Constantine remained on his knees, gulping the dry, dusty air. His head ached and his temples thumped with raging blood. Even in his distress he could hear the footsteps behind him and he whipped his head around. The figure was over him and he looked at the face in the last flickering light of the spilled oil and screamed.
‘He induces a trance, like a soothsayer,’ said Maria. ‘That is commonly done. His skill is that he can make hundreds of people see it at once. He has learned the ways of the mind, and how to make the mind see what it wants to see. He leads your mind to its own fantasies. But most of what you saw were tricks, to make you susceptible to the final illusion.’ Maria stretched her arms across the little dessert table and grasped Haraldr’s hands. Zoe had set up the tables all across the porch of her villa, as well as on the terraces descending to the Bosporus. The entire hillside twinkled with candlelight like a miniature city; the stairs, marked with glowing silk lanterns, were brilliant boulevards. There was no moon and the sea was sable-black.
‘Nevertheless, you cried at what you saw.’ Haraldr wondered if she had seen some new vision of his fate. Or perhaps her own.
‘At what I let myself see. I saw the fire and the raven because I dreamed these things. Because I am afraid for you. Not because they will happen but because I care for you. Because I . . .’ She trailed off, the missing words obvious. ‘You saw the dragon at the end, because that is your Norseman’s myth. But you are the only one who saw it. We all saw the light of New Jerusalem because we have all been in the Mother Church, and Abelas persuaded our minds to see it again. Abelas is very gifted, some say dangerously so. Do you know that he was escorted to his ship by his own Allemanian guards and has already sailed off in the dark? He worries that people who saw terrible things will try to kill him. The church would like to see him out of the way because he casts doubt on the veracity of miracles. And he will probably be mad within a year. I would say his art will soon be lost, and even the chronologists will be too frightened to record all of what we have seen.’
Haraldr clutched Maria’s hands. What she had said about Abelas had, as she would say, ‘the resonance of truth’. But if Abelas had the gifts of a soothsayer or seer, he could without question see into time. And he had known Haraldr, had seen him born, had seen him die, had seen the last dragon fly at the end of time.
And perhaps,
Haraldr thought,
Abelas saw my soul unmasked.
‘He knew you, didn’t he?’ said Maria. Haraldr’s eyes registered the shock. Maria was also gifted, perhaps dangerously so. Haraldr wished that Zoe had not left them alone. He felt unsure of himself with her now; in the light of the candle she was not the same friend he had grown to love during the long summer afternoons. She was the lover he had known on those endless nights. He knew what she wanted, the unmasking of the secret that separated their questing souls, and he still could not give it to her. ‘No.’ Haraldr could not look at her. ‘He did not know me.’
Maria looked down and her fine, dark lashes seemed to work at vanquishing tears. When she looked up again, there was a kind of tragic acceptance on her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they are going to dance.’
The dancers, a troupe of twenty beautiful young women dressed much like Maria, except in more colourful and less precious silk, formed a ring, their arms interlocking to form a continuous chain. To the music of flutes and cymbals they began to sway, first at the hips, sensually, then incorporating their entire bodies with fluid undulations of their locked arms and precise movements of their feet. Slowly they built to ever more elaborate, frenzied rhythms, movements added to movements until the ring swayed, twisted and spun like a top with the power to change its shape endlessly.
Soon younger men and women, many quite drunk, began to form rings of their own, swaying and whirling with less grace but equal fervour. Maria impulsively grabbed Haraldr and led him to one of the rings on the terrace below him. They spun about with a large group for a while, and then the circles broke into fours, and finally couples were left to their own improvisations. The music whistled and chimed to an elaborate climax. The night was a blur of flashing silk and candlelight. Maria soon outpaced Haraldr and moved in with the professional troupe, her grace almost the equal of theirs and her undulant hips and bared legs even more erotic. On and on she went, her eyes and teeth shining fiercely.
Finally the music stopped to offer the exhausted dancers relief. Maria came to Haraldr, her breasts rising and falling rapidly and her forehead wet. She wrapped her arms around him and he could feel that her passion had only been momentarily diverted. She looked up at him, her eyes still on fire. ‘I would give my soul to make love to you tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you give me yours?’
He held her to him. ‘I know what I must say to you,’ he said. Tell her, he pleaded with himself. Every inhibition was gone at this moment - the oaths to Norway, the risk of exposure, the fear of her betrayal - and yet that truth had never seemed more deeply buried in his breast. If he told her, everything would change between them. And he loved her too much at this moment to want to change anything.
Maria’s eyes teared as she waited. Finally she dropped her head. ‘Why? I will share anything with you. If you are a criminal, a traitor, a slave, if you have a wife, a queen, a whore, I don’t care. I have to know who you are. Don’t you see what it means that that is so important to me? I want to know how to place you within my life. I will do anything you want me to. But I have to know.’ She looked up at him again. At that instant Haraldr realised that they both stood on some great precipice, and they could either leap from it wrapped in one another’s arms, or walk away from that brink separately, strangers for ever. He could only answer that fate with silence.
‘I have told you everything,’ she said, her voice the plaint of some small, doomed animal. She shuddered with a single sob, released him, and ran madly across the terraces, her legs pumping and her fists attacking the night air.
‘You are an angel of the Lord,’ said Constantine as the noseless monk dabbed the cut over his eye with a wet cloth. ‘I apologize for regarding you as another cutthroat. Who knows how long I would have lasted out there.’
‘I followed you,’ said the monk. ‘They lied back there. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon. He was once . . .of our lavra. He is in trouble. Men in Constantinople. We monks protect our own.’ The monk’s voice had the curious resonance of the noseless; he spoke as if it took a great deal of time for his words to travel from his brain to his mouth.
‘So why have you helped me?’
‘Because he is a friend of mine. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon.’
Constantine decided not to pursue the matter; the noseless monk was a not too bright Good Samaritan, and perhaps he thought that Constantine was someone who could help his friend with his legal problems. And perhaps Constantine could. ‘Can you take me to see Brother Symeon?’
The noseless monk nodded and turned into the night, adeptly picking a path through the jagged bases of the spires. The darkness was overwhelming. It was as if the monk’s single taper were a candle adrift in a vast dark sea. The monk moved swiftly and Constantine’s heavily fleshed chest ached. Brother Symeon awaits, he told himself as he grimly pursued the black shape before him. The key to all Rome may be out there in this hideous night. They began to climb, scrambling over tortured, worn rocks. The air was suddenly cooler in pockets. To his left Constantine glimpsed a few glowing portals. He imagined the jagged presence of the cones around him without actually being able to see them.
‘The ladder . . . needs repair,’ said the noseless monk. He thrust his taper towards a weathered wooden lattice that climbed into the blackness. ‘Watch that the steps don’t break. You being . . . big.’ Constantine heard the old wood creak beneath him as he climbed. After what seemed an endless, purgatorial ascent the monk paused ahead of him and the timber beneath his foot groaned, cracked and sagged. Constantine’s foot flew out into the dead void and his shoulders seared with pain as he suspended his ponderous bulk from his burning hands. Where he found the will to pull himself to the next rung, he could not say. Perhaps the Hand of the Pantocrator.
The monk helped him over the ledge. Constantine guessed, from the condition of the ladder, that Brother Symeon was a true eremite who never ventured from his cone cell. He probably raised his food and water up with a rope.
‘Brother Symeon,’ called the noseless monk as he stopped beneath the tiny hewn door. ‘Brother Symeon ... I have brought... a man ... to help you. A man from . . . Constantinople . . . Brother Symeon?’ Constantine heard no answer. ‘Brother,’ called the monk to Constantine, ‘come. Brother Symeon . . . will see you.’ Constantine ducked beneath the entrance, scraping his head against the rough lintel. He could straighten up inside the cell. The noseless monk held his taper out so that Constantine could see Brother Symeon. Constantine moaned with shock and despair and his knees went out from under him, pitching him to the rough stone floor.
The fountain resembled an enormous pine-cone; the surrounding cypresses echoed the intricately perforated marble shape. Water bubbled with a musical, faintly chiming sound. Maria was standing in the pool, her chiffon underskirt pulled up to her knees.
‘Maria.’
Maria turned. Her eyes seemed shrouded, swollen. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘You asked me once why I wanted to cause you pain. Now I ask you. Why?’ She thumped her breast with a tight fist and glared. ‘If there is some vengeance that you want now, my breast has no more armour. No need of armour. The knife is in it. Twist it if you want.’
Haraldr waded in after her and she stood erect with her breast out, as if challenging him to a combat. He put his arms around her and pressed her warm cheek to his. Then he held her away and found her eyes.
‘I told you once I was from an important family in Norway. That was no lie, but not all the truth. I am the rightful King of Norway, uncrowned only because I have not returned to claim what is mine.’
Maria held him as if he were the last thing she would ever hold in her life. She kissed his face and neck with wet passion, her tears spilling onto his robe. ‘I knew you were no land man, no mere nobleman,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it the first time we talked. I knew you bowed to no one.’ Then Maria stiffened with shock. ‘Mother of God,’ she murmured as if greeting death. ‘When must you leave?’ Just as suddenly, she smothered him again. ‘I will go to this Norway with you,’ she murmured hotly. ‘I will be anything. If you have a queen, I will be your concubine. . . .’
Haraldr held her to him and looked up at the brilliant mantle of stars. They were falling now, the two of them, falling from those heights, and while there was fear, there was also a joy he had never imagined. ‘I have no queen. And everything in my soul wants to make you my queen.’ He paused and stroked her hair lightly and listened to the sibilance of fate’s warning as he plunged through the stars; could she hear it? ‘But there would be terrible dangers for you on the journey. And I see you here, in the light and sun and beauty of Rome, and it breaks my heart to see you there, in a night that lasts for months, with the rough men of my court, in the shrieking cold of our winter. I would die to see the light go out of your eyes.’
She clutched his robe and looked at him with a new blue flame. ‘Would I have a life here without you? I have seen the beauty of Norway in your eyes, and there is no place on earth where winter is not followed by Persephone’s return. There are rough men in our court, too, Hetairarch, even if their words are oiled.’ She pulled his mouth to hers and whispered before she let their lips touch. ‘And if the night is long, then we will kindle a fire inside it that will burn for ever.’
Maria pressed her breast tightly to Haraldr’s, and he could already feel her naked body next to him, beneath thick down covers, in the Royal Hall of Norway at Nidaros.
‘Brother Symeon . . . has not . . . been well.’
Constantine gasped and clutched at his throbbing chest. Not well? Brother Symeon, who sat against the wall opposite the door, his legs crossed in front of him, was a pile of bones to which still clung not even a few desiccated shreds of flesh; apparently mice were agile enough to scale these heights even if dogs weren’t. The scavengers had left some tattered fragments of the late Chartophylax’s coarse wool habit. Constantine watched in astonishment as the noseless monk ladled water into the skull’s gaping, intact jaws; apparently the demented monk had tied the bones together with leather cords as his skeletal companion had begun to fall apart, sinew by rotting sinew. Constantine recovered his wits quickly enough to decide on a course of action. ‘Do you think Brother Symeon is well enough to talk to me?’ he asked the monk. ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb him.’
‘He’s . . . expecting you,’ said the monk somewhat irritably, as if this were a fact any fool should have known.
‘Brother Symeon,’ said Constantine, ‘I believe that I can help you if I may presume to examine your correspondence.’ Constantine hoped that the monk would communicate Brother Symeon’s assent. But after a moment the monk turned to him and stared, as if Constantine’s reply were now expected. ‘I seem to be having difficulty hearing Brother Symeon,’ Constantine told the monk. ‘If you could perhaps help me by relaying his words . . .’ The monk swivelled his head to Brother Symeon and shrugged. He waited a moment and turned back to Constantine. ‘He’s talking as loud as he can!’ shouted the monk to deafening effect in the bell-shaped cell. ‘Can’t you hear him!’
Constantine reflexively put his hands over his brutalized ears and whispered, ‘Yes. Yes, I heard him. That was quite loud enough. Brother Symeon, thank you for your gracious invitation to examine your documents.’ He began to cast his eyes about the cell - whatever possessions the Chartophylax had left behind surely would be easy enough to locate -and hoped that he had not overestimated Brother Symeon’s hospitality. Apparently he had not; the monk said nothing as Constantine walked over and picked up the simple wooden box that rested on the floor just to the right of Brother Symeon. Despite an unadorned exterior, the little casket was sealed with heavy, engraved bronze hinges and a sturdy bronze padlock. Constantine paused and considered his words very carefully. Finally he said, ‘Brother Symeon, if you please, would you ask your brother there to hand me the key to this lock?’