A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  ‘A jug of your finest, friend,’ he said amiably to the owner. One of the first phrases Demetrios had taught him. A man had to survive, after all. The owner didn’t smile back, just picked up a large pitcher and poured out some wine into a smaller jug. Einar licked his lips and pushed two copper coins across the tiles. ‘One cup will do.’ The man pushed a clay beaker at him, then went back to wiping down his counter.

  Einar threw one cup down and had refilled another almost before the sour taste hit the back of his throat. The tavern’s finest was very far from fine. Still, Einar had grown accustomed to disappointment on that score. ‘So, friend. Who are all these folks?’ He jerked his head at the gabbling crowd. The owner said nothing. ‘What are they? Soldiers, whores?’ Again the man said nothing. Instead a deep, rumbling laugh sounded further along the counter.

  ‘You won’t get much talk out of him, friend.’ The speaker was a bulky fellow, curly black hair, sharp little beard, bulging shoulders, a uniform of sorts. ‘Show him.’ This, to the tavern-keeper. The man obliged, opening his mouth and waggling the stump of his tongue at Einar.

  ‘Hel’s breath,’ Einar hissed.

  The soldier laughed. ‘That’s what you get for badmouthing your commanding officer.’

  ‘Someone couldn’t take a joke then?’

  ‘You didn’t hear what this one said.’ His companion took a swig of wine. ‘Don’t feel too bad for him. He’s a wealthy man – a hell of a lot wealthier than if he’d stayed in the navy. Any sailor with an evening to kill comes in here. A few of us soldiers too.’ In his short time in the city, Einar had learned to appreciate the distinction.

  ‘So if I tell him his wine tastes like pig piss he won’t have too much to say on the matter?’

  ‘Not much,’ the soldier chuckled. ‘Then again his wine’s cheap and there’s plenty of it. That’s all most in here want.’ The owner himself seemed entirely indifferent as to the quality of his wine.

  ‘And the women?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, I take it these aren’t your comrades’ wives.’

  ‘Hah! I hope not. A few whores. Some actors. Like that one.’ He pointed out a woman with light brown curls falling over startling green eyes who had more admirers fawning over her than the others. ‘She can fill the Hippodrome, that one.’

  ‘What’s an actor? Or the Hippodrome, for that matter?’ He vaguely remembered something about horses.

  ‘You’re a foreigner here I take it.’

  ‘Oh, you could tell?’ Einar sculled back his wine.

  ‘Well, you’re in the right place. This is a city of foreigners.’ He swept his cup around the room. ‘Thrace, Cilicia, Italia, Greece, Macedonia, Illyria, Bithynia. . . Everyone comes from anywhere but here.’

  ‘Yet here we all are.’

  ‘Aye.’ The man tapped the rim of Einar’s cup and drank. ‘Go on then. Where are you from?’

  ‘Which way’s north?’

  The man raised a hairy knuckle.

  ‘Well, head that way a few thousand miles and you’ll be getting close. And you? Just another foreigner?’

  ‘Armenia.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’ Einar found his attention momentarily distracted by the green-eyed girl whose gaze kept darting over a bare shoulder at him.

  ‘You will. We’re the best fighters in the empire. Maybe the whole world.’

  ‘I know a few back home would dispute that.’ Einar took another sip, this time holding the woman’s glance over the rim of his cup.

  His drinking companion noticed this and uttered a knowing chuckle. ‘You like actors, huh?’

  ‘Hey?’

  The Armenian grinned and turned to the room. ‘Hey, Orlana – you’ve got an admirer over here! How about one of your acts, eh?’ The deep boom of his voice carried over the tavern hubbub. The woman turned, slow and supple as a cat. ‘And which act d’you have in mind, darling?’ Her voice was like liquid honey.

  ‘The Empress, of course!’ the Armenian roared. The crowd liked the suggestion and the little tavern was soon filled with bellows of ‘Aye – the Empress! Show us the Empress!’

  Whoever this Orlana beauty was, she propped one foot on her bench and her robe fell loose, revealing a thigh like polished marble. Even from there, Einar could see a shadowy orb of flesh and the flash of a dark nipple. Aye, he thought, full of distractions this city.

  She planted a hand on her shapely hip. ‘I see no geese.’ This only made the crowd cheer the louder.

  ‘I’ll be your goose!’ cried one sailor.

  ‘And me!’ yelled another.

  In a second, the room was fairly bursting with volunteers. Seemed everyone in the place knew what was about to happen except for Einar. But the woman could certainly work a crowd. A flick of her hand and they all fell silent. ‘None of you slavering dogs,’ she said, to groans of disappointment. ‘Her.’ She pointed a long-nailed finger at another woman standing along the counter from Einar.

  Whether this other woman knew the actor or not, she affected total surprise. She was a lissom piece under a cloud of hair dyed red. Ignoring her token protests, the sailors dragged her to the table. Someone was yelling for grain. Einar leaned back on the counter and accepted another refill from his drinking companion.

  ‘You’ll enjoy this, Northman. It’s quite the spectacle.’

  Somewhere at the back of the shop, a bag of grain was produced and passed forward, spilling kernels over the laughing customers. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘You’ll see. They say it was the favourite trick of the Empress Theodora two centuries ago. Back in her days at the Hippodrome.’ The Armenian winked. ‘Before she was raised to the purple.’

  Einar could only imagine that if their empress had been anything like Orlana, life at the imperial court must have been anything but dull. She ordered the jugs and cups cleared from the table in the middle of the tavern. The redhead was led forward. The crowd was yelling something fearsome, but Orlana took the woman’s hand and helped her onto the table. It was all done so deftly that Einar began to suspect this wasn’t the first time they had done this together. The redhead lay on her back, her scarlet fan of hair falling in a cascade over the end of the table.

  ‘I have to say,’ observed Einar to the Armenian, ‘none of you folk seem much concerned about the hundred thousand Arabs camped outside your gates.’

  The Armenian’s eyes didn’t shift from the table. ‘Those walls have taken everything thrown at them for two hundred years. Every household has provisions enough for three winters. The cisterns are brimming. The navy’s at full strength. We’re well led. Now, anyway,’ he added. ‘What’s to worry about?’ He had to shout now because Orlana had just mounted the table and was standing astride the redhead, loosening the flimsy girdle around her slender waist and shrugging her robe off her shoulders. Einar had seen a good deal in his long life, but so far nothing had disarmed him quite like the sight of that splendid torso in the flickering torchlight. She stood there, naked as a babe, apparently with no shame at all. Einar skulled back the rest of his cup.

  ‘So what’s your trade?’ said the Armenian, as if the sight of that goddess shining like a sun in this dingy hovel was nothing new.

  ‘Back home, they call me a hus karl.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  Orlana was crouching over the redhead’s face. Someone passed her the jug full of grain and she began to pour. Einar’s gaze followed the trickle of seeds south between her breasts and down the shallow furrow of her stomach. ‘A guard, more or less.’ He frowned. ‘Sworn to a queen.’ There was a roar as the grain spilled over Orlana’s dark triangle and ran off into the redhead’s open mouth.

  ‘A queen, no less! Well, well! Where is she then?’

  ‘Thankfully not in here,’ Einar replied. ‘And you?’ The Armenian’s answer was swallowed up in a gale of laughter as the redhead lurched upright and spluttered a shower of grain all over the eager onlookers. The woman looked wild-eyed. She cast arou
nd her, yelling, ‘Krasí! Krasí!’

  Wine. Well, it did look like thirsty work.

  The Armenian dug an elbow in Einar’s ribs. ‘I said – I serve the senior general in the city. His name is Arbasdos. The emperor just made him kouropalates.’

  Einar had no idea what kouropalates meant, but he nodded along. ‘Sounds impressive,’ he said, somewhat absorbed with the sight of blood-red wine flowing like a river where the grain had run before, and the redhead’s tongue lapping the stuff down like it was the mead of the gods.

  ‘There’s no higher honour in the empire. If you get bored of waiting on your queen, you could do worse than serve him. He’s developing a taste for Northmen.’

  The word sent a jolt through Einar’s brain. ‘Northmen, you say?’

  The noise was rising. Orlana knew how to spin out her performance, no error, reducing the flow of the wine to a trickle, toying with her audience and the redhead.

  ‘He has another one in his service,’ yelled the Armenian, still gamely trying to make himself heard. ‘Well, he’s locked up for now. In fact, he’s a tricky son of a bitch. Needs to learn his place. By the saints, the man can fight, though.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Something foreign,’ gnarred the Armenian. ‘He’s dark as the night.’

  One of the onlookers – a nasty little stoat with a pinched face – could resist temptation no longer. He thrust his hand between the redhead’s thighs.

  ‘And he walks with a limp—’

  These were his last intelligible words before the tavern erupted into chaos. In the same instant, the redhead produced a knife from gods only knew where and skewered the stoat’s hand to the table. Blood spurted everywhere. Orlana was thrown on her arse and bounced off the table as the man’s screams filled the little room. The redhead was on her feet, yelling foul-mouthed curses as she kicked at the men crowded round her. One man fell back, knocked another and in two blinks of an eye the whole pack of them were at each other’s throats.

  The Armenian stood, roared, smashed his cup on the floor and ploughed in, fists whaling. A sailor reeled out of the fray and butted into Einar, knocking the wind out of him. He shoved back, sending the sailor into another, and before Einar knew what was happening a fist crunched into his jaw.

  It didn’t happen often, but Einar lost his temper then. It felt good, he had to admit, being in the midst of an old-fashioned fist fight. He put down three men at least before something knocked into his shins and damn near tripped him up. He looked down and there were those beautiful flashing eyes again, filled with terror. He stooped down and hoisted her to her feet, warding off blows around him.

  ‘Come on, lassie,’ he growled in Norse, shoving another man out of the way. The door was close but he still had to land several more punches to clear a path to it. The two of them had barely stumbled out into the street when a patrol of nightwatchmen arrived on the scene and waded into the fight.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Einar gasped, clutching his temple which hurt like a mule-kick. The woman was looking up at him, breathing hard. She pulled her robe around herself but didn’t answer. ‘Are you hurt?’

  She gave a shake of her head. Suddenly her eyes lit up with a dazzling smile, she touched his face and then ran off down the street.

  Einar stood panting, watching her shadow meld into the darkness. ‘This bloody city,’ he muttered. But then he smiled.

  Because Erlan was here.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Pieces, pieces, Katāros thought, as he climbed the stone steps that led up to the Scriptorium. It was the player with the most pieces on the board who controlled the game. And he fancied that in the slender form of this northern queen, he had won himself a piece of considerable worth.

  It remained to be seen how she could be used to his advantage. But he was in no doubt that she was now his to manoeuvre. It hadn’t needed more than a little cursory kindness. A set of rooms, a change of attire, a meal, a servant – carefully selected by him, of course – and the promise of an audience with the emperor. After that, gratitude came pouring out of her like a mountain stream in spring.

  That she would get what she had come to the Great City for, he doubted. But beauty had its own currency – he of all people knew that – and he intended to expend her wisely. Meanwhile, he had other pieces to gather.

  He entered the Scriptorium.

  The silence here was unlike the silence of the basilicas – with their heavy solemnity, their air laced with incense, their great looming spaces filled with the presence of that one unendurable question. No. The silence of the Scriptorium was honest. He felt no fear here, only the ghost-thoughts of the minds who had gone before, who had taken a bench and opened a scroll.

  His gaze rose to the vaulted ceilings, along the soaring arches and down the shining black pillars to the banks of shelving. Somewhere among them was another piece of the game. Another answer. And it wore on him like a thirst. He inhaled the scent of the tallow lamps and musky parchment, readying himself. If he had to scour every record in the place, he would find the answer.

  For three nights, the librarians brought him pile after pile of documents and codices. Architectural plans, audits for the city garrison, military logs, histories, annals, tax records, legal codes, edicts of the Church, administrative protocols, imperial doxologies. Anything that made reference to the land walls. A forest of words through which he prowled like a wolf hunting down his prey. He read till his eyes blurred, till his neck and shoulders were stiff as bark, and on the fourth night, in the dead hours before the dawn, he found it.

  A simple note from the palace sakellarios to the deacon of the Church of St Mary of Blachernae, accompanying an endowment from the Emperor Justinian, second of his name, to that church.

  To the Holy Virgin and Mother of God – who opened the gates to blessing and glory when all were sealed – His Imperial Majesty bequeaths this gift of five thousand solidi in furtherance of the Glory of Her Name and that of the Most High God and His Most Righteous Son Christ Jesus. . . etc., etc.

  It was the date which caught his notice. Ten years previous, almost to the day, and within less than a month of Justinian’s restoration to the throne after he had been deposed and his nose had been slit. The mutilation was intended to disqualify him from the purple for ever. Justinian had refused to accept this limitation.

  His return involved a rather obscure episode which Katāros happened to know. When Justinian had escaped his exile in Krim, he sailed in secret to the shores of Thrace, whence he travelled overland to the outer wall of the city and was then, somehow, smuggled inside, in time to lead the coup that put him back on the throne. The tale didn’t relate how he had entered the city. There were rumours – probably originating with Justinian himself – that it had been the Holy Virgin herself who had intervened, miraculously spiriting him through the walls. Manifest nonsense, Katāros was certain. Nevertheless, Justinian had got inside.

  The cogs of logic began to turn in Katāros’s mind. A wildly inflated gift from a man hardly known for his piety. A pay-off, perhaps – but for what? ‘To the Holy Virgin, who opened the gates of blessing and glory when all were sealed.’ Given the timings, the timings—

  The more Katāros thought about it, the more certain he became.

  It was well before the first hour when he jumped down from the wagon and paid the driver. At the open cistern of Aetius, the great thoroughfare of the Mese forked. He had already resolved to cover the rest of the distance to Blachernae on foot, picking his way along the pathways that bounded the meadows and orchards carpeting the Sixth Hill.

  He was dressed in a long drab tunic under a cloak of darker wool with the hood pulled well forward. Before he had left the palace his unpainted face had looked perfectly ordinary in the mirror, and with his hood up at this hour no one would pay him any heed.

  The basilica of St Mary stood a little below the Palace of Blachernae, which sat perched on its rock in splendid solitude at the northernmost point
of the city overlooking the headwaters of the Horn. The land walls ran down the ridgeline, blistering outwards like a carbuncle to enclose the palace within their protection, and rising not half an arrow’s flight away.

  He went inside. The church was quite deserted. It was an hour at least before even the most devout would be on their knees. The still air felt cool but his mind was burning with uncertainty and impatience.

  His gaze followed the green jasper columns down the central aisle towards the white marble steps and gilded iconostasis at the eastern end of the church. Above him, the sun was beginning to break through the highest windows, glinting off the silver mortar in the mosaics adorning the walls. He saw images of the Mother of God, of miracles from the life of Christ. The feeding of the five thousand. Lazarus raised from the dead. Aye, he needed a miracle himself, though he doubted his will was in alignment with that of the Christians’ god.

  Two huge candles flickered either side of the double doors in the iconostasis. The doors to heaven. Well, heaven can wait, he thought with scorn. I’m seeking a different door.

  His eyes shifted to the metal gate in the corner of the nave. He guessed it led to the crypt. If anything was to be found, surely it would be down there.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said a voice beside him. He turned and saw it belonged to a young monk smiling at him. Some pious fool. The youth’s tonsure was as fresh as his complexion. Just as well.

  ‘I am here for my mother.’ Katāros launched into a hastily conceived tale that his mother was buried in the crypt and he was here to fulfil a vow to pray for her soul at the beginning of each new year. The little cleric ate it up, nodding away earnestly, and before long he was holding the gate open and handing Katāros an oil lamp to light his way.

  ‘I’ll see that no one disturbs your prayers,’ he said softly.

  ‘God bless you, Brother.’ As Katāros descended into darkness, he couldn’t contain a snigger. At length he reached the crypt. In the puddle of wan light he noticed an unlit torch on the wall.