A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  The Empress Maria, on the other hand, was reserved and very proper in her speech and manner. A thin woman – once surely a great beauty – although she was hardly old even now. But she was one of those women whose beauty dried out of them a little more as each year passed like a tender piece of fruit, stretching her skin into a fine, fragile veil over her bones and what flesh she still carried. Maria did not speak unless each word had first been carefully considered. Perhaps she didn’t want to be thought a fool. But holding so obdurately to this line, there was something almost comic about the interplay between mother and daughter, since Princess Anna had no time for ceremony at all and frequently upset Maria’s carefully curated veneer. Poor girl, she had been born into the wrong life, Lilla reflected, since every day, from dawn to dusk, her existence at court was an endless succession of formalities.

  Yet nothing Lilla had seen till now could compare to the ceremony being played out before her. She stood as a guest with the empress and her attendants – all female, naturally – in the upper gallery of the great temple the Christians called the Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom. She had seen it before and been awe-struck by its cavernous domes and arches, by the magical veils of sunlight floating through its many windows, by the scattered shards of gold reflecting off the mosaics that covered its inner walls. But here she saw the building as it was surely meant to be: filled with people, the air swirling with incense, the marble columns echoing with the sound of the holy men’s chanting, a thousand candles dancing among the crowd and the procession of priests. She was glad of the imposition of silence. Brittle conversation with the empress would have been too stifling. Instead she wanted to surrender to her senses for a while, to the strangeness and gentle charm of the Christians’ ritual, although she understood it very little. Yet something in her spirit was nourished nonetheless. She found the relentless goad of her revenge, the weight of sadness in her womb, the raw wounds in her heart, the hollowness in her bones after her long fever, the obsessive thoughts and cares that turned and turned in her mind but never moved forward – all these receded into shadow for a while and something else drew forward. Something unnameable, something unknowable. Some thirst that cried out for quenching.

  And here at last was water.

  It was too much, yet not enough. Some secret hidden from everyone – or else some great pretence to which all were party. As if the ritual, the robes, the processions, the serious expressions on everyone’s face, from the emperor down to the beggars filling the square – all of it was some colossal joke, which would crumble into absurdity if only one person were to let the mask slip and laugh.

  But no one did.

  Erlan had marched in time – as best as his ankle would allow – in the emperor’s guard of honour, from the Great Palace across the Augustaion to the atrium of the huge church, parting on their way a sea of thousands – nay, tens of thousands – like the prow of a great longship, his entourage of officials and highborn nobles trailing in their wake.

  There, under the eastern colonnade of the atrium, Erlan watched as the emperor bowed in greeting first to a golden book, the magic of which Erlan still did not understand, and then to two priests, one dressed in white with a black hood, the other, older and more severe, garbed in gorgeous robes of gold and silver. This was the one they called the patriarch, Erlan guessed. The most powerful of their holy men who seemed to rank higher than almost everyone in the city, except for the emperor himself. Behind the old greybeard, the great rust-red stone facade loomed, a cascade of buttresses and pillars. Looking at it, of all that Erlan felt, the least he expected was a shiver of fear. Why should he be afraid of a building? He shook it off as silliness. Emperor and patriarch turned to enter, and behind them almost the whole city made ready to follow them inside.

  They crossed one threshold, a second, a third – each bigger than the last, each increasing his anticipation. He tried to brace himself for what was to come, but how could he really? Who could be prepared for the extraordinary wonder that struck his eye when he followed the other guards under the massive stone lintel into that giant’s hall?

  Valhalla, he thought, breathlessly. Surely I am in Valhalla. Here was a hall to house the gods if ever one had been built. He fixed his head straight ahead while his eyes roved and darted around the vast chasm of stone, all the while asking how. How could human hands build this monstrous mountain and then hollow it out with such delicacy, such deftness, that somehow a colossal weight of stone floated like a cloud far above his head? Such weightlessness, such beauty. How? If he had been allowed to speak, he would have uttered no sound; astonishment had stolen every word.

  He told himself to pull his wits out of the stars and forced his attention back to his situation. There was some exchange between patriarch and Emperor at the screen of pillars near the eastern end of the church, set behind a little raised platform of white stone. The emperor carried forward a large golden bowl beyond the screen which, Erlan saw through the pillars, he laid upon some kind of table covered in golden cloth. An altar, Erlan supposed, though there was no blood upon it, as yet. The guard of honour, meanwhile, took up position to the right of this, behind the green and purple columns in the south-east corner of the great hall, where a small gilded throne – positively discreet by the standards of the palace – awaited the emperor.

  Soon enough the emperor re-emerged from behind the screen and took his seat while the patriarch approached a far grander and more prominent throne, placed at the centre of a semicircle of tiered stone benches immediately behind the altar, which were slowly filling with the lesser priests.

  Erlan glanced at Einar, standing two places further down their rank, trying to catch his eye.

  ‘Eyes front,’ a stern voice hissed to his left. He recognized Alexios’s clipped tone. Erlan obliged, feeling childishly self-conscious.

  The great hall was nearly full now – the central area crowded with faces, with the highest-ranking citizens to the fore and the lower orders standing further back near the doors where all had entered. Above them, the galleries too were full of faces gazing down in expectation. Lilla was up there somewhere. Erlan couldn’t help wondering what she made of all this.

  The patriarch’s voice suddenly rang out from his lofty throne. A high, brittle voice, yet powerful, carrying as far as any voice could in all this air and stone. He began with some commonplace greetings to the people.

  It was the eve of a feast day of a great hero of the Christian people: an angel named St Michael, he announced. Half of what he said, Erlan could not understand; he had no context for the Christians’ stories. But he listened anyway, and soon the old patriarch was describing how this angel Michael was appointed captain of the armies of their god; how in a great war in the heavens, Michael had defeated the angel Lucifer, ‘the great dragon’, who had rebelled against the throne of God, casting this rebel pretender down to Earth with a great multitude of his followers, where ever since they had been leading humankind astray, causing discord and suffering.

  It was strange. The story echoed something of Vassili’s talk and, still further back in Erlan’s past, the words of the Watcher. . . Although the demon had spoken of a tyrant, not a lord of hosts, not an almighty king who ruled over all. Erlan listened and something stirred in him, something like fear again, only a fear rooted far deeper than mere apprehension of danger, or even loss. Abruptly the patriarch finished his speaking, and another white-robed priest approached the little stone platform in front of the altar and climbed its steps. He opened a book. But before he began to read, from under the platform on which he stood men started singing, and their voices were joined by others out of sight around the upper galleries of the great hall. The song was like none Erlan had ever heard, its music a strange contradiction, full of a kind of mournful joy, or else an exultant lament. Deep, rich voices moved in perfect opposition to one another, weaving melodies and harmonies so intricate the Norns themselves could hardly have matched their complexity. It was a world away from the shamanic so
ngs of any goði in the north. The goði’s song called to a man’s soul, its rhythms throbbed through his body as if drawn up through the earth on which he stood. This, though, was music of another kind. It seemed to fall from above, pouring into a man’s heart, filling his head.

  The lone reader now joined in the chorus, his clear, high voice soaring over the top of the others, singing the words of his book rather than speaking them.

  Erlan felt suddenly hot. Perhaps it was the heat off the other people since the hall itself was cool in the shade of all that stone. Beads of sweat prickled all over his body. He glanced at the necks of the guards in front. No one else was sweating, only him. The heat in him continued rising, becoming oppressive, his breathing quickened until he was almost panting. And when he looked back up at the reader on the platform, he nearly dropped his shield in his surprise.

  The book was burning.

  He blinked twice, not daring to rub his eyes for fear of some petty reprisal. Still the book burned with a flickering purple flame. He watched, spellbound. The singing priest seemed oblivious to the licking flames that rose nearly to his face, nor did he seem to suffer the flames’ heat, but when he opened his mouth again to sing, purple fire billowed out.

  What strange trick was this? Erlan thought, but no one else around him seemed to take this as out of the ordinary.

  His pulse thudded in his temples. Sweat was streaming off him now; the harmonies of the voices grew louder and louder inside his head, their volume rising to something impossible, intolerable. Yet how? Louder still and louder, till the song became a torment, a deafening, shrieking swirl of sound which he longed to shut out. He wished he could block his ears. Instead he saw more flames now, rising under the stone platform where the singers stood, each voice a hearthstone to this purple fire that did not burn. He felt terror now, horror, his discomfort creeping into a kind of nausea in his belly but soon spreading through his limbs. His left arm was shaking. He clasped the handle of his shield all the tighter to hold it still. The grip felt wet and greasy. He glanced down and saw, in confusion, that his left arm was soaked in blood. Blood streaming in crimson rivulets down his forearm, filling the cracks in his fingers. The scar across his bicep, the mark of the wound the Watcher had inflicted that had been so quick to heal, was split. His arm throbbed with new pain as if the wound were freshly struck. He felt the same in his calf, felt blood trickle down his leg to his heel and then the floor. The pain bit sharper. He clenched his jaw against it, forcing himself to stand steady, crushing his eyes shut to blot it out.

  But there he found no respite. Instead, in the darkness of his own mind’s eye, he saw a vision both terrible and full of wonder. He saw no longer the great climbing pillars of marble, nor the soaring domes above him; rather he heard music – and such music – song and voices beyond description in their power and beauty, and yet one of them swelled from his own chest, filling him, bursting out of him like a sunbeam of morning. He saw mirrored surfaces bright as the sky, and towering walls and huge columns, glittering with jewels and sheathed in silver and gold. He saw a multitude gathered before a throne, each face iridescent and flawless, glowing like blades tempered in the heat of a smith’s forge-fire. They were all upturned towards what seemed like a throne but far bigger than any in which a man might sit. And when he turned to look with them, he found himself blinded. The very sun was there, the sun enthroned somehow, its light too pure to look upon. And then the vision suddenly rose away from him, or else he fell from it – falling and falling, his stomach giddy with the drop, and it felt like a memory, and the light rose away beyond sight until in place of the great golden throne room, dull grey and then dread black shadow came around him, fear and rage and bile and hatred filled his heart, a terrible weight of shame that dragged at his limbs, lower and lower and lower. . . into the abyss of abject darkness where no light could ever reach.

  Erlan forced open his eyes.

  He stood there still in the great temple, the people all around him now watching the patriarch standing by the altar, addressing the people again. But instead of escaping his vision, one terror replaced another. For there again were the purple flames, no longer a few flames burning here and there, but a great gushing cataract of fire cascading from above, tumbling onto the altar, swirling all around the old priest and the singers and the lesser holy men, hovering in a great roiling cloud over the congregation, yet they all stood there, their heads crowned in flame, oblivious, while the bank of fire rolled closer and closer to Erlan.

  ‘What will you do?’ the patriarch cried out suddenly. ‘Will you submit?’ He turned and flung out a burning arm. It seemed his finger pointed straight at Erlan. ‘Will you? Will you?’

  The words rang with terrible force in his ears – the blood, the pain, the fire, all of it crashing in on him. He was mad, surely. He had lost his reason, certainly, every thought scattered but one. He had to get out. He had to escape that fire. He staggered sideways out of rank, barging his way between two other guards.

  ‘Stay in line, Northman,’ hissed Alexios, but Erlan was beyond caring what protocol demanded. He had to get out.

  And then he was shoving past people, guards, patricians, senators, caring nothing that he marked each one with his streaming blood. He fled headlong, leaving a trail of muttered outrage that he should dare to break the solemnity of the ritual. But he was gone, gone. . .

  To the left, he glimpsed daylight streaming through a smaller doorway. Gasping with relief, he ploughed through the crowd of attendants standing behind the great men of the city and at last reached the door. The doorkeepers stood aside, their faces a welter of alarm and disgust. Erlan lurched past them and through the doorway out into the bright sunlight.

  He saw a fountain, flung down his shield and spear and threw himself over its lip, burying his head in the cool water, his eyes wide with terror and confusion. For a few blessed seconds he saw nothing but the white stone fountain-bowl through the clear water. He stayed there staring as long as he could hold his breath. Then, hesitantly, he straightened up.

  He looked around, hardly able to trust his own senses. Everything was quiet. There was the outer courtyard on the south side of the great temple – a shaded walkway, cobbled stones, pavings.

  Was he mad then? Or was all of it only a fleeting bolt of madness escaped from some broken crack in his mind?

  He shook the water from his hair and turned away from the fountain. Suddenly he froze, terrified that he really had lost his reason. Because there, not twenty paces from him, was Aska.

  Erlan peered closer, afraid that the apparition would morph into something worse. But the dog sat calmly on his haunches in the shade. Erlan clicked his fingers. The dog didn’t move. ‘Come here, you mangy bastard,’ Erlan growled. Aska just sat there, watching, his one eye weighing on his master as heavy as a mountain.

  From far away, a sound rolled down from the heights of the western hills, peals of metal thunder drawing ever closer in their race to reach the heart of the city. . . Bells.

  Alarum bells.

  The attack had begun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The Karisios Gate stood proudly atop the summit of the Sixth Hill of the city. It was one of the twin fortresses that overlooked the Lycus valley, the other being the Gate of St Romanus, standing on the Seventh Hill. The steep-sloped valley in between was reckoned to be the weakest point in the vast fortifications that protected the city’s landward flank.

  Erlan and Einar stood on its high rampart, sweating under the swelter of the midsummer sun. ‘It’s hotter than a dragon’s arse-crack up here,’ grumbled Einar. ‘I could never get used to living in this damn heat.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Erlan chuckled softly. ‘You’re starting to look like a Greek to me.’

  ‘What I look is bloody ridiculous.’ The fat man tugged miserably at the leather bindings under his chin which were squashing the cheek-guards against his face. They were both garbed in the scale armour, tall spiked helmets topped with white fe
athers, and the milk-white cloaks of the imperial guard. ‘You feeling better?’

  Erlan nodded grimly. ‘I’ll do. Greek food, huh?’

  ‘Food, my arse! What about the blood, boy? There was enough there for a bath-day.’

  ‘Old wounds,’ grunted Erlan evasively. ‘Ain’t the first time I’ve had one open up. Bad timing.’

  ‘You can say that again! I thought Alexios was going to have a fit.’

  The friends’ conversation was cut short when Alexios himself shot them a disapproving look from the parapet.

  A few strides in front of them was gathered a select company of senators, palace officials, military worthies, and the sundry cockless attendants that seemed to trail the basíleus like flies at the back end of a horse.

  ‘My guess is they will try to force the Gate of St Romanus,’ Emperor Leo was declaring to his entourage. ‘That’s where I would concentrate my forces if I were Maslama. Not that it would do me any good,’ he added with a dry chuckle.

  There were a few obliging smiles. But any mirth was shortlived. Erlan couldn’t help thinking most of these highborns looked damned uneasy, their rich olive skin washed pale with fear. Or at least with anticipation. All except the eunuch, Katāros, who stared out with a cool eye over the human tempest brewing to the south.

  ‘They may, of course, try for the Rhesios Gate, Majesty,’ worried another flabby official known as the eparch, dabbing at his face. Erlan gathered this man held some position over the running of the city. Despite the early hour he was already streaming with sweat. ‘Should they take that, the city will open up like a gutted fish.’

  ‘Have confidence, Lord Daniel!’ cried Leo. ‘I tell you, they’ll never break through.’