Another five steps and Haraldr listened again. Four more. Haraldr’s skin crawled and yet he could sense nothing, even this close to fate’s answer. Then the light of realization dawned.
The Empress! It is her they have plotted against, after all! As I voluntarily bury myself in this dungeon, my mother and my pledge-men are probably struggling for their lives!
Haraldr pivoted frantically, lost his balance and stumbled.
Haraldr pulled himself up, his veins ice. He had fallen three, four steps. He reached ahead. Nothing. No stone. The barrier he had felt that very afternoon was gone. Very slowly he descended another step. Gone. Haraldr paused on a threshold of fate. Up or down? Then something told him that the beast he could not run from waited below.
At two hundred and fifty steps the walls closed in. Haraldr had to turn sideways to squeeze through. Then there were no walls, no steps. He walked forward and smacked into a wall. He ran his hand over the slimy surface. He looked down at his feet, and he could see them, vague shadows against other shadows. And the stairs were to his right. Down he went, the light coming up to meet him like a winter dawn; he was almost able to see each step before he set his foot on it. At three hundred and twenty-five steps he squeezed through an even narrower passage than the one before and turned again in a grim vestibule lit by a flickering from below.
The last forty steps were straight down. Carved pilasters marked the entrance to the shrine. The single lamp within the dark-walled chamber was set just above the doorway. The sputtering flame flicked light over a tile basin filled with water. The water was covered with a pale mist. No, steam; the air was warm, almost as sultry as a steam bath.
The statue of Hecate stood on a low platform behind the basin. It seemed as if she had been draped with a real robe of fine black fabric, for only her delicate alabaster ankles and feet showed. Her head was bowed, her hair painted so lifelike that it might have been as real as her cloak.
The statue moved. Haraldr stooped to pull his dagger from his boot, never taking his eyes from the startling motion. He backed away, seeking the corner to protect his back and flanks, if there were others.
The robe slid from the shoulders and the statue stood revealed in flawless alabaster, except for the dark nipples and sable pelt between the legs. The face turned up. The lips were red and the eyes blue, even in this light. Haraldr reeled from the blow he had never expected. Maria was his Valkyrja, her white skin drawing him on into the last black night of his mortality.
She stood still, hair shimmering, piercing azure eyes unblinking, almost armoured in her nakedness. Haraldr took a tentative step forward, and then his boots were wet, and he was stumbling through the warm water. She still beckoned, her blood-red lips faintly parted. He stood, dumb, disbelieving the perfection of her body. The full woman’s breasts, the erect areolae, the unflawed curve of her hip, the glistening pelt. He stepped closer, rapt at the flaring of her chiselled nose. He did not see the knife until she had already raised it from her thigh.
He was powerless, now refusing to believe that such beauty could be wedded to death. He watched the heaving of her breast as her arm shot out; there was a faint blue vein beneath the mercurous ivory surface of her skin. The blade flickered against his throat. She held him with her eyes. He remembered the last time he had seen Olaf’s eyes, the sense that all time had fallen into that void. It was as if his fate were within that abyss, waiting for him to find it.
The knife moved swiftly. When she cut his collar open, she nicked his neck and the warm blood trickled. Never blinking, she ripped downward, slicing the front of his robe open. Her arm fell wearily, as if she had freed herself of a great burden, and the knife clattered on stone. Her breasts rose with a violent inhalation and she attacked the incisions in his garments, ripping at silk and linen. When she had exposed his almost immediate erection, she knelt and pulled off his boots. Then her face was above his, her hands searing velvet claws on his shoulders as she lifted herself. Like an adder, she brought the point of her nose towards his. He could no longer look at the blue fire in her eyes. Her smell seemed to drown him and his steel member reached for her. She settled, and he felt the fiery point of wetness. She held there, tantalizing, pulling his hair hard, pulling his head forward.
She came down slowly, a consummate torturer. If he arched upwards she drew back, now raking his neck with her nails. He placed his hands beneath her tensing thighs and could feel her wetness spilling onto the soft down beneath the sable patch. She let her body slump against his and they both convulsed.
Haraldr knew that the stars in the heavens reeled and pitched from their orbits. There had never been a Rage like the fury of this pleasure. Her spine was willow-supple and he pressed her to him, her breasts kneading his chest. Then she would stiffen and tease him with the merest touch of her hard nipples. She would writhe until he thought his brittle member would snap, and then rise, tightening, rippling, soothing him with her lips, those delicate crimson lips, gentle on his forehead. And then she was mad, sucking at his eyes, his nose, his lips, sucking the blood at his neck, biting and ripping until he felt fresh blood flow. And in all this there was pleasure, rising like the molten spume of a huge burning mountain.
Maria rocked, wrapped in coruscating clouds of sensation. The scent of his blood, the giant arms pressing her breathless, the power that she could so wilfully control. He was like the sun inside her, his golden hair glowing with that sun, the hardness of him, all over, yet the softness of his brilliant skin, like gold leaf hammered to the suppleness of velvet. And the death in his eyes. What gods does he dance with now? she wondered, swaying and pumping, listening for the music she knew he heard. She pressed his chest, clawing the curled gold threads, her wide eyes reaching his and forcing him down to the cool marble slab. She was close now. Close to the knife.
She felt the sun exploding inside her and knew she would be gone, and it was now! She strained for the knife and felt its silver handle hard and, in an insane instant, wondered if he would stay hard afterwards, and could she keep him in until he cooled, letting the night enter her again? She had the knife now, but she did not have his eyes. There.
And then she went beyond. The eyes before her floated with their white-ice blueness and she was beyond. Beyond him, his one death, to the thousand thousand souls he held in his eyes, and she knew it would not end here. There was more. She dropped her knife, the sun in her novaed, and she fell away from her body, her soul drifting with the glassy stars.
Haraldr strained with every fibre to contain her violent spasms, and then he burst inside her, his whole being drained in an instant. For a moment it was black before him and he wondered if he had been taken into her eyes, into the whirling black vortex of fate.
Haraldr saw the dagger before he saw his attacker’s huge shadowed form looming above him. The knife fell like a comet towards Maria’s still spasming back, and he rolled, flinging Maria away like a doll. He was on his feet before he could think.
The Hound! his mind screamed for a moment. But the metal-swathed giant in front of him was not the same; the Hound still had a piece of his nose, but this man had only two inhuman gills. The giant’s dagger swayed in front of him, its movement hypnotic. Haraldr looked at the awful face, ringed with helm and byrnnie like some demon warrior, and knew that the Rage was on it. Without armour or even a weapon, Haraldr’s fate was indeed here in Hecate.
Haraldr waited for the monster to commit himself; the knife continued its lulling serpent dance. Maria thrashed in the water near him, momentarily distracting him from his attacker’s menace. Was Maria the assassin’s helper as well as his bait?
Maria lurched towards him. The pommel of a knife touched his outstretched hand. He could not look, and for a moment would not believe. A dagger, and not his; he could tell from the feel of silver rather than bone. She pressed it into his grip.
Haraldr did not wait for Odin, and his arm was as swift as Thor. The monster’s dagger swiped against Haraldr’s shoulder, but by then the point of Haraldr’s blade had crunched effortlessly through the gaping, artificial orifice in the centre of the monster’s face; his eyes rolled back, and when Haraldr pulled the dagger from his brain, he dropped like a dead walrus into the pool.
Maria came to Haraldr sobbing, her hair plastered to her skull. She nuzzled into his arms, her heart pulsing like a bird’s, and pressed her cheek against his chest. Her tears were warm.
Haraldr turned her head with one hand and with his foot tilted up the lolling head of the floating corpse. ‘Who was he?’ he demanded.
‘I have seen him before,’ Maria said with a horror innocent beyond any conceivable guile, and in that moment he was certain he could trust her. ‘In the Grand Hetairia.’
She turned again to his chest, her cheek smeared crimson from the wound on his shoulder. She sniffled and stopped her sobs. Then she placed her lips against Haraldr’s chest and touched her velvet tongue to his trickling blood.
‘Remember. Shoot the horses. At close quarters, spear the horses. With your swords, gut the horses. Keep your shields up and don’t even concern yourselves with the riders until you have got them off their horses.’ Blymmedes looked at the incredulous faces of his Norse colleagues. ‘Believe me, the Saracen values his horse above the life of his closest comrade. Without his mount he is literally a legless man on an endless plain without food or water. The value of his horse exceeds anything he could win in spoils or ransom. Kill enough horses and you don’t need to kill Saracens.’
‘That’s sensible enough.’ Haraldr nodded. From what he had already seen, the Saracens’ huge, swift horses were more formidable foes than the men who rode them. ‘But perhaps the ransom available to them here will incite them even to fighting on their own legs.’
Blymmedes turned in his saddle and checked again on the progress of the distended baggage train. The Imperial caravan had just left the cross-roads where the road from Antioch met the coast road, an ancient highway that ran a few miles north to the seaport of St Symeon, and south past the port of Laodecia all the way to Tripoli, Beirut, Caesarea, finally turning inland at Arsuf to their destination of Jerusalem. ‘I am certain they will consider the Imperial baggage train a more convenient target than the Sacred Person of our Mother. An abduction of the Empress would provoke massive punitive action. As I’m certain you have seen, the value of the baggage train is an Empress’s ransom, without the attendant risk of retaliation.’
‘So you think that is why the astute Strategus Nicon Attalietes has ordered the Imperial Excubitores to guard the Imperial baggage train?’ asked Haraldr with wry emphasis. ‘What if the Saracens are to receive a ransom for
not
sparing the life of our Mother?’
Blymmedes pushed back his golden helm and massaged his temples. The Varangian, Haraldr Nordbrikt, was a clever boy, thought the Domestic, but perhaps his intellect was a bit too active; he saw conspiracy in the rising of the sun each morning. Only one man in the entire Roman Empire was both devious and able enough to carry out such a plot, and the Orphanotrophus Joannes knew that his brother -
Lord God, forgive me for thinking such a thought -
would not go shod in the Imperial buskins for a single day without the Divine sanction of the purple-born niece of the great Bulgar-Slayer. But what about a plot engineered by the Orphanotrophus Joannes to embarrass the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes through the agency of the Strategus Meletius Attalietes? After all, the Orphanotrophus Joannes was a dedicated enemy of the Dhynatoi, and blessedly so, for if Joannes and Nicon Attalietes ever joined forces, the result would be too disagreeable to contemplate. But if this conspiracy only aspired to slitting the throat of the scapegoat, Meletius Attalietes, let the Orphanotrophus Joannes conspire. The purple-born surely was safe.
The Domestic looked at Haraldr. ‘My friend, I’m certain I would see demons scampering about by light of day if I had seen what you saw last night.’ BIymmedes thought of that obscene giant, his brains oozing from the hole in his face, and wished he could have seen Haraldr dispatch him. ‘But I know the man who tried to kill you served in the Hetairia and I’m almost certain that he was punished and expelled by the Hetairarch for some illegal confiscation. He had a grudge, and you were the most convenient Varangian. I’m certain he is not an agent of some plot against our Mother.’
Perhaps. Haraldr, mind aching from sleeplessness and worry, tried again to make sense of it. What if the giant had not acted on his own? Who had sent him? Haraldr was too fatigued to think of the possibilities. And his mind was too full of Maria. She appeared in a flash of alabaster; he could feel her smooth, wet skin. The previous night he had taken her back to the villa before he had alerted his own men to the attempt on his life. At the gate she had given him a kiss more erotic, certainly more emotionally powerful, than their embrace in the Temple of Hecate. She had saved his life, and he hers. But that kiss had told him that they had yet to plumb the depths of their shared fate.
‘There!’ BIymmedes stood in his stirrups and pointed to the rugged crags that pushed the coast road against the azure band of the sea. Haraldr saw nothing, but BIymmedes assured him that a large Saracen force was stirring dust in the heights. ‘We’re vulnerable now that we have turned south to Laodecia. They’re waiting.’
‘I’m going to the Empress,’ said Haraldr. Signalling Gregory to follow, he spurred ahead, passing the huge baggage train of Attalietes’s thematic army. Incredible, he thought as he observed the rugs and pillows and wine jars these so-called soldiers had brought along. Before he had transited half of the thematic army’s line of creaking wagons and groaning pack mules, he was passed by two akrites heading in the opposite direction, their dust- and sweat-stained mantles flying and their horses whipped to a furious, foaming gallop. Only minutes later Blymmedes came by, heading towards the Imperial carriages like a whirlwind. ‘This is it!’ yelled the elbows-akimbo Domestic.