Byzantium (16 page)

‘Halldor! Ulfr!’ barked Haraldr. They looked up, surprised at the unexpected sternness of his tone. ‘Get the men in here and assigned to beds. In one half hour have them dressed in full armour for drills in the courtyard.’

‘Where would you like to be?’ asked Maria. She stood before her bedchamber’s arcade, and the colour of her eyes was so closely keyed to the hot, flat cerulean sky and sea behind her that it appeared they had been painted with the same precious pigment.

‘I am at your discretion, mistress,’ said the eunuch. His name was Isaac. Despite his beardless skin, his jaw was tense and muscular. In his elegant, perfectly fitted silk robe, his frame seemed lithe and supple but with broad, masculine proportions. His blond hair was long and lightly curled.

Maria laughed delightfully. ‘No, I intend to leave this entirely up to you. Surprise me.’

Isaac did not have to deliberate. He was a
vestiopratai,
an Imperially licensed dealer in the finest finished silk goods, and while he numbered many of the Dhynatoi and high-ranking ladies of the court among his customers, this was his first summons to the Gynaeceum, the Imperial women’s apartments. He had prepared thoroughly; he could describe the plan and furnishings of the Mistress of the Robes’s apartments as accurately as if he had been there a dozen times previously. ‘You are not troubled by the heat?’ he asked.

‘No. I hate to be cold.’

Isaac led Maria to an observation cupola on the roof; he sent her eunuchs for cushions and cold wine. The breeze that whispered through the delicate columns was like silk tissue teased over the skin. He had long ago learned to be expedient, and as soon as the cushions and goblets had been properly placed, he unlaced Maria’s scaramangium. She stepped out of the robe and stood on the marble bench so that her body was exposed to the breeze. Isaac hardened her nipples with butter-smooth fingers, then took the chilled wine in his mouth. When he touched his cold tongue to her nipple, she convulsed and whimpered. His tongue slid towards her navel but she pushed him away. She unlaced him and stripped off his robe. He was as solid and as smooth as a statue. She fell to her knees and ran her tongue along the tawny mass of scar tissue at the base of his erection, then towards the engorged tip. ‘It is so beautiful,’ she said. ‘When you are almost ready, come inside me.’

Isaac was in fact both a eunuch and a silk dealer. But his principal vocation was making this sort of call on wealthy, highly placed women, a vocation for which he was uniquely suited. While the operation to create a eunuch was usually performed in childhood, some boys like Isaac had their testicles surgically removed in mid-adolescence. Although their bodies might never develop fully masculine characteristics, their ability to function sexually, and their desire to do so, could sometimes remain intact. Such a eunuch offered a highly placed woman two invaluable attributes. He usually would not arouse suspicion, and he could not impregnate them.

When they had finished, Isaac reclined on the tasselled cushions; he always provided his customers an opportunity to talk. Maria sat and shaded her eyes against the sun as she looked out towards Chrysopolis, the huge city across the Bosporus. ‘You are better than I had hoped,’ she said.

Isaac smiled. ‘Most eunuchs can function physically, I have found. Unless, of course, they have had the entire male apparatus removed.’ But this catastrophic surgery was rare; because the operation was so dangerous and the wound caused recurring problems even when healed, it was usually only performed on Pechenegs or other
barbaroi
races. ‘That they do not is usually a matter of inadequate desire. Or technique.’

Maria laughed. ‘What technique was required for me?’

‘That was desire. Is there any man who hasn’t desired you?’

‘I want something beyond desire. Still, I enjoyed this. You are like a boy, and yet also a man. I will want you again. I have a lover, and another boy with whom I am in love. But my specialist advises me that on certain days I must abstain if I do not want unintended consequences. Still, the more regularly one enjoys passion, the more one becomes addicted. If I did not have a lover now, I would not need you so badly.’

‘I am at your discretion, Mistress.’

‘Do you work with men?’

‘Only if a lady asks for another man to join us.’

‘Have you ever had a Tauro-Scythian?’

‘No. I would try to find one if you are interested.’

‘No.’ Maria looked down and stroked her fiat, velvet-soft belly. ‘Do you know what they are going to do with those Tauro-Scythians they are calling pirates?’ Maria understood the efficiency with which information passed among the city’s highly placed eunuchs; it was as if they had all joined in some secret pact to punish the society that had deprived them of their manhood by exposing its secrets.

‘They are still arguing. The military are quite set on simply massacring the entire lot now that their ships are unloaded. They say there is still a threat of invasion.’

Maria snorted. ‘The military are the stooges of the Dhynatoi. The Dhynatoi have never forgotten how Basil the Bulgar-Slayer used the Varangians against them.’ Almost half a century earlier, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer had recruited a large force of Norse mercenaries to put down a revolt of the Dhynatoi. The Varangians had been so effective in crushing internal opposition that Basil had created the Varangian Guard to institutionalize permanently their role as the sentinels of Imperial power; over the succeeding decades the Varangians had come to be seen as the champions of the middle and lower classes, who relied on the protection of a strong Emperor, and the sworn enemies of the selfishly ambitious landed aristocracy.

‘Somehow the rumour has been started that there is a Tauro-Scythian Prince among the traders,’ Isaac said. ‘The Grand Domestic’ - the Grand Domestic was the Empire’s highest-ranking military commander - ‘has elaborated this gossip into a theory that this prince intends to enter the city with his Varangians, then summon a huge invasion force lurking somewhere in the Rus Sea, and open the gates for them when they arrive. The Grand Domestic is determined to find this man, even if it means resorting to the kind of crude measures with which Herod hoped to indemnify himself against the Christ child. He has already had the Rus traders interrogated.’

‘How fascinating!’ Maria’s eyes sparkled like a child’s. ‘I wonder if the fair-hairs will eat our flesh and drink our blood, as the prophets have foretold.’ For centuries the ‘fair-haired nations’ had been cast as the agents of doom in so many Byzantine tales of the apocalypse that their role was as well known as that of the Antichrist.

‘I think it is all nonsense,’ said Isaac. ‘Of course, there is no such prince, and all the talk of action on the part of the Grand Domestic is bluster. It always is. What everyone will probably end up agreeing to do is to execute this bandit who killed the Manglavite, though they should rightly give him a palace near the Forum Bovis - send the rest of the Tauro-Scythians off to garrison Ancyra, and be done with it.’

‘Yes,’ said Maria distractedly. She put her hand on Isaac’s thigh. ‘I suppose that compromise would make everyone except the Tauro-Scythian bandit happy.’

The bronze breastplates and the brilliant white horses flickered in the sun. The same mounted contingent that had greeted Haraldr three days ago at the docks rode stiffly into the courtyard. The tough-looking Topoteretes dismounted and looked around. Haraldr discerned that the Byzantine officer was more than a bit impressed by the sight of almost five hundred armoured Norse giants slashing, shoving and grunting in martial cacophony.

A black-frocked civilian mounted on a mule rode in among the horses: John, the interpreter with the squinched, hairless face. Interesting, Haraldr thought, that the same interpreter was assigned to the navy and now this group of horsemen. Perhaps there were fewer Norse interpreters than it seemed at first. That meant they might run into Gregory again. And then they might be able to get some information about the bewilderingly formal, circuitous Griks.

John the interpreter looked about, spotted Haraldr, and nudged his mule towards the
barbaroi
chieftain. ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt, come with us,’ he said as if he were a gaoler addressing a prisoner.

‘Where?’ shot back Haraldr. His blood was spiced from three days of hard martial drills, and he decided to get some answers from these Griks for a change.

The interpreter stared sullenly. Haraldr noticed that his head and face were freshly shaven; with his smooth skin John looked like a pink frog.

‘Where?’ Haraldr repeated.

‘City,’ said John, as if answering an insistent, squealing child.

Inside the walls! Haraldr’s breast drummed. He snapped for one of the Byzantine servants - or were they spies - who were always loitering around. With hand motions he indicated he wanted a washbasin and clean tunic.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ snapped John.

Haraldr’s stomach plunged like cold lead. In his sweaty, torn tunic the only place he would be fit to be received would be in a slave-gang. Or a dungeon. Well, he would not let this black-frocked frog march him off, He continued to motion to the servants and sent them twittering on their errands. John stared angrily but said nothing. The Topoteretes walked over and spoke to the interpreter, who rattled on irritably and pointed at Haraldr. Many
barbarois
peppered the recitation.

The Topoteretes shrugged and went back to studying the drilling Norsemen.

Halldor walked up. ‘I’m going into the city,’ Haraldr told him. ‘You’ve got command until I return; Ulfr is your marshal and counsellor. You know the drill schedule, so keep to it. I’ll be back.’ The servants brought up the washbasin and one of Hakon’s silk tunics, and Haraldr splashed water on his face and towelled dry. When he looked up, Halldor was still observing him earnestly. ‘Yes. If I don’t come back,’ Haraldr concluded, ‘you have the command permanently.’

The mounted escort wound through the narrow streets of St Mama’s Quarter, looping around the back of a domed church, huge by Norse standards but relatively small in relation to the surrounding buildings. As the stone-paved avenue straightened out, Haraldr could see an expanse of mowed grass ahead. He looked up and gasped.

The great land wall, which traversed the width of the peninsula on which Constantinople had been built, had been only partially visible as they had sailed into St Mama’s Quarter. Now, from an unobstructed head-on view, it seemed like a vast, tiered, many-towered city unto itself. The first line of defence, a moat as broad as a small river - it was partitioned by a series of dikes that enabled it to climb up and down the gently rolling hills - would alone have been the engineering miracle of the north. Just beyond the moat was a brick parapet about as high as the walls of a Rus city; then a broad, graded path; and finally a second wall of unimaginable dimensions; the alternating courses of stone and brick rose a good twenty ells and were studded with massive stone turrets at regular intervals. Beyond this colossal defence was the main wall.

This third wall was at least as tall as a Norse dragon-ship stood on end and yet the towering rectangular fortresses set against the sheer brick-and-stone surface at intervals of sixty ells (they looked like the teeth of some world-devouring beast as they ran off into the distance as far as one could see) were twice as tall again; each of these Titan-made towers was a soaring castle capable of defending an entire city the size of Kiev. Perhaps the gods had built these defences, but not even the gods would dare come against them.

A small, open gate framed by carved stone beams punctured the great wall. Several officials in long silk tunics - one of the silk-clads seemed to be a eunuch - examined the documents presented by the Topoteretes, then began to question him insistently. The eunuch looked at Haraldr and shook his head. The Topoteretes pointed to something in the document and began a heated discourse. Haraldr observed that Basileus and Joannes and Manglavite figured in this argument. The eunuch protested again but the documents were returned to the Topoteretes, and he signalled his men to ride on. The escort tunnelled through the wall and emerged on a brilliant white landscape.

A stone-paved avenue more than a hundred ells wide extended beyond the wall towards the distant heart of the city. On either side of the street the three- and four-storey buildings rose like sheer cliffs, though these palaces often had marble-columned arcades at street level and elaborate balconies and rows of arched windows on the upper floors. Pack mules, wagons, slave-borne canopied litters and ordinary pedestrians jammed the street; they passed one four-wheeled carriage with an elaborately gilded, curtained, boxlike enclosure for its invisible occupants. Haraldr struggled to capture details as his escort led him down the avenue at a brisk canter: an arcade rollicking with roughly dressed men who hoisted wineskins as they disputed over board games and tossed dice; a statue of an unclothed man set into a niche above a brass-fitted oak door, so astonishingly lifelike that one could see the veins beneath his pale marble skin; a shorn black-frock, like John the interpreter, offering bread to three ragged beggars who sat on a scrolled stone bench. There were far fewer women than men about, and most of them had wrapped bright cloth veils about their faces and moved in protective clusters. But one young woman with a brightly painted face strutted alluringly alone.

The escort paused at a major intersection less than a dozen blocks into the city. Looking south, down the paved street perpendicular to the main avenue, Haraldr saw enormous, featureless, russet-brick edifices, looming some six, even seven, storeys high. People milled about on the street and stuck their heads out of the innumerable windows. For the first time Haraldr noticed that the sky over the Great City was strangely dingy. He quickly established the source of the pollution; maybe another dozen blocks due east from these buildings was a huge, gritty pillar of smoke, fouling the entire horizon. Not far away, another shaft of soot rose above visible tongues of flame; glowing cinders shot up into the roiling black column. Was the Great City on fire?