Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Haraldr studied the Saracen mast-forest, sails unfurled on the eastern horizon like enormous white leaves. He squinted to discern the formation of the bobbing dark hulls, wondering if he had found his answer. He could not be sure. Odin, he prayed, as much to himself as to the god, I lay it all in your hands. Then he turned to Ulfr and Halldor and sucked in a parching breath. ‘There will be no battle cry,’ he said. ‘We’re going in by ourselves, just this ship. I alone will board.’

  ‘Halldor’s blackened, sun-split lips slackened in shock. Ulfr’s jaw dropped.

  ‘Yes. I have invited the ravens to join me.’ Haraldr looked hard at Ulfr and Halldor. ‘But the men are nearly mutinous. In this hot blue sea they have long ago forgotten that day beside the white waters of the Dnieper. Yet if my strategy has been successful, I will have both saved a good half of my force and given them as their leader a true favourite of Odin. When we return to Constantinople, they will cleave to me as if I were their Emperor. And when we return to the city, surely I will need nothing less than fanatics to guard my back.’

  Ulfr conveyed the order down the line of ten fully rigged galleys; soon Haraldr could see arms, swords and spears gesturing with confusion atop the decks. He ordered his own crew to furl sails and take their places at the oars. As his ship moved swiftly out of line, the crews left behind stilled and hushed. Soon the only sounds on all nine ships were creaking tackle and flapping canvas, the splash of waves on hulls, and the invisible abrasion of the wind. A man was about to show them that he was a god.

  Haraldr caught the spray at the foredeck as the fast galley charged; the droplets stung his sun-tormented face like flung sand. Here the sun rises so high that it does not offer a shadow for much of the day, he thought, vaguely considering what mechanism of Kristr’s doing had created this phenomenon, so different from the long shadows of the northern lands. He focused on the mast forest, trying to discern if he would win this wager or lose everything.

  It was confusing, so many masts - three to a ship - so many sails, all crowded together. Then the formation began to make sense, and he whispered his thanks to Odin. It was as he had expected; the Saracen vessels were clustered in groups of from three to a dozen, and they bobbed and yawed curiously; the hulls often bumped together.

  ‘You are indeed as clever as Odin,’ said Ulfr as he and Halldor came forward and observed the curious progress of the Saracen fleet. ‘I hope you are as lucky.’

  Halldor waved his arm as if anointing the careening lines of Saracen ships. His byrnnie glistened with sweat and his teeth were as white as bleached bone against his cooked face. ‘A ghost fleet,’ he said, ‘intended to function like an army of false camp-fires. As their men perished of thirst they abandoned ship after ship, towing the dead vessels along in files to deceive us that their strength was intact.’

  ‘That must be their flagship,’ said Ulfr, pointing to a deep-hulled vessel with a kind of house on the stern, three separate masts, and perhaps a dozen empty oar ports to a side. ‘It leads the line.’ Despite the growing chaos within the ranks of the ghost fleet, most of the ships had been rigged to run with the wind, and the flagship cruised smartly ahead of the long, swell-tossed files. Haraldr observed the lead ship carefully. Odin enjoyed tricks. He squinted for resolution, and as they approached the flagship his hopes plunged in sickening concert with the pitching deck. He had indeed offered the one-eyed god a premature thanksgiving. A full crew manned the top frame of the Saracen flagship, as well as the half dozen ships to her stern. Steel jerkins glinted over white robes and flashing spearheads and curved, silvery steel swords pointed to attention in immaculate rows.

  ‘We change the orders?’ asked Halldor.

  ‘No,’ said Haraldr raptly, as if he suffered from some narcosis of fear. ‘Odin has led me here. If Odin intends to offer me to the ravens this day, not ten thousand men could save me.’ Is it the heat? he wondered as he distantly contemplated his deadly folly. Or was fate so thick around him that it had charged the air with the heat of its vast cauldron?

  ‘Boarding ropes!’ shouted Ulfr. The galley swung parallel to the hull of the flagship and prepared to drift into position for a fast boarding. Ulfr and Halldor worked frantically with the boarding ropes, too mesmerized with Haraldr’s god-driven fury to try to stop him. But why was he laughing? The heat. The heat and the fear had driven him mad; the line between madness that saved a man and that which doomed him was finer than the finest silk filament. Odin had finally forsaken their hero, and they would joyfully share his fate.

  ‘Look!’ shouted Haraldr. He was still laughing. ‘My foes will have to dismiss their unbidden supper guests before they can fight!’ Halldor and Ulfr raised their heads, at first bewildered by Haraldr’s babble, then incredulous at what they saw at the railing of the Saracen ship. Ulfr coughed, revulsion gagging his throat. Dozens of seagulls had descended upon the Saracen warriors; they perched on unmoving shoulders and pecked the eyes from unprotesting heads. The ghost fleet had also been provided a ghost crew.

  Haraldr leapt to the deck of the Saracen ship. The stench was appalling; he had never imagined such decay, but then he had never known such a sun. The Saracens had their backs strapped straight against their spears and were lashed to the railing. As he walked the deck, slimy with the foul droppings of the carrion birds, Haraldr felt the spirits of the dead hovering about their unburied corpses; their sighing plaints were a hot miasma in his nostrils. He looked straight ahead as he went aft, but he could not ignore the awful cooing and clucking of the birds, an obscene satiation worse even than the cawing of hungry ravens. He saw the door to the cabin at the stern of the ship; he now only wished to escape the sun and the spirits that were sucking away the air around him. He wondered at the strange, partially peeling blue script that bordered the rose-enamelled wood. The door rattled as the ship pitched, then suddenly swung open.

  The scimitar raked Emma with a dry screech; the sound was far more alarming than the impact. Haraldr lashed out with his shield and felt as if he had crushed a bird’s chest. He stepped back and with his sword probed the blue-black pall inside. A spear jutted past him and he snapped it like a twig. He placed his shield beneath his chin and tried to adjust his eyes to the darkness. Then he saw the nimbus of light around the curtains and ripped the fabric away with his sword.

  The Saracen sat at a large table of carved wood inlaid with rosettes of pearl and ivory. He was coal-bearded, still almost as juicily plump as a fat partridge; a clean white cloth covered his head. Beside him stood a single wraithlike guard in a filthy, stained smock, a curving dagger swaying in his withered grip. The Saracen pushed the guard back and immediately opened a black lacquered box set before him on the table. The light from the portals glossed a small, flat, gold ingot, then another, then another, until the Saracen had placed twenty ingots on the table. Haraldr extended his sword and pricked the man’s windpipe. He held up his other hand and flashed his fingers to signal ‘five’ four times. Then he shook his head no, and began to flash five again and again and again, until it seemed he had done it a hundred times. When he was finished, he cut a small nick on the Saracen’s well-fleshed throat.

  The Saracen shrugged, turned up sausage-thick fingers almost immobilized with gem-encrusted rings, and waved Haraldr to a latticed hatch at mid-deck. He opened it and climbed into the hold at the point of Haraldr’s sword.

  Light from the oar-ports sliced the hold with hot white blades that flickered as the ship gently rocked. The Saracen very slowly pulled aside a dingy canvas, revealing seven large wooden chests bound with bright brass fittings. The Saracen hiked up his billowing cotton robe, shrugged at Haraldr, and assumed a ridiculous posture as he probed his bowels. He winced as he withdrew the key.

  The Saracen unlocked all the chests before opening any of them. When he began to lift the lids, he went about it so quickly and dramatically that Haraldr expected a ruse, Saracen warriors springing from their last hiding place. But it was not ice-of-battle that glimmered in the thrusting light
, it was Roman gold. Enough shimmering solidi and golden ingots to buy all of Europe. For a moment Haraldr saw Olaf’s last moments at Stiklestad, heard the dying words from Jarl Rognvald’s sky-blue lips, and saw the ice-white swords of retribution bloody the northern horizon. And then, in a blinding epiphany, all he could see was the Empress City, luminous in her aureate mantle, receiving him into her scented arms.

  Maria asked her guard to have the carriage stopped; brakes whined and the enclosed compartment pitched and canted slightly back. She slid across the cushioned satin upholstery and nudged aside the shell-pink brocade shade. She could see over the queued-up crowd at the news bulletins posted by the great bronze gate to the Imperial Palace complex.

  ‘What is it, Maria?’ asked Anna Dalassena, daughter of the Grand Domestic, in her chiming voice.

  ‘Look. Remember the Tauro-Scythian we saw last summer - where was it? - the nervous one with the clumsy hands and the agile tongue?’

  ‘No,’ demurred Anna with a leisurely folding of her thick dark lashes. She indeed remembered the towering barbaros; hadn’t she in fact lain in her silk sheets later that night, her head whirling from wine, and for a dreadfully fascinating instant imagined those huge arms enfolding her? But as the flower of Anna’s maindenhood had yet to be pruned, she was obliged to coyness. Maria, on the other hand, in the months that Anna had waited on her, had alluded to the most delectable, most extraordinary intimacies between men and women. Anna suppressed a giggle; Maria had no chastity to protect. How exquisite that would be.

  ‘Oh,’ said Maria, the elegant line of her lips scrolling with amusement, ‘I had rather a fantasy of the Tauro-Scythian that night. As I recall, I saw to it that he was rough with his hands.’

  Anna blushed profoundly. ‘Please, Lady, tell me what this man has done for his name to be posted by the Chalke gate. They haven’t cut off his hands, I beseech the Holy Mother.’

  Maria smiled, thinking that it was time that bright, spirited little Anna learn a woman’s pleasures. She needed to think of someone suitable, someone gentle yet vigorous. Perhaps Isaac would know.

  Anna’s face pressed next to Maria’s, and the braided loops at the sides of their heads touched. ‘Holy Mother!’

  The bulletin was framed and set in the usual marble niche. Maria read the florid script with mock gravity. ‘Varangian champions defend Christendom at edge of the world; restore Roman riches to furtherance of Glory of Christ the King. Varangian Nordbrikt, his arm strengthened by the Mother of God, single-handedly vanquished the infidel.’

  ‘They say he’s now rich enough to buy Nicephorus Argyrus’s palace!’ blurted Anna.

  ‘Anna,’ said Maria musically, ‘you suddenly recall the man?’

  Anna smirked. ‘Yes.’ Then her face dropped. ‘My father isn’t happy about this Tauro-Scythian’s success. I heard him.’ She sighed, trying to imitate the mysterious note of melancholy that so often crept into Maria’s discourse. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever have him to a banquet in our chambers.’

  ‘No,’ answered Maria. She pulled the shade back and motioned the carriage on. ‘I fear the Tauro-Scythian’s enemies have multiplied as rapidly as his riches.’

  Maria settled back against the cushions and closed her eyes as the carriage rumbled up the Mese, the city’s main artery. Extraordinary. The dream had been months ago. And how vivid it had been. Perhaps more than a dream. Perhaps a vision like those of the prophet Daniel: the fair-hair, the fleet of ships manned by spectres, a chest of gold as brilliant as the sun. But there were other dreams. No. She could not recall them. Would not. Fair-hair haloed by horrible black flocking creatures, frozen waters dark as onyx, awakening with fear on her tongue. Had she some gift of prophecy? There were many in the city who claimed it, but, as with virtue, that gift was much more often claimed than possessed.

  Maria opened her eyes and clutched her hands tightly together. Yes. The fair-haired barbaros was a harbinger of death, but she had not seen if the death that haloed his golden head was his own or that of another. Maria started; it was as if an icy finger had suddenly brushed her cheek. She whipped her head, expecting Anna’s cheerful confession of the prank, but Anna had slid across the seat to peer intently through her own window. Maria touched her faintly rouged cheek as if daubing a wound, and shuddered that she found nothing but her own silken warmth. Tonight in the Hagia Sophia she would pray to the Mother of God that the fair-hair not visit her dreams again. And pray for his soul, because in her silent heart she would pray that it was his own death she had foreseen.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Thorvald Ostenson, centurion of the Grand Hetairia, fourth in command of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. The leather fittings of Ostenson’s new gold breastplate creaked as he came round the chair on which the man sat, hunched over, his back trembling in soft heaves like the belly of a small, wounded animal.

  ‘This pitiful head upon whom the ravens have chosen to defecate belongs to John Choniates, a petty tax officer from the Anatolian theme.’ Mar Hunrodarson folded his arms atop his writing table and studied the wretch who sat before him.

  The man’s eyes were pools of vitreous red surrounded by enormous purple bruises, and his chin was as raw as fresh meat where his beard had been plucked. His short, stiff fingers were swollen and caked with blood.

  ‘So why are they feeding these little mice to Varangian lions?’ asked Ostenson. ‘Don’t the ball-less paper-stuffers know that we are already overburdened with felons above the rank of patrician, and our strength is short as it is? Besides, a Varangian takes little pride in playing a broken reed like this. The men are malingering when they’re asked to perform these inconsequential interrogations.’

  Mar looked up at Ostenson; he had just promoted the lanky, straw-headed farm boy from Iceland to centurion. Mar had learned his lesson with Hakon. When he had seen to it that Hakon was elevated to the honour of Manglavite, he had thought that it was more important to find a man who was suitably vicious - something Mar knew couldn’t be taught -than to look for intelligence in his key subordinates; Mar had reasoned that he had enough wits for all five hundred members of the Grand Hetairia and then some. Well, Mar also had the wits to know when he had been wrong. Ostenson was part of Mar’s new strategy to surround himself with men who did not run out of words after axe, ale and cunt. This new centurion had the keenness to understand the intricacies of Roman power, if he were taught well. And it was clearly time for the education of Thorvald Ostenson to begin.

  ‘Ordinarily I would have flatly refused the use of my offices to execute sentence on such a menial bureaucrat,’ explained Mar to his coarse-featured but sharp-eyed subordinate. ‘But here my own objectives are served.’ Mar paused like a rune-mentor. ‘You understand the significance of Anatolia and the rest of the Eastern themes, do you not?’

  Ostenson nodded. He knew that the Anatolian theme was the richest of the eighteen Asian themes, or provinces, that comprised the breadbasket of the Empire.

  ‘The wealth of the Eastern themes,’ continued Mar in a pedagogical rhythm he had learned from listening to the endless discourses in the Emperor’s chambers, ‘is not simply the endless sacks of grain they provide the Imperial granaries, or the yet more extraordinary harvest of taxes they provide the Imperial Treasury. It is military manpower. By this I mean the thematic armies.’

  Again Ostenson signalled his understanding. Each theme was able to mobilize a highly competent citizen army, both to protect its own borders against minor incursions as well as to supplement the Imperial Taghmata, the Constantinople-based standing professional army, in times of major conflict. Fully mobilized, all of the thematic armies could quintuple; the size of the Imperial Taghmata.

  ‘And you understand the system of inalienable military freeholds, then?’ asked Mar, certain that his new centurion had not troubled himself with such arcane details; Ostenson’s bewildered eyes quickly confirmed his doubts. ‘Well,’ Mar continued, ‘understand that these citizen soldiers cannot magically transform their hoes in
to spears and their burlap tunics into armour. If you travel through Asia Minor, as I have, you are struck by the prosperity of the small farms, strip after endless strip of shimmering grain and dewy pasture. For centuries Roman law has required each of these prosperous small farms, which are the freeholds of the peasants who work them, to provide and equip one soldier to remain in readiness for service in the thematic army. The Emperors have long understood that Roman power is dependent on the survival of these military freeholds, so for centuries they have enforced laws strictly banning purchase of the freeholds by the Dhynatoi.’

  Ostenson’s eyes narrowed. The Dhynatoi not only wallowed in the centuries-old fortunes provided by their vast landholdings but also dominated the Roman Senate and had placed their stooges in many of the most important Imperial military commands. The Dhynatoi were vain, ostentatious and insufferably arrogant; when one of them occasionally ran foul of his own kind and ended up in Numera Prison, the Varangian centurions would cast lots for the privilege of attending to him.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Mar went on in the wry tone he used when he criticized official policy, ‘recently these laws have proved difficult to enforce. The peasant freeholders, who are called upon all too frequently by the Imperial tax collectors, as well as by their local military commanders, wish to elude these obligations by illegally selling their farms to the Dhynatoi. The Dhynatoi, for their part, are only too willing to purchase these properties illegally, which they acquire by the hundreds, even thousands, and consolidate into vast estates.’