Byzantium (109 page)

The half hour passed beneath the blazing lights. ‘Where is Zoe?’ shouted a guildsman near the ambo. The cry was taken up briefly. ‘Zoe! Zoe!’ The poor folk countered with ‘Theodora! Theodora! Give us our Empress!’ A fight broke out just beneath the ambo, and Halldor’s shoulders cleaved the crowd as he waded in to separate the combatants. At the back of the church another scuffle erupted and began to spread. Soon there was a twenty-person brawl just in front of the narthex. The shouting became general, and many of the people on the catwalks and arcades leaned over and shook their fists.

‘We are losing the moment God has given us,’ said Alexius. He stepped forward. ‘Children of God!’ the Patriarch’s voice ran through the domes. He made the sign of the cross and the crowd quieted. ‘Where is Zoe!’ shouted someone defiantly. The shoving near the narthex resumed.

A roar came from within the narthex. Haraldr realized that the violence was probably much more ferocious outside the church; now the mob outside was forcing its way in. He sickened at the thought of killing these people. The pressure of the crowd outside surged against those inside, and they began to fall to the marble floor in successive waves. Haraldr shouted to Halldor to ready a boar to carry Theodora to safety. The roaring from outside continued. ‘Forget the acclamation! We only have time to save her!’ shouted Haraldr to Alexius. Haraldr took Theodora’s bony elbow and urged her towards the steps.

‘No!’ Theodora shook her arm loose and stood stiffly, her head erect. ‘They will have to carry me from this place.’ Haraldr looked desperately at Alexius. The cost of the Empress’s safety was rising with every oath the crowd uttered. Alexius shook his head helplessly.

Haraldr turned towards the narthex. The crowd had quieted, and those who had fallen remained prone without struggling to rise. The Imperial Diadem and purple-and-gold robes glittered beneath the massive pediment of the church’s main door. The Empress and Augusta Zoe stepped through the prostrate forms of her subjects with the grace of a dancer. Behind Zoe walked the Mistress of the Robes in a celestial white-and-gold scaramangium. Maria’s blue eyes were visible even across half the vast nave. Her pearl-wreathed head never dipped to observe her feet despite the awkward path. She always looked directly at the ambo. Theodora’s slender shoulders heaved once, and she gasped with relief and joy. Alexius made the sign of the cross and his terrible eyes enjoyed an instant of triumph before they focused on the unseen foe he was now girded to meet.

Zoe ascended the stairs of the ambo in a silence so absolute that Haraldr could hear the click of her pearled hem against the marble steps. Her face was heavily masked with paint and powder, but her reddened, shrouded eyes betrayed both the terror of the last few days and the emotion of the moment. Her gaze swept quickly past her sister and Alexius as she mounted the ambo and turned to her people. Maria looked steadily at Haraldr as she came to the top of the steps, and there was much as passion in her glistening eyes and faintly twitching lips as he had ever known when he had held her naked in his arms. Then she turned, bowed to Theodora and the Patriarch, and stood between the two sisters.

Zoe looked down on her still-prostrate subjects. ‘Augusta Theodora,’ she said without looking at her sister, ‘I offer you the equal share of my office and my throne.’

‘Not equal, Augusta Zoe,’ said Theodora, her face brilliant with emotion. ‘You have precedence. I acknowledge that. And you are free to marry if you wish, and place an Emperor above us both. I owe you that much.’

Zoe’s breast surged and she blinked rapidly. Her sensual lips trembled, naked with emotion. ‘I have missed you,’ she whispered.

Theodora turned to Zoe with abrupt, artless sincerity; for a moment it seemed her precarious crown would topple. Tears moistened her dry, red cheeks. ‘Sister,’ she whispered. Zoe turned. ‘Sister,’ she said, her eyes welling. They confronted each other for a moment, and then stepped forward and embraced.

Maria came to Haraldr’s side. The last time he had seen her she had been disguised as a hideous crone; now he had never seen her more beautiful, her eyes more supernaturally radiant. She grazed his sleeve with her finger; he thought his knees would buckle with the intoxication of that mere contact. ‘I love you,’ she whispered as the sisters continued to exchange caresses and their own intimacies. ‘I could not send word to you. Symeon and I hid all night. We were able to get Zoe away from Michael and have spent the rest of the day persuading her. We knew that everything depended on it.’

‘It did,’ whispered Haraldr. ‘It seems that today you and I, with considerable help, have given Rome a new fate.’

‘Yes. I wonder if that is the destiny we have so often felt in each other’s arms.’

‘Perhaps. The only destiny I am concerned with now is the one that places you in my arms tonight.’

Tears beaded Maria’s fine dark lashes, and she touched Haraldr’s sleeve again.

‘Rise up, Rome!’ Alexius’s voice resounded through the domes and the crowd seemed to stand as one. ‘Rise up and welcome the Light of the World! Rise up and welcome the purple-born Majesties the Empress and Augusta Zoe and the Empress and Augusta Theodora!’

‘Long life to Zoe and Theodora!’ thundered the crowd over and over again, an acclamation of such pounding resonance that Haraldr actually looked up to make certain that the groaning walls still supported the immense domes. Alexius made the sign of the cross and held his hands over the heads of the Empresses to symbolize that they had both received the crown from the Hands of the Pantocrator. The chants continued for some time. After a while Theodora beckoned Maria, embraced her, and bade her stay at her side. The three women looked from one to the other, their faces jubilant.

Haraldr studied the three faces with his own joy. There seemed to be a magic about them; not just the beauty of two of the women, or the spectacle of the Imperial raiment, but something much more familiar; the charmed way their pearl-like teeth flashed as they smiled and whispered close to each other’s ears, the sense that something more profound than even fate had brought them together. He remembered how Maria had said that Zoe and Theodora were both her mothers. That thought prompted a strange shift in his vision, almost as if he had removed a distorting glass from his eyes; suddenly he could see something he had not noticed before because he had never thought to notice it. He had long since forgotten how much alike Maria and Zoe had appeared to him the first time he had seen them together, and yet now with Zoe’s very different sister present, he was struck by the subtle similarities between all three of them, a certain line to the mouth, the structure of the bones around the eyes. They were as much alike as a daughter and . . . Haraldr felt a cold finger trace up his back and he realized that destiny had not yet finished its game with him. Maria’s parents, he was now certain, had not merely been friends of Zoe and Theodora. One of them, most likely Maria’s mother, had shared the same purple blood.

‘Duck!’ Halldor gestured to the Imperial Chamberlain. ‘The Varangians are eating the duck,’ he explained to the desperate-looking eunuch. He pointed to the other end of the long table. ‘The Senators are dining on pork.’ The harried chamberlain hissed a flurry of new directions to the servants. The suckling pig that the servants had tried to serve Halldor was hurriedly transported directly in front of the ever-regenerate Senator and Proconsular Patrician Romanus Scylitzes. Large grilled ducks were placed on silver platters in front of Halldor, Ulfr and Hord Stefnirson. Halldor politely told the hovering eunuch that the Varangians would carve their own meat. The tablecloth fluttered in the strong, dry September wind; the weight of the Imperial Eagles embroidered in gold thread kept the fabric from being whipped away in the occasional gusts. The sun was brilliant and the sky as clear as blue porcelain.

‘Where is Haraldr?’ asked Ulfr, nodding to the empty place setting next to Halldor.

‘He is working on another petition,’ said Halldor.

Ulfr rolled his eyes. ‘I hope this one works. In another month it will be too late to start out. We will have to wait until next spring. And by then we may be too fat to move.’

Senator Scylitzes stood and began a celebration of the ‘demi-deified Achillean virtues’ of the new Emperor Constantine Monomachus, whom Zoe had taken as her husband only two months after the deposition of Michael Kalaphates. (According to court gossip, Constantine Monomachus had been one of Zoe’s lovers during her first marriage, to the Emperor Romanus.) The Monomach, as he was known, was virtually everything the Imperial Court valued in an Emperor; he was handsome, graceful in his movements, charming and adept in his speech, and an able military commander. But the august Imperial dignitaries had quickly discovered one particularly egregious flaw in their new Emperor. The Monomach preferred coarse companions: innkeepers, merchants and professional loungers, many of whom he had promoted to Senatorial rank immediately after receiving the diadem and sceptre of his office. And many of whom were now seated at the end of table, utterly ignoring Scylitzes’s endless discourse as they played with their food, knives and a wooden court ball that they casually lobbed across the table in curious concert to the rhythm of Scylitzes’s sentences.

‘Does that man ever shut up?’ asked Hord in disbelief.

‘Senator Scylitzes has received a suitable reward for his remarkable adaptability,’ said Halldor. ‘He succeeded in rescuing his fortune from the mob, in which he was more fortunate than many of his Dhynatoi comrades. But Scylitzes, who once would not have deigned to walk on the same side of the street as an honest merchant, must now acknowledge as his colleagues some of the foremost rascals of the lower Mese. Notice how they appreciate the Senator’s Attic eloquence.’

A group of masons walked by, pallets of thin clay bricks loaded on their backs. ‘Does the Emperor usually go to these lengths to inspect a building project?’ asked Hord.

Halldor laughed. The table at which they sat had been set up in a large open yard behind a fairly modest town house just northeast of the Forum of Constantine. The busy masons were laying a foundation for a considerable annex to the house, an expansion twice as big as the original structure. ‘For this particular building he does,’ said Halldor. ‘The Emperor is particularly interested in inspecting some equipment in the existing house.’

Hord understood. ‘Who is she?’

‘Her name is Sclerena. She is the niece of the Emperor’s first wife. They have a touchingly intimate relationship.’

Hord shook his head. ‘So he goes to all this trouble, telling us that he is inspecting this highly important construction project, and sets this table and serves us whatever we wish so we won’t grumble while he ploughs his niece. And he has only been married for three months.’

The chamberlain appeared at the head of the table and cleared his throat. ‘Sirs, Mistress Sclerena sends you a small token of her esteem for her Emperor’s guardsmen and Senators.’ A dozen young women in diaphanous white tunics pranced into the yard and began a sensuous, whirling dance. ‘This Sclerena is apparently a very clumsy builder,’ said Halldor. ‘I am beginning to think that this construction here will require frequent inspection and supervision.’

Hord and Ulfr laughed and joined the newly minted Senators in pounding a rhythm on the table. Some of the dancers had already begun to leap onto the table when Haraldr appeared and stood at his place setting. He was dressed in the robe of the Hetairarch, the office he had agreed to assume temporarily for Zoe’s new husband. Beside Haraldr, resting

on the tabletop at the level of his hip, was a pudgy, apparently disembodied head. The head made a few ridiculous faces and then sprang onto the table, propelled by the suddenly revealed, squat body of a dwarf. The dwarf sprinted the length of the table, pausing along the way to swat the rumps of two dancers. He halted dramatically in front of Scylitzes and made motions, as if drawing out his own tongue. He turned his rear end to the Senator and made loud farting sounds, then sped off, as if propelled by his feigned flatulence. He lay beneath the legs of one of the dancers and stuck his tongue out obscenely. Finally the dwarf leapt off the table and ran into Sclerena’s house.

‘Who was that?’ asked a stunned Ulfr.

‘That is Theodocranus the Dwarf,’ said Haraldr. ‘He was a famous buffoon in Adrianopolis and promises to succeed here as well.’

Halldor looked down at the Senators, who were still in hysterics over the diminutive clown and were already emulating a few of his more vulgar gestures with the dancers. ‘I believe he already has,’ said Halldor wryly. ‘This Theodocranus the Dwarf is likely to be our next Senator. How do you know him? He doesn’t seem like one of Maria’s friends.’

‘He is my petitioner.’ Haradlr folded his arms and smiled smugly.

‘What?’ Ulfr groaned. ‘Now we will be forced to stay here, but in the Numera Prison instead of the Numera barracks.’

‘So you think,’ said Haraldr confidently. ‘I believe the Emperor will find Theodocranus a man of exceptional eloquence.’ This statement was greeted with incredulous head shaking, and Haraldr sat down to share his insight. ‘I have observed that the Emperor hates dealing with anyone who reveals any kind of serious intent. If a minister comes to him with a well-conceived plan to drive the Seljuks out of Taron theme, the Monomach will scowl and throw that minister out before he can finish the introduction to his discourse. But send a one-legged comic in there to stutter the latest banter from the market-place, and the Monomach is all ears. I believe Theodocranus will get the Monomach’s attention in a way that I never could.’

Haraldr watched the dancers for a while, hoping that Theodocranus was having a successful interview. After a quarter hour of waiting, the Imperial Chamberlain approached. ‘Hetairarch, His Majesty would like to see you.’

Haraldr was escorted into the modest hall of the house, then to a dressing chamber where the Monomach stood in his purple scaramangium and smoothed his luxuriant silver hair. Theodocranus stood on a chair placed directly in front of the Emperor and held up a bronze mirror for his sovereign. He had just begun a ribald jest about the Emperor’s notorious sexual appetite. ‘The Emperor visited the Imperial stables,’ prattled Theodocranus in his warbling voice. ‘He saw that one of his prize stallions couldn’t hump the mare he had been penned to stud. The Emperor asked the stallion what was wrong and the stallion said, “I am afraid of losing it in there.” The Emperor pulled his out to show the stallion and said, “I’ve put this in many a mare of my own, and look, it is still here.” The stallion’s eyes grew wide when he saw how the Pantocrator had endowed the Monomach, and he said to the Emperor, “Well, if mine was that big, I certainly wouldn’t be worried about losing it, either!” ‘ Theodocranus clapped his stubby hands and Haraldr winced. The Monomach clutched his stomach in a paroxysm of mirth, finally tumbling to the floor in comic rapture.