Young Constantine turned away from the window and lit the tapers on his small writing table. His tutor Methodius had assigned him a volume of Pausanias’s travel writings to copy for the evening. Methodius came from a drab monastery far to the east in the city of Nicopolis, close to the borders of the Caliph’s lands, and although a scholarly man, he had provincial ideas of teaching, forcing Constantine to copy, copy, copy. The youth preferred to read as much as possible, and writing out duplicates of each page slowed him immensely.

The seventeen-year-old boy had made minimal progress on his assignment during the humid August day. His hand-copy of Pausanias was a mess, covered with marginalia scribblings of birds that made it difficult to read his cramped handwriting. Constantine had taken much to painting in the many hours he had to himself, and the birds of the roofs of the imperial city were his primary subjects — he had seen few other live animals. He had once seen a trained lion from Egypt and a shaggy black bear from the north of the Black Sea when a traveling circus gave a private performance in the royal quarters. A stout Bulgar almost as hairy as the bear dragged the creature around on a sturdy chain, teasing it in mock wrestling matches that the broken-spirited animal could never win. Constantine was sixteen then, but in private that night he cried like a small boy over the poor bear, chained and humiliated to entertain another creature whom life had also chained and humiliated.

That same night he had sat beside Helena, and thinking of her cold dismissal of him helped bring the tears. Today he had passed her in the upper corridors, and she held her nose in the air and ignored him the way she always did. As her purple robes swept past him he bowed and spoke his customary kind greeting: “You are lovely today as ever, my wife.” She said nothing and faded into the distant end of the hall. Sometimes she would answer him, but never to say “my husband.” She had not once called him that in the four years since Romanus had forced her to marry the frail boy. She never shared Constantine’s embrace or his bedchamber or even tasted his lips. No one in the palace expected her to: the marriage was dynastic and an excuse for the usurper. Beautiful Helena was the daughter of Romanus Lecapenus, who proclaimed himself the basileopator — the Emperor’s father — after she married Constantine, son of the deceased emperor Leo the Wise. It was but a tiny step to make himself co-emperor, and then the senior emperor, and at last remove the thirteen year-old boy to a tower chamber away from the working of the Empire…Romanus’s empire. Helena had done her part to make her family, the Lecapeni, the rulers of Byzantium, and she had no reason to give her husband a son and complicate the succession that Romanus had busily secured for his own boys, already crowned co-emperors.

This situation suited the girl fine; she had no use for her husband of convenience. She stayed loyal to her father and brothers, even though the boys were bullies and imbeciles; but all brothers were that way. Besides, her husband had nothing to offer her. Constantine was thin and meek. His black hair was always stringy and limp, and the one feature that might have impressed an onlooker, his coal-dark eyes inherited from his mother Zoe (known as Carbonopsina, “eyes of coal”), were always glazed and distant. She thought he might have gone funny in the head after years of living in fear under one prison warden after another: first his drunken uncle Alexander, then the scheming Patriarch Nicholas, who had exiled his mother to a monastery. Romanus had now become the jailer, although it was a measure of her father’s kindness that he kept the adolescent emperor alive after the marriage — Constantine should at least be grateful for that. Helena occasionally pitied the boy who so politely addressed her in the halls whenever they met, but she had done her part and wanted nothing more to do with him.

If she had some idea of his feelings for her, she would have avoided him completely: despite the scorn and snubs he received in the palace hallways, Constantine had fallen in love with the raven-haired girl. When Romanus sternly informed the boy that he was making himself Constantine’s father-in-law, the helpless child shivered in apprehension. But the first sight of Helena — on the day of their wedding — surpassed even the most outrageous of his hopes. During the rushed ceremony in Hagia Sophia he could barely remove his eyes from the twelve-year-old beauty. He had heard that his mother Zoe had once been one of the most stunning sights of Constantinople, but he believed his child-bride outshone even her.

Four years of gazing at Helena during imperial ceremonies or as she flitted past him in the palace deepened his love for the Armenian doe. Now she was sixteen and had transformed into a radiant nubile young woman with chiseled features, soft cinnamon-colored eyes, and creamy alabaster skin. And yet those pretty features were always mocking him and moving away from him, and he could do nothing to break her icy defenses.

Constantine completed one more line of Pausanias before the tapers began to flicker. He pushed aside the volume and picked up a sketch he had made that morning: an ink outline of Helena’s face. The black and white medium caught her pulchritude better than any other: no colorful mosaic could describe her appearance. Constantine tossed the vellum sheet into a corner with his other studies of Helena. He had made more drawings of her than even birds of Constantinople. He worried that one day she might discover the portraits, learn what he thought of her, and hide herself in a place where he could never find her again. Then all he would have were the portraits and the memory…but wasn’t that all that he had now?

He extinguished the last of the dying tapers and climbed into his cold, empty bed. No servants came to help him, although if he wished he could call some, and they would come grudgingly and leave quickly. To them he was the palace ghost. He might be the son and grandson of great emperors, but to everyone else he was just a mouse in the wall of the Palace of Romanus II Lecapenus. The lonely emperor shut his eyes and closed another day in purgatory.

The day ended, but a restless night began.

Constantine toppled into the deep pit of sleep, but he continued to fall without hitting bottom. He spun dizzily in darkness, and the air around him became musty and stale. He fell past gray stone walls that tightened around him. He was spinning down a dark tube — the moist air told him it was a water well. He twisted and turned in the long fall, and helplessly wondered when he would find the bottom and a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

A swell of ebony water rushed to meet him and seized his body. The water was painfully frigid, but the cold shock did not wake him. His dream-body floated in the water and numbness spread through his fingers, down his arms, across his chest. He struggled to bring feeling back into his limbs. He managed to stiffly move his feet and tread water. His hands felt in the darkness for the wall of the well, but the stones were smooth and tightly mortared; his fingertips clawed vainly to find grips.

As much as he thrashed his weak limbs, the surface of the dream water remained undisturbed, like dark glass. Gripped in the weirdness of the nightmare, he did not at first find this peculiar…until the strange vibrations began in the deepest part of the well.

The water surface rippled once and then stopped. He bobbed in the well, treading water to keep his head afloat, but his own paddling made no disturbance. He stopped moving for a moment to rest his tired arms. The ripples shuddered over the water surface again, and again they stopped. He waited. A third time the water shivered. Constantine’s lower limbs were nearly exhausted from keeping his head above water, but he sensed with the omniscient awareness sometimes granted to dreamers that drowning was not the greatest danger. Something throbbed in the well far beneath him, the thing that was making those great ripples. Something enormous rising through the unguessable depths below his feet.

The ripples shivered through the water again. And again.

Constantine was drained, ready to surrender and drop into the abyss beneath him and meet that shape the shook the water. But then, he thought: not yet. It isn’t close enough yet. It is coming closer, but it will not reach me tonight, maybe not for many nights. Relief spread through him and the fear of drowning ebbed away; he let his frozen muscles relax. He slipped beneath the water and then the water was gone and the pleasant darkness of dreamless sleep poured over him at last. He rested quietly the remainder of the night.

* * *

He fell into the well the next night. And the following night. For a full week, each evening when he closed his eyes to escape his drab life, he dropped into a nightmare and fought to escape from the unseen behemoth that shook the water and walls. It came closer every night, but always at the last moment before fear of horrible death overwhelmed him, he managed to reassure himself that it was not tonight. Soon, maybe, but not tonight. And then his sleep continued undisturbed.

He had read about dreams in the Bible and how they prophesied of the fall of Empires, deaths of Kings, and coming of Saviors. But could the dreams of a little emperor, a teenage boy who, although the Equal of the Apostles, could not get his wife to love him, mean anything at all? He wanted to ask Methodius, but he knew that the priest would only quote those same biblical passages that Constantine had memorized years before with his old tutor, Theodore. Theodore would have known what the nightmares meant, but he had been gone for many years. Like all of Constantine’s friends in the palace, he had been hastily exiled when Romanus seized power.

Methodius lacked Theodore’s rapport with Constantine, but he still sensed that the boy was uneasy. “You are distant today, young basileus,” Methodius remarked when Constantine’s eyes habitually strayed from an Arabic medical volume. “Are the young Lecapeni bothering you again?”

“Yes,” Constantine answered, which was true, although it had nothing to do with his mood. The Lecapeni, Romanus’s obnoxious sons Christopher and Stephen, taunted and teased him at any opportunity, tripping him and laughing, or stealing his art tools and sketches when he tried to work outside his private chambers. Constantine regurgitated an old story for Methodius’s benefit: “Stephen grabbed my writing quills today when I was in the throne room copying down details of a diplomatic ritual. I chased him through the kitchen, but he’s taller than me and can even outrun some of the soldiers. He kept letting me get close to him, then he’d toss one of the quills at me and call me ‘bastard’ and then keep running. It was an hour before I got back all of my quills.”

“And you did nothing about it afterwards?” Methodius asked.

“What could I do? I’m a prisoner here, and one day Romanus may become tired of me and poison my food or send me to a monastery. Let his sons make fun of me and his daughter keep out my bed if it means I’ll survive and have one more day of writing and painting.”

Methodius smiled and gently patted the Emperor’s pale hand. “Constantine, you are a wise boy, wiser than myself, and it saddens my old heart to think what a great ruler you would have made. You are quite right, it is sometimes better to live in our minds and our art than to protest and lose what little we still possess. But do not let them call you ‘bastard’; that you should not take.”

“I’ve read the law code,” the boy protested. “It condemns fourth marriages and the offspring of fourth marriages. Romanus made me sign it, sign my parent’s love and myself into oblivion.”

“You are too cruel to yourself, basileus. The church condemns fourth marriages, but the Patriarch made a special dispensation for your father. Even though you signed the law, it cannot condemn a marriage the church blessed before the law came into effect.” He held tightly onto the boy emperor’s hand, forcing Constantine to look straight into his sharp, gray eyes. “You are Constantine Porphyrogenitus. You were born in the purple, son of Leo the Wise and Basil the Great. Others may forget, but you must always remember.” And for a brief moment, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus saw in his old tutor the shadows of the wisdom of Theodore and felt a tingle in his chest that made him feel greater than all the stone towers and churches and palaces in the city.

Then suddenly he remembered the dark well in his dreams, the mysteriously turbulent water, the unknown danger slithering up from below. The feeling of power vanished, and for a moment the walls of the palace shook and the ground buckled. He ripped his hand from the tutor’s wizened grip and cast his eyes about the walls of the library. His skin crawled, his palms were clammy against the marble table

“What is it, what is wrong, basileus?”

Constantine held still to see if the movement would repeat. The room was still. “Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“The walls shook. The ground too. Something shook the palace — from beneath.”

“I felt no earthquake,” Methodius said in a soothing voice.

“Not an earthquake, something smaller but more violent, right below us.”

Methodius shook his hoary head. He often worried over the young emperor, and it saddened him to see the boy frightened now even of shadows and phantom earthquakes. “We have had enough for today, basileus. Close up your medicine volume and I’ll tell you your assignment.”

Constantine relented. His tutor had felt nothing, so maybe it had been nothing. The dream had captured his waking imagination, nothing more. To push it to the back of his mind he asked Methodius to tell him another story from the East. The tutor had once traveled in the cities of the Caliph, even as far as the capital in Baghdad. The Muslims were the mortal enemies of Byzantium (one of too many enemies that surrounded the Empire on all sides), but Constantine loved the stories of their lands, and Methodius had compiled a great store of wondrous folk tales and legends. The old priest loved to tell them to the boy because no one else in the palace or the city had any use for the stories of the East.

“Tell me again of the ancient Persians, and the fight with the sea-demon Gandarewa,” Constantine begged. Methodius, glad to help the Emperor forget about his lonely day, repeated the story of the hero Keresapa that he had learned from the Avesta, the holy book of the ancient Persians that he had studied in Baghdad. Constantine listened to the tale long into the afternoon until the time came for his dinner.

He always ate his dinner alone in his room, but on the way back to his bedchamber he passed his Empress again and wondered if he might convince her to take a meal with him. After the talk with Methodius he so desperately wanted to share his dinner with someone that when he gave Helena his standard royal greeting he nervously tacked on an invitation to dine in his bedchamber.

She laughed, thinking he was joking. But he wasn’t, so she became cruel to frighten him away. “I’ll never share your bedchamber — husband,” she snarled. She laced the final word with enough venom to kill a Nubian elephant. Too late she realized that the use of that word — the first time she had uttered it — would give the boy hope.

“Husband, did you call me? Why did you call me that, my wife?”

She retreated. “Aren’t you my husband?”

“I am, but you’ve never called me that.”

“And I won’t ever again. I just wanted to see what you would do.” She tossed her black locks around and marched away. He could not see her cheeks flush red as she wondered what silliness made her use that word.

Never had one of her insults so cheered Constantine. He floated back to his room to have his meager feast of bread, cheese, and scrawny leg of lamb. He crawled into bed thinking of the sweet title husband passing through the mouth of his Empress. Never had those apple-red lips seemed quiet so lush, rounded, and kissable as when they had spoken that word.

Then he closed his eyes. And the well opened up beneath him and he fell back into the nightmare.

* * *

He began to feel the quaking during the day. Acutely — he made no mistake about what was happening. It was no dream but a vibration in the marble floors. He saw no physical effect: the courtly purple curtains of his room hung slackly as before. But he sensed the stone floor shake and the waves of motion pass into his bones. He said nothing to the people in the palace, and they noticed nothing at all: their faces remained stony as ever. In his room he stared out the window to see if the city shook when the vibrations came. The pillars in the Forum of Constantine stood steady, and the old walls of the city remained firm. But as the days passed and the quaking became stronger, he thought he could discern in the depths of the streets beneath the imperial monuments a subtle shift, a quiet stirring. The very hint of it made him feel sick; the numbness of his dreams crept up from the trenches of Constantinople and reached vainly for him. With each passing day and dream-filled night, the struggle to grab him became less and less vain.

Although the rumblings followed no regular pattern, Constantine noticed that they never came when he went to mass in Hagia Sofia. In the great church he had his only opportunity to observe his father-in-law, and he hoped to catch a look of unease on Romanus’s white-bearded face. If Constantine, the powerless co-emperor, could feel these ripples of fear in the great city, perhaps the ruling emperor could feel them too. But Romanus had the same cheerless look that he had worn since he first “championed” young Constantine and took power. There was nothing new there for the boy to read.

There was nothing new at all in the palace or the city except what the boy could feel during the day and plunge into helplessly at night. In those nightmares he began to understand the origin of the disturbances. It (and he could give it no name because that would indicate that he somehow understood its form or shape) had come from the sea. It dwelt in dark currents and swam slowly through the waters of the Bosphorus, squirmed into the Sea of Marmara, and circled around the Golden Horn…seeking and seeking for that deep well that would bring it up into the palace. It might have taken years of careful and slow questing, but it discovered a sluice beneath a small bay long forgotten since Constantine the Great built the city. The monstrosity swam into this neglected harbor and squeezed through the drowned opening into the well beneath the palace. The same well in which the boy emperor plummeted each night, and felt It clawing up from below to seize him and pull him into the hidden harbor —

Constantine flung himself onto the floor of his room, shocked out of the nightmare for the first time. He saw moonlight pouring through his window. Why had he awoken this time, still in the deep of the night? What was he trying to tell himself? Maybe the only escape had been to wake — It had come too close. Or maybe he had realized something in the sliver of his brain that was still conscious and forced himself awake to discover it….

He rushed to the window that overlooked the waters. The moon reflected off the calm surface of the Sea of Marmara, but the Emperor looked directly down from his chamber. Beneath him was the Harbor of Bucoleon, where ships with rotting cables of no use to the Imperial Navy lay at anchor. A forgotten harbor that had almost disappeared with the rising of the sea over the last three hundred years.

He knew why his mind had woken him: this was the forgotten harbor of the nightmare. This is where It had come, directly below where he slept. Every night when he closed his eyes, he tumbled down into the dungeons of the palace to the submerged harbor where It made its watery nest.

And what, Constantine wondered, was to be done about that?

The young emperor lived a life of avoidance and fear. He existed through omission, surviving only by what he did not do instead of what he did do. He stayed silent when Stephen and Christopher bullied him, he never spoke to the ruling emperor, he made no overtures to his beautiful wife other than weak social pleasantries in the corridors, and his bravest action was to attempt to read a tedious mythology compendium in the library that even Methodius scorned. But now he had to take action: something horrid laired beneath his city, and only he knew about it, although he had only a vague idea why it had singled him out. He had a duty as emperor to destroy It, but his ideas on how to accomplish this were even vaguer. But the next morning he set to work.

The earliness of Constantine’s studies surprised Methodius. The old priest was accustomed to meeting the boy after lunch, but on that day the seventeen year-old had beaten him to the library.

“The Republic, my emperor? You have read that before, three years past, if my weary old head remembers correctly.”

Constantine nodded, keeping a finger on his place in the gargantuan library copy of Plato’s complete works. He said: “I have not read it as much as an emperor should.”

Methodius grinned cynically. “Plato speaks of a state that needs no emperor, but a philosopher. Even you, my learned basileus, cannot claim to be a philosopher.”

“I’m not reading about building the perfect city,” the boy answered, returning to his reading. “I’m reading Book Seven, the analogy of the cave.”

Methodius surrendered to his pupil’s wishes and disappeared into his private cell to continue his work creating a digest from the histories of Ammianus Marcellinus. Constantine remained with his book for many undisturbed hours. No quaking bothered him during that time; perhaps, he reasoned, because his mind turned so far away from his little world as he studied the difficulties of Plato.

When he finished he sought his tutor, but the monk had fallen fast asleep over his work, so the young emperor chose to slip off and continue his quest. Methodius was the only man in the palace who kept watch on Constantine’s movements, so now the boy was free to go where he wanted without fear that someone would miss him.

As he walked the halls of the palace, he again felt the pain of being a stranger in his own castle. Soldiers, priests, and officials ignored him, even though his purple robes and royal broach clearly told them who walked among them. He descended winding stone staircases down into the busier levels of the palace where he rarely went. Even here he attracted as much attention as a peasant in the crowded stands at the Hippodrome. He kept away from the throne room and Romanus’s living quarters; his father-in-law alone he needed to avoid. He would demand a reason for Constantine’s movements. If Romanus discovered his plans, he would certainly lock the boy away as a maniac. But Constantine saw his father-in-law only during masses, and had little chance of running into him now.

One person he did hope to meet as he descended lower and lower into the palace: Helena. When he decided to take up his quest, he thought about finding an ally, but quickly abandoned the idea because he had no friends in the palace except the doddering Methodius, who’s mind was too narrow and prosaic to understand the mission. Although he gave up getting a partner, he still thought of Helena. She had no love for him, but of all people he wished most for his beautiful bride to be at his side. Maybe she would understand if he explained carefully to her. And then he abandoned this idea, too. A silly dream, and to think of it saddened him. He put his mind back on his quest.

At last, after an hour of exploring deeper and deeper into the imperial residence and discovering many nooks in his own home that he had never entered during his seventeen years, he found a tiny staircase in a musty pit behind the kitchens. The staircase dropped into a tight crevice that only just admitted the boy’s shoulders. Twenty steps down and the stairs stopped at a rusty metal door. It stood slightly ajar, and the stale odor of sea water and mildew hissed through the crack.

Constantine knew that what he sought lay beyond that door. He had descended from his private quarters in as close a direct line as he could manage. He sensed that many floors directly above him was his own imperial bedchamber, and past this door was the well. It would not be the well in his dreams: his research had told him that. And It would not be the unseen swelling menace in his dream either, but something worse and yet less tangible. Now was not the moment to fight it and make a stand. He had not felt the violent vibrations all day: It rested and waited. Constantine must rest and wait too.

But he still had to see the future battlefield, even if the sight of it made the nightmare stronger. His small hands gripped the rusty edge of the door and strained to pull it open. It grated outward easier than he had hoped, revealing midnight beyond. He tightened his jaw and stepped across the threshold.

* * *

She saw him walking down the corridor and prepared herself for another desperate greeting. She had become warier of him after the last time they met when he flung an absurd proposal at her and she gave an inexplicably embarrassing response. Now that the word husband hung between them, she felt blood flood her cheeks whenever she thought of Constantine. And it angered her all the more.

When he began to walk directly toward her instead of merely past her, she almost panicked and ran. Weeks before she would have rudely walked around him. Now her feet rooted to the floor and she waited to see what he planned.

“Helena, my empress, I need to ask you for a favor.” His voice was confident, not at all like his usual polite but hopeless greetings.

“Wh-what? Ask me and let me go.”

She drew back when he held out his hand for her. But the empty hand remained in the air, waiting patiently. Only an hour before, he had dismissed the idea of seeking Helena’s help, but after he had seen the dark water he felt a new vigor rise inside him and he could hold his gaze steadily upon her and ask her to accompany him with no fear that she might reject him. “Come with me to the library so we may talk privately.”

“Why should I? You don’t have anything to tell me. And whatever you want, what makes you think I’ll do anything for you?”

“Because I’m your husband, by your own acknowledgment.”

She tried to think of a rude answer, but the moment was strangely heavy and her light jabs would be powerless. The Emperor kept his hand outstretched, his eyes steady.

Suddenly, Helena tired of the whole game and surrendered…for the moment. Although she did not take up Constantine’s hand, she agreed to follow him the library. Perhaps she could find a way to humiliate him later, she told herself, although the excuse did not fully convince her. She stayed a few steps behind Constantine as he lead the way, fearful he might try to seize her and kiss her or some other foul thing. She was stronger than the wispy seventeen year-old, but to have to wrestle the little emperor off her body would be distasteful.

In the quiet of the library, hazy in the deepening dusk, the Emperor showed her to the stool where he often sat as a pupil with Theodore. “You trust me at least to come this far, Helena. Can you trust me a little further?”

She was becoming anxious. Never before had she seen the boy so strong-willed. “How much further?”

“The depths of the palace.”

“What, the prisons below?”

“No, there is a grotto deep under the foundations, where no one but I has gone in hundreds of years. There is something there which we must destroy.”

It sounded ludicrous, a fable Bulgarian peasants would tell around a fire. But the Emperor’s voice sounded so stern and sane that a lump grew in her throat. “And what is this — thing?”

Constantine could hear a warble in her words, and his surety that she would believe him grew stronger. Now he had only to tell her the truth, and she would join his quest. “The true form of it, I do not know. I only know that it is evil, and that it hates me, hates our city, and hates God.”

“True form? I don’t understand.”

He tapped spidery fingers on a volume on the table. “Have you read The Republic?” She shook her head. The women of the palace were taught only history basics, and the classics of the ancients were left to men. “There is a story in this book about men who were born in a cave and lived there without leaving it. Because of this, they believed that the cave was the whole world. They knew nothing about objects outside the cave entrance. Well…they did know a little bit.” Constantine raised his hands before the candle on the table. The flame cast a shadow of his hands on the library wall in the rough shape of an eagle, the symbol of Byzantium. “Light from outside cast shadows on the back wall of the cavern. Because they never saw what cast the shadows, the prisoners in the cave believed that the shadows were the real things, and so this was what they thought an eagle really looked like.” He wiggled the shadow-eagle’s wings. Helena giggled a little. “They could have left the cave to see for themselves, but they were afraid to abandon the safety of their home and walk into the bright, strange light.”

He took his hands down. “This palace we live in, and all the world we see outside the window, is that cave. Everything we see and know are shadows of something greater that we are afraid to find. It doesn’t say anything in The Republic about dreams, but I believe that at night in our sleep we sometimes crawl out of the cave for a few minutes and see the real forms, but the light is so frightening that we call those dreams nightmares and try to forget them.”

She shook her head. “I still do not understand.” But goose bumps traveled up her skin, and the shadows of the library grew darker and more ominous to her.

“Then come with me, and let’s see together.” He held out his hand once more. And still she would not take it, but followed him out of the library.

“Where are we going?” she asked when he walked down a seldom-used staircase.

“We are going to leave the cave. Only for a short time.”

Again he made the long journey directly down into the foundations of the palace. But this time he went stealthily because he had the Empress at his side. The sight of the two teenagers together would astonish anyone who knew the imperial family. But night was falling over Constantinople, and fewer people were walking the corridors. Constantine and Helena pressed close to the shadows and galleries of the palace, and no one noticed them passing into the basements.

They reached the dank back passage and he guided her down the steps to the iron door. “What is this place?” she asked, feeling a shiver from the cold, wet air that the door exhaled.

“You will see, but you must first let your eyes become used to the dark.” Constantine pulled the portal open and stepped into the blackness. The girl’s will gave out; she could not walk into that solid wall of black. A pale hand stretched from the dark and offered itself to her. She laid her cold, slender hand in Constantine’s grip, and found it surprisingly warm. He drew her inside.

The echo of dripping water told of a cavernous stone hollow with a vaulted ceiling. Constantine, on his first visit, had waited ten minutes until his eyes became accustomed to the lightless place and revealed the outlines of the cavern. Helena tried to grope past him, but he held his free arm across her body to stop her. “There’s a short fall into the water directly in front of you. Stay in one place and rest your eyes, you’ll soon see.”

They stood waiting in the dark, still as tomb monuments. Helena gripped her husband’s hand tightly. It grew warmer as hers grew clammier. She worried that Constantine might have lured her into a trap to get revenge for all the times she had scorned him. Maybe she deserved it. As for the Emperor, he was confident that Helena would stay at his side. She had come too far to lose her trust him.

Gradually they were able to make out the tremendous cavern. The ceiling vaulted high overhead, held aloft on a forest of pillars decorated with Corinthian tops and pagan reliefs of medusa heads and winged chargers. Similar carvings might have covered the bases of the pillars, but they were lost in unclean dark waters that flooded the room except for the promontory where the Emperor and Empress stood. The promontory was a pier: a wobbly wooden boat was tied to a rusted hook near Constantine’s foot.

“An underground cistern,” the Empress gasped.

“As old as Constantine the Great,” the Emperor answered. “And forgotten maybe since Heraclius, three hundred years ago. I believe it was a secret way of escape for the Emperor, but the sea water rose higher and flooded the way, so soon the emperors forgot about it. But beneath the waters the sluice still reaches the sea, and through this hole, It crawled beneath the palace.”

“But why don’t I see — It?”

“Because its shadow isn’t strong enough for us to see…yet.”

Four steps led from the promontory into the water beside the boat. Constantine slowly walked down the wet stairs to the small craft, and the Empress, her grip on the boy’s hand still tight, followed him. He stepped into the wobbly boat, then helped guide her in after him.

“But there is no way for us to leave, this boat is useless to us,” she said.

Constantine picked up a pole and pushed the craft away from the pier. “We must be as close as we possible to the cave entrance before we leave.”

“You said the entrance was deep under water.”

“I do not mean that cave.”

The pillars were planted so thickly that the boy easily pushed the tiny vessel along by thrusting the pole against them. They soon past out of sight of the pier. Constantine stopped pushing them along, and the boat drifted briefly in the stagnant waters before it stopped.

Helena held her breath. The air was so dank and heavy that she hated breathing. Constantine remained motionless and gazed at his beautiful wife in the gloom. “If this is a joke,” Helena began, but then stopped. A vibration shook the water around them. The ripples that Constantine had seen in the well of his mind echoed around the boat.

“You felt that too, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Yes. An earthquake?”

“No. The exit from the cave is close, so even you can feel it now. We must go outside, and see the true form of the thing. Each day, It grows stronger, trying to make its shadow in the cave where we live —” his fingers vaguely took in all the city above them “— greater and greater until nothing can defeat it. We would be weak shadows against its great shadow. But, outside of the cave, our true forms can face its true form. The battle would be more even.”

The vibrations shook the water again. Her head spun and heart pounded, forcing her to breathe the unhealthy air. “I still do not understand — but — but — what are we going to do? How can we leave — the cave?”

Constantine slipped to the floor of the boat and lay his body flat. “We must sleep.”

It was too much to hope that she might lay by his side. But she now believed him enough to curl her body into a little ball near his feet and rest her head against the rim. She checked to see if the Emperor had closed his eyes, which he had. She no longer believed that he planned to leave her alone and frightened in this horrible place as a spiteful joke. He was serious and had been so all along. Yes, she thought, I can close my eyes now and sleep without worry. She had not felt the least bit of drowsiness before, but suddenly it consumed her and she began to fall into a heavy sleep. She fought for a moment only, the lingering suspicions of a practical joke still on her mind, and then she surrendered.

After weeks of experiencing the nightmares, Constantine had to wait only a minute before the dark claws reached up from below and pulled him down.

* * *

The sound of water still lapped all around them, but they were no longer in an echoing, dank chamber. Constantine opened his eyes first and jumped up. His hand flashed to his sword and drew it out of the scabbard; he instinctively knew the blade would be there. The light of the sun danced along the silvery weapon. It was a long heavy sword, similar to what the Varangian Guard of the palace used, but it felt just like a part of his arm as he swung it through air. He chuckled in a deep, throaty tone. So this is what the perfect sword feels like.

He raised Helena to her feet, but she kept her eyes shut, afraid of the great light. “My Empress, open your eyes and see the world outside the cave.”

Constantine’s body blocked some of the beams of sun, so she was at last able to open her eyes and squint into the light. She checked a scream, because the man before her could not possibly be Constantine. He was almost six feet tall and his muscles bulged against his golden chain mail armor. A ruddy, healthy face and thick black beard replaced the hairless one of the youth. But the eyes were unmistakable: the eyes of the Emperor.

Helena had changed less dramatically in Constantine’s view. She was had become even more beautiful, but the innocent charm of the teen girl had matured into the vibrant bloom of a great woman. There was no hint of immaturity in the angles and curves of her face, and her sable mane of hair tumbled past her waist.

The boat had vanished, and all around them flowed an endless sea of the brightest blue. The ocean as it should be, an eternity of unfathomable water. Their boat had vanished, but the two adults stood upon that idealized ocean as if their feet were set on a plank. “The cave,” she exclaimed. “We have come out of the cave.”

“Yes, but don’t be afraid. We are greater here than we can ever be in the place we left.” His voiced roared each word. He was a commander, and leader of men and speaker of law. And she was fit to be the consort of the greatest men who had ever lived: Alexanders and Caesars and Umars. But even in that moment when they beheld each other in perfect glory, youthful thoughts pestered both their minds.

“He is a great man, but perhaps that little pale boy is sweeter.”

“She is more magnificent than Helen of Troy, but the lithe girl of the palace is almost as delightful, and closer to the earth.”

Then these thoughts from the cave faded, and Constantine seized his Empress’s hand and together they ran across the surface of the water as if it were a flat field of blue roses swaying in a breeze. He swung his great sword with a free arm and hollered a war cry. When the initial joy of his new power and perfect Empress ebbed, he remembered the quest. He had come this far to face It, and he yelled at the top of his powerful lungs a challenge to the hidden menace.

“Intruder beneath the city of Constantine, the Emperor of the Romans summons you! You have haunted my nights with your calls, and now I have come to answer you. But be warned, I am no little child trapped in a well, but the true Constantine, born in the purple and wielding the sword of my power.”

His words flew into the sky but no response came back. Helena held his mailed shoulder. “Why does it not answer?”

“Maybe it does not hear.”

I hear, miserable children. But I do not wait on brats like a palace servant.

The malignant voice shook the waters, and Constantine understood at last the source of the ripples he had felt for the past weeks. This voice carried not through air, but through water, and tore the oceans as it moved.

“We are no children. Show yourself and see that we are mighty as you.”

The trembling that followed must have been a laugh, for they could feel no words in the sound, but it rumbled so deeply that the ripples grew into waves. The Emperor and Empress ran over the waves like little grassy hills. The voice spoke words again.

Yes, I will show myself, but you will see the folly of your boast, for I am mightier than any King or Emperor of your world, and here I am greater still.

At first Constantine thought it was land, a rising island, but boiling water steamed around it as it continue to rise and rise into the clear sky. The beast of the sea towered above them the way the walls of Theodosius dwarfed the puny attackers who year after year sought to take the city. Helena shuddered even in her perfect body. Constantine felt the cold of her hands through his chain mail. But Constantine’s heart would not fail him. He brandished his weapon and tilted his head up to look in the face sneering down from leagues above. Red slits glowered at the two children from above an awful grinning maw filled with silver daggers. Scales of brackish green covered the bulging body beneath the serpentine neck. They saw no limbs, but Constantine imagined that great webbed claws propelled the gargantuan body beneath the surface.

Why are you not stunned to see me? Do you know me, Byzantine dog?

“Gandarewa,” Constantine bellowed the name at the grotesque head atop the serpentine neck. He had seen that face in the treasury of loot from the wars with Chosroes, King of Persia. The icon leered from vases, shields, and other royal Persian ornaments. Dragons, Theodore and Methodius had called them, and one Persian dragon ruled all the others: Gandarewa, the sea-dragon, foe of all living things. It took the hero Keresapa nine days to kill it. But Gandarewa appeared to have recovered from its earlier demise, and now even a whole army could not harm the awesome beast.

Yes, I am Gandarewa. All creation is my food, all Gods are my enemies, all prophets and heroes are my foes.

“Why have you come to my city?”

A second laugh threw up more hills around the Emperor and Empress, but they were now used to the watery terrain.

Your city? I am Gandarewa, and I claim this city as mine — all its inhabitants will feed my hunger and swell me again to greatness. You worthless crumbs will be the first I devour.

The monster’s jaws slavered, and the saliva dripped from its lips to make large splashes in the water.

But before I devour you, I shall tell you how I came to “your” city. I died when Keresapa slew me, but only my physical body. I am greater than any little man or earth spirit. My kin do not die when slain, only when forgotten. When the Muslims overthrew the Persians and their legends began to die, I weakened, but still I would not fade. When the Persians abandoned the old religion, there was no longer a legendary hero like Keresapa to imprison me. Weakened, I swam up the rivers of Mesopotamia, looking for people to feed upon. I squirmed and wriggled into the North, and at last I reached an inland sea — the Black Sea, you call it — and searched for a suitable place in which to hide.

Then I felt the pull of your city: great, powerful, and ignorant of me. I drifted weakly toward it, knowing there I could find an endless supply of unwary victims. Three hundred years of journeying finally brought me to your harbors, but still I was a mere shadow in the physical world. And then I found you, powerless little emperor — one who could sense me — and I knew I had found my first victim.

I grow slowly, I have years to make myself real in your world. I shall slowly devour your city, then when I am great once again I shall return to my native land and devour the usurpers there. All living things will be my provender, and I shall never stop until I devour all the world. I was here at the beginning of the world, and I shall be its end!

It started another volcanic laugh, but Constantine held aloft his sword and shouted into the sky with a voice that almost equaled the dragon’s: “I am no little emperor now, Gandarewa. I am the shape of that perfect emperor who is your match, and I have the strength of my empress behind me. Leave our city or I shall force you from it; and if you will not go by force — then I shall destroy you.”

The red eyes of the dragon peered into the black eyes of the Emperor of Byzantium; two ideal wills strained to gauge how serious a threat its opponent was. Gandarewa reached his verdict first.

The serpent head struck faster than even the idealized Constantine could imagine. The neck shoved the gaping jaws forward like a uncoiling spring. The man leaped away in time, or the swordlike teeth would have sliced off his arm. But the jaws snapped shut around their target: the Empress. She had no chance to move or scream before disappearing behind the teeth that gnashed together.

“Helena!” Constantine yelled, but already the dragon reared back its head and pulled the morsel in its mouth toward the sky. Constantine regained his footing and charged Gandarewa’s hulking body. He was almost lost in the shadow of the beast as he rammed the sword into the scaly side. The impossibly acute point split the scales and the weapon sank up to the hilt, but Gandarewa took no notice of the pin-prick.

The dragon’s sudden strike against her occurred so fast that Helena had to shake her head before she realized that the moist and stifling darkness around her was the inside of Gandarewa’s mouth. Deadly fangs hemmed her in, and the ribbed roof of the mouth pressed down to crush her. The cold, clammy tongue shoved her back toward the pulsating throat muscles. Her hands reach up and caught on a wet ridge of the crushing roof, and she stopped herself from plummeting into the sucking gullet.

The jaws stopped grinding, trying to understand why the food would not go down. Helena got her feet under her, and miraculously, she stood up. She was an empress and would not be the meal of any lesser creature. Her body grew into an iron rod as she raised up and pushed her hands against the slimy roof. The upper jaw resisted with a bewildered groan that rumbled out of the dragon’s throat, but it gave way. The teeth ground against each other as they were torn apart. Daylight burst into the tiny space.

Constantine heard the groans and saw far above his wife standing up straight in the maw of Gandarewa, a purple pillar jamming open the jaws. She made no effort, showed no strain: she only stood and the evil dragon could do nothing.

“The Empress of the City that Shall Never Fall!” Constantine cheered, although neither the woman nor the pained monster could hear his shout. The Emperor seized his sword and extracted it from the dragon’s side, then leaped onto the monster’s back. To the eyes of a man in the cave of our world, it would have seemed an impossible jump that could have cleared the height of Hagia Sophia, but to Constantine in the light of the world outside the cave, it was only a hop. The Emperor landed on the monster’s back near the neck and drove his blade into where the sinuous neck fused with the body.

Gandarewa howled, pained in two directions. The head snapped around quickly to find the new gnat stinging it. The force hurled the Empress from its mouth. She did not plummet to the water, but was a petal drifting in the breeze, floating and dropping in jerky patterns toward the ocean surface below.

Constantine had no chance to see if she landed unhurt. The empty jaws of Gandarewa struck at him like an unleashed battering ram. The Emperor leaped backward, and the snapping jaws closed onto a hunk of the dragon’s own flesh. The pain inflamed it to greater haste, and it struck again, missing its target but gouging out more of its own hide. Blood dripped from its fangs, and its own blood drove the creature mad with both with hunger for living things and embarrassment that a speck of humanity could so easily humiliate it.

Constantine retreated farther along the dragon’s back and shouted insults over his shoulder in a voice that copied his teasing brothers-in-law, Christopher. “Gandarewa, you cannot swallow a little girl, and to eat a single man you must make a meat platter of your own back. How do you expect to eat the world if this is how you begin?”

Emperor of rats, I am merely playing with my food!

Another strike, and this time the jaws almost swallowed the warrior. Constantine slid to one side and only suddenly losing of his footing saved him from falling into the dragon’s mouth. But he lost a grip on his sword, and it slid from the dragon’s back and into the ocean. He would have fallen after it, but his flailing hand managed to catch onto the upper lip of Gandarewa’s mouth. The beast flung its head high, and Constantine’s stomach dropped away from him as he hurtled skyward dangling by one hand from the slavering jaws.

The evil creature swung its head from side to side to shake off the clinging pest. Constantine’s armor rattled and his vision blurred, but he had managed to secure his second hand on the upper jaw ridge and held on. The head descended suddenly, and Constantine used the dropping motion to swing himself up onto the dragon’s nasal ridge. The burning red irises of Gandarewa looked directly into the Emperor’s black eyes from only a few feet away. Constantine’s muscles stiffened, his hands dug desperately at the scales to find a grip.

But the sickening motion of the monster’s head had stopped. The red eyes attenuated into burning slits.

Eye to eye at last, little emperor, but still not equals. You’ve brought me the first pain I have felt in a thousand years, and I shall give you enough pain to last you a thousand more before I eat the flesh of you and your pathetic empress.

Constantine knew he had come to the end. But he still refused to believe that it was he who would end. He had steeled his heart and mind and come this far; it was not right that someone who had suffered such as he should fail. No, it was not right…he was the Emperor and he would not die at the jaws of this upstart lizard from a fallen kingdom.

“My people have survived horrors worse than anything such as you, worm.” He pulled up one knee, struggled to raise his body. “We have fought Huns, Vandals, Goths, Muslims, Bulgars.” He pulled his other leg beneath him, and swayed to his feet, which stayed miraculously rooted on the scaly surface. “We have survived betrayals within our city walls and traitors who sought to sell us to our foes. My father and my grandfather before me slew all their enemies, and tiny dragon, I am Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, and I shall slay you!”

Gandarewa had time for one more laugh, but did not seize the opportunity. The dragon only glowered at the proud figure standing on its snout. It burned with a hatred of all life and hope.

And so Gandarewa did not see the great wave that rose beside him. In its fight against the little warrior it had raised many watery peaks, but this one rose almost to the height of its head. Even then, the rising water was nothing to concern the dragon in its moment of victory. But on the height of this wave proudly stood a woman in billowing purple robes. She let the wave thrust her toward the sky, raising her the same way soldiers raised a man on their shields to proclaim him their ruler. In her hands was the traditional weapon on the soldier, the shining steel sword.

“My love, my Emperor, I return your sword.” Helena hurled the glittering weapon in a wide arch toward Constantine. It landed perfectly in his bare-handed grip.

The eyes of Gandarewa had the briefest moment to see the poised image of the ideal Emperor and his ideal weapon….Then the cold metal plunged between its eyes into the brain and brought it a second, final death.

The Emperor and the Empress drifted to the water below in each others arms while the dragon’s dying muscles convulsed in mindless agony. The turbulent water rose to catch them, but Constantine Porphyrogenitus and Helena Lecapena passed through the surface this time and sunk into the black depths. The light of the world extinguished, and they fell back toward the cave.

* * *

She drifted for a time she could not measure before she opened her eyes. Constantine had already tied the boat to the pier and was returning to pull her up and lead her to the stairs.

“Are we…are we…” she murmured sleepily, trying to collect her jumbled thoughts.

“We are back in the cave,” Constantine announced. “It is a safer cave now, I hope.”

She had enough strength to raise herself upright, and then Constantine’s warm hands held her arms and guided her onto the steps. Touching the cold stone revived her. Her head hurt, but as her body began to awaken, she felt vigorous and strong. A few more steps onto the flat pier, and she no longer needed the boy’s support. But she let him keep his hands around her.

They stood on the pier and looked over the still waters of the cistern. “A dream?” she asked at last.

“Do you think so?”

She looked at the little emperor. His appearance remained unchanged: he was the same meek, thin boy who had lead her into the grotto and onto the water. But his appearance was no longer the only part of him she saw. “If it was a dream, than it has changed my waking world.”

“Then…” and Constantine’s voice fluttered, the shy boy of the palace returning. “…then let that be enough.”

“No,” she answered. She let her grip slip from his shoulder and slide down the arm into his hand. “It will not be enough.” She pulled him to her. His arms wrapped around her soft shoulders and brought their lips together.

“My husband,” she whispered when at last they came apart.

“My wife.”

Hand in hand, they left the dank cistern behind and closed the iron door, abandoning the cavern to be forgotten for many more generations. They ran up the winding marble staircases of the palace. No one saw or heard them, for it was midnight outside and the whole city slept. The only sound in the royal residence was the patter of their purple slippers. Their breathless run was somehow more dreamlike than the bizarre battle they had just fought in a world far beyond the waking one.

They reached the top floor. She was leading now, and dragged him to the door of his bedchamber. She stopped him and gave him another long kiss. “My Emperor, do I have your permission to come to bed?”

He opened the door for her and motioned the way inside. Before she had taken more than three steps into the room, papers rustled around her feet. The zephyr blowing through his window had tossed the Emperor’s sketches about the room. All across the floor were portraits of a single, stunning face. The face of Empress Helena. Once he had feared that she might find them, but now he took it as the last sign of that eventful day.

He held her from behind and kissed her white, flawless neck. “I have seen the perfect Helena Lecapena, but I only want the one in my arms.”

She stayed in his arms until the next morning was already waning into afternoon.

* * *

“Sister, sister, be merciful to your own flesh and blood.” Stephen and Christopher bent low to support the heavy weight of the chains around their necks. Neither could raise his eyes to look at the stern woman who lorded over them.

“I am. Instead of having you blinded or killed, I am sending you to the monastery to spend some time with the man whom you exiled, my father. Give him the love of his daughter when you see him, and tell him his son-in-law also sends his love.”

Two priests hastily tonsured the bound captives with razors, then soldiers dragged them off to the harbor to place them on the boat that would maroon them at the island monastery of Porti with the decrepit, remorseful Romanus. As the soldiers forced them from the throne room they cried out once more for mercy from their sister, but she had tolerated their drunken foulness and cruelty for too many years. Her family’s shame left through the palace doors with them.

Helena returned to the side of her husband, Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. Only the day before crowds cheered him to take up the imperial diadem and replace the lazy, wicked sons of Romanus II as ruling emperor. Constantine was shocked to hear the people cry for him. For years he had been friendless inside his own home, and now he found all the friends he could ever want in the city outside. To the people of the Empire, he was still the boy whom Romanus had snatched from public view. Constantine was a hale thirty-nine year old, not a weak child anymore, but the masses still shouted in celebration when he appeared in a palace window and waved to them.

The Emperor kissed his wife’s white hand, which looked as smooth as when she was a slip of a girl at sixteen. She did not look like the ideal woman he had seen when they left the cave that one time, but neither was he the broad-chested warrior she had seen. But they loved what they had, and from their love had come six beautiful children. The eldest, Romanus, was a reward of the night they defeated the horror beneath the palace.

So it happened that Constantine lived to see the bullies who had tormented him dragged in chains from his throne room, his jailer made a lonely and guilty self-exile, and the beautiful girl who had once loathed him become his adoring wife, friend, and mother of his children. Sometimes in the night as he lay in her caressing arms, he saw a dark well open beneath his feet. But nothing lay in the depths, no ripple disturbed the placid waters, and Constantinople knew peace for a long time.

The End