Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Father Katalakon descended to the flagstone path in front of the stark, empty cells. The plaster had begun to chip from the walls, and here and there weeds prised apart the underlying courses of bricks. The wind came from the north; in the woods behind the empty convent, leaves rattled. The wooden doors to the cells were rotting and the Father Abbot decided not to open one.

  I am certain it was the purple-born Eudocia who resided here, thought Father Katalakon. As to the rumours of the child born here, I am certain of that as well, and I expect Brother Symeon to provide me proof. But that will not be enough to save our establishment. What Brother Symeon must uncover are the names. Who was the father? And yet more important - vastly so - where is the child?

  The wind gusted and eddied, swirling leaves against the doors of the cells. Father Katalakon looked north, towards the unseen but profoundly felt presence of mighty Constantinople. He shuddered despite the dazzling silver light on the heaving sea. Having taken this step, he now had to admit to himself that it was not simply the fate of their Holy Enterprise on Prote that was at stake. If Father Katalakon succeeded in finding this child, the fate of the Empire was in his hands.

  I

  Kiev, Rus Land, AD 1034

  ‘I am condemned to spend my life looking out of windows.’ Elisevett sighed, trying to sound as weary of life as possible for a fifteen-year-old virgin. She settled into the embroidered cushion she had placed in the deeply recessed window seat; her scarlet silk robe was varnished with the candlelight diffusing from the adjacent clerestory. She pressed the tip of her long-bridged nose to the glass and looked out into the night, past the dim outlines of the domed and peaked palace roofs and down the pine-shrouded bluffs of the Citadel of Kiev. The Dnieper River looked like ink striated with gold, the shimmering reflections of the hundreds of torches that flared along the sandy beaches. The pounding of the shipwrights’ hammers and the shouted commands to the porters were a muffled, distant din. If she were the merest fur-trader or strug-poler, Elisevett reflected, or even a reeking Tork slave girl, she would be able to journey down that river. But of course the Princess of Rus would not be permitted to go. No. She would spend her life in terems and churches, first waiting upon her father’s bidding, then upon whomever he chose for her. Elisevett thought of her mother, so dry and wasted, like a tree with the sap drained. That would be her fate as well, to look out of windows while the life ran out of her.

  But on this night she would escape that fate. On this night she would journey, go away for ever, right here in the very cathedral where they had so often paraded her, dressed like a jewelled, silk-wrapped little rusalka doll, for every gaping miuzhi and liudi in the entire world to stare at in slack-jawed wonder. No, tonight would not be at all like that. Tonight she would kill the little doll.

  ‘Come here’ she said. ‘You can see the lights by the river.’ She turned. ‘Come here.’

  Haraldr looked back through the low, arched entrance of the tiny storage room on the third floor of the Church of the Tithe, praying that the cathedral was indeed empty. He squeezed awkwardly into the window seat. He had never been this close to her before. Her sandy hair, pulled back and tightly coiled on either side of her head in the Greek fashion, seemed streaked with gold. He could smell her rose-water scent and hear her breathe. He tried to suck air into his constricting lungs. He could not imagine what the touch of her would do.

  ‘Look at them.’

  Haraldr watched the points of light swirl like fireflies as the workers moved among the blunt prows of the beached river ships. The dark forests beyond the left bank of the Dnieper stretched off to an eerily orange-fringed horizon, the corona of thousands of camp-fires. Haraldr shuddered. The Pechenegs were on the land.

  ‘Jarl Rognvald told my father you are not going down the river with him. My father was not pleased. Why are you staying?’ Elisevett leaned away from Haraldr and ran her fingers over the luminous pearls that studded her high silk collar, taunting her earnest Nordic swain to answer the question she knew he would not. While she observed his torment she considered how extraordinary it was that Christ - she doubted that the Lord’s sinless Mother would have interceded on her behalf in this matter - had answered her prayers by providing the hapless detskii, Haraldr Nordbrikt. He was a suitable vision, of course, tall and silky golden and so broad in the chest and shoulders, with those dazzling blue eyes and that interesting scar that pulled his right eyebrow up slightly. But then rakish Nordic giants were a plague in Rus these days, due to her father’s relentless ambitions. No, what was truly wonderful and extraordinary was the manner in which Haraldr Nordbrikt affected her mother and father. She saw the way her father glared and gasped; if this mere detskii in his Lesser Druzhina offended him so much, why didn’t the Great Prince just send him off against the Pechenegs and be done with him, instead of keeping him around Kiev to collect tolls? And her mother. She all but reached out and caressed Haraldr with her eyes, not in a leering fashion as an older woman might but with this strange glimmering ember deep within. But if Haraldr were her mother’s lover, then her father would also send him off against the Pechenegs. Or could he? How mysterious. And how wonderful it would be if Haraldr Nordbrikt were her mother’s lover.

  Elisevett lowered her thick, dark, resin-coated lashes, an utterly feigned expression of modesty. ‘I think you are staying because of me.’

  Haraldr wanted to clutch desperately at this great secret that had just been wrenched from his breast, and yet its leaving also filled him with immense joy and relief. Nothing will ever take me from you! his head sang triumphantly. But dry chalk seemed to fill his throat, and he had to strangle a pathetic, creaking whimper.

  Elisevett silently acknowledged this initial milestone on her journey and forged ahead. She removed a tiny folded parchment from the sleeve of her tunic. When Haraldr recognised the scrap, he became vertiginous with panic, and for a moment he imagined himself pitching forward through the window and plunging to his death. Elisevett squinted over the awkward Slavic script. ‘What is “gold-wreathed goddess”?’ she asked.

  Haraldr raised his hand in the feeble gesture of a dying man and finally forced a syllable out. ‘Your . . .’ His palm fluttered near the ornate gold bracelets that twined her arm. ‘Arm rings. You are wreathed in gold.’

  ‘I did not say for you to point at me as if I were a serving maid.’ Elisevett snapped ‘My father could have you flogged in the Podol Square if he knew you sent verses to me.’ She lowered her head for a long moment and wondered what she would see when she arrived at her destination. It did not matter, as long as it was not this. She wondered if he would be fearless - and foolish - enough to follow.

  Elisevett looked up at Haraldr again, her smoky-blue eyes wide. ‘The embassies have come since I was four months old. Three weeks ago the Prince of Hungaria. Last autumn a king of Langobardia. I am the third daughter of the Great Prince, to be auctioned off like some shackled kholopy in the Podol market in order to bear the swinish brood of some petty tyrant with filthy habits. The gifts they have sent my father already fill a chamber.’ Her voice lowered to a mysterious, wistful sigh. ‘You are the first to send me something forbidden.’ She hissed conspiratorially. ‘Your own verse.’

  Haraldr’s heart rose in his chest like a desperate caged bird. The life that had ended four years ago at Stiklestad could begin again. Gold-ringed, cherished, snowy vision. I am not worthy of you but you have accepted my verses.

  ‘Touch me.’ Like some wizard’s conjuring, the scarlet robe slinked fluidly past her knees to reveal several inches of firm, pale thigh. Her whisper was like cat’s fur. ‘Touch me.’

  Haraldr inhaled sharply; even the damp air seemed to stick in his throat. Not in this holy place, and with the axe her father, Yaroslav, held over his head.

  ‘If you don’t, I will tell my father that you did.’

  Haraldr was conscious only of a bead of sweat rolling down his back. He watched his trembling hand reach out with the sickening fascination of a boy wat
ching his first execution. Elisevett’s eyes were spikes. But his hand crept closer, more assured of its desire.

  Her thigh was like a rose petal, summer-plush, smooth and warm. Her white hand pulled his higher. His insides were liquid and his skin was pelted with sleet. Higher, downier, softer. If he went farther, his heart would stop.

  ‘Stop.’ Elisevett pressed her legs together and slowly pulled his hand from between them. She knew now that he would have to go with her. ‘You could die for what you just did,’ she told him. She brought her lips closer, and her eyes were fierce, manic. ‘You know what we must do now.’ She pressed Haraldr’s face with her silky hands. Her heavy lashes folded down and her face turned up in bitter triumph. It would be over soon.

  Haraldr watched her eyes pulse beneath her pale, almost translucent lids. Her wine-red lips twitched. He distantly remembered one of Olaf’s skalds using the word dangerous to describe a woman.

  Like an attacking beast, her arms were around his neck, overwhelming his senses: the smell of her, the petal-soft cheek, the hot breath. He spasmed at the first lancing touch of her lips against his, and then flesh melted and fused. They held, gasped, teeth grinding. Then she pushed him away, her high breasts heaving beneath her silk. This was the moment. Her eyes found his and made certain that he would obey. ‘You know I am as pure as the Mother of White Christ,’ she said. ‘You must teach me.’

  The rest was a dream. In a pile of white priests’ vestments, silk sliding, hard lilac nipples, probing the hot, downy centre, each contact excruciating. She was so slick, like curiously hot ice - one slip and he would be gone.

  It ended suddenly, with consummation still in progress.

  Haraldr could not believe the paralysing surge in his gristled loins. Before, with the whore Jarl Rognvald had purchased for him, all the ale he had consumed to prepare for his initiation had dulled him sufficiently to allow for what had then seemed a lifetime of wondrous exploration. But with love and without ale, love-making was clearly different.

  Their hearts pounded in concert for a moment. Then Elisevett heaved with a single sobbing inhalation. She had rid herself of the detestable innocence that tied her childhood; the little doll had been smashed by his bludgeoning manhood. But there was this strange new sorrow. Where would she go now? The still wet new wings of womanhood began to wilt, and suddenly she had a maddening desire to undo all this, to go back to the Him she had renounced for this new him.

  Haraldr clutched his new life in panic; why had she begun to cry like this? He tried to caress her but she wrenched away and furiously pulled her robe out from among the scattered, crumpled vestments. She stood, tears welling over her dark lashes, her scarlet silk draped in front of her. ‘I’m going to have to tell my father what you did,’ she said sobbing.

  Two guards preceded him and two followed. The noise from the river was now an assault; the musicians had started a tinny rehearsal. The warmth of the day lingered in ponds of still air as Haraldr and his gaolers ascended the steps to the summit of the Citadel of Kiev. They turned beside a stack of freshly quarried granite blocks and entered a colonnaded walkway bordered with newly planted cypresses, finally pausing in front of a bronze door embossed with a trident, the family crest of the Great Prince Yaroslav of Rus.

  Haraldr was ordered to wait in an ante-chamber. The guards locked the doors as they left. The candelabra were not lit and the only light came from two brass oil lamps hung on opposite walls. Along the far end of the chamber, scaffolding had been erected by visiting Greek artists, and the chalk outline of a mural traced a phantom image in the faint light.

  He waited on his feet, too stunned with terror to begin an accounting of his misery. After what seemed like hours he heard footsteps and voices, then nothing. His legs ached and he slumped against the wall, then sat on the cold marble floor. His resurrection last night had ended so quickly, it might never have happened, a butterfly that had flickered across his vision one summer afternoon and was gone. Kristr was cruel, he gave pleasure and then punished for it. No, this was Odin; the prophet of fate had finally come to claim the ending that had been stolen from him four years ago. The thought provided a melancholy comfort; the terrible dark fall that had begun at Stiklestad was almost over.

  ‘Nordbrikt! Get up, you hamster-eating moron! You’d sleep on the gibbet!’ The lamp flared and Yaroslav’s scar-faced bailiff kicked at his feet. ‘You kissed the Devil’s arse this time.’ He gave Haraldr a shove towards the double doors.

  The Great Prince Yaroslav’s office was lit by a single flickering lamp set on a massive ivory table inlaid with silver tridents. Leather- and ivory-bound manuscripts were stacked at Yaroslav’s left elbow and he pushed them away. The Great Prince’s stubby, larvae-like fingers crept over the table-top as if he were fumbling for something in the dark. Finally he looked up. His face had a greasy, slightly jaundiced pallor that closely matched the colour of the table-top. Purple folds almost like separate appendages hung beneath his wide, hen’s-eggs eyes.

  ‘Haraldr Nordbrikt, Haraldr Sigurdarson,’ said Yaroslav in a weary, rattling voice; it was as if he were deciding which of the two names offended him the most. ‘I spend too much time dealing with’ - Yaroslav paused and gasped - ‘you.’ Yaroslav’s right hand snatched a small jewelled replica of a cathedral and his busy fingers went to work on it. ‘Now, I understand that you have brought some sort of ... suit to my third daughter.’

  The Great Prince’s voice was so introspective that Haraldr was not certain he had heard properly. Did he dream this? He soared on a gust of bewilderment and hope.

  The Great Prince rose, stepped round the table with his jerky lame gait, and stood with his stout belly aimed at Haraldr’s belt. His glaring pop eyes offered no hope at all. ‘You are the opposite of me in every way. God in his ineffable wisdom made you tall and straight. I am short and crooked. Your father and then your brother worshipped you as if you were the sacred skull of St Andrew. My father, the blasphemous fornicator, banished me to Rostov and then still tried to extort tribute from me, and I fought my brother, Syvataspolk, he of the foul-smelling grave, for ten years for the right to rule this city!’ The Great Prince’s voice was steadily rising; his face darkening. ‘And yet I am the one called the Great Prince, and all Europe comes to me, and even the Greek Emperor calls me friend, and you’ - Yaroslav gulped for air like a fish out of water - ‘you are a prince without a name, much less any subject who would raise any sword for him or tithe a grivna to his cause. Your rank is detskii in my Lesser Druzhina. I believe you now have the lofty responsibility of collecting the toll at the Lybed Bridge. And I can tell you on good authority that you will never be promoted even to pasynok.’

  Haraldr boiled in the acid of four years’ humiliation. Another voice screamed at him, but it was not Yaroslav’s.

  ‘I know why you regard me with such contempt.’ Yaroslav paused like a man on the brink of a sheer promontory, then gulped and stepped forward. ‘You affront the Great Prince because you know, as indeed the scabrous tales are recited in every court in the north, because your brother’ - Yaroslav stuttered with rage - ‘your brother knew my wife. Because your brother fouled my wife with his stinking lechery! Your brother put his hands all over my wife and spoiled her, and after all I did for him he rutted her like the drooling satyr he was. He ruined her with his filthy lusts!’

  Haraldr had not known this. Yes, his brother had always spoken of Ingigerd with reverence, but Haraldr had never imagined that they had been lovers. His frigid, leaden stomach plunged towards the floor. Now he understood the sin for which he had been punished for four miserable years.

  ‘Stop this, Husband.’ Haraldr peered with terrified wonder into the dark corner of the room. Gaunt, wraithlike, a cloak wrapped round her like a burial shroud, sat Ingigerd, Queen of Rus. Haraldr had not even noticed her when he had entered. The outline of her broad, angular shoulders became visible as she rose from her chair. ‘You knew that I was not pure before you ever held me. I have given you four sons
and three daughters. It was my father, the same who forbade me to marry the man who touched me first, who sent as my dower the Swedish mercenaries who defeated your brother, Syvataspolk. It was my lover’ - she spat out the word - ‘Olaf, who sent his friend Eymund to take Novgorod for you.’ Ingigerd stepped towards the light and clapped her hands to the breasts, now low and shrivelled, that men had once called the great snowy joy-cliffs of Sweden. ‘Your dynasty is built on this corrupt flesh, Great Prince.’

  Yaroslav returned to his chair and sat with a cringing posture. He deeply regretted that the sight of Norway’s royal excrement had caused him to vent his old jealousy in this unfortunate display. He considered again the counsel his wife had offered him earlier in the day, when his daughter Elisevett had come to him with another of her endless vexations. Haraldr, as Ingigerd had pointed out, was Norway’s rightful heir; and reliable Norse military assistance, such as might be provided by a grateful son-in-law, was essential to the survival of Yaroslav’s dynasty. And then Elisevett was no prize: she was a mere third daughter, an intractable child whose precipitate temperament might break an alliance as easily as her precocious loins might build one. But the problem with this marriage was - as were all problems of statecraft - pecuniary.

  Currently Haraldr offered nothing but liabilities. The reclamation of his throne would require a considerable fortune, and at the moment Haraldr was worth more dead than alive: the purse now offered for the head of Haraldr Sigurdarson was a staggering one thousand gold bezants, and it seemed that virtually every Norseman in Rus was intent on winning that bounty, save the most ardent Norwegian patriots; Yaroslav, himself, had been tempted more than once to solve several of his problems by surrendering the fugitive Prince of Norway. Of course, his wife would have bitten his balls off, so it was just as well he had resisted. Haraldr, however, was not the kind of man who seemed likely to win men’s loyalty, so it would be pointless to risk a single silver grivna on the chance he might reclaim his throne. But if Haraldr could finance his own reconquest of Norway, he would be worth the risk of a third daughter. Of course, Haraldr would need the money quickly, while Elisevett was still young; without an heir to bind Norway to Rus, the exercise was pointless. And there was only one place in the world where a layabout like Haraldr could acquire a fortune virtually overnight. And if Haraldr never returned from that journey, what would have been lost? Even Elisevett had dozens of other suitors.