Eudocia Ingerina looked at Basil.
“Will you be Emperor or no?” she asked. “If that man in there is not dead–what are you?”
His flushed blue eyes rolled towards her; she twitched her robe from his grasp and lifted the thin silk curtains from the carved door.
I, forgotten, caught hold of the ribbings of scented sandal wood and looked in … you may believe what I saw, what I was blinded for seeing.
The Emperor Michael, Lord of the East, Vice-regent of God, the last of the Amorian Cæsars, sat on the floor by the gilt and glorious brocades of his bed.
His hands were smitten off and his garments trailed with sticky blood; his head was bowed on his chest and he uttered bitter complaints. In his black hair some crimson roses still hung; the great rubies and topaz glittered on his breast. Behind him in the rich murk light I could see the other Emperor, a huddled heap of red and yellow, and in the middle of the marble floor (green as the tomb of Copronymus) the two hands of Michael, twisted into a clutching shape, with huge and wonderful rings on the fingers.
With a soft movement like the dappled Persian deer Eudocia Ingerina stole into the chamber; Basil and John of Chaldia were behind her; she stopped before Michael; her lamp showed his creeping blood.
“Well,” she said. “Well, shall I not be an Empress after all?”
And she touched him with her foot that was covered with a shoe of green and violet leather, so that he looked up from his incoherent lamentations.