‘Uncle, Uncle!’ Michael Kalaphates fell to his knees. ‘No, Uncle!’ Crawling on his knees, he manoeuvred round the writing table like a large, eager dog, grasped Joannes’s enormous black boots, and kissed them in supplication. The bluster about the Neorion and Numera and even Baku, Michael had identified as such. Mount Athos was quite another matter; his uncle would earn only the general approbation of court, church and city for having dispatched a prodigal nephew to a grim cell in an isolated community where his only companionship would be stinking, burlap-shrouded, prayer-chanting eremites. Neorion would in fact be preferable.
Joannes allowed Michael to wipe his nose on his boots for a few moments, observing that his nephew had spent so much time consorting with actresses that he had acquired thespian abilities of his own. Still, the desired message had been delivered. Joannes viciously kicked the nephew’s ribs. ‘Get away, scamp. Even your snivelling needs improvement.’
Michael returned to his chair. He rubbed his throbbing sternum thoughtfully. What did his uncle want in exchange for sparing him even a few years of poverty, chastity and, worst of all, obedience?
Joannes sat and appraised his nephew, wondering how many times he would have to whip this dog before it learned even a single trick. Still, Michael was energetic, clever, a natural dissimulator - all raw materials with which Joannes could work skilfully.
‘I would like you to assume a position of some benefit to your family. Certainly you owe us that much.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Michael sincerely. An office of some sort? Why, if it ensured his continued exposure to the ... culture of this great city, why not? From what he had seen of men with official duties here at court, their interests were identical to his: horses, women, rich food and strong drink.
Joannes leaned back in his chair. ‘You have heard, no doubt, that our Imperial Father, your uncle and my brother, is not well. He has borne the burdens of state for so long, and so diligently, that in the confidence of our familiar sanctuary I confess to you that I fear for his life.’
‘Oh, no, Uncle. No!’ So, thought Michael, the common gossip can no longer be denied. And a pity it is indeed. Without an Imperial relation, even one who pointedly disregarded him, life would be so much more difficult here. Perhaps he would no longer be welcome at Argyrus’s.
‘Our splendid Father is not in imminent danger, of course, but we must be concerned now to relieve some of the burden upon him; otherwise we may indeed have cause to mourn our lack of foresight. We who are closest to him must now circle around him, and, like the columns that thrust up the celestial dome of the Hagia Sophia, take a share of the weight that encumbers and threatens to bring our magnificent Father plunging to the dust.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Michael wished his uncle would get to the specifics. Something ceremonial, perhaps. That would be more desirable. A chance to sport about with the Hetairarch and the Manglavite; even the crumbs from their table, metaphorically speaking, would soon sate one to glorious excess.
‘The position I have selected for you is that of Caesar.’
‘Caesar?’ Michael knew that this was the title of the Emperor of ancient Rome, but with the endemic inflation of titles in the new Rome, a Caesar might very well be the man who carted manure from the Emperor’s stables. Caesar? Either the title was in fact that insignificant, or it had not been used for many, many years.
‘I see you are not familiar with the dignity you are to be assigned,’ said Joannes, his shrouded eyes seeming to draw in light. ‘The Caesar is only designated when the Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator has not sired a purple-born heir. In the event of the death of the Emperor, the Caesar would succeed him to the Imperial Throne.’
‘This is Her Majesty’s galley,’ said Maria. The wind whipped at the black sable collar of her coat. Signal banners flapped in the rigging and the hull groaned slightly. ‘I am privileged to use it.’ Maria looked over at the group of a dozen servants, wrapped in heavy woollen cloaks, standing by the railing amidships. ‘Please excuse me. I must instruct them on the cleaning and management of the villa. It has been closed for some months, and many of them will be new there.’
Haraldr watched the Bucoleon Harbour recede with each powerful stroke of the bireme’s eighty oars. The city was incandescent, the lead roofs and marble revetments glittering like jewels in the glancing light of late afternoon. Gulls screeched as they descended to accompany the ship across the Bosporus. Chrysopolis seemed to float by to the right, a city splendid enough to dazzle the world by itself, and then the urban clutter gave way to elegantly spaced villas surrounded by groomed cypresses, and gardens rendered by winter into brown-and-grey geometric sketches.
A large, canopied, richly enamelled white skiff deposited Haraldr and Maria and six of the servants alongside the steps of a stone jetty; the skiff was quickly rowed back to the galley for the other servants and some supplies. The jetty crossed a narrow section of rocky beach and ended at an iron gate set in a stone wall; Maria’s chamberlain unlocked the gate. Marble steps covered with dead leaves climbed through a series of terraces to the entrance arcade of a large three-storey villa.
From the porch in front of the villa Haraldr could see grey, spiky orchards extending behind the house for some distance. They entered the house through a small, roofless atrium; a dead bird had fallen in among the leaves. A narrow hall led to a two-storey peristyle surrounded by gold-veined marble columns. An ornamental basin at the near end of the peristyle was drained of water, and the tiles were dirtied with dried scum. ‘It will take some time for the heat to circulate after the furnaces are started,’ said Maria. ‘I think it is warmer outside.’ She put her hand on Haraldr’s arm; it was the first time they had touched since the previous night. She guided him back out to the porch. They paused at a marble balustrade that overlooked the series of terraces. They were perhaps a hundred ells above the water. The sun had a rose tint as it flirted with the hills far to the west, and the vast cities across the water glowed softly in the final diffusion of daylight.
‘My parents left me this villa.’ She ran her gloved hand over the smooth marble railing.
‘You have never spoken of them.’
She put her hand on his arm again. ‘There is too much of which we have never spoken.’
‘Who were your father and mother?’
Maria’s eyes were a vivid reflection of the glistening sea. ‘I never knew them. They died . . . were killed, when I was an infant. They were involved in a ... political matter. They were banished, their properties confiscated, their names expunged from record. Our Empress Zoe, then merely the niece of the Bulgar-Slayer, was my parents’ friend. She was able to intercede and retrieve some of their estate, and their newborn daughter, in hope that there might one day be some sort of pardon. But the ship carrying my parents into exile was overtaken by a storm and they were drowned. The Empress has raised me as if I were her own child.’
‘So you consider her your family?’
‘Her sister is also . . . my family.’
‘I did not know you were close to the Augusta Theodora.’ Strange, thought Haraldr; he remembered the interaction between the Empress and her sister in Euthymius’s mime, a bitter rivalry generally acknowledged in palace circles.
‘Yes. She is my other mother. I miss her.’ Maria bit her brilliant, wind-rouged lower lip. ‘Who is your family?’
‘I am from Norway. It is a peninsula in the part of the world you call Thule. My father died when I was very young. He was an important man in Norway. A man of noble birth.’
‘And so you are of noble birth as well?’
‘Yes.’
‘What dignity were you assigned in Norway?’
Haraldr regretted his partial honesty. ‘I was a member of the king’s court. We do not have as many or various kinds of dignities in Norway as you do here in Rome.’
‘I cannot believe you ever bowed to anyone.’
‘I bow to our Father and our Mother, just as I bowed to Norway’s king.’
‘Perhaps you will not always do so.’
‘I see. When I lead the fair-hairs to the despoliation of Rome?’ Haraldr’s tone was sarcastic.
Maria smiled. ‘It is appropriate that you should be annoyed with me. I was hoping that you would find my chronic melancholy seductive. A girlish conceit.’
‘I find you seductive.’
‘Yes.’ Her jaws clenched and her voice lowered. ‘I know that you are going to sleep in my bed tonight. I know what you are going to give me in my bed; I can see it in your eyes and feel it between my legs, feel it deep in my belly. Do you know that I am already wet?’ Her eyes blazed back at the sun as it slid behind the horizon. ‘But how can I get you to give me back your love?’
‘Perhaps love is not necessary.’
She turned to him and he was astonished to see the tears. ‘It has to be,’ she said in a voice so small, so desperate, that he reached out to touch her burning face, then swept her into his arms.
‘One of our treasures is sleeping,’ whispered Michael, Emperor, Autocrator and Basileus of the Romans. He put his fingers to his lips to caution silence. Joannes glanced to the Imperial couch. Beneath the rich, gold-embroidered canopy that draped the enormous four-columned bed, beneath the breeze-soft claret sheets, lay the wizened, gnarled figure of a man who appeared to have just emerged from half a century of keeping company with snakes and scorpions in some cave, and indeed probably had. The latest of the Emperor’s ‘treasures’ snored in long, shallow rattles, and his unshorn, verminous hair spread out over the Imperial pillows like a halo of excrement.
The Emperor quickly guided his brother from the Imperial bedchamber, through a vast ante-chamber, to a smaller audience chamber, ringed with newly installed mosaics depicting the visions of Ezekiel. The monk Cosmos Tzintzuluces stood beside a small marble table and peered into what seemed to be a large gold reliquary shaped like a multidomed church; the miniature domes were tiled with red gemstones. Tzintzuluces greeted Joannes effusively.
Joannes grunted a polite greeting in reply. He tolerated Tzintzuluces, not the least because the intervention of this apparently sincere monk in the life of the Emperor was vastly preferable to abandoning His Majesty’s spiritual care to the wiles of the despicable Patriarch Alexius. Praise the Pantocrator that He had created the monasteries, thought Joannes, for without the debilitating rivalry between the priesthood and the monks, secular government would soon be overthrown by ecclesiastical forces. Still, Tzintzuluces had to be watched. Like all truly religious men, he was a fanatic, and like all fanatics he had no plan, only an ultimate, largely abstract goal. And men without plans were dangerous.
‘Come see this, Brother.’ The Emperor took Joannes’s arm and urged him beside the table. He hefted the miniature church. ‘This is how Saints Cosmos and Damian will look. We are building around the existing foundations, with these additions and the construction of an upper storey that will add a symmetry and magnificence that the previous architects neglected. We have already ordered the quarrying of the finest Lacedaemonian and Sangarian marbles, as well as Thessalian onyx. There is to be a fresco depiction of the martyrdom of the glorious saints, and our mosaics extolling the Pantocrator will emphasize the role of St Luke. Of course, the edifices of the rest of the monastery will be adorned with the same degree of devotion and respect. And the surrounding neighbourhood will also receive a renovation, as we have commanded the architects to consider new baths, fountains, a park . . .’
Joannes no longer heard his brother’s raptures. He had already computed the cost of the Emperor’s latest expiation within a few dozen solidi. A price that regrettably must be paid, he told himself. At least the Emperor’s building projects were charitable, not self-indulgent; Saints Cosmas and Damian, after all, had been physicians who did not charge for their services, and this lavish reconsecration of their humble church would remind the vicious mob of the hospices, monasteries and orphanages so recently endowed by their caring Father. And this activity would perhaps, in some way, serve as a rebuttal to the rumour-mongers; a dying man would not rise from his deathbed to commission whole new monastic complexes that he would never live to see.
Joannes turned to Tzintzuluces. ‘Do you see how our Father spares nothing for the welfare of his children?’ Joannes shook his head and attempted to smile wistfully at the monk. ‘He is so doting that I sometimes fear he will spoil them.’ Joannes approached Tzintzuluces more closely and whispered in his ear; the Emperor was still talking, almost to himself, going into further detail about where the various mosaic scenes would be placed in the chapel. ‘Blessed brother,’ said Joannes, ‘might I borrow our Father for a time, even as I admonish myself for depriving him of even a moment of your salutary ministrations? What I hope to humbly offer him, will, I think, also ease his torment.’
Just as effusively as he had greeted Joannes, Tzintzuluces bade him farewell and withdrew, content that even though he had momentarily released his sacred charge to the clutches of the world, it would be in the company of a man equally devoted to him, a man who, like Tzintzuluces himself, wore the black frock of worldly denial.
She placed her hand in his. The night was clear, cold, magical, the cities spread across the black water like carpets woven from the stars, the stars above them mirrors of the Great City’s brilliance. She leaned back and looked overhead, her arching throat swanlike, erotic. ‘Do you think they ever collide?’ she whispered. ‘They swirl about in the heavens, they are known to fall to earth, but do they ever collide?’
Haraldr looked up. ‘Perhaps they do, or have, in a time when there were no men to witness them, when only the gods saw. I know that like all things, each one of those fires will one day come to an end.’
‘Yes. Every fire must exhaust itself. But perhaps some burn longer than others, Do you know much of astrology?’
‘I have met one of the astrologers attached to the Imperial retinue. I have also met others at court who consider the science to be pure chicanery. Is astrology an interest of yours?’