‘You remembered,’ said Zoe happily yet demurely. ‘We found we had much in common in Antioch, did we not? I am so pleased that your uncle has permitted you to renew our acquaintance.’ She cast her eyes at the servant.
‘Although I am virtually terrified by the boldness of what I must remark, let me humbly beg you that our acquaintance be given the opportunity to ripen into friendship. I will beseech the Holy Virgin each night that before I have pined away each of my days, I might be invited to sup with you again. Until then I will mourn, deep-eyed Hera, that I am for ever cast down from your Olympian immanence.’
Zoe laughed huskily, perhaps erotically. ‘I have enjoyed this interview, Nephew. You may be certain that we will be more than strangers in the future. In the meantime I will propose to your uncle that you be offered a dignity more in keeping with your charm and intellect. Now I must regretfully ask you to take your leave.’
Michael stood, bowed, and withdrew with his arms folded across his breast, his eyes seeming to plead what protocol, and the presence of Joannes’s spies, dictated that his tongue could not. Zoe nodded and the bronze doors slid shut on the shimmering vision of his Mother. Michael passed quickly through an ante-chamber dazzling with mosaics, and was escorted by a chamberlain down a series of hallways that turned twice before ending at another set of bronze doors. The Khazar guards at the gate to the Empress’s apartments halted him; their komes carefully eyed Michael, then pulled a marker out of a little tally board before he finally opened the doors. ‘May I visit the Virgin of Kamilas to give thanks?’ Michael asked the komes, referring to a palace chapel near the Gynaeceum. The koines reached for a document resting on the stone barricade and read it with dark, darting eyes. Finally he looked up and shrugged. ‘It is permitted.’
The little church consisted of two apses stuck on the first storey of a larger building used for wardrobe storage. Michael proceeded to the altar of the Holy Mother of Heaven, who floated serenely in the midst of a mosaic applied to the half dome of the apse. He stepped inside the silver chancel screen and placed a single silver nomismata on the gold altar table; metal against metal made a dull, mysterious ring in the absolutely still chapel.
Michael did not hear the priest until he materialized, seemingly as magically as the Holy Spirit, by his side. The priest picked the coin off the altar with slender, cadaverous fingers. He turned about, and Michael followed him into a little room full of sacramental candles. The priest pulled a battered, rusty knife out of his cloak and pried a slab of marble pavement from the floor. He lit one of the candles and handed it to Michael.
The first part of the passage was through raw earth; Michael cursed the gummy soil that quickly dirtied his best silk. After forty fathoms the dirt tunnel intersected what appeared to be the basement of a long-razed palace; a few bits of plaster still clung to the ancient brick vaults. Michael transited the unbearably dank basement to a crumbling perimeter wall, crawled through a small opening, and entered a stone-walled passage so narrow that he had to walk sideways. This ran for fifty fathoms before ending in stone stairs that climbed almost as steeply as a ladder. At the top of the stairs Michael perched himself precariously on a little ledge; a door that looked like it had been designed for a small child was just at his left. He removed the key from his boot, unlocked the door and squeezed through into a treasury of little-used chalices, porcelain cups, glass basins, bronze lamps and icons. The antechamber beyond was empty, and the lamps had been extinguished. He took a second key, quickly unlocked a small bronze door bordered with embossed eagles, and, at the end of a featureless but aromatic hallway, parted the dark silk curtains.
The bed beneath the great gilded dome reminded him of an altar: the gold-brocade canopy thrust up by twisting golden columns; the scarlet curtains threaded with thousands of tiny Chi-Rhos, the monogram of the Christ. He approached the bed with excruciating precision, then reached out, his hand steady, and flung the curtain aside.
‘Wicked Nephew,’ said Zoe. She was naked except for her rings, her heavy breasts and sensuous belly thrust out, the jewelled fingers of her left hand beside the shaped, golden pelt between her legs. With her right hand she reached out and touched Michael’s face. ‘Take that filthy thing off.’
Michael stripped frantically and fell on Her Majesty, his face buried in her breasts. She laughed in great throaty peals. ‘Yes, little Nephew, I shall have you to dine again. That is, I shall have you dine upon me. You would have been a surpassing thespian, my little slave. I believe that your odious uncle is even now receiving a favourable report from his spy.’ She pushed him away and sat up, her hands cupping her own breasts. ‘Now tell your precious mother about this clever scenario in which you are to play the buffoon. Symeon has heard the most fantastic rumours.’
Michael eyed the Empress’s pubic triangle while he hurriedly spoke. ‘He wants to make me the Caesar.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you must adopt me first. I am to ... charm you.’
Zoe fell back with the force of her laughter. She writhed with mirth for a moment and then reached up and kneaded Michael’s scrotum. ‘My little boy,’ she said, puckering her lips facetiously. ‘My precious little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘Suck at my breast, my little cherub!’ She let him go, arched her neck, and pressed her voluminous white bosom upwards, a finger at the tip of each thick, erect, porphyry-coloured nipple. ‘There, my child, my paps will give you life!’
Michael’s attention to her breasts calmed Zoe, reducing her boisterous laugh to gentle moans. She began to slide her pelvis over the silk sheets in snakelike motions. ‘Love slave,’ she said with a moan, ‘you must now play Sophocles’s tragic hero and enter your mother’s womb.’ She lifted his head. ‘Come to me, little Oedipus. I shall not even make you bawl for my favour. Give me your essence.’
Michael eagerly lowered himself between the twitching Imperial legs. Zoe wrapped him with her gorgeous limbs. ‘Ah, my little slave’ - she sighed - ‘my precious tiny Caesar, my dear Nephew and soon adopted son.’ She gasped and fought for control as his buttocks pumped above her loins. ‘Listen to me, little one. Once you are named my husband’s heir, you must reward the uncle who has enabled this delicious . . . incest. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes . . . yes,’ he began to wail. ‘Reward . . . unnnh . . . Joannes . . .’
Zoe pulled her knees forward, reached back behind her buttocks, and wrapped her thumb and forefinger around Michael’s thrusting member. She squeezed, first firmly, then so painfully that he stopped his motion and looked at her with watering eyes.
She pressed her lips towards him and whispered, her words hot on his heaving chest. ‘I want you to kill him.’
‘I thought it might be instructive for you to see this, Manglavite Haraldr.’ Joannes selected an instrument from the table and held it towards the light. ‘You might be called upon to spend more of your time here in the Neorion.’ He looked back over his shoulder, his eyes almost invisible inside his grotesque head. Then he walked over to his subject, his step heavy, his boots resounding in the sinister chamber. The naked man was chained between two bloodstained stone pillars, his legs spread slightly; a long wooden rail, supported by ropes that could be raised or lowered on pulleys, supported his arms. Two assistants waited dutifully beside the wretch. One was tall by all but Norse standards and had the charred blue skin and short, wiry black hair of Afrikka. The other was a small, noseless Armenian; Haraldr had been told that condemned prisoners might prolong their lives by assisting in the punishment of others.
‘Interrogation, Manglavite Haraldr, is an art superior to that of the painter, the carver in stone, even the goldsmith who chases pure images of the Virgin with skill and delicacy.’
Joannes pointed to the helpless wretch who in his terror had already deposited faeces and urine on the bare stone floor. ‘This inert clay, capable only of the most basic human responses, is the raw material from which I will fashion an object of both beauty and utility in the eyes of the Sacred State we both serve. Though some might perceive our creation as fearful, even repulsive, remember that the most hideous acts of cruelty are beautiful to the Pantocrator when they serve to create martyrs to our Glorious Faith, or when such acts serve to punish the condemned souls who have rejected His Sacraments. If the fiery lakes of Hell are beguiling to our Lord because they purify his Heavenly Empire, then we His servants must find pulchritude in the interrogator’s designs, for by them do we purify the Earthly Empire.’
Joannes turned quickly to face Haraldr, elbows whirling rigidly as if he were the enormous toy top of some evil Titan. ‘You, Manglavite Haraldr, are privileged to apprentice yourself to this art.’ He whirled back to face his raw material, a man of about twenty-five - or perhaps thirty-five? - with short dark hair and a patchy black beard. It was impossible to tell who he might have been, what his character was, for Neorion had already taken the humanity away from him, as it did everyone, victim or victimizer, who entered its grim portals.
‘Like any artist, the interrogator must carefully consider where to begin. The novice tends to strokes that are too delicate or, conversely, too broad. I rather prefer to’ - Joannes nodded to the blue man, who seized the victim’s head in his huge, dark fingers - ‘begin with an unexpected flourish, a conundrum to delight the eye of irony.’ Joannes took a short knife resembling the instrument of a surgeon and held it to the man’s mouth; the dark eyes above the gleaming blade glared with a kind of noble defiance and Haraldr asked Odin to help this man die well, and quickly, for he deserved a good death.
‘When a man undergoes interrogation, the object of greatest concern to him is his manhood. He is least fearful for his oral cavity and the organs therein, for he knows that he must be left his tongue if he is expected to provide us with the verse we have so arduously prompted him to compose.’ With a deft, instant motion, Joannes began to carve around the man’s mouth, and in a mere moment he flung aside a small, bloody mass like a piece of rotten fruit. The Armenian scrambled after the discarded flesh and dropped it into a large wooden bucket.
Haraldr fought his swoon and surging gut. The poor victim jerked his head as much as he could, and his exposed, reddened teeth chattered while blood poured down his chin. He was in every other way intact, but he was already in countenance a cadaver, a fleshless skull.
‘But a man still speaks credibly without lips,’ said Joannes. He stepped back and appraised his work. ‘The interrogator, like the artist, knows when his work is finished, for that is when the object he has created praises the Pantocrator in the voice he has intended for it.’ Joannes reached down and grabbed the man’s penis. ‘This creation of mine can already praise the Pantocrator by informing us who is arming the rabble of the Studion.’ The man rolled his head with the great, gaping bloody smear where his mouth had been but said nothing. ‘If we take the testicles, as was my fate, we leave the means but not the desire. If we take the penis, we leave the desire but not the means.’ Joannes yanked on the penis and sliced it cleanly away. He turned and showed the bloody, limp member to Haraldr.
‘Perhaps I should perform this alteration on you Tauro-Scythians.’ Joannes grinned, an obscene, heavy-lipped smile more terrible than his scowl. ‘I am concerned that yours, and those of your henchmen, will trouble you more than this is troubling our friend here.’ He tossed the penis into the Armenian’s bucket, then wiped his hands on a towel offered by the blue man. ‘The slut Maria, with whom you are enjoying yourself, is a chronic malefactor, a delinquent whose immoral licence flaunts every standard and expectation of a Christian community. She is anathema to all who worship the True Light of the World.’
‘She is not anathema to our purple-born Mother,’ said Haraldr.
When Mar and I destroy you,
Haraldr vowed silently,
her name will be one we shall invoke over your foul corpse.
Joannes could scarcely conceal his astonishment. Haraldr Nordbrikt was challenging him. Haraldr Nordbrikt and the Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson, fowl of the same feather. But to his face! Even the Hetairarch was not so carelessly impudent. But that was the difference between the two; the Hetairarch was much more clever, and more dangerous. And that was why Haraldr Nordbrikt’s tongue would not earn him lodging in the Neorion that very evening. ‘Someday,’ growled Joannes, ‘you may be asked to assist me with the whore Maria in this place. I enjoy working with women. I often ask them which set of lips they are most loath to part with. It becomes quite easy to distinguish between those who are vain and those who are lustful.’
Ice clotted Haraldr’s veins. She a hostage to him? He had not thought of that when he had so blithely taunted Joannes. Christ. Odin. The flame of rage collapsed into mocking embers.
Joannes turned back to his artwork, satisfied that he had made a useful point. Strange, he thought, how these huge Varangian brutes could be moved by tiny, chattering creatures like women. ‘Our talk has been most useful, Manglavite. It gives our creation an opportunity to reflect on his own reticence. Let him now praise the Pantocrator.’
But the Pantocrator was only praised in the dignity of the wretch, a man who, Haraldr reflected, was probably innocent, and if not, then guilty only of righteous outrage. Haraldr was exhausted, brutalized, pained by his own agony in watching Joannes’s methodical deft dismemberment of this once human being; he could not imagine the courage and strength of the simple man who was mutely accepting this terrible attrition of his mortality. Finally, after the Armenian had filled his bucket, Joannes pronounced his creation a disappointment, if only because the clay was of too poor a grade to be moulded into any object of value. He turned away from his failed creation for the last time. ‘Manglavite Haraldr Nordbrikt,’ he rumbled, ‘I have been musing, as I often do when I am at my ease in my workshop, and one of the subjects I have entertained while I have worked today is how to best employ your abilities. It comes to my mind that you are currently in complete disuse -in fact, one might claim, disutility - in your office of Manglavite. I have thought of a more useful vocation for you and your Varangian fellows until our Father resumes his customary protocol. Since our Christian community is increasingly plagued by this rabble in the Studion, an example of which we have before us, you and your men will be assigned to duty as cursores in that district until such time as I am convinced that these precautions are no longer necessary.’ Joannes walked to the forbidding steel double doors; he waited until his assistants had opened them and left the chamber with their bloody towels and buckets of viscera. Then he looked back at Haraldr with a grin like death. ‘I leave you today’s legacy of my art, perhaps flawed, but one you might yet learn from.’ Joannes slammed the huge doors shut behind him.