Emperor's Winding Sheet by Jill Paton Walsh Page A

thought of for once getting the better of him, he went to take warm water and towels to the Emperor’s bedside, and empty slop basins himself.
    He had hardly got the Lord Constantine lying between clean sheets, and swabbed down the wooden boards beside his bed, and set a clean bowl ready for the next disaster, when Stephanos needed similar attention himself. The boy sniffed disgustedly at the acrid smell of the cabins, and recklessly poured wine into the water with which he mopped up the mess. The ship continued to pitch and roll easily on the swell; really it seemed to Vrethiki more like the rocking of a cradle than like the open sea; but it was hard work being the only member of the Imperial party on his feet. It was night before he finished tending everyone. The Emperor had refused to eat anything at all, but Stephanos had taken a few spoonfuls of soup that Vrethiki offered him on a spoon, and coaxed and wheedled him to swallow.
    When all was done he went above decks. The clean salt air filled his lungs and lifted his spirits. He listened to rope and timber grumbling at each stress and strain, at the water frothing and slopping along the ship’s side below him. He looked at the neatness with which every rope lay curled, and the tidy trim of the sails, and mentally saluted the captain. He looked up at the fantastically abundant stars—mil lions more of them than ever graced an English sky, clustered as thick as buttercups in a Bristow water meadow. He stood leaning on the gunwale for a long time before he found the strength to steel himself for the closed fetid air of the cabin beneath.
    Things continued so for three days. On the second, grumbling and hectoring him in English, and telling him he would need his strength for the days to come, Vrethiki managed to feed the Emperor a bowlful of broth, a spoonful at a time. To Stephanos he said sharply in Latin, “Oh, come, sit up and eat, sir. Where’s your manhood?” And Stephanos flinched, and struggled upright, and ate like a scolded child.
    That evening when Vrethiki climbed up to take the air, the ship was moving through a narrow channel with a sloping wooded coast on either side. It looked like the Bristow Channel, only narrower. The green shores pricked his memory. “This is the Hellespont,” a sailor told him. “Keep a sharp eye out for the shore—it’s Turkish land.”
    â€œWhich shore?” asked Vrethiki.
    â€œBoth,” said the sailor. But nobody offered any resistance to the four ships, as they slipped up the middle of the channel in the gathering dark.
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    BEYOND THE NARROW CHANNEL LAY A TRANQUIL LANDLOCKED sea, on which the ship moved so swanlike that even the Emperor and his Eunuch recovered somewhat. Vrethikicarried food for them from the galleys, and acted as page again rather than nursemaid. The Emperor gave him a heavy silver coin, and a slow half-smile as a grave thank-you for caring for him. Vrethiki put the money in the little knot of rag with the coronation bounty, reflecting that though it would take more than gold to save his skin, and escape was beyond hoping for, there would surely be a use for it some time. On the evening of this smoother day he went up as usual to take the air, and found the ship almost motionless, sail flapping gently, deliberately letting slip the wind.
    â€œNearly there,” said the coxswain, whose Italian was just comprehensible, when the boy asked, with gestures, why this was so. “And not wanting to land till morning.”
    Nothing broke the surface of the tranquil sea. Gently it rippled, glassy and smooth, and shining with opalescent radiance in the low-sloping light of a golden evening. Leaning on the rail, idly looking, dreaming, the boy nursed his anger in his heart like secret treasure. It gave him strength. But for all that, it was a fair fine evening. It seemed as though a translucent infinitely pale shawl of gray-blue silk had been cast over the surface