‘Darling. Some day you will find the proper kind of love with a man. Give yourself time to find the Christ’s love, and then you will find a man’s true love.’
Maria chattered her front teeth in minute, nervous little clicks. ‘I feel that on this journey I will find a resolution. I will either fill my soul, or my being will completely evaporate, like a dead lake. But I will not be this empty, cold thing any more, a shell with no light inside. My palmist, Ata, told me that soon love, fate and death would collide in my life. I am not afraid to die, because I am already dead. But once before I die I would like to love a man and not feel the rot in his soul.’ Maria looked at Theodora almost belligerently for a moment, and then her face slowly began to contort. She burst into tears.
The world was a reflection in a copper sheet. The dust stirred by the horses’ hooves swirled up into the dust already suspended in the air like a dry, chalk-fine fog. The approaching horses of the scouts merely added to the choking ochre cloud.
The scouts, dark, wild-eyed men called akrites, wore jerkins of quilted cotton over short linen tunics. There were four of them, silver helmets dulled to brass in the dusty pall. They rode directly to the Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores, bowed in their saddles, and began talking with animated gestures. Haraldr had difficulty with the dialect - the akrites were from Armenikoi, a theme half-way to Khoresm - but he understood. A Saracen raiding party, fair-sized, was just ahead.
‘It appears that the Saracens have positioned themselves to block the Cilician Gates,’ came the quick, effortless translation.
Haraldr pushed his helmet back, wiped the grit from his forehead, and smiled at Gregory Zigabenus, the interpreter who had accompanied the Rus trade fleet. ‘I understood some of that already, Gregory.’ Then he said in Greek, ‘Because you . . . teach well.’ He added his own silent thanks to Odin and Kristr for this gift of the little eunuch. The assignment apparently had been by chance, but the adventuresome, unfailingly cheerful Gregory was as welcome as a third hand in a single combat. Like every Roman, Gregory was mute on the subject of the Emperor and his immediate circle, but otherwise he had been a continuing education in what Joannes had called ‘the shoals of the Roman system’. And strange waters - not to mention dangerous - they were indeed.
Haraldr looked down the road up which he had just ridden, along with two dozen horsemen of the Imperial Excubitores. The graded path, here only wide enough to draw a wagon through, wound down through the russet haze towards a dull, brownish-grey plateau ringed by the slightly darker convolutions of the Taurus Mountains as they rose to their snow-crested heights. He had never imagined so much land, or so little beauty. And yet the mute austerity of the terrain bespoke the power of the Romans. For almost six weeks, at a clip that surely measured at least two and sometimes three rowing-spells a day, the Imperial entourage had traversed territory not unlike this. Not as dusty, certainly; farther to the north the peaks were less precipitous and the pastures still held some of summer’s verdure. But the distances, the isolation on many stretches, surpassed anything imaginable even on Norway’s barren central plateau. Yet, most remarkably, just when one thought that the Romans had finally run out of folk with which to populate this prodigious domain of theirs, the endless road (paved as neatly and much more sturdily than the floor of a Jarl’s hall) would enter the tree-rimmed perimeter of yet another pasture; pass through the rich, dark, relentlessly cultivated communal fields and orchards speckled with ripe fruit; and lead them to the clustered mud-brick, thatch-roofed huts of yet another Roman village. The industry of these provincial Romans, lost in this frightening vastness, was something to behold; hoeing their autumn harvest of vegetables, chopping wood for winter, sacking grain, bundling fodder, driving their massive oxen to and fro, they had coaxed a bounty from a wasteland that a Norse farmer wouldn’t give a piece of silver the size of his fingernail for. And yet, as Gregory had explained, many of these proud, busy people preferred to become rich men’s slaves because of the burden of Imperial taxes on free peasants.
‘The Domestic wonders if you wish to go forward with them. He says if you do, you will see a Roman ambush.’
Haraldr turned to Nicon Blymmedes, Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores: thick-chested, wiry-limbed, about two score years old. Blymmedes was accompanied by two dozen mounted soldiers wearing waist-length mail shirts and conical helms, with their bows and tooled-leather arrow quivers slung over their backs. The rest of their vanda, a company of about two hundred strong, were footmen who had disappeared up ahead, seemingly swallowed by tortured rock and swirling dust clouds.
‘Yes, thank you, I will,’ said Haraldr directly to the Domestic. He had come to like the hawk-nosed, constantly frowning Blymmedes. The Domestic, unlike so many of these endlessly scheming Romans, seemed solely concerned with doing his own job properly - no, perfectly - and seeing that his subordinates performed with similar punctiliousness. Yet he was eager to teach, and he had accepted Haraldr as a fellow warrior with perhaps a different philosophy of warfare but of considerable aptitude in martial affairs.
The small contingent started up the steeply climbing roadway. Blymmedes fell back between Haraldr and Gregory and began another of his tactical discourses, vigorously illustrated with his leather-tough hands. ‘You see, I have sent my infantry up ahead’ - Blymmedes thrust both his hands forward as Gregory translated - ‘and positioned them in the heights on either side of the road.’ He pushed his hands apart to show the dispersal. ‘Now we will come forward past the position of our hidden infantry. We will appear to be a mere scouting party, but one that offers the prize of a foolish officer of the Roman Imperial Taghmata. The Saracens will see us and advance quickly to profit from my impudence. Prudently we will retreat the way we have come. They will follow us, lusty with the promise of my ransom. When our pell-mell retreat has lured the Saracens beneath the positions held by my infantry . . .’ Blymmedes brought his hands together with a loud clap.
‘Deal with the enemy on your terms,’ said Haraldr directly, repeating one of Blymmedes’s axioms.
‘Yes,’ said the Domestic, hazel eyes flashing eagerly. Then he shook his finger. ‘But meet the enemy. The ambush does not work if you simply run away. Retreat alone cannot win victory.’
Gregory pretended to translate. ‘You understood? I thought so. The Domestic, I think, feels that Roman strategy has become too cautious under the man who commands him. This is as far as he can go in criticizing the Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena, however.’
Blymmedes was now occupied ahead, having taken the point of the column. He signalled to his unseen forces in the hills. The road continued to climb and narrow, the crumbling, shard-strewn rock walls rising ever more steeply. They rounded a blind turn and looked up to a narrow defile backed by nothing but thin coppery sky. Blymmedes fell back for a moment and whispered to Gregory, then went boldly up ahead.
‘These are the Cilician Gates,’ whispered Gregory. ‘The Domestic wanted you to know that Alexander brought his army through this pass.’
Haraldr nodded. Alexander of Macedon, or the Great Alexander, had been a Greek King who had conquered the world to the Gates of Dionysus in the days before the Roman Empire even existed. Alexander sounded more like a god than a man, but the Domestic often referred to his tactics and courage and seemed very proud to speak the same language as this great demigod.
The horsemen wandered slowly into the massive jaws of the Cilician Gates. Haraldr caught a breathtaking glimpse of rugged terrain falling away to a dull green plain.
The Saracens seemed to come out of the rocks. They led their horses by the reins, then saddled up deliberately, as if they had enough time to pause and straighten the quills of their arrows. A few bright curved blades began to flash, and bows rose in disjointed arabesques against the metalled sky. The Domestic, conspicuously displaying himself four ells in front of the rest of his horsemen, held his reins deftly, almost as if he were preparing to touch a woman’s face. Horses snorted, but no one on either side made a sound. Then the nearest Saracen, a beetle-brown face with a coal-black beard and eyes rimmed with glaring whites, raised his arms and legs like a four-winged bird preparing to fly. Arrows hissed from quivers.
It was as if the mountains behind them had found huge metal voices. Even the Domestic whipped his head around with astonishment. Then his face almost instantly purpled. In that same instant the Saracen leader let his limbs relax and fall. He neatly wheeled his horse about, and the rest of his band just as suddenly turned their rearing mounts and began to vanish into dust and rock.
Haraldr had no idea of the specific meanings of the raging oaths the Domestic began to bellow with bulging-eyed fury, but a translation was hardly necessary. Blymmedes spurred his horse and charged back down the road. The
komes
in charge of the vanda ordered the rest to follow. The Domestic’s curses were quickly swallowed up by the unearthly, blaring, pounding, whistling din of the lifeless crags.
A short way down, Haraldr reined his horse around a switchback and saw the source of the sound. The road was jammed with armoured horsemen and footmen as far as anyone could see; the files of soldiers in mail coats and breastplates glinted through the dust like strands of silver thread as the road zigged and zagged thousands of ells down the mountain. Jammed in among the vanguard of this army were two dozen musicians equipped with every manner of drum, horn, bell and whistle one could imagine. Haraldr knew immediately what he beheld; ever since they had crossed the Bosporus into Asia, the citizen-army of each provincial theme had, as soon as the Imperial caravan had entered their territory, joined the Imperial Taghmata to guard their Empress and her Holy pilgrims. But the meeting places had always been carefully appointed. This was a curious breach of protocol and military discipline.
The Domestic’s livid face was inches from the rather puffy, even somewhat indolent features of a man mounted on a huge white horse. The horses trotted in quarter-circles as Blymmedes bellowed furiously. The other man simply sat higher in the saddle, like a traveller trying to ignore a troublesome dog. Finally Blymmedes abruptly ended his diatribe, shook his head like a tutor puzzled by a witless student, and motioned with his hands, as if he were attempting to push the entire thematic army down the mountain. The other man ignored this signal and rode past the Domestic, stopping just in front of the Excubitores; Haraldr was close enough to detect the perfumed fragrance that surrounded both rider and horse. The man was groomed like a courtier, his brown beard immaculately trimmed, the beautifully chased dragons on his gold breastplate still bright beneath a thin layer of dust; even his horse’s bridle was brightly enamelled. His indigo eyes, which despite the slackness of his face had a command to them, swept over the Excubitores, Gregory and Haraldr with no acknowledgement whatsoever that they were separate individuals but as if collectively they represented a single large deposit of donkey excrement to be avoided on his upward journey. Then he turned, spurred back to his waiting army, and shouted a command in a brisk, imperious voice. With the same musical cacophony that had heralded its arrival, the thematic army turned and began to lumber back down the mountain.
Blymmedes rode back to his men, shaking his head. ‘Next lesson,’ he shouted to Haraldr, ‘I teach you how to keep the thematic army from scaring off your quarry when you’ve already got their heads in your game bag!’
‘Who was that man?’ asked Haraldr.
The Domestic’s eyes flared again. ‘That eminent tactician was Meletius Attalietes, Strategus of the Cilician Theme and the first son of the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes.’
‘You see, Mistress, interruption of the effluent phlegms that produce these desires is the reverse of the procedures that stimulate the sexual inclination. One must simply manipulate the organs with careful consideration of vortices that regulate the discharge of the vital humours. Mother of God willing, we have every reason to assume that you will be relieved of your grievous and insolent inflammation before the hour of Compline.’
The Empress of the Romans, Zoe the Purple-Born, ordered her face towelled by white-robed Leo, her eunuch vestitore, and considered for a moment the advice of this new specialist in the treatment of sexual disorders. The deathly pale, long-faced eunuch physician, who always seemed to perspire above his upper lip, was in countenance alone dour enough to dissipate the carnal appetite. But as for his procedures, Zoe seriously had to consider that perhaps she had exhausted the knowledge of these learned charlatans. What good had the specialists done to facilitate marital relations with her late husband, Romanus? The endless applications of aphrodisiac ointments prescribed by these experts had done nothing to restore virility to the senescent manhood of a white-haired windbag. And now that she herself required the reverse procedure, due to her present husband’s persistent neglect of his marital obligations, their success seemed equally unlikely. Michael. No, she would not think of him any longer. The disappointment was too acid.
‘Maria,’ asked Zoe, ‘what do you think of this physician’s ambitious promulgations? In your experience is desire physical, something that can be manipulated by pressure on the offending internal organs? Or is it rather spiritual and therefore beyond the probing fingers of our learned specialists?’
Maria puckered her brow, cracking the dried cosmetic paste the Empress had applied all over her face. She sat on a gilt camp stool set in front of the Empress’s portable Magyar steam bath; only Zoe’s flushed face was visible at the top of the round leather cabinet that enclosed the Imperial body. ‘I am certain that it is both. Of the two components of desire, the physical is easier to assuage. The spiritual element of desire, however, can lead one to overcome even a physical repulsion and enjoy the love of a man who is fair neither in limb nor in countenance.’ She idly dipped her finger in the silver bowl of rose water set on the cabinet beside her chair. ‘I have never loved both the spiritual and physical aspects of the same man, at least not at the same time. Who knows? Perhaps that is an explosive combination of elements, like the ingredients of liquid fire. It would incinerate the soul. But I have never met a man who, having aroused my body, was sad enough to arouse my spirit.’