Byzantium (38 page)

Maria slowly released the demigod and stepped towards Haraldr. Her hips inclined slightly forward, only a thumb’s width from his thighs. She held her hands just above his chest and spread her fingers. For a moment she looked directly at him, her eyes reflections of the brilliant azure sky outside, her lips slightly parted. Her fingers touched his chest like the barest breeze. That was all. She closed her eyes for a moment and stepped away. She looked once again at the towering Heracles and then went into the sun by herself.

‘It is so dark in there,’ she said, taking Haraldr’s arm again. ‘Sometimes in the dark I feel I cannot breathe.’ They entered a shaded arcade roofed with thick ivy. She was quiet for a while. They left the stadium and wandered in a small poplar grove, poking at statuary fragments with their feet. Between the rows of trees, the limestone cliffs fell away to the green-and-gold plain below. The trees that ringed Daphne shimmered in the late-afternoon breeze. Maria’s fingers moved softly against Haraldr’s sleeve. She spoke as if mesmerized. ‘Do you fair-hairs believe in the Apocalypse?’

Haraldr asked Gregory to clarify, but Maria interrupted. ‘The End of Creation.’ She looked out over Daphne, now a mosaic of golden spires and long, misty, smoke-purple shadows. ‘We shall subdue the sons of Hagar, the Emperor shall regain Illyricum, and Egypt shall bring her tribute once more. And he shall set his hand upon the sea and subdue the fair-hair nations.’ Her recitation was dreamlike. ‘Then a base woman will rise up and rule the Romans and there will be conspiracies and slaughter in every house and this impure queen will anger God and He will stretch out His hand and seize His strong scythe and cut the earth from under the city and order the waters to swallow it up. And the waters will crash forth and raise the city spinning to great height, and then cast it down into the abyss.’

Haraldr knew that Maria had sensed his tremor of anxiety. Was she testing him with this reference to an ‘impure queen’?

‘I see I have frightened you,’ Maria said, her voice light. ‘It is such a wicked tale. Do you have one like it?’

Haraldr assumed she had only been playing. ‘Yes. Ragnarok. The Doom of the Gods.’ Haraldr watched Daphne glitter in the lowering sun and felt Odin stir to life. ‘The sun turns black, earth sinks in the waves, the blazing stars are quenched from the sky. Flames leap fierce to scorch the clouds, until Heaven itself is seared to ashes.’ Haraldr lost the skaldic rhythm with the words that followed. ‘And then the wolf, Fenrir, will devour all, even one-eyed Odin the All-Father.’

‘Odin? Is he your fair-hair demon?’

‘He is the god of war, verse and vision. He hung from the tree of infinite roots to seize the mead of verse from the Underworld, and in his palace, called the Valhol, slain warriors raise their swords again, to wait for Ragnarok.’

‘So you do not believe in Christ the King.’

‘I was baptized with the water of all-conquering Christ.’

Now Maria seemed perplexed. ‘So you believe that Christ will rule in the end, after Odin perishes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you believe that you will be spared to enter the New Jerusalem?’ She gathered that he did not understand. ‘You see, when the Empress City has been cast into the abyss, God will allow the fair-hairs to rage forth upon the earth and they will consume blood and flesh and the sun will turn to blood and the moon darken. And then the Antichrist, a serpent in the guise of a man, will arise to battle Christ. After terrible tribulations Christ will cast the Devil and all of the unjust into a lake of fire. And the just shall be brought into a great city of crystal and gold, the new Jerusalem that will descend from heaven.’ Maria seemed to recite from some text. ‘And there shall they dwell in the sight of God, and there shall no longer be night, nor need of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will give them light, and the just shall reign for eternity.’

Haraldr pondered this tale in which the Norsemen played such a menacing role. Was this why the Romans feared the northern nations, even with their God-granted gift of liquid fire? He looked down and saw Maria’s flickering blue challenge. ‘So you believe that we fair-hairs will hasten the rise of Christ’s great foe the Devil Antichrist?’

‘Those are the visions of the prophets.’ Maria paused and reflected, as if she gave partial credence to these visions. ‘What do you think?

Haraldr remembered the words of the Christian skalds at Olaf’s court. ‘We believe that . . . that after Ragnarok, Christ will raise up a hall more fair than the sun, thatched with gold, at a place called Gimle. Perhaps that is this New Jerusalem you speak of. It is said that the gods shall dwell there in innocence and bliss.’

‘How extraordinary! That you fair-hairs would also know of the Holy City of God.’

‘That is not the end of the tale.’ Haraldr felt as if he could see beyond sun-flecked Daphne to the dark border of creation. Maria clutched his arm tightly. Odin spoke, death dark on his own tongue. ‘Now comes the last black dragon flying, the glittering serpent from Nidafell. He is a blackness that will consume all flesh, all life, all light, even his own being. When he soars in the darkness, all creation will cease to be.’

‘Then no one will judge you in the end, and bring the just to everlasting life?’

‘No one, man or god, will be left to judge. A man will judge himself, by the courage with which he stands before the last dragon.’

Maria looked down for a long while. Finally she blinked, and a tiny tear hung on a painted lash. ‘Your tale is better than mine,’ she whispered. ‘It is so brave, and so sad.’

The wind fluttered the leaves in the grove behind. Gregory spoke in Greek; someone was approaching. Maria turned and waved. She let go of Haraldr’s arm and advanced a few paces to wait for Leo, who attacked a flight of stone steps with red-faced vigour. Leo whispered breathlessly into Maria’s ear, then held out his arm to her. She placed her white fingers on Leo’s silk sleeve and turned to Haraldr. ‘Thank you for your lovely tale. Anna is coming for you.’ Then, with dancing white slippers, Maria descended the golden steps of Daphne.

‘That ass has more sense than the man who beats him,’ muttered the Keeper of the Imperial Beacon at Toulon; he plucked at his short black beard with consternation. ‘You be careful with those!’ The Keeper quickly steadied the stumbling pack mule and made certain that the load - two large terracotta canisters - was secure. ‘Fool!’ he shouted to the batman, a small Cilician whose weathered dark skin was the same colour as his sweat-stained brown burlap tunic. ‘You break one of these and your own piss could set it off so quickly that you would wish for Hell-fires to save you from the flames.’

The batman grabbed the mule’s harness to steady himself and looked back at the narrow, rocky path he had just ascended; it led from the main road which threaded through the Cilician gates. ‘Well, your Sirship, accustomed as I am to the loads of faggots we bring up here, and that is no worry to me, for my children would not go fatherless. But you want the Devil’s spittle, and for good reason I do not know, and you pay only what the load of faggots is, to boot.’ The batman pulled the long-suffering mule over the last steep step-up. A small stone-walled fort stood at the flat top of the crest. The batman slapped the mule’s rump; the beast trudged towards the fort’s heavy wooden gate. ‘It’s me that should protest, Sirship.’

‘It’s you that should protest,’ mumbled the exasperated Keeper as he followed the delivery through the gate. They stepped into a deserted court; a rectangular, three-storey stone tower rose at the northwest corner of the walls. Atop the tower was a flat bronze ellipse twice as tall as a man, surrounded by four workers who busily polished the shimmering surface.
I should protest,
thought the Keeper
; I
am asked to maintain Toulon with one assistant and five lice-eaten guards. When the sainted Bulgar-Slayer was alive, the frontiers were important and we would sometimes have an entire vanda posted up here. Now the corvee that would provide us with even temporary reserves from the thematic army has been eliminated by the offices of the Strategus Attalietes. Fine, he will one day learn his lesson when the sons of Hagar pour through the Cilician gates and darken his own fields and there is no thematic army to resist them, and the Imperial Taghmata cannot be summoned because the Imperial Beacon at Toulon has been destroyed by the heretics!
The Keeper hitched up his belt and strode to the tower.

He ascended the grey stone steps and stopped in the clock room. His young assistant, the Superintendent of the Imperial Dial, maintained the room spotlessly; the afternoon sun through the grilled glass windows lit scoured stone. The brass tank of the water clock gleamed, the gears and pulleys beneath it clicked like busy beetles. With a habitual reflex the Keeper checked the time on the large engraved bronze disc. He looked for the coin-size gold pin that signified the sun and then plotted it against the overlying grid of arcing wires that indicated the hours. Tenth hour of the day; four hours past the red-enamelled vertical wire that marked the meridian, two hours above the red arc that indicated sunset. It was the hours after sunset that mattered to the Keeper. ‘Let’s check the beacon,’ he said to the Superintendent, a studious young graduate of the Quadrivium in Dorylaeum, whose once-sallow cheeks had taken on a healthier brightness from his mountain posting.

The pair climbed through the small circular stone stairwell to the roof of the tower. A charred stone tub three arm spans wide took up most of the roof space. Towering above the tub was the elliptical copper mirror; the guards had just finished their meticulous polishing and the slight concavity captured a compressed, distorted image of the mountain landscape. The Keeper looked north, imagining that he could see the summit of Mount Arghaios a dozen leagues across the dull, olive-grey expanse of the Taurus plateau. May the clouds stay away and your watchmen stay awake, he thought, silently invoking the beacon keepers’ prayer for his counterpart atop the distant mountain. And for you also at Mount Samos and Kastron Aiylon and Mount Mamas and Kyrizos and Mokilos and St Afxendios and of course the Grand Superintendent of the Imperial Dial in the great Magnara in the Empress City. The Keeper sighed, thinking of the distance that separated him and his ambitions from the Queen of Cities; he attempted to assuage his melancholy with the thought that he was the most important of the Keepers, for he started it all. And he would at least not have to worry about his watchmen sneaking wine to their posts and drifting off; his message would come by swift courier from Antioch by way of Adana.

The Keeper inspected the improvised crane that would lift the terracotta canisters to the roof of the tower. ‘Yes!’ he shouted down, signalling the guard to attach the clay jars to the hoist.

‘I’m not comfortable with the idea of using liquid fire,’ said the Superintendent. ‘I really think it might melt the mirror and burn through the roof.’

‘I guess when you studied the Quadrivium they didn’t teach you that a wood fire can actually burn hotter than that stuff,’ said the Keeper good-naturedly. ‘The advantage to liquid fire is that it ignites instantly and the flames leap more vigorously. When Basil the Bulgar-Slayer - may Christ the King preserve and keep his immortal soul - was alive, we used it all the time. Look, you can figure it before I can say it. Even when the flame is up to maximum visibility in four minutes . . .’

‘True. Four minutes for each beacon, times eight beacons in all, totals more than half an hour. And given the usual delays, it is quite possible that a message sent from here in one hour could be received at the Imperial Palace in the next. Hasn’t it happened before?’

‘Indeed it did, the year before you came here. We were told of the capture of Edessa by the Saracens. At that time the schedule called for the beacon to be lit at the fifth hour of the night to signal that particular event. But the light finally arrived at the Magnara in the sixth hour of the night, signalling that Edessa had resisted the siege. By the time it was all straightened out, the relief force was two weeks late. The problem was traced to Mokilos, where the Keeper had allowed two women of a nearby village to inspect his “facilities” that night. Needless to say, that particular Keeper no longer has that particular equipment to display. Nor does he have eyes with which to miss beacons shining brightly in the night.’

‘So why do they give us liquid fire but cut a watchman from our roster every month, it seems?’

‘Well, something big is afoot down there in Antioch.’ He pointed south. ‘They want to make sure this message is not delayed. And you and I are going to have to share in the watch duty.’ The Superintendent groaned. ‘Let’s look at the new schedule,’ said the Keeper; he genially slapped the bony shoulders of his assistant.

They descended to the clock room and the Keeper went to the polished wooden cabinet in the corner opposite the water tank. He unlocked a shiny brass padlock, removed the sealed document, and displayed it to the Superintendent. The Superintendent examined the seal. ‘The Orphanotrophus Joannes,’ he said with youthful awe. ‘Usually it is the Grand Domestic who sends us the schedule.’

‘Yes,’ said the Keeper, ‘I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if someday the Orphanotrophus Joannes appeared at our gate to set your clock. They say his seal is on everything these days. Perhaps I should petition
him
to find me a posting in the Empress City. Well, let us see what the new schedule is.’ The Keeper peeled apart the seal; the Superintendent crowded in so that he could read the paper as soon as it had been unfolded.

After a moment the Keeper and the Superintendent looked at each other in shock. The most important messages were always scheduled for the second and third hours of the night, while the evening winds still whipped clouds and fogs from the peaks. For years now the message reserved for the second hour had been ‘Antioch besieged’, and for the third hour it had been ‘Antioch has fallen’. Now there was a change. The message for the second hour was ‘The Empress has been attacked’. And for the third hour, ‘The Empress is dead’.