by Tom Harper
I bowed. It seemed that Count Hugh had forgotten the scribe who accompanied him on his embassy to the barbarians, though it would be many months before I forgot the preening Frank who had almost been pissed on in the barbarians’ tent. ‘An honour, Lord.’
‘Count Hugh is one of the few Franks who understands the need for all Christians to unite under the banner of God and His Emperor,’ Isaak explained. ‘He hopes to persuade his countrymen to follow his good sense.’
‘Thus far without success,’ said Hugh mournfully. He fingered the agate clasp on his mantle. ‘Some of them are reasonable men, yes, but too many listen to the poison which the whelp Baldwin spouts.’
Isaak looked at me carefully. ‘But these great cares are not for Demetrios. If you seek the way out, take the north door from this passage and continue until you find the chapel of Saint Theodore. You will find your way from there.’
I bowed. ‘Thank you, gracious Lord.’
He attempted an insincere smile. ‘A Caesar’s duty is to aid his subjects. And perhaps I will see you next week – at the games?’
I did see him at the games, though I doubt if he saw me. He was seated on a golden throne beside his brother on the balcony of the Kathisma, while I shared a bench high on the southern side with a group of fat Armenians, who cared for nothing but gambling and honeyed figs. Worse, they supported the Greens.
‘Why would anyone support the Greens?’ I asked of my neighbour, a thin man who chewed his fingers incessantly. ‘You might as well declare yourself in favour of the sun.’
The man looked at me with terror, and returned to his fingers.
‘Demetrios!’
I glanced up warily, for one meets many men in the Hippodrome and not all are to be welcomed. This one I was happy enough to see, though I barely recognised him without his axe and armour. He wore a brown woollen tunic with a studded leather belt, and high boots which had little difficulty poking a space between me and my timid neighbour.
‘Shouldn’t you be at the walls?’ I asked.
‘The walls have stood safe for seven centuries, and broken every army which came at them. They may survive an afternoon without me.’ Sigurd shuffled along the bench a little, taking advantage of the newly vacated space. ‘I thought I could take a few hours to see the Greens win.’
I groaned. ‘Not the Greens. Why would you want to see them win?’
Sigurd looked puzzled. ‘Because they do win. Who would not support the strongest team? Don’t tell me that you support the Blues?’
‘The Whites.’
Sigurd guffawed, happier than I had seen him in weeks. ‘The Whites? You can’t support the Whites – no-one does. Have they ever won once in your entire lifetime?’
‘Not yet. Their day will come.’
‘But they don’t even race to win. Their only purpose is to act as spoilers for the Blues, to knock the Greens off the track and let the Blues past. They’re not competitors. You might as well see me supporting the Reds.’
If you supported the Whites, as I did, these were not new arguments. ‘Perhaps there is nothing I would rather see than the Green chariot upturned on the spina. The first and only time that my father brought me to Constantinople, he took me here and told me to choose a team. I was wearing a white tunic that day, so when I saw the Whites I decided that they would be mine.’
‘You must regret not wearing green.’ Sigurd was merciless.
‘Not at all. Because one day the Whites will win . . .’
‘If a murrain strikes down the Greens and Blues and Reds first.’
‘And I will have more joy from that single victory than you will from a lifetime of seeing the Greens roll past the finishing post.’
Sigurd shook his head sadly. ‘You will die a bitter man if you wait for that day, Demetrios.’
Thankfully, a fanfare of trumpets rescued me. We fell silent as the Emperor rose from his throne.
It was the first race of the afternoon, and the hippodrome was as yet only three-quarters filled, but its spectacle remained undiminished. The arms of the arena stretched away from where we sat, alive with the colours of all the races and factions of men in their tens of thousands. In the distance, above the far gate, four bronze horses reared up as if pulling their golden quadriga into the air, while the great dome of Ayia Sophia crowned the horizon. Along the spine in the foreground were the statues and columns, the monuments of a thousand years of competition towering above us. There were Emperors and obelisks, set beside half a dozen effigies of Porphyrius and the other charioteers of legend, to whose company the church had added saints and prophets. I could see Moses, clutching two tablets of stone as he hurried towards the north gate; Saint George, brandishing his lance; and Joshua sounding his horn from atop a sandstone column.
Down in the Kathisma the acclamations were finished. The Emperor retook his seat, accompanied by a thundering roar from the crowd as the gates sprang open and the chariots emerged. They were quick on the damp sand of the arena, and had passed the northern marker in seconds. The factions rose as their champions galloped past, great squares of blue and green, many hundreds of men wide, all shouting in unison. None wore White or Red, for few were fool enough to support the junior teams who raced only in support of their seniors.
The teams slowed as they navigated the first turn around the southern post. They were directly below me, now, but some fool follower of the Greens chose the moment to raise a wide banner which completely obscured my view. By the time I could see again, they were past the Kathisma on my right and almost back at the far end.
‘Is that the Whites in the lead?’ I asked, squinting into the distance. ‘And the Greens, straggling along there at the rear?’
‘If the Whites could race seven circuits as well as they race the first two, then perhaps one of their drivers would be immortalised in stone on the spine.’ Sigurd was sitting forward on the lip of the bench, craning to see what was happening. He looked as happy as a ten-year-old.
‘Tactics,’ I muttered through my teeth.
As ever, the Whites had started well; as they came back towards us they led the Reds by a length, and the Blues and Greens by several more. But it was illusory, for the senior teams were biding their time, letting their horses stretch their legs on the opening circuits while their junior partners raced for the stronger position.
‘They’re taking their time.’ Sigurd bit his knuckle, looking anxiously at his team. ‘They don’t want to leave too much to do in the turns.’
‘They won’t have to. Not with that lame mule on the outside.’
But I was speaking from hope rather than reason. I could see the Green and Blue drivers using their whips more freely now, goading their teams into an ever faster rhythm. The leading pair were beginning to tire – the Whites faster than the Reds, I feared – and soon all four would meet. Every man in the hippodrome was tense; some could not keep to their seats in anticipation, but bounced up and down like puppets.
‘There go the Reds. Your Whites have gone too close to the spine. They’ll never take this turn cleanly.’
It seemed Sigurd was right, for the Whites had kept an impossibly straight line coming down the stretch towards us and would need to rein in the horses almost to a standstill if they were to make the turn without crashing. Seeing his chance, the Red driver was fading away to his right, intending to cut inside the White chariot and force him against the far wall so that his allies the Greens could go through.
‘Never mind that your horses can’t run. Now it seems you have a driver who can’t drive either.’ Sigurd did not disguise his glee.
But his crowing was too soon, for the Whites were not slowing their approach to the turn. If anything, they were accelerating. I saw the Red driver look over at his challenger in disbelief, then start frantically lashing his beasts in a belated effort at overhauling the Whites. He heaved on his reins, trying to edge across the Whites, but there was not enough space and his nerve failed him.
With immaculate timing, the White drive
r leaned back in his chariot and pulled in his team. They seemed to slow almost to a stop, inscribed a gentle arc around the post below us, and began to canter away down the far side while the Reds, held off from turning and forced almost against the wall, watched the Blues and the Greens gallop past them.
‘That won’t help the Greens,’ I shouted in Sigurd’s ear.
‘I thought the Whites were to knock out the Greens, not the Reds. Can’t they tell one team from another?’
The noise of the crowd was overpowering; all were on their feet now, willing their favourites to snatch the lead from the Whites, who were slowing quickly. By the next turning post, if not before, the teams behind would have caught them and their race would be effectively over. I had seen it happen too many times before. But, as Sigurd had said, they still had to trouble the Greens long enough for the Blues to edge in front. In a straight, wheel-to-wheel contest, not a man in that stadium would have gambled against the power of the Greens’ four horses.
The White driver now adopted a defensive strategy, standing almost side-on in the quadriga as he looked back to see his opponent. With every second that passed, he sacrificed speed veering across the track, trying to stop the Greens from passing while not impeding his Blue colleague. It was an awesome display of skill. But when your horses are tiring, and your opponents are nosing at your wheels, skill can be insufficient. They were about three quarters of the way down the eastern stretch, on the fifth circuit, when the Green driver turned his chariot slightly left. The White driver reacted immediately but was too quick: the Green had deceived him, and had just enough time to snake back across the track before throwing his horses into a skidding turn which must have come close to snapping his spokes. The White driver screamed at his horses to run faster, raining his lash down on their backs, and for a moment he and the Greens were galloping in tandem, as if all eight horses pulled a single, two-man chariot. The shouts from the crowd – from the factions, the gamblers, the fruit-sellers, even the morose man whom Sigurd had dislodged – rose in a cauldron of noise; Sigurd and I were bellowing out cheers and abuse like madmen. If the Whites could hold off the Greens until the next turn, I thought, they might have a slender hope of pushing them wide and upsetting their rhythm.
They could not. The Green driver, with almost indifferent ease, snapped his reins and watched the Whites drop ever further behind. By the time he reached the turn they were gone from his sight, and from there the distance only grew. The Blues tried to match his speed, but they had rested their hopes with the Whites and left their own charge too late. The noise subsided, and all around the hippodrome men began to reclaim their seats. Only the Green faction stayed standing: somehow they managed to sustain their cheering unbroken while their team galloped out the two remaining circuits.
‘Not a bad race,’ said Sigurd. ‘We could have done better. He waited too long to attack. But I never doubted he would do it.’
‘That,’ I told him, ‘is why I’ll never support the Greens.’
Some of the Green faction had vaulted over the wall and run onto the track to embrace their champion, to wrap him in the victor’s cloak and carry him on their shoulders in triumph. Down on my right, the palace guards had opened the gate to the Kathisma stairs, where the charioteer would soon ascend to receive the Emperor’s blessing. The Armenians beside me were cackling with glee and swapping piled coins among themselves, while other spectators argued over whether the Blues should find a better driver, or if they should send their horses to pasture and bring in a fresh team.
I was about to search out a fruit-seller when a movement down on the arena floor caught my eye. A spectator had crossed the barrier and was moving down the edge of the track; as I watched, he reached the foot of the stairs, darted past the hesitant guards and began running up towards the Kathisma. Straight towards the Emperor.
I leapt from my bench in a panic. What if this was the moment I had been commanded to prevent, an assassin who would murder the Emperor in full view of a hundred thousand Romans? Could it even be the monk? He was too far away to see, and obscured by the stair wall which also protected him. The lumbering guards were at last giving chase, but he was well ahead of them and climbing ever higher. If he pulled a bow from under his tunic now, I thought, he would have clear sight of the Emperor.
Not knowing what I could do, I ran. Not down, for that was too far and too crowded, but up, towards the long arcade which swept around the rim of the stadium. It was almost empty at this hour, save for a few children who had come to escape the noise and bustle, and I sprinted along it as if driven by Porphyrius himself, around the bend and down the straight to the place where steps fell away towards the Kathisma. So quickly did I take them that I almost tumbled headlong to my doom, but my desperately outflung arms managed to steady me on the shoulders of a passing wine-seller.
I reached a mezzanine, level with the second floor of the Kathisma, and paused. The interloper had stopped on the winner’s dais, an exposed platform before the Kathisma where the garlands were bestowed, and was on his knees. Patzinaks had sprung down from the imperial box to surround him, but they kept a wary distance as he finished his obeisance and rose to his feet.
‘Prince of Peace,’ he declaimed, ‘the least of your subjects begs an audience. Hear my petition, Lord, that you may know the mind of your people.’
He spoke loudly, in a voice well-drilled by some theatre or market. His words carried across the ranked benches, for all about him had fallen silent; further off, I could hear the murmurings as his oration was repeated around the hippodrome.
I could also see the Emperor from my vantage, ensconced on his throne like a statue of Solomon. He neither spoke nor moved, and his guards and courtiers followed his example.
I found the silence ominous, but the orator seemed to draw strength from it. ‘Why, Lord, are your lands ravaged by heretic barbarians, occupying our homes and eating our bread? Why do you tolerate their invasion, and feed their appetites for ransom and plunder? Every man in your realm would rather die defending his home from such carrion, than invite them in as wolves to the flock. Lead forth your armies, Lord, and drive them from our shore as once you routed the Normans and the Turks. Will we be snared by their wiles and slaved to their power? No.’
He was not alone in answering his own question – from all directions, voices began to echo his defiance.
‘Will we see the Kelts defiling our daughters, plundering our treasury and sleeping under our roofs? Will we be forced to declare, against all the teachings of the church and of God, that the Spirit proceeds from the Son? That our Patriarch should be the slave of a Norman Pontiff? That, in the manner of the heretics, we should choke on unleavened bread when we feast at Christ’s table? No!’
Now I could hear the ‘No’s’ resounding from the far side of the arena as well. Still, though, the Emperor did not move.
‘These barbarians are an abomination before God and His church, and before all who truly believe.’ The orator had worked himself into a frenzy; his arms swung wildly and his face burned red. ‘We have them in the palm of our hand: we should not stretch it out in friendship, but squeeze them in our fist until their blood runs from our fingers. Prince of Peace, your people beseech you to lead your army into battle and win them a victory to rank with your triumphs at Larissa, at Lebunium. Or, if you will not do so, then let some other member of your family lead them, and rout the barbarians from our homes. Defend the honour of Christ and the empire. Kill the barbarians!’
His words were like a wind on embers: hardly had he spoken them than the cry was taken up by the crowds around him. Quickly, their neighbours joined them, and then their neighbours’ neighbours, until all the stadium shook with the chant. It was louder than any cheer I ever heard for a charioteer, louder even than the acclamation when the Emperor was crowned. ‘Kill the barbarians! Kill the barbarians! Kill the barbarians!’
In all this the speaker was forgotten. Looking back, I saw Patzinaks surrounding him, dragging him
from the platform, but he had worked his mischief. Whichever party or faction had employed him – and no doubt that information would be worked out of him in the dungeons – they had made their point. Whether the Emperor was wise to put his faith in the barbarians, to entrust the recovery of Asia to them, I could not know and did not care, but it was clear now that he had spoken truthfully in his garden. If he died, there would be war. And though the chanting, hate-filled faces around me seemed confident enough, I feared that in that battle there would be no victors.
κ γ
It was a long season, the Great Lent that year, but more from fear than penitence. A black mood hung over the city, the anger of ten hundred thousand people against the barbarians who starved and mocked them. It seemed they had stolen even the sanctity of our fast, for what was praiseworthy in fasting when there was nothing to eat anyway? Every day Helena went to the markets, and every day she was gone longer, trying to find what scraps were to be had. Most stall-holders had little to do but gossip, and even at the far end of the Mesi the ivory-carvers and silversmiths sat by their doors and watched their hands grow smooth. Only the churches kept their custom – increased it, even, as their incensed domes resounded with the prayers of a city begging God for food, deliverance or vengeance.
And all this while the smoke of the barbarian camp rose from across the Golden Horn, from behind the walls of Galata. More of them arrived, of all their tribes and races, and it took great purpose from the Emperor and the unbending Patzinaks to keep them quartered in distant villages, prevented from joining with their compatriots in Galata. In the city, the scuffles between Romans and visiting Franks escalated: one day a watchman was almost blinded when he intervened to stop some young squire being stabbed by the mob. None of the barbarians passed our gates after that, and my duties receded even more into the confines of the palaces.
It was wearing, lonely work, for there was little for me to do save watch. Once, early in March, I actually went to Krysaphios and asked to be released, but he would not allow it: the Emperor, he said, was adamant that every risk should be countered. So I continued my uncomfortable vigil, well rewarded but ill satisfied.
