Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Again Haraldr felt the awful stirring deep in his entrails. Even now, especially now, he could not tell everything to Halldor or Ulfr or any of his men. It was not only the oaths he had sworn to Olaf and Jarl Rognvald, but he now realized that the Jarl had been agonizingly prescient when he had warned him that his deadly secret could also condemn the men pledged to his keeping. Haraldr would have to deal with Mar as he had dealt with Hakon, in the arena from which the only exit was victory or death.

  Haraldr pressed out the piece of parchment prised from Asbjorn’s frozen teeth. The message had been written in runic symbols, obviously drafted by an interpreter who had made several mistakes. Still, the message was clear enough. Haraldr read it aloud again, as if the words were some sort of chant that would induce a state in which a greater truth would be revealed. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt. The next head is yours. Think well with it while you yet own it. Leave Miklagardr.’

  ‘Mar would not have needed an interpreter to write the runes,’ offered Halldor.

  ‘Perhaps the interpreter’s hand is a clever ruse,’ suggested Ulfr.

  Haraldr followed his own silent line of reasoning. Why would Mar want Haraldr to leave if he had, as he had said, use for him? But perhaps Mar had butchered Asbjorn Ingvarson simply to unnerve Haraldr, to remind him of the blade he held at Haraldr’s back. If Haraldr could prove that, he would not wait. He would ask Odin to choose between his two Rage-gifted champions. But what proof? A mistaken judgement now would almost certainly doom five hundred men.

  Haraldr examined the remains of the red wax seal, again cursing himself for destroying most of it that morning; by the time he realized what he had done, the remaining bits had been flattened on the stone walkway by dozens of feet. Still, the fragment that remained had a recognizable detail, an arm holding a sword. That could easily be Mar, but then many men carried swords - though it was unlikely that monks did. Haraldr fixed every detail of that fragment in his memory. If he saw it again, his sword would be swift.

  ‘Could it be Mar’s seal?’ asked Ulfr.

  ‘Why would Mar use his own seal but try to disguise his hand?’ countered Halldor.

  ‘Or perhaps Joannes is trying to make us think that Mar opposes us.’

  Haraldr just shook his head. Each thought was like a box within a box within a box. Were Mar and Joannes themselves merely ruses? Was the whole intent of the play and its grisly aftermath to confuse? Yes, a man could be beaten by ruses alone. To march on the city that day would have been suicidal, but soon Haraldr would have to take some action; they could not fester here indefinitely, eventually to turn on themselves. He considered the bitter irony: by defeating an army of phantoms he had won enough gold to buy a kingdom, but now all the gold in the East could not help him against the phantoms the Romans had set upon him. And the names of these phantoms were fear, confusion and indecision.

  How could a garden so beautiful be so empty? she had wondered, but she knew that only the iridescent peacocks watched. The huge leaves, so green that they seemed flaked from giant emeralds, bowed deeply with the moist heat. Her robe was hot, so she had slipped it up to her hips as she sat on the cool marble bench and dangled her legs in the little pool. The peacocks rustled and spread their silky fans. She touched herself, and she was already wet. Then his hand came over hers and held it there. He stroked her gently with her own finger, her spine became fluid, and she rocked her head back and saw the sun, distant and filtered through the emerald canopy. His other hand pulled her robe up and the silk seemed to dissolve over her arms, and she shivered when he touched her hard nipple. She floated on the pool, the water warm.

  He tossed her like a doll and she faced him, he standing, she poised, weightless, legs wrapped around him, sensing the searing gristle just beneath her. She lowered herself and he was like a shaft of rock covered with hot unguent, sliding deep. She pressed her milky breasts to his chest, pulled his silky hair, and kissed his soft golden eyebrows, her tongue darting over the hard ridge of the pale pink scar. She rocked and rose, and the birds made a single noise like the note of a golden hymn.

  Her scream shattered the glassy leaves and brought the night like a black hammer. The obsidian head of her lover leered, his horrible beak tittering and the nacreous beads of his eyes reaching for her soul. She screamed and screamed again, and her lover’s wings rose up like storm clouds. She awakened.

  ‘Mistress,’ lilted the eunuch Nicetas. He stood at Maria’s bedside, a silver tray and golden goblet balanced on his slender fingertips. ‘Mistress, would you care for your draught?’ The Mistress of the Robes usually requested this narcotic when she awakened in the night, if she did not have a companion to ease her nocturnal anxieties.

  Maria looked around the bedchamber. ‘No, Nicetas, light a lamp.’ Nicetas found the brass lantern on the dresser and lit it with his own oil lamp. ‘Is our Mother awake?’

  ‘Yes, Mistress.’ The blessed Mother was often awake, since she was so rarely rendered pacific by the attentions of her husband.

  Maria put on her beryl-green robe and padded down the marble hallways in her silk slippers. She paused before the eunuchs who guarded the Empress’s ante-chamber and was nodded past. The ante-chamber was brightly lit by the silver candelabra; the floor of opus sectile resembled a meadow of crocus and hyacinth. Two more eunuchs in lacquer-stiff silk greeted her and went softly to the huge ivory doors, incised with the Imperial eagles, and slid them slightly apart. After a moment one eunuch turned and nodded, and Maria crossed the room.

  Columns of white-veined Carian marble supported the soaring golden dome of the Empress’s vast bedchamber; the walls were revetted with alternating panels of deep red porphyry and moss-green Thesallian marble. Maria observed that the Empress had expanded her cosmetics factory. Three servants attended tables covered with vials, jars, mortars and pestles, and rows of braziers simmering dozens of pungent-smelling potions.

  ‘Little daughter!’ cried the Empress Zoe as she swept across the room to greet Maria, her flawless white arms extended, her sheer gauze gown clinging to her full yet youthful form like a windblown cloud. She drew the small clay jar in her hand beneath Maria’s nose - it smelled vaguely of whale oil -and then dabbed with her fingers, gently massaging a cool cream into Maria’s forehead. ‘This is new. It will erase a frown as if an angel had passed over your face.’

  Maria acquiesced; was not Zoe’s own unsurpassed pulchritude proof that her endless cosmetic inventions had merit? Still, the Empress’s obsession was desperate, as if she believed her beauty might flee in the night if she did not remain awake concocting ways to preserve it. Of course, Maria acknowledged that she, too, would be as vigilant when she reached the Empress’s age. She hated to think of herself as prune-faced and desiccated, no longer able to contort her lithe spine against the supple body of a young athlete. But perhaps she would not live that long.

  Zoe stood back and admired Maria. ‘Already the care has been absorbed from your skin.’ She handed the jar of ointment to a servant. ‘I guess you have heard?’

  ‘That the Senator and Patrician Andronicus Cametus has been murdered by one of his conquests? It’s not entirely true; the boy’s father was the assailant. He hid in the Senator’s bath.’

  Zoe waved her hand as if the entire scandal were a wisp of stagnant air to be fanned away. ‘No. I can see that you don’t know.’ She parted her bow-shaped, blood-red lips in a curiously triumphant pout, inhaled as if to speak, and then paused, savouring her coup. ‘We’re going to Jerusalem,’ she finally said. She fluttered her hand frivolously. ‘My devoted husband commands it, so I must obey. Should I have occasion also to submit myself to the sinful pleasures of Antioch and the appalling decadence of the Levant on this holiest of ventures, it would simply be as the dutiful wife of our Holy Emperor Father.’

  Then I am bid to suffer these scourges at your side, my blessed Mother,’ said Maria, her eyes cast down in mock humility. Then she looked up earnestly. ‘But isn’t it in truth dangerous?’

  ‘I t
hink not, at least once we leave Roman soil. The Caliph is reputed to be most gracious. And’ - Zoe drew the word out with a delicately salacious flourish - ‘we are to have a special guard attached to our regular military escort. Those Tauro-Scythians who have made themselves so rich, and the monstrously acquisitive Nicephorus Argyrus so much richer.’

  Maria felt as if the blood in her face had been sucked away by a shrieking dry winter wind. She could only stammer. ‘I -I - Mother . . .’ Her teeth began to chatter slightly.

  ‘Little daughter! The Tauro-Scythians are such . . . luxuries! They amuse us.’ Zoe placed her arms around Maria. ‘You have never been afraid of northern barbaroi before, and you have even met the commander of these men. Why, you said he was partially civilized, in a grim sort of way. I do remember.’

  ‘I fear he is too grim for me. I have had dreams.’

  ‘Ohhh . . .’ Zoe let the exclamation breeze through her lips. ‘I am so ... stimulated by your dreams, Maria. Had I had your . . . imagination when I was your age, perhaps I would have been more . . . deliberate in my choice of companions.’

  ‘Mother, these dreams bring me no pleasure.’ But Maria realized that there was even now a residue of the ecstasy she had known in the dream garden, and that her memory of that passion was all the more vivid because of the horror that had followed. ‘No, that is not entirely so. There is pleasure and there is terror. My dreams offer love and death, twined so tightly that you could not get a knife between them. Perhaps death is the ultimate desire.’

  Zoe’s icy amethyst eyes seemed to darken, like crystal pools shadowed by a cloud, as she thought of her own troubles. ‘Yes, little daughter, love and death are but the different sides of one coin. How well your Empress Mother knows the truth of that.’

  ‘You may not.’ John the frog-faced interpreter held the document against his chest as if he were a woman shielding her bare breasts. ‘I have translated each word exactly as written.’ He fixed his eyes defiantly on the ceiling.

  ‘Let me read!’ snapped Haraldr in Greek so that the Topoteretes would hear.

  The tough-eyed, leather-skinned Topoteretes, who had been absorbed in studying Halldor’s sword, looked up in surprise. After a moment he barked at the surly, black-frocked interpreter, who sulkingly handed the paper to Haraldr.

  Haraldr studied the claret script. He made out the term for the Emperor, and also another Greek word that troubled him. ‘It says something about my going by ship,’ he told Halldor and Ulfr. ‘My previous journey to the Emperor’s Palace did not require a sea voyage.’

  ‘I smell the raven-slime,’ said Ulfr. ‘They could plan to take you to a place of imprisonment. I’ve heard they frequently exile their own to islands from which there is no escape.’

  ‘Or just feed you to the lobsters,’ offered Halldor.

  Haraldr decided he would balk on this issue. He tapped John on the arm; the interpreter jerked it away indignantly.

  The dam Haraldr had built against his rage and frustration could hold no longer. He leapt to his feet, grabbed John’s gown at the chest, and with one hand jerked the astonished interpreter over his head; his other hand quivered over the pommel of his sword, waiting, if necessary, for the Topoteretes.

  ‘Ask the Topoteretes why they are transporting me by sea! Ask him!’

  To Haraldr’s surprise the Topoteretes laughed, his head back, showing big white, horsy teeth. He even poked Halldor and gestured, showing how much he appreciated this treatment of the interpreter. ‘Ask him!’ shouted Haraldr to his red-faced, flailing captive. The interpreter translated frantically, and Haraldr, recovering his control, dropped him hard on his feet.

  The Topoteretes shrugged and explained. The interpreter stepped back and made the sign of the cross; he spoke in unsteady Norse. ‘He says they want to receive you in the palace harbour. It’s more appropriate.’

  Haraldr looked at Halldor and Ulfr. He raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  ‘I think we can trust our friend the Topoteretes,’ said Ulfr.

  Yes, thought Haraldr, I can assume I am going to the palace. But has Mar sent for me, or is it Joannes? Do Mar and Joannes work in concert? Then all of the pieces shifted and he felt a sudden tranquillity, almost as it had been when he was a boy struggling to learn the runes and suddenly he had made sense of it all. Fate alone would greet him at the end of this day’s voyage, and the masks destiny wore were not important. If he died, it would be a better end than remaining the wealthiest prisoner in St Mama’s Quarter. If he returned, it would be with the answers to these devilling questions.

  A small warship waited at one of the commercial wharfs in St Mama’s Quarter. Haraldr was actually greeted by the kentarchos, the captain of the ship, a wiry man of about thirty who wore a bright brass breastplate embossed with a lion. The kentarchos told Haraldr he could roam the deck freely; Haraldr studied the great throwing engines with the bewildering complexes of gears, ropes, pulleys and windlasses, then went to the bow and examined the ornate bronze spout, shaped like a bellowing lion, that could belch forth the terrifying flames he would not have believed in had he not already seen their devastating effect.

  The warship passed the enormous harbour boom and the foreboding grey tower and skirted the tip of the finger of land that thrust the Great City into the sea; in ancient times, Haraldr had learned, this entire peninsula had been called Byzantium. The sun parted the slate-coloured base of the roiling cotton clouds, projecting a broad shaft over the eastern prow of the city, and Haraldr once again gaped at the thrilling panoply of glistening domes.

  The ship docked at a wharf next to a large, blocky gatehouse projecting from the towering seawall. Soldiers armoured like the Topoteretes and clearly under his command joined Haraldr’s escort and led him up wide marble steps to a series of grass-and-ivy-covered terraces lined with stone statues, some of them as startlingly lifelike as the ones Haraldr had seen in the city, but others standing stiffly at attention, arms at their sides. As he walked among the stone figures Haraldr noticed that their eyes had a strange life force, as if they were filled with visions of distant realms and other times, times before there were men and only gods inhabited the earth. For how many aeons had men preceded him up these steps, beneath this stony scrutiny?

  The terraces climbed to the Imperial City within the Empress City. Haraldr had seen the palaces from a distance, and yet then they had seemed a miniature world too fantastic to be real, like looking into a knothole and finding a splendid city inhabited by elves. Now this world surrounded him in its dazzling actuality, the rows of carnation- and sulphur-coloured marble pillars towering above him like gleaming stone forests, the spray from the fountains turning into crystal fragments that melted against his face. He wondered at an enormous golden building made of domes fanning out like the petals of a flower, cyan-blue ponds teeming with darting orange fish, marble cypresses carved into foliate traceries so delicate that it seemed they would crumble in the breeze; in the distance shimmered a vast silver dome, huge enough to swallow a dhromon. Chalk-white avenues fanned out in the sun, swarming with eunuchs in silk, soldiers in armour, and occasional groups of ladies who seemed to float along in the coral-tinted shade of endless porticoes.

  The escort steered Haraldr sharply right in front of a massive, shell-coloured building; Khazar bowmen stood at attention within a towering portico. Haraldr and the Topoteretes were admitted through the massive silver doors. They crossed a marble hall busy with scurrying, sumptuously dressed eunuchs, then wound through a jade-columned portico, a courtyard with gurgling fountains, and halls decorated with endless ochre and gold mosaics depicting scenes of battle; half a dozen times they had their passes inspected by guards posted at each entrance to a new room or passageway. Finally they halted in front of a cottage-sized, vault-like structure made of porphyry marble as deeply purple as a ripe plum.

  Two Varangians in their golden armour stepped from a door at the side of the vault and looked at the passes. The Topoteretes nodded and stepped aside while th
e Varangians came round Haraldr’s back. Haraldr hated the fear that crawled up his spine; had he not resolved to remove all speculation from his mind and leave his questions to Odin and Kristr? And yet how else could he feel at this moment?

  ‘Sir, please accompany us,’ said one of the Varangians in Swedish-accented Norse. The menace thawed slightly, and Haraldr stepped into a lurid purple chamber. Half a dozen armoured Varangians stood rigidly at attention; a single Varangian faced them, his huge back to Haraldr. The golden broad-axe crossed over his chest glimmered as he turned.

  Haraldr resisted the swoon. Yes, he had been prepared for this encounter. But now, face to face with Mar Hunrodarson, he wanted to fall to his knees and toss the fear from his surging stomach.

  Mar stepped forward, the axe moving in his hands, and Haraldr heard the rustle of the raven’s wings. But Mar merely passed the axe to the Varangian flanking Haraldr on his left. He extended his hands in greeting. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt,’ he said, without even the ominous emphasis on the last name that Haraldr would have expected. Then Mar grabbed Haraldr’s arm and drew him close. Haraldr could not mask the terror in his eyes.

  ‘Before you go in, listen,’ Mar whispered. ‘I have heard of a plot against you. If you have been threatened, I must know of it.’ Mar paused and drew Haraldr into his insane, glacial eyes; the rest of the Hetairarch’s face was utterly void of meaning or inflection, as if he were a walking corpse that had lost its spirit but not the heat that still flushed its cheeks. Haraldr remembered that he had been fooled once by that face.

  ‘You wear doubt like a battle standard,’ Mar continued. ‘But you have nothing to fear unless you challenge me. I would use your secret as a shield for myself, not a sword against you. Look, my plan will benefit us both. We are both Norsemen . . .’

  Mar stepped away as two eunuchs entered the chamber through a rear door. The taller and elder of the two was a pale-browed but firm-fleshed man who wore cream-hued silk so heavy, yet so finely woven, that it seemed like a metal foil. The other man, similarly splendid, held an ivory baton with a golden dragon atop it. This eunuch was short, with a receding jaw marked with a large dimpled scar just below the corner of his mouth.