son that, and the husband and wife who lived there tried to quiet him down and stop the abuse. While they were distracted, I lifted a couple spoons and a faience bowl.

  “My boss dragged me outside again and once we were out of earshot, he scratched my head like he actually liked me and we went out to sleep by the tombs and we ate well, though he was a stingy bastard.”

  “These are awful lessons to learn. Deception. Greed.”

  “I know. About a week later I went back to that house to apologize. I told them I felt terrible. I burst out crying. I spilled everything about my crooked boss and how he’d bought me. I begged them to forgive me, and they did. They forgave me. They told me I could stay there with them until they found me a place where I could serve.”

  “See?” said Nicephorus, leaning forward. “There is kindness, Tyun. Not everyone is hard. Not everyone betrays.”

  “True, true,” Tyun admitted. “So that night I got up in the dark and I went through the house and took everything of value: candlesticks, the wife’s crappy little jewelry—they were not rich people—and I went out and met my boss, who was waiting by the door, and we ran off to a small village and lived well there for about a week and a half before we had to go into the city and steal again.”

  Nicephorus shifted uneasily on the dirt floor.

  “That was a typical scam for us,” said Tyun. “But we got bolder with it. Back then, the great Seljuk emirs and maliks and the sultans often did not live in the palaces and capitols they conquered. They would set up their courts outside the walls in a city of military tents, the mu’askar. We robbed the court’s ministers and katibs blind. Sob stories. Scams. Outright theft. Snipping through felt walls, cutting through leather. It was an education. Over the years we got platters, bowls, ladles, chased helms, the trumpets they blew their fanfares on…” He smiled, recalling fixtures of brass.

  “Was it your master who taught you to search for sacred relics?”

  “Yes,” said Tyun. “That’s how he died, in fact.”

  Reprobus chimed in: “We were seeking to claim a feather from the wings of the cherubim.”

  “We did not expect the violence of their glory,” said Tyun. “The wheels within wheels. Buzzing. The old bastard was sheared apart from neck to hip.”

  * * *

  —

  Outside, it was getting dark, and the Factor and his guard fled through the small lanes of Myra. It had been a large and prosperous town. Now houses stood empty, abandoned. Whoever followed knew when to hang back. The Factor would linger, waiting for a figure to appear, but there was no sign of a tail. Perhaps a nervous fantasy?

  Then, moving again in some little paved byway, they’d hear footsteps behind them, timed to match their own.

  They were lost, and the half-empty streets of the town enfolded them.

  * * *

  —

  “Now you,” said Tyun, pointing at the monk. “More retsina? I want you drunk.”

  “There is no need. I will speak freely,” said the monk.

  “Of yourself,” said Tyun. “That is generous.” He poured the wine. “Have you always been, you know, holy? With God and the Virgin and whoever?”

  “There is a story,” said Nicephorus, and looked down at the plaited rug they sat on, so thick with dirt it was almost muddy. “I was once dead.”

  Tyun was delighted by the teaser. He reached out and took the monk’s wrist and shook it and urged him to tell, tell.

  Reprobus watched them both, and there was the wisdom of the wolf in his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Nicephorus was born in the town of Monopoli, south of Bari, when the whole of Apulia was part of Byzantium. There was only one midwife in the town, and she served both the low and the high. The day after Nicephorus was born, the same midwife assisted in the cubiculum of a woman known for her fine taste, the wife of one of Monopoli’s grandest shellfish magnificoes. She gave birth to a baby girl. Perhaps Nicephorus and this child of wealth would hardly ever have met, except to glimpse each other passing through archways; or perhaps they would have been friends, companions, meeting shyly by the countinghouse where Nicephorus’s father worked for hers, later holding hands in the blind alleys where the laundry hung. Their story was never written, for there was a fever at that time, a prelude to the pox, and it killed them both, girl and boy.

  Nicephorus, days old, died, scarlet in the face. His parents wrapped him in a sheet and laid his infant body in the grave.

  It was a small town; the two mothers, sharing midwife and grief, could not help but meet. They were at the church. They had shared a midwife and had heard each other’s stories. The wealthy woman clasped the clerk’s wife. Those around them avoided them, for the curse of ill luck on infants was thick and catching. This was a dangerous concentration.

  The two women began to meet during the day to talk of their sorrow. One weaved, the other spun. There was a friendship between them, born of sadness. Their husbands did not entirely approve. The two mothers spent hours in church upon their knees together, praying. They walked barefoot together to visit holy shrines built in caves by the sea. They spoke about how the boy and the girl, if they had lived, would have fallen in love and one day married. It was meant—the Fates and all—if the shears hadn’t clipped off the babes’ threads so quickly.

  There is no sorrow so deep, no way to turn the head once that has happened, the death of your child. But in time, the women even smiled together at some shared pleasantry.

  “You know this how?” said Tyun.

  “My mother,” said Nicephorus. “But everyone watched them. Everyone knew.”

  This warm companionship went on for many months. Perhaps a year. And then a holy man came to town. He was of deep sacredness, and the black-winged wheatears would settle around him like the Holy Spirit. The worms would rise out of the ground to greet him.

  He heard that a poor woman had lost a babe and was broken because of it.

  He went to pray with Nicephorus’s mother and as they spoke, he was struck by her piety and reverence. She went daily to pray in the church for the soul of her son. She saw the angels at midnight when she was crying.

  “To the poor shall all be given,” said the saint, and he went to the ossuary and knelt by the bones and asked to be locked in the tomb all night. He said he would keep vigil by the body of the defunct infant. The sexton closed the door to the crypt behind him and set the lock upon it. Through the watches and hours of the night, the holy man called for mercy on the babe, and his prayers were answered.

  The next morning, when he was let out, he held a dirty cloth, and swaddled in the cloth was Nicephorus, wailing as if newborn, full of life.

  “He has been chosen,” said the hermit and, kneeling, gave the boy back to his mother.

  The mother said something rapturous like the Magnificat.

  That evening, the hermit was asked to visit the house of the wealthy woman. She sat upon a divan.

  “I have heard,” she said, “you can raise the dead.”

  The hermit said, “I can do nothing for the rich.”

  “A hermitage need not be bare,” said the wealthy woman. “It can be a foundation that attracts the faithful from all over greater Apulia and the Murge.”

  “The rich do not need miracles,” said the holy man. “The accrual of rent from those who can’t pay it is miracle enough.”

  “I have always understood that a martyr’s grave, though to be longed for, is best enjoyed in one’s own good time,” she said.

  “Those who lay violent hands on the holy rarely swell later with healthy heirs.”

  “I hear Herod had eighteen children.”

  (With a hand cupped to an ear:) “Is that an avenging angel?”

  “So I am denied grace because I am rich?”

  “You are granted grace because you are rich. Be thankful for what you have. There is so much more for you to atone for.”

  Thus the hermit was allowed to depart from the port of Monopoli and to wander on, and the wealthy woman was filled with fury and bitterness. She could not bear to see her friend’s new happiness.

  Nicephorus’s mother couldn’t hide her joy at her boy’s resurrection. She wanted to share each new darling kick and squeeze. But she did not want to cause her friend unhappiness, so she avoided her entirely. And the wealthy woman noticed she was being shunned. You were my friend? And now that you have what you want…? Like that.

  She and her husband began a campaign against Nicephorus’s family. It is not hard to destroy reputations in a time of unrest. Byzantium and the Normans were tussling over the port of Monopoli, where Nicephorus’s father was a clerk, and the town passed from hand to hand. Stories circulated that the father of the dead boy, the resurrected mite, was zealously loyal to one side or another or perhaps to neither and knew the secrets of Egyptian poison—a concoction so powerful it had to be compounded while blindfolded. The new governor turned him out of the gates and told him he was lucky to be leaving town with his life. “We have found a post for you in the countryside.” Nicephorus’s father discovered he was to be deployed as a goatherd. He and his family were assigned to a beehive hut in the middle of a drab plain, beside some olive trees recently broken in a storm. He did not own his own goats. Boys of twelve performed the same job and gave him tips on how to milk. “Bump the udder first.” He did not enjoy throwing rocks at walls with them.

  Nicephorus grew up in the flat plains between Monopoli and Bari, and though they were featureless—largely horizon, grass, broken rock, and dwarf olives—he found much to wonder at. His mother would say to him, “Look out at the clouds, and how they roil and turn red like Armageddon. Never forget that your life is a wonder. You were dead, and now you live. Never forget that there are miracles everywhere, and you are only present in this world to see them once.”

  But his father became more and more bitter. The man could not stand the cold in their hut in wintertime, the chill rain that blew in off the sea, or the sickness of the goats that lived with them; and though Nicephorus’s mother would not stop praising the old hermit and sending up prayers for him, Nicephorus’s father increasingly suggested that it had not been a miracle at all, but that the risen Nicephorus was actually the hermit’s own brat.

  “The miracle is,” he said, “that an old buzzard like that could actually convince someone of childbearing age to fuck him.”

  His anger got louder and could be heard echoing across the rocky pastures. The goatherd boys stopped talking to the little family in the hut of stone.

  Another year went by, and Nicephorus’s father neglected his flock. Goats were disappearing: stolen or eaten. Nicephorus’s mother took the child on her shoulders and walked the dusty fields, trying to scare the strays back home.

  When she returned one day to the beehive hut, her husband was sitting on their pallet in tears. He reached out his hand for the boy. “I love him,” he said, “but he is not mine. He is not ours. He will always be a stranger.”

  Nicephorus’s mother lit into her husband. He did not believe in miracles, she yelled. He needed to have faith, for what could be more real and solid than the flesh of the son standing before them? A boy chosen by God to live, to come back from the dead, a boy destined for divine work?

  The father nodded. He stood and was still nodding. He nodded while he ducked down and left the hut. He walked off into the rain. The mother hugged her son. She whispered to him how much she loved him, and how much his father loved him, too. “Don’t listen to him. Don’t listen.”

  The father, out in the rain, came to the bluffs at the edge of the ocean, and then kept walking over the edge.

  The cliffs in that place were spiked tufa and wicked, clawed.

  After his father’s death, Nicephorus grew for years on the plains of Apulia, playing lazy games with the other kids, doing whatever work was needed so there was goat cheese for the great men of Monopoli.