Cynan ap Clydno and I came to Byzantium and found that the Shining Company had been there before us. Our journey was of just more than two months, mostly over sea, in the kindest part of Summer, but for all that we travelled quickly enough, in the old Empire's routes, a song travels faster.
Oh, the song we found waiting for us in the Imperial City bore little in common with the song that Aneiron had sent out into the world - the language was changed, and not so much as a single stanza remained as it had been - and yet the core of the tale had come before us, of the band of three hundred warriors who went unafraid to death, and the one man who had lived despite himself.
It was not so difficult, then, as it might have been, for the both of us to gain a place among the Emperor's bodyguards.
****
Our new company were called the Excubitores. My Greek - my old tutor would have been proud - was good enough for me to pull the meaning from the word - 'those who are out of bed', but it meant 'sentinels'. When we slept, we slept in the Imperial Palace itself, an elite group of 300 seasoned warriors who had almost nothing in common with Mynyddog Mwynfawr's chosen band, in ancient stone chambers that shared nothing with the raw new barracks at Dyn Eidyn.
It was good, I think, for Cynan, to have a company around him again, but with so few reminders of home. I knew that what had happened in Catraeth plagued him still, though he didn't speak about it; in the days, he spoke little, and did not look back to the dark-haired Greek women who still sighed over him; in the nights he would sleep poorly, and when he did sleep, would wake from dreams with the terrible memories still showing in his eyes, and I would sit beside him until he could sleep again.
But the other men of the Excubitores were not so different from us, after all. The name might have meant, rather than tireless sentinels who kept watch the night, 'men who cannot sleep for nightmares'. Rarely was Cynan the only man to wake gasping and shuddering in the night; their campaigns were different, but their remembering was the same.
And though I had been only a shieldbearer, home in Britain, now I was also one of them, a warrior sleepless in the night.
****
One of the first things we did upon coming to Byzantium was to return the dagger of Phanes to its original owner. I say 'we', but it was truly only me - Cynan had given the dagger to me, early in our voyage.
"I suspect this should be in your keeping," he said to me, as he retrieved it from a sack of his things.
I tried to give it back to him, at first; it seemed strange that such a beautiful thing should be in my hands. "But Phanes gave it to you, so that you could return it to its owner," I told him, "And besides, I am only a shieldbearer."
He laughed. It wasn't the way he had laughed before, but it was still a good thing to hear. "I took it from him because I was running away, and it gave me a direction to run in," he said. "But for you, I think, you have been running toward this dagger since the first time you saw it. Take it, Prosper. Keep it safe until you can return it to where it belongs."
Alexandros was not difficult to find. He was still in the Emperor's Bodyguard; we were of his company, and it took only a few questions for someone to point him out to me.
"Have the Blues been racing well?" I asked him, after we had been introduced.
He smiled at me. "Only a few weeks since you got off the boat, and you've already found your faction, Prosper? Truly you will be a man of Byzantium."
"I think it was always going to be the Blues," I admitted ruefully, and then I showed him the dagger. "Do you remember losing this?"
He laughed and took it from me, turning it over and over in his hands. "This old thing! It's been years; I never thought to see it again."
I might have bristled at the way he treated such a fine and beautiful object so casually; but even as new-come as I was to the city, I had begun to realize that beauty and fine craftsmanship were on an entirely different scale, here. Oh, it wasn't that the city was rich - though it was rich, of course, it also had its poor, and many of them. But even the poor, in Byzantium, drank from painted glass cups that would have been worth a king's ransom back in Gwynedd; and if they cracked, they tossed them casually away in the street, for they knew they could buy another the next day, for little more than the cost of the wine that filled them.
The dagger was still a beautiful thing and a finely-made weapon, even here among the luxury of the Empire, but weapons just as fine, and just as beautiful, were easy enough to come by. It made me feel at the same time ashamed of our poverty, of the shabby decay of the once-fine villa my father ruled from; and yet somehow, also, fiercely proud of the land where I was born.
"Phanes always meant to bring it back to you," I told him, "But he will not leave Dyn Eidyn, now, he has made it his home." And there, that was the pride - that a man like Phanes, who had journeyed all over the world, who knew this city and places still richer, maybe, had chosen to stay in Mynyddog's hall, with the thatched roof and the dogs among the rushes and the peat-smoke and the mud and the Saxons still nipping at our heels.
"Phanes always was as strange one," Alexandros said, and handed the dagger back to me. "You keep it."
"I can't," I said, even as my hand closed around the archangel on the hilt, a shape by now long-familiar. "It's yours. Don't you want it back?"
"The Blues have been losing again," he told me, with a half-smile. "I still can't afford to pay you back for it. You might have been better off choosing the Greens, but I'll deny it to my grave if you tell anyone I said that. Besides, Phanes had it years longer than I ever did. And I suspect you love it better than I."
"All the same," I tried to insist, "You never owed me for it - it's meant to be returned - I cannot -"
"Save my life with it some day," he said, "And we'll call it even."
Cynan laughed at me again, when I told him the story. "So we brought a dagger halfway around the world to return it to a man who didn't want it anymore. So much for your patterns!"
"I don't know," I said thoughtfully, as I went through my new gear, finding a place for the dagger. It was silly, if you told it that way, and foolish really that we thought we could ever return it: how likely was it, after all this time, that its owner would even have still been in Byzantium? And yet he was, and he'd ceded it to me, anyway. I pulled it half-out of the new sheath I had fitted to it - a dagger made in Byzantium, to the Byzantine style, and yet it had come to Britain, been mended and remade there, fit itself to the hands of men who called that island home. I touched the wavy patterns in the metal. Conn's teasing me about my way of trying to make patterns on mens' lives had, by the end, spread to all the company, and yet it was Conn who had learned to make patterns of his own. I had seen the archangel instead, and come all the way to the Imperial Palace for it. "Maybe this was the pattern," I said. "Maybe it was meant for my hand."