Free A Death in the Venetian Quarter by Alan Gordon Page A

everything else she was a monstrous evil.
    â€”—NIKETAS CHONIATES, ON THE EMPRESS EUPHROSYNE
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    A nd about time, too. Dear God, it’s hard enough trying to get a word in edgewise with this man when he’s speaking, but just try wresting a pen away from him!
    But even Feste cannot be everywhere at once. Yes, fellow fools, I call him Feste here, even though I should be using his Guild name. I cannot bring myself to do that. He was Feste when I first met him, and Feste when we fell in love, and even though he’s Theophilos to the Guild, Feste is what springs to my lips, whether in passion or in scolding, and there’s been plenty of both. I know his true name, too. He gave it when we took our wedding vows, possibly the first time in thirty-odd years that he had uttered it. There have been other names as well, both for him and for me, but for the telling of this tale, it shall be Feste and Aglaia.
    I’m used to courts. I grew up in one, married into another, raised my first two children there, to the extent that I was allowed. My fortunes took an interesting turn when I married my second husband. Most women marry a fool for love first, then get practical on the next husband, but I did it the other way around. With a disposition like that, it is small wonder that I became a fool myself.
    And, oddly enough, becoming a fool gained me access to the greatest
court in the world, something that being a mere local duchess never would have done. But, as the Empress’s Fool, I came and went in Blachernae unchallenged, while mere kings and generals were made to wait at the front gate, staring as I strolled by in my motley and whiteface.
    At the time of the Venetian invasion (I will not call it a Crusade! The noble names that men attach to their murdering!), Euphy, as we called her in private, was around sixty, although she would claim forty, and that only when her grown daughters were in the room to refute anything less. She had set a fashion years ago by appearing unveiled in public. Now, when a veil might have had a more than favorable effect on her appearance, she wore makeup to create the illusion of beauty. So much makeup that you could peel it off in one piece and use it as a mold of her face.
    She had been much abused in life, had Euphy, victimized by circumstances, the machinations of the court, the jealousies (rightful ones, I might add) of her husband, and, worst of all, the absence at this stage of her existence of jealousies of her husband. But where others so buffeted will accept their fates philosophically, Euphy fought back. She fought back from exile, from forcible tonsuring, from the beheading of her lover, she fought back. Where others would have gone mad, she … well, she went mad, there’s no denying that, but with the madness came a fierce cunning. She mastered the grand Byzantine traditions of spying, manipulation and murder, and practiced them with ruthless joy.
    And did it as a woman would, not as some pale imitation of a man. While other women would say, Oh, he’s treated her very badly, what can we do? with Euphy, it would be, Oh, he’s treated her very badly, should I have him killed?
    Women, in those rare occasions when we gain control over the world, can easily surpass men in the exercise of cruelty. I think this may be why men are afraid to let us have control over the world.

    I realize, in writing this, that I am betraying a certain admiration for the woman, mad and murderous as she was. Yet do I not, as a fool, wear an excessive amount of makeup? Have I not, as a fool, killed my share of men? I have lived too much with the mockery of others to place my conduct above theirs, no matter how piously the Guild paints its stated goals. We use many of the same tactics that have given the Byzantine Empire its reputation, justifying the means by the ends. But in the end, I sometimes think that we are no better than anyone else.
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    On the morning after the