Byzantium (26 page)

‘Fuck her! Fuck her!’ The first few Varangians to shout were quickly joined by a rhythmic chant.

The couple kissed prone for a moment - the not-so-beautiful woman just observed all this with elegant amusement - then rose, turned to the Emperor, and stood and watched while he grabbed his throat like a man choking or poisoned. Neither they nor the monk attempted to help, and the Emperor collapsed in a heap.

‘They’re saying someone murdered an Emperor!’ hissed Halldor. ‘His wife and her lover.’

The monk plucked the Imperial diadem from the fallen Emperor’s head and removed the purple robe. The monk then placed the crown on the yellow-robed man’s head and wrapped him in the purple robe. The beautiful woman turned to the not-so-beautiful woman, erupted with arm-flailing anger, and drove her off the stage. Then the beautiful woman went to one side of the stage to paint her face while the newest Emperor sat contemplatively on his gilded throne, the monk hovering over him in a somewhat sinister tableau.

‘Kristr!’ Haraldr released the strangled oath as a tall blond man wearing huge padding and the uniform of the Varangian Guard entered the stage. The make-believe Varangian stood on the side of the throne opposite the monk, his great axe extended over the Emperor; it was unclear as to whether he was protecting the Emperor or preparing to behead him.

‘Mar Hunrodarson?’ asked Halldor.

Haraldr nodded, his veins iced. He had suspected that the Imperial Throne might be an illusion masking a greater and more sinister power, but to finally see his speculation confirmed by a Roman source, and to know that Mar himself was that power . . . But it wasn’t that clear. What of the black-frock? Was he the mysterious Joannes, and if so, did he and Mar share power?

Before Haraldr could begin to sort through these alarming new questions, the organ raced to a triumphant flourish and a second tall, blond, padded and armoured actor entered the stage, followed by a band of makeshift Varangians. This second mock Norseman was quickly swarmed by a band of actors wearing white robes; he held his Varangians back, then stepped forward and one by one knocked the white-robed actors to the floor.

‘Haraldr! Haraldr! Hardraada! Hardraada!’ chanted the audience.

Haraldr uncomfortably watched his stage persona finish bashing the mock Saracens, then reach into the stage floor and pull out a chest filled with brilliant gold coins. The mock Haraldr proudly displayed the chest to the Emperor, and as he presented the offering, both Mar and the black-frock bent simultaneously and mimed speaking garrulously to the Emperor, each taking an Imperial ear. With that the curtain was drawn.

Haraldr leapt for the stage, intent on asking Euthymius just what message this cryptic, unfinished drama had been intended to convey, even if it meant posing his question with the blade of his sword. But he was quickly intercepted by his pledge-men.

‘Haraldr! Haraldr!’ yelled the Varangians as they swarmed around him.

‘Find Euthymius!’ Haraldr frantically shouted to Halldor.

The Varangians boosted Haraldr to their shoulders, then ebulliently tossed him high into the night sky; they caught him and continued to throw him into the air again and again.

After several minutes Halldor returned and shouted to his still soaring leader. ‘I can’t find Euthymius!’

Someone opened the gates and the whores came in.

Silence. The Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena turned the brass cock at the base of his water clock and emptied the fluid into a washbasin he kept beside the machine’s ponderous, brass-pillared base for precisely that purpose. Even though the hourly whistle did not sound at night, he hated the insidious ratcheting of the mechanism that caused a small statue of a beast - a different one for each hour - to appear in a miniature arcade. Visible now was a bear, indicating the ninth hour of the night. Dalassena looked at the erect gold creature (its finely modelled little paws clawed the air) with his usual vague dread, a psychic burden he carried so habitually that it seemed to press on his shoulders physically, bowing him forward like an aged porter. Three hours until the first hour of the morning, five hours until he would once again be at his office in the Palace. He hated this reminder of the routine that had chained him, but the clock had been a gift from the Senator and Magister, Nicon Attalietes. So he was obliged to display it prominently in the office he kept in his home, the hilltop palace that he had acquired through the generosity of Senator Attalietes and his circle.

But for a moment at least, Dalassena was free from time and its irksome herald, sound. His wife Eudocia had long since succumbed to the oppressive gaiety of their evening at the Palace of the Zonaras; the price of being among the Dhynatoi but not of them was that one had to pretend to enjoy the social rituals that the Dhynatoi themselves disdained with weary sarcasm. His daughter, Anna, also had come home, though only an hour ago; he ached to think of the corruption of her doe-eyed innocence, but since Anna now often dined only a chair removed from the Empress, he endured the pain of her despoliation like a soldier in a field hospital stiffening against the amputation of his leg. The only sound from this quiet precinct of the sleeping city was the occasional rattle as armed guards checked locked gates, and the ghostly sough of the wind through columned arcades.

Dalassena went to his lacquered wooden writing table and removed the sheaf of dispatches that he regularly brought home and studied, as if in taking these profound drafts of his predicament he could somehow find expiation. The dispatches reported raids near Hadath and Raban; some large estates had been torched and a distant nephew of a senator had been slain. Bulgars had come across the Danube near Nicopolis and had penetrated almost to Trnovo in Paristron theme. The continuing fester of Sicily, where Abdallah-ibn-Muizz was taking Christians captive by the thousands. Libyan pirates had sacked three coastal villages in southern Crete. The successes were almost as nettling: the siege of Berki would soon be concluded now that a force of Varangians had arrived; and, most appalling of all, the victory by this new Tauro-Scythian menace over almost two hundred pirate vessels, at the very ends of the earth. Just the kind of thing that would kindle the dangerous imagination of the mob.

Dalassena clenched his still powerful fists. Madness. His generous appeal to the self-interest of the swollen-headed Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson had not brought a breath of reply; apparently Hunrodarson was unaware of the directive from the Emperor’s own offices to explore expansion of the Middle Hetairia, the less prestigious Imperial Guard that had been virtually defunct for decades and was now manned by only a few well-born fugitives from Saracen courts, ceremonially invested to reward them for converting to Christianity and swearing allegiance to the Emperor. This directive proposed to revive the Middle Hetairia to accommodate a second force of Varangians, a force that would be equal in numbers to Mar Hunrodarson’s Grand Hetairia. And this initiative had not been sponsored by Mar Hunrodarson; Dalassena was certain of that. No, he reflected, Hunrodarson has taken to making his appeals to the Logothete of the Dromus, with all these not entirely unfounded claims of massive civil discontent in the city and his continued lobbying for another Varangian unit to be posted outside the palace; even Hunrodarson is reluctant to invite any more of his
barbaroi
band of cutthroats within the Chalke Gate. So it is clear that the extravagantly lucky thug, Haraldr Nordbrikt, is the beneficiary of some other highly placed patron, perhaps someone promoting a rival to Mar Hunrodarson. Why can’t Hunrodarson, who is as clever as he is mendacious, see that he is being asked to share his bone with another equally vicious dog?

Dalassena shuffled through his writing cabinet, took out his pen and ink and a sheet of Alexandrian paper, and laboriously scripted a note to the Domestic of the Hyknatoi - one of his key subordinates in the Imperial Taghmata - instructing him in the course of action they should now take. He decided he had better use his personal seal on the document, rather than the official stamp of his office. As he fingered the small, cone-shaped stone implement, he noticed that traces of wax had been left on the face, and he picked the engraved surface meticulously clean. Had his wife Eudocia been using his seal again, perhaps to place orders with the Vestiopratai, the imperially licensed dealers in silk garments; wasn’t it enough that she had one eunuch silk merchant who called weekly? That was simply not acceptable; the woman was determined to make a travesty of his marital dominion.

Bardas Dalessena pressed the stone seal into the glimmering hot wax, then put his writing instruments away and savoured silence. Within seconds he had completely forgotten the diatribe he had intended for his wife.

The sound of steel striking brass echoed through a cavern. Haraldr felt the pain and wondered how he had come to sleep with seals, slippery seals, soft, down-covered seals, their bodies underneath and atop and beside him. But seals did not have furless arms or legs or great hanks of wet hair. Still, seals could smell like this.

Again the noise in the cavern, but this time it was someone screaming. Haraldr struggled to raise his torso, and bodies slithered away from him. He saw the whore, her face paint smeared into a blurry mask, and then the dancer. Around they went, pulling hair, grunting and squealing. Haraldr dragged his legs from under a bedding of flesh punctuated with bulging breasts, jutting buttocks, and staring, wheat-thatched belly furrows. He shook the whore; she had to stop screaming. But she wasn’t screaming. Haraldr struggled to his feet. The brass was shattering inside his head.

The courtyard looked like the aftermath of a terrible battle; the wreckage of Euthymius’s stage was scattered amid a vast carpet of naked men and women, their clothes and empty containers of various intoxicating beverages. Odin, the herons of forgetfulness must have plucked every mind last night, thought Haraldr, his stomach retching and his head bursting with hot metal and the horrible shrieking. Then he saw the actual source of the screaming, an olive-skinned dancer rising above the prone but obviously not totally incapacitated form of a wild-haired Varangian. At first Haraldr assumed that only an excess of pleasure filled the dancer’s throat, but then he saw it too.

It had been a Varangian, when it had forearms and calves and bowels and genitals and a head. It now hung naked, six feet off the ground, from its own small intestine, which had been wrapped around its waist and then tied to the balcony above, so that the truncated body spun slowly within one of the broad, soiled, white plaster arches of the courtyard arcade.

Haraldr bent over and let the bitter alcoholic bile surge over his tongue and onto the pavement. The vomit filled his nostrils and he retched some more, choking and sputtering like a child. Another woman screamed, and a Varangian began to shout.

Haraldr held his hands to his screeching head. The screaming and shouting became a chorus. Ulfr came running; he had remained sober to guard the gold, along with a few of the most devoted disciples of Kristr among the Varangians, who would neither drink for pleasure nor fornicate. They had been at their posts in the strong-room all night.

‘A message has been left,’ said Ulfr as he stood over a disembodied arm lying on the stone pavement a few ells from the corpse. The stiff, purple forefinger had been carefully arranged to point directly at a large, algae-tinted terracotta jar resting a few ells away against the inner wall of the arcade.

Haraldr looked inside the jar and gagged. Steeling himself, he reached in. His trembling fingers found a single, grotesquely slippery lock of hair; the bowel-knifing touch told him that the rest of the scalp had been flayed to the bare skull. He forced back the bile and commanded himself to bring the head up. He stood and looked with uncomprehending terror into the face: no lips or ears, a shrivelled, bruise-coloured penis in place of the nose, and a rosy testicle in each eye socket. A piece of parchment was clenched between bloody, grimacing teeth. Shaking from head to toe, nauseated beyond anything he had ever imagined, Haraldr prised the teeth open, removed the parchment, and clawed with bloody fingers at the crimson wax seal. He read the message, crushed it in his hand, fell back against the wall, and slumped to the ground, holding the bloody skull against his chest like a boy cradling the dead body of a beloved pet.

One by one they entered, their robes of glossy white silk stiff with gold thread, to stand at their places around the polished ivory table. But the black-frocked Orphanotrophus Joannes did not acknowledge or even see them. He had gone home to Amastris. He smelled the dust of Asia Minor in the hot summer wind and heard the buzz of the locusts.

‘But I did the sums.’

‘You can’t have finished all of them,’ his mother had said. She held the lump of cheese in her hands, squeezed, and the thin, milky liquid oozed between her thick, mannish fingers. He remembered that distinctly.

‘But I did. If Stephan and Constantine are going, I must be able to go too.’ The sea was where he had wanted to go, the coarse wet sand of the beach near the docks and the big cool pebbles around which he could curl his toes.

‘I need you to look after Michael. He’s everywhere at once and into everything now. Look.’ His mother swept up the naked infant, who had almost disappeared into a half-empty grain sack.

Joannes could tell that his mother was concealing something from him. He knew then that his day would not be good. He said goodbye to Constantine and Stephan and waited, quietly doing sums in his head. After what seemed a very long time he heard his father’s voice, that beaten, whining voice that alone of all sounds terrified him, for he knew the defeat in it. His father, tall yet paunchy, with his reek of fish sauce and cheap wine, was in the company of a second man, and Joannes shrank from this man immediately. He had the ugly, hairless chin of a eunuch; jaundiced, squinty eyes that made him look like a snake; and a tunic stained like a butcher’s smock.

This is the one,’ Joannes’s father told the snake-eyed eunuch. ‘He reads better than boys twice his age and there is no function of arithmetic he cannot already perform.’