Byzantium (21 page)

Maria’s eyes ignited. Several of the newly arrived traders noticed her, shouted curiously among themselves for a moment, then gestured for her to dance. Alexandros took her arm and urged her towards the door but she pulled away. She unwrapped the long, scarf-like, jewelled pallium that covered her sheer tunic at both front and back, and threw it at Giorgios. She leapt onto the table.

The Venetians backed away slightly, thunderstruck by this vision faintly cloaked in almost transparent white silk. Maria began to dance slowly, with the sinuous control of a professional. The tunic restricted the movement of her legs, so she pulled it high on her hips and knotted it. As she spun more rapidly the truncated garment hiked up farther, and her black pubic triangle teased her audience. Two traders began to close in on the table. Alexandros swept his cloak aside and slowly drew his short sword. A hand reached out and Maria kicked at it. A dozen hands grasped for her,

Alexandros and Giorgios savagely hacked the Venetians with their swords. Somehow Maria kicked herself free and leapt from the table onto Giorgio’s back. They were able to retreat behind Alexandros’s whirring blade, but only because Maria’s gem-studded pallium had been dropped in the melée and most of the Venetians considered it an equally valuable and far less fiercely contested prize. Three of them lay bleeding on the floor while the rest ripped the garment to shreds and scrambled after the loose baubles.

Alexandros and Giorgios - with Maria still on his back -raced uphill, in the direction of the still-glimmering spine of the city. After half a dozen blocks they stopped and ascertained that no one was following. Giorgios wrapped Maria in his cloak; her tunic was in tatters. Her face betrayed nothing, but her eyes were startling, their hue visible even in the dark. ‘There is a lovely park just a little farther up the hill,’ she said. It was as if nothing at all had happened back at the inn.

The park was a small, nicely maintained refuge in the midst of a cluster of upper-middle-class town houses; a ring of cypresses shielded a little pool and an adjacent marble pavilion. Maria spread Giorgio’s cloak on the neatly mowed lawn. ‘Alex’, she said, ‘go to the corner and watch for the cursores.’ The cursores were the city’s nocturnally vigilant police force. Alex looked quizzically between his friend and his lover, then shrugged and walked away.

Maria feverishly removed Giorgio’s clothing. For a moment she reverently caressed his painfully erect shaft. When he penetrated her, she gasped as if stabbed, and her fingernails brought blood from his back. They rolled ferociously in the grass, and her moment came quickly. She screamed, a short, sharp note, then clung desperately to Giorgios. ‘Holy Mother, how I love you,’ she gasped. She fell silent and licked his neck and wondered to herself,
I do love Giorgios. But why did I just feel the Tauro-Scythian deep inside me, like a knife in my womb?

They are the offal of the Empire, the horseman observed to himself, the effluence of the stinking sewers in which they spend their days hiding from the sun and the police. Armenian peasants, Selucid mongrels, mutilated criminals, all of the outcasts who have come to the Empress City to exist as human cockroaches, two-legged insects who scurry from the dark alleys at night to cut purses and throats. The horseman counted five of these nocturnal predators; they had set a barrier of refuse across the narrow, unlit side street, a trap for any citizen foolish enough to stray near the putrescent arteries of one of Constantinople’s largest slums. But the horseman, who was in his own way a denizen of the night and the less decorous recesses of the city, had seen them even before they discerned his giant silhouette against the distant backlighting of the Magnana Arsenal. He made no attempt to alter his course.

Hooves clamoured on ancient paving stones, then quieted as they slowed on the silt and trash that had begun to bury this forgotten, reeking little lane. The five waited, listening for the hoofbeats of an escort, and satisfied themselves that their victim was alone. But when they distinguished the black-frocked figure and the huge head, they postponed their assault, wondering if this was the man who rode in the night. They whispered their confusion, and the horseman, who had learned to make out murmured confidences across a room full of tittering dignitaries, smiled and listened.

‘It’s the demon-monk. I’ll swear to it on the hair of a saint’s ball-pouch.’

‘No. We’ll see demons ‘nough when we’re called to Hell.’

‘Won’t be Christ the King nor Devil’s disciples you’ll have to fear if he catches you first. He’s an unholy black whirlwind, set down by a conjurer, then he’s somewhere across this cursed city a wink later.’

‘Listen to that while you still got ears, brother. Let’s beat out of here and lay ourselves upon some sotted whore so to thank the demons who saved our balls from Joannes.’

Before the five could vanish into the shadows, the horseman had charged into their midst. The cutthroats looked up in terrified rapture, then shrank from the monstrous leering head as if it were a lighted torch thrust into their faces.
Mark me well,
the horseman thought as the five stumbled into the dark crevices between the towering hovels.
Spread the word like poison into your fetid warrens, let every miserable, damned soul in these pestilent warehouses of human refuse know who I am. I am more than power, that all-too-recognizable face of uniformed authority that clubs you into your stinking lairs by day and gives you short leash by night. I am something more formidable, that ultimate alloy of power welded to the implacable resolution to wield it without hesitation or pity. I am fear.

The horseman, whose name was indeed Joannes, now returned to his intended route; he spurred his horse up the good stone road to a hill crowned with a large, plain-fronted town house. He circled round the back of the building, then turned off the street into a colonnaded arcade screened with vines. A boy in a short silk tunic recognized him and slid open a gate that led into a large interior court. As he gave up the reins to another stable boy, Joannes looked at the outlines of the elaborate topiaries in the court: a boar; an incredible crouching lion. He traversed the long interior arcade to the large brass double doors, where he was greeted by two armoured, stubble-faced Alemmanians, taller even than the black-frock himself, and quickly ushered inside.

‘Orphanotrophus,’ said his host, using Joannes’s official title in the Imperial Administration of the Roman Empire. The candelabra were not lit, and the single row of candles in sconces on the walls cast a wavering, hallucinatory light over the mosaics above them; here and there golden tesserae glimmered like little stars.

‘Logothete of the Dromus,’ answered Joannes; this was the official title of the man responsible for all intelligence gathering, both foreign and domestic, in the Roman Empire. Joannes pointedly ignored the Logothete’s honorary rank of Magister, the highest for any administrative officer in the Roman government, though such an address would not be neglected by any other courtier who hoped to keep his manhood. The hollow-eyed, glowering monk had no use for the complex apparatus of court ceremony, just as he gave little thought to his own meaningless title: Orphanotrophus, or Guardian of Orphans, head of the Empire’s vast network of charity hospitals and orphanages, and now, incidentally, sole authority over hundreds of thousands of solidi in charitable ‘donations’ - usually extorted by various threats - for which he was accountable to no one, and which rarely redressed any of the Empire’s social ills. Titles might have currency to the posturing milksops at court. But tonight a simple monk had the real business of the Empire to conduct.

Joannes knew his way and silently followed the mute-eyed servant to the corner of the room. The servant, a pale, blond-haired Thracian in an oversize silk tunic, pressed against the wall. With a slight exhalation the smooth marble panel swung aside. Joannes and the Logothete entered a small, cool chamber; the servant followed with a single brass lantern in the shape of a ram. The servant bent over and pulled a thin stone slab from the floor. A chill gust swept into the chamber, and the Logothete shielded the lantern. The servant descended into the dark hole.

After feeling his way down the familiar wooden steps, Joannes let the servant guide his legs into the small boat. He swung to the side and sat. The lantern, to his acute eyesight, lit the entire cistern. As the servant paddled the boat through the inky subterranean lake, Joannes counted the rows of algae-striped columns and studied the patterns of the bricks in the rounded vaults overhead; numbers and order were the two fundamentals for which his mind instinctively quested. When they had passed beneath twenty vaults, they reached the far end and climbed to a small wooden dock. They ascended a short flight of stone stairs that led to a stained oaken door. The servant unlocked the door; the room they entered smelled of incense, good wine, and a woman’s perfume.

‘I have something special tonight,’ said the Logothete as he and his guest lowered themselves to tasselled brocade couches. The Logothete had dark, piercing Asiatic eyes that sparked ferally as the servant began lighting the sconced oil-lamps. Like Joannes, he had been born to a low-level bureaucrat and had suffered a family disgrace; his father had been paymaster to a provincial regiment and had been cashiered for skimming funds, while Joannes’s father had been a minor legal clerk in the Black Sea port of Amastris and had been caught forging deeds of sale. This was the bond between Joannes and the Logothete, worth more than any momentary political allegiances or utterly fictional declarations of loyalty.

‘You’ll find this quite remarkable,’ said the Logothete. His servant poured wine from a glazed clay jug into silver goblets. ‘A Sicilian vintage. It will be past its time in two or three weeks, so drink copiously.’ The Logothete smiled. Joannes would drink liberally whether or not the wine was good, and certainly regardless of any invitation. The Logothete waited until Joannes had downed a full goblet and half of a second; he knew from long experience that Joannes never exceeded his considerable capacity but often drank enough to convince others that he had gone beyond his limits.

‘The information comes from my usual correspondents at the court of Yaroslav, as well as interviews with Rus traders who have journeyed from what are commonly referred to as the Islands of Thule, though we are certain that Thule is actually a collection of separate nations, some of them islands, some of them large peninsulas, linked by a common language. My offices have also had conversations with Frankish traders and diplomats who know and deal with these northern
barbaroi,
whom they call, with their characteristic simplicity of expression, Northmen.’ The Logothete paused to sip, then placed his goblet on a small ivory-surfaced cabinet. ‘The facts are thus. The level of military organization among the northern
barbaroi
is much higher than the Strategus of Kherson, our putative expert in these matters, has led us to believe. Land battles involving tens of thousands of men have been reported, and fleets of hundreds of fast craft manned by heavily armed marines regularly launch lightning attacks on their neighbours. Because these northern nations are not dominated by a single great power, there is considerable political flux among them, and the northern
barbaroi
kings regularly depose one another. Bands of warriors - often considerable in number - disenfranchised by these conflicts are almost always available for hire, or simply for the promise of booty, to the next usurper.’

Joannes thought for a moment before speaking in his sepulchral baritone. ‘So. The military resources for an invasion by the northern
barbaroi
certainly exist. This is one of those rare instances in which popular hysteria has a basis in fact. It is quite coincidental, of course. If a blind man spends enough time grovelling in the street, eventually he might chance across a gold coin someone has dropped.’

Joannes signalled the servant to fill his cup, settled back, and looked steadily upwards, as if he had just located some hovering phantom he wished to address. ‘Of course, the military capability of these northern
barbaroi
is in itself hardly alarming, merely another name added to the litany of antagonists who ceaselessly harass our borders. But alone among our multitudinous adversaries, the northern
barbaroi
have the seafaring abilities to threaten the Queen of Cities herself. If they did mount such a naval belligerency, and had the good fortune to find their assault coincident with, let us say, an incursion by the Bulgars across the Danube estuaries, then we would find the northern
barbaroi
a serious menace.’ Joannes snapped his gaze back to the Logothete. ‘However, you mention this political flux in the northern nations. As long as thieves quarrel among themselves, the gatekeeper has little to worry about. Without strong leadership any northern
barbaroi
incursions would be little more than ill-fated acts of piracy, even with half the Imperial Navy dispatched elsewhere.’

‘You discount the notion that a
barbaroi
prince arrived incognito with the last Rus trade flotilla?’

‘You found nothing. It smacked of the usual Dhynatoi rumourmongering.’

‘I am not entirely satisfied with what I found. The rumour may have started among the Rus.’

‘Continue to work on it, then. As much as I would like to build the Rus trade, if this Prince is produced, I would have no choice but to make cause with the Dhynatoi in urging the extermination of all the northern
barbaroi
who arrived with that fleet.’

‘Would that be enough? Suppose one of these
barbaroi
thieves, to follow your metaphor, was already the gatekeeper?’

Joannes’s dark, oily eyebrows descended towards his stormy irises, and for an awful moment the Logothete wondered how he could have so miscalculated his ally’s loyalties. But Joannes then nodded appreciatively at the extrapolation of his metaphor. The Hetairarch, the northern
barbaros
Mar Hunrodarson, opened the gates to the Imperial Palace each morning. And the Hetairarch was perhaps a servant who had begun to imagine himself a master. ‘Develop your theory,’ rumbled Joannes.