‘There has never been a man like this man. This Haraldr.’ Maria clutched her arms and cocked her head; her voice was hypnotic. ‘All the rest have simply drawn the poison out of me, sucking away the putrescence of my soul with the proboscis between their legs, feeding on that obscene gruel because it is the only sustenance their own corruption can digest. They leave me empty, yet cleansed of my own toxins. This man filled me with the brilliance of the stars. The sun. A thousand suns. A light pure and searing. An incandescence in which every fate is revealed. A light in which I saw love and death as lovers, joined in the mad ecstasy I shared with them. At the moment that light flared to infinite brilliance he offered me an exchange. He offered me that light in exchange for my life. He offers that trade to everyone he touches. I saw it in his eyes. There are souls trapped in his eyes, a thousand thousand souls for a thousand years. I know. I am with them now. He lives, and I will die.’
Zoe slid next to Maria and took her limp, almost lifeless hand. ‘Little daughter,’ she said with a sigh, ‘now you have entered a realm I perhaps know better than you.’ She wrapped her arms around Maria’s vision-stiffened shoulders. ‘Our Komes Haraldr has beguiled you. Fear is the most powerful aphrodisiac; it not only arouses passion but also bonds souls. You were there when he killed that man, weren’t you?’
Maria nodded numbly. ‘Blood excites me. I wanted him to make love to me again.’
Zoe raised her eyebrows for a moment. ‘Well,’ she said conclusively, ‘we are each plagued with our passions. I am a slave to simple caresses and the merest devotions, while you, being rather more . . . cosmopolitan, have developed more . . . complex desires. We can never fully exhaust these passions, and yet we can acquire the wisdom to endure them. You are wise, my child, you will endure long after this Komes Haraldr has gone back to the frost-breasted maidens of distant Thule.’ Zoe kissed Maria’s forehead. ‘I rather think your unwarranted inquietude at our predicament has inflamed your memory of the golden giant. When we see him again, you will find him just another Tauro-Scythian curiosity.’
‘You are not afraid, Mother?’ Maria’s eyes were wide and incandescent.
‘Of course not. I am the most valuable being beneath our Lord’s sight. The ransom I can bring is worth far more than any goal that might be obtained by placing my soul before the judgement of God. No one clever enough to steal me would be fool enough to kill me.’
Zoe stroked Maria’s downy temple with her fingers. No, little daughter, I do not fear the hands I have fallen into, however rough and unwashed they may be. I do not fear a confinement that will probably be long, longer than I can permit your precious heart to suffer before it must. But now I know what must be done when we finally return to my city and my people. And when I think of that, I know fear.
The Mandator, chief intelligence-gathering officer of the Imperial Excubitores, spoke in Arabic to the squat, scruffy-bearded man, a petty merchant from the look of his uncalloused hands and his dirty linen robe. The merchant showed several blackened teeth as he jabbered in a singsong voice; as he spoke, he seemed to clutch frantically at the vague, ground-clinging, early-morning mist. The Mandator gestured to the man’s cup and ordered a batman to fill it with more wine. He bowed to the merchant and stepped back to talk with Blymmedes and Haraldr.
‘He’s an Arab from this place, not a Seljuk,’ said the Mandator, a wiry, spooky-eyed man who usually dressed just like the akrites he supervised. ‘He says they rebuilt the kastron for defence and they have no wish to invite quarrel with the Romans. According to him, the Seljuks have murdered the governor of the kastron and have sent out couriers to the east.’ The Mandator lowered his bristling, sun-bleached brows, for a moment fixing his usually wandering eyes. ‘He is telling the truth. I have no need to intensify his interrogation.’
Blymmedes nodded agreement. ‘See that the paymaster attends to him.’ He turned to Haraldr. ‘It appears the hireling has initiated his own scheme. Are you prepared to interrogate the Seljuk?’
Haraldr pulled his knife from his belt and nodded. Blymmedes’s akrites had chased down a contingent of the Seljuk rear guard and had succeeded in capturing a Seljuk warrior.
‘Good,’ said Blymmedes. ‘It is important that you do it. They think you fair-hairs are demons, Christ’s avengers.’
The Seljuk waited on his knees, his arms bound behind him. Haraldr forced his hands to steady. This was not his type of business, and it required a kind of courage that he had not considered before. But Blymmedes had convinced him how important this was. And he needed no convincing of the importance of the lives this wretch might save when his tongue was persuaded to glibness.
The Seljuk’s bright, feral eyes widened when he saw the golden giant approach. Then he remembered his own fierce father, and his big brothers who had swatted him, and he spat at the demon’s boots. Allah would soon embrace him.
Haraldr held the Seljuk’s eyes. He reached around and slit the rope that held the Seljuk’s hands, then raised him up. He signalled the batman to give him a bowl of steamed grain with bits of sliced lamb. The Seljuk looked at the bowl, sniffed, and barked something in his staccato tongue. An akrites who knew the Seljuk dialect - many of them did - spoke in Greek to Gregory, who then translated for Haraldr.
‘He says why should he poison himself? He - excuse me, Haraldr Nordbrikt - calls you a huge pig.’
Haraldr looked into the furious, curiously smug face. The man was not much older than Haraldr, with a dense black beard and a sharp handsome nose. He clearly prided himself as an indomitable warrior and was probably one of their officers. Haraldr took the bowl from the Seljuk’s hands, shovelled several handfuls of the food into his own mouth, chewed at length, and swallowed before handing the bowl back. The Seljuk snatched the bowl from Haraldr and devoured the rest of the dish like a ravenous dog.
‘Does he wish more?’ asked Haraldr. The Seljuk nodded and another bowl was brought, tested by Haraldr and served. And then another. Did their guest wish to drink? Watered wine was brought, tested and poured for him. Was their guest at last satiated? The Seljuk nodded, eyes gleaming, certain that Allah had bewitched his foes.
Haraldr gestured that he would relieve the Seljuk of the burden of his empty goblet. When he had given the cup to the batman, he turned suddenly, clamped his hand to the Seljuk’s forehead like a vice, and neatly sliced his right ear off.
The Seljuk was rigid with shock; blood streamed down his neck and dripped off his shoulder. Haraldr seized the Seljuk’s jaw, popped it open, and stuffed the ear in. ‘Tell him to eat his ear!’
The Seljuk fell to his knees, retching and coughing. Haraldr knelt with him, his hands over the Seljuk’s mouth and nose. ‘Eat!’ The Seljuk’s eyes seemed to grasp for the air denied his lungs. Haraldr held his knife to the desperate face again. ‘Tell him to eat his ear or I will feed him his other ear and then his nose’ - Haraldr waited for the translation and sliced skin from the tip of the nose - ‘and then I will make him eat the nose that droops between his legs.’ He lowered the knife to the man’s belly, slit the coarse linen robe, and made a shallow cut across the abdomen. ‘And if he does not eat, I will find another way of filling his belly.’ Haraldr then placed the bloody point of the dagger against the tear gland of the Seljuk’s right eye. ‘When he has seen all this, we will provide him a dessert. He will have no trouble swallowing his eyes.’ Haraldr pushed against the Seljuk’s face and toppled him backwards. ‘Then our physicians will make certain that he lives.’
Haraldr stood over the Seljuk like an ancient Titan. ‘The first question saves his eyes.’
After a few minutes of verbal interrogation the Seljuk had gratefully saved everything except his previously forfeit right ear. It was an ominous tale. The Seljuks had been in the pay of the Emir of Aleppo but now planned to keep the Empress as their own property. They intended to rendezvous with a larger Seljuk force riding from the east, then retreat with their prize to a series of mountain redoubts in northern Persia, beyond the reach of any p
ower, even the Romans. The ransom they extorted would finance their westward ambitions. For this reason they saw no need to deliver the Empress once their demands had been met; for if their demands were met, they would soon enough be at war with the Romans.
Blymmedes asked Haraldr and Gregory to accompany him. They climbed a rocky path that snaked to the summit of a sheer outcropping. The kastron, now four or five bowshots away, was a sinister apparition in the moonlight, a dungeon rather than a town. The dark walls were only about two bowshots on a side, but they were a good twenty-five ells high and were rooted in a roughly faceted summit that scarcely allowed purchase to a few scrubby trees. Toothlike merloned battlements ran along the top of the wall; in the crenellated openings the robes of the Seljuk sentries were visible as a pale luminescence.
‘I don’t like sieges,’ said Blymmedes. It is work for engineers, not soldiers. Towers, tortoises, fire blowers, mangonels. Of course it would take weeks to bring the equipment up here, dig the tunnels and entrenchments, and erect the engines. And there are too many Seljuks inside such a small place, so they would first slaughter the inhabitants to preserve food. A disagreeable business altogether.’ Blymmedes paused and frowned even more deeply; the lines were like slits in his leathery forehead. ‘Of course that is the simple problem, and now its solution offers us nothing. My akrites have already encountered the reconnaissance elements of the Seljuk force and have interrogated - though not as eloquently as you, Komes Haraldr - one of their scouts. The relief is quite a large force and only a day away. Even if my infantry arrives tomorrow evening to help us initiate the siege, we would not be able to withstand both the relief force and the force inside. And of course we do not know when Constantine will return with his thematic forces, though with such assistance as he will offer we might hope he is delayed indefinitely. I do not see any way we can prevent the Empress’s abductors from escaping into the Plain of Aleppo, and from there to wherever they may wish to go.’ Blymmedes folded his arms, looked up at the brooding kastron, and shook his head.
Haraldr studied the walls. At the back of the kastron the crenellations were almost crested by a twenty-ell-wide lip of tortured rock that fell away to a sheer drop of almost two hundred ells. ‘How wide are those walls on top?’ asked Haraldr.
‘Three men abreast,’ answered Blymmedes, his brow slightly unfurrowing.
‘So despite the considerable number of these Seljuks inside, were I to gain access to those walls I would only have to worry about three men. At a time, that is.’
‘True,’ said Blymmedes. ‘But how would you get on the walls, and what objective could you accomplish on the walls alone, for you could never survive a descent into the town.’
‘My comrade,’ said Haraldr with renewed vigour, ‘the Seljuk who leads this army impresses me as a bold, ambitious leader who can count on the fanatical loyalty of his men; why else would they have joined him in this daring escapade? Up on those walls, my objective will be to meet face to face with this noble warrior. But before I can achieve this intercourse, I will need you to help me with a diversion.’
The drums broke the dawn. The kastron was a blocky silhouette against a radiant sunrise still hidden by the summit. Five light cavalry vanda of the Imperial Excubitores and four hundred Varangians advanced in stately formation to within a bowshot of the walls. The Mandator of the Imperial Excubitores, Domestic Nicon Blymmedes at his side, formally called upon the walled town to surrender to his Majesty Michael, Emperor, Basileus and Autocrator of the Romans. For several minutes the only sounds were the snorting of horses in the Roman ranks and the faint crowing of roosters from inside the Citadel. The scream began inside the walls. For a very long minute the sound left the kastron and was amplified among the surrounding crags, finally assaulting the Roman forces like a dry, biting, nerve-scraping wind. Then the scream lifted into the sky and became pure and clear: sheer human terror. The body flew against the lightening sky, arms and legs milling madly. For a moment it seemed to succeed in gaining desperate flight. Then it plunged sickeningly, the scream lowering in pitch and ending with the sound of a bag of wet sand smashing into a wooden wall. Naked, arms akimbo like a huge, pitiful, plucked bird, the body lay on the rocks in front of the Roman formation. The head was cocked perpendicular to the spine; Blymmedes walked forward and gently lifted it. Haraldr did not know the man at first because the facial skin had been slit at the forehead and peeled off like a rabbit’s pelt. Then he saw the eyes, terror still intact. Leo, the Empress’s eunuch.
Blymmedes faced the Citadel. A figure stood framed in a crenellation just above the thick wooden main gate. The Seljuk’s white silk seemed to have a phosphorescent corona. He called down in a powerful voice that bounded stridently off the rocks. The mandator translated.
‘His name is Kilij. He is the leader of these Seljuks. He says withdraw or he will see if the woman can fly any better than the eunuch.’ Cold hands knotted Haraldr’s intestines. He struggled with a maddening urge to run forward and settle with Kilij. But no. The plan. He must meet this Kilij.
Blymmedes and Haraldr discussed Kilij’s ultimatum with animated gestures, just the type of argument among commanders one might expect before a cowardly retreat. After a few minutes Haraldr stomped angrily to the rear. Blymmedes gave the order to withdraw. Within minutes the cavalry and the Varangians were winding down the narrow, dusty road to Harim. Haraldr could hear the Seljuks jeering from the walls, and the cold hands made the knots ever tighter.
Grettir squinted. The sun was now a golden globe just resting on the kastron’s east wall, preparing to break loose and float into the sky. The mist had contracted into purplish streaks in the shadowed ravines. Grettir stepped forward proudly and gratefully. Odin had favoured him by sparing his leader, Haraldr Si--no, Nordbrikt, if he so wished, and by giving his tongue Grettir this chance to atone for his stupid treachery. The eagle-feeding Saracen-Slayer had asked for the most amusing man among them, and Grettir had been a virtually unanimous choice. Well, it was true; a skald who skinned onions for half a year had to become a prankster or he would drown in his own tears. Besides, as Odin’s din hastener had told him, today his humour would be worth a thousand swords. Judging that he was just outside bowshot, Grettir cocked his big knife-edged hat and stepped onto his stage, a patch of fairly even ground illuminated by a sun that had now been freed to the pond-blue sky. This morning I’ll teach even mischief-making Loki a thing or two, Grettir told himself, hoping to calm his quaking hands.
Haraldr waited at the base of the sheer drop beneath the east walls of the kastron. When he heard the dim but clearly perceptible sound of a human imitating, with comic hyperbole, the crow of a cock, he turned to Halldor. ‘Good. Grettir has begun.’ Haraldr looked two hundred ells up the crusty face of the cliff. Wafting slightly in the breeze, the rope ladders hung like glorious braids in the dazzling sun. Haraldr clapped Joli Stefnirson and his brother, Hord, on the back and winked at Ulfr. ‘I told you that any man from Geiranger can climb like a goat. But Joli and Hord can fly. They are Norway’s eagles, and today they will bring us Seljuk meat.’ Next Haraldr checked an apparatus the Domestic had called a ‘fire blower’. This was a long brass tube attached to a leather bladder worn on the back. The infantryman carried the hollow tube in his hands and had a wood-and-leather bellows strapped under his left arm; tapers tipped with some incendiary substance used to ignite the liquid fire were stuck in his belt. ‘Let’s give Grettir enough time to win his audience,’ Haraldr told the clustered, eager-eyed Varangians.
Grettir skipped drunkenly; dozens of arrows bristled the ground a few steps in front of him. Doffing his hat with exaggerated gestures of deference, Grettir veered towards the arrows with freakish bounding steps, stopped suddenly as he encountered the feathered shafts, teetered forward while waving his arms as if he were about to pitch into an abyss, then staggered backwards before tripping over his flapping legs, tumbling into a heap, and starting all over again. The Seljuks, at first incredulous at the assault of this sin
gle addle-brained infidel, had begun to join in the game, sending down their arrows every time Grettir lurched close. Grettir saluted the salvos with increasingly elaborate flourishes of his silly hat. The jeering Seljuks soon crowded the walls.
Suddenly Grettir dropped his hat and jerked his head up as if a rope were pulling against his neck. Swivelling his head on his distended neck, he reached down and clutched at his crotch, then began increasingly vigorous scratching motions. The Seljuks howled with laughter. Grettir turned his back to the walls, pulled from beneath his tunic the specially shaped pig bladder he had contrived and pumped his hips and jerked his free hand up and down as he blew into the bladder. When he had the device inflated and in place, he turned with his arms wide. The Seljuks shrieked with delight and began an immediate chorus of trilling observations. Grettir surged wildly with his hips, showing off a pig-bladder phallus as long as a man’s arm, complete with a melon-size scrotum.
Grettir continued to stalk with his absurd giant steps, his hips pumping in enormous circular motions. Within minutes the Seljuks had several of their concubines up on the walls, stripped naked and gyrating their pelvises in reply to Grettir’s prodigious thrusts. The walls swarmed with Seljuks now; they jammed the crenellated openings and balanced on top of the merlons. One warrior fell from his perch and lay in a cream-coloured heap at the base of the wall; no one even noticed. ‘Loki,’ Grettir said aloud, as happy as he had ever been, ‘I have shamed you.’
At the base of the cliff Haraldr could clearly hear the rising din of mirth. He started up the rope ladder first, followed by Halldor, Ulfr, the fire blower, and then a gradual procession that ultimately would total a hundred picked men. Haraldr climbed quickly, repeating the phrases the Mandator had taught him and reflecting on the strange hilarity that accompanied their grim ascent. He soon reached the jagged rock lip at the summit; he gripped the stone and easily pulled himself over the natural obstacle.
Byzantium - A Novel Page 34
