She saw him and came directly for him, her face glowing and her fierce blue eyes wet. She held out her hands but did not embrace him. ‘I will not burden you with my questionable repute among these august personages,’ she said, smiling radiantly but with tears now rolling off her lashes. Haraldr wanted to hold her but reasoned that she knew the manners of this court far better than he.
‘I am sorry I have not been able to see you,’ Haraldr said. ‘This new office requires all my time. I am fortunate to be able to enjoy - if that is the word - even a quasi-official function such as this. But of course you are always with me. You were with me there.’
She shook her head and the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I am so glad you are alive. Just knowing that has made each day a joy.’
‘Do you know that you saved my life?’
‘But I didn’t,’ she said happily. ‘You went in spite of my warning, and yet you are alive.’ She looked up at him as if beholding the miracle of his resurrection. ‘My dreams are meaningless.’ She said this with such great happiness and relief that Haraldr decided not to tell her about the creek, and the king who had waited beyond it.
‘You saved me because your soul helped me forward when there was nothing else,’ he improvised, a distortion that was less profound than the truth.
‘You do not have to say that,’ she said. ‘What you told me before you left was enough.’ Suddenly her eyes doubted.
‘That was true,’ he told her,’ and still is. Why, in fact, I survived out there I do not know for certain. But you were indeed with me then.’
‘Yes. That has the resonance of truth,’ she said, drawing herself up and projecting her breast with wry self-confidence. She seemed very girlish and keen, perhaps more like Anna. ‘Since you have been gone, I have spent much of my time listening for the truth.’
‘And what have you heard?’
‘A great deal.’
‘Will you tell me?’
Her eyes were utterly clear and guileless, like a completely still fjord. ‘I want to very much. You are the reason I have begun to hear these things, or if not hear them for the first time, at least begin to listen to them.’ She smiled at him and shaded her marble-hued forehead against the sun. ‘One thing I know is that I have always put the act of love - or perhaps in my case, act of hate - before the idea of love. What you said about flesh coming between our hearts is true. You know the love I have here’ - she patted her abdomen with both hands -’but I want you to feel the love I have here.’ She touched her fingers to her breast. ‘And for all my ... experience with the other love, I do not know much of this’ - she pressed her fingers against her heart - ‘love.’
Haraldr was so deeply touched, he doubted that his own sincerity was equal to hers. ‘Perhaps I am no specialist in this’ - he touched his heart - ‘love, either.’
‘I believe it is a study that takes time. Its truths are not arrived at in a night of hot, wet embrace.’ She smiled deliriously but wistfully, as if remembering a pleasure she would not taste again. ‘Our passion was something grand and glorious, but it was a tower that rose too high on a foundation of air. Can we tear it down and begin again, and this time build something solid, even if less brilliant and overwhelming to the senses? Something we can live in?’
Haraldr still could not trust her - or himself - but she offered something that was far more rare than gold, or even Imperial diadems in Rome. Simple friendship, with the prospect of real love. And perhaps - he had wondered at her choice of phrase - they could build a roof beneath which they could live, perhaps together. ‘I want to try,’ he told her. ‘Not as your bedmate, or even as some silly, innocent gallant. You to me, like I am with Halldor and Ulfr. Besides, I am totally occupied with the responsibilities of Hetairarch.’
‘I know,’ she said, her face radiant. ‘When you are free for a moment, have a message delivered to me. I will meet you here, or in one of the gardens. We will be afforded only the time and privacy to talk.’
‘Agreed,’ said Haraldr, his golden face beaming at her. ‘Let us clasp arms in the manner of comrades.’ He clutched her lithe forearms in his huge grip and laughed. ‘I will consult with you at my earliest conceivable convenience, esteemed Eminence.’
She bowed and smirked. ‘Verily, your Hetairarchship, it will be an overawing honour surpassed only by the appearance of the glorious Pantocrator Himself at my morning ablutions.’ They looked at each other and enjoyed their spoof of court flummery for a moment. Then Maria bowed and turned to leave. After a few steps she turned and said, ‘I am so glad you are alive,’ before waving farewell and skipping off among the gawking dignitaries.
‘Uncle!’ whined Michael Kalaphates. ‘How can you run off on this . . . this excursion at this time!’ Michael swooped his dice off the ivory tabletop and bolted to his feet as if the Bulgars were at the door. ‘You are all that stands between me and a life of ascetic contemplation!’ Michael swept his hand at the lavish trappings of his hall; the silk tapestries from Persia, the silver candelabra, the gilded chairs. ‘Pity me, Uncle! If you can scarcely endure the life of contemplation I lead in this palace, can you imagine me in a monk’s cell? Uncle! You are all I have!’
Constantine threw his arms around the trembling Caesar. ‘Nephew, nephew, you know you are quite capable of fending for yourself.’
‘I am extremely anxious, Uncle,’ said Michael; he smoothed his silk robe as if in eliminating the wrinkles he was exerting control over himself. ‘Now I am not even admitted to the palace. I tried three times last week.’ Michael clutched the dice in his balled fist. ‘It is all so plain. Remove me from the public view, and when everyone has quite forgotten I exist, tie me up some night and carry me off to Mount Athos. That is the plan, Uncle.’
‘I assure you that I won’t permit that,’ said Constantine. ‘I may be of little consequence to our Emperor and the Orphanotrophus, but my blood flows in their veins and I can vouchsafe that I will remind them of that if they move you one stade from this house. I was Strategus of Antioch! They seem to forget that I am a man of ability!’
‘I know you are a man of ability, Uncle, as well as my dearest relative and most cherished friend. That is why the thought of your leaving for even two days quite unravels me.’
Constantine clasped Michael’s shoulders. ‘We need to find a weapon to use against them. I have been sitting in that gaol next to the Numera for two months to try to stumble over something. Nothing. Until this Maleinus individual appeared. I am not particularly given to the notion that the Pantocrator personally prepares our agenda for each day, but I must confess to the singular intimation that the Hand of Providence is guiding me - and you as well, Nephew - towards the Holy Establishment at Prote.
‘Of course you are right, Uncle. I only wish I was not subjected to this confinement. Together we could have made a pleasant excursion of it. I’d wager this Maleinus is fond of dice and horses. When will you go?’
‘The sooner the better, Nephew. I will be back in three days.’
Michael nodded. ‘Bless you, Uncle. If I survive to tell this tale, I will reward you in any way I can.’
Constantine and Michael embraced. The Caesar escorted his uncle to the door and watched him ride off, through the ring of Khazar guards and down the broad paved road, until he passed from sight behind a cypress grove. Michael turned and re-entered his ante-chamber, then stopped to stare at the mosaic on the wall to his right, a lifelike depiction of an eagle devouring a snake. His face began to crimson deeply. Suddenly he threw his dice at the picture so savagely that the ivory cubes and ceramic tesserae exploded into shards and dust.
‘Monastery!’ Michael shrieked, his neck corded and every vein in his face seeming to stand out. He raised his head, his throat gurgling slightly, towards the gold-coffered ceiling. This is not what you promised me, sir!’ he shouted in vicious, spitting syllables. ‘This is not at all what you promised! Do you recall the conversation we had that day, sir? You stood beside me. Your hand was in mine. You made me tell you my secrets while all of them were watching. Do you remember I told you how I could see the music floating in the dome, and how much I wanted to touch myself, and how my father wouldn’t let me? And you told me that your father had never fouled his mother?’ He screamed madly again. ‘You told me I could make them all pay for what they did to me! It was your idea, and now you have abandoned me to them! You are going to let them take me to a monastery!’ Michael quieted, but his neck stiffened and his head jerked up as if he had been pulled by his ears. ‘What? What?’ he said softly. He lowered his head slightly. ‘Very well,’ he said, seemingly half to himself, half to his unseen conversant. ‘But remember that I am not a patient man.’
‘Soon we will have the torpid heat.’ The Empress Zoe ran her ringer along the surface of the silver wine cask, tracing the engraved outline of a dancing nymph in the finely beaded condensation. ‘Does the heat make you long for Thule, Hetairarch Haraldr?’
‘I think of home often. The heat is not relative to the issue.’ Haraldr had dreaded this interview, and yet he would have requested an audience with her had she not requested to see him. The matter had to be settled.
‘Yes,’ said Zoe. She leaned back against the cushions of her sitting couch. A gust of dry, warm wind swept through the arcaded balcony, and she blinked her gold-thread lashes. ‘I have often felt that there is a claim on you.’ She waved her hand, and her delicate ringers seemed to stroke the thick, fragrant air. ‘Not merely the kind of claim that one heart places on another but the claim a land makes on its people. Or perhaps the claim a land makes on the man who would rule over her.’
Haraldr stiffened and drew his torso erect; he had been uncomfortable when she had asked him to take a couch opposite her, and now he wished he had remained standing.
She was certainly only guessing - this business of the prince who had come with the Rus fleet was still about, albeit now a vague, virtually forgotten rumour. But Haraldr had hoped he would never hear it again.
‘Maria says you came from an important family in Thule,’ continued Zoe in a slow, deep timbre. ‘Do you aspire to rule over your home some day?’
Haraldr decided that she was not setting a trap, that in fact this was her way of pointing to the snare in which they were both caught. ‘Yes. I have thought of ruling some day. In Norway, my home. It is now my fancy. But then I once, for a moment of madness, fancied myself ruler of Rome. And in that intoxication I dreamed that I took Rome in my arms.’ Haraldr inhaled silently and held the breath.
Zoe’s eyes blinked and closed. ‘I understand your vision. I saw it once too. It was a dream, exquisitely beautiful, as dreams often are.’ She paused and stroked her forehead lightly, as if brushing away a gnat. ‘My husband awakened me from this dream.’
Haraldr’s heart thudded. ‘Yes, I believe that I was awakened in a similar fashion and saw that I had dreamed.’
Zoe’s finger traced over the engraved silver nymph again. ‘The beauty of dreams is that life does not hold us accountable for them.’
Haraldr eased backwards, the relief surrounding him like an eddy of the warm breeze. ‘And life can never entirely destroy the beauty of dream.’ In his gratitude he felt a residue of the passion that had joined them once.
‘The beauty, no. The substance, yes. Life so often destroys the substance of dreams, and yet so often provides us with new dreams. New beauties.’ Zoe sat erect and propped herself up with a silk-sheathed elbow. Her blue eyes had a diamond-like glimmer. ‘I have already thanked you in the name of Rome and the purple-born Empress for the lives of my people and the safety of our Empire. But you also know me as a woman, Hetairarch.’ Zoe’s full crimson lips curled with the merest hint of salacious irony. ‘And I have not thanked you as a woman for saving the life of my husband.’
‘He saved my life as much as I saved his, Majesty.’
Zoe nodded. ‘Yes. Like Achilleus, he has taken up his sword again, clad in the armour of the gods.’ Zoe stared as raptly as if the Emperor stood before her in his golden breastplate. ‘He will come to me, Hetairarch Haraldr. I have beseeched the Virgin with my prayers. Now that he is well, he will come to me.’
Haraldr sincerely hoped that Zoe would find this dream fulfilled. ‘Yes. He is a proud man, and justly so, and he did not want you to see him reduced by his illness. But I can assure you that his health grows more robust with each day. When he is the man you remember, then you will have him again.’
‘You are a gracious man, Hetairarch.’ Zoe eased back against the silk cushions. ‘You made love to me, and yet you do not begrudge me the resurrection of my love. So in kind I will not begrudge you the restoration of your love.’ Zoe leaned forward and looked at Haraldr earnestly. ‘Maria says that you two have conversed.’
‘Yes. We are starting to know each other.’
‘That will not be easy for you, Hetairarch. I have known Maria all her life, and yet she remains one of the great mysteries of my life. For all her beauty and . . . spontaneity, she has an ancient soul, profound and perhaps unfathomable. I do not know the depths of it.’ Zoe smiled warmly and the small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes became visible. ‘When she was a small child, my sister and I took her to summer at Botanci, on the sea. It seemed to us that she stared at the sea for weeks, nothing but that. And yet she seemed so happy to be alone, as if she had a secret child’s friend, a nymph who came up from the water when we were not looking. Finally we asked her who was out there. I remember her words so clearly because they were too sad for any child to speak. “Everyone,” she answered us. “The world will end in fire. I want to remember the time when there was only water.” ‘
Haraldr tried to see Maria as a child and wondered if even then, as she sat before the sea that had watched her grow and would see her wither and turn to dust, if even then she was moving towards him, and he to her. ‘She has told me that you were her parents’ friend. Were they worthy people?’
Zoe’s eyes were distant, as if she now sat beside that little girl and also stared into eternity. ‘They were the best of people. There were none more . . . worthy. They loved her more than . . .’ Zoe’s lips quivered. ‘How they loved her. Perhaps they would also have seen into her weary, tender breast and understood her. The rest of us can only love her.’