Zoe stood close to him and put her hand on his neck, and the touch thrilled him as if a mosaic Virgin had reached out to him. She pulled his head down and whispered next to his ear. ‘Speak softly and the wind will carry our words away. It is said that you and the Hetairarch intend to strike at the Orphanotrophus.’
Haraldr stiffened. But at least she had used her charm and not her sex; she had allowed him that much dignity. ‘We have intentions but no plans,’ he said honestly; he would not have told her if they did.
‘You cannot wait,’ she said. ‘My husband could die at any time now. . . .’
‘If Your Majesty will forgive me, when that does happen, we must give the Caesar time to gather strength. If he could join us against Joannes, our chances of success would be immeasurably improved.’ Haraldr did not add that he and Mar disagreed on this point.
Zoe shook her head vehemently. ‘My nephew is a dear boy, but he is weak. He has been entirely subjugated by Joannes. When Alexius prepares to anoint him with the Imperial Diadem, I would not be surprised to see Joannes snatch the crown from the Patriarch’s hands and set it upon his own grotesque head. He will certainly occupy the throne. My husband has restrained him. Under the next Michael, Joannes will unleash a terror on my people such as you have never even dreamed.’
‘You are suggesting that I personally swat down Joannes? Remember that you have asked me to butcher that particular bird once before. And you have heard my answer.’
‘You were an innocent then. You still are. But the next revelation may cost you your life.’
Haraldr looked down on her intense, questing face. She was beautiful in this role as well. And yet there was truth to what she said. He had been taken totally unawares by the Emperor’s condition; he could not afford many more revelations like that. Mar had become increasingly unreliable, if not treacherous; Haraldr had begun to suspect that Mar’s goals extended well beyond the death of Joannes, and he had no idea how he and his men would then fit into Mar’s plans. And now the Caesar could not even earn his lover’s approbation. But what did this ally offer? ‘You did not summon me here to save my life, Mistress. What price do you offer me to save your own?’
Zoe smiled and tapped a perfect white tooth with a fingernail. ‘Indeed. Let me be candid. I must find a champion. In spite of our . . . estrangement, my husband would never let his brother harm me. If my husband were dead, and my people broken to Joannes’s bit, I would be in great jeopardy.’ Her jaw set firmly, with true Hellenic nobility. ‘I am not afraid to die, Manglavite. I am afraid to let Joannes live.’
‘Yes. I saw the Studion burn.’ Haraldr once again felt fate gaming with him, forcing him to play. This wager would be huge. ‘Once I had severed the head of this black-frocked eagle, how could you ensure that the Imperial Taghmata would not obey their Dhynatoi masters and massacre my men in reprisal? They would certainly not miss Joannes, but they would welcome the pretext to eliminate every Varangian in Rome.’
‘I would go to my people and ask them to rise up against the Taghmata. That would alter the equation in your favour, would it not?’
Haraldr ran through the myriad contingencies he and Mar had batted around for months. Yes. She was right; with the distraction of a civil uprising, the Taghmata could be defeated. Then he admonished himself to deal with Zoe, as one sovereign to another. He was no longer a mere servant of Rome. ‘Yes, I believe you can guarantee that my men would not be punished. But what would be my reward?’
‘Rome.’
What monstrous guile. Madness had seized Rome. The good were perishing and the rest lived in the vast structures of their lies. ‘Indeed, my Mother.’ Haraldr did not attempt to conceal the taunt in his voice. ‘You would adopt me, as you did the Caesar, and name me after some Emperor of ancient Rome, I presume. Or perhaps an invention more grand. King of Macedon, in honour of Alexander.’
Zoe moved away from him and looked out over the pattern of brilliant lights and inky water. ‘I would anoint you myself. I would bestow on you the only real power that remains in Rome. The anointment in the Hagia Sophia is an empty ritual without the coronation that can only take place between my legs.’
Haraldr imagined himself captured by a whirlwind, swept up in the madness of Rome. To think of her naked, waiting, was intoxication enough; to think of the power that penetration would endow was to leave the middle realm and gambol among the gods. But it was fantasy. A boast on her part. She played the woman but in her loins was only power. And she would guard that power with empty promises. ‘Indeed,’ he said, his momentary madness now restored to wry reason, ‘and to celebrate our betrothal, I would pluck the girdle of Orion from the skies’ - he pointed to the constellation wheeling above them - ‘and fasten it about your fair loins as a wedding belt. I have but to reach for it.’
Zoe smiled as if restraining a laugh, like a child caught in some mischief. ‘My crown is not as inaccessible as your wedding gift. But in refusing it, you have given me the assurance I need, that your ambition has practical limits. Let me give you the assurance you need. If you wish, I will swear on a piece of the cross upon which our Saviour died that I will keep the other promise I have made tonight.’
Haraldr was aware of the importance of these relics among the Romans but he saw no reason to make her take an oath on them. ‘If I fail, I will be able to offer your complicity to barter for the lives of my men. That is the pledge you have given tonight.’
Zoe resembled an ancient marble statue with amethysts for eyes. Then her lips twitched slightly. ‘You have become more . . . civilized than I had ever anticipated, Manglavite Haraldr. But you have not lost your . . . impetuosity, either. Since I find you so candid this evening, let me ask you this: When I offered you Rome, wasn’t there a moment when you lusted for her, no matter the cost?’ She paused, and pearls winked dully as her breast rose with an inhalation that was imperceptible on her face. ‘Wasn’t there a moment when you desired me?’
Haraldr nodded. Zoe’s gemstone eyes warmed and the stone became living flesh. She came towards him; he could feel the heat of her. Her face was beyond beauty. ‘So. If you fail, we will both die. That is a destiny that already weds us. If we are to be consummated in that death, then let us be lovers in this life.’ And then she slipped her silken arms around him and pressed her jewelled head to his chest.
She was everything he had wanted her to be: desperate, innocent, majestic, tender, her body and face a treasury of desire. He made love to her for an entire night. And as the dawn pinked the Bosporus, he wrapped his arm around her regal white bosom and realized two maddening truths: he could love this woman. And he could never stop loving Maria.
John Proteuon looked at his neighbour Stephan and threw his arms up helplessly. ‘Oxen stray,’ he said, not without sympathy, but trying not to be too encouraging. ‘Look,’ he explained as he wiped his hands on his coarse, rain-soaked tunic, ‘I have to help my brother with the ploughing. Because I am a soldier doesn’t mean I must go looking for stray animals. The next time some Emperor wants to attack them’ - John pointed north to the Bulgarian border at the Danube River, a ride of two days - ‘I will go riding off and you will stay, and you will not be helping me fight the Bulgars any more than you are right now helping me to help my brother plough.’ John gestured out in the field where his brother trudged along behind oxen yoked to the awkward, top-heavy, curved ploughshare.
Stephan stood in the heavy mist, his brown hair beaded with moisture and his dull grey eyes swimming above gaunt cheek-bones. He looked as if he hadn’t been eating well, thought John, which he probably hadn’t. With the increase in the window tax and the addition of the hearth tax and the constant work-levies taking men away from their farms to build these roads to nowhere, honest farmers like Stephan often looked like stray dogs. John began to feel guilty; as a military freeholder he was exempt from these additional taxes, and in truth he hadn’t had to spend much time fighting. In fact, he had once been mobilized to go to Asia Minor, but that campaign had been called off or ended or something, and other than that, he just had to show his topoteretes that he still had a spear and helmet and a horse. And since he hadn’t seen his topoteretes in two years, he hadn’t worried much about that lately. And the rain would soften the soil so that it would go easier tomorrow, so what would be the harm in just looking for the animal for a while? After all, if Stephan had lost his ox, he would have to pull the ploughshare himself, and it was clear he wouldn’t last long at that.
John saddled his horse, decided his spear would be an annoyance, and helped Stephan up behind him. They rode away from the cluster of small brick-walled cottages and passed through the broad fan of tilled acreage that surrounded the village. The common pasture was just a rock-strewn expanse of green scrub bordered by a wood that greyed into the mist. It was empty. ‘Didn’t Marosupous have his goats here?’ asked John, referring to another village neighbour. ‘They are gone too,’ said Stephan in his thick, slow, slightly Slavic accent; his mother had been a Bulgar who had been born here before the Bulgar-Slayer brought this area south of the Danube back into the Empire.
‘They are gone too!’ exclaimed John, leaning back so he could bat Stephan on top of his idiot skull. ‘Why didn’t you say! Someone has stolen all the animals! It’s clear!’
‘I told you,’ said Stephan.
‘You told me your ox had been stolen, ox-head, not your ox and Marosupous’ goats!’ John pondered the situation. He could go back for his spear, collect his brother, Marosupous, Gregory and his brother. But then he’d be leading that clumsy band all over creation with no idea where the animals had gone. ‘Stephan,’ he said, ‘run back to the village and tell everybody what has happened. I am riding over the ridge to see what I can see.’ Without a word Stephan slipped off the horse and ran, ankles flapping in battered knee boots.
John rode through the cold, wet woods and out onto a rocky slope that climbed to a little promontory marked by a pile of large, crumbling stones. A fine idea, he admonished himself sarcastically when he reached the look-out; he could only see about two stades into the mist, enough to make out a fragment of the narrow cart path that wound through the shallow hills before intersecting the big paved road to Nicopolis. John was about to pick through the scrub and take the path when he heard something strange out in the mist, coming from the direction of the Nicopolis road. He reined his horse still and listened for a while. How strange. A sound he had never heard before, gradually but steadily rising. A sound like some kind of heavy rain, perhaps, rain and hail, or a freak wind. But no, the sky wasn’t right; in fact, a steady west wind was beginning to push the mist back from the Nicopolis road. Animals. Yes. But more than one ox and a few goats. A herd. That was it. These thieves had made off with every animal in Paristron theme, it sounded like, and were driving them down the road.
The first man to come up the cart path did not see John. He wore a steel breastplate and helm and was armed with a bow and quiver and small round shield. John didn’t recognize the uniform, but he could well guess that the man was Imperial Taghmata - out here for what purpose, God only knew. John felt like riding up and telling this lout what he thought about the Taghmata stealing peasants’ animals even during peacetime. But as he wasn’t armed - and who knew what kind of renegade this man was or how many accomplices he had with him? - he’d wait. Maybe he would see a centurion or topoteretes he could complain to. John rode back up to the promontory and concealed himself behind the rough natural cairn on top. The wind continued to sweep the mist off towards the Nicopolis road, and five more men joined the first, all armoured alike; one, however, had no bow. An officer; just the man to hear about this crime. John nudged his horse back down the cart path.
The men called to him in some vulgar tongue. John pulled back on the reins and looked down at them; they were still distant but he could see their flushed, smooth cheeks. Eunuch soldiers? Is that what they have serving in the Taghmata now? They called again and this time he recognized the dialect and realized that these men weren’t eunuchs. He decided he had best return the way he had come and pretend he was just a frightened peasant. Which he was. He reached the rocks and looked back to see if they were following.
Below him, the mist had fled from a section of the Nicopolis road. Out of the opalescent fog marched greyish rows of spearmen in steel helms and hide jerkins flanked by horsemen armoured like the six he had already encountered. How many? wondered John, his alarm building with every row that materialized out of the mist. He waited and counted. By the time he had reached one hundred ranks, he decided enough was enough and charged down the slope as fast as his horse could negotiate the rock outcrops. His horse was in full gallop and wheezing when he passed Stephan on the outskirts of his village. ‘Bulgars!’ John shrieked so loud that the word burned his throat. ‘The whole Christ-forsaken Bulgar army!’
The woman had perhaps recently entered her fourth decade of life; she had a face that a passerby on this spring night would have found plain, certainly unalluring, but solid and well cared for. A face of the middle class, tending to lower, the wife of a guild tradesman more plodding than prosperous - perhaps her husband was a leather cutter or raw-silk processor who contracted work for more ambitious tradesmen who owned their own businesses. She wore a long wool tunic with a wool cloak over that, for there was a chill in the air, a crisp post-rain freshness, and she was returning from the public baths near her home in the Platea district next to the Golden Horn; she carried her pail and towel in her right hand. Fear was a dim reflection in her dull brown eyes, because although she was reasonably confident that the cursores were never far in her middle-class, tending to lower, neighbourhood, there were some unsavoury tenements in the area - one on her block - and there had been thefts and assaults. But this fear was a minor nuisance of life; what tormented her was the anxiety of what she was about this night.