Maria stared raptly ahead. ‘No,’ she said in an entranced voice. ‘She is happier than ever with Michael. She has hinted that she can think of him as a husband.’
‘And you wish to wait for their wedding?’
‘No. I believe she is only amusing herself.’ Maria dipped her head as if letting the vision go. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It is as if, as you say in your tongue, I can hear the Valkyrja singing.’
The Church of St Mary Chalkoprateia was located just outside the walls of the Imperial Palace complex, north of the huge bronze Chalke Gate and virtually within bowshot of the Hagia Sophia. It was one of the oldest churches in Constantinople, an austere Roman-style basilica with a flat, coffered roof and a single large apse. It might have looked like a large warehouse save for the brilliant frescoes and mosaics covering the interior walls, the result of an extensive restoration more than a hundred and fifty years previously. The visitors, six in all, seemed to have dressed in concert with the architecture; their rough woollen cloaks concealed the rich silk and gold vestments beneath. They entered the vaulted narthex at the front of the church, were greeted by four of the resident priests (who wore their vestments openly), and were quickly escorted to a door at the north end of the narthex. A colonnaded walkway led to the priests’ apartments, a cluster of brick buildings of much later construction. Shafts of sun lanced through the columns and illuminated the visitors’ jewelled silk slippers, just visible beneath the hems of their brown cloaks. The visitors entered a square, marble-framed portal and were shown down a short hallway. The room at the end of the hall was large and set into a curving apse at the end of the building. The walls were buff-tinted plaster, set with tall arched windows. The shutters remained closed. Two gold-framed icons glimmered on a small cupboard. The bed was covered in blue silk. The resident priests and four of the six visitors made the sign of the cross and left the room. The carved wooden door closed behind them.
The Augusta Theodora lowered her woollen hood and looked around the room. ‘I am certain that Pilate did not lodge Our Lord so well on the eve of His excruciation,’ she said; her blue eyes were girlish, mischievous.
‘You may be kept waiting longer than was our Lord,’ said the Patriarch Alexius; he continued to wear his hood. His beard looked like spun silver against the coarse wool. ‘But when I need you, it will be important for you to be close to the Mother Church. Though, of course, it would be far too dangerous for you to spend that length of time within the palace precincts. Someone would talk.’
‘How will you proceed, Father?’
‘I believe that if necessary, I can bring down our Emperor with the patent evidence of his heresies. But I believe that his madness will soon provide his own undoing. We will wait. At least until Mar Hunrodarson arrives.’ Theodora betrayed her surprise. ‘Oh, yes, my child, I informed him that my need for him was imminent shortly after our Orphanotrophus Joannes enrolled in one of the monastic establishments he had so energetically advanced against the interests of the One True Faith. If Mar Hunrodarson has kept to my schedule, he will have entered the Sea of Marmara already. He will wait for instructions off Arcadiopolis. And then, if necessary, he and the Tauro-Scythians will extirpate the unwanted growth from the Imperial Palace.’
‘You may find Mar Hunrodarson an even more luxuriant and far more resilient growth, Father.’
‘He is ambitious but not a fool. He knows that he cannot rule without your sanction. Let him be the man at your side. You will need neither to crown him nor to bed him. I believe his robust thinking will strengthen the secular arms of our empire while I carry forth the standards of spiritual Rome.’ Alexius tipped his head in a wry gesture. ‘And we could turn the people against him whenever we wished.’
‘It is a pity you cannot lead the secular arms of our Empire, Father. In your own fashion you are a very robust thinker.’
Alexius responded to the sarcasm with a fond smile. ‘You know, my child, my thinking on this matter could be considerably more vigorous if I knew the identity of your sister Eudocia’s child.’
No trace of amusement remained on Theodora’s face. ‘No. Father, I am willing to become your sacrifice, but I do not want that for ... the child. That is one matter on which my sister and I agree. Perhaps when she is older. But she is--’ Theodora broke off, unwilling to give up any more information.
‘Very well, my child. I was only considering the girl’s own safety. Assuming the Emperor knows.’
‘I do not think he does.’
Alexius nodded cryptically. ‘I must go, then. If matters develop as I expect, I must prepare the Mother Church to withstand a siege.’
‘Hetairarch Haraldr, this is where I find myself unable to accommodate myself to the risk of war.’ The Emperor nodded that he wished his goblet refilled, and the chamberlain inclined over him for a moment. ‘I can race a team in the Hippodrome and wager on them according to their fitness, the experience of their driver, the condition of the track. If I lose, I can train the team more vigorously, hire a better driver, or perhaps sell two of the horses and replace them with others. But in war, if my team loses, I have lost the capital I need to continue in the sport, so to speak. I can hire new generals, of course, but I cannot sell dead soldiers for live soldiers. And my people suffer the loss, not only those who die but also those who grieve for them. So I consider the odds in war to be generally unacceptable.’
‘But you have moved boldly in appointing Maniakes to command in Italia,’ said Haraldr. He was enjoying the wine, the unexpected informality of the dinner, and the chance to deal with the Emperor’s only critical shortcoming: his reluctance to assume field command of the Imperial Taghmata. ‘Maniakes’s success in Sicily have already rewarded your wager.’
‘Ah, Hetairarch,’ said Michael, raising his finger in the manner of a rhetorician, ‘in Sicily I bet the man. I knew that Maniakes could win for me and for my people. But had I been there to decide on each day’s movements of our forces, I would have been quite beside myself. Let me bet on my generals, yes. But do not ask me to wager on the actual battle.’ Michael took a deep drink and the red wine spilled onto his dark beard. ‘Now you, Hetairarch Haraldr, are also a man upon whom I would wager to bring me victory in the field. How do you do it?’
Haraldr paused and also took a deep draught. He looked over at Constantine, who was so drunk, it appeared he might collapse into his roast pig. ‘I allow only the best men at my back, and then make certain that I am always at the front to lead them. I do not command my men to do anything I am not prepared to do myself. I am certain that my men are drilled in every tactic that I might wish to employ, and I remember that in battle the memory grows weak, so I make certain that my tactics are simple and direct to begin with. But at the moment when fate hinges, I am not unlike yourself, Majesty. I trust in luck.’
‘Indeed!’ Michael spilled his goblet as he lurched forward in excitement. ‘Tell me what you mean. I had always considered you a kindred sportsman of sorts, but I thought you entirely grim in battle. What do you mean?’ Michael nodded for the chamberlain to refill Haraldr’s cup. ‘This is a different wine, Hetairarch,’ he offered as the eunuch poured from the silver ewer. ‘From Dyracchium. If you do not like it, pour it out.’
Haraldr drank deeply; he didn’t like the taste of Dyracchium vintage, but he was enjoying himself too much to complain. ‘Majesty,’ he said, conscious of a slight slurring of his words, ‘we Norsemen believe in a god called Odin. But you do not have to consider him a god if it offends your Christian piety. You could consider him a talisman, like a splinter of the True Cross, or even a personification, like Fortune, But we believe that Odin sends his favour to certain men in battle and withholds that favour from others. If he sends his Valkyrja, these being his angels of death, to pluck a man from the battle, then nothing that man can do can arrest his fate. We have a saying: “No man lives to evening whom the fates condemn at morning.” ‘
‘Does this Odin enjoy any sports besides war?’ asked Michael ebulliently.
Haraldr jerked his head up. What had the Emperor asked him? Had he been asleep? His head snapped up again and a surge of alarm brought his wits back for a moment. How could he be this drunk? He had not consumed enough wine to have already summoned the herons of forgetfulness. He felt the drowsiness in his arms and legs, and his terrified heart pounded life back into his limbs. He lurched to his feet and his spastic arms sent his cups and dishes clattering; his spilled wine spread a broadening red stain over the white-and-gold tablecloth. His feet seemed stuck in mud, but he staggered towards Michael and reached with arms that felt like huge logs. ‘You . . . have . . . poisoned--’ He gasped, suffocating. Then the room whirled and he fell forward onto the table with a tremendous crash.
Michael and Constantine stood up. They looked over Haraldr’s twitching torso like hunters examining a slaughtered beast. A long golden lock of Haraldr’s hair rested in the garos sauce on the Emperor’s plate. Michael lifted the sodden strand of hair from the golden dish with the tips of his ringers and looked over at his suddenly alert uncle. ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘that when this Odin decided to bring our friend here to a timely end, he also divined to ruin my roast pig.’
‘Do you smell it?’ Halldor stood on the St Mama’s Quarter wharf and stared towards the Great City. The setting sun flared off the soaring round towers of the main land wall.
‘I am gagging from the stench.’ Ulfr looked back at the three light galleys tied up on the wharf. Varangians poured over the ships, attaching rigging, finishing out the oar ports, checking caulk and loading kegs of provisions. ‘Even if he was with Maria, he would have come out here to check on this. No Norseman takes the sea that lightly.’
‘I don’t like the whole business,’ said Halldor. ‘The way those Pechenegs were waiting to move into the Numera before our mattresses were cold. It was as if the Emperor were only too eager to have us out of the palace.’
‘Where did Haraldr go last night? Did you ask Maria?’ ‘I sent a man to Haraldr’s house. Erling. I told him not to come back until he found her. He hasn’t come back.’ Halldor shifted on his feet. ‘We need to arrive at a plan.’ ‘Unfortunately we don’t know what to plan for or against.’ ‘Let’s consider the two possibilities. If Haraldr is in trouble, we need to find him, rescue him and prepare to depart immediately. The other possibility is that Haraldr has met with some treachery that has placed him beyond our help.’ Halldor looked at Ulfr and astonished his friend with his tearing eyes. ‘In that case I intend to join him in the Valhol. But before the Valkyrja wrap their cold limbs around me, I will reduce the palaces of Rome to a pile of cinders.’
‘I will join you if it comes to that. So will they.’ Ulfr pointed to the Varangians. ‘But if he still needs our help, we must find him. . . . Look.’
Gregory, mounted on a horse vastly oversize for him, galloped along the wharf. The hoofbeats pounded against the shouting of the workers. ‘Comrades!’ he yelled. He swung off the horse expertly. ‘I have information.’ He took a moment to catch his breath. ‘Haraldr went to the Emperor’s apartments last night. None of my informants saw him leave.’
Halldor and Ulfr exchanged ominous looks. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Gregory. ‘The Emperor has been consulting with his astrologers all day. I have become acquainted with the chamberlain who attends one of these scientists, and he overheard this gentleman working on his astronomical calculations with his assistants. The Emperor has asked them if the stars will be auspicious for a man who takes a very great risk.’
‘For what day are they calculating, Gregory?’ asked Ulfr.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘As I said, that whole city reeks right now,’ said Halldor. ‘I suggest we march in there and demand that the Emperor tell us where we can find Haraldr. And then we should march right out again and leave Rome before the Emperor takes this great risk of his.’
‘What if the Emperor does want us out of the city, and Haraldr out of the way, as it would look right now?’ asked Ulfr. He pointed to the massive towers of the land wall. ‘Those walls aren’t going to tumble down because all three hundred and sixty of us demand to see the Emperor. And even if we do get in, we can hardly hope to attack the entire Imperial Taghmata, particularly when they are the ones who will be fortified behind the palace walls.’
Halldor nodded impassively. ‘Of course.’ He seemed almost embarrassed by his impulsiveness. He looked out over the harbour for a while. ‘This is what we do. We begin to go into the city in small groups. Not all of us will make it through before they close the gates at sunset. The rest can come through during the morning.’
‘And how do we deal with the Taghmata?’ said Ulfr.
‘Allies,’ said Halldor. He looked grimly at the towers of the Great Wall; only the crenellated tips were still glowing. ‘Our Varangians will rendezvous in the streets around the Devil’s Walking Stick Inn during the morning. And by then I expect to have asked for and received the help of a lady.
‘A lady?’ asked Gregory.
Halldor nodded. ‘A very formidable lady.’
‘I don’t wish to be exhausted by your preliminaries concerning the ruling planets and the relative position of the planets in the zodiacal signs and aspects and limits.’ Michael leaned forward in his throne and glared at the trio of astrologers. ‘I simply want the answer to the question I put to you this morning.’
Cyril, the spokesman for the group, was an elderly man with a grey beard and black-and-silver widow’s peak. He wore a white pallium with his white silk scaramangium and carried the trail of the pallium very elegantly, as if he were posing for a statue. ‘Majesty,’ he intoned with the rolling speech of an educated Hellene, ‘I must warn you that the positions of the stars for the period of time you have mandated to us portend only blood and sorrow. Might I recommend that you put away the idea of this venture, or at least postpone your enterprise until the planetary aspects are more favourable?’