‘Let us forgo supper and ask the servants to bring us dessert.’ Mar smiled salaciously and looked around the room. ‘The Curator of the Magnara is here, so I imagine his wife has accompanied him to give the proper public display of their mutual infidelity.’ Haraldr noted this with interest, since he had slept with the Curator’s wife, Danielis, half a dozen times. ‘And I do not see the Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena - no doubt he is home wringing his hands over his dispatches - so we can assume that Anna has probably come.’
Haraldr nodded and signalled the servant. He had at first been taken aback by the protocol of the Imperial Court, which was quite different from that practised in the more liberal-minded private homes - like Argyrus’s - or in a notoriously permissive environment like Antioch. Among dignitaries, it was considered scandalous for women to dine side by side with men; they instead dined in a separate chamber. But when dessert was served, the women were invited to join the men.
At court, the suffocating protocol constrained this contact to elaborate formality. Here, however, the interaction frequently exceeded propriety - thus the popularity of Argyrus’s venture.
The women had already begun to trickle into the dining hall, generally in groups of two or three. Here and there a man would stand and invite a lady to sit; she might accept, or she might pretend that she had not seen the gesture (even if the desperate gallant was flapping his arms in her face like a frantic bird) and hold out for a more desirable opportunity. Haraldr had come to enjoy the flirtatious ritual, the nods, the gestures, the raised eyebrows, the subtle communications and often quite complex strategies that the participants had evolved.
Haraldr sensed someone hovering at his shoulder. He turned and rose immediately. ‘Anna,’ he said, and bowed deeply.
Anna fixed her intense agate eyes on his and nodded. A servant brought her a chair. She and Mar greeted one another before she sat.
Each week she is more beautiful, thought Haraldr. Her colouring was still fresh, virginal, her cheeks and lips flushed brilliantly. But her eyes had become heavier, darker, more sensual, and full woman’s breasts now swelled against her dark blue scaramangium. ‘You will make Eros weary of his errands tonight,’ he told her. ‘You are the most lovely woman here.’
She put her hand lightly on his. ‘Tonight I only hope to dispatch Eros to one breast.’
Mar coughed dramatically and jerked his head to the right. Haraldr wished he had a wizard’s incantation that would turn him into a fly. But it was too late. She had seen him.
Danielis, wife of the Curator of the Magnara, walked among the tables, her long, swan-like neck erect, her arms relaxed, her fingers slightly poised as if she cradled some fragile, invisible object. Her husband, the dignitary responsible for not only overseeing but also financing all of the official diplomatic receptions at the Magnara Palace, was seated several tables away and had already deposited his decorum head first in the lap of an actress reputed to be the mistress of a famous polo player. That circumstance was hardly to Danielis’s discredit - far more humiliating to have been invited to sit by her own husband. But with Haraldr, her widely acknowledged paramour, also occupied, she was in an awkward situation. As was he.
Mar stood, his face regal, his eyes waiting to make contact with Danielis’s. She looked at him and the entire room seemed to hush for an instant. She then raised a sharp, dark eyebrow in a gesture that was at once almost imperceptibly delicate and wildly erotic. As Danielis moved to take her seat beside Mar, Haraldr nodded at him gratefully.
Haraldr had seen men’s eyes in combat - even Berserks -more pacific than Anna’s when she saw her rival seated only a place removed from hers. Danielis leaned forward and inclined her head slightly towards Haraldr. She had large, greyish-blue eyes that contrasted vividly with her dark hair, and a long, chiselled nose that seemed to pull her face down slightly, giving her beauty a hint of sadness that Haraldr found appealing. ‘Manglavite,’ she said in her demure, almost soothing voice. ‘Anna.’
‘Lady,’ said Anna as if she were an executioner addressing a client. She placed her hand on Haraldr’s thigh. But Haraldr could not help thinking of Danielis. Unlike most women of fashion who now wore only the long, sheath-like scaramangium robe in imitation of their Empress, Danielis persisted in wearing both a dalmatic, a short, sleeveless tunic; and a pallium, a long, shawl-like garment with an opening for the head - over her robe, a swathing of radiantly patterned silk that concealed her up to her chin. But once unwrapped, Danielis would insist that Haraldr perform as her ‘stallion’; he was never certain which role she enjoyed most for herself, the mare or the bareback rider.
Anna pressed her breast against Haraldr’s arm. Anna, he reflected, for all her sparkling eyes and busy hands, was the opposite of Danielis. Anna had lost her maidenhood somewhere on the road to Antioch, apparently to some clumsy lecher who had made the experience painful. She was still wary, so Haraldr had not pressed her. They had twice been alone in his chambers and merely had stayed awake, conversing, occasionally caressing, almost until cockcrow, when he had ordered guards and carriage to take her home. She had been very good for his Greek, and she made him happy.
‘Anna, have you heard of the new drama?’ asked Danielis as the servants brought out stuffed pastries, shaped like little churches, on silver plates.
‘No. Oh, I see, I believe you have confused the genres. This is a mime, or rather a comedy in the form of mime.’
‘Yes. I think you are correct. How wise of you to know that.’ Danielis plunged her fork deep into her little pastry church. ‘The content is considered improper. I have been told that the actress will lay aside her cloak and bare her bosom in emulation of Aphrodite.’
‘No. She will remove her cloak and appear before us quite entirely naked, as the ancients have shown us in their statuary.’
Danielis made a sharp, quick little inhalation, her public expression of shock. Hah, thought Haraldr, when Danielis is as naked as Aphrodite, she gasps like a post-horse. ‘Anna,’ Danielis asked, ‘do you think that viewing this spectacle will inflame the passions of the gentlemen present? How wicked it would be if this emulation of Aphrodite encouraged our gallants to an emulation of Hephaestus.’
‘But, Lady,’ said Anna, her pupils like needles, ‘Hephaestus was the lame husband of Aphrodite, cuckolded by the warlike and altogether more desirable Ares. Do we not see that emulation right here, even before our Aphrodite has yet appeared?’
Mar choked on his pastry. Danielis’s nostrils flared and a vein stood out beneath her ear. ‘Indeed,’ said Danielis, her voice uninflected by the accusation and insult. ‘We have other emulations as well. I am certain that we also have an Athena among us.’
Anna’s nails clawed Haraldr’s arm. Athena was a virgin goddess. ‘But where?’ Anna’s voice was faintly tremulous. ‘A maiden would hardly have the temerity to enter this company. Perhaps the error in your understanding is one of terminology. If I were, for example, to call a woman who squanders her . . . assets a spendthrift - and perhaps some would call her worse - I would not then be correct in considering a woman who merely prudently budgets her assets a miser.’
Mar and Haraldr exchanged helpless looks. ‘And I would not consider a woman--’ Danielis broke off, realizing that her voice was rising and the conversation around her abruptly diminished. She looked straight ahead and lifted her chin. Anna breathed hotly against Haraldr’s ear. ‘Tonight I want to emulate Aphrodite,’ she whispered with more anger than desire. Haraldr wondered why he could suddenly hear the clinking of silver and glass. A collective gasp drifted from the far end of the room. Anna turned her head and in spite of herself sighed the name. ‘Maria.’
The cold knife ripped Haraldr from breast to belly. He could not turn his head. He could not be the only one who had not turned.
He did not recognize her at first. Her hair, loosely braided, glistening in the light of the candelabra, was arranged simply around her head in the fashion of the ancient statues and wreathed with a band of fresh flowers woven with almost tapestry-like intricacy. She wore no paint on her face, but her eyes were so deeply azure that they seemed, even from a distance, to have been coloured in with some intensely concentrated pigment.
But it was her attire that had reduced them all to silence. Instead of a scaramangium, she wore a long, loose gown, again much like those depicted on the statues. Held by a small gold clasp at each shoulder, the shimmering white gown scarcely draped her breasts and seemed to leave half of her upper body exposed; the delicate yet proud sculpture of her bare throat and arms was as astonishing as any immortalized in marble. As she walked, the fabric teased her audience, clinging momentarily to the contour of her breast or thigh like another skin, then falling into complex folds to reveal glimpses of bare bosom. It was as if a goddess walked towards them, naked except for the iridescent cloud in which she had cloaked herself.
Every man who was free to choose her stood, more in homage than invitation. Homeric paeans flew into the awed silence. ‘Helen, daughter of Zeus . . .’ ‘She challenged Aphrodite the golden . . .’ Serene, almost oblivious, Maria walked towards the apse at the end of the room.
Haraldr was numb. He had loved so many since her, had held so many tender breasts and opened so many white legs. Why had they all done nothing to make this moment easier? She could still choke the breath from his lungs. She was behind him, her presence so strong that it seemed to bind his limbs.
‘Rome’s goddess has returned! Welcome, precious light, we mortals beg even the merest moment of your grace!’ Nicephorus Argyrus gestured to the chair that already waited for her. ‘You have no choice. I will close this establishment, dismantle it, sink the bricks and stone in the western sea if you take your seat beside any but your humble host!’
Maria laughed, the falling of liquid silver, and descended like snow. She was two seats down and across the table from Haraldr. He could see her face without looking at it, even taste her flesh. She nodded now, first at Anna, then at Danielis, at Mar, and finally her eyes passed like hot brands through his heart. They never paused, never reflected, only moved on like a great blue storm, unconscious of the destruction it left behind.
Anna put her hand gently on Haraldr’s arm and whispered in his ear: ‘You still love her.’
The great black horse struggled against the reins. Joannes shouted at the Komes of the Imperial Excubitores to grab the bit. The stallion jerked his head, jittered his flanks, and settled. Joannes quickly dismounted. The Topoteretes who had sent for him waited outside the abandoned warehouse, a blazing taper in each hand. ‘Orphanotrophus,’ he said as he bowed.
‘How do we get down there?’ asked Joannes brusquely. If this were anything less than reported, the Topoteretes’s head would greet tomorrow’s petitioners at the Chalke Gate.
‘This way, Orphanotrophus.’ The Topoteretes held his torch up into the empty vault of the warehouse. Heavy, distorted shadows flickered over the brick ribbings. The floor had a thick layer of dirt. A small animal darted along next to the wall.
‘The stairs were covered with freshly cut boards and a layer of earth for camouflage,’ said the Topoteretes. He plunged his taper into the dark hole in the floor. The ancient, crumbling steps had been cleaned and repaired with hastily set brick and mortar. Joannes followed the Topoteretes down, fifteen steps in all.
The floor below was hard earth, almost like fired clay. The Topoteretes thrust his torch up again. Joannes’s jaw tightened, and his shoulders began to ache. It was an old cistern, probably one of the City’s original water-storage facilities, long forgotten, drained, the residue of silt compacted and dried on the floor. The mortar had fallen away from many of the thin, slab-like bricks used to build the vaults, leaving the masonry surface as jagged as old teeth. Beneath the vaults were stacked thousands of spears.
Joannes grabbed one of the spears and examined the shaft, threw it aside, and examined another. How could this be? How could this cancer exist in the body he knew as well as his own, and yet leave him unaware of the symptoms? No. He had known. And he had denied his own knowledge of this sickness, this plague.
‘Who is responsible?’ he asked the Topoteretes, his question more wondering than demanding.
‘We are interrogating some individuals now, Orphanotrophus. I am certain we will have some names for you by tomorrow.’
Names. Four, five, a dozen mutilated wretches yielding their final sobbing confessions. Pointless. This was the work of many. Well organised and, considering their means, well funded. There was substance here. Rage - channelled, directed, plotted into the uncertain future. And he was not ready for them.
‘Thank you, Topoteretes.’ Joannes felt the weariness in his legs as he climbed back into the night. He had known, he had vacillated, he had postponed, he had hoped against hope. Soon it would be too late. What had to be done had to be done.
‘Komes!’ rumbled Joannes when he reached the street. ‘I want you to deliver a message for me. Tonight!’
‘Altogether remarkable.’ Michael Kalaphates raised his cup to the stage just exited by the actress who had emulated Aphrodite. ‘Her subtlety was most affecting, was it not, Uncle?’
‘Perhaps I am in a better position than you to appreciate her subtlety, or lack thereof,’ said Constantine.
‘Ah . . . yes,’ Michael had, in his excitement, forgotten that his eunuch uncle had a rather different perspective on the female anatomy. He tipped his cup to Haraldr. ‘Well, for subtlety it would be hard to exceed the performance of our Manglavite, who this evening entertained three women with whom he is ... well acquainted, all at the same table. A display of courage as well as subtlety.’
‘His courage has not been tested yet. He still has to go up there, if only to make his apologies.’ Mar pointed to the women’s gallery on the mezzanine surrounding the theatre; there was an open seating area at the rear, and rows of curtained booths along each side.