Mar followed a main street that zigged and zagged. Men in short tunics, some carrying sacks of feed on their backs, others driving donkey carts, zipped across at the intersections, heading down dusty side roads towards the Hippodrome stables. A cart with two huge, striped cats caged inside rolled past, followed by dozens of filthy, barefoot children who ran along singing a song. Beside an intersection a woman stood on her hands; her tunic had fallen away to leave her lower limbs completely exposed. A man threw a coin to the pavement beneath her head, and she spread her legs open. The various fortune-tellers were everywhere, sitting on carpets or sheltered beneath painted booths. A diviner, an old man with greasy silver hair, beckoned to them from one side of the street; a palmist, young, with beautiful black hair and a big scar that parted her chin, waved from the other, ‘Hetairarch!’ she yelled; Mar nodded and walked on. A noseless man ran past them, a small costumed dog under his arm.
Mar turned left. A dwarf directed singing by three pretty, sad girls in clean white tunics; a large crowd joined in choruses and coins showered onto the filthy street before the poignant little songbirds. After a right turn the street ended against a cluster of wooden buildings wedged round a tenement with a crumbling, vine-laced facade. ‘Big man, big, big man . . .’ The coarsely seductive woman’s voice came from a shallow porch in front of one of the wooden buildings. Mar ignored the disembodied invitation and slipped into an alley next to the brick tenement. Finally they stopped at a thick wooden door at the rear of a large, newly plastered, three-storey building. A viewing grate in the door slid aside at Mar’s knock. The door opened. Inside was a storeroom that smelled of sharp fish sauce and flour. Another door and they were into the light.
‘Hetairarch!’ A short, bald man in a sparkling blue silk tunic clasped Mar’s arms. His crooked teeth flashed in an open smile. He had a clipped, dark, wiry beard. ‘Welcome! Welcome!’
Mar turned to Haraldr. ‘This is Anatellon the charioteer. He won seven races in the Hippodrome. The Emperor Constantine had a bronze bust made of him.’
‘Of course the Emperor also made a full-size bronze statue of my best horse!’ said Anatellon. He threw his arms wide and emitted a curiously high-pitched giggle. He looked at Haraldr. ‘And you need no introduction, Har-eld, Slayer of Saracens and Seljuks, and now Manglavite of Rome.’ Anatellon extended his arms; his forearms were as thick as the forelegs of an elk and so hard that they seemed carved of marble. After clasping Haraldr’s arms, Anatellon suddenly raised his hands over his head. ‘So you hacked him right in two!’ he exclaimed, bringing his arms down in a huge motion. He giggled. ‘I like that!’
Haraldr looked around. They stood in a bright antechamber next to a heavy wooden spiral staircase. Whirling music and frivolous voices came from a larger room beyond; Haraldr could see only glimpses of bright silk through a wooden screen carved with intricate leafy patterns. Anatellon led the two Norsemen up the staircase to a dimly lit hallway punctuated with curtained openings every half dozen ells. A woman went past them like a wraith, her face as lovely and pale as a porcelain mask, her white limbs and large breasts seeming to fluoresce beneath a gauzy robe. Her glistening dark hair was coiled in the fashion of the court and sprinkled with gems. ‘She’s an Alan,’ whispered Anatellon to his guests. ‘Too good for this place. I won’t give her to just anyone, even if they can meet the price. I’ve already got a few highly placed gentlemen who want to take her into the palace and make a lady of her.’ He winked at Haraldr. ‘You could afford her.’
The hallway ended at bronze double doors chased with images of four rearing horses. The doors slid open and a young eunuch with a sweet, cherubic face bowed. The principal furnishing of the room was a large canopied bed. Anatellon gestured to three silk-cushioned backless chairs with thick ivory armrests. The eunuch quickly brought wine; he served the glass goblets with overly elaborate gestures, an unintended parody of the polished elegance of the Imperial Chamberlains. Mar motioned with his head at the eunuch, and Anatellon nodded. The boy left the room and slid the doors shut behind him.
‘I haven’t told the Manglavite Haraldr any of the details because I wanted to hear the story myself,’ said Mar to Anatellon. ‘What, exactly, did you see?’
Anatellon bent forward and tensed his bulging forearms. ‘Three nights ago a man came to my establishment and sat downstairs. I recognized him immediately as Nicetas Gabras--’
‘What?’ blurted Haraldr. ‘Not my chamberlain, Nicetas Gabras?’
‘Believe me, Manglavite, it would be most unhealthy for a man in my business not to know the faces of men owned by the Orphanotrophus Joannes.’ Mar nodded, apparently vouching for Anatellon’s reliability. ‘Anyway, I made it my business to keep a sharp eye on Gabras. To no end, it seemed. He drank a few cups, then called for a girl. He wasn’t with her more than a quarter of an hour. Then he left, but as he walked out he passed a man who had been sitting by himself all night, the kind who find melancholy at the bottom of a cup. Anyway, I was watching Gabras very closely, and as he passed this man he held his right arm by his side like this’ -Anatellon let his arm fall straight to the floor - ‘and showed three fingers like this. A gesture you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for something. Anyway, Gabras leaves, and this fellow stays and drinks for another two hours, perhaps. Then he calls for the same girl Gabras was with and, well, you should hear it from her.’
Anatellon got up and slid the doors open; he spoke briefly to the eunuch waiting in the hall. By the time he returned to his seat, a young woman had entered the room. She was not much taller than a girl but fully developed in the breasts and hips; she had heavy, sensual lips and a slight dusk to her skin.
‘Tell these eminences what happened, Flower.’
‘Yes.’ Flower looked at the carpet; there was a soft green tint to her eyes. Her wavy hair, streaked with light and dark brown tufts, hung freely over her shoulders. ‘You see, I had intended to take this man to another booth, Daria’s, because the previous guest had disturbed mine.’ Flower made a comical churning motion with her arms to indicate that the ‘guest’ had apparently vomited. ‘This man insisted that I take him to my booth. The third booth on the right.’ Flower shrugged. ‘Why not? I decided. Men make strange requests. So. I removed the filthy bedding and he reclined himself on the bare mattress. I had begun to unveil myself in the manner most men find provocative when he told me to turn away. So. I uncovered myself and found him still fully clothed, with his arm reaching beneath the mattress. “Turn away,” he said quickly, “modesty commands me to ask you to turn away until I have become accustomed to my nakedness.” ‘ Flower narrowed her eyes. ‘What? I have never heard this before. This is all becoming more curious than I can bear. So. I pretended to hide my eyes, but I looked at him through my hair like this, and as I spied, I saw him reach beneath the mattress again, and this time I discovered the cause of his modesty. From beneath the mattress he miraculously produced a great fat wallet. I could see it sag from the weight of the coins. He concealed it within his clothing, which he then removed. Then, of course, he asked me to join him and proceeded in the manner of men.’
Haraldr shook his head. Gabras, the milk-mouthed little swine. ‘Do you have any idea who this excessively modest . . . guest was?’
‘Yes, Manglavite,’ said Anatellon. ‘Having been advised by Flower of these further coincidences, I made inquiries among my clientele. The man is called the Physician. Not because he dispenses palliatives, purgatives, and healing draughts, but because he can so quickly alleviate all of the pain and suffering that this life brings upon us.’ Anatellon made a slashing motion across his throat.
‘Where would two ailing Norsemen find this apothecary?’ asked Mar.
‘Studion,’ said Anatellon ominously.
‘Studion.’ Mar’s inflection was the opposite of Anatellon’s. He said the word as if it were some sort of rare gem.
The oil lamps cast a yellowish light over the stacks of documents, making them seem ancient, archival. Joannes rub
bed the deep sockets of his eyes, wishing that these papers did indeed reflect the great flow of history and not merely the fragile aspirations of a single man whose life span would be so evanescent, so insignificant against the great firmament of time. Unless. Yes. Here, surrounding him, in these figures, this legislation, these tax codifications, were the dimensions of his immortality. Yes. Just as the builders of the great Hagia Sophia had proceeded from mere wooden models to an edifice that would reign through the millennia until the Last Trumpet blew, then so these papers were the architect’s vision of the great edifice to his memory. And yet like the ever-remembered architects of the Mother Church, he needed a builder, a back to hoist the bricks and place them within the exacting strictures of his schemata. Yes, he had thought he had selected his builder well, a back broad and noble. But now that back was bowed, afflicted; each day it carried fewer and fewer bricks to the Heaven-scraping vaults. Each day his builder fell behind the schedule that had to be kept,
Joannes looked at papers on his writing table, Brilliant. This series of novels - a novel was a new law mandated by the Emperor - would generate enough tax revenues to again fill even the great Bulgar-Slayer’s vast underground treasuries, revenues enough to send armies and fleets to the Pillars of Heracles again, to regain Alexandria and Aleppo and bring Venice and Genoa to their knees, to again reap the wealth of the Tigris and the Euphrates, to humble the caliphates and the Bulgars and exterminate the Scyths from the face of the earth. The world as the Pantocrator had enjoined them it should be. And it was already here, in this beautiful paper construction! The numbers could not lie! Let the Sophists in their impotent bureaux invoke their mincing reservations about ‘an overburdened collection apparatus’, let the hand-wringing Strategi protest about ‘the difficulties of enforcement’. It would work! The numbers would become solidi, and the power those solidi could buy would reach out into the world; the numbers would increase and the power of Rome would be restored.
But it took the force of an Emperor to place such a sweeping reform before the people, for in truth wasn’t the Emperor and Autocrator really the master builder who himself could not build without the hundreds of thousands of sweating backs who laboured at his command. If the master builder was not there to lash and cajole and inspire his labourers once again to put their shoulders to the load even when they were slumped with weariness and exhaustion, then no edifice would rise. And for all the labourers of Joannes’s new Rome now knew, the master builder was a phantom, a man who could no longer appear in public, even for the briefest ceremony. Theotokos. Today’s incident in front of the Hagia Sophia could have been the end. Yes. That serious. Fortunately the barbaroi Varangians had been able to detain all of the witnesses and convince them of the inestimable value of discretion.
The barbaroi. Thugs who built nothing, only plundered what others had laboured to construct. The Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson was moving too quickly; even common gossip acknowledged that now. And Haraldr Nordbrikt. What a mistake. To see the witless brute serenaded in the Hippodrome, his head bowed meekly - as if there had ever been a humble thought in his vanity-engorged skull. Build Haraldr Nordbrikt up and he would be more dangerous than Mar Hunrodarson; the people of the city might actually come to like him. Haraldr Nordbrikt’s ascendant power clearly required the pruning that had already been arranged for him. Was it to be tonight? He would have to check with Gabras.
Joannes shook his massive head as if awakening from a bad dream. That was what was insufferably offensive about these fair-hairs in the palace! The time one spent dealing with them added to nothing, and took away from matters of real importance! Look at him, sitting here fuming at pasty-faced pirates from Thule when history waited! Time, passing inexorably, demanded his answer.
Joannes brought his massive splayed arms down on his writing table, and the impact echoed through the empty corridors of the Magnara basement. Where was the answer? Where? And then like the voice of an angel, the answer came to him. Extraordinary. Was it possible? Perhaps it was. And yet to do it would be more difficult than passing the entire peninsula of Byzantium through the eye of a needle. Who could do that? Not even a conjuror. But perhaps ... In the silence of the night the angels whispered again, and Joannes heard. Yes. Love. Love, which had created the entire world out of the formless abyss, had brought light to eternal darkness, and had vaulted the endless waters. Love had done it once. And might do it again. Love. And luck.
‘What do you dream about?’
Halldor’s eyes snapped open. He groggily pieced together the Greek sentence. Had he been asleep? How long? Odin! Well, it was no feather bed being Komes of the Middle Hetairia, particularly now that Haraldr was almost always occupied with his Manglavite duties, whatever they were. Ulfr, thankfully, handled the considerable burden of administration, but it was still Halldor who had to pound the excruciating ceremonial discipline of the court into five hundred swaddling-new guardsmen, most of whom still couldn’t tell a lofty patrician from a lowly exarch or find their way from the Magnara to the Chrysotriklinos. It was sufficiently taxing to make a man fall asleep next to a woman as beautiful as this.
‘You were dreaming. I can tell.’ The lady’s blue eyes reflected the glowing candelabra far over her head.
Halldor pulled his legs up so the bulge in his robe wouldn’t be so prominent.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she said, laughing. ‘I am not a virgin.’
No, you’re worse, thought Halldor, you’re the wife of some official whose title Halldor couldn’t exactly pinpoint; the essential fact was that the husband had been exiled for several years as temporary special Strategus of some theme halfway to Vinland. The lady had issued Halldor an invitation to dine with her, and as some irascible old Magister had pointed out to him, it would have shamed the lovely woman had he refused; surely even a semi-pagan Tauro-Scyth understood that it was his Christian obligation to console the lonely ‘semi-widow’. So after a suitably proper five-day interval, during which the prospective liaison had become the titillation of half the ladies at court, here he was. Asleep, with nothing consummated.
‘Did I bore you?’ she asked, stroking his long blond hair with fingers like slender ivory flutes.
Halldor smiled at her. Her lips were as exquisite as a Greek Aphrodite’s, her hair almost pure gold in the lamplight. Her breasts swelled against her silk scaramangium. He touched his lips to her ear, inhaling the scent of roses and fresh meadow flowers. ‘When . . . did you . . . ever . . . bore a man?’ Halldor surmised that his Greek had been fluent enough when she threw her arm around his neck and crushed her breasts to his with an embrace as tight as a shipbuilder’s vice. He finally prised his mouth away from the tender aggression of her lips to ask the salient question. ‘Where . . . would you like . . . to do this?’
‘In my bath,’ she said, gulping, her eyes glittering.
The child looked up, his black eyes mesmerized by the sight of the giant fair-hairs and their woman. He hastily stripped the tattered rag from the torso of the fallen man and vanished. Squirming clusters of large rats continued to work on the face and toes of a fresh corpse only a few ells away. The fallen man groaned. Mar held Haraldr back. ‘A pox blotch,’ he said. ‘He will be dead soon, anyway.’ Haraldr looked about, searching for an instrument of mercy. He saw a large piece of scorched masonry that had crumbled from the ruined, fire-gutted building to his right. He picked up the big stone and walked over to the now-naked, softly breathing man. Haraldr gasped; the man’s face and most of his body were a mass of pustulant sores. Only the feverish eyes were human. They reached out and the man moaned. ‘Holy . . . cherubim . . . save me.’ Haraldr looked at the tittering, fearless rats, waiting only for him to step back before they began to nibble on living flesh. He brought the stone smashing down on welcoming eyes.
Mar held Flower in his arms. She had bravely agreed to come along and identify the Physician, if possible; she had not reckoned on this. ‘This is where they come to die, when even the streets turn them out,’ sai
d Mar, as if anything could explain this. A man entered the intersection, his frock as black as the charred shells of the tenements that towered above him. The bearded monk bent over another corpse, one of half a dozen or so lying about in the muck, and silently arranged the stiff, chalk-hued arms. ‘They come here to die because they know the monks will find them,’ said Mar. ‘Over there’ - he pointed north - ‘is the Studius Monastery. They have a fraternity of monks who do nothing but retrieve and bury the corpses that here are shunned by even the dirt.’ Mar walked over to the monk and bowed, then handed the serene-looking man some gold coins. The monk dipped his head perfunctorily and continued his work.
Mar took Flower’s hand and looked at Haraldr. He spoke in Norse. ‘When you see the live creatures of the Studion, you will understand why I have taken us through the refuges of the dead.’
They soon came among the living. A dark alley opened up onto a fairly broad avenue, which in spite of its breadth was almost completely canopied by jutting, enclosed wooden balconies and makeshift platforms that in many cases joined over the streets. The stench of human excrement was overpowering. The surface of the street was spongy, and to his horror Haraldr realized that it was paved with well-trodden mud, rubbish and sewage, perhaps to the depth of an ell. Beneath the precarious wooden canopies and reeking, slimy facades clustered hundreds of supine forms. The lucky ones were covered with straw; most of the rest, many of whom had bare skin showing through their rags, were huddled together in scores of human mounds, each several ells high. Haraldr was incredulous. ‘Won’t the ones at the bottom suffocate?’ he asked Mar.
‘Look again. They are not piled on one another but on mounds of garbage. The heat of decay keeps them warm.’
Byzantium - A Novel Page 41
