Byzantium (53 page)

Joannes looked at papers on his writing table, Brilliant. This series of novels - a novel was a new law mandated by the Emperor - would generate enough tax revenues to again fill even the great Bulgar-Slayer’s vast underground treasuries, revenues enough to send armies and fleets to the Pillars of Heracles again, to regain Alexandria and Aleppo and bring Venice and Genoa to their knees, to again reap the wealth of the Tigris and the Euphrates, to humble the caliphates and the Bulgars and exterminate the Scyths from the face of the earth. The world as the Pantocrator had enjoined them it should be. And it was already here, in this beautiful paper construction! The numbers could not lie! Let the Sophists in their impotent bureaux invoke their mincing reservations about ‘an overburdened collection apparatus’, let the hand-wringing Strategi protest about ‘the difficulties of enforcement’. It would work! The numbers would become solidi, and the power those solidi could buy would reach out into the world; the numbers would increase and the power of Rome would be restored.

But it took the force of an Emperor to place such a sweeping reform before the people, for in truth wasn’t the Emperor and Autocrator really the master builder who himself could not build without the hundreds of thousands of sweating backs who laboured at his command. If the master builder was not there to lash and cajole and inspire his labourers once again to put their shoulders to the load even when they were slumped with weariness and exhaustion, then no edifice would rise. And for all the labourers of Joannes’s new Rome now knew, the master builder was a phantom, a man who could no longer appear in public, even for the briefest ceremony. Theotokos. Today’s incident in front of the Hagia Sophia could have been the end. Yes. That serious. Fortunately the
barbaroi
Varangians had been able to detain all of the witnesses and convince them of the inestimable value of discretion.

The
barbaroi.
Thugs who built nothing, only plundered what others had laboured to construct. The Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson was moving too quickly; even common gossip acknowledged that now. And Haraldr Nordbrikt. What a mistake. To see the witless brute serenaded in the Hippodrome, his head bowed meekly - as if there had ever been a humble thought in his vanity-engorged skull. Build Haraldr Nordbrikt up and he would be more dangerous than Mar Hunrodarson; the people of the city might actually come to like him. Haraldr Nordbrikt’s ascendant power clearly required the pruning that had already been arranged for him. Was it to be tonight? He would have to check with Gabras.

Joannes shook his massive head as if awakening from a bad dream. That was what was insufferably offensive about these fair-hairs in the palace! The time one spent dealing with them added to nothing, and took away from matters of real importance! Look at him, sitting here fuming at pasty-faced pirates from Thule when history waited! Time, passing inexorably, demanded his answer.

Joannes brought his massive splayed arms down on his writing table, and the impact echoed through the empty corridors of the Magnara basement. Where was the answer? Where? And then like the voice of an angel, the answer came to him. Extraordinary. Was it possible? Perhaps it was. And yet to do it would be more difficult than passing the entire peninsula of Byzantium through the eye of a needle. Who could do that? Not even a conjuror. But perhaps ... In the silence of the night the angels whispered again, and Joannes heard. Yes. Love. Love, which had created the entire world out of the formless abyss, had brought light to eternal darkness, and had vaulted the endless waters. Love had done it once. And might do it again. Love. And luck.

‘What do you dream about?’

Halldor’s eyes snapped open. He groggily pieced together the Greek sentence. Had he been asleep? How long? Odin! Well, it was no feather bed being Komes of the Middle Hetairia, particularly now that Haraldr was almost always occupied with his Manglavite duties, whatever they were. Ulfr, thankfully, handled the considerable burden of administration, but it was still Halldor who had to pound the excruciating ceremonial discipline of the court into five hundred swaddling-new guardsmen, most of whom still couldn’t tell a lofty patrician from a lowly exarch or find their way from the Magnara to the Chrysotriklinos. It was sufficiently taxing to make a man fall asleep next to a woman as beautiful as this.

‘You were dreaming. I can tell.’ The lady’s blue eyes reflected the glowing candelabra far over her head.

Halldor pulled his legs up so the bulge in his robe wouldn’t be so prominent.

‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she said, laughing. ‘I am not a virgin.’

No, you’re worse, thought Halldor, you’re the wife of some official whose title Halldor couldn’t exactly pinpoint; the essential fact was that the husband had been exiled for several years as temporary special Strategus of some theme halfway to Vinland. The lady had issued Halldor an invitation to dine with her, and as some irascible old Magister had pointed out to him, it would have shamed the lovely woman had he refused; surely even a semi-pagan Tauro-Scyth understood that it was his Christian obligation to console the lonely ‘semi-widow’. So after a suitably proper five-day interval, during which the prospective liaison had become the titillation of half the ladies at court, here he was. Asleep, with nothing consummated.

‘Did I bore you?’ she asked, stroking his long blond hair with fingers like slender ivory flutes.

Halldor smiled at her. Her lips were as exquisite as a Greek Aphrodite’s, her hair almost pure gold in the lamplight. Her breasts swelled against her silk scaramangium. He touched his lips to her ear, inhaling the scent of roses and fresh meadow flowers. ‘When . . . did you . . . ever . . . bore a man?’ Halldor surmised that his Greek had been fluent enough when she threw her arm around his neck and crushed her breasts to his with an embrace as tight as a shipbuilder’s vice. He finally prised his mouth away from the tender aggression of her lips to ask the salient question. ‘Where . . . would you like . . . to do this?’

‘In my bath,’ she said, gulping, her eyes glittering.

The child looked up, his black eyes mesmerized by the sight of the giant fair-hairs and their woman. He hastily stripped the tattered rag from the torso of the fallen man and vanished. Squirming clusters of large rats continued to work on the face and toes of a fresh corpse only a few ells away. The fallen man groaned. Mar held Haraldr back. ‘A pox blotch,’ he said. ‘He will be dead soon, anyway.’ Haraldr looked about, searching for an instrument of mercy. He saw a large piece of scorched masonry that had crumbled from the ruined, fire-gutted building to his right. He picked up the big stone and walked over to the now-naked, softly breathing man. Haraldr gasped; the man’s face and most of his body were a mass of pustulant sores. Only the feverish eyes were human. They reached out and the man moaned. ‘Holy . . . cherubim . . . save me.’ Haraldr looked at the tittering, fearless rats, waiting only for him to step back before they began to nibble on living flesh. He brought the stone smashing down on welcoming eyes.

Mar held Flower in his arms. She had bravely agreed to come along and identify the Physician, if possible; she had not reckoned on this. ‘This is where they come to die, when even the streets turn them out,’ said Mar, as if anything could explain this. A man entered the intersection, his frock as black as the charred shells of the tenements that towered above him. The bearded monk bent over another corpse, one of half a dozen or so lying about in the muck, and silently arranged the stiff, chalk-hued arms. ‘They come here to die because they know the monks will find them,’ said Mar. ‘Over there’ - he pointed north - ‘is the Studius Monastery. They have a fraternity of monks who do nothing but retrieve and bury the corpses that here are shunned by even the dirt.’ Mar walked over to the monk and bowed, then handed the serene-looking man some gold coins. The monk dipped his head perfunctorily and continued his work.

Mar took Flower’s hand and looked at Haraldr. He spoke in Norse. ‘When you see the live creatures of the Studion, you will understand why I have taken us through the refuges of the dead.’

They soon came among the living. A dark alley opened up onto a fairly broad avenue, which in spite of its breadth was almost completely canopied by jutting, enclosed wooden balconies and makeshift platforms that in many cases joined over the streets. The stench of human excrement was overpowering. The surface of the street was spongy, and to his horror Haraldr realized that it was paved with well-trodden mud, rubbish and sewage, perhaps to the depth of an ell. Beneath the precarious wooden canopies and reeking, slimy facades clustered hundreds of supine forms. The lucky ones were covered with straw; most of the rest, many of whom had bare skin showing through their rags, were huddled together in scores of human mounds, each several ells high. Haraldr was incredulous. ‘Won’t the ones at the bottom suffocate?’ he asked Mar.

‘Look again. They are not piled on one another but on mounds of garbage. The heat of decay keeps them warm.’

They began their stroll through Hell. The clumps of bodies stirred from endless wet coughs and moans. A man, his scalp covered with great black scabs, squatted in the street, groaning and clutching his knees. Two boys, perhaps ten, kicked at a solitary old man. A naked, filth-blackened child stood by a sleeping man and woman, wailing.

Block after block of this. A man, his greasy tunic thrown up, rutting like a dog with what appeared to be a very young girl, almost a child. In one tenement there was a party; two men stuck their heads out of a window and tried to drop bits of their flaming tapers on the bodies huddled below. A naked woman squatted on a wooden balcony and urinated. A boy of fourteen, perhaps, handless, his mouth covered with sores, offered the Norsemen a sex act he could perform with the stump of his slender wrist.

Haraldr could scarcely believe his reeling senses. He had seen pockets of misery in Hedeby and Kiev, the offal-strewn, muddy streets crowded with cutpurses, charlatans and crippled beggars. But the Studion was beyond his experience, beyond imagining. Now he understood why he had been blindfolded on his initial entry into the city, and why these wretches would attempt to burn their own dwellings. This offended the gods, and it should offend man. He had known the Empress City to be wanton, even cruel. But this was an infection of the body, a great corruption that would contaminate everything she touched. And yet the monk who came to bury the outcasts of the Empress City was a part of her, too; no Norseman would have had that kind of courage or devotion to the souls of strangers. The beauty and virtue of this ravishing city were beyond imagining, and so was her unspeakable evil. Perhaps that was also true of Maria.

Halldor draped the thick linen towel round his waist and waited. The steam glazed the green marble benches with a film of condensation and clouded the plastered vault overhead. Halldor enjoyed this Roman ritual, particularly when there was a woman waiting at the end of his sweat. When he had assessed that the foul humours - whatever they were - had been expunged from his body, he mopped his body with the towel and entered the next chamber. The large pool was almost obscured by steam, like one of Iceland’s natural hot pools on a winter day. He heard a splash and saw a vague diffusion of pink.

Halldor rinsed himself in the tub adjacent to the pool and then walked carefully down the opus-sectile steps; he could see a mosaic pattern on the bottom of the pool but could not make out the motifs. The water was cool but not chilling.

‘They say you are a great seafarer.’ Her voice was crystalline, delightful. Halldor began to suspect that he would want to dine here more than once. He wished the steam would clear so he could get a look at her. In his arms she had felt like one of those statues come to life, each curve perfect. ‘Can you cross the water that separates us?’ she asked, her voice ringing delicately against a domed ceiling with a large glass oculus in the middle.

Halldor stroked easily; he had learned to swim at three summers. He touched the far end of the pool and wiped at the water in his eyes. ‘You didn’t navigate properly.’ Halldor reached towards the teasing voice and made brief contact with slippery flesh. She thrashed away. Suddenly he could feel her against his back, her breasts and thighs sliding by. This time he got hold of an ankle and pulled her into his arms. ‘You have been netted,’ he said. She laughed and pressed her entire body against his and kissed him, letting the water drain from her lips like a thin, aphrodisiac oil. ‘Yes,’ she said, laughing, ‘but do you think you can spear me?’ Then she ducked out of his arms and swam away.

The filth-paved road turned abruptly left, into the triangle created by the southward sweep of the Marmora coastline before it met the Great Wall of the city. ‘We have met all the honest folk of the Studion,’ Mar said in Norse, motioning back towards the long, dark boulevard of misery they had just traversed. ‘Let us now go among the liars, thieves, cheats, whores and murderers.’

The buildings here were better maintained, with plaster and wood patchwork frequently visible, though whole facades of crumbling brick and rotting wood also awaited repairs that might never be made. Signs, and even an occasional statue, appeared here and there above the arcades of dingy inns and food shops. Prostitutes, their faces virtually painted on, prowled like cats. ‘Pretty thing. Eminences,’ said one sourly as she passed, eyeing Flower enviously; beneath her caked-on powder, large boils raised pale welts.

Cutpurses ran beneath the arcades in shadowy packs, and they soon became bolder, swarming into the street to run about the Norsemen like crazy jackals trying to determine whether a lion was sufficiently wounded to permit an attack. At an intersection five or six whores held a man upside down by his quivering legs; another garishly painted woman sat by his head with a rock, bashing his teeth out. ‘Cheated her,’ explained one of the women to the gathering crowd.

The inns became larger, and crowds milled in the street; a man in silk passed, accompanied by more than a dozen retainers all wearing swords and cheap steel breastplates. ‘I get you best price for the girl,’ squeaked a voice that seemed to come from Haraldr’s elbow; he never saw the source. An old man completely blinded by cataracts pounded on Haraldr’s chest and vanished into the crowd. A woman smiled, her rotted teeth like old wood between her brilliantly painted lips.