A murmur of discontent came from the invisible crowd of soldiers. Zeno knew them to be a desperate crew, who would hold him responsible for failure, and would not thank him for success.
'We must separate at once,' he said calmly. 'I thank you for having been ready. If possible, we will meet a week from to-night.'
He did not choose to let them know that Johannes himself had refused to quit the tower, and he was about to leave them, meaning to find his way home alone, when the sound of feet moving behind him, and of men whispering together told him that he was surrounded on all sides by the soldiers. Then some one spoke in a tone of authority.
'You must stay with us,' the voice said. 'You have our lives in your hand, and we cannot let you go. It might suit your interests to give us up to the Emperor any day.'
Seeing his liberty threatened, Zeno laid his hand to the knife at the back of his belt and was about to try and break his way through. In the dark, a man with a drawn weapon in his hand easily inspires terror in a crowd. But it was clear that the soldiers had determined beforehand what to do, for they closed in upon him instantly, and his arm was caught by a dozen hands when he was in the very act of drawing his knife. He was held by twenty men, as it seemed to him, who all took hold of him and lifted him from the ground, not very roughly, but irresistibly. He had no chance against so many; Gorlias Pietrogliant himself could have done nothing, and he was far stronger than Zeno, stronger perhaps than any man in Constantinople.
Zeno knew that it would be worse than useless to shout for help; at his first cry he would most likely be strangled by men whose own lives were more or less at stake. They carried him quickly along the street and through unfamiliar and narrow ways which he could hardly have recognised even in broad daylight, much less at night. They turned sharp corners to the right, to the left, to the right again, and he thought he could distinguish the broken outlines of a ruined wall against the faint greyness of the ink-and-water sky.
Then all was dark for an instant, and he felt that his bearers were pausing at some obstacle or difficulty. The lantern flashed again, and he saw a rough vault above him; there was a big cobweb just above his head, and a loathsome fat spider jumped out of a crevice and ran along the threads till it disappeared as if by magic in the very middle of the web. He saw it in an instant in the sudden light as some one held up the lantern to show the way. Such things take hold of the memory and stick to it afterwards, as little burs fasten themselves upon one's clothes in autumn fields. Besides, though Zeno was one of the bravest men of any age, he detested fat spiders, and was very nearly afraid of them.
He felt himself carried down an inclined plane at a swinging rate; the air smelt of dry earth, and presently it grew much warmer, though it was not at all close. It seemed a long time until the men stopped, set him on his feet, and left their hold on him. The man who had acted as the leader now pushed the others aside, and stood before him, a broad-shouldered Tartar with a huge tawny beard, dressed in leather and wearing a breastplate embossed with the Roman eagle. Zeno knew him well; he was a Mohammedan, like many soldiers of fortune in the Greek army at that time, his name was Tocktamish, and he had been with Zeno in Patras. He spoke a barbarous dialect, compounded of Greek and Italian.
'Messer Zeno,' he said, 'we are not going to hurt you, but we think it better for your own safety to keep you here for a while, till everything is quiet again. Do you understand?'
'Perfectly,' Zeno answered, with a laugh. 'Nothing could be clearer! You naturally suppose that if I found myself in danger I would turn evidence against you to save myself, and you propose to make that impossible.'