Mar’s face twitched slightly. He remembered the vision of her, naked, wanting him. Since then he had ached, thinking of what it would have been like to make love to her. Why hadn’t he? She had not been the first woman he had turned away from (why? he had reasons he could not admit), but she had been the culmination, the one who had brought him closest and had therefore let him fall the farthest. Why hadn’t he? He was not waiting for a woman who was pure; many who had offered themselves to him had been virgins.
The corners of Maria’s mouth trembled and her nostrils flared. ‘Do you think of me, Mar? I want you to think of me. I want every man who has ever touched me to burn with the memory of me.’ She swished forward, her silk cloak like a cloud. ‘I think of what it would have been like with you. I thought of you once when I was with him.’
‘And this is how you love him? You are a bitch.’
‘I love him!’ she screamed, her face brilliant. ‘I love him so much, I wake up in the night sick with dread that he will never love me again! I vomit! I heave my soul up for loving him!’ Her hair fell around her cheeks and her shoulders jerked with strange, dry sobs.
Mar shook his head. ‘I pity you. You are addicted to your passions. You have taken everything as long as you have known life, and so you despise anything you cannot entirely consume, like a flame that hates water. You will never understand men like Haraldr and me. We are Norsemen. When we are twelve summers old, we go on the western sea in open boats and sail to lands you Romans have never heard of, where the ice floats in great islands and the absence of everything except his own will makes a man strong.’
Maria cocked her head slightly, defiantly. ‘When I was twelve, I took my first lover.’
‘That man forced you, and later you killed him for it. I know the truth of that.’
‘I loved him. I liked it. It made a whore of me.’
‘So you pretend you are a whore with every man? As it was with me?’
‘I make love but I do not love. As I had hoped it would be with you.’
‘But with Haraldr it is different?’
‘Who is he!’ she blurted with a desperate, bell-like voice. ‘When he is inside me, I feel his fate around my neck, and mine around his. We are strangling each other with this destiny, two vines sucking the life out of one another. You say I will get him killed. Yes, I have known it, I have prayed for it, I have tried to do it! And he gave me my life back, so I could try again.’ Her eyes were insane, incandescent. ‘Who is he!’
‘He has not told you who he really is?’ Mar sneered. ‘Perhaps your love is not returned, then. You would understand the fate around your neck if you knew.’
‘Tell me!’ she shrieked, and fell on Mar, pounding his huge chest with her small white fists. He showed his gleaming teeth and she clawed his face. ‘Tell me!’ He felt the blood on his cheek. She lunged at an object on the ivory-inlaid trunk opposite her bed. ‘Tell me or I’ll kill you!’ Mar looked at the knife and laughed. She swiped wildly, and he caught her wrist. She strained to reach him with the knife, and he deliberately wrenched her arm so that the blade touched his throat. ‘You want to kill me, little bitch. Look, it is only a thumb’s width. Kill me.’ She grimaced and let the knife drop. Mar looked into her mesmerizing eyes: the rage, the danger, the invitation. He knew his purpose for coming here now. Why had he concealed it from himself? He brought his lips close to hers, and she did not recoil as he had thought (hoped?) she would. He grabbed her hair and pulled her to him and kissed her, and she pressed back, her lips angry yet soft, the kiss that had made him sleepless a hundred nights. Then she pushed him away. Tell me!’
Mar ripped her cloak off, revealing a sheer silk tunic; her nipples were erect beneath the mistlike drape. She looked at him and pulled her hair slick against her head and held it, and for a moment she had the utterly wild aspect of a blue-eyed panther. She dropped her hands and placed them on the draped neckline of her tunic and pulled down and ripped the garment from her shoulders. The silk settled at her ankles like falling eiderdown. ‘Set me free,’ she said.
Mar stared at her, his desire a great engine in his throbbing chest. If Haraldr Sigurdarson wanted to fight over her, he would kill him. He was a hundred times a man in every way except that he had never been able to take a woman. And now he would. He studied her body again, reality exceeding even memory; she had had him so close then, now there was nothing about her he did not desire.
She helped him undress, silently looking in his eyes the entire time, her face inscrutable. She took him to her bed and he was hard. ‘My fair-hair,’ she said, pressing down on him, demanding what he had hoped to plunder. Her breathing was quick and harsh. ‘Destroy me,’ she said raspily. ‘Set me free.’ She clutched at Mar’s hair. ‘Let him live.’
Maria ground her pubis against him until he grimaced with pain. ‘I like it, my fair-hair, I like it . . .’ She clutched his head to her breasts. ‘Bite me! Harder!’ She arched her spine and growled like a cat. ‘Harder! Make me bleed!’
Intoxicated beyond any sense he had ever known, Mar took the soft skin of her breast between his teeth and ripped and tasted the blood. And then his loins exploded.
They breathed in a furious contrapunto. Mar fell quickly from the precipice of passion, disgusted with himself, not because he had taken another man’s woman but because he had fouled himself. What had been different this time, he wondered, to make him do it? Did he really hate Haraldr Sigurdarson that much? Or was death closer than he thought? His genitals felt cold and filthy with her wetness. She was a whore. He pushed Maria away and retreated from her bed.
Maria sat up and smeared the blood over her breast like a fascinated child. She watched Mar dress. ‘I liked it,’ she said in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from some great distance. ‘You were as inept as a thirteen-year-old boy. I have seduced boys with beardless chins and had to teach them. Now I have taught you. It is all for my pleasure. As you say, I am quite addicted to it.’
Mar looked at her as if she were a leper. ‘You are mad and empty,’ he said, pulling his boots on and then standing to confront her. ‘You are like the western sea, with this great force, this great tempest, but like the sea you rage alone, in emptiness and in silence, without meaning, unless a man dares to challenge you. Every man who loves you is a fool. I was a fool to come here.’
Maria watched Mar leave. There was a high-pitched sound in her ears. She felt as empty as the sea Mar had described. There had been no pleasure, only the gift of pain she had demanded. She had hated it, and herself, and it had not set her free.
Alexius, Patriarch of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith, appeared in a burst of white silk and gold embroidery. Behind the luminous Patriarch, through the briefly opened bronze doors to his personal apartments, Mar caught a glimpse of servants clearing the silver and gold settings of the Patriarch’s breakfast table. Mar fell to his knees and lowered his forehead to a red carpet sprinkled with delicately woven gold chrysanthemums. A sweet incense filled his nostrils.
‘Rise, Hetairarch.’ Alexius beckoned with his ring-laden fingers. ‘Rise up.’ It was a strange, powerful face, the feminine lips contradicted by the hawklike nose, the eyes still, guarded, but fearsome nonetheless.
‘Father, you honour me--’
‘Nonsense. It is my pleasure. Since His Majesty is no longer able to join me for breakfast, I often feel that I am losing conversance with the secular arms of our glorious Empire. I welcome this opportunity to conduct a private and, indeed, intimate interview.’
Alexius showed Mar through a series of ante-chambers and Patriarchal offices; the bustling secretaries with their armfuls of documents and the hurrying dignitaries in silk and gold seemed little different from the officials of a major Imperial Bureau. The difference, Mar noted, was that here there was a powerful uniformity of purpose, a sense that these officials served, with unstinting obedience, but one master.
‘I thought we might converse in my church,’ said Alexius. ‘I am intent on redeeming your soul for the Pantocrator, you know. So I will ask for His intervention. It is hard to deny Him in the Mother Church.’ They entered a short, vaulted hallway that opened onto the south arcade of the Hagia Sophia. Alexius walked to a heavy marble balustrade and gestured into the vast chamber of golden light that extended beyond, above and below them; everywhere Mar looked, scintillae of colour accreted into architectural forms and then dissolved into light again. This is Rome, Mar told himself, a huge structure so disguised by the multiplicity and splendour of its parts that it is impossible to tell what is solid, real, and what is illusion. But one must not be dazzled by the lights. There were real walls, real columns here. And if a man had the intelligence to identify and the temerity to remove the critical supporting structures, he could bring even this edifice down.
‘It is quite fragile,’ said the Patriarch, almost as if he had opened a window into Mar’s mind. ‘Look.’ He pointed to the massive pier at the end of the arcade, one of four that thrust up the soaring central dome. ‘If you focus through the light, you can see how it is inclined backwards.’ Mar squinted; the pier indeed tilted noticeably, as if the weight of the presumably incorporeal gold dome were crushing down on it. ‘When I walk in here each morning,’ said Alexius, ‘I am in awe that God has permitted the dome to stand through another day.’ Alexius looked about the enormous golden shell with an unexpected warmth and familiarity, as if he were watching a small child he would some day have to send off to life, war, love, disappointment, death.
After a moment the Patriarch turned to Mar, the beasts in his dark eyes finally unleashed. ‘This is my fortress,’ he said, his voice even but now much deeper in resonance, almost supernaturally compelling. ‘It is the most powerful structure on earth. Its strength is not in the mass of its walls but in their fragility, the fashion in which they are transformed by the light of day into the pure light of God’s Eternal Being. Some day men, perhaps with means we cannot dream of today, will defeat the walls of this city. But how can anything defeat the light in which the Pantocrator reveals himself to men?’
The dragon of Nidafell, thought Mar. The last dragon will consume even the light of the Pantocrator.
Alexius’s eyes retreated. ‘I see I have failed to move you with talk of God. Let us then talk of Rome, and what we must render to, if not our Caesar then to the powers that have given us a Caesar.’
Mar looked up into the golden carapace that seemed more an opening than an enclosure. Perhaps there was a power to this light. It enabled the Patriarch to speak with the direct tongue of a Norseman instead of the oily mendacity of the Roman courtier.
Do not disappoint him.
‘We will not accept the continued intervention of the Orphanotrophus Joannes in the affairs of the Empire.’
Alexius raised both wiry eyebrows. ‘And who are we, Hetairarch?’
‘The Varangians of the Grand and Middle Hetairia.’
Alexius nodded his head. ‘That is no small thing. One thousand warriors of proven, and more importantly, feared ability. And even more importantly, already quartered inside the palace gates, indeed surrounding the person of the Emperor. But do the Scholae, Excubitores and Hyknatoi of the Imperial Taghmata’ - these were all elite palace regiments - ‘share your resolution? If not, they would certainly deter the swiftness of your thrust. Perhaps with fatal consequences for all involved.’
‘Of course you are correct in your reservations,’ answered Mar. ‘If we had to defeat the Imperial Taghmata,’ he said, slightly smirking with the boast, ‘the endeavour might take us several days. By then the people would have become aroused and could possibly create a situation that would force us to accept any candidate they proposed. However earnest the intentions of the simple folk, we might be left with another unsuitable candidate. But if the Imperial Taghmata were convinced that both the people and other . . . powers were resolute in their wishes, they would acquiesce to our coup.’
‘An artful hypothesis, Hetairarch. But you fail to calculate the most significant of Rome’s many powers, if only because in that power is the will of the Pantocrator manifest in human form. I mean the purple-born. And is not the purple-born currently an author of our predicament?’
‘Indeed the older sister is. Fortunately she is not the last purple-born Macedonian.’ Mar paused for effect. ‘The Varangian Guards would defend your client Theodora to the last drop of our blood if she were to ascend to the Imperial Throne. We would, of course, hope to consult on the choice of her consort and Emperor.’
Alexius clasped his hands beatifically. ‘Well said, Hetairarch! I applaud the economy of expression you Varangians are noted for.’ The eyes suddenly leapt at Mar, for a moment literally stifling his breath. ‘In matters according to God, I am undisputed on this earth. In matters that pertain to Caesar, my concerns are manifold. I govern a state within a state, with all the predictable difficulties of such administration. Fractious Metropolitans, incompetent bishops, rebellious priests in far-flung sees. Like a state, I have my enemies. Internally the growth of the monastic establishments independent of Patriarchal jurisdiction has become an epidemic that leeches the church of its vital resources. Externally I must contend with malignant impudence of the see of old Rome, which threatens every soul in my state. And let us not forget my mandatory allegiance to the Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans. I am crowned by him, and can in theory be deposed by him.’
‘This Emperor will depose no one.’
Alexius made the sign of the cross, praying that the Emperor would be able to complete in Purgatory the penance he had begun here on earth. ‘Yes. It is the Caesar we must concern ourselves with.’
‘The Caesar is in Neorion.’ Mar caught the surprise, and new respect, in Alexius’s cat-quick eyes. ‘Four days now. He is still alive. My presumption is that he was overly assertive and Joannes intends to knead him into a more pliable state. All the more reason that the succession to this Caesar be initiated.’