by Tom Harper
‘But did you see the terror in their eyes, brother?’ Isaak asked merrily. ‘They imagined you were some pagan god of the ancients, Zeus descended to claim their souls.’
‘I fear the gold made more impact on them. What do you say, Krysaphios?’
‘I fear even the lustre of gold will not warm their hearts. The deceit was plain in their faces. Their captain has sent them as a distraction, to divert us with hopes of promises to come until their strength is sufficient that we cannot resist them. Then he will come – and he will lay down his own terms.’
‘The chamberlain is right.’ Isaak’s fingers twisted a pearl which dangled by his ear. ‘If all Duke Godfrey wanted was to spear Saracens in the name of his church, then he could have taken the oath and be besieging Nicaea even now, rather than casting threats outside our walls. Delay favours his ambition.’
The Emperor leaned against a wall and stared at a hanging icon of the Theotokos. ‘So – the barbarians are duplicitous. That we knew. What do you propose we do with them, brother?’
‘Muster our armies and confront them.’ There was no doubt in Isaak’s voice. ‘When they see the size of our forces, they will agree our demands immediately.’
‘And if they do not?’ Alexios probed. ‘Our legions are not so invincible as they were in the age of our grandfather, even of our uncle. That is why the barbarians have come.’
There was a shout at the door, and all looked around as it opened to admit Sigurd. He wore a wolf pelt cloak from his shoulders, while his hauberk cast dappled crescents of light across the floor.
‘Your pardon, Lord.’ He genuflected. ‘The ambassadors ask to take their leave. What are you doing here?’ he added, puzzled. I thought he spoke to me, though his eyes were on Aelric.
‘Let the barbarians wait,’ said Krysaphios. ‘They can leave when the Emperor dismisses them.’
‘More smoke and toys,’ Alexios muttered. I was having difficulty reconciling this reluctant, businesslike figure with the autocrat who controlled the fate of nations.
Isaak looked up. ‘But what do they say? Have they agreed to take our oath?’
‘They plead that they must consult their leader. They wish to defer their decision for a later time.’
‘If they needed their captain’s assent then he could have come himself.’ Isaak punched the palm of his hand. ‘I told you, brother, they will lead us a dance until they can strike us. Our only hope is to strike first.’
‘But what if they do not surrender when we mass our army? What if I am sitting on my horse at the head of my cavalry and the barbarians refuse our demands? Then I will either look a coward, or be forced to press home the battle. A quarrel between us and the barbarians will draw laughter in the court of the Sultan, and will do nothing to restore our inheritance. And if we lose the battle – what then? Our walls will be undefended and the barbarians will take the city – we will lose everything.’
‘We would not lose the battle, not against those barbarians. Throw gold on the ground and they would root at it like swine.’
‘Dyrrhachium. Joannina. Ochrid. Arta. Have you forgotten those battles, Isaak, merely because there are no triumphal columns or arches to remind you? I have not. The barbarians defeated us there, and whatever their defects, they fight at least as hard as we do – doubly so when there are riches to be won. They are a race of gamblers, and if they thought they could take our city they would not hesitate to risk the throw.’
By the door, Sigurd shifted a little on his feet. The gesture was not lost on the Emperor. ‘But what to do now, you say? Tell them, Captain, that . . .’
I was genuinely curious to see what the Emperor would decree, but at that moment a movement by my side distracted me from his words. Aelric, who had stood by me in silence all this time, was moving forward, unbidden. He staggered a little, as though under a heavy burden, and there was a dull emptiness in his eyes. You might have thought he had drunk too much, save for the deliberation with which the axe lifted off his shoulder and settled into his hands. The weight seemed to compose him: his stride stiffened, and the muscles of his arms tensed as the blade came up beside his head.
‘What . . . ?’
Almost numb with surprise, and almost a second too late, I saw the impossible truth and sprang forward. The Emperor’s back was to us, though he must have sensed something was amiss for he began to turn; Krysaphios was looking away, and Isaak was speaking with Sigurd. A bow of light played across the blade as it swung past a pendant lamp, and a roar rose in Aelric’s throat.
For an instant it seemed as if my heart stopped, and with it all time, but mercifully my body continued to move. I dived for Aelric’s feet, flailing my arms forward to catch him. His axe was slicing through the air as I felt my fingers make contact with his brass-ringed boots; I fastened my grip around them and let my full weight meet his legs.
There were many shouts, but his was one. His knees buckled and he tumbled forward, tangling me between his shins as his axe struck the floor. What else it might have hit in its path I could not tell. Our momentum carried us sliding across the marble a few feet, until at last we came to a halt. Even then he was not defeated; he pulled free of my grasp and began to rise to his feet, his axe still in his hand.
A roar sounded from above, and I looked up. Sigurd was standing over me, a tower of rage and fury. His face was ashen, shaken, but there was not the least compunction in his eyes.
‘You betrayed us,’ he breathed. ‘Everything.’
His axe swung down, and hot blood splashed against my cheek. At a little distance, Aelric’s head rolled free across the floor.
ι η
For a moment we were still as the icons on the walls – Sigurd, Alexios, Krysaphios, Isaak and I. Blood welled from the stump of Aelric’s neck, soaking through my robes, but I had not the wit to move. A bead of sweat or tears sank down Sigurd’s cheek, and the rings of his armour tensed and slacked as his chest heaved beneath it.
The Sebastokrator Isaak was the first to find his voice. ‘The barbarians,’ he hissed. ‘They must have planned this, to murder you in your own hall and seize the crown as it slipped from your head. Let us kill them now, and then fall upon their kinsmen in their camp.’
I saw Krysaphios nodding behind him, but Alexios raised a weary hand to still them. There was a gash in his sleeve where Aelric had landed his final, glancing blow. ‘Do not touch the ambassadors,’ he commanded, imposing authority on his shaken voice. ‘Why would they attempt such a crime when they were my hostages? They must have known their lives would be forfeit if anything happened to me while they were here.’ He paused. ‘Unless, of course, there was another candidate ready to take the diadem and command the mob to save them.’
His sharp eyes glanced at each of us in turn, fixing – so I thought – a second longer on Isaak than any other.
‘We will seek out all who have a claim to the throne and establish their whereabouts,’ said Krysaphios. ‘And we should deploy the guard in the streets, lest in haste someone has already started to move against you.’
‘Can we rely on the guard?’ asked Alexios. ‘If one of my longest-serving Varangians will betray me, whom then can I trust?’
Sigurd winced; he seemed on the edge of tears. ‘The Varangians will defend you to the death, Lord. But if you do not trust us, then take our arms and make us your slaves.’ Dropping to his knee, he held his axe by its blood-swathed blade, and offered it to the Emperor.
‘Take it, Lord.’ Krysaphios kicked angrily at Aelric’s headless corpse. ‘If you do not know why a Varangian should have done this terrible thing, you cannot tell us why another may not try again. Was he a traitor all this time, waiting for his moment to strike? If so, why now? Was it a moment of madness? Or did he indeed act for a wider cause among his legion?’
‘On balance,’ I observed, ‘it would have been useful if Sigurd had not been so quick to dismember him.’ I looked at the staring, lifeless eyes and shuddered. This was a man who had ridden at my side
and eaten in my home: it was not easy to see him now. ‘It would have been worth everything to know his motives.’
Sigurd, still on his knee, growled. ‘You can wrestle a snake to the ground, Demetrios, but to be sure it will not bite you must behead it. My duty is to keep the Emperor from harm – yours is to find those who would harm him before they enter his presence. Which of us has failed today?’
‘My task would be easier if you did not help the monk by destroying every link with him.’
Sigurd looked as though he might like to use his axe again, but Isaak spoke to me first. ‘What of the monk? There is a greater power at work when the Emperor is almost murdered in his own palace, and you think only of spies and foot soldiers. Forget the monk, if he even exists, and instead seek out his masters.’
I was about to retort unwisely, for in all this argument it seemed my own role in bringing down the assassin was forgotten, but I was forestalled by an urgent rapping on the door, and the sound of voices in the passage beyond. We turned, and Sigurd raised his axe, though Alexios stayed unmoved.
‘Who disturbs the Emperor?’ Krysaphios’ fear wrought anger in his voice.
‘Your pardon, Lord, but it is urgent,’ said a voice behind the door. ‘The watchmen on the walls report smoke rising from the outlying villages. The barbarian army has begun to riot, claiming that we hold their embassy hostage and demanding their release.’
Isaak exploded. ‘You see brother – already they are moving. Their haste betrays them. Let us chain the hostages and ride out to face our enemies.’
Alexios ignored him. ‘Captain,’ he said, beckoning Sigurd. ‘I will not disband your legion. Long service has proven their value; I would be an ingrate and a fool to squander it because of a single man’s treachery.’ More immediately, I thought, he could ill afford to lose good troops with the barbarians so near. ‘Fetch your company and escort the envoys to the gates. Explain that I will await their answer in the coming days.’ He pulled his lorum straight, wiping a drop of blood from one of its gems. ‘If so much as a single strand of their hair is harmed, either by your men or by the mob in the city, you will answer for it personally, Captain. Is that clear?’
Sigurd nodded, bowed, and backed from the room, while Isaak glowered in the corner.
‘Now,’ continued the Emperor. ‘Find me the captain of the Patzinaks. I have forgiven the Varangians the traitor they unknowingly harboured, but I cannot keep them in the palace if even a single man is suspected. I will need men about me I can trust, for it will be another day at least before we know if the danger is passed.’
‘The danger will never pass so long as the barbarians live outside our walls,’ muttered Isaak.
‘Unless the danger is already within.’ Krysaphios turned to me. ‘Demetrios, you remember the list I showed you once?’
It was almost two months since I had seen it, but I remembered enough of its eminent names to manage a convincing nod.
‘Then take a company of Patzinaks and find where those men are as quickly as you can. Any who have taken sudden trips to their country estates, or who have hoards of arms cached in their cellars, or who have tried to slip through the gates in disguise, report back to me. I will be at the new palace with the Emperor.’
I nodded my obedience. ‘And what of Aelric? Someone must know, or guess, the motive for his treachery. Some of his comrades? His family, perhaps?’
Krysaphios shrugged impatiently. ‘Perhaps. You can ask Sigurd when he returns. Though do not seek him in the palace – by nightfall all the Varangians will be at their barracks by the Adrianople gate.’
I made my obeisance and left, stepping over Aelric’s riven head as I did so. The blood had matted through his greying hair, and the jaw was slack, but the eyes remained as firm as ever, fixed where Sigurd’s vengeful blade had swung.
The next few hours passed in a daze. The shock of what I had witnessed, the disaster which had almost befallen and my improbable part in averting it, occupied my soul as I marched my squadron of Patzinak mercenaries between the houses of the nobility. I quizzed their gatekeepers and stewards, searched their halls and cellars for signs of flight or rebellion, but found little. Most had been in the palace, watching the ambassadors; some were away in the country, and a few were at home attending to their private business. All of them I noted in the thin book I carried, recording their excuses and alibis with reflexive thoroughness. Krysaphios could scour it for whatever incrimination he sought, but none of the men I saw seemed seized by manifest guilt.
And hour after hour, as I asked the expected questions and heard the expected answers, I struggled with the motive of the crime. Aelric could not have hoped to gain from his treachery, for even had he felled the Emperor he would have died the next instant. Unless madness or an evil spirit had taken hold of him, someone must have driven him to attempt the murder with a threat greater than certain death. What could that be – and who? It might have been the monk, but whose ends did he serve? Was it as Isaak suggested, that the barbarian envoys had hoped to use the confusion to their advantage? That was madness, for they would have been slaughtered to a man. Or was it the barbarian captains, away in their camp, hoping that the Emperor’s death would give them an excuse and an opportunity to take the city? That was almost too fanciful to credit. Or were the barbarians simply a distraction, an irrelevance in a political contest fought among our own nobles?
I found no answers, but when my task was done I took the notes to Krysaphios at the new palace. Such was my exhaustion, my shock, that I did not argue when the guard announced that the eunuch was unavailable: I called for a secretary, sealed the book with wax, and left it with him to relay to his master. Then, as it was not far, I walked along the hilltop in the shadow of the walls to the Varangian barracks.
‘Is Sigurd the captain here?’ I asked.
‘On the ramparts,’ answered the sentry.
‘Can I speak with him?’
‘You can,’ he said dubiously, ‘though you might regret it. He’s in an evil mood.’
‘I’ll risk it.’
I crossed the parade ground and climbed the broad stair up to the wall, watching my breath cloud the bitter air. The sky was clear, a swathe of purple far above me, and the first stars were beginning to prick through. They reminded me of the Emperor’s opulence, the glittering gems set in the imperial fabric, and I wondered who would have been wearing those robes tonight if I had been a second slower. The Sebastokrator Isaak? The Emperor’s first son, barely eight years old? One of the eminences whose servants I had interviewed that afternoon? Or a barbarian from the west, sitting awkwardly on the throne watching the abomination of an empire?
I found Sigurd alone, leaning on the deep embrasure between two battlements and staring out at the sparks across the water where the barbarian campfires burned. He grunted when I greeted him, but did not turn to face me.
‘It seems so tranquil,’ I mused, pulling my cloak tight about me. ‘Truly, night smoothes the fractures of the world.’
‘But night dawns, and it will be a long time before the fragments of this day are forged back together.’ Sigurd tipped a clay flagon to his lips, and I heard the gulping of liquid tumbling from its throat to his. ‘Wine?’
‘Thank you.’ It was coarse stuff, but a welcome tonic against the cold.
‘Though you’ve no cares. You saved the Emperor’s life. You can expect a house and a pension for such service. I let a traitor destroy the honour of the Varangians, and come within an inch of razing the empire.’
‘So who guards the Emperor now, if the Varangians are expelled from the palaces?’ My fevered mind wondered whether Aelric’s deed had merely been a gambit to discredit his legion, to leave the Emperor vulnerable.
‘Patzinaks.’ Sigurd’s voice implied they might as well be lepers. ‘Round-faced barbarians from the east: an ugly race, with ugly women and uglier habits.’
‘Reliable?’
‘As rocks. Once the Emperor defeated them in battle; now they
worship him as a god, and serve him as zealots. I once saw a Patzinak stand for four days and nights in driving snow because no order came to relieve him.’
There was a silence as we swapped the wine again. I leaned against the massive parapet, and felt the cold of the stone on my cheek.
‘I know your wounds are sore,’ I began again, ‘but there are questions which need swift answers before the trail fades. Did Aelric have any particular comrades in the guard? Or a family?’
‘He was in a company of men who were all like brothers. But do not seek answers from Sweyn or Stigand or any of the others: they were as ignorant as me. Otherwise Aelric would never have crossed the palace threshold, except in chains. He had a family, though – a wife, Freya, and a son.’
‘Do they live in the barracks?’
‘None of the women do. The wife keeps a house in Petrion, not far from here. The son left home years ago – he probably has grandchildren by now. Remember, Aelric was already a warrior when most of us were still sucking on our mothers.’
‘Did you know him then? Back in Thule?’
‘England,’ Sigurd corrected me automatically. ‘No – our paths here were separate, and it was years later, when I was a grown man, that we met.’
‘And his wife – did he meet her here, or was she also from England?’
‘English. She fled with him after the Bastard conquered us.’
‘I think I had best see her. Will she already have been told Aelric’s fate?’
‘I doubt anyone has thought of her until you, Demetrios. You may have to relate the news yourself.’
‘Will you come?’
Sigurd drained the last of the wine and tossed the bottle over the parapet. I heard it shatter on the stones below.
‘I cannot leave this place.’ He kicked at the battlement before him. ‘We are not allowed any closer to the palace than these walls.’
On balance, I decided, it would probably be better to arrive at the widow’s house without her husband’s murderer.
