Byzantium (4 page)

Elisevett lowered her thick, dark, resin-coated lashes, an utterly feigned expression of modesty. ‘I think you are staying because of me.’

Haraldr wanted to clutch desperately at this great secret that had just been wrenched from his breast, and yet its leaving also filled him with immense joy and relief.
Nothing will ever take me from you!
his head sang triumphantly. But dry chalk seemed to fill his throat, and he had to strangle a pathetic, creaking whimper.

Elisevett silently acknowledged this initial milestone on her journey and forged ahead. She removed a tiny folded parchment from the sleeve of her tunic. When Haraldr recognised the scrap, he became vertiginous with panic, and for a moment he imagined himself pitching forward through the window and plunging to his death. Elisevett squinted over the awkward Slavic script. ‘What is “gold-wreathed goddess”?’ she asked.

Haraldr raised his hand in the feeble gesture of a dying man and finally forced a syllable out. ‘Your . . .’ His palm fluttered near the ornate gold bracelets that twined her arm. ‘Arm rings. You are wreathed in gold.’

‘I did not say for you to point at me as if I were a serving maid.’ Elisevett snapped ‘My father could have you flogged in the Podol Square if he knew you sent verses to me.’ She lowered her head for a long moment and wondered what she would see when she arrived at her destination. It did not matter, as long as it was not
this.
She wondered if he would be fearless - and foolish - enough to follow.

Elisevett looked up at Haraldr again, her smoky-blue eyes wide. ‘The embassies have come since I was four months old. Three weeks ago the Prince of Hungaria. Last autumn a king of Langobardia. I am the third daughter of the Great Prince, to be auctioned off like some shackled
kholopy
in the Podol market in order to bear the swinish brood of some petty tyrant with filthy habits. The gifts they have sent my father already fill a chamber.’ Her voice lowered to a mysterious, wistful sigh. ‘You are the first to send me something forbidden.’ She hissed conspiratorially. ‘Your own verse.’

Haraldr’s heart rose in his chest like a desperate caged bird. The life that had ended four years ago at Stiklestad could begin again.
Gold-ringed, cherished, snowy vision. I am not worthy of you but you have accepted my verses.

‘Touch me.’ Like some wizard’s conjuring, the scarlet robe slinked fluidly past her knees to reveal several inches of firm, pale thigh. Her whisper was like cat’s fur. ‘Touch me.’

Haraldr inhaled sharply; even the damp air seemed to stick in his throat. Not in this holy place, and with the axe her father, Yaroslav, held over his head.

‘If you don’t, I will tell my father that you did.’

Haraldr was conscious only of a bead of sweat rolling down his back. He watched his trembling hand reach out with the sickening fascination of a boy watching his first execution. Elisevett’s eyes were spikes. But his hand crept closer, more assured of its desire.

Her thigh was like a rose petal, summer-plush, smooth and warm. Her white hand pulled his higher. His insides were liquid and his skin was pelted with sleet. Higher, downier, softer. If he went farther, his heart would stop.

‘Stop.’ Elisevett pressed her legs together and slowly pulled his hand from between them. She knew now that he would have to go with her. ‘You could die for what you just did,’ she told him. She brought her lips closer, and her eyes were fierce, manic. ‘You know what we must do now.’ She pressed Haraldr’s face with her silky hands. Her heavy lashes folded down and her face turned up in bitter triumph. It would be over soon.

Haraldr watched her eyes pulse beneath her pale, almost translucent lids. Her wine-red lips twitched. He distantly remembered one of Olaf’s skalds using the word
dangerous
to describe a woman.

Like an attacking beast, her arms were around his neck, overwhelming his senses: the smell of her, the petal-soft cheek, the hot breath. He spasmed at the first lancing touch of her lips against his, and then flesh melted and fused. They held, gasped, teeth grinding. Then she pushed him away, her high breasts heaving beneath her silk. This was the moment. Her eyes found his and made certain that he would obey. ‘You know I am as pure as the Mother of White Christ,’ she said. ‘You must teach me.’

The rest was a dream. In a pile of white priests’ vestments, silk sliding, hard lilac nipples, probing the hot, downy centre, each contact excruciating. She was so slick, like curiously hot ice - one slip and he would be gone.

It ended suddenly, with consummation still in progress.

Haraldr could not believe the paralysing surge in his gristled loins. Before, with the whore Jarl Rognvald had purchased for him, all the ale he had consumed to prepare for his initiation had dulled him sufficiently to allow for what had then seemed a lifetime of wondrous exploration. But with love and without ale, love-making was clearly different.

Their hearts pounded in concert for a moment. Then Elisevett heaved with a single sobbing inhalation. She had rid herself of the detestable innocence that tied her childhood; the little doll had been smashed by his bludgeoning manhood. But there was this strange new sorrow. Where would she go now? The still wet new wings of womanhood began to wilt, and suddenly she had a maddening desire to undo all this, to go back to the
Him
she had renounced for this new
him.

Haraldr clutched his new life in panic; why had she begun to cry like this? He tried to caress her but she wrenched away and furiously pulled her robe out from among the scattered, crumpled vestments. She stood, tears welling over her dark lashes, her scarlet silk draped in front of her. ‘I’m going to have to tell my father what you did,’ she said sobbing.

Two guards preceded him and two followed. The noise from the river was now an assault; the musicians had started a tinny rehearsal. The warmth of the day lingered in ponds of still air as Haraldr and his gaolers ascended the steps to the summit of the Citadel of Kiev. They turned beside a stack of freshly quarried granite blocks and entered a colonnaded walkway bordered with newly planted cypresses, finally pausing in front of a bronze door embossed with a trident, the family crest of the Great Prince Yaroslav of Rus.

Haraldr was ordered to wait in an ante-chamber. The guards locked the doors as they left. The candelabra were not lit and the only light came from two brass oil lamps hung on opposite walls. Along the far end of the chamber, scaffolding had been erected by visiting Greek artists, and the chalk outline of a mural traced a phantom image in the faint light.

He waited on his feet, too stunned with terror to begin an accounting of his misery. After what seemed like hours he heard footsteps and voices, then nothing. His legs ached and he slumped against the wall, then sat on the cold marble floor. His resurrection last night had ended so quickly, it might never have happened, a butterfly that had flickered across his vision one summer afternoon and was gone. Kristr was cruel, he gave pleasure and then punished for it. No, this was Odin; the prophet of fate had finally come to claim the ending that had been stolen from him four years ago. The thought provided a melancholy comfort; the terrible dark fall that had begun at Stiklestad was almost over.

‘Nordbrikt! Get up, you hamster-eating moron! You’d sleep on the gibbet!’ The lamp flared and Yaroslav’s scar-faced bailiff kicked at his feet. ‘You kissed the Devil’s arse this time.’ He gave Haraldr a shove towards the double doors.

The Great Prince Yaroslav’s office was lit by a single flickering lamp set on a massive ivory table inlaid with silver tridents. Leather- and ivory-bound manuscripts were stacked at Yaroslav’s left elbow and he pushed them away. The Great Prince’s stubby, larvae-like fingers crept over the table-top as if he were fumbling for something in the dark. Finally he looked up. His face had a greasy, slightly jaundiced pallor that closely matched the colour of the table-top. Purple folds almost like separate appendages hung beneath his wide, hen’s-eggs eyes.

‘Haraldr Nordbrikt, Haraldr Sigurdarson,’ said Yaroslav in a weary, rattling voice; it was as if he were deciding which of the two names offended him the most. ‘I spend too much time dealing with’ - Yaroslav paused and gasped - ‘you.’ Yaroslav’s right hand snatched a small jewelled replica of a cathedral and his busy fingers went to work on it. ‘Now, I understand that you have brought some sort of ... suit to my third daughter.’

The Great Prince’s voice was so introspective that Haraldr was not certain he had heard properly. Did he dream this? He soared on a gust of bewilderment and hope.

The Great Prince rose, stepped round the table with his jerky lame gait, and stood with his stout belly aimed at Haraldr’s belt. His glaring pop eyes offered no hope at all. ‘You are the opposite of me in every way. God in his ineffable wisdom made you tall and straight. I am short and crooked. Your father and then your brother worshipped you as if you were the sacred skull of St Andrew. My father, the blasphemous fornicator, banished me to Rostov and then still tried to extort tribute from me, and I fought my brother, Syvataspolk, he of the foul-smelling grave, for ten years for the right to rule this city!’ The Great Prince’s voice was steadily rising; his face darkening. ‘And yet I am the one called the Great Prince, and all Europe comes to me, and even the Greek Emperor calls me friend, and you’ - Yaroslav gulped for air like a fish out of water - ‘you are a prince without a name, much less any subject who would raise any sword for him or tithe a grivna to his cause. Your rank is
detskii
in my Lesser Druzhina. I believe you now have the lofty responsibility of collecting the toll at the Lybed Bridge. And I can tell you on good authority that you will never be promoted even to
pasynok.’

Haraldr boiled in the acid of four years’ humiliation. Another voice screamed at him, but it was not Yaroslav’s.

‘I know why you regard me with such contempt.’ Yaroslav paused like a man on the brink of a sheer promontory, then gulped and stepped forward. ‘You affront the Great Prince because you know, as indeed the scabrous tales are recited in every court in the north, because your brother’ - Yaroslav stuttered with rage - ‘your brother knew my wife. Because your brother fouled my wife with his stinking lechery! Your brother put his hands all over my wife and spoiled her, and after all I did for him he rutted her like the drooling satyr he was. He ruined her with his filthy lusts!’

Haraldr had not known this. Yes, his brother had always spoken of Ingigerd with reverence, but Haraldr had never imagined that they had been lovers. His frigid, leaden stomach plunged towards the floor. Now he understood the sin for which he had been punished for four miserable years.

‘Stop this, Husband.’ Haraldr peered with terrified wonder into the dark corner of the room. Gaunt, wraithlike, a cloak wrapped round her like a burial shroud, sat Ingigerd, Queen of Rus. Haraldr had not even noticed her when he had entered. The outline of her broad, angular shoulders became visible as she rose from her chair. ‘You knew that I was not pure before you ever held me. I have given
you
four sons and three daughters. It was my father, the same who forbade me to marry the man who touched me first, who sent as my dower the Swedish mercenaries who defeated your brother, Syvataspolk. It was my
lover’ -
she spat out the word - ‘Olaf, who sent his friend Eymund to take Novgorod for you.’ Ingigerd stepped towards the light and clapped her hands to the breasts, now low and shrivelled, that men had once called the great snowy joy-cliffs of Sweden. ‘Your dynasty is built on this corrupt flesh, Great Prince.’

Yaroslav returned to his chair and sat with a cringing posture. He deeply regretted that the sight of Norway’s royal excrement had caused him to vent his old jealousy in this unfortunate display. He considered again the counsel his wife had offered him earlier in the day, when his daughter Elisevett had come to him with another of her endless vexations. Haraldr, as Ingigerd had pointed out, was Norway’s rightful heir; and
reliable
Norse military assistance, such as might be provided by a grateful son-in-law, was essential to the survival of Yaroslav’s dynasty. And then Elisevett was no prize: she was a mere third daughter, an intractable child whose precipitate temperament might break an alliance as easily as her precocious loins might build one. But the problem with this marriage was - as were all problems of statecraft - pecuniary.

Currently Haraldr offered nothing but liabilities. The reclamation of his throne would require a considerable fortune, and at the moment Haraldr was worth more dead than alive: the purse now offered for the head of Haraldr Sigurdarson was a staggering one thousand gold bezants, and it seemed that virtually every Norseman in Rus was intent on winning that bounty, save the most ardent Norwegian patriots; Yaroslav, himself, had been tempted more than once to solve several of his problems by surrendering the fugitive Prince of Norway. Of course, his wife would have bitten his balls off, so it was just as well he had resisted. Haraldr, however, was not the kind of man who seemed likely to win men’s loyalty, so it would be pointless to risk a single silver grivna on the chance he might reclaim his throne. But if Haraldr could finance his own reconquest of Norway, he would be worth the risk of a third daughter. Of course, Haraldr would need the money quickly, while Elisevett was still young; without an heir to bind Norway to Rus, the exercise was pointless. And there was only one place in the world where a layabout like Haraldr could acquire a fortune virtually overnight. And if Haraldr never returned from that journey, what would have been lost? Even Elisevett had dozens of other suitors.

‘Haraldr. My father married no less than the daughter of the Greek Emperor. Do you know what he gave the Emperor in exchange for his bride? Kherson. The entire city of Kherson.’

Haraldr stared maniacally at Yaroslav. It was all he could do to keep from shouting, ‘I’ll give you a nation! Denmark or Angle-Land or Bulgaria!’

‘Haraldr. It would be enough for me to know that Norway was a grandson’s birthright. But presently you are sovereign of nothing beyond your own boots. And I cannot worry about defending you against your legions of enemies when my own cities are besieged by Pechenegs and I need the cooperation of all Norsemen in ridding Rus of the eternally menacing pagan horde.’ Yaroslav’s throat rattled, and he sighed as if he could hardly go on. ‘You are aware, of course, how valuable your corpse is. I feel that if you stay here, it is only a matter of time before you are found out. Yesterday I received a correspondence from a Jarl of Denmark who has served me ably in my Druzhina in Novgorod - I won’t reveal his name to you, as I will not reveal yours to him - a correspondence inquiring if I harbour the Prince of Norway at my court. A week ago my own
podiezdnoi
asked me if I had heard rumours that the lost Prince of Norway, the one who ran from Stiklestad, is a fugitive in Kiev.’ Yaroslav paused and looked at Haraldr searchingly. ‘Are you beginning to understand?’