Haraldr held his breath. He fell almost without impact through the roof of the balcony and felt only a slight scraping as he hurtled through the floor. Almost as soon as he knew that he had crashed through the next roof, his fall ended with sudden impact and he felt a pain in his ankle. The flames were all around him. He smelled his hair singe. He rolled towards the adjoining room. The choking air seemed cool. He sat up and slapped at his smouldering cloak. Ulfr squatted on his haunches, looking at him.
Ulfr and Haraldr descended the stairs, shouting to warn the tenants as they passed each landing. The street was entirely deserted. No onlookers, no panicked residents scurrying out with their meagre belongings. They saw someone running in the next block; behind the flailing figure a wooden hovel, several storeys high, was almost entirely consumed by flames. The upper storeys of the tenement they had just escaped were a blazing crown; the building resembled a giant torch thrust into the night. Embers showered down.
Ulfr shook his head. ‘What you said is right. The Studion is like no other place.’ Huge timbers fractured and plunged flaming to the street. Haraldr and Ulfr ran west through an intersection to escape the falling debris. They encountered no one. It was as if the devils had claimed all the souls of the Studion and were now razing it with fire. Ahead of them, the wooden building they had seen from a distance collapsed with an explosive
whoosh
and blocked the street. They went back, skirted the burning tenement they had just escaped, and proceeded north. No side streets intersected this thoroughfare for several blocks, and there were no fires up ahead.
The toughs came out of the shadows like silent, dark spirits. Maybe twenty, but no apparent spear shafts, Haraldr observed calmly; the spear was the only weapon that could reach him before his sword could reach the man who wielded it. Haraldr unsheathed his sword. ‘Too much killing this night,’ he said grimly. The sound of timbers cracking punctuated the enormous sibilation of the flames at their backs. The toughs formed a blockade. Haraldr held the Hunland steel high so that they could all see it. ‘We’ll charge them,’ he told Ulfr.
The toughs scattered before Haraldr had got within a dozen ells of them; they jittered like anxious dogs for a moment before the shadows pulled them back into their lairs. Two blocks south, the entire crown of a tenement fell into the street with a tremendous roar and flash of light. Haraldr and Ulfr turned to watch for a moment, then continued north.
Haraldr rubbed his smoke-fouled eyes. He thought of bathing, he thought of the next time he would hold Maria and feel her silk next to his skin. He could no longer save the Studion. But Odin had given him another day. He was suddenly quite weary. Where was a side street? They needed to turn east.
The street ahead shimmered. The flames behind them soughed like a great wind, and embers floated past. The street was moving. Haraldr felt as if his legs had vanished. His bowels iced. Odin. Clever, tricky Odin. The prankster. The street ahead was alive with people. Not hundreds but thousands, backed up for blocks, a crowd like that on the Mese for the coronation of the Caesar. But this crowd was different, bristling, with shafts sticking up among it like the spikes of a sea urchin. Spears. Hundreds of spears.
‘Nephew. I was told you waited on me.’
How gracious of you to point that out,
thought Michael Kalaphates,
since I have been waiting here in your ante-chamber since the third hour of the night. And it is now the eighth hour of the night.
‘It is quite late, Nephew,’ said Joannes. ‘Perhaps I was too strident in my previous criticism of your industry, or lack thereof. Since you have attained your lofty dignity, you perhaps allowed the pendulum to pivot too far in the direction of application. It wearies me simply to observe the hours you obviously now devote to affairs of state.’
‘My profound apologies if I have momentarily deterred you from your verily unceasing pursuit of our Empire’s concerns, Uncle, but I did have a matter of grave import to discuss.’
‘Indeed.’ Joannes’s sluglike lower lip lapped over his thin upper one. ‘I had rather hoped to insulate you from grave matters, as your health is so precious to me.’
‘As yours is to me, Uncle.’ Michael paused. ‘I have heard rumours of a plot.’
‘It is not possible to walk beneath the Chalke Gate without hearing rumours of a plot, Nephew,’ said Joannes with deliberate weariness in his deep, growling voice.
‘I believe it is, as much as it tortures my very soul even to contemplate the words, a plot against you, my dearest uncle.’
Joannes’s deeply socketed eyes rolled towards Michael like the swivelling spouts of an Imperial
dhromon.
‘Let us not carry this amusement further, Nephew.’ A lightning bolt crashed inside Michael’s skull. Joannes showed his awful teeth. ‘I know Constantine is your favourite uncle.’
‘You are both equally dear,’ Michael somehow replied. He was numb with relief. And fear, the fear of a possibility he had never considered. It had been a mistake to come here tonight, sheer hubris. No. It was not possible that Joannes could know.
‘Well, Nephew, I am touched by your sincere concern for my welfare. But as I am most weary of, as you so graciously phrase it, my unceasing labours on behalf of the state, I would like to bathe first. I see no possibility of assassins lurking in my bath, however customary such venues have become for murders of all sorts, and even palace coups. I would like to think that my demise would require more imagination on the part of the miscreant.’ Joannes’s Chamberlain opened the door to a hallway. As Joannes stepped beneath the lintel he whirled dramatically and faced Michael. ‘You have whetted my curiosity, Nephew. Why don’t you join me in my baths and tell me of the imminence of this danger to my person.’
Haraldr looked south. Flaming wreckage completely blocked the street. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to Ulfr as he turned back to face the mob. ‘They have seen us. We cannot let them know that we are afraid of them, or the lives of my pledge-men will be worth nothing on these streets.’
Ulfr drew his sword. ‘An axe age, a sword age. The ravens will drink well tonight. And this mob will soon know with how many lives the corpse of a Varangian is purchased.’
‘No.’
Ulfr looked at Haraldr incredulously.
‘Not yet.’ Haraldr unbuckled his breastplate and sword belt, took off his helm and cloak, and handed all of his weapons to Ulfr. ‘Odin permitted me this once before,’ he said.
‘My friend . . .’ Ulfr trailed off. There was no use protesting; Haraldr had made too many mad ruses work in the past. But for a Varangian to perish unarmed, a prisoner, perhaps tortured, was a fate literally worse than death; his bench in the Valhol would wait, empty, until the last dragon flew.
‘I won’t deny you your place at the benches,’ said Haraldr. ‘If they come at you, take up your sword and summon the birds of death. But wait patiently for my return. I may be gone for some time.’
Haraldr walked towards the mob. Stripped of the badges of the feared Varangians, he felt strangely free, and yet terribly frightened as well, almost like a man in the middle of some prodigious dive. He could hear no voices above the fire storms. He came within spear range and for a moment wondered what it would feel like to have steel thud into his unprotected sternum.
The faces had the frightening uniformity of misery. Pale, deep eyes, mournful lips, angry jaws. Men, many women as well. Burlap, cheap tattered linen, rags. Stringy, filthy hair. Scars, sores. A cleft palate, a man on bare stumps. They shifted as he approached, their silence as awesome as the stillness in the Mother Church. A middle-aged woman came forward and stood a step in front of the rest. Vividly Haraldr saw the Hound at Stiklestad, that step beyond the howling wall. And his brother’s last steps.
‘Why are you burning the Studion?’ she demanded, her eyes flashing. She had a long, worn face, a face that never had had a chance at beauty and was now past the age for it.
Haraldr was stunned, and then he realized what she meant. Of course. Two birds with one arrow. Joannes had ordered the Studion burned and knew that the people would attack the Varangians as the agents of that calamity. ‘We Varangians did not set these fires.’
The crowd erupted, as angry as a tempest. Fists shook and spears bobbed up and down. The woman screamed over her comrades. ‘See what they think of your lies!’ The crowd seemed to lift her towards Haraldr. His pagan roots surfaced and he feared the spirit world he would enter without his sword.
Christ,
he wondered,
where are you? Will you receive me in your paradise if I am denied the Valhol?
They were around him, the white heat of death. He was clawed and punched, and the woman was pushed into him. She glared up with gritted, decayed teeth. ‘Is there another reason why you should not die, Varangian?’ she shrieked. He looked at her eyes, thinking she was not the face of the Valkyrja he had imagined, and spoke the words that needed no prompting from any god. ‘The Blue Star.’
The woman’s hate-filled eyes were suddenly as wondering as a child’s. She thrust her arms into the air, screamed, and began to push the crowd back. The mob slowly quieted until the huge flames that were consuming their homes could be heard again. ‘What business do you have with the Blue Star?’
‘I want to plead my case, to convince the Blue Star that we Varangians did not fire the Studion. I think I know who did order this.’
The woman stepped back and studied Haraldr for a moment. Then she shrugged and led him through the crowd. Haraldr looked out across the expanse of faces, feeling another kind of Roman power, far different from the power he had felt at the coronation of the Caesar, but perhaps, in a strange way, greater. And he knew in that moment that the two powers of the Great City would some day come to a bloody reckoning.
As Haraldr had suspected, the Blue Star was among his flock, herding them from behind, his bulky form towering above the rest, his shelf-like beard jutting out proudly. Haraldr looked at the silly, silken little henchmen beside their leader and wondered if he had done the right thing in so boldly confronting this very petty street prince.
‘So you want to see the Blue Star,’ said the big man. He held up his hand so that the sapphire ring was visible.
Haraldr nodded; the man’s manner convinced him he had made his final mistake in the middle realm.
The Blue Star looked at Haraldr for a moment and dipped his head. That was the last thing Haraldr saw, the Blue Star nodding at him.
Naked, Joannes gave credence to the Bogomilist heresy that man was created in the image of Satanael, not God. The smooth, hairless, white wax skin draped a demonically distorted form: the great, swelling knees and elbows; the breastbone that curved like the chest of an enormous, feather-less bird; the penis a solitary, pathetic little pod dangling beneath an immense, shovel-like pelvis. A torturous embroidery of scarlet eczema ran from his wrists to the shoulders of each arm.
‘I do not like to stay long in the dry heat,’ said Joannes. He seemed curiously at ease. He slumped against the marble bench and languidly waved his grotesque hand through the mist of steam. ‘The wet heat does not deprive the skin of its oils.’
Michael looked at the mosaic that circuited the walls of the steam room. Joannes’s apartments were in one of the oldest buildings in the palace complex, constructed in a time when different fashions and canons of beauty had prevailed. Like this mosaic. A woman and man walked before a graceful portico, the architecture convincing in its substance, the human forms swelling with the glories of the flesh, the green and gold leaves behind the buildings almost rustling with the breeze. It reminded Michael of Antioch, where ancient revelries of the flesh were still redolent in the hot nights. How different from today’s Rome, the harsh, attenuated forms one saw in art, the airless ether that allowed only the spirit, not the flesh, to breathe. He looked at his uncle. Joannes’s deep sockets were blank, lids folded over the deadly irises. What could he know of old Rome, him with his tiny, vestigial penis, his blind disregard for the beauty and splendour around him? Why did he then live amid the echoes of a pagan world he could never touch even in his imagination? That was obvious. During his residence in the cenobium Joannes had come to despise the church and even its symbols. And that was why the Pantocrator, His voice rising among the hosannas of the seraphim in the Hagia Sophia, had decreed that Joannes, a monk without faith, should die.
‘Uncle, I am quite wilted. May I wait for you in the steam room?’ Joannes nodded assent, his eyes still closed, his huge head lolling. Even the seven-headed beast has its moment of repose, thought Michael. He rose and entered the large vault that contained both the warm tub for washing and the cold pool for swimming. Lit by candelabra, the mosaics around the wall, all secular scenes, took on a sacredness, and Michael knew that even in this place the Pantocrator was still with him, guiding him. He saw the wooden box on the broad marble rim of the tub. How clever. The foolish conspirator would have brought the soap as an offering. But this was so subtle, so intricate. The Caesar was clever enough to rule Rome; this was proof. Even if Joannes did suspect him, he would never anticipate this. Strangulation, perhaps, or a knife concealed in a towel. Fool. When Joannes was dying, he would have the moment to know he had been a fool, to look into the laughing eyes that had cast him into the fiery lakes.
Michael entered the pool. Yes, stay at a distance, when the convulsions begin summon the servants. He will be seen to die untouched. The water was so vitalizing, made him feel so alert. He stroked and floated. Would they crown him again? Yes, they would have to. No longer merely the Caesar but Emperor, Basileus, Autocrator. His hand in that of the Pantocrator. Michael found himself growing erect. He fondled his stiffening penis and enjoyed the silky, surreptitious thrill. He remembered as he often did how his father had hit him for that, when he had found the Caesar - Michael had always been the Caesar, wasn’t that clear, just as the Christ had always been the Lord? - touching himself at the public bath in Amastris, the filthy, cheap one they had to go to, carrying their own pails and greasy soap and dirty linen towels. Not simply beat him, his pitch-stinking fist crashing into the Caesar’s face; his father had told the men at the shipyard, and they had held him over the nauseating vat of caulking pitch and told him they were going to burn it off, and then they had tarred it! His father and those men had tarred it so that he could not touch it! It had not burned off like his uncles’, like they had said it would, but it had burned! And the Caesar had run home and told his mother (he and the Pantocrator so loved their mothers, they were so alike in that), and she had taken him to the baths and sponged him herself, as she had when he was smaller, and she had touched it again and again and cleansed it. And she had not let his father put his stinking hands on her after that. Never again. The Caesar stroked himself and realized that once he had destroyed Joannes, the Pantocrator wanted him to destroy his father.