Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Eventually Maria caught Haraldr staring at her. Impelled by a force that seemed to gather him up like a huge surf, he did not turn from her blazing cobalt-blue eyes. She made no expression or gesture whatever, and yet her unwavering gaze drew him within the ice-tinted fires. Haraldr felt the same sort of convulsive shudder that he had when he’d touched Serah, yet this sensation penetrated to his soul. The voice in his head spoke so clearly that he wondered if the others had heard. Thoroughly spooked, he closed his eyes for an instant and a fantastic vision composed of images so fleeting that he could not discern them flashed before him. He felt something strike his neck quite perceptibly, and he could not breathe. His eyes shot open and his hand jerked up to his neck and he was surprised to find nothing there. Maria was still looking at him. Her lips softened into the barest hint of satisfaction, as if she acknowledged the vision to which her powers had drawn him. The voice spoke again, this time as softly as a woman’s silken touch.

  The shouts broke the frighteningly irresistible connection.

  Disappointed and relieved, Haraldr turned towards the commotion at the entrance to the dining hall. A giant figure in a black frock and high black hat - a ‘monk’, Haraldr reminded himself - lurched forward as if he would topple, yet slapped his gangly, curiously shaped arms at the distraught, silk-clad eunuchs who were trying to prop him up. The black-frock took several unsteady steps towards the table, and then, his shoulders wavering in an almost constant rotation, leered over the guests.

  Like the other monks Haraldr had seen, this man had cropped his beard and hair, apparently just recently; his skin was as smooth as a woman’s. But his features were huge, distorted, almost monstrous: a nose like a great, swollen eagle’s beak; an upper lip as thin as an engraved line; a thick, almost purple lower lip; and a grotesquely heavy, bestial jaw. His tangled dark eyebrows seemed to merge with his small dark irises, and his eyes rolled about with a manic, piercing fury. After a moment Haraldr realized that this baleful monster-monk was not freshly shaven. He was a eunuch.

  The monk’s strident voice rumbled over the table, the slurring of the words only adding to the inherent menace in his discourse. A swarthy, sumptuously dressed man seated across the table from Haraldr inclined his head towards the painted cheek of his lady and mumbled some commentary on the monk’s discourse. Haraldr strained for some recognizable words or names and was startled to hear ‘Joannes’. The same Joannes whose name he had heard invoked so often?

  The monk heard his name as well, and his already angry features shadowed with rage. His explosive response was entirely verbal, but the resounding sentences seemed to assault the swarthy man physically; the man’s head snapped back and his dusky complexion ashened. He rose, his entire body trembling, bowed to Nicephorous Argyrus, and hurriedly led his obviously terrified wife from the room.

  The monk went back to his wavering vigil. Someone tipped over a goblet of wine and a few guests tittered nervously. Maria tilted up her exquisite nose and dabbed her lips with a linen napkin. She spoke very slowly to the monk, using the name Joannes quite clearly, and there was no mistaking the timbre of annoyed sarcasm in her musical tones.

  Joannes replied precisely and gravely, almost as if he had suddenly been released by the herons of the ale-benches. His tongue was a thick reptilian pad that slid over his lower teeth as he talked.

  Maria followed his words with a quick glaring retort. When it seemed that the goddess and the monk would remain locked in this exchange of hard looks and words, Nicephorus Argyrus rose, said something to the guests, and clapped his hands. In a flash of brilliant hues and dazzling flesh, several acrobats in colourful jackets and brief loincloths flipped over the table. The guests laughed and clapped. His audience lost, Joannes stalked from the room. Haraldr noticed with considerable curiosity that the monk moved much more steadily than he had when he entered. Had he only been feigning drunkenness? And why? And who was he? Kristr’s chief wizard?

  The acrobats bounded into the main hall and the guests rose and followed. Dancers and more acrobats on stilts gambolled about to the whirling rhythms of cymbals, pipes and stringed instruments. Eunuchs brought fresh goblets of wine, but many of the guests were already making their farewells to Nicephorus Argyrus. Maria’s entourage of pretty young women had returned to her side, and the two officers of the Scholae and the Hetairarch were strapping on their swords.

  Maria turned, and the stunning blue eyes glanced in Haraldr’s direction. His heart hammered at the thought that she might be thinking of him, as he was of her. She reached out to the Hetairarch, again placing that infuriating, familiar hand on his arm, and spoke to him for a moment. Then she turned amid her train of lovely young ladies and vanished like an achingly beautiful dream.

  The Hetairarch walked straight for Haraldr, his step graceful, the heavy, jewelled sword and scabbard riding his brocaded hip.

  ‘The lady has a message for you,’ the Hetairarch said pleasantly, with a touch of genial man-to-man ribaldry. Haraldr thought his heart would thunder out of his chest.

  The Hetairarch slapped Haraldr’s shoulder and said, ‘Follow me, I’ll give it to you away from prying ears.’ He led Haraldr to a small clerk’s room with cases for files and a few parchments piled on a plain wooden table; it was lit by a single ram-shaped iron oil lamp. The Hetairarch turned and faced Haraldr, his features flickering in the light.

  ‘She says she hopes your fair hair will not bring about your own doom before she has a chance to see it again.’

  Haraldr was confused. Was she warning him as well, or just teasing? And was this the extent of her message? Why this secrecy? His skin began to crawl.

  The Hetairarch seemed to sense Haraldr’s unease. ‘Well,’ he said affably, ‘I wanted to give you advice as well.’ He smiled and stepped closer. His eyes were rimmed with a touch of black paint. Haraldr’s instincts warred; he desperately needed this alliance, yet he was becoming acutely uncomfortable.

  The Hetairarch came half a step closer, still smiling. ‘You don’t know what the Hetairarch does, do you?’ His inflection was curiously lilting. He reached out and lightly touched the ends of Haraldr’s silky blond hair.

  Haraldr cringed, rocked by revulsion. Kristr damn all! A crooked! Pervert! Boy lover!

  ‘You still don’t know who I am,’ the Hetairarch said, still smiling, but there was a strange metal-edge to his lilting voice that made the hair at Haraldr’s neck rise. No ... no!

  It all happened at once. The handsome, slightly feminine features darkened as if a great storm cloud had passed over them, and in an instant the Hetairarch had the face of the beast: nostrils flared murderously, mouth blackened and snarling, eyes veined and bulging with rage. Odin’s Rage. Haraldr already felt cold steel at his throat. The Hetairarch slammed him against the table as if he were a puny child.

  The voice roared and howled like the last dragon. ‘The Hetairarch,’ the demon spat in terrifying, barking convulsions, ‘commands the Imperial Guard!’ The syllables, each a separate explosion of rage followed by a thundering gasp, jolted Haraldr like the blows of a broad-axe. ‘I! Am! Mar! Hun! Ro! Dar! Son!’

  The sword slid against Haraldr’s neck and he could immediately feel the tickling flow of blood. He could do nothing; it was as if a crate loaded with anvils had rolled upon his chest. Odin!

  The beast fled from the face of Mar Hunrodarson. Haraldr now merely faced the most terrible, intimidating human visage he had ever imagined. The great force relaxed slightly but the sword stayed at his neck.

  ‘Just so you know that the Rage is no weapon against me,’ Mar said, his voice still metallic and his teeth clenched. With a lightning-quick movement he thrust the bloodied sword back in his scabbard. Most of the deep crimson hue of the Rage receded from his face. He pulled Haraldr up by his bloody collar.

  Haraldr’s head spun and he sat meekly on the edge of the table. He was the new boy at court who had taken a profound thrashing from the reigning tough. And that was all he was; no son of the gods, no king
from kings, not even leader of five hundred Varangians.

  ‘I hope this proves to you that I am not the one who wants you dead,’ said Mar, his voice even if not genial. ‘It was I who made certain that no one meddled with the investigation into Hakon’s death. A fair ruling was all I sought, and I helped to see that you got it.’

  Mar confidently turned his back on Haraldr. ‘Hakon was a buffoon. I had reason for encouraging his rise at court. But he had become a liability, even an affront to the Imperial dignity. And I was appalled when I learned that he was going to sacrifice five hundred good men in another of his foolish cheats. If you hadn’t killed him, I would have.’

  Mar turned and placed both hands firmly on Haraldr’s shoulders. There was nothing remotely suggestive in the gesture.

  ‘Yes, your life is in danger here, but not by my hand. It would hardly be in my interest to kill you.’ Mar grinned tightly. ‘I have use for you.’

  Mar threw back his head. The grin spread over his entire darkly flickering countenance before he lowered his gaze and fixed his glacial eyes on Haraldr again. ‘Yes, Haraldr Sigurdarson, Prince of Norway. I have use for you.’

  The building had been an old Roman inn, and it stood between crumbling, centuries-old brick tenements. The street in front had stone kerbs, but the ancient pavestones were invisible beneath a thick layer of silt and rubbish. A sailor in a ragged fustian tunic sat against the building’s soiled marble facade, his head ducked between his knees. A prostitute paced before him, her face painted as garishly as a wooden puppet; she seemed at least fifty years old. The music of some kind of stringed instrument came from inside.

  Alexandros and Giorgios had consumed enough courage at Argyrus’s to cast aside boldly the filthy sheet that served as the inn’s front door; Maria followed. There was but a single large table, and no one was having sex on it; half a dozen Venetians howled as they gathered around a furiously attentive young man rapidly and deftly pounding a huge knife blade between his spread fingers. Less interested in the game were four or five prostitutes and another dozen sailors who milled beside the row of marble basins that had, in better days, dispensed food to the establishment’s patrons. The current habitues scarcely acknowledged the new arrivals; they discreetly gestured to one another while taking furtive glances. One man plucked tentatively at a lute.

  Maria watched a sailor slip his hand inside the coarse linen tunic of one of the whores and knead a sagging breast. ‘I am so disappointed,’ Maria said. ‘Perhaps we have come on one of their Saints’ days.’

  ‘We have seen enough,’ said Giorgios, slurring slightly. At that moment the sheet over the door swept aside and at least two dozen people and assorted creatures burst through the arched doorway so convulsively, it seemed that the little inn had somehow ingested them in a single gulp: sailors in coarse tunics; more affluent traders in relatively cheap export-grade silks; some young, not unattractive, prostitutes; several musicians with lutes and pipes; yapping dogs, screaming monkeys and a small spotted panther on a leash. The music shrilled in frantic circular rhythms, and almost immediately a woman whirled on the table; after a very short performance one of the silk-clad Venetians wrestled her to the floor and began removing her robe.

  Maria’s eyes ignited. Several of the newly arrived traders noticed her, shouted curiously among themselves for a moment, then gestured for her to dance. Alexandros took her arm and urged her towards the door but she pulled away. She unwrapped the long, scarf-like, jewelled pallium that covered her sheer tunic at both front and back, and threw it at Giorgios. She leapt onto the table.

  The Venetians backed away slightly, thunderstruck by this vision faintly cloaked in almost transparent white silk. Maria began to dance slowly, with the sinuous control of a professional. The tunic restricted the movement of her legs, so she pulled it high on her hips and knotted it. As she spun more rapidly the truncated garment hiked up farther, and her black pubic triangle teased her audience. Two traders began to close in on the table. Alexandros swept his cloak aside and slowly drew his short sword. A hand reached out and Maria kicked at it. A dozen hands grasped for her,

  Alexandros and Giorgios savagely hacked the Venetians with their swords. Somehow Maria kicked herself free and leapt from the table onto Giorgio’s back. They were able to retreat behind Alexandros’s whirring blade, but only because Maria’s gem-studded pallium had been dropped in the melée and most of the Venetians considered it an equally valuable and far less fiercely contested prize. Three of them lay bleeding on the floor while the rest ripped the garment to shreds and scrambled after the loose baubles.

  Alexandros and Giorgios - with Maria still on his back -raced uphill, in the direction of the still-glimmering spine of the city. After half a dozen blocks they stopped and ascertained that no one was following. Giorgios wrapped Maria in his cloak; her tunic was in tatters. Her face betrayed nothing, but her eyes were startling, their hue visible even in the dark. ‘There is a lovely park just a little farther up the hill,’ she said. It was as if nothing at all had happened back at the inn.

  The park was a small, nicely maintained refuge in the midst of a cluster of upper-middle-class town houses; a ring of cypresses shielded a little pool and an adjacent marble pavilion. Maria spread Giorgio’s cloak on the neatly mowed lawn. ‘Alex’, she said, ‘go to the corner and watch for the cursores.’ The cursores were the city’s nocturnally vigilant police force. Alex looked quizzically between his friend and his lover, then shrugged and walked away.

  Maria feverishly removed Giorgio’s clothing. For a moment she reverently caressed his painfully erect shaft. When he penetrated her, she gasped as if stabbed, and her fingernails brought blood from his back. They rolled ferociously in the grass, and her moment came quickly. She screamed, a short, sharp note, then clung desperately to Giorgios. ‘Holy Mother, how I love you,’ she gasped. She fell silent and licked his neck and wondered to herself, I do love Giorgios. But why did I just feel the Tauro-Scythian deep inside me, like a knife in my womb?

  II

  They are the offal of the Empire, the horseman observed to himself, the effluence of the stinking sewers in which they spend their days hiding from the sun and the police. Armenian peasants, Selucid mongrels, mutilated criminals, all of the outcasts who have come to the Empress City to exist as human cockroaches, two-legged insects who scurry from the dark alleys at night to cut purses and throats. The horseman counted five of these nocturnal predators; they had set a barrier of refuse across the narrow, unlit side street, a trap for any citizen foolish enough to stray near the putrescent arteries of one of Constantinople’s largest slums. But the horseman, who was in his own way a denizen of the night and the less decorous recesses of the city, had seen them even before they discerned his giant silhouette against the distant backlighting of the Magnana Arsenal. He made no attempt to alter his course.

  Hooves clamoured on ancient paving stones, then quieted as they slowed on the silt and trash that had begun to bury this forgotten, reeking little lane. The five waited, listening for the hoofbeats of an escort, and satisfied themselves that their victim was alone. But when they distinguished the black-frocked figure and the huge head, they postponed their assault, wondering if this was the man who rode in the night. They whispered their confusion, and the horseman, who had learned to make out murmured confidences across a room full of tittering dignitaries, smiled and listened.

  ‘It’s the demon-monk. I’ll swear to it on the hair of a saint’s ball-pouch.’

  ‘No. We’ll see demons ‘nough when we’re called to Hell.’

  ‘Won’t be Christ the King nor Devil’s disciples you’ll have to fear if he catches you first. He’s an unholy black whirlwind, set down by a conjurer, then he’s somewhere across this cursed city a wink later.’

  ‘Listen to that while you still got ears, brother. Let’s beat out of here and lay ourselves upon some sotted whore so to thank the demons who saved our balls from Joannes.’

  Before the five could vanish into t
he shadows, the horseman had charged into their midst. The cutthroats looked up in terrified rapture, then shrank from the monstrous leering head as if it were a lighted torch thrust into their faces. Mark me well, the horseman thought as the five stumbled into the dark crevices between the towering hovels. Spread the word like poison into your fetid warrens, let every miserable, damned soul in these pestilent warehouses of human refuse know who I am. I am more than power, that all-too-recognizable face of uniformed authority that clubs you into your stinking lairs by day and gives you short leash by night. I am something more formidable, that ultimate alloy of power welded to the implacable resolution to wield it without hesitation or pity. I am fear.

  The horseman, whose name was indeed Joannes, now returned to his intended route; he spurred his horse up the good stone road to a hill crowned with a large, plain-fronted town house. He circled round the back of the building, then turned off the street into a colonnaded arcade screened with vines. A boy in a short silk tunic recognized him and slid open a gate that led into a large interior court. As he gave up the reins to another stable boy, Joannes looked at the outlines of the elaborate topiaries in the court: a boar; an incredible crouching lion. He traversed the long interior arcade to the large brass double doors, where he was greeted by two armoured, stubble-faced Alemmanians, taller even than the black-frock himself, and quickly ushered inside.

  ‘Orphanotrophus,’ said his host, using Joannes’s official title in the Imperial Administration of the Roman Empire. The candelabra were not lit, and the single row of candles in sconces on the walls cast a wavering, hallucinatory light over the mosaics above them; here and there golden tesserae glimmered like little stars.

  ‘Logothete of the Dromus,’ answered Joannes; this was the official title of the man responsible for all intelligence gathering, both foreign and domestic, in the Roman Empire. Joannes pointedly ignored the Logothete’s honorary rank of Magister, the highest for any administrative officer in the Roman government, though such an address would not be neglected by any other courtier who hoped to keep his manhood. The hollow-eyed, glowering monk had no use for the complex apparatus of court ceremony, just as he gave little thought to his own meaningless title: Orphanotrophus, or Guardian of Orphans, head of the Empire’s vast network of charity hospitals and orphanages, and now, incidentally, sole authority over hundreds of thousands of solidi in charitable ‘donations’ - usually extorted by various threats - for which he was accountable to no one, and which rarely redressed any of the Empire’s social ills. Titles might have currency to the posturing milksops at court. But tonight a simple monk had the real business of the Empire to conduct.