Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  ‘Maria,’ asked Zoe, ‘what do you think of this physician’s ambitious promulgations? In your experience is desire physical, something that can be manipulated by pressure on the offending internal organs? Or is it rather spiritual and therefore beyond the probing fingers of our learned specialists?’

  Maria puckered her brow, cracking the dried cosmetic paste the Empress had applied all over her face. She sat on a gilt camp stool set in front of the Empress’s portable Magyar steam bath; only Zoe’s flushed face was visible at the top of the round leather cabinet that enclosed the Imperial body. ‘I am certain that it is both. Of the two components of desire, the physical is easier to assuage. The spiritual element of desire, however, can lead one to overcome even a physical repulsion and enjoy the love of a man who is fair neither in limb nor in countenance.’ She idly dipped her finger in the silver bowl of rose water set on the cabinet beside her chair. ‘I have never loved both the spiritual and physical aspects of the same man, at least not at the same time. Who knows? Perhaps that is an explosive combination of elements, like the ingredients of liquid fire. It would incinerate the soul. But I have never met a man who, having aroused my body, was sad enough to arouse my spirit.’

  ‘How interesting, little daughter.’ Zoe reclined her head towards the crimson silk canopy of the bathing pavilion. The lamps had already been lit; the sun had just vanished behind the peaks of the Taurus. ‘Do you realize that you have lately come to speak of your amorous pastimes with the most curious melancholy? I advised - no, implored - you to bring some sort of... diversion with you to prevent just this sort of malaise. And this ceaseless wandering in the wilderness would have taxed the virtuous patience of Moses, the chosen of God. It is the vastness of Asia that afflicts the mind with such lassitude and apprehension.’

  ‘I felt this emptiness before we even departed the Empress City.’

  ‘Oh, well, little daughter, you certainly must know that the brighter the flame of passion, the more rapidly the fuel of desire is consumed. Your problem is that you stoke the flames too quickly and awaken in the middle of the night to find that your bed is cold.’ Zoe relaxed as the steam dissipated the road weariness in her back. Michael. She could not elude him. He was the heat that still fevered her nights. If only Joannes had not quenched Michael with lies about Romanus (not lies . . . you watched as they held his head under ... he came up once, gasping, eyes bright). Zoe felt an internal cold, the jeopardy of her immortal soul, as the memory flew by her like a dark comet. But they were lies in the context of her love for Michael and her people. Even Joannes had known that. Joannes. To have had the man who seared her soul wrenched from her scorching grasp by the malignancy she found repellent beyond all else: Joannes. He is the one who has banished me to this life of saintly contemplation. So contemplate I will, though of matters saintly it will not be.

  ‘Mistress?’ asked Maria. ‘Is my own melancholy infectious?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Zoe with a frown that indicated she was still thinking. ‘The Tauro-Scythian. The homes of my own personal Varangian Guard. Haraldr something - I think they all have the same family name, all probably having had the same father. Anyway, he of pirate-slaying fame.’ Zoe’s voice was almost chilling in its deliberation. ‘We have so rudely neglected him, shut up in here with our tittering little birds like Anna and that dreadful Hellenist bent on ransacking the library at Antioch.’

  Maria looked down at the thick blue carpet. She had not dreamt of the Tauro-Scythian harbinger of death since they had left the Empress City. And peering out at him several times a day through the curtains of the Imperial carriage, she had come to see him as simply another oversize barbaroi curiosity. But to look in his death-filled eyes again? She realised that she had seen the doom in his icy irises even that night at Nicephorus Argyrus’s; for a fleeting moment she wanted that tragedy deep inside her, and her womb stirred. But this man would not be a harmless pet like Giorgios. He was a murdering savage from Thule. She had lied to her Aunt Theodora. Out here, in this barren post-apocalyptic vastness, she realised she was afraid of death, and always had been. Her entire life had been driven by her fear of death’s ineluctable darkness. ‘Is it wise?’ she asked. ‘Are we not convinced that he is an informer for Joannes?’

  ‘Symeon assures me that he is,’ said Zoe with bland indifference. She needed no further proof; her Chamberlain Symeon, a vestitore to her uncle, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, for decades, had so many ears in the palace precincts that he would know if a mouse squeaked in the Triclinium (a largely unused ceremonial pavilion) late at night. ‘He says that Joannes himself sponsored the Tauro-Scythians under this Haraldr in the Sacrum Consistorum. And later this Haraldr met Joannes alone at Neorion.’

  Maria crossed herself quickly at the mention of the gruesome tower. ‘Then we have been laudably prudent in excluding him from your presence so far. Why would we now wish to invite this snake into our gilt cage?’

  Zoe arched her perspiration-slickened eyebrows. ‘Except for Symeon and Theodore and Leo and you, darling, I am surrounded by Joannes’s spies as a fishmonger in his booth is by his stinking fish. Besides, I am not suggesting that we uncover our metaphoric bosoms to this Cyclopean menace Haraldr whatever, or even our physical breasts. It’s simply that there is a primitivism, a ... vigour to his race that I find . . . enchanting. We will converse with him, beckon him to share drink with us perhaps, and encourage him to speak to us of his perpetually frozen homeland’ - here Zoe smiled maliciously - ‘and any other matters we may find to our interest.’

  Maria offered her own bewitching smile for the first time since the morning sun had glared over the snowcaps of the Taurus. Zoe, she reminded herself, had been Basil the Bulgar-Slayer’s favourite niece, and while Zoe’s father had been a blathering sophist with the sole ambition of totally depleting, within the providentially brief three years of his reign, the bulging treasuries his older brother had won in a glorious half century of relentless conquest, Zoe had been the heiress to the Bulgar-Slayer’s strength and wiles. Yes, this evening would be amusing, after all. She and her beloved Empress would give Joannes’s Tauro-Scythian busybody all the information he could stuff within his thick skull.

  ‘You’re certain it is the Empress herself you are to see and not Symeon, that--’ Halldor was about to make some satirical reference to the Empress’s prize geld. He caught himself out of deference to Gregory, who had just entered Haraldr’s tent.

  ‘Symeon brought me the message himself. Signed in purple ink just like the Emperor’s missives.’ Haraldr looked over at Gregory, who had put on a white silk robe that swallowed him up as if he were a boy in a man’s tunic. ‘You appear more nervous now than when we faced four times our number in Saracen brigands this afternoon, my friend. Don’t tell me your fearless breast is quavering.’

  Gregory was indeed nervous; he hardly smiled at Haraldr’s attempt to lighten his burden. Blessed though the Holy Mother and Father of the Romans indisputably were, it simply was not safe to come too close to them. As he began his career in the Imperial Administration Gregory had never imagined he would have reason for that concern, and was more than happy to think that his viewings of their Imperial Majesties would be from no greater proximity than those permitted the rabble of the Empress City. Now to think of entering an Imperial pavilion and - may Christ grant him absolution for thinking so - especially that of Her Imperial Majesty, who could quite clearly eliminate anyone who gave her offence, even an Emperor and Autocrator! No, he cautioned himself, it was too irreverent, as well as profoundly unsettling, even to think such things. ‘There is an ancient Greek story I have not told you of, Haraldr Nordbrikt,’ Gregory said weakly. ‘About a man named Daedalus, who built wings of wax for himself and his son. The boy flew too close to the sun and perished.’

  ‘Well,’ said Haraldr, ‘I don’t think my problem on this journey has been one of overexposure to the Imperial sun.’ Haraldr shook his head in bewilderment. He had quickly learned that an assignment to guard the
person of the Empress actually meant guarding the swarm of eunuchs who in fact guarded the person of the Empress. These pale drones, who on this journey had probably not trodden with their silk slippers more than two ells of their Empire’s vast expanse of naked earth, became angry hornets defending their nest when even the homes of Her Majesty’s special Imperial Guard approached the Imperial Carriage and Pavilions. Gregory had insisted to Haraldr that these imperious functionaries were versed in a combat at which he was ill-equipped to best them, so Haraldr had observed the curious protocols and had been rewarded with an occasional sighting of blurred crimson silk as Her Imperial Majesty was escorted from her brightly gilt carriage into the scarlet pavilion that the advance party had waiting for her every evening.

  And Maria. He was certain she was among the ladies who occupied the four curtained carriages; perhaps she even rode in Her Imperial Majesty’s carriage. A eunuch had whispered her name in one of the endless, flustered, hand-wringing deliberations over protocol. Maria. Haraldr could not describe the agitation that had seized him just to hear the name. Was she waiting with her mistress now? How could he keep his face from colouring like a maiden’s when he finally saw her? No. He must not think of her. He was here to serve the Emperor.

  ‘I am certain this will be a brief interview,’ said Haraldr as he gave his hair a final combing; a servant held a mirror above his silver washbasin. ‘Just as one is not permitted in the presence of the Emperor and Autocrator for any length of time.’

  The eunuchs met Haraldr and Gregory just inside the encirclement of one hundred and fifty Varangians that secured the complex of Her Imperial Majesty’s domed brocade pavilions; anyone who came within an axe shaft of this human barricade without plainly declaring a password that was changed each evening would have his skull instantly split. The ritual the eunuchs explained to Haraldr was identical to that for his audience with the Emperor, but with a surprising exception: ‘Her Imperial Majesty,’ the wizened Symeon had unctuously droned, ‘expects you to reply without prompting from her Chamberlain.’

  The entrance to the main Imperial Pavilion was curtained with brocade so thick that it seemed to be made of lead. The sound of some sort of stringed instrument, much more elegant and melodious than anything Haraldr had heard at the court of Yaroslav, sweetened an atmosphere already rich with the scent of fresh roses. Walls of heavy brocade divided the pavilion into separate spacious rooms with gauzy canopies overhead. Haraldr and Gregory were led through two fabric ante-chambers before they were finally thrust to their faces in the thick nap of a carpet that smelled of myrrh.

  A eunuch guided Haraldr to a couch covered in glass-smooth silk. Cushions thick with down seemed to swallow him up, producing a disorienting, weightless feeling. The lamps flickered. He dared not look directly at either woman, but he already knew. His heart pounded his ribs with huge, hollow thumps and he was certain his voice would quaver. This was worse than any battle. Helpless, sinking, he gave himself up to the god who had suffered unspeakable torment to give men the beauty of verse. Let this torture make him as eloquent in the face of her beauty. Maria.

  The voice was throaty, almost mesmerizing, flowing forth like a thick fragrant syrup. Haraldr could only distantly observe that it was not Maria who spoke. ‘Your Mother the Empress greets you and thanks you for the assurance your offices have given her on this most arduous yet joyous pilgrimage.’ Gregory, seated to Haraldr’s left, translated with considerable fortitude. Haraldr forced himself to concentrate.

  When the translation was finished, Haraldr knew he should look upon the Empress. Kristr! Which of the two was lovelier? The Empress was like a living statue, a beauty so ideal that it could exist only in the imagination. Or upon the face next to her. In fact, they looked almost as alike as sisters. The same pearl-laced coils framing the same exquisitely contoured, slightly rouged cheeks; the glistening, deftly sculpted lips. But the eyes of the Empress were ash-tinted with a sorrow that showed even in the surrounding flesh, in minute creases that shadowed the corners of her eyes. Maria’s eyes, almost amethyst in this light, challenged him; they were as hard as the gem they resembled. It was as if she knew of the liberties he had taken with her in his fantasies. He was shamed, a boy confronted by his secret love.

  The Empress said something to Maria about ‘gold’ or ‘golden’, and ‘hair’, and Haraldr’s wealth; it was an aside that Gregory was not invited to translate. Maria’s gemstone eyes remained obdurate, fixed on a point somewhere to Haraldr’s left and considerably behind him. The Empress laughed, showing perfect, small teeth; for the first time Haraldr registered that her coiled tresses were as stunningly golden as Maria’s were raven-black. An uneasy silence followed. The Empress looked at Haraldr steadily, forcing him to lower his eyes. His head buzzed with tension. Was this acute coyness his fantasy lover’s fashion? Hadn’t Maria haunted him with her eyes on their previous meeting? Hadn’t she hoped to see his fair hair again? Oh, no. What a fool, he suddenly realized in the pit of his stomach. That declaration had only been manufactured by Mar to his purpose.

  Maria spoke an aside to the Empress, her tone like a knife’s blade. ‘Tongue’ and ‘oxen’; something to the effect that one should not expect a beast set to the plough to regale one with wit. Haraldr felt as if hot irons had been placed to the backs of his ears. He knew his forehead visibly flamed. Why would not Odin release his tongue? The weight on his chest was crushing.

  The Empress spoke again and Gregory translated. ‘The lady Maria says she has dined with you on a previous occasion and that your tongue was, shall we say, charmingly . . . audacious. It would distress your Mother so to think that the honours and wealth you have won since then have made you reticent among us.’

  Maria’s lips flickered with the barest discernible taunt. Haraldr wondered if his chest would explode with excitement. She remembered him! Her demeanour now was the ruse. Haraldr closed his eyes as an ancient wind swept his mind. Odin was ready to speak.

  ‘Forgive my insolent silence, my Blessed Mother. I can only say that since coming among the Romans I have seen many wonders that have brought comment spontaneously to my tongue. Your Imperial Majesty is the first such wonder to deprive me entirely of the faculty for speech.’

  The Empress’s wine-red lips parted and her pearl teeth sparkled in a display of glee. She sat up and pulled her arms about her knees; her long, elegant white fingers stroked the raised golden-eagle medallions on her silk robe. Maria shifted to place her elbow on a thick maroon cushion. She cast her eyes down.

  Zoe signalled with the merest nod, and a white-robed eunuch passed among the couches with silver goblets on a silver tray. The wine was strong and aromatic and seemed to change flavours in Haraldr’s mouth, ending its passage with a faint sweetness that dissolved on his tongue. A drink for the gods, he thought. He was seduced by the heady vapours and the down and silk that wrapped him up.

  ‘What place in Thule do you come from . . . Har-aldr?’ Zoe successfully feigned interest in her own question.

  ‘Norway.’

  Zoe nodded. ‘Nor-way. And before you earned honour among the Romans, what were you?’

  Haraldr was instantly cold, but almost as quickly he realised that the Empress was asking one question only to get to another. ‘I was a land man at the court of the Great Prince Yaroslav.’

  Maria’s laugh was as harsh as breaking glass. She spoke several sentences to Zoe; Haraldr made out the word servant three times. He was thought a servant’s servant; apparently the Roman’s were not impressed with the Great Prince, and certainly not with his former toll collector. The blood pounded in Haraldr’s ears.

  More wine was served. Zoe spoke between sips. ‘I have heard such tales of you Tauro-Scythians. Is it true that one man may have many wives?’

  Haraldr flushed with wine and embarrassment. He tried to shift his body but the downy cushioning gave way, trapping him as if he were struggling in a spider’s web. ‘Not for those who believe in Kris--Christ. Pagans, perhaps.’

&nb
sp; Zoe’s eyes bored away with insistent insincerity. ‘Yes. I have seen some of you who wear amulets dedicated to a heathen god. He is a bull?’

  Haraldr was confused for a moment. Then he understood. Many Norse pagans wore the hammer of Thor, while the Greek word for bull was the similar-sounding tauros. He explained to the Empress.

  Zoe tired of these preliminaries. She lowered her voice to a gentle growl. ‘So. I have heard that followers of this Thor-god will take a woman and have intercourse with her before an entire multitude. A man will spread his harlot’s haunches atop him even as he sits playing dice with his friends.’

  Haraldr’s face was singed with embarrassment. Was the Empress testing his modesty? Then he remembered the scene in the play, how she had rolled on the floor with her lover. And Hakon had called her a ‘bitch-whore’.

  Maria again directed an aside to Zoe. Haraldr could tell she made an obscene jibe; he did not know many of the words except donkey. He looked sharply at Maria. Who was she but a presumptuous lady-in-waiting, while he was rightful King of Norway. Odin filled his throat with a fate-tempting voice; hadn’t the Empress asked for audacity? ‘I am certain, your Imperial Majesty, that were a Roman to observe our love-making, he would not find it different from the habits he is accustomed to. Unless, of course, his own practices were as curious as those you have described.’