Byzantium (6 page)

Hakon dabbed at his nose with one hand. The other wrapped almost entirely around the girl’s neck. Jarl Rognvald decided that he would intercede if Hakon tried to kill the girl. The lewd chorusing of the Varangians quieted. Hakon’s eyes wandered, as if he were looking for a signal. The clearly voiced verses lilted over the crowd.

Sable-haired
Plundered from the strand that is sea
Dauntless to spill the wine of ravens
Swan-white stands she.

A fair snippet of verse, thought Haraldr as he savoured the skald’s words. The poet has imagined her coming from the desert, which is said to be a sea of beaches, and because she has spilled the brute’s blood she can yet wear her hair uncovered, like a maiden, and so is still white and pure . . .
Why are they all looking at me?
Haraldr wondered. Then he realised what had happened, and his veins iced. He was the poet. He had spoken aloud, perhaps not in his own voice, but the words had certainly come out of his mouth.

‘Hvat?’
bellowed Hakon, as astounded as he was furious. Grettir took two slow paces towards Haraldr and looked at him as if he had just seen a serpent talk. Jarl Rognvald’s heart soared in the instant before he furiously began to reason how to get Haraldr out of there alive.

Haraldr felt the pressure of Hakon’s dagger against his windpipe almost before he saw the gleam of steel. ‘I’m sorry, Jarl Rognvald, but your bodyguard has mocked me,’ Hakon growled; there was no sorrow in his voice. ‘I’m going to have to ask him if his sword is as sharp as his tongue.’

‘He’s carved from a tall tree,’ jibed Grettir, ‘but it looks as if the wood is still green.’

‘Hakon!’ Jarl Rognvald’s hand gripped the pommel of his sword. ‘Hold back. This boy is my ward. He is not paid to defend me. But I am bound by honour and love to defend him.’

Hakon weighed his own decision, the satisfaction of butchering a meddlesome old Jarl against the huge bonus he would receive when he delivered his recruits in Constantinople. And he needed the Jarl’s Rus pilots to ensure that delivery. But when they reached the Rus sea and no longer needed the river men’s expertise, he vowed that the lobsters would taste old Norse meat. And as for the Jarl’s turd-chewing ward, he would never see the river’s end.

Hakon dropped his sword and he shrugged and sniffed contemptuously. ‘Yes, Grettir, this wood is too green to whittle. Perhaps,’ he added ominously, ‘a few weeks on the river will season it.’

The Varangians hooted with derision. Too green to whittle!’ echoed through the crowd.

Grettir turned back to Haraldr. ‘It would have been an honour to die at the hand of Hakon. But listen to the praise they’re singing you now. You’ve a hard tongue but a soft back.’ The laughter rose like the thunder of a coming storm. A wind screamed inside Haraldr’s skull, whipping humiliation into a suicidal frenzy.

Haraldr’s wet palm slipped against the bone handle of his sword, but almost at the same moment Hakon flung his arm towards the sand and something thudded against Haraldr’s foot; he felt a minute searing, as if he had stepped on a spark. He looked stupidly at his feet and saw a gold pommel staring up at him. Hakon’s dagger had sliced through the sole of his heavy boots and had just nicked his big toe. Haraldr reflexively tried to pull his foot away, but his boot was pinned to the firm, damp sand and he stumbled. He lost his balance and fell to his knees.

The laughter shrieked like a tempest. ‘Hakon has toppled the tallest tree with a nick of his dagger!’ Grettir chortled.

‘Green-wood!’ bellowed Hakon.

‘That’s his name, Green-wood!’ echoed voices from the crowd.

‘Green-wood, next time I see you with your hand on your sword, I’ll aim two ells higher. I’ll make you the tallest geld in the East.’ Hakon paused, hawked, and spat a great yellow wad on Haraldr’s hand. ‘And then I’ll make you shorter by a head.’

The howling north wind blew away the drunken haze. Haraldr recognized a voice that he knew but had not heeded since that terrible day four years ago, when he had shut his ears to it. It was strange, so thunderous and yet so intimate, as if it not only knew him but also was of him, as if another soul, separated from him at Stiklestad, stood partially inside him and partially outside, sharing some of him and rejecting the rest. There had been times when Haraldr had sensed that he could completely enter this twin soul and share his power, which he knew to be considerable, for he had on occasion felt the other’s fist, as hard as an iron ingot yet as light to lift as down. Still, he could not simply take a slight step and embrace his fugitive twin; he knew that he had to cross through the spirit world, cold and ancient, filled with the furies of the old gods and the beasts of the deepest abyss. So he had long feared the other and had struggled against him, fettering the part of him that wanted to begin that journey.

Now, for the first time in four years, he pulled against those bonds, somehow feeling that the fetters might at last be broken if only his will to do so was great enough. His vision darkened with a ferocious mind storm, and his hand flexed and trembled and strained for the handle of his sword. If only he could reach it!

Jarl Rognvald’s hands clutched Haraldr’s arm like a vice, but it was not that which was able to restrain him. ‘Wait,’ whispered the strange inner voice, which for an instant was his own.’Wait.’

‘His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans.’

The Empress Zoe sat up. The head of her chamberlain, Symeon, framed by the leaden silk curtains of her canopy and illuminated by the single oil lamp he had brought into her bedchamber, seemed to float in the darkness, an ancient, hairless mask of white parchment. She nodded quickly and the curtains swished vaporously aside. Zoe stepped onto the thick carpet beside her bed. She was entirely naked, and for an instant her generous bosom and satiny flank gleamed like honey-tinted white marble. A second eunuch wrapped her in a gauzy robe. Her already erect nipples, dark and thick, pressed against the sheer fabric. The two eunuchs left a lamp on a small table and swept silently out of the room, their slippers whispering on
opus sectile.

She met the Emperor in the more intimate vestibule of her cavernous, domed bedchamber. The miniature eagles embroidered all over his robe flickered dully, like gold insects flitting in the moonlight. She could see at once the hint of weariness in the otherwise impeccable carriage of his broad shoulders and muscular chest. She pressed her lush bosom against him and kissed him fiercely. She had become accustomed to his slight, almost palsied recoil.

‘I ... I came to say I will be unable to stay with you,’ he said when she took his hand and urged him to the direction of her canopied bed. His voice, deep and resonant, had a natural command, but this was offered without inflection. He was apologising, though he did not wish to.

‘You are still working?’

‘I could work for the next ten years and not repair the damage done by my . . . predecessor. I had no idea what he had done. No one did. Not even my brother. The substance of it, yes. Not the extent of it.’ The Emperor’s lustrous, dark eyes contracted for a moment, hardening. ‘Even if the Rus trade resumes, we must institute another surcharge to the window tax. The Dhynatoi will do everything they can to oppose us.’ The Dhynatoi were the empire’s enormously powerful landed aristocracy; among the myriad Imperial exactions, the window tax - based on the number of windows in a dwelling - was one of the few levies that fell more heavily on the owners of large estates than it did upon peasant freeholders,

The Empress Zoe brushed the dark curls from her husband’s forehead and again drew him towards her bed. The Emperor did not resist. He sat on the edge of the enormous sleeping couch, his back perfectly erect. He relaxed his shoulders and exhaled, audibly, through his nose. Zoe began to unlace his robe at the back. She unlaced the fine linen undershirt as well, and peeled away both layers to expose her husband’s muscle-dimpled back. She slipped out of her wrapper and pressed her breasts to his flesh. His back tensed.

‘Stay with me,’ Zoe whispered into his ear.

He turned, his face fixed with a kind of horror, as if her breasts were diseased. ‘He was murdered.’ The Emperor’s tone was now vaguely frantic. ‘Your husband. The Emperor. I am certain of it.’

‘You are my husband. You are now the Emperor.’

‘Romanus was your husband when you - when you and I--’

The Emperor seemed to strangle on the words. ‘When he asked me about us, I lied to him in the sight of the Pantocrator. I perjured myself on the holy relics. And then I turned away while he was murdered. Does mere acquiescence make the mark of Cain upon me any less indelible?’

Zoe pulled her robe over her breasts. Her recitation was ritualistic, an oft-repeated exorcism. ‘He was near death. The last of his innumerable follies was his final ablution. His doctors warned him not to bathe. He simply drowned. You saw the corpse. Perhaps the servants were . . .
inattentive.
But they were not assassins.’

‘They say someone held his head under. A Varangian. The Hetairarch, they say.’

‘They
say? The hirelings of the Dhynatoi, who will repeat anything for a price? There are many powerful men who would have preferred a far less . . .
vigorous
successor to Romanus. This is how they attack you, and the men who stand between you and their obscene ambitions. If any hand held my . . . your predecessor’s head beneath those waters, it was the hand of the Pantocrator Himself. Romanus was a plague. Your hands cured me of him. Now they will cure my people.’

‘And who will be physician to my affliction?’ The Emperor stood up, pulled his robe over his shoulders, and stepped away from his wife’s bed. ‘For even if I wash seven times in the River Jordan, I cannot heal the infection of my soul.’

‘Don’t touch it!’ The arrow had drifted lazily out of I the sky like a wounded bird and clattered harmlessly on the deck. ‘It might be poisoned.’ Jarl Rognvald walked to the foredeck, crossing the planks that covered the main cargo hold. He carefully picked up the metal-tipped, neatly feathered shaft and held it up for all to see. ‘What a bowshot.’ He looked across the still, yellow river toward the startlingly green, thickly wooded bank. ‘I’d measure it over five hundred ells.’

‘Gleb!’ shouted Jarl Rognvald to his Slav pilot. ‘Call for a tight file.’

Haraldr squinted at the mysterious, dense wall of foliage. Ten days already on the river, the placid monotony of the waters like the sultry, unsettling stillness before a lightning storm. Each day with its whispered drifting warning of the hidden enemy. The eerie tranquillity of the star-flecked nights, and the creeping, subtle terror that one might awaken to find that one’s boat has drifted from anchor and thudded into the bank, into the hands of the unseen demons. (It had happened to one crew last night; the watch had got drunk, and in the moonless night no one knew until they heard the screams.) Jarl Rognvald was increasingly withdrawn when he was not preoccupied with command, staring down the river like a seeress struggling to spy the future. And for Haraldr, dreams. So many dreams here. Not only of a dying sun and blood on the land but also of a place of wind and cold and endless blackness. The voice, always that voice now, whispering, cajoling, drawing him into that deepening dark void where his fears stalked on nightmare feet. On the river, the beasts of those inner depths had become more fierce, and his fugitive soul seemed ever more distant.

Haraldr was certain he saw a glint of metal in the distance. Another. Yet another! Far ahead, the left bank lowered and the verdant screen was interrupted by a dun patch filled with colours and flashes of steel and bustling movement. ‘Larboard bank! Larboard!’ he yelled. ‘Pechenegs!’

Gleb the pilot limped along the gangplanks, coming forward to stand in the prow with Haraldr and Jarl Rognvald. He was a short, grey-eyed man who shaved his head save for a long grey lock above each ear. Gleb had obtained his limp on his first Dnieper trip, when his boat had been tossed on the rocks. After that he had lived to ‘vanquish the river’, and that was why he had taken three more trips. But it was said that Yaroslav had had to make Gleb’s sons and grandsons rich men before he could persuade Gleb to become lead pilot for this expedition. ‘A man needs the luck of the whole world to go four times down the Dnieper,’ Gleb had told Jarl Rognvald. ‘By the time he starts his fifth trip, he will have used up all the luck there is.’

‘They’ll be giving us a show now,’ muttered Gleb.

Jarl Rognvald looked at him quizzically.

‘That crew they captured,’ groused the pilot, ‘be sure that they haven’t yet killed all of them.’

A distant shout boomed across the water. ‘The famished eagle feeds at last!’

Haraldr’s stomach roiled. Several ships, oars churning, had moved up fast on the larboard. From the prow of the lead boat, gold returned the sunlight; byrnnie, helmet and gold-tinselled braided beard. Hakon.

Little had been heard from Hakon since they had left Kiev. He had communicated with Jarl Rognvald through a messenger, and his men were quietly disciplined on the water. Now, just when Haraldr was beginning to think that Hakon was simply another of his deviling dreams, here he was.

‘Jarl Rognvald, we must moor our ships up ahead!’ Hakon was commanding, not requesting. ‘The skeleton-copulators are sure to entertain us. I want them to know that we also have art-skills!’

Jarl Rognvald cocked a frosty eyebrow at Gleb.

The pilot nodded. ‘Fear is the Pecheneg’s sharpest blade. We need to show them that our steel is just as good.’

The Pechenegs had trampled a path to the river like a vast herd of giant lemmings; only a dozen or so trees at the water’s edge, stripped to mastlike shafts and curiously paired, rose above a river of human and horse heads thousands of ells wide and long enough to disappear over a hill far in the distance. The warriors had dismounted and stood in their own rough clothes as well as the plunder of a dozen other races: homespun robes with leather caps and jerkins, skin and fur tunics, spiked and conical helmets over glossy black hair, tattered Frisian cloth, byrnnies of chain mail and iron discs, even a cluster of Pecheneg potentates in silk robes and gleaming armlets. The makeshift horde erupted into a cataclysmic, shrilling, droning welcome.