Byzantium (17 page)

Neither the Topoteretes nor his men took notice of this catastrophe; they had been distracted by the approach of another contingent of a dozen mounted men quite similar in arms and attire to their own. The leader of these horsemen had a sweat-beaded, squarish face and red, irritated eyes, as if he had just ridden right through the smoke. The Topoteretes tipped his head deferentially, and the red-eyed man spoke with animated gestures. Then the red-rimmed eyes turned to Haraldr, widened in surprise, and he immediately gave the Topoteretes what seemed to be a brusque order. The Topoteretes produced the magical documents again and the red-eyed horseman looked at them, handed them back, and thought for a moment. He snapped to one of his men, there was some probing of saddle packs, and a length of dark cloth was finally handed to the Topoteretes. The Topoteretes then spoke to John the interpreter.

‘You have to be blindfolded.’

Haraldr iced with terror. There was no reason, unless they intended to put a blade to his neck. Two horsemen were already at his side. He reflexively pushed them away. His horse reared, and more horsemen closed around him. He threw one right out of the saddle, but a blow cracked his head. Sparks showered as he sent another Byzantine flying off his horse. Hands clutched all over him, he heard a sound like glacier fracturing and smashing into his head, and a brilliant light exploded into darkness.

Ice. He was in a huge ice cave. His head throbbed and his neck ached. How had he got back to Norway? Had he ever left? Yes. The pounding in his head had a pattern; he could think between the metallic throbs. Yes. He had left. River. City. Haraldr jerked erect. His eyes focused. Ice. Somehow the Griks had carved a room from ice. The pure white light, more diffuse than day but almost as bright, momentarily defeated Haraldr’s quest for reason. Then he shaded his eyes and concentrated on bringing his mind back. The ice was stone. Incredible stone. A dazzling white marble with sinuous blue veins. His head lolled and he strained to study the complex pattern on the floor, knowing that if he understood it, his mind would come back. The floor was paved with polished marble, a woven pattern of bands and circles of emerald and ruby-coloured marble. The light that glazed the marble seemed to come from high above. He looked up. Light flooded in from a ring of windows set at an impossible height.

‘You shouldn’t have fought.’ The frog face of John the interpreter leered at him, but he was speaking the words of the Topoteretes, who crouched over Haraldr with apparent concern. The blindfold was just a precaution.’

Against what?
thought Haraldr, painfully reorienting.
To keep me from seeing what? So I won’t know my way to
. . .
what? Where exactly am I?
Haraldr rubbed his head and looked around the vast hall. Dozens of finely dressed eunuchs circulated, buzzing in discussion with one another as well as some soldiers, four or five dark-skinned Saracens, and several big, shaven-headed men in poor brown wool tunics little better than those worn by Norse slaves.

Just a few paces from Haraldr an excruciatingly thin eunuch with a curiously flabby, pale face abruptly terminated his conversation and minced delicately, on slippered feet, towards Haraldr’s group. With one sweep of his narrowly spaced hazel eyes the eunuch managed to look right through the Topoteretes, give the merest hint of contempt at the sight of the black-frocked interpreter, and completely ignore Haraldr. One hand propped on his bony hip, the eunuch extended the spidery fingers of the other. The Topoteretes placed the documents in the eunuch’s outstretched hand. The eunuch unfolded the packet with the very tips of his fingers, as if the pages had been dipped in fresh dung. He was clearly less impressed than the previous inspectors; he brusquely flipped through even the purple-tinted document. But the eunuch did pause over a plain-coloured sheet, and something he read caused one of his thin, seemingly painted-on eyebrows to quiver slightly. That was the only reaction he betrayed. Without a word he folded the packet, turned, and walked off.

‘You follow him,’ commanded John the interpreter in his sourest tone. ‘And don’t try any more stupid
barbaroi
tricks.’

The eunuch never once looked back to see if Haraldr was following. He left the great hall and, after a long, winding transit over marble-paved corridors, stopped in front of heavy wooden double doors laced with gilt trim. He pulled a yellow silken cord that dangled near the door frame; to Haraldr’s astonishment the doors slid silently open, as if they ran on greased tracks. Without even looking at Haraldr, the eunuch rolled his eyes towards the aperture.

The room was bright and strangely warm and humid; marble benches and compartments lined the walls. Two young boys dressed in short white tunics waited by the doors. ‘Clothes,’ said one of the boys in a heavily accented attempt at Norse. With motions he indicated that Haraldr should take his clothes off. They don’t bathe a man before they toss him in a dungeon, thought Haraldr with constrained relief. Still, he could not escape the sensation that death, however perfumed and silk-frocked, stalked this place. He remembered what Gleb had said. The Griks were never straightforward about anything.

Haraldr stripped and was shown through a door at the end of the room. He was greeted by a blast of hot, steamy air. His eyes watered and for an instant he thought he would be attacked. Then the wonder of the place hit him. The large domed chamber was almost completely filled with a brilliantly blue pool; at the bottom of the pool was a shimmering illusion, a twining green garden depicted with multicoloured bits of tile.

Haraldr luxuriated in the cleansing heat and the cold water; how long had it been since he had enjoyed a steam bath? The pain at the back of his head subsided to a dull ache and he began to reassemble his scattered wits.
Put aside your fear,
he told himself.
Presume that you come as the leader of five hundred Varangians, not a condemned criminal; they had you at their mercy on the street, and yet look where you are now. You have the instrument to serve the Griks, and they clearly have the wealth to serve your ends. But why with every question that is answered are there two new ones? Who is Nicephorus Argyrus? And what was it the Griks didn’t want you to see?

When he had finished bathing, Haraldr was towelled and combed and rubbed with scented oil, then dressed in a long tunic of very fine white silk; the high collar was crusted with heavy embroidery. Back in the marble hall, two eunuchs, both of them surprisingly stout, waited for him along with the birch-thin eunuch who had led him here originally. His head cocked in annoyance, the spindly eunuch cast his eyes over Haraldr as if he had been forced to look at a mutilated corpse. He turned to the other two and compressed his thin lips in an attitude of bored, barest approval; then his wretchedly bony shoulders shuddered slightly and he minced off.

The two big eunuchs flanked Haraldr and each firmly but decorously took an elbow. The hallway eventually turned into a large, sun-flooded arcade. Haraldr squinted out over a blazing expanse of white marble. He could see patches of peacock-blue sea framing a massive temple-like structure several hundred ells away. Then he turned to his left. He gasped and knew for certain where he was.

Spread out over a gentle slope was a glittering jewel box that was an entire city. Fantastic, multicoloured buildings stood on verdant terraces laced with neat rows of flowering trees, shimmering azure ponds and pools, and beds of vermilion blossoms. Scores of domes, held aloft by columns of brilliant jade-green marble or deep plum-coloured porphyry, forming swirling patterns so deft and intricate that they seemed to have been painted against the backdrop of the sea and sky. Here in a magical city within the Great City was the home of the Emperor.

The eunuchs tightened their grip and led Haraldr towards the prodigious building straight ahead; six white columns, so huge in girth that were they hollow a man could build a comfortable cottage within them, thrust up to a marble roof at a dizzying height. Beneath the portico, two-storey silver double doors, embossed with fierce-visaged, armoured eagles, were surrounded by a perfect, motionless semicircle of powerful, dark-eyed men in burnished steel breastplates and steel helms. Haraldr observed the guards’ dusky, foreign features with a sharpness in his breast; these men were Khazars, from Serah’s homeland. The armoured arc split momentarily to allow Haraldr and his escort to pass. The enormous doors slid open as silently as those in the bath.

Paradise. It was not simply the vastness of the hall; a bowman could not have shot the length of the jewelled cavern and the ceiling, coffered with elaborate gold beams flecked with silver medallions, soaring like a fantastic sky. It was the supernatural sumptuousness: pearl-white marble columns topped with plum-coloured capitals wreathed with carved vines and flower buds, candelabra that looked like lacy silver clouds dotted with glinting ice crystals, curtains of braided ivy, garlands of pink roses, hanging tapestries stitched with lustrous flowers.

The entire back of the hall was cloaked with a vast purple curtain damasked with hundreds of huge eagles embroidered in gold. Forming a sort of funnel beneath the hangings were two ranks of soldiers in golden armour, bearing standards topped with golden eagles and dragons. A single figure stood at the very end of the funnel, in front of a now-visible seam where the two halves of the curtain met. Haraldr’s heart leapt to his throat.

This man was as tall and broad as Hakon. He wore a golden breastplate and a plumed golden helmet with metal cheek pieces folded over his entire face, concealing all save glints of blue behind the eye slits. A Varangian Guard, certainly, and very likely Mar Hunrodarson himself.
I would not have expected this Paradise to end at the executioner’s block,
thought Haraldr with a groin-stabbing renewal of his fear.
But I am told that the Griks rarely do the expected.

The Varangian stood perfectly motionless, an immense silver-bladed broad-axe inlaid with elaborate gold niello pressed to his chest. Like a rodent mesmerized by a snake, Haraldr was drawn to the eerie glimmer of life visible within the eye slits, expecting some evidence of malice or recognition. But the guarded irises were so still, they might have been bits of glass.

The curtain drew aside slightly and the eunuchs led Haraldr past the rigid Varangian. The rest came like a fantastic dream. He was in a vast, rose-scented, many-domed hall echoing with an unsettling, powerfully sonorous music that pulsed within his very bones. The hail was filled with a living rainbow, hundreds of utterly motionless, silk-sheathed, bejewelled figures arrayed in perfectly concentric semicircles, each ring a different dazzling hue. The rainbow was broken in the middle by a great massing of incandescent gold: a throne the size of a small building flanked by two large trees with leaves of delicate gold; gem-bright birds perched in the gilt branches. As Haraldr approached, the birds tittered and called in a supernatural melody, cocking their brilliant heads and flapping their wings. Haraldr came to the terrifying realization that the birds were in fact jewels, creatures of enamelled gold to which somehow the Griks had given the power of both movement and voice. Then the beasts came to life from behind the trees and the blood drained from Haraldr’s face and his knees buckled. Lions! Creatures of the gods! The great beasts rushed forward to devour him, tails pounding the ground and huge jaws gaping. They roared like the trumpets of doom, and Haraldr reflexively felt for the pommel of the sword that he had been forced to leave back in the barracks.

The lions halted as if the gods themselves had turned them to stone. Reason tried to command Haraldr’s whirling senses. Not stone but metal. The lions were incredible metal creatures, just like the birds. But this deduction did nothing to assuage fear. What wizardry, or, more frighteningly, what knowledge did this Emperor possess?

The huge throne was covered with a purple satin canopy and encrusted with gemstones and iridescent white pearls. The giant god who might have occupied this grandiose furnishing was not present. Instead, a mechanical man sat to one side of the vast cushion. His body was metal. No, he was swathed in a full-length tunic of stiff purple brocade covered with mazelike courses of gems and precious spangles and flocking eagles of flickering gold thread. He wore a jewelled, helmet-like cap, and no winter sky was as thick with stars as this cap was with gemstones; they spilled from the crown in sparkling runnels that streamed down the mechanical man’s eerily human cheeks. The device’s eyes were agates polished to a watery sheen. Kristr! Not agates. These eyes moved! They were wet with life. This was a living man! No, not a man. A god. Perhaps all-conquering Kristr himself.

The two eunuchs threw Haraldr to the floor and prostrated themselves alongside him; this ritual of obeisance was repeated three times. Then the eunuchs raised Haraldr to his feet. He looked for the throne and moaned with awe. The entire gold edifice floated high overhead, the purple canopy seemingly grazing the gold-flecked dome. Kristr - He could be no other - looked down on him from his rightful position above all mortals.

His head craned back, dully gaping, Haraldr tried to focus his entire will on reason’s moribund whispers, and for a moment he found a certain mental equilibrium. Metal dragons and lions and birds and fire that burns on water and now this. The rest are the creations of men, and so this must be as well.

He clung to that thought even as his terrified awe rushed him off, as savagely as the currents of the Dnieper, on the dark river of ignorance and superstition. No, no, reason struggled, all the works of men. But if this is the Emperor, does it matter that he is not immortal Kristr? He is a man made a god, with the power of the gods.

An elderly eunuch in a gold-hemmed robe approached slowly and deliberately; age spots covered his bald head. He looked directly at Haraldr, his steady gaze a startling contrast to the condescending evasion practised by the lesser officials. The eunuch’s pale grey eyes were sad, weary and ancient, as if he had seen the cares of a dozen lives. He motioned Haraldr to bring his head down.