Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Joannes knew his way and silently followed the mute-eyed servant to the corner of the room. The servant, a pale, blond-haired Thracian in an oversize silk tunic, pressed against the wall. With a slight exhalation the smooth marble panel swung aside. Joannes and the Logothete entered a small, cool chamber; the servant followed with a single brass lantern in the shape of a ram. The servant bent over and pulled a thin stone slab from the floor. A chill gust swept into the chamber, and the Logothete shielded the lantern. The servant descended into the dark hole.

  After feeling his way down the familiar wooden steps, Joannes let the servant guide his legs into the small boat. He swung to the side and sat. The lantern, to his acute eyesight, lit the entire cistern. As the servant paddled the boat through the inky subterranean lake, Joannes counted the rows of algae-striped columns and studied the patterns of the bricks in the rounded vaults overhead; numbers and order were the two fundamentals for which his mind instinctively quested. When they had passed beneath twenty vaults, they reached the far end and climbed to a small wooden dock. They ascended a short flight of stone stairs that led to a stained oaken door. The servant unlocked the door; the room they entered smelled of incense, good wine, and a woman’s perfume.

  ‘I have something special tonight,’ said the Logothete as he and his guest lowered themselves to tasselled brocade couches. The Logothete had dark, piercing Asiatic eyes that sparked ferally as the servant began lighting the sconced oil-lamps. Like Joannes, he had been born to a low-level bureaucrat and had suffered a family disgrace; his father had been paymaster to a provincial regiment and had been cashiered for skimming funds, while Joannes’s father had been a minor legal clerk in the Black Sea port of Amastris and had been caught forging deeds of sale. This was the bond between Joannes and the Logothete, worth more than any momentary political allegiances or utterly fictional declarations of loyalty.

  ‘You’ll find this quite remarkable,’ said the Logothete. His servant poured wine from a glazed clay jug into silver goblets. ‘A Sicilian vintage. It will be past its time in two or three weeks, so drink copiously.’ The Logothete smiled. Joannes would drink liberally whether or not the wine was good, and certainly regardless of any invitation. The Logothete waited until Joannes had downed a full goblet and half of a second; he knew from long experience that Joannes never exceeded his considerable capacity but often drank enough to convince others that he had gone beyond his limits.

  ‘The information comes from my usual correspondents at the court of Yaroslav, as well as interviews with Rus traders who have journeyed from what are commonly referred to as the Islands of Thule, though we are certain that Thule is actually a collection of separate nations, some of them islands, some of them large peninsulas, linked by a common language. My offices have also had conversations with Frankish traders and diplomats who know and deal with these northern barbaroi, whom they call, with their characteristic simplicity of expression, Northmen.’ The Logothete paused to sip, then placed his goblet on a small ivory-surfaced cabinet. ‘The facts are thus. The level of military organization among the northern barbaroi is much higher than the Strategus of Kherson, our putative expert in these matters, has led us to believe. Land battles involving tens of thousands of men have been reported, and fleets of hundreds of fast craft manned by heavily armed marines regularly launch lightning attacks on their neighbours. Because these northern nations are not dominated by a single great power, there is considerable political flux among them, and the northern barbaroi kings regularly depose one another. Bands of warriors - often considerable in number - disenfranchised by these conflicts are almost always available for hire, or simply for the promise of booty, to the next usurper.’

  Joannes thought for a moment before speaking in his sepulchral baritone. ‘So. The military resources for an invasion by the northern barbaroi certainly exist. This is one of those rare instances in which popular hysteria has a basis in fact. It is quite coincidental, of course. If a blind man spends enough time grovelling in the street, eventually he might chance across a gold coin someone has dropped.’

  Joannes signalled the servant to fill his cup, settled back, and looked steadily upwards, as if he had just located some hovering phantom he wished to address. ‘Of course, the military capability of these northern barbaroi is in itself hardly alarming, merely another name added to the litany of antagonists who ceaselessly harass our borders. But alone among our multitudinous adversaries, the northern barbaroi have the seafaring abilities to threaten the Queen of Cities herself. If they did mount such a naval belligerency, and had the good fortune to find their assault coincident with, let us say, an incursion by the Bulgars across the Danube estuaries, then we would find the northern barbaroi a serious menace.’ Joannes snapped his gaze back to the Logothete. ‘However, you mention this political flux in the northern nations. As long as thieves quarrel among themselves, the gatekeeper has little to worry about. Without strong leadership any northern barbaroi incursions would be little more than ill-fated acts of piracy, even with half the Imperial Navy dispatched elsewhere.’

  ‘You discount the notion that a barbaroi prince arrived incognito with the last Rus trade flotilla?’

  ‘You found nothing. It smacked of the usual Dhynatoi rumourmongering.’

  ‘I am not entirely satisfied with what I found. The rumour may have started among the Rus.’

  ‘Continue to work on it, then. As much as I would like to build the Rus trade, if this Prince is produced, I would have no choice but to make cause with the Dhynatoi in urging the extermination of all the northern barbaroi who arrived with that fleet.’

  ‘Would that be enough? Suppose one of these barbaroi thieves, to follow your metaphor, was already the gatekeeper?’

  Joannes’s dark, oily eyebrows descended towards his stormy irises, and for an awful moment the Logothete wondered how he could have so miscalculated his ally’s loyalties. But Joannes then nodded appreciatively at the extrapolation of his metaphor. The Hetairarch, the northern barbaros Mar Hunrodarson, opened the gates to the Imperial Palace each morning. And the Hetairarch was perhaps a servant who had begun to imagine himself a master. ‘Develop your theory,’ rumbled Joannes.

  ‘The Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson has long openly petitioned for greatly increased recruiting of Varangian mercenaries. Lately he has focused on my office, almost daily providing me with intelligence - some legitimate, some highly exaggerated - regarding suspected civil uprisings in the City, and suggesting that a new, lesser Varangian guard be created and posted in the city, though outside the palace, for riot control. Interesting, isn’t it? The champions of the common folk petitioning to become their oppressors.’

  Joannes nodded and gulped another draught of wine. ‘Mar Hunrodarson is clearly an exceptional barbaros. He has learned to thrust and cut with Roman paper almost as well as he can with Frankish steel.’ Joannes drank again and reflected silently. If things were going well in the Imperial Palace, this would be the time to eliminate the barbaros upstart Hunrodarson. But things were not going well at all, and the wily Hetairarch would have his role in the drama that surely would be enacted over the next few years.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Logothete, his eyes keen and fiery as he responded to his guest’s twitching brow. ‘The Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson is extraordinarily patient for a man capable of such ill-tempered eruptions. I believe he will wait, strengthen his hand with the increasing insinuation of his fellow barbaroi in the military affairs of the Roman Empire, and when the time comes’ - here the Logothete trod warily, knowing the relationship between the Emperor and Joannes - ‘position himself to broker the succession. With a sufficient force of Varangians in or even near the City, it would be possible.’

  ‘Then we must either make Mar Hunrodarson our broker, or find someone who will break his sword when that time comes,’ said Joannes, as much to himself as to his host. He covered his deeply set eyes with his long, misshapen fingers, pressed in, then moved the spatulate fingertips to cradle his chin. �
�Perhaps we can do both.’

  The Logothete showed decay-rimmed, ragged teeth. Most officials of the Imperial Administration exerted their power like porters hefting heavy crates. Joannes was a juggler, capable of keeping several contradictory goals in the air at once. ‘I suppose you have this Janus already in mind? The information you wanted from Italia?’

  Now Joannes raised his thin upper lip in what appeared to be a snarl, though the Logothete knew it as a rare expression of genuine, if sinister, mirth. ‘Yes. I believe this man, Haraldr Nordbrikt -I presume that is the correct pronunciation of yet another ludicrous barbaroi name - that this Haraldr Nordbrikt and Mar Hunrodarson have a relationship that is rather, one would say, pregnant. As you know, when the Grand Domestic wanted this Haraldr Nordbrikt and his men butchered in Neorion, Hunrodarson interceded and provided information that justified the murder of the Manglavite.’

  ‘Yet consider their only meeting,’ said the Logothete, contributing the presumed antithesis. ‘My man in the house told me that they closeted, argued, and perhaps struggled. And Hunrodarson made no attempt to get Haraldr Nordbrikt a posting anywhere near the city; it was he who insisted that the Imperial pardon banish Nordbrikt and his men for a period of months.’

  ‘A deception? Perhaps Hunrodarson wishes to allay any suspicion of his barbaros accomplice.’

  ‘Or he thinks that Haraldr Nordbrikt will fail in his mission for the merchant Argyrus, leaving a powerful force of Varangians looking for a more effective leader. Better than martyring their hero, is it not?’

  ‘A possibility that certainly would have occurred to me, were I standing in Hunrodarson’s boots. Well, right now all we have are possibilities, but possibilities that we can quite likely turn to our advantage. What word do you have of Haraldr Nordbrikt?’

  ‘The last landfall was Brindisi, almost two months ago. They had been at sea for several months without sighting the Saracen fleet. They provisioned very quickly, and there was a detail you might find interesting. Unlike most barbaroi wine bags, who prefer to drink barrels of that piss they call ale, Nordbrikt loaded his ships, almost until the rails were awash, with barrels of plain spring water. I would suspect he was heading south towards Libya and intended to remain at sea for some time. He may be a resourceful man.’

  Joannes grunted. Monkeys in the Hippodrome could also perform tricks. Still, something about this Haraldr Nordbrikt interested him. He had possibilities, but better still, he was entirely expendable. There was absolutely nothing to lose in using him, and possibly the Roman Empire to be gained.

  Joannes gulped a full cup, belched deeply, rose, and motioned the servant to let him out without even gesturing to the Logothete. At the door, however, he turned. ‘If this Haraldr Nordbrikt makes a return landfall, see that I know at once.’

  ‘Giorgios?’ Her voice was visible in fine silver bubbles, and she knew that it was not Giorgios who was there. The sea around her was a vast azure platter with a pure gilded rim. She was cold and he was like the sun, his hair a golden halo high above her. ‘Mar?’ Again the silver bubbles. He was not Mar. The other one. The silk, the wicked scar. He was like a sun. But the sun was gone, and the sea, fiery as opal, lit them from below.

  The ships flew over the dimming horizon, and the blue glow from the sea candled the faces, hundreds of them, hollow and ghostly, their dead teeth chattering obscenities. But the fair-haired sun made them shrivel and they floated away like dry leaves in the soft breeze. The fair-hair climbed aboard and he was gone, and her heart tore with a pain so real. Then he stood before her again, and in the wooden chest he held the sun. With his hands he scattered light, and she could feel the hot incandescence when his arms took her up.

  ‘He tells you to behold the Pillars of Heracles, Haraldr Nordbrikt. The ends of the Earth.’ Marmot-Man, Haraldr and the Byzantine pilot stood in the prow of Nicephorus Argyrus’s galley. The deck pitched in a south wind with the same harsh, steamy rasp as a harlot’s love cries. Marmot-Man had been forced to join this mortifying pirate-hunting expedition as interpreter for the pilot, who otherwise could not have warned these reckless barbaroi that they were rapidly approaching uncharted waters.

  ‘There is a sea beyond these Pillars,’ said Haraldr. He pointed to the west. A molten sun hovered above a watery horizon the colour of steel. Haraldr shielded his eyes to discern the slight shift of hue that marked a spit of headland jutting into the sea.

  ‘A sea indeed, but it would not be wise to venture into it for any great distance, Haraldr Nordbrikt. It is the moat that separates the world of men from the walls that thrust up the vault of the firmament.’ With his hands Marmot-Man drew the shape of a box. ‘So that living men cannot attain these walls and climb into paradise, Lord God has furnished this sea with every imaginable ferocious creature of enormous size, and some so frightening to behold that their gaze alone will shatter a ship to timbers.’

  Haraldr continued to study the sun-hammered horizon. ‘As a boy, I spoke with a man who sailed this great western sea with Bjarni Herjolfsson. They ventured as far as Vinland and saw no walls. Another man sailed with Leif the Lucky and went ashore on Vinland. There was no paradise, only miserable skraelings - savages.’ Haraldr rotated his palms to sculpt a sphere in the air. ‘The world-orb has no walls.’

  Marmot-Man sighed. ‘Well, Haraldr Nordbrikt, that is also the opinion of certain overly learned heretics at court who read the words of ancient Greek pagans.’ Marmot-Man rose on his toes to approach Haraldr’s ear more closely. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt, believe me, you do not want these heretics as your friend or their enemies as yours,’ hissed Marmot-Man. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt, say no more of this earth shaped like a Persian melon.’

  Haraldr looked away, weary of Marmot-Man’s pointless, often conflicting confidences. Almost four months at sea, and Marmot-Man had furnished nothing more than incidental glimpses of the vast structure of Grik - no, Roman, he reminded himself - power. It was as if, even at the limits of the Roman world, Marmot-Man were reminded of a sword over his neck.

  The ravens took wing in Haraldr’s gut as he remembered the blade that threatened his own head. Each day for the last four months he had ached with the shame that he could not reveal to Halldor, Ulfr and the rest of his pledge-men all that had transpired in his meeting with Mar Hunrodarson. Yet how could he admit to his physical fear of Mar, and, far worse, tell them that Mar held knowledge that could prevent all of them from ever seeing their homes again? What fate was Mar, even at this moment, divining? Haraldr had heard nothing from the terrifying Hetairarch during the week they had remained in St Mama’s Quarter, preparing to sail; but now, alone at night on this distant sea, it was as if Mar’s mighty grip was an ever-tightening noose about his neck. Lately he would awaken hardly able to breathe. And what of these other enemies Mar had alluded to, perhaps even more deadly than the Rage-filled Hetairarch?

  Yet when Haraldr thought of sailing right through the Pillars of Heracles to the sanctuary of the cold green sea that Norsemen alone commanded, he was pulled irresistibly back. The Empress City. He wanted her embrace, her scent, her heat, her . . . Maria. With some strange clarity undiminished by time and distance he could still see the brilliance of her lips and eyes, hear her speak, watch her hips sway. In his endless rocking fantasies each night upon these fevered southern seas, Maria and the city had become the same imaginary lover, and when he finally held Maria against his breast, loving her so deeply and limitlessly that he would melt within her, he would know then that the Empress City had trothed herself in return. They had already loved a hundred nights in as many different places within the Empress City, the night before on a marbled terrace, lying upon silk, naked to the whispering breeze, her swan-white skin iridescent like the lights of Halogoland writhing against an arctic horizon. He had been away from her, both of her, so long.

  Haraldr struggled against the torpid seduction. It was this unearthly heat. The heat attacked reason. The heat was death, and death waited out on this flaming sapphire brine. He could consid
er what awaited him in the Empress City, when, or if, he returned to her. ‘Count no day until the sun has set,’ he reminded himself as he squinted into the boiling copper disc looming over the western horizon. This day was far from ended. He called for Ulfr and Halldor to join him forward.

  ‘We come in with the sun at our backs.’

  Ulfr nodded. ‘Ja, my friend, if the men don’t fight these Saracens soon, I think they’ll begin to set their sword upon the wind. They’ve given you a name now. Hardraada. Hard-ruler.’

  ‘If they are still full-strong enough to praise me with such curses, then I have served them well.’ At least about this Haraldr could be pleased. At their last landfall, now almost two months ago along the coast of Langobard-land, Haraldr had provisioned his ships with water rather than the local wine, to which the men had greatly taken. The men had complained bitterly then, and the hard-mouthing had continued for the next month while they had searched for the Saracen pirate fleet at open sea. Then they had sighted the Saracen masts rising against the bleached horizon like a seagoing forest and for another month had dogged the huge Saracen fleet along the endless coast of Blaland, the vast landmass sometimes called Afrikka. Haraldr had enforced strict water rationing among his own men while staying at sea to block the Saracens from turning into the Afrikkan ports. Yes, his men were as testy as penned stallions scenting a mare in heat. But consider what entreaties the crews aboard the Saracen ships now would be issuing to their Devil-God, Maumet. If indeed they had the spit to speak.