Lord of Slaughter (6 page)

Fishmongers declared the quality of their wares, their catch laid out like treasure, iridescent in the cold light. Saddlers and grocers challenged the crowds to find a better price anywhere on Middle Way. Jewellers sat flanked by scowling eunuchs, a bullion dealer stood by his scales, six fully mailed Norman mercenaries around him. They made Loys shiver, though they were not Beatrice’s father’s men, he would have recognised them. Next to the bullion dealer was a row of coin changers, less impressively protected by native Greeks and hard-eyed easterners. Loys longed to take Beatrice here, to buy her jewels to make up for the ones she’d lost to robbers in Montpellier before they’d boarded the ship for Constantinople.

The streets were busy, and he fought against a tide of people heading towards the Golden Gate – the city’s main ceremonial entrance. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked a boy who passed him.

‘The emperor’s back! He’s leading a triumph. He’s got the Varangians with him! Northern giants! They have a savage who attacked him in his tent with them!’

Loys had no time for that, he had to be at his studies.

He pushed on, past the emperor Marcian’s granite column and into the squabble of the Bull Market – where bulls and virtually everything else were on sale. It was less busy than usual but still busier than any other market he had ever attended in his life. He shoved his way through, thinking it the one blessing of poverty that you lacked a rich purse to steal.

From there he went under Theodosian’s Arch, decorated with images of victorious Roman soldiers – still gaudy in yellow, red and pink after all these years - and on down the Middle Way to the Forum of Constantine, where, thank God, the market was closed. He strode past the statue of the Roman emperor who had founded the city, only glancing at the other marvellous bronzes that decorated the wide square. At the exit of the forum were two keystones in the wall in the shape of huge blank-eyed heads, both taller than he was. Their brutal, heavy features stared out with expressions of ancient animosity. They made him shiver. Pagan gods or heroes, he thought, their names now forgotten. Loys saw eternity in their stares and his own life seemed fragile and fleeting.

Once through the forum, the magnificent hippodrome appeared – a massive building in pink cement supported by marble columns that stretched like a parade of trees out to the south-west. He had seen a chariot race there but it had all been too rough for him – the rival factions of Blues and Greens brawling on the terraces. He’d winkled his way out of the crush when a brute of a man behind him had pissed up the back of his trousers.

Past the hippodrome to the north-east shone the bright white walls of the palace and, beyond that, the most marvellous thing he had ever seen, the great dome of the mother church of Eastern Christendom, Hagia Sophia. He’d known God in that place among the ribbons of incense smoke that climbed from the gold of the altar through the sunbeams beneath the huge vault of the ceiling. The building was beyond mortal dreams, it was infused with God’s glory, its architects divinely inspired.

He walked on, following the Middle Way past the Numera. He never liked this part of the trip. The Numera was the city’s prison – built over one of Constantinople’s ancient cisterns. The most disturbing thing about it was its silence in the midst of such a busy city. Every other building in that area burst with noise, from the beggars and traders on the steps of Hagia Sophia to the clucking officials coming and going from the palace and the young men of the Magnaura laughing and fooling their way to their studies. Not so the Numera. Even the relatives of the prisoners, straining at the bars of its gates to offer food for the inmates and bribes to the guards, were cowed and subdued. The building itself was utterly quiet, its walls thick and the labyrinth of cells and tunnels, man-made or natural, that sprawled beneath it so deep that no sound of torment ever escaped.

The Numera was the plainest building on the road, a square block of unfaced brick in dirty yellow, like a stubby bad tooth in the mouth of a beautiful woman, thought Loys. At dawn it sat directly in the shadow of the great church, squatting silent in darkness as if the sun feared it. He guessed it would be getting a few more inmates with the emperor’s return.

He arrived at the steps of the Magnaura, its vast columned porch looming above him. He went up, nodding to the guard at the scholars’ gate, and passed through into the cloistered garden that led to the Senate House – which is what the school was still called, though the senators had long gone.

The scent of olive trees hit him. In the streets no tree would survive a moment – firewood and building materials being precious commodities. Here they stood in smart lines, their branches heavy with the green and purple fruit. He picked one and sucked off its flesh. ‘Agh!’ Bitter. He smiled to himself, wondering if they always tasted that way straight off the tree. He imagined Beatrice by his side, laughing and saying, ‘Well, there’s something you didn’t know, you with all your learning.’

Birdsong filled the air but it came from no natural birds. At the bottom of the line of olive trees was one of the wonders of the city – another olive tree, life-size and cast in bronze, with splendid birds in its branches, their glass feathers catching the light in spangles of colour. Their song piped high and sweet, backed by a sound like rain from the water that powered the machine. He would never get used to this, he thought. In some ways he considered it unholy and recalled the passage from the Bible: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’

God forbade such things. But could God begrudge man such beauty? Loys would have loved to have shown the singing tree to Beatrice, though that was impossible. No woman was allowed in the precincts of the university. He moved on.

The Senate House had an exterior of light yellow cement with three big arches of windows sitting beneath a dome. He still felt a thrill entering the exalted halls of the Magnaura. Today he had just a couple of teaching jobs – rhetoric and philosophy to the dense sons of some nobles. They weren’t inclined to learn much so he wasn’t inclined to teach much, and beyond giving them a few philosophers’ names to drop when questioned by their families, he spent his time with them talking of the many curiosities of the earth – the dragons of the east and the sand seas of Arabia.

Then he would take a class on law himself and – the highlight of his day – join the formal debate in the afternoon. That day he was speaking on the energies of God as separate from the essence of God – how we can know what God does but never what he is. Loys had also prepared a speech on the practice of hesychasm – a hermitage of the soul, withdrawing and stripping away all sensory perception until the eye of the soul awakens and an intuitive knowledge of God is developed. Loys was a theoretical rather than a practical student of this discipline.

He reached the door of the building and stepped inside to be met by the doorkeeper. He waved and went to walk through into the teaching cells but the man put up a hand to stop him.

‘Visitor for you.’

The doorkeeper’s face was pale.

‘Who?’

‘Go to the master’s rooms. He’s there.’

‘Who?’

The man said nothing, just scuttled into the little office behind his table. Loys went across the wide atrium, glancing down at the mosaic beneath his feet. Perseus slaying the Medusa, the snake-haired monster whose gaze turned men to stone. The way the doorman had acted you’d think there was one waiting for him in the master’s study.

He walked to the back of the building, passed the turn into the debating arena and went along a corridor to a single door on the left. He had been here only once before – when he gained admission by interview to the school. Well, actually an appearance before the faculty, at which he had to win through in a debate. It had not been easy – Rouen didn’t have that sort of competition – but he had done it. One debate on a subject of his choosing, one on theirs. Thank God they hadn’t picked the law.

He knocked on the door and a voice he didn’t recognise said, ‘Come.’ He thought it was a woman, but when he opened the door the master was on one of the guest chairs in his own room and behind the study table, in the master’s normal place, sat an exceptionally finely dressed and – no other word would do – beautiful man of around thirty. He shimmered in white silk and gold and, most tellingly, a bright purple sash worn left to right over his scarlet and brocade tunic. Only the emperor, his family and their very nearest associates had the right to wear that colour.

Behind him stood two enormous men, one clearly Greek by his short hair and beard, the other an African, his skin a deep black. Both had golden whips at their belts, along with a club and a sword. The whips, Loys knew, were for clearing a way through crowds for their master.

Loys instantly prostrated himself. He had no idea who this man was, but that sash, combined with the fact he’d turned the university’s master out of his own most comfortable seat, meant it was better to overdo the formalities rather than risk any appearance of arrogance.

‘Stand up, scholar, stand up.’ The sing-song voice was of an unusual timbre. The man had smooth skin like a woman’s, beardless; his limbs were long and his hands thin and graceful. His fingers bore three gold rings, one of which looked heavy enough to be an official seal. Certainly a eunuch, thought Loys.

He stood up.

‘Do you know me?’

‘No, sir, I do not.’

The man put his tongue into his lower lip in contemplation. Loys noticed the master had his eyes firmly on the eunuch, a static smile cut into his face like a scar into the skin of an orange.

‘I am the chamberlain. The parakoimomeno.’

Loys instinctively bowed. The parakoimomeno – he who sleeps beside the emperor – was the second most powerful man in the empire after the emperor; some would say more powerful even than he. Basileios was always away fighting his wars. The emperor didn’t enjoy court life even when he wasn’t fighting, and stayed at his estate up the coast. The chamberlain remained in Constantinople and was responsible for all the day-to-day running of the city.

‘He doesn’t look clever,’ said the chamberlain to the master.

‘He is the best man for the work you describe, sir,’ said the master. ‘I have none better.’

‘You’re not just giving him to me because he is a foreigner and you fear to lose a native scholar?’

‘This man is steeped in occult lore, sir.’

A long silence. The chamberlain’s expression was as blank as the moon’s. Loys and the master waited for the chamberlain to speak, and they waited a good while.

Eventually he said, ‘You are a foreigner. You live here at the school?’

‘No, I live—’

‘By the lighthouse gate.’

Loys said nothing, just gave a little bow. The eunuch was trying to intimidate him, and the wise course of action was to let him. No point standing up to such men. Better to allow them to intimidate you with long silences than with their soldiers.

‘With your wife. Who is higher born than you, it appears.’

Loys remained silent still.

The chamberlain puckered his lips.

‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Silence is a talent and a precious one.’

After that Loys didn’t really feel he could speak until asked a direct question.

‘What do you think of magic, scholar?’

‘Sir?’

‘Your theory of magic, what is it?’

Loys rocked from foot to foot.

‘The Church tells us it is the devil working through malicious and envious men.’

‘But what do you think?’

‘I am bound to think the same. Though I can consider and understand heresies, even rehearse their arguments the better to prepare our priests to know them, then—’

The chamberlain held up his hand to silence Loys. He reached inside his tunic, took a coin out of a pocket and laid it on the table.

‘Study it and tell me what you think.’

Loys picked it up. It was an ancient Roman coin from the time of the founding of the city. On one side it showed Constantine along with his mother St Helena, on the other a picture of Christ on the Cross. It had been drilled to allow it to be worn as an amulet.

‘It is a charm, sir,’ said Loys, ‘probably for good luck or power.’

‘Yes, it is. And I would say it’s an effective one. From where does it derive its power?’

‘From the image of the True Cross.’

‘Is that the same as from God?’

‘A difficult question, sir. There are many drunken old women who babble the name of Christ in their spells. It would depend how it was used. And, of course, by whom. Contemplation, proper contemplation, of the image of Christ can lead us closer to God, whatever the iconoclasts would have had us believe. The Cross is an inspiration to faith, and it is through faith miracles are achieved. Yet the devil has many disguises.’

‘Spoken like a philosopher,’ said the chamberlain. ‘Which is to say you have given no answer at all. What if I told you the power of the coin came from the image of the emperor?’

‘Then that would make it no more than a pagan icon. A channel for the evildoing of demons.’

‘Our founder and ancestor Constantine a channel for demons?’