The lance blurred by him and he heard Halldor grunt. Haraldr swung his shield to his front and looked back. Halldor hung by one hand, his face gushing blood. Haraldr’s shield took a blow and he had to turn. His sword lifted the Seljuk into the air and sent him flailing into the gorge. Haraldr crouched atop the rock lip. He could see right through the crenellation into the walled town. As if the kastron were a box tipped to one side, every man in the city seemed to have spilled onto the west wall or stood below it, waiting for an opportunity to view Grettir’s performance; apparently only a single guard had remained posted along the entire east wall. Haraldr surveyed the route he intended to take as the others began to gather beside him. Halldor’s face was severely gashed. ‘Can you go on?’ asked Haraldr.
‘They didn’t cut my legs off,’ snapped Halldor.
Haraldr dropped to the grey-brick pathway atop the wall. They already had twenty-five men on top now; enough. The rest should be able to join them quickly. Flanked by Halldor and Ulfr, Haraldr took his axe with one hand, set his shield, and positioned the Roman with the fire blower almost against his back.
The first Seljuks to notice the Varangian invaders were lost in the clamour near the centre of the west wall. Haraldr could see them distinctly pounding and tugging at their fellows like miniature actors in a raucous comedy. Then a few more Seljuks began to turn, but most were held rapt by Grettir and the naked mime of their whores. When the Varangian phalanx reached the southwest corner of the kastron, they met the unwary Seljuk spectators like a whirring, relentless steel engine.
The carnage was appalling; hastily produced scimitars did almost nothing to deter the Varangian advance. The first Seljuks to fall screamed their oaths to Allah or simply ululated with surprise, but their distress was blanketed by the blaring revelry of their fellows. Only after dozens had pitched off the battlements did the change in tenor begin to spread orchestrally north, to the centre of the wall, but the crowding made a concerted defence impossible. Only the sheer weight of frantic bodies began to stop the Varangian push. Haraldr shouted to the infantryman armed with the fire blower.
The long brass tube, a glowing taper now fastened to the tip, jutted past Haraldr’s shield, a phallus far more obscene than the pig bladder Grettir still played with below. Haraldr grimaced against the intense heat as the fire streamed out. The molten lance virtually seemed to blow a hole in the first Seljuk, then splattered; Haraldr quickly stomped his boots to shake off the singeing droplets. The spout of flame swept in a slow arc across the breadth of the battlements, quickly extending its reach as flaming Seljuks plunged from the wall. Within seconds the Seljuks began to leap well in advance of the fiery tongue. When the liquid was exhausted, Haraldr looked ahead, just past the blackened bricks that defined the fire blower’s deadly range. Waiting for him was an armoured guard cordoning the white-silk-clad figure of Kilij. With Ulfr and Halldor at his side, and now almost a hundred Varangians on the walls behind him, Haraldr pushed forward across the scorched bricks. The Seljuk guard died quickly, their elegant scimitars and oaths to Allah no match for Hunland steel and Odin’s fury.
‘Kilij,’ said Haraldr. He handed his shield to Ulfr and gripped his axe with both hands. He had already calculated that the next arc of his blade would be perhaps more fateful than the blow that had killed Hakon, and yet he did not need Odin to strengthen his arm, only to assuage his fears. Before he had climbed to these walls, he had been certain that when Kilij’s head rolled into the streets, his Seljuk followers would immediately give up their cause and their captives. But now that wager seemed far less certain.
The Seljuk leader was viciously handsome, his dark, sharp features framed with a dense beard and a beautiful engraved silver helm. Holding Haraldr’s blade with his eyes, Kilij slowly knelt, removed his helm, and began a recitation punctuated with many Allahs. Haraldr ignored the appeal and stepped forward, conscious that if he had erred in his judgement, he would never escape these walls alive. He caught the Seljuk’s night-filled eyes and in Odin’s ancient voice he recited the phrase that the Mandator had taught him. The words were said to mean, ‘I am the Avenging Angel.’
Kilij lowered his forehead to bricks speckled with the blood of his guards. Atop the walls, the silence was now complete. From the city below came the wails of badly burned men. Haraldr told Halldor to hold Kilij’s head up. Halldor yanked on the glossy black hair, bringing the dark face to that of the golden angel. Kilij’s pupils became antic flying insects seeking escape from a doomed head. Haraldr lifted his axe high, his own fate as tentative as his victim’s.
To the left, down in the town below, Kilij’s desperate eyes found their sanctuary. He lifted his head defiantly and his left arm shot out, a gold-ringed finger pointing. He smiled wickedly.
Down below, on the street just inside the gate, another Seljuk ululated insanely. Kneeling at his feet was a woman in a white silk robe, her raven hair long and undone. The Seljuk who had cried out jerked the flowing tresses and forced the face of the kneeling figure to look up. Instantly numb, his upraised axe suddenly weighted with the huge burden of this revelation, Haraldr could only murmur the name once, somewhere in the last redoubt of his reason. Maria.
A second Seljuk stepped forward, touched a heavy-bladed scimitar to Maria’s neck, then raised the blade to the sky. The swordsman looked up to the walls, and Kilij grinned like death. The exchange was now stated in terms so graphic that no language would be needed. The life of Kilij for the life of the Roman woman.
Maria did not lower her head, nor did Haraldr lower his axe. Their eyes met, her blue fires perhaps pleading, perhaps challenging, clearly questioning him. A simple instinct bound his arms for a heartbeat, and then he listened to some vastly more profound intuition. He found the answer he would give her beyond love, beyond death, somewhere amid the black ice of eternity.
The only sensation Haraldr felt as his axe descended in a whooshing arc was the slight vibration of Kilij’s skull splitting and the virtually simultaneous cracking of his coccyx. The axe clanged on brick.
Halldor held the two halves of Kilij together at the shoulders, but faeces and bowels still gushed onto the bricks, and the neat seam along his chest spurted blood. In the courtyard the Seljuk executioner wearily lowered and then dropped his scimitar, stunned by his leader’s demise and utterly astonished at the huge golden demon’s ferocious disregard for the life of the woman second only to the prophet Christ’s mother. It was so quiet that the sound of the Seljuk’s blade clattering to the street seemed like a small rock slide. The Seljuk who held Maria’s hair let it slip from his fingers like a bewitched man watching the gold in his hands turn to sand. Her face radiant, her cheeks and neck flushed as if with love-making, Maria stood and stared at the vision on the walls above her.
Haraldr pulled his axe free. With each hand he grabbed a lock of Kilij’s hair but saw that the scalp would simply pull away from the skull. He found a grip on each side of Kilij’s neck. He lifted, oblivious to the horrifying scent of the spilling organs. His arms swooping wide like the giant-taloned wings from Nidafell, Haraldr raised the butchered halves of Kilij, turned to face the courtyard, and stood with arms out and elbows locked, like a hunter displaying a brace of rabbits. ‘I am the Avenging Angel,’ he told the Seljuks in their language. ‘I have come for my Mother.’
The Seljuks’ billowing robes seemed to collapse like felled tents as every man among them threw himself to the ground and pressed his lips to the dust. A frightening silence followed this huge rustling homage to the terrible golden avenger. Only one person remained standing within the Citadel, her brilliant face still lifted to Haraldr, her gem-blue eyes telling him that she was the fate to whom he had just given his reply.
No one present could remember having seen the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes walk for at least ten years. But the old man, his spine grotesquely conformed to the shape of the chairs in which he spent his days and nights, hobbled to the window. He placed his thick, gouty fingers against the marble-re
vetted recess and pushed his deformed nose towards the glass. He hacked wetly as he always did before he spoke. Everyone quieted. Despite his massive chest and the leonine growl with which he habitually cleared his throat, the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes had a voice like a whisper beside a grave. ‘Dogs, whores, lepers. Look how they lick their adulterous mother’s pustulant afterbirth.’
Attalietes shuffled around to face his retinue. His thin white hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck, and his grey beard fell in sagacious disorder to his chest. A large purple blotch spread over his broad, nut-coloured forehead; his nose and cheek below his left eye were scarred by surgeries to remove similar skin malignancies. Several years ago Attalietes had sent for a specialist in facial restorations from Alexandria but had dismissed the man for reasons he would never discuss. The Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes was not accustomed to giving reasons.
‘You get over here.’ He jerked his swollen hand at his son, Ignatius, as if he were strangling a chicken.
Ignatius Attalietes had the same indolent features as his late brother, Meletius, but as he preferred to avoid altogether the salutary effects of outdoor exercise - having hit his head badly while taking instruction at polo as a very young boy - he had a particularly spectral pallor. Boils spotted his forehead and nose, as if some mysterious demonic force had directed his skin to emulate his father’s afflictions. He lowered his head and minced towards his father.
‘Get over here, you spineless milksop.’ Attalietes batted his son’s ear. ‘Mele’s dead and you wring your wrists like the capons at court. Mele would have sent that holy turd a pile of their whoreson noses. But you. You tell me what you see.’
Ignatius inclined slightly towards the window with the vertiginous sense of a man looking into an abyss. He could see all he needed to see. Three stories below, the street was solid rabble, and for that matter every street as far as he could see down to the distant pale square of the Forum Bovis was jammed with the clamouring beasts. They were disgusting, the terrible anonymity of their ragged, brown-tunicked poverty. It was as if the sewers beside their tenements had flooded, and now the feculent sludge had filled the streets. They had set fires at many of the intersections, and the smudgy pillars were choking off the sun, deepening the vile coloration of the scene. Ignatius didn’t care any more. He was frightened. He began to sob softly beside his father’s wheezing face.
Attalietes decided not to humiliate his son further. What was the use? As much as Ignatius was a coward, Mele - he still could not believe it - Meletius had been a fool. What was he doing south of Antioch in the vanguard of the slut’s escort? No doubt the holy turd, Joannes, and his sexless brother, Constantine, were laughing richly over Mele’s corpse. And now this. Oh, the black-frocked excrement’s slimy hands are all over this, certainly. Damn fool, Attalietes thought, admonishing himself. I should have withdrawn to Arcadiopolis or Nicomedia when I heard of the whore’s abduction. But there was so much to do here, what with the plunging value of land in Cilicia and Teluch and Lycandus. My God, even Armenikoi has shown some downward trends. Too much to do, too much possible still. God is so cruel. When Nicon Attalietes had been young and vigorous, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer had limited the universe of the Dhynatoi to polo and banquets and hunts. Those luxuries had cost the Dhynatoi more of their vitality than if they had rebelled and had been cast into the Numera or Neorion. But now, when there was so much to be taken, so much simply waiting to be plucked, there were only feeble old men without the strength to grasp it, and callow youths without the courage to reach for it. Perhaps Mele would have been the one to extend the Dhynatoi’s grasp again, Attalietes silently lamented. But Mele is dead and the mob is at the door.
‘Manganes.’ Isaac Manganes, a short, Asiatic-featured man who glowed like an icon in his robe of Hellas silk, came to the window. A former middle-level military commander from Armenikoi who had been denied promotion by less competent superiors, Manganes had begun working for Attalietes as manager of several estates in Armenikoi. He had proved himself so much more able than the network of cousins, nephews, and - yes, sons - who supervised most of Attalietes’s properties that he had soon risen to overseer of all the Asiatic estates. When the position of Strategus of Cilicia had been purchased for Meletius, Manganes had been summoned to the Empress City to become the elder Attalietes’s next-in-command, with responsibility for the enormous body of day-to-day details the old man didn’t like to bother with. That is the plight of the Dhynatoi now, thought Attalietes as Manganes came to his side. To have to depend on the lowborn for our survival. Well, at least Manganes appreciated the luxuries to which he had become accustomed.
‘I have to tell you, the situation is hopeless.’ Manganes knew his patron preferred blunt talk to the florid dissimulations one heard at court. That, less than health concerns, was why the old warrior had not entered the Chalke Gate to the Imperial Palace for perhaps five years. Besides, as Attalietes always said, ‘Why should I go to his palace and endure his strutting capons and branded felons when I have a dozen of my own palaces?’ Unfortunately, considered Manganes as he watched the mob surge against the gates of Attalietes’s vast hilltop residence, this palace is about to be sacked and burned by the unclean horde. Unless . . . Well, the old man will have to suggest it first. There are some things a hireling from Armenikoi can never say.
‘You’ve considered . . . everything?’ Attalietes’s black-streaked white eyebrows quivered as he faced Manganes.
‘Senator, it has been well conceived. The . . . duping of Meletius, the abduction of the Empress, the dispatch of the Grand Domestic and the rest of the Imperial Taghmata to recover the purple-born. You’ll recall that I cautioned against the reduction in your personal guard even though we were all convinced that under the Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena the Imperial Taghmata had become our personal guard. This is just the sort of eventuality I was concerned about. As long as the Taghmata is under the authority of the Emperor, our assurances of its protection cannot be absolute.’
‘All right, Manganes, you’ve made enough noise shutting the gate I left open.’ Attalietes wheezed irritably. ‘Why can’t we buy off the mob’s leaders? Surely the walking dung heap has not paid this stinking herd so well?’
‘Senator, the Orphanotrophus Joannes has a unique system of inducements. In his one hand he offers the carrot; his orphanages and charity hospitals. Entirely inadequate for the demands on them but sufficient to offer hope. In the other hand Joannes carries his whip. Neorion. And of course, in this matter an even more powerful force is at work.’
Attalietes nodded slightly. The purple-born harlot. His legacy. Attalietes could still see the Bulgar-Slayer strutting before the Sacrum Consistorum, hands thrust against his hips, pausing to twirl his black beard as he pondered the next advance of Rome’s borders. The arrogance of his simplicity! Throwing away his purple robes and rings and diadems to receive his supplicants bareheaded in a tunic the colour of ashes. Always surrounded by his barbaroi goons, as if he could not trust his own courtiers; it was he who had invited the fair-hair menace to the very bedchamber of Roman power. His lifelong hatred for the Dhynatoi was evident in every rough, clipped utterance, in every brutal, larcenous action. His vicious Novel No. 29, forcibly returning estates of the Dhynatoi to the dull-witted slovens who had not maintained them in the first place! Why hadn’t the Bulgar-Slayer seen the true glory the highborn would have afforded him if only he had included them in his vision of Rome. Instead of the glowering, ruthlessly simple despot had raised his throne on the offal of peasants and labourers.
‘No one can buy their devotion from the purple-born,’ emphasized Manganes. He coughed deliberately and dared to prompt the inevitable. ‘Still, even the purple-born has her enemies. We have ample proof of that in this conspiracy in which we have become pawns.’
Attalietes turned slowly from the window and with laborious motions and rasping breath returned to his gilt-and-velvet chair. His brilliantly robed retinue faced him from a respe
ctful distance: two elderly senators; his useless nephew, Manuel; four glorified accountants with what seemed to the old man almost uniformly pinched, narrow faces and squinting, myopic eyes; his eunuch chamberlain; and the obligatory staff of three additional fluttering capons. If any sight could compel the unprecedented step he was about to take, they were such an epiphany. Yes, their faces told him what he had long suspected but until now would not admit. The Dhynatoi could no longer stand alone. They would have to make an alliance. An alliance with the Devil. But which Devil?
Attalietes rattled the phlegm in his throat. ‘Well,’ he said, exhaling, ‘you have read all the proposals from the two extortionists who have offered to save us from the mob. What do you think, if that is not asking the impossible?’
Manganes surveyed the numb faces and coughed again. ‘Senator, we know the Hetairarch has the lesser ambition.’
‘I know the Hetairarch,’ offered Ignatius with a sudden brightening. ‘We have spoken about horses three or four times. He is very civilized.’
‘Yes.’ Fools, thought Attalietes. Manganes is too young to have seen the Varangian victories at Scutari and Abydos, the victories that had saved the throne of the Bulgar-Slayer. What dung! He had been no Bulgar-Slayer, just a Varangian payer. And now this barbaroi Hetairarch who was far too civilized for anyone’s good. Fools.
The white-haired, immaculately groomed Senator and Magister Romanus Scylitzes spoke up. Owner of huge chunks of the themes Thessalonica and Dyrrachium, his speech reeked with presumed Hellenistic elegance. ‘My esteemed colleague, virtuous mentor and indefatigable paramount. Might I offer a deduction of my own? I declare the Orphanotrophus the inferior source of jeopardy, offering these substantiations. The Orphanotrophus and his egregiously purple-clad sibling suffer from the dilute blood of the plebeian classes. Because they are not conditioned to the obligations required by their station, they will rapidly weary of their lofty occupations. Suffering from languishment and irresolutions due to these exhaustions, the midnight-cloaked will be forced to gesture forth with his own hand, not in augur of our own despoliation, but suppliantly, in reciprocation of the gesture he would have us perform today, though vastly exacerbated against restraint.’ Insufferable, turd-spewing windbag. Joannes hardly needs an hour’s sleep each night and his brother has the endurance of a pack mule. As usual, it was pointless to counsel with these parasites. An old man would decide the way an old man best decides. With his ancient, ulcerous churning gut. And that decision has already been made. ‘Chamberlain. Send my secretary.’ Attalietes raised and shook his bloated fist. ‘The rest of you, get out.’
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