Byzantium (33 page)

‘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.’

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.’

Zoe looked slyly at Maria, whose cheeks became slightly tinted. The
barbaros
had a certain deftness, Zoe observed to herself; by making his hypothetical Roman a man, he had avoided a direct aspersion to the Imperial Dignity. In the manner one should treat a lover found more skilled than one had expected, it was time to lead this Haraldr on to more . . .
intriguing
postures. ‘Maria says you are a harbinger of our destruction. I have often wondered why so many of my children have an inordinate fear of you fair-hairs. Of course, your role in casting us into the abyss has long been chronicled in The Life of St Andrew the Fool, and in our time this sagacious oracle seems to be present at every meeting of the Sacrum Consistorum - though God accepted the saint’s worthy soul half a millennium ago. However, since you are of the fair-haired race and St Andrew was not, might we know if you are an agent of such sabotage?’

Haraldr’s heart seemed to constrict involuntarily at this line of questioning, but he was certain that his identity was not what the Empress wanted to know. What was she getting at? He cautioned himself that this Imperial beauty was a thorn-girt rose; her question had ridiculed both him and Maria and apparently also disparaged the policies of Imperial officials, all to an end that was no more discernible than a headland lost in a fog.

Answer soberly, Haraldr instructed himself; you have permitted yourself enough recklessness for the evening. ‘It is true. If the Empire of the Romans turned against my Father the Emperor and my Empress Mother, I would be the agent of the Romans’ destruction.’

Maria spoke to Zoe, waving her hand dismissively; Haraldr recognized the words
serpent
and
flatterer.
Haraldr felt as if she had physically slapped him; his bed and his heart would be empty tonight. It saddened him to think that his fantasy love had been inspired by such an astringent reality.

Zoe sipped with both hands on her goblet, as if she were a priest consuming the blood of Christ. ‘I understand that you have made yourself most favourably known to my husband’s brother.’ Zoe’s voice was devoid of inflection, neither innocent nor accusing.

Haraldr made no attempt to conceal the shock of realization. Of course! The mouth, the eyes. One face a grotesque inflation of the other, and yet . . . Brothers! That was why the Emperor had appeared to be a mere puppet of Joannes; more likely his Imperial Majesty, who lacked none of the aptitudes for leadership, simply valued the advice of his older brother. It explained so much.

‘The Orphanotrophus Joannes,’ prompted Zoe, dismayed by the
barbaros’s
crude disingenuousness in attempting to conceal the liaison. Surely he was more skilled than this.

‘Yes . . . Joannes,’ said Haraldr, recovering. ‘He had suggested I not boast of the honour he has paid me. Yes, he indeed offers me the inestimable gift of his guidance.’

‘But of course. Our Orphanotrophus guides all of our earthly fortunes much as Christ the Pantocrator guides our immortal souls. He has the hands to mould whatever he will with the clay of our beings.’

Maria spoke sharply. Something about hands too big and statues lacking in grace; Haraldr would remember to ask Gregory later. Then he was chilled to the core despite the swaddling warmth of the down cushions. Kristr! Maria hated Joannes. There had been no doubt of her enmity that night at Nicephorus Argyrus’s. Could the Empress share this animosity? Had there not been a strange timbre to her voice when she had spoken of him? Cold, stormy, mortally dangerous, these Roman waters were indeed.

Zoe looked keenly at Haraldr. She was certain that this interpreter was good, and that the
barbaros
was really almost a
semi-barbaros
with a fair command of Greek already. And yet he had betrayed nothing when she had mentioned sabotage, and had stumbled with witless guile over her mention of the grotesque monk. He was either an innocent or a dissimulator worthy of Odysseus, an actor to make the entire Hippodrome weep. Either way he would be useful. But before she took this . . .
seduction
further, she would need to know which. She signalled Symeon to escort her guests out, and spoke in parting.

‘Your Mother has enjoyed this interview,’ translated a gratefully exhausted Gregory as Zoe finished. ‘When we arrive in Antioch and begin our official entertainments there, I will ask that you be seated at my dining couch.’

‘Brother,’ muttered Constantine, mocking the imperious tone of the letter’s perfunctory salutation. He continued to read.

My instructions will arrive in two separate missives. This is the first. As is your duty as Strategus of Antioch, you will send the escort you are obligated to provide her Imperial Majesty to the scheduled rendezvous at Mopsuestia. At Mopsuestia your Turmarch (I of course presume that you will not accompany your army into the field, given the ever-present threat to Antioch itself) will not accept the transfer of command from the Strategus of Cilicia. Instead, due to the temporary depletion of your own ranks and the necessity of defending your own city, the Strategus of Cilicia will be humbly beseeched to continue his escort of the Imperial Party as far south as Tripoli. You are to pay for the accommodation of the Cilician troops within your theme with the surcharge to the land tax I ordered earlier this year. I trust you will show the Strategus Meletius Attalietes every hospitality your splendid city has to offer.

Your second set of instructions will be delivered to you in the form of a letter introducing the
homes
of Her Majesty’s special Varangian Guard. This Tauro-Scythian, named Haraldr Nordbrikt, is a tool I plan to use for one surgical procedure, after which he will be blunted to uselessness. Until then, see that he is particularly well cared for.

With affection and in the service of our Holy Brother,

Joannes Orphanotrophus

Constantine took a small key from an unlocked drawer beneath his writing table, then opened the lock of another drawer. He removed a box with an ivory lid, unlocked the padlock that secured the sliding top, and deposited the letter in the box, then locked everything back up again. He sat for a moment with his hands clasped across his chest, his beardless, slightly sagging chin slumped forward.

Brother. Never consulting, never asking, always the command: Brother. Yes, his brother, Joannes, had pulled him along as he rose in the Imperial Administration; and yes, Joannes had engineered the stunning deification of their precious little Michael, over whom Joannes doted as if his youngest brother had sprung from his own mutilated loins. But had anyone ever wondered how Constantine might have performed on his own, had he been the firstborn? Or had he been the last-born, permitted to go through life with the undamaged reproductive equipment that had placed Michael on the Imperial Throne? Yes, Joannes had given up his manhood, but so had Constantine, and yet everyone revered Joannes as if he alone had made this ultimate sacrifice for the family. And Michael, now unbelievably the Emperor and Autocrator of the Romans, had given up nothing for the family! Yet now, from beneath the Imperial Diadem, he looked down upon his ‘second brother’, Constantine, as if the Strategus of Antioch were merely a court fool dressed for the part, incapable of performing the simplest Easter distribution without the personal intervention of the all-knowing Orphanotrophus Joannes!

The fountains gently tinkled in the courtyard, balming Constantine’s anger. A man does not say when or who will bring him into the world; only the Pantocrator determines that fate. Joannes’s schemes had worked in the past, and this current exercise, however nebulous it might seem at the moment, would no doubt bring them all further success. And some day Constantine would be brought back to the Empress City, and there he would prove to both his eldest and youngest brothers the true measure of his abilities. Until then, Antioch was the fairest exile a man could know.

He rang for his chamberlain. ‘Basil,’ he told the bowing eunuch, ‘order the Turmarch to my office right away.’

‘You would prefer we discuss this flatulent Plato our Hellenist is always ranting about? The man is an Aeolus, so prodigious is the hot wind he makes.’ Zoe was irritable after the jolting, pitching descent from the Cilician Gates.

‘I simply do not think that this single Tauro-Scythian offers anything other than his own considerable wind. While we toy with this savage the repulsive Orphanotrophus Joannes continues to strengthen his stranglehold on your people. I would not be surprised to hear that in your absence he has snatched up the Imperial Diadem and placed it on his own head.’

‘Joannes could not keep the brother I have crowned on the throne for a day without my Purple-Born connivance. The people would put the palaces of the Dhynatoi to the torch and then smash down the palace gates to evict the usurper.’ Zoe’s voice was as fierce as her pride in the devotion the common folk - the merchants and labourers and fishers and butchers and porters - reserved solely for the authority derived from birth in the porphyry Purple Chamber of the Imperial Palace. She and her sister, Theodora, were the last Purple-Born survivors of the Macedonian dynasty established by their uncle, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, and woe betide the upstart who would attempt to take from the folk of Constantinople the living legacy of the Emperor who for half a century had lifted them up and protected them against the Dhynatoi.

‘No,’ Zoe said, ‘Joannes is as presumptuous and arrogant as Babel rising from the Plain of Shinar. But we must not forget that he is also thorough and patient. Which returns me to our Tauro-Scythian. Why would Joannes sponsor a
barbaros
upstart if the
barbaros
did not figure in some important equation? If this Haraldr is innocent of Joannes’s wiles - and despite your protests, I believe that this is possible - if he is innocent, we can turn him to our purpose. And if he is a willing accomplice of the grotesque Joannes, then we can send him back laden with poisoned treats to offer his patron. And what could
we
possibly betray of our own objectives? Between the sexless brute Joannes and myself is that absolutely transparent intimacy that can exist only between the most implacable foes.’

‘I do not assail your logic, Mother.’

Zoe pushed the curtain slightly aside to see why her carriage, and presumably the rest of the Imperial caravan, had stopped.

‘Well, you know I value your intuition, little daughter. What is it?’ ‘

‘For a moment I got the sense that this Haraldr fancies himself ... I don’t know. He looked at me as if he considered himself a king.’

‘Well, he certainly cannot think he will conquer the Roman Empire with his five hundred Varangian malfeasants. But do you think he has ambitions for himself?’

‘Ambitions? I am not sure that is the correct term. Fate rules all, and yet fate has no ambition. This man ... he chills me. It is not as if he is an agent of some worldly power but an emissary of destiny itself. There is this current of raw fate that seems to surround him, almost as if you could touch him and . . .’ Maria clasped her hands, as if to stop them from quivering. ‘I do not make sense, I know. But I have told you what Ata said about the three lines crossing. He never said that the man might be a
barbaros
fair-hair. I don’t know.’

Zoe placed her hands over Maria’s. ‘I think this Tauro-Scythian is a chorus player in this drama of ours. But perhaps . . . don’t take offence, daughter, but you said once he brought you pleasure, if only in the evanescence of sleep.’ Zoe smiled wryly. ‘Perhaps he is an instrument of a simple fate. I know you find the Tauro-Scythians pleasurable to countenance, and you never did conclude your . . . investigation of the Hetairarch’s . . . abilities. Perhaps you make too much of a basic desire, the one, as you so astutely pointed out the other day, that is easiest to assuage.’ Zoe laughed delicately. ‘You would hardly be the first lady of my court to take a Tauro-Scythian
barbaros
to your bed.’