Ergodotes finalized the details, getting a lengthy, chuckling discussion of how the poison would work and how his ‘specialist’ would deliver it to the ‘acquisition’.
‘One thing,’ asked Ergodotes when he was satisfied that everything else had been taken care of. ‘How do we stop if we must change our plans?’
‘You can’t do that!’ said the fat man, howling as if it were the funniest thing he had said all night.
‘Provocations,’ said Haraldr. ‘Four incidents last night, yours, and two others already tonight. He looked at Ulfr searchingly. ‘There is a plan here.’
‘Well, they’re getting nowhere,’ said Ulfr. ‘Was anyone hurt tonight, other than the ache in Askil’s head?’
‘Hedin had his leg cut,’ said Haraldr. ‘That’s what concerns me, that there is no apparent reason for these quarrels. Ulfr, the Studion is like no place we have ever known. The palace, for all its splendour and vastness, is like a court in the north, only more complex. The Studion is like a dense, almost impenetrable forest, with its own laws, its own warnings, its various hidden lives that can suddenly appear to challenge one’s own.’ He pointed down the street at a vista of towering, brutely simple brick buildings, ramshackle balconies, reeking lanes, and wretches sleeping on the streets. ‘They are doing something out there, and we don’t know what. But we are certainly part of it.’
The Caesar looked out on his empire; a doe loped into a clearing and then darted back into the thick brush. On the Golden Horn, the sails were like bits of coloured paper. Michael turned away from the window.
‘When will he do it?’
‘He says tomorrow night,’ replied Ergodotes. ‘He did not think it would be difficult to arrange, since I had given him most of the information he needed.’
Michael recoiled from the sharp pain in his stomach. Was he moving too precipitously? Did he need more time to contemplate, to prepare? Then he remembered - no, felt, in his belly, almost as if a woman had grasped his manhood -that moment in the Hagia Sophia, the moment that had transfigured him, the moment that seemed like a thousand times the ecstasy of an ejaculation, a thousand thousand times more than the exhilaration of a wager won, a sensation that wrapped the soul like the arms and legs of Helen, who drove the strong-greaved Achaians across the water to Troy. That sensation would never release him: The beauty, the light, the chords of pure sound, the . . . godliness. God. Hadn’t there been a moment, as the chants of Rome’s dignitaries rose to beseech the Dome of Heaven, when the Pantocrator had answered? Yes. Yes. There truly had been. Only if a man had been there could he know this, even believe this, and how many men had ever stood where he had stood that day? The Pantocrator already moved His Caesar’s hand, was not that clear? Yes. The Caesar could not move fast enough now; had not God created all of this in scant days? And as God was present at His creation, so the Caesar would need to be there when his creation began. He was Caesar, heir to the lords of both the old and new Romes. He would look in the dying eyes of the man who denied him his indescribable passion, his eternity, his soul of pure light, and damn him to the tomb where the voices of the adoring multitude were for ever silent.
‘Ergodotes,’ said Michael, ‘tell the centurion of my guard that I am to be escorted into the city tomorrow.’
‘Yes, Majesty.’ Ergodotes withdrew with his hands crossed over his breast. He had reached the door before Michael remembered, with a jolt, the detail he had neglected.
‘Ergodotes,’ he whispered, coming close, ‘where will it be?’
Ergodotes stepped back in the room, closed the door, and told his Caesar the secret.
The new moon floated over the Studion, her full, lustrous serenity a mockery of the squalid world below. The bonfire had been set at a crossroads, and the flames cast an orange glow on the surrounding facades and down the four arms of the streets, turning the intersection into a fiery crucifix. The young man had stripped off his tunic and stood in a dirty loincloth, his bare buttocks tensed. He let out a whoop and dashed towards the pyre of burning boards and branches. Just when it seemed he would plunge into the flames, he lifted, throwing his arms skywards and pulling his legs up. He hurtled through the raging tongues and rolled into a ball when he landed on the other side. After he had popped back to his feet he was given a drink of wine from a clay jar; his friends pounded his back and two young girls threw their arms around him and kissed him. The crowd cheered and another young man stripped off his tunic and prepared to take his leap.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Haraldr.
‘I don’t like anything in this Studion,’ said Ulfr, ‘but of all I have seen, this least offends the gods. At least there is some joy in this. They say it is an old pagan custom, to leap over the fires on the new moon.’
Haraldr looked down the long blocks of misery. Another fire blazed at an intersection five blocks away. ‘Look at these,’ he said, pointing to two ponderous, listing, enclosed wooden balconies that met over the street and were saved from collapse only by their mutual buttressing. ‘This is why elsewhere in the city the Logothete enforces the separation of balconies by at least four fathoms. Here, one spark could turn the entire Studion into a pyre.’
‘Perhaps that is why the regulations are not enforced here,’ said Ulfr.
‘I am certain that is the reason.’
‘Trouble.’ Ulfr pointed to the distant intersection where the second fire blazed. The crowd, perhaps sixty men, women and children, seemed to have been sucked in around a single scuffling vortex. ‘Shall I call for a decurion?’
‘No. We’ll go down there.’ Haraldr had the notion that the worse the odds against the Varangians, the
less
likely these people would attack them. Two Varangians against sixty or a hundred reinforced the notion that the fair-hairs had supernatural powers; a decurion and his squad of ten might make the Norsemen seem like mere mortals.
By the time Haraldr and Ulfr reached the crowd, the agitation had ceased and the group almost seemed to be waiting obediently for the Varangians. The desperate, dirty faces even backed away to form a little cordon. ‘This is one of them,’ said a rheumy-eyed man of about thirty; he shoved forward a scowling, curly blond-haired youth about a dozen years younger than himself. The boy had cuts on his lips and eye; blood spilled over his sparsely bearded chin.
The crowd erupted into a blizzard of accusations, arms raised, hands waving. Haraldr salvaged a few words from the hurricane of shrieking voices. Apparently a number of the youth’s accomplices had thrown things at the crowd in order to distract them; the youth had then either purloined some clothing or fondled some women or both. Nonsense, thought Haraldr. These were not crimes in the Studion. What was really going on here? He nodded to Ulfr to be ready. The crowd continued to protest.
Finally the rheumy-eyed man grabbed Haraldr’s arm and pointed skywards. The tenement rose eight, perhaps even nine, storeys from the street, and the fire had been set on top of the highest balcony, just below the peaked wooden roof. Small figures gestured against the glow, and suddenly embers showered down; a large blazing coal plunged right into the middle of the crowd and everyone scattered, only adding to the chaos of oaths. Now Haraldr understood the alarm. As miserable as it was, Studion was home for these wretches. And up above them in the night were the seeds of Studion’s destruction.
‘Ulfr! Grab some of the more able men!’ Haraldr grasped the tunic of the rheumy-eyed man and pulled him along; the man understood and signalled to four of his friends. Another group of six or so young men followed Ulfr into the tenement. The dingy, smoke-stained building reeked of human waste. The stairs were narrow wooden slats with frequent gaps. At the third landing a little boy sat, deftly skinning a small rodent with a sharpened tile. The halls were grim and bare but surprisingly free of rubbish; apparently the tenants threw everything into the street. In the hall extending off the ninth landing, two young men, their tunics pulled up, engaged in sex. Haraldr shoved the lovers aside and pushed the door at the end of the hall open. At least a dozen more young men sat on a bare wooden floor, passing wine jars and shouting at each other; a naked woman straddled one of them. They seemed curiously unawed by the giant fair-hair crashing in on them. ‘Stay! Stay! Stay!’ shouted Haraldr, waving his short sword. ‘If you rise, your legs will be cut off!’ He shouted at Ulfr to enforce the order and looked out at the balcony; the arch that opened into the wooden structure had crumbled, so that the balcony seemed more like an extension of the room. The fire had just burned through the ceiling of the balcony and was now kindling on the floor. ‘Get their tunics,’ yelled Haraldr; he assumed that no water was to be found in the building and that the best recourse would be to smother the flames.
‘Get them off!’ Ulfr directed his helpers to collect the coarse burlap garments. A youth leapt and lunged at one of the rhuemy-eyed man’s friends. In an instant all was bloody chaos. Ulfr held back, not knowing who was friend or foe. Too late he discovered that their only allies had been the rheumy-eyed man and his four friends; the youths who had already been in the room and the six who had followed Ulfr quickly stabbed and bludgeoned them to the floor.
Haraldr did not hesitate; his sword cut down four of the youths before the rest squeezed out of the door. The woman remained in the corner with a wine jar clutched to her breast. Haraldr hesitated, his instinct telling him to get out. But he looked at the twitching corpse of the rheumy-eyed man and his dead or dying friends - one moaned pitiably, flopping like a wounded seal in his blood-soaked tunic - and decided he owed the people of Studion this chance. ‘Let’s get their cloaks,’ he shouted to Ulfr.
The balcony exploded and spat embers and searing drops of pitch, which had apparently been used to ignite it. A fiery curtain forced Haraldr back towards the door. Ulfr shouted and Haraldr turned. The hallway was a furnace, the floor awash with blazing pitch. Haraldr looked about at blank, windowless walls and knew that here, in this terrible place that offended the gods, he had finally lost Odin’s favour.
‘You are not the man I usually deal with.’
‘They told me to expect you,’ said the Cephalonian, so-called because he came from the Island of Cephalonia, off the west coast of Hellas not far from Athens. The Cephalonian had Hellenic colouring, the blond hair and light eyes, but he was no Apollo or Hermes. In fact, there was little about him that was memorable. In a crowd someone would walk past him and never remember that they had seen him.
‘Indeed so.’ The eunuch who addressed the Cephalonian was young, still encumbered with a baby’s fat, with puffy red cheeks and a sneering manner. ‘Just who did they tell you to expect?’ He looked around at the candlelit vats and tubs of the small medicinal soap factory, wrinkling his nose at the astringent smell.
‘They told me to expect the Orphanotrophus Joannes’s Chamberlain.’ The Cephalonian looked at the eunuch as if sizing him up, then allowed his expression to indicate that he was impressed with what he saw. ‘That’s what I was told. The Chamberlain himself. Which has to be you, sir, from the look and manner of your Eminence.’
The eunuch, who was in fact a mere cubicularias - a glorified janitor - to the Orphanotrophus Joannes, tried not to look too pleased; indeed he attempted to harshen his demeanour. ‘Well, then, man, they must have told you what I have come for,’ he snapped.
‘That too, Eminence.’ The Cephalonian wiped his hands on his tunic and went to a long, low shelf at the far end of the room. He came back with a little wooden box and displayed it to the eunuch. ‘Just manufactured this morning, special as he likes it. Be assured that the ingredient still has its pharmacological properties intact.’ The Cephalonian opened the box and let the eunuch inspect the foul-smelling piece of soap, laden with special unguents to treat an eczema that afflicted the Orphanotrophus Joannes. ‘I don’t imagine I need to tell your Eminence not to let anyone else use this.’
The eunuch appraised the Cephalonian as if he were some kind of lesser life-form. His lips curled contemptuously. ‘Surely you don’t think we are operating a public bath, do you, man?’
The smoke would kill them before the flame. Then something, perhaps Odin, directed Haraldr’s attention upward. The roof beams. ‘Ulfr,’ he shouted, his sword already poised. The two Norsemen hacked as they never had in battle. But the exertion was suffocating them, the smoke pouring into their lungs.
A muffled crack preceded a stunning cascade of timbers and tiles; not just the ceiling but the pitched roof of the entire building apparently had been supported by the beams. Air rushed in, briefly reprieved their lungs, and then fanned the blazing pitch. ‘Where . . .’ mumbled Ulfr; his head was gashed and he seemed disoriented.
Haraldr glimpsed the moon through the rising smoke. The remains of the roof rose above him like a tiled cliff. ‘Ulfr! We have to climb!’ He scrambled over the tiles with desperate agility and clung to the peak of the roof. Ulfr almost slid to the street but also attained the precarious perch. To the east the lights of the city ran beyond vision. Beneath them, extending south to the seawall and west to the land wall, the entire Studion had erupted into regularly spaced conflagrations, not merely at the street corners but also in dozens of tenements like this.
‘They’re burning it,’ shouted Haraldr. The flames erupted through the tiles and collapsed another section of the roof. The choking smoke thickened and obscured the terrible lights of the Studion. Haraldr crept like a four-legged spider down the eastward pitch of the roof. He yelled up at Ulfr. ‘Balconies!’
Ulfr inched his way down and propped his feet on the cornice. The roof of the balcony below was on fire. ‘We’ll probably fall through the burning timbers until we hit a floor or ceiling that isn’t on fire,’ said Haraldr.
‘Odin has told you this?’ asked Ulfr. ‘What if they’re all on fire?’
‘Then we will not need a funeral pyre.’
Ulfr nodded. ‘I have been ready to die with you more than once.’ He crouched on the cornice and prepared to jump. ‘I will see that a warm bench is waiting for you in the Valhol!’ he shouted, and then he plunged feet first into the inferno.