Byzantium (47 page)

‘Komes.’ Haraldr was doubly shocked. He had not expected the Empress, and not in this setting.

Glowing braziers offered the only light, and a dry, clean, aromatic heat. Everything was tinted red; the Empress’s lips were like fresh blood. Zoe curled on the cushions like a panther; there was a sense of power, even viciousness, latent in her lithe limbs. And there was much of her limbs to see. The sheerest lilac silk, hardly more opaque than the drizzling mist outside, clung to her breasts and hips. Haraldr helplessly noticed that his Blessed Mother’s nipples were large, flat areolae.

‘Komes Haraldr.’ The voice was like liquid desire. ‘Can you speak without your little tongue?’

Haraldr had been asked to come without the ubiquitous Gregory; now he was grateful for the concentration Greek required. ‘Yes. I have learned a great deal on this long road.’

‘Yes, you have,’ Zoe said, enunciating carefully. ‘I am impressed by your fluency.’

Haraldr thanked Christ’s Father, Lord God, for the many tongues he had created in his tower at Babel. The barrier of language seemed to take the seduction out of Her Imperial Majesty’s voice. ‘It is my intention to become, as you Romans say, “civilized”.’

Zoe’s eyebrows quivered and set with a slightly elevated arch. ‘Yes. But you must retain the ... impetuousness of your race. I believe I owe my present comfort, if not my very life, to your . . . instincts. I want to thank you more properly and more privately.’ A serving eunuch brought wine in response to some signal Haraldr had missed.

Haraldr took his goblet. Perspiration began to bead on his back but he felt a certain stimulation. Maria had proven herself fond of such preludes. Then he almost choked. Christ! Citron! Surely he was not intended to use the Empress as he had Citron?

‘So, Komes Haraldr.’ Zoe raised her goblet, her smooth white arm compressing her ample breast. The nipple had now become slightly erect. ‘Let us raise a cup to your future as a civilized man. And let us hope that you do not become too civilized.’

Suddenly Zoe stood, and Haraldr scrambled out of the couch and onto his knees, his head bowed as prescribed by protocol. He could hear the Empress swish towards him. He closed his eyes in terror like a man expecting the blade to kiss his neck. The Imperial fingers tousled his hair like a breeze. ‘Golden silk,’ she said, her voice frightening, but only in its sorrow. Then the touch of the purple-born fingers was gone. Eyes shut tight, Haraldr again heard silk rustle.

‘You may rise, Komes Haraldr,’ said Theodore in his droning tenor. Haraldr stood and crossed his arms over his breast. Zoe waited by the curtained brocade partition, apparently to take leave of her guest. She was now wrapped in a glistening black sable cape faced with purple satin.

‘Komes, am I a fool to be certain of your loyalty?’

‘We would both be fools if you could not be certain of that loyalty.’ Haraldr’s unhesitating pledge brought him not even an inkling of anxiety; in the long, monotonous weeks since the rescue he had allayed many of his suspicions. The Romans, he had concluded, were more incompetent than treacherous; when the arrows had begun to fly, they had defended their Empress with absolute unanimity. The sorely misjudged Attalietes certainly had been a colossal blunderer, but ultimately he had given his life to defend the Empress. Constantine was equally inept, but had he truly conspired against the Empress, he would have obstructed or opposed Blymmedes’s rescue mission, rather than approving it and in fact facilitating it with his temporary withdrawal. And Joannes’s nephew, Michael Kalaphates, had come very close to his own mortality fighting at the door of the Empress’s carriage. Certainly the Romans had their internecine feuds - every court did - but in this case it was obvious that the ‘conspiracy’ he had imagined was actually a Seljuk adventure. And as for the attempt on his own life, he still did not discount Mar’s involvement, but he was certain that no Roman had sent his would-be assassin.

Zoe fixed Haraldr with the certitude of centuries-old power. Her seductive lips became muscular, shaping her words as if they were to be carved in stone. ‘Komes, Maria is coming for you. She has much of which to speak with you. But she will also ask a question in my name.’ Head erect, Zoe vanished in a whisper of sable and silk.

Theodore ushered Haraldr back to the lavishly cushioned couch. He waited, smothered in down and plied with wine, for what seemed an hour. Then the brocade was lifted away and Maria appeared with heart-stopping suddenness. She wore a coat of pale blue silk trimmed with white ermine; the collar of snowy fur came up to her chin, and her skin seemed like the whitest marble against it. Her raven hair was loosely pulled back and set in a single braid.

‘I am sorry. Our Mother wished to speak with me.’ She looked at her slippers, the same white silk with pearl beads that she had worn to the banquet at Antioch. There was no intimacy in her voice. It was as if Hecate - Haraldr sucked in a breath almost audibly at the memory of what lay beneath that coat - had never happened. ‘We are only two days from Nicaea. In a week we will be in the Queen of Cities. I long for my home. Do you miss your home?’

‘Yes.’ For the first time in weeks Haraldr thought of the debt he must pay to the kings in whose footsteps he followed. And yet how could he leave her now?

‘Do you remember the stadium in Daphne?’

‘Yes. I remember everything at Daphne.’

Perhaps her cheeks became more deeply tinted, perhaps it was the play of the braziers on her usual glow. ‘Together we heard the echoes, the acclamations to the heroes of ancient Hellas and old Rome. When we return to the Empress City, you will be the hero of new Rome. In the streets they will sing your name.’ She looked up at him for the first time. The intense blue of her eyes was always a fresh marvel. ‘Who will one day walk in those ruins, to listen for your name? Will they be as we were, lovers in search of their own fate?’

Haraldr felt the surging in his breast and the stirring in his loins. She acknowledged . . . them. Or was it no longer them but a single being, a new soul born in that terrible instant? ‘I know my fate,’ he told her softly.

‘Yes. So do I.’ She stood suddenly. ‘Come to my bed.’

Haraldr struggled to his feet and reached out with a trembling hand.

Maria stepped away. ‘No. You must promise not to touch me except where I touch you. You cannot ask me except what I ask you.’ Then she touched his hand with the hot brands of her fingers.

The partitioned chamber in the Imperial Pavilion had room for little more than a large wooden bed frame covered with thick down quilts. There was no light from lamps or braziers but the room was quite warm. Maria stood and held Haraldr’s hand in the darkness for several minutes. He could hear her breathe occasionally, but the silence was otherwise absolute. It was as if they were alone in the vastness of Asia Minor. Her touch seemed to fill him with a warm liquor that quickly dissolved his bones.

She dropped his hand, and he could see the motion and hear the sigh of silk as she removed her coat. He could sense that she was naked. Her vague form vanished and the quilts were ruffled by a breeze. From the bed she said, ‘Come to me like Heracles.’

Haraldr stripped as naked as the statue and found his way to the bed. He lay down carefully, unwilling to break the strange spell she was casting. After a few minutes she took his hand again. She sighed, or perhaps it was a muffled, tiny sob. Then she began to explore his arm.

Time became suspended. She traced every vein, every indentation, the outline of every muscle, and he in turn claimed the same territory from her. How long did they float through black oblivion before she stroked his nipple and pressed her satin palm against his huge pectoral? How long before her fingers crept to his belly and his to her wet fur? And then the ritual repeated, this time with lips instead of fingers. They had long ago passed the stars; there was no heat except their own. Finally she held over him, just as she had in Hecate, but this time she lowered her nose to his, the fine-tipped nose he now knew like his own flesh. Perhaps it was a freak of the shadows, perhaps not, but her eyes seemed to light from within and he could see the lapis gleam. ‘You are my angel,’ she whispered. ‘My avenger and my destroyer. I love you.’ Then she settled and brought him inside her.

How long they rocked on that warm, impossibly brilliant sea, he also did not know. This time it was slow, endless, a complete dissolution of the flesh. At the end they shuddered only slightly but in perfect concert, and ceased to be. They were utterly exhausted.

‘Who are you?’

Haraldr started: he must have dozed off. Had it been a dream?

‘Who are you? You are no land man from Rus.’

Haraldr felt her eyes on him, and reality reconstituting his body, if only because for a moment he had actually considered telling her everything, not merely the cryptic affinity he had offered Serah. But the oaths he had taken to that secret were too strong, the risk too great even for love. And then he realized a stunning new truth, that this new love, Maria, also commanded his silence: in Maria’s arms he wanted to remain Haraldr Nordbrikt. In her arms he wanted to end the flight that he had begun at Stiklestad, to stay here among the Romans, to become civilized, to serve his Mother and Father. And to love her, here, for ever. He knew that he could not indefinitely share both these loves, Norway and Maria, yet he would lose them both if he told her now. So for now he would offer her the only truth he could. ‘I cannot tell you who I am.’

She wrapped her arms tightly around his back and pressed her lips softly to his neck. He nuzzled her lustrous hair and whispered in her ear. ‘Who are you?’

Maria kissed Haraldr on the lips and then released him and rolled away from his body. ‘I do not know,’ she said.

Her voice was so plaintive that Haraldr reached out for her with pain in his heart. What sorrow was hidden so deeply? But Maria sat on the edge of her bed and draped her coat over her shoulders. ‘It is almost time to prepare for our day’s journey,’ she said wearily. ‘You must leave.’ She turned to face him. ‘My last question is for our Mother. To it you can reply only yes or no.’

Haraldr sat up and stroked the raven’s plumage. She threw her arms around him and kissed him fiercely, as if it were her last. And then she pushed him away and stood up, her arms wrapped against some inner cold. ‘Our Mother asks if you will, when she commands, sever the head of the Imperial Eagle.’

‘Keleusate.’
The eunuch’s voice clattered like broken porcelain on the bare marble floor. Mar Hunrodarson lifted himself to his knees in response to the invitation but did not rise to his feet. This was a calculated act of protracted obeisance; the purple-born Augusta Theodora could still look down on him as they spoke. Theodora’s thin lips, drawn like a string across her small face, flattened into a wry suggestion of a smile. The pale blue eyes sparkled like ice in the cold room, as if the giant Hetairarch were merely a callow suitor whose attentions Theodora found too fervent and clumsy.

‘Hetairarch.’ Theodora held her arms out and extended her long pale fingers towards the Hetairarch’s shoulders, as if she were a conjurer commanding him to rise. Again the eyes flashed, droll and challenging. Theodora turned swiftly and reclined on her couch.
‘Keleusate,’
offered the eunuch again; he gestured for Mar to sit on the blue silk couch opposite the Augusta.

‘You are accompanying our Father to Thessalonica?’ Theodora’s question was rhetorical. ‘How unseemly that he did not greet my sister or her rescuers on their return, leaving their reception to the offices of his brother, Joannes. I understand that he has not even sent her a message of welcome. And now it seems that my sister embarrasses his piety to such a degree that he must flee to the arms of his saint before he can even look upon her again.’

‘St Demetrius has issued our Father an urgent summons,’ said Mar. He tried to imagine the pain and frustration cloaked behind Theodora’s chalky, impassive features. With her reddish-blonde hair drawn back into a single tight braid, the Augusta not only looked older than her sister but also, curiously, more innocent; the rumour, widely bandied about by the satirists and street gossips, was that Theodora was still a virgin.

‘And while he obeys the summons of his patron he permits his Hetairarch to make his own pilgrimages.’ Her inflection was acid. ‘Perhaps customs have changed since I ... left the palace. I had always assumed that the Hetairarch kept a relentless vigil at His Majesty’s side.’

‘I will rejoin the Imperial procession this evening,’ said Mar without a hint of apology. ‘It is often my habit to depute the care of his Imperial Majesty to my lieutenants.’

‘I see.’ Theodora’s grim lips pursed as they resisted a mocking grin. ‘You are so often occupied with more important errands.’ The Augusta looked straight at Mar and then laughed, the throaty, masculine laugh of a woman too clever really to care about her sexuality. ‘Such an ambitious man. Indeed, haven’t I heard of your ambitions . . . somewhere . . . wherever? You know I do not go out much.’ She fluttered her hand in a gesture of mock femininity. The voice that followed cut like a newly honed blade. ‘Why do you think I would wish to further your desires?’

Mar composed himself, determined to meet this notoriously direct woman with his own candour. ‘Because I believe your Majesty and I share a common enemy.’

Theodora smiled at Mar as if she were indulging a small child in some elaborate masquerade. ‘But of course you must know that out here I have no enemies. Only water bugs. And servants who prefer gossip to work.’

Mar leaned forward slightly. ‘Have your tongue-wagging servants told you of the Orphanotrophus Joannes’s most recent success?’

Theodora snapped back: ‘What do you mean, Hetairarch?’

‘I know that Joannes engineered the abduction of your sister.’

‘There are many of us who suspect that.’

‘I can offer proof.’

Theodora considered what use such proof might be to her sister or her mentor, Alexius. Very little, without command of the Imperial Taghmata. But any knowledge of Joannes was a potentially deadly weapon. ‘Can you produce this evidence?’