Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Haraldr soberly considered the monk’s words. Olaf had once told him that the best tutor in games of power was the man other men feared and avoided, not the man who nightly drew the skalds to flatter him and heap him with praise. But a powerful instinct warned him that this monk’s lessons might well be fatal. Still, the faith they shared in one man was enough to tip the scales. And what would he gain by refusing?

  ‘I share your devotion to our Father,’ said Haraldr, searching for the correct tone; with the Romans, it was obvious one always had to speak as artificially and obsequiously as a skald. ‘I believe your offer to be the most generous gift I have received here, even more generous than the gift given me by the Saracen pirates I recently met. I am grateful, and in need of any assistance your offices might provide.’ As his response was translated and Joannes replied in Greek, Haraldr studied the monk’s distorted features and remembered his fleeting perceptions in the presence of the Emperor. Strange, he thought, and unlikely, but it would explain much. He abandoned the notion when the Norse translation began.

  ‘Good. I have a letter for you bearing my seal. It contains no threats or warnings. It is rather an introduction to my brother, the Strategus - that means the military governor - of Antioch, a city you will pass through on your Holy mission to Jerusalem. I want you to be known to my brother, and he to you. I also have a nephew there, about your age, though he sadly lacks your ambition. Perhaps he could learn from you.’

  Joannes reviewed his own concerns during the translation. The assassin had died before he had revealed the truth; Joannes was certain of that. He looked again at the seal he had shown the hapless Nordbrikt. The Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena was just arrogant and stupid enough to have put his personal seal on such a crude enterprise. Yes, this would have been his fashion, but the indisputable fact was that the by now demon-racing assassin had named the Grand Domestic far too early in the interrogation and had lingered far too painfully while insisting that he was telling the truth. Someone else was using the Grand Domestic to screen his own intentions. But who? Surely the Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson did not know that Joannes had already moved to pre-empt the Hetairarch’s proposed expansion of the Varangian Guard.

  Joannes refused to consider further the myriad possibilities. He tried to look composed as the obviously befuddled Varangian Nordbrikt was led away. He chided himself for the time wasted on this inconsequential project. Varangians, even the Hetairarch, were hardly worth the effort. Not now. Not when so much else was at stake.

  Joannes lowered his head to the paper-strewn table and went home to Amastris, to the time when his being had split into the two persons who now so desperately struggled to achieve a single voice. He felt the hot dust on his lips and lay again on his back, the pain still in his testicles, his arms strapped to his sagging cot so that he would not loosen the ligature. Michael, dear little Michael, crawled, stumbled, shakily stood and gurgled beside him. The infant grabbed for his brother’s finger, caught hold and held, cooing with delight. And the love entered Joannes, and the pain vanished.

  Back in the Neorion Tower, watched only by a corpse without eyes, the huge black-cloaked shoulders of the monk trembled with sobs. ‘Michael, Michael, dear little Michael,’ he murmured, choking with grief. ‘Now you are afflicted and is there nothing I can do to succour you?’

  So you are not keeping company with either of those boys?’ As she waited for Maria’s answer the Augusta Theodora sipped from a goblet fashioned of embossed gold leaf pressed between clear glass. She was fond of elaborate table settings, but otherwise the apartments in her country palace were almost barren; the only decoration on the dull terre-verte marble walls of her dining chamber was a small enamelled icon of the Virgin, framed in gold.

  ‘No.’ Maria paused for a silver forkful of fish. ‘It was a mistake. They say that love is a flower that can only bloom once. If it withers without bearing fruit, there will never be another blossom. My first man was a mistake, and so all of the rest have been.’

  ‘I wish you could forget about that, darling. No one blames you.’ Maria took several silent bites while Theodora watched her expectantly. ‘I think you might be happier if you tried to remain chaste,’ Theodora finally said. ‘And as much as I am concerned about your journey, darling, I feel that this pilgrimage will be a salve to your soul. Allow the Christ to fill your heart. The Patriarch has helped me to see that when we love the Christ, we are never without love.’ Alexius, Patriarch of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith had become Theodora’s spiritual adviser and personal friend during her exile.

  Maria ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Alexius is as determined as Joannes to keep you and your sister apart.’

  ‘My sister is determined to keep us apart. She will always blame me for Romanus. That I refused him and she was forced to marry him. I thought that it would all be buried in the same crypt as Romanus. But it will always be there.’

  ‘Joannes is responsible for this breach. He never could stand up to the two of you together. He told the Emperor lies about you, and the Emperor repeated them to Zoe. You believe anything from the mouth that drinks your soul.’

  ‘Emmanuel says that the Emperor has not taken that draught for some time. Perhaps on this pilgrimage she will have an opportunity to consider who truly loves her and who is merely using her.’ Theodora frowned like a troubled child.

  ‘I know how much she loves you. That is really the reason it was so easy to turn her against you.’ Maria tapped her goblet with her fingernail, a staccato pecking that went on for almost half a minute. ‘It is strange how thin the membrane of love is,’ she finally said, ‘and how precariously it withstands the pollutants of the soul. Sometimes when I am with a man I love, I feel that I can reach inside him and find only decay.’

  ‘Darling. Some day you will find the proper kind of love with a man. Give yourself time to find the Christ’s love, and then you will find a man’s true love.’

  Maria chattered her front teeth in minute, nervous little clicks. ‘I feel that on this journey I will find a resolution. I will either fill my soul, or my being will completely evaporate, like a dead lake. But I will not be this empty, cold thing any more, a shell with no light inside. My palmist, Ata, told me that soon love, fate and death would collide in my life. I am not afraid to die, because I am already dead. But once before I die I would like to love a man and not feel the rot in his soul.’ Maria looked at Theodora almost belligerently for a moment, and then her face slowly began to contort. She burst into tears.

  III

  The world was a reflection in a copper sheet. The dust stirred by the horses’ hooves swirled up into the dust already suspended in the air like a dry, chalk-fine fog. The approaching horses of the scouts merely added to the choking ochre cloud.

  The scouts, dark, wild-eyed men called akrites, wore jerkins of quilted cotton over short linen tunics. There were four of them, silver helmets dulled to brass in the dusty pall. They rode directly to the Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores, bowed in their saddles, and began talking with animated gestures. Haraldr had difficulty with the dialect - the akrites were from Armenikoi, a theme half-way to Khoresm - but he understood. A Saracen raiding party, fair-sized, was just ahead.

  ‘It appears that the Saracens have positioned themselves to block the Cilician Gates,’ came the quick, effortless translation.

  Haraldr pushed his helmet back, wiped the grit from his forehead, and smiled at Gregory Zigabenus, the interpreter who had accompanied the Rus trade fleet. ‘I understood some of that already, Gregory.’ Then he said in Greek, ‘Because you . . . teach well.’ He added his own silent thanks to Odin and Kristr for this gift of the little eunuch. The assignment apparently had been by chance, but the adventuresome, unfailingly cheerful Gregory was as welcome as a third hand in a single combat. Like every Roman, Gregory was mute on the subject of the Emperor and his immediate circle, but otherwise he had been a continuing education in what Joannes had called ‘the shoals of the Roma
n system’. And strange waters - not to mention dangerous - they were indeed.

  Haraldr looked down the road up which he had just ridden, along with two dozen horsemen of the Imperial Excubitores. The graded path, here only wide enough to draw a wagon through, wound down through the russet haze towards a dull, brownish-grey plateau ringed by the slightly darker convolutions of the Taurus Mountains as they rose to their snow-crested heights. He had never imagined so much land, or so little beauty. And yet the mute austerity of the terrain bespoke the power of the Romans. For almost six weeks, at a clip that surely measured at least two and sometimes three rowing-spells a day, the Imperial entourage had traversed territory not unlike this. Not as dusty, certainly; farther to the north the peaks were less precipitous and the pastures still held some of summer’s verdure. But the distances, the isolation on many stretches, surpassed anything imaginable even on Norway’s barren central plateau. Yet, most remarkably, just when one thought that the Romans had finally run out of folk with which to populate this prodigious domain of theirs, the endless road (paved as neatly and much more sturdily than the floor of a Jarl’s hall) would enter the tree-rimmed perimeter of yet another pasture; pass through the rich, dark, relentlessly cultivated communal fields and orchards speckled with ripe fruit; and lead them to the clustered mud-brick, thatch-roofed huts of yet another Roman village. The industry of these provincial Romans, lost in this frightening vastness, was something to behold; hoeing their autumn harvest of vegetables, chopping wood for winter, sacking grain, bundling fodder, driving their massive oxen to and fro, they had coaxed a bounty from a wasteland that a Norse farmer wouldn’t give a piece of silver the size of his fingernail for. And yet, as Gregory had explained, many of these proud, busy people preferred to become rich men’s slaves because of the burden of Imperial taxes on free peasants.

  ‘The Domestic wonders if you wish to go forward with them. He says if you do, you will see a Roman ambush.’

  Haraldr turned to Nicon Blymmedes, Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores: thick-chested, wiry-limbed, about two score years old. Blymmedes was accompanied by two dozen mounted soldiers wearing waist-length mail shirts and conical helms, with their bows and tooled-leather arrow quivers slung over their backs. The rest of their vanda, a company of about two hundred strong, were footmen who had disappeared up ahead, seemingly swallowed by tortured rock and swirling dust clouds.

  ‘Yes, thank you, I will,’ said Haraldr directly to the Domestic. He had come to like the hawk-nosed, constantly frowning Blymmedes. The Domestic, unlike so many of these endlessly scheming Romans, seemed solely concerned with doing his own job properly - no, perfectly - and seeing that his subordinates performed with similar punctiliousness. Yet he was eager to teach, and he had accepted Haraldr as a fellow warrior with perhaps a different philosophy of warfare but of considerable aptitude in martial affairs.

  The small contingent started up the steeply climbing roadway. Blymmedes fell back between Haraldr and Gregory and began another of his tactical discourses, vigorously illustrated with his leather-tough hands. ‘You see, I have sent my infantry up ahead’ - Blymmedes thrust both his hands forward as Gregory translated - ‘and positioned them in the heights on either side of the road.’ He pushed his hands apart to show the dispersal. ‘Now we will come forward past the position of our hidden infantry. We will appear to be a mere scouting party, but one that offers the prize of a foolish officer of the Roman Imperial Taghmata. The Saracens will see us and advance quickly to profit from my impudence. Prudently we will retreat the way we have come. They will follow us, lusty with the promise of my ransom. When our pell-mell retreat has lured the Saracens beneath the positions held by my infantry . . .’ Blymmedes brought his hands together with a loud clap.

  ‘Deal with the enemy on your terms,’ said Haraldr directly, repeating one of Blymmedes’s axioms.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Domestic, hazel eyes flashing eagerly. Then he shook his finger. ‘But meet the enemy. The ambush does not work if you simply run away. Retreat alone cannot win victory.’

  Gregory pretended to translate. ‘You understood? I thought so. The Domestic, I think, feels that Roman strategy has become too cautious under the man who commands him. This is as far as he can go in criticizing the Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena, however.’

  Blymmedes was now occupied ahead, having taken the point of the column. He signalled to his unseen forces in the hills. The road continued to climb and narrow, the crumbling, shard-strewn rock walls rising ever more steeply. They rounded a blind turn and looked up to a narrow defile backed by nothing but thin coppery sky. Blymmedes fell back for a moment and whispered to Gregory, then went boldly up ahead.

  ‘These are the Cilician Gates,’ whispered Gregory. ‘The Domestic wanted you to know that Alexander brought his army through this pass.’

  Haraldr nodded. Alexander of Macedon, or the Great Alexander, had been a Greek King who had conquered the world to the Gates of Dionysus in the days before the Roman Empire even existed. Alexander sounded more like a god than a man, but the Domestic often referred to his tactics and courage and seemed very proud to speak the same language as this great demigod.

  The horsemen wandered slowly into the massive jaws of the Cilician Gates. Haraldr caught a breathtaking glimpse of rugged terrain falling away to a dull green plain.

  The Saracens seemed to come out of the rocks. They led their horses by the reins, then saddled up deliberately, as if they had enough time to pause and straighten the quills of their arrows. A few bright curved blades began to flash, and bows rose in disjointed arabesques against the metalled sky. The Domestic, conspicuously displaying himself four ells in front of the rest of his horsemen, held his reins deftly, almost as if he were preparing to touch a woman’s face. Horses snorted, but no one on either side made a sound. Then the nearest Saracen, a beetle-brown face with a coal-black beard and eyes rimmed with glaring whites, raised his arms and legs like a four-winged bird preparing to fly. Arrows hissed from quivers.

  It was as if the mountains behind them had found huge metal voices. Even the Domestic whipped his head around with astonishment. Then his face almost instantly purpled. In that same instant the Saracen leader let his limbs relax and fall. He neatly wheeled his horse about, and the rest of his band just as suddenly turned their rearing mounts and began to vanish into dust and rock.

  Haraldr had no idea of the specific meanings of the raging oaths the Domestic began to bellow with bulging-eyed fury, but a translation was hardly necessary. Blymmedes spurred his horse and charged back down the road. The komes in charge of the vanda ordered the rest to follow. The Domestic’s curses were quickly swallowed up by the unearthly, blaring, pounding, whistling din of the lifeless crags.

  A short way down, Haraldr reined his horse around a switchback and saw the source of the sound. The road was jammed with armoured horsemen and footmen as far as anyone could see; the files of soldiers in mail coats and breastplates glinted through the dust like strands of silver thread as the road zigged and zagged thousands of ells down the mountain. Jammed in among the vanguard of this army were two dozen musicians equipped with every manner of drum, horn, bell and whistle one could imagine. Haraldr knew immediately what he beheld; ever since they had crossed the Bosporus into Asia, the citizen-army of each provincial theme had, as soon as the Imperial caravan had entered their territory, joined the Imperial Taghmata to guard their Empress and her Holy pilgrims. But the meeting places had always been carefully appointed. This was a curious breach of protocol and military discipline.

  The Domestic’s livid face was inches from the rather puffy, even somewhat indolent features of a man mounted on a huge white horse. The horses trotted in quarter-circles as Blymmedes bellowed furiously. The other man simply sat higher in the saddle, like a traveller trying to ignore a troublesome dog. Finally Blymmedes abruptly ended his diatribe, shook his head like a tutor puzzled by a witless student, and motioned with his hands, as if he were attempting to push the entire thematic a
rmy down the mountain. The other man ignored this signal and rode past the Domestic, stopping just in front of the Excubitores; Haraldr was close enough to detect the perfumed fragrance that surrounded both rider and horse. The man was groomed like a courtier, his brown beard immaculately trimmed, the beautifully chased dragons on his gold breastplate still bright beneath a thin layer of dust; even his horse’s bridle was brightly enamelled. His indigo eyes, which despite the slackness of his face had a command to them, swept over the Excubitores, Gregory and Haraldr with no acknowledgement whatsoever that they were separate individuals but as if collectively they represented a single large deposit of donkey excrement to be avoided on his upward journey. Then he turned, spurred back to his waiting army, and shouted a command in a brisk, imperious voice. With the same musical cacophony that had heralded its arrival, the thematic army turned and began to lumber back down the mountain.

  Blymmedes rode back to his men, shaking his head. ‘Next lesson,’ he shouted to Haraldr, ‘I teach you how to keep the thematic army from scaring off your quarry when you’ve already got their heads in your game bag!’

  ‘Who was that man?’ asked Haraldr.

  The Domestic’s eyes flared again. ‘That eminent tactician was Meletius Attalietes, Strategus of the Cilician Theme and the first son of the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes.’

  ‘You see, Mistress, interruption of the effluent phlegms that produce these desires is the reverse of the procedures that stimulate the sexual inclination. One must simply manipulate the organs with careful consideration of vortices that regulate the discharge of the vital humours. Mother of God willing, we have every reason to assume that you will be relieved of your grievous and insolent inflammation before the hour of Compline.’

  The Empress of the Romans, Zoe the Purple-Born, ordered her face towelled by white-robed Leo, her eunuch vestitore, and considered for a moment the advice of this new specialist in the treatment of sexual disorders. The deathly pale, long-faced eunuch physician, who always seemed to perspire above his upper lip, was in countenance alone dour enough to dissipate the carnal appetite. But as for his procedures, Zoe seriously had to consider that perhaps she had exhausted the knowledge of these learned charlatans. What good had the specialists done to facilitate marital relations with her late husband, Romanus? The endless applications of aphrodisiac ointments prescribed by these experts had done nothing to restore virility to the senescent manhood of a white-haired windbag. And now that she herself required the reverse procedure, due to her present husband’s persistent neglect of his marital obligations, their success seemed equally unlikely. Michael. No, she would not think of him any longer. The disappointment was too acid.