Haraldr waved for Maria to follow him upstairs. He walked quickly ahead of her to his vaulted, candlelit bedchamber. His Alan girl stood in waiting, her sinuous body sheathed in white silk and her opal-grey eyes anxious. He kissed her marble-smooth white forehead and sent her out. She walked gracefully past Maria, looking at her keenly, almost like one stallion appraising another.
‘She is like a white leopard I saw once,’ said Maria raptly, apparently unable to contain her admiration for an equally splendid female. ‘You must be beautiful together, your gold and her ivory.’
‘Yes,’ said Haraldr, ‘and tonight when she wraps her panther legs around me, she will truly regret that it may be the last time. Not because she loves me - she hardly knows me -but because I have kept her well. And I have grown to see the beauty in the simple truth of that.’
Maria looked terribly pained; at exactly what he did not know, but he was pleased to see her anguish. She bowed her head so that he could no longer see. ‘I am a mean bitch. I did not want to speak of those things.’
‘No. Let us speak of love. Your lovers and my lovers. I have a new mistress now. When I am in her arms, I do not always think of you.’
Maria looked up with a faint hope written on her face. ‘I always think of you.’
‘Even when you are tearing flesh with some new gallant?’
‘There was a lover. That once. I did it to ... I will not lie and say I did it for you. I did it to save myself. But there is no one now. I am empty.’
‘You have made your own bed, Mistress. If it is empty, then that is your own doing.’
‘Yes.’ She seemed to have made some decision, like a traveller who looks back on his home and knows in that instant he will never return. ‘I came to speak of a dream I had in that bed.’
Haraldr felt fear like a brief, sudden gust in the room. Her dreams, if they were to be believed, had a curious prescience. It was quite likely, given her strange, sad soul, that she was one condemned to see ahead in time. A seeress, of sorts, though apparently she could not induce the trance. ‘Speak of it,’ he told her.
She described the dream, the ravens, the king beyond the creek, and the wound in his neck. When she had finished, she added, ‘I did not think it was important to tell you, because I thought it was really about me. That I missed you.’ She shook her head blindly, as if trying to toss some terrible thought out of it, and a tear streamed across her temple. ‘I wanted to kill you once. I thought you were the messenger of my death. You know that. But I don’t want you to die.’ She looked up with brimming eyes, her lips contorting horribly.
For the first time in my experience,
Haraldr observed, amazed,
she looks ugly.
And in that moment his heart was touched. She was a woman, a human being, not a goddess after all. He had been no fool to seek her desperate, lost soul. ‘Please don’t go to this war,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I will do anything you want. I will leave Rome for ever, whatever. I will enter a convent.’ Her shoulders wrenched with sobs. ‘Please believe me. You are going to die out there. I saw it.’
She clenched her fists until her knuckles burned welt-red and then dropped her arms to her side as if drained of every feeling. Her voice fell; the whispered words seemed like a cry from an abyss: ‘I could not live knowing your soul was not somewhere in this world.’
He reached for her, not so much from pity but from knowing that her fiery touch would perish this strange new incantation. But she was cold, almost lifeless, and when she fell against him sobbing, she was not an Aphrodite with searing, snake-stealthy arms, but a small girl in need of chaste comfort. And somehow he touched her lonely, flickering soul in a way he never had when he had felt himself deep inside her. He pushed her away and held her hands, afraid that at any moment the heat and light that obscured her real being might return. ‘I promise you I won’t die out there,’ he told her.
‘I am frightened.’
‘So am I,’ admitted Haraldr. ‘But nothing in life is certain. Even destiny must sometimes stray from its own path.’
‘Or perhaps destiny misleads us into thinking it has strayed.’ Maria wiped her nose inelegantly, and Haraldr could not keep himself from holding her again.
‘You must go,’ he told her. ‘There is too much our hearts must say to each other to again place the barrier of our naked breasts between them. I will come back to you.’ She drew away from him with her own understanding of this new, virgin troth. She clutched his hands one last time, then dropped them and silently fled to the door. But beneath the ornate lintel she paused and turned awkwardly, as if her emotions had finally confused her limbs. She looked back at him, the blue eyes like a fjord on the last dying day of summer. ‘If I do not return,’ he told her, answering the question on her sad child’s face, ‘then I want you to know that I died loving you.’
The City of New Rome did not sleep. In the hours of the waning night it began to migrate from the street corners and anxious family enclaves to the Forum of Constantine. From the districts of Petrion and Xeropholios, from Phanarion and the Venetian Quarter, from Blachernae where the Great Land Wall meets the Golden Horn, from Sigma and Deuteron, even from the Studion they came, the guildsmen and labourers and merchants and vagrants and petty bureaucrats, gnarled old women who had not been outside their homes for years, babies at their mother’s breasts, they all came to watch the invincible armies of Imperial Rome go forth against the Bulgar horde.
Dawn. Polished breastplates, scarlet tunics, golden standards and banners emerged in the first diffusions of daylight. The Imperial Taghmata had already assembled in a great procession along the avenue of the Mese, extending down to the Chalke Gate and the Imperial Palace complex. Behind the mounted regiments the Imperial baggage train and the supply wagons of the Taghmata jammed the Augustaion and the precincts of the Magnana Arsenal; the mules were even wandering into the open atrium of Hagia Sophia. The head of the armoured column waited beneath the statue of the Emperor Constantine in the Forum. The enormous bronze Emperor, his countenance patinated with the centuries, stood atop seven massive drums of porphyry. A crown of rays, like shafts of sunlight through a cloud, haloed his godlike features, and he stood with the trail of his simple tunic draped over his left arm, his right arm raised as if exhorting his people. He faced east, searching for the rising sun that would send the armies of Rome west to meet the enemies of his great city and the vast empire that he had founded.
The crowd that now ringed the Forum and surrounded every building, filled every street, yard and park as far as one could see, issued no ringing acclamations. They were subdued, their anxiety a low, buzzing rumble like a distant windstorm. They waited to see if Rome would have a champion in this terrifying hour of need. And beneath the statue of the first great Christian Emperor of Rome, the aspiring champions contested that honour.
‘The Caesar must lead!’ Michael Kalaphates’s face crimsoned like the flushed eastern horizon as he tried to restrain his voice. ‘I have been acclaimed by the people and crowned by the Patriarch. That is my claim to ride out first!’
Bardas Dalassena reined his Arabian, as equally white and gorgeous as the Caesar’s mount, his muscular forearms corded with tension. ‘You yourself acknowledge that I have supreme command.’ The Grand Domestic grimaced. ‘When the Emperor is present, he leads the procession because of his stature as supreme commander, and that alone. None of his other offices pertain to this protocol.’
‘That is specious,’ replied Michael, his horse now circling Dalassena’s as if the two stallions were preparing to settle the matter. ‘Nowhere in the protocols is it suggested that anyone precede the Caesar except the Emperor. Ever. Under any circumstance.’
‘This is a matter of military, not civil protocol!’ shouted Dalassena.
‘Understand that I defer to you in the matter of command, Grand Domestic,’ said Michael, perfectly content as he was to relinquish responsibility for this ill-starred campaign. ‘Permit me to allow my children the comfort of knowing that the Hand of the Pantocrator will be the first to smite their enemies.’
Haraldr steered his dappled Arabian away from the circling combatants and looked over at Mar. ‘We need to do something,’ he said in Norse. Haraldr reined around to face the east. Thorvald Ostenson, at the head of the mounted ranks of the Grand and Middle Hetairia, held aloft the golden dragon standard of the Grand Hetairia; company banners demarcated the five vanda behind; the Varangians were uniformed in newly lacquered Roman steel byrnnies with brilliant scarlet plumes atop their helms. Behind the Varangians the units of the Taghmata, headed by the golden-armoured Scholae beneath their gilded eagle standards, disappeared down the Mese, a metallic river of latent fury. It was not wise to dispatch an army of this size with any sort of doubts over their leadership. But weren’t such doubts now unavoidable?
Haraldr wheeled and faced the crowd to his right. Most of these spectators were various dignitaries from the Palace precinct - he could see Anna Dalassena and her mother standing in front - a few were prosperous merchants from Haraldr’s own neighbourhood. Even these, with their sophisticated understanding of the predicament, had the look of peasants watching their village leader flaunt some ancient superstition. Haraldr could only imagine the speculation among the labourers and minor tradesmen whose dun-coloured masses filled the western end of the Forum. If they did not get this column under way, this army’s first action might be against the people of Constantine’s great city.
Mar looked up at the green bronze face of the Emperor Constantine as if asking for advice. He shouted for the bandmaster, who commanded the two ranks of drummers, trumpeters, flautists and cymbal players arrayed on either side of the Varangians, to count twenty and commence playing. Then he charged his Arabian between Michael and Dalassena. The Manglavite will lead,’ Mar said, nostrils flaring but his voice even and dignified. ‘The Grand Domestic and the Caesar will ride side by side behind the Manglavite. The Hetairarch will follow the Caesar and Grand Domestic’ Just then the band blared into the lightening sky, effectively cutting off debate, the Caesar and Grand Domestic, at a loss to do otherwise, lined up as Mar had ordered but edged forward as each tried to move a neck ahead of the other; Haraldr finally blocked them with the rump of his horse. Anna Dalassena ran out of the crowd and handed her father a spray of golden marigolds; he took them with a look of mixed surprise and anger. Then Anna came beside Haraldr’s horse and handed him a single white lily. She held his hand as he took the flower. He could not hear her well but he could read her lips easily: ‘From Maria.’ Anna kissed his hand and ran back into the crowd. As if on her signal, the petals of spring flew into the air like snow.
The acclamation began at the Chalke Gate and swept forward with such force that it seemed like some great gust of wind. Even the band was palled to silence and the group of four horsemen at the front of the column turned in alarm; Haraldr wondered if the Excubitores back on the Mese hadn’t begun to riot among themselves. He looked at Mar helplessly. The sound was a hurricane that seemed as if it would throw the statue of Constantine to the pavement. Petals flew into the air. What could possibly be going on?
The horseman rode alone alongside the ranks; in a huge rippling motion all the Taghmata cavalry dismounted and the infantrymen dropped to their knees. The oncoming horse was a white Arabian caparisoned with gold and purple, and the horseman, in the finest gold armour, wore purple boots with a purple cloak flowing behind. His head was bare save for a single jewelled band round his forehead. Is Joannes mad, thought Haraldr, engaging an imposter to play the Emperor?
The horseman was fifty ells away when Haraldr realized that what he saw was not an imposter but a vision, a miracle. The man in Imperial raiment was the Emperor Michael. Not the same man whom Haraldr had adored a lifetime ago, but not the same pathetic wretch who had writhed in dying agony at his convent for prostitutes. He was still noticeably swollen, but he rode erect in the saddle and handled his horse with power and ease. And when the Emperor was still a dozen ells distant, Haraldr could see that his eyes were more powerful, more resolute than ever, the eyes of a man who had seen the abyss and with the force of ultimate will had leapt over it.
‘Grand Domestic! Caesar!’ shouted the Emperor, his voice audible even over the storm of his fame. ‘You will ride together, preceding the Imperial Scholae.’ Michael Kalaphates and Dalassena made no attempt to compose their astonishment-slackened faces and spurred off, exchanging looks that might have been passed between the centurions of old Rome when they saw the door of the Christ’s tomb rolled aside. The Emperor turned on Haraldr and Mar with a gaze of full recognition and furious purpose. ‘Hetairarch! Manglavite! You will ride behind me! I alone will ride at the head of the armies of Rome!’ Mar and Haraldr bowed deeply and fell in behind. The Emperor made the sign of the cross three times. Then he spurred his horse slightly and the powerful beast took the first step west. Responding instantly to this signal, the ranks behind began their march towards the destiny of Rome. Above them, the first clear shaft of the morning light caught the bronze rays that wreathed the head of the Emperor Constantine and gilded that ancient metal with the brilliance of the sun.
‘And so, I must reiterate my conclusion that the author of the
Taktika
cautions us against a frontal assault in this instance.’ The Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena flourished his hand as if he intended to produce this long-dead military expert to support his views personally. The Emperor, seated stiffly on a purple-canopied portable throne raised on a dais covered with cloth of gold, studied the thick scarlet wool carpet spread out before him, seemingly more interested in the pattern of highly geometricized Imperial Eagles than his Grand Domestic’s tactical discourse. Candelabra hanging from the lofty silk brocade vaults of the Emperor’s campaign tent glittered the ornamental gold breastplates of the Varangians of the Grand Hetairia, who flanked the Emperor in perfect arcs. A priest set a gold-framed icon and ornate gold censer at the Emperor’s feet.