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take precautions for my personal safety. I only ate mess food prepared by the army cooks, and I did not leave the barracks unless I was on duty or in the company of two or three of my colleagues, and then I only visited places I knew to be safe. Had my companions realised my fears, they would have scoffed at my timidity. Compared with the other cities I had known — London for example — Constantinople was remarkably peaceful and well run. Its governor, the city eparch, maintained an efficient police force, while a host of civic employees patrolled the marketplaces, checking on fair trade, cleanliness and orderly behaviour. Only at night, when the streets were given over to prostitutes and thieves, would my colleagues have bothered to carry weapons to defend themselves. But I was not reassured. If I was to be silenced for what I had witnessed in the imperial swimming pool, then the attack would come when I was least expecting it.
     
    The one person to whom I confessed my fears was my friend Pelagia. She ran a bread stall on the Mese, and I had been seeing her twice a week to practise my conversational Greek because the language I had learned in the Irish monastery was antiquated and
     
    closer, coincidentally, to the language spoken in the imperial court than koine, the language of the common people. An energetic, shrewd woman with the characteristic dark hair and sallow skin of someone native to the city, Pelagia had already provided me with a lesson in the tortuous ways of Byzantine thinking, which often succeeded in extracting advantage from calamity. She had started her business just days after her husband, a baker, had burned to death in a blaze which had started when the bread oven cracked. A city ordinance banned bakeries from operating in close proximity to town houses, otherwise the accident would have sent the entire district up in flames. The ashes of the fire were barely cold before Pelagia had gone to her husband's former business competitors and worked on their sympathy. She coaxed them into agreeing to supply her stall at a favourable discount, and by the time I met her she was well on her way to being a wealthy woman. Pelagia kept me up to date with all the latest city rumours about palace politics — a favourite topic among her many clients — and, more important, she had a sister who worked as a seamstress for the empress Zoe.
     
    'No one doubts that Zoe had a hand in Romanus's death, though it's less certain that she actively organised what happened in the bathhouse,' Pelagia told me. We had met in the spacious rooms of her third-floor apartment. Astonishing to people like myself from lands where a two-storeyed building is unusual, many of Constantinople's houses had four or even five floors. 'My sister tells me that poisons of every sort are readily available in the empress's quarters. They are not even kept locked up for safety. Zoe has a mania for creating new perfumes and unguents. Some say it's a hangover from the days when she was trying to rejuvenate herself and bear a child. She keeps a small army of women servants grinding, mixing and distilling different concoctions, and several of the ingredients are decidedly poisonous. One young girl fainted the other day merely from inhaling the fumes from one of the brews.'
    'So you think Zoe was the poisoner, but not the person who arranged for Romanus to have an accident during his swim,' I asked.
    'It's hard to say. If the empress did plot with her lover to do away with Romanus and rule the empire through him, she's been disappointed. Michael, my sister tells me, has been acting as if he alone is in charge. She is not consulted on matters of state - they are all taken care of by his brother, the Orphanotrophus. So if Zoe had nothing to do with the murder, she may well bring an accusation against the new Basileus in order to overthrow him. Either way, you are in real danger. If there is an enquiry, the investigating tribunal will call witnesses to