The monk swept dust from the floor, pried up a little stone slab, plucked the key out, and delivered it to Constantine. Praying fervently to the Pantocrator, Constantine inserted the key and turned the lock and was rewarded with the firm unlatching of the mechanism.
The box was lined with lead sheets and the papers were loose inside it. Constantine sat on the floor and held the taper so that he could read. After a long while he shifted and said, ‘Interesting, Brother Symeon. I can see that you were quite blameless in that matter. And I can assure you that the responsible authorities in Constantinople will soon know of your innocence.’ Indeed they will, thought Constantine. In addition to the usual eremite meanderings about ‘the uncreated Light’ and other such theological musings, Brother Symeon had chosen to preserve an account of his own fall from grace. Apparently he had discovered the evidence of the ‘bastard child’ and communicated the secret to Father Katalakon, who had gone to Joannes with the information, apparently over the objections of Brother Symeon. Joannes had immediately incarcerated Father Katalakon in the Neorion and had dispatched some thugs to transport poor Brother Symeon to the same location. But Brother Symeon had been hidden by his brethren and then spirited off to the sanctuary where he had ended his days.
Constantine went back through the parchments, certain that the crucial letter had to be among these documents. But no. He peeled away the lead lining and found nothing. He went through the parchments again. Then he almost burst into a sob at the realization. Joannes had the letter. Still, all was not lost. It was conceivable that Father Katalakon still lived. No. But just the knowledge of the crime Joannes had committed, and the secret he suppressed, would be useful. No. Suddenly Constantine knew the utter despair of his position, sitting here in the hot Cappadocian night with an addle-brained, noseless monk trying to pull secrets from a pile of stinking bones, while his nephew might already be chanting the Psalter on some distant island. He wanted to let soothing, desperate tears flow, and yet he told himself that a man of ability does not succumb to such predicaments.
Constantine thrust his taper out into the cell; were there perhaps other caskets? No. Then something glimmered in Brother Symeon’s tattered habit. There. Behind the empty rib cage. Yes, it was large enough. Yes. Indeed, yes! ‘Brother Symeon,’ began Constantine, his voice tremulous with excitement, ‘I am ready to return to Constantinople to plead your case. But in order to do so, I must take with me that letter you have sealed in lead sheets and sewn into the lining of your frock. Please excuse me while I remove it.’ Constantine crawled over beside the skeleton and reached warily; he prayed to the Pantocrator that he would not knock Brother Symeon’s skull off its perch of strung-together vertebrae. The thin lead container came away easily, and with trembling hands Constantine peeled the pliable metal sheets apart. He saw immediately that the parchment was inscribed with the critical file numbers above the top margin. He rose to his feet as he read in the eerie torchlight. Incredible. It was all here. The name, the disposition of the child. Incredible. Had they ever told the child? Perhaps, but perhaps not. No wonder Joannes wanted this secret buried. It would change everything.
‘Brother Symeon,’ said Constantine, bowing before the open-mouthed skull, ‘these documents have convinced me that the entire Roman Empire will soon be indebted to your scrupulous regard for the truth.’
‘Each time will be better from now on,’ whispered Maria. ‘This was the beginning.’ Her wet body pressed against Haraldr’s, and she kissed him on the neck. Their love-making had been different from before, with none of the sudden violence or exhausting ritual that had marked their passion in the past. Tonight had been tender and intimate in a casual, endearing way. They no longer clutched for each other in the huge vortex of fate but simply felt their closeness in the quiet room.
Maria propped herself up on her elbow. ‘I want to wait until we return to Norway to marry you,’ she said. ‘I want to become your wife in your land, by your custom. I want Norway to be my home.’
‘No, I want to marry you here as quickly as custom permits. I want you in my bed every night.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I will live with you. As your mistress.’
Haraldr leaned his head up and looked at her. ‘Are you telling me that your Orthodox Church would object to our marriage?’
‘No, but they would submit you to excruciating rites of instruction in the One True Faith. May the Holy Mother forgive me, but I would rather have your heathen body next to me than have you off in the Hagia Sophia chanting with the priests. I will marry you in your church. It is Christ’s church, is it not? I don’t think I want this Odin to bless my marriage bed.’
‘Yes. My brother left a strong Christian church. I may have to rebuild it, but we will be wed as Christians.’
‘So that is settled.’
‘You will find churches in Norway very small. Palaces even smaller.’
This room is small, this bed smaller still.’ They began to kiss, simple kisses punctuated with whispered confidences, and slowly they made love again. And when they were done, they lay so close together that each seemed to be breathing for the other. But between them there were still secrets.
‘Hetairarch.’ Joannes bowed and gestured for the Senators to remove Haraldr’s drenched cloak. The cold December wind flung the rain at their faces like bits of scree. ‘I’m sorry that it is not a good day to be out, but then it is worse for them.’ Joannes nodded at the enormous crowd of miserable, soaked indigents who clustered outside the portal of the new Redemption of the World Charity Hospital. ‘You were correct, Hetairarch,’ said Joannes as he looked out over the sodden, dull-coloured throng. ‘This was a shame that Rome could not long have suffered.’ Joannes took Haraldr by the arm and led him down the arcaded walkway to the street. ‘May I show you to them? You are a popular man here since you began distributing free food in the Studion.’
And it will do you well to be seen with me,
thought Haraldr. As he walked beside the giant monk, Haraldr glanced at the deformed face and thought of the vision Joannes had revealed deep in the Bulgar-Slayer’s empty treasury. Could Joannes ever find in that vision a just Rome that served all its citizens? Unlikely, and that was why Haraldr would have to deal with him before he - and Maria - could in good conscience leave Rome. But the Emperor, despite a minor setback earlier in the autumn (no doubt prompted by an overly hasty resumption of his duties after the Bulgarian campaign) grew stronger each day. He had exercised with the men of the Grand Hetairia two days ago, and it seemed likely that he would soon return to his wife’s bed. Perhaps the Emperor could give Joannes’s vision the depth it was missing. Perhaps Joannes would be forced by the sheer momentum of gestures like this to change his policies. A man could be ensnared by his good deeds as easily as he could by his sins. Haraldr entertained his own vision: being able to leave Rome without the blood-bath that would follow the final judgement of the Orphanotrophus Joannes.
‘Your Hetairarch!’ boomed Joannes. The crowd was mad with delight. ‘Hetairarch! Hetairarch! Hetairarch!’ they chanted, waving their arms high. ‘I detest ceremony,’ said Joannes somewhat sourly as the acclaim finally ebbed, ‘or I would have arranged something. As it is, it seems that the appearance of the Hetairarch is quite enough ceremony for them.’ He urged Haraldr back from the street. ‘You must see it. I readily confess to sinful pride over it. It is a marvel. No facet of the healing arts has been left unpolished, no comfort for the ailing neglected.’
Joannes, the obligatory Senators trailing behind him like whipped dogs, was greeted at the entrance to the hospital by many of the staff of physicians, which included half a dozen women in long linen robes. Joannes gestured down the long, vaulted hallway to his left. ‘The dictates of modesty prevent us from visiting the women’s wards. But I assure you that they are as well equipped and staffed as the men’s facilities that we will see. Needless to say, our women physicians are a great comfort to the infirm of their own gender, for they allow our female patients to discuss freely symptoms peculiar to their sex, and submit to examination without exposing their female organs and their inherent delicacy to their opposite gender.’ Haraldr wanted to guffaw in open derision at Joannes’s sudden concern for female delicacy - no such gender distinctions were made in Neorion - but it had long ago become clear to him that Rome was an empire built on saying one thing and doing another.
It is also an empire built on astonishing knowledge and achievement, thought Haraldr as the chief physician, a sagacious-looking man with a long silver beard and wide, worried eyes, led them through the wards. Row after row of beds - all occupied - with clean linen mattresses and pillows stuffed with wool, not straw, and with clean mats on the swept floors beneath them. Quilts covered most of the patients, and a hypocaust system just like those in the palace circulated hot air beneath the floor, providing a clean, dry heat; the chief physician explained that the different wards were kept at various temperatures depending on the nature of the ailment and which humours were contributing to the symptoms.
Joannes’s entourage paused by the bed of a man with a face as yellow as Syrian silk. The chief physician pointed out the toilet that the man had been provided, the same as was furnished to all the patients: his own sponge, basin, towels and soap for bathing, arranged neatly by the bed; and a chamber pot set at the end of the bed. An assistant brought the chief physician a copper basin full of steaming water, and the chief physician carefully soaped, rinsed and dried his hands on a clean towel. The chief physician then pulled back the batted quilt, lifted the yellow-faced man’s robe, and pressed his abdomen with long, searching fingers. He looked up at the group around him. The rheumatics have yet to be evacuated,’ he said. ‘As there is danger that they may lodge in the body and be transported into the heart, I will ask the apothecary here’ - he gestured to a younger, black-bearded physician - ‘to prescribe an herbal purgative.’ The chief physician stood and pointed to a pasty-looking wretch sleeping two beds down from the yellow-faced man; another physician held the man’s elbow over a small copper bowl and collected blood from a slit just inside the crook of the arm. ‘If the purgatives do not induce the evacuation, then we will have recourse to a phlebotomy, as you see practised there.’
Six enormous wards of perhaps a hundred beds each occupied the main rooms of the hospital; subsidiary chambers housed a bakery, baths, a kitchen, and chemists’ laboratories for the production of medicinal potions and salves. There was even a tool room where the dignitaries were shown a grindstone ingeniously attached to a whirling lathe for the purpose of meticulously sharpening surgical blades. Joannes watched the surgeon’s assistant hone a small steel instrument. When the screeching of the grindstone stopped, Joannes turned and whispered to Haraldr, ‘I am beginning to understand your Northman’s wisdom, Hetairarch. These blades’ - he gestured at the shining rows of surgical instruments on the workman’s bench - ‘will do far more to ensure the peace and stability of the Studion than the blades I have used in Neorion.’
‘I would like to believe that you have learned that lesson, Orphanotrophus,’ Haraldr whispered back. ‘You would save me the effort of putting a particularly keen edge on my own blade.’
Joannes continued to study the immaculately boned scalpels. But he nodded his understanding.
‘You must enjoy this while you can,’ said Maria. ‘It is not seemly for a man to bathe with his wife.’ She playfully splashed the cool but comfortable water in his face.
‘Perhaps that is your custom. I will make the Queen of Norway sit in the sauna with me until she is as red as a lobster, and then take her outside and rub snow all over her myself.’
‘I do not wish to scandalize your people.’
Haraldr pulled her almost weightless, floating body towards him and felt her hot, silky breast like a rare oil spread on his skin. ‘So a man troths you and suddenly you have become a woman of convention like Lady Attalietes.’
Maria rose above him like a sea nymph, her wet breasts shimmering in the light. ‘Did you imagine that you made love to Theophano Attalietes last night? I am only concerned that my children do not have a mother of bad reputation.’
Haraldr kissed her deeply and imagined the kings she would bear him - and Norway: fierce, powerful, with the passion to lead and the intelligence to mediate. Kings who would marry the strengths of Norway and Rome, and perhaps some day, even rule over both.
Finally Maria pulled away and hung her arm round Haraldr’s shoulder; her legs fluttered above the tiled bottom of the deep pool. ‘I am concerned about your reaction to Joannes’s latest contribution to the welfare of his brother’s subjects,’ she said; his enthusiasm had troubled her since he had returned home that evening with tales of quite ordinary healing arts. ‘He has built several of these hospitals already, usually coercing various dignitaries into financing them, and he always ends up appropriating most of the operating capital to his own coffers while the institution quickly declines into a putrid alms house. Or even a brothel.’
‘Yes, but that has always been in the middle-class precincts where the need for such care is not desperate. Believe me, little light, I have no illusions about the character of the Orphanotrophus. But now that he has extended his arms to the people of the Studion, the people are not likely to allow so easily those arms to be withdrawn. And the Emperor is, I believe, almost fit enough to impose his own stamp on the business of the Empire. Joannes will soon find himself wedged in on both top and bottom, and forced to make far more sweeping accommodations. If Joannes can be coerced into saving lives and offering hope, isn’t that vastly preferable to the lives that would be lost if I were to attack him? Perhaps I am becoming too much like a Roman, but can’t a better vengeance sometimes be achieved simply by the threat of vengeance?’