Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Mar stuck his finger in Haraldr’s chest. ‘I don’t want you to think I am threatening you,’ he hissed, ‘but you are Haraldr Sigurdarson, rightful heir to Norway. You should be sitting on a throne instead of polishing someone else’s. But now you seem only too happy to be Joannes’s servant. You urge caution at every turn. “Let us see if the Emperor recovers.” Now it is “Let us see if this Caesar turns out to be as pliable as Joannes would hope.” You always have a reason to hold back.’

  ‘What alliances have you brought us? You yourself said this Caesar interests you.’

  ‘That was before Joannes bought him with a crown. And I am working on the most important alliance we could possibly have, and when I have enlisted this confederate, you are going to have to prove that your bluster is backed up by Hunland steel.’

  ‘Well, I certainly intend to wait and see what this miracle alliance is. I hope it is someone more important than that clerk in the Magnara, who is able to tell us when Joannes arrives in the morning and little else.’ Haraldr looked around again. ‘But I don’t think this is the place to discuss this.’

  ‘And when will we discuss it, since you are always off ploughing your woman? Your value as an ally has become virtually nil since you took up with Maria.’

  This was another theme Mar had begun to carp on, with constant jests and cryptic allusions about Haraldr’s lover. Was he jealous? ‘Maria has encouraged me to pursue . . . our cause. If you will remember, that was once the source of a considerable misunderstanding between us.’

  ‘Well, now she is taking the opposite tack. A month ago you were cautious. Since you started fucking her, you are submissive. When she changes her mind again, will you rush over to the Magnara and try to assassinate Joannes and get us all killed? That woman is dangerous to you and to me.’ Mar poked his finger in Haraldr’s chest again. ‘You argue with Joannes’ - Mar lowered his voice - ‘over Maria, and he sends you to the Studion. You are fortunate he permitted you to leave Neorion. Now, with the entire Middle Hetairia stuck in the Studion, we have no chance of a joint defence if Joannes orders the Imperial Taghmata to move against us. And you are going to lose men in there trying to police those miserable swine. A lot more than you think. The Studion is going to swallow you up. And Joannes knows that.’

  ‘I think I can advance our purpose in the Studion.’ This was another area of disagreement; Haraldr was convinced that the city’s wretched poor were valuable allies, and Mar completely discounted them.

  Mar looked skywards for assistance. ‘Yes. Out among the people. That has become your special folly. That and Maria. You are a fool for that woman. And you are only beginning to dance the fool’s ditty. She will break you. Do you think you are the first?’

  Haraldr glared, but not with righteous denial. He had heard many of the stories, and she had never denied the substance of any of them. Nor had she apologized for them. ‘I know about her. Why bring that up?’

  ‘Because the crow shit she drops on your head is going to get in my hair as well. I have known her much longer than you have. You are merely a lull in the tempest. Has she ever told you about us?’

  ‘Yes.’ But he didn’t know, really, and the thought sickened him far more than any of the others. ‘She said she has known you for some time. You were close once. I did not ask--’

  ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t fuck her. To be truthful with you, I thought she was mad. She was even wilder then. She had such rage. Real rage, in a way that Odin would understand. She wanted me to punish her. Really. I do not mind admitting that I often enjoy punishing men. But not women. I have never struck a lover.’

  ‘You have never had a lover that I have seen,’ said Haraldr. Before he had time to regret the words, Mar’s hand was on his throat. The force was so great and immediate that Haraldr thought his windpipe would instantly collapse. Almost as quickly, Mar took his hand away and looked around to see if anyone had been watching. His eyes were a murderous glacier blue.

  ‘Don’t overestimate your usefulness, Prince of Norway,’ he hissed, then turned and stumped off.

  Joannes stroked the neck of his snorting black stallion. ‘I hope it pleases you, Nephew,’ he shouted to Michael Kalaphates. Michael craned his head to look up at the peristyle entrance of his new palace. ‘It is magnificent, Uncle. So ... Hellenic. What do you think, Uncle?’

  Constantine’s horse clambered over the marble porch. ‘It is indeed magnificent, sir. It reminds me of Antioch. Out here you can open the entrance up with a freedom that is not afforded in the city. Well done, brother! It is a palace fit for a Caesar!’

  Michael reined his gleaming white Arabian round and looked east towards the Golden Horn, the natural harbour that flanked Constantinople on the north. The great buildings of the surrounding cities were sparkling miniatures from this vantage, and the ships that crowded the narrow waterway seemed like expertly painted little toys. His new residence, which looked much like an ancient pagan temple with its two-storey peristyle and clean, rectangular shape, was surrounded with beautiful cypress groves and a vast woodland park for hunting; the closest building, other than his own stables and servants’ complex, was another ivory-white palace set on a gentle green promontory about twenty stades away. And although the Caesar did not know it, not considerably farther away was the country palace of the Augusta Theodora.

  The three men dismounted. Joannes signalled to the retinue waiting on a paved road that ascended the hill in gradual loops. The hundreds of grooms, chamberlains, guards, cooks, wardrobe masters, huntsmen and priests filed past in yet another procession to the glory of the new Caesar. Grooms arrived to take the horses, but Joannes waved off the boy assigned to his stallion and continued to hold the jittery horse’s bit. ‘I must return to the palace, as you know how much of the burden now falls on my shoulders. I simply wanted to see you settled, and know that you will be happy here.’

  ‘Uncle, I am delirious,’ said Michael, doffing his scarlet bonnet in respect. ‘I only wish that your solicitude for my comfort had not inspired you to place me so far from the arduous toils and manifold concerns of the Imperial Palace. For to help you heft the burdens of our beloved Empire would in some small way relieve the enormous incumbency of gratitude your copious generosity has placed within my breast. As surpassingly splendid as these comforts are, it would equally gladden my heart to know that I could be immediately - yea, instantaneously - at my uncle’s summon should he need even the merest assistance.’

  ‘This is where I need you, Nephew, resting, contemplating, building the reservoirs of strength and wisdom that you will need for the sake of all Rome should you ever be required to wear the Imperial buskins. Like the worthy stylite perched atop his column who praises the Lord with his utter immobility, your service is in your patience and sedentary devotion, as precious to the Pantocrator as the bustling about of all the Imperial Taghmata. Now, Nephew, brother, I must bid you farewell, and leave you to the pleasures your Father and I have long sought for you.’

  Michael and Constantine watched Joannes pound off on his powerful stallion, then walked through the bronze doors of the residence, admired the fountains in the inner courtyard, and found a small reception room that had only one door. Constantine looked about in the hall before he quietly shut the door behind him.

  ‘Can you trust any of the servants?’ asked Constantine in a low voice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael. His scarlet boot distractedly nudged a ram-shaped bronze lamp set on the small marble hearth. ‘I brought my old cook, Ergodotes, and made him a vestitore. I am certain he is reliable.’

  ‘Good. You have someone who can get information in and out.’

  ‘Have I not you as well?’ Michael seemed surprised.

  Constantine cleared his throat. ‘I had rather hoped you might ask me to live here with you.’

  ‘Uncle!’ Michael beamed and embraced his uncle. ‘Of course! I had not even dared to suggest you join my luxurious exile. You will make this elegant incarceration not only tolerable but a
lso amusing!’

  ‘And perhaps productive.’

  The shadow crossed Michael’s face again. ‘Yes. What concerns me now is that our “Father” might recover sufficiently, if only temporarily, to regret his acquiescence to Joannes’s scheme. Then’ - Michael looked at Constantine with vulnerable, pleading eyes - ‘this situation is more dangerous than I had expected. I am a decoration, so to speak, that could quickly become unfashionable.’ Michael erupted and viciously kicked the head off the bronze lamp. ‘Damn him! Damn him! We will be his hostages as long as he lives!’ Michael’s face was crimson, and his eyes had a curious opaque glaze. He exhaled sharply through his nostrils, twice in rapid sequence. ‘I have been considering a plan along with an ... associate of mine. It is quite dangerous. I will understand if you wish to hear no more of it.’

  Constantine opened the door quietly and checked outside in the hall, then came back in the room. His forehead was perspiring, but there was grim purpose in the set of his jaw. ‘They took the manhood from between my legs,’ he said softly. ‘They did not take the manhood from here.’ He thumped his well-larded chest. ‘Tell me about this plan.’

  ‘Blood! Blood!’ The girl stood as naked as Eve and shook her dirty burlap tunic in Ulfr’s face. She spat, made a punching motion with her fist, then pointed at Askil Eldjarnson and rattled off a string of words that Ulfr guessed he wouldn’t have known even if his Greek was as good as Haraldr’s. He did recognize one of the words, however: ‘Rape.’

  Ulfr looked down at the shrieking, gesticulating girl; she had greasy brown hair and teeth like a glacier rift. Another word he could understand: ‘Virgin.’ She pounded on Askil’s chest and spat in his face. ‘Look at her, Komes Ulfr,’ said Askil calmly but mournfully. ‘She has lice. And breasts like kneecaps.’ The gangly, thin-faced Icelander spread his hands in a gesture of incredulity. ‘If a man visits the butcher, why would he pay for the meat and steal the entrails?’

  Ulfr nodded sympathetically. The girl was sixteen, if a day, and if there was a woman of sixteen summers in the Studion who was still a virgin, whether she wanted to be or not, she deserved to be appointed one of these Christian saints. Blood had been smeared on her tunic and around her pubic area in an improbable quantity; she was saying she had been raped, not sacrificed to Odin. Ulfr guessed she was a precociously shrewd whore with a clever new cheat; he would tell the men to watch out for yet another Studion snare.

  ‘Varangian devils!’ yelled another woman, a toothless, soot-faced hag of indeterminate age. ‘Devil sent you, Devil take you back!’ Ulfr could not understand everything shouted by a burly man with a dirty rag over one eye, but the essence of it was that in addition to raping children, Varangians also fornicated with the Emperor. Ulfr looked around. More than a dozen people had congregated, most looking on silently with sullen, flickering eyes. Something was wrong. People in the Studion wouldn’t assemble on a filthy street corner in the dead of night to involve themselves in an ordinary misery like the putative rape of a young woman. And the younger men - six, seven of them - were too well fed to be from the sounding blocks. They were professional trouble-rousers from down near the seawall, not the ragged beggars and petty thieves that afflicted this area.

  ‘I’m going to pay her something for her virtue,’ said Ulfr to Askil in Norse. He had reached inside his wallet for a coin when a swaggering, swarthy young man of no more than twenty-five walked up and put his arm around the girl and said, ‘I am her father.’ Ulfr nodded at the word father and smiled sardonically. Very well. He produced a copper follis and held it out to the man; the girl swatted it away. ‘Silver!’ shouted the father, who now caressed his alleged daughter’s bare flank. Ulfr deliberated. His instinct was to offer Hunland steel as payment due this impudent little thug, or better still, break him with his bare hands. But he remembered what Haraldr said about how cheap trouble was in the Studion, and how dear the cost might be to put an end to it if it ever got out of control. He produced a silver nomismata.

  The girl snatched the coin and ran off, vanishing so quickly into the putrid shadows that it was as if she had never existed. Her ‘father’ stood open-mouthed for a moment and then scurried off in search of her. Ulfr looked at the crowd and told them in Greek to ‘be off. The burly man, the old hag, and two others went growling and mumbling into the night. Ulfr noticed that the band of toughs had swelled to a dozen. He was just about to tell Askil to unsheath his long sword.

  A motion and a blur from the crowd. Askil grunted and fell to his knees and the stone plopped on the fetid pavement at his feet. Ulfr brought his long sword shrieking out of the sheath. He had no recourse. They had been attacked, and now they had to kill, or the life a Varangian would not be worth the dung on the streets of Studion.

  Ulfr studied the flashing blades that now ringed him. Knives. No swords, no armour, no spears. He asked Odin to guide him to the most deserving victim and instantly whirred his blade halfway through the neck of one of the tallest toughs. The rest looked at the gushing, twitching body and reconsidered their boldness. Askil was on his feet, his long sword unsheathed. He charged and scattered half a dozen into the night. The rest backed away slowly from Ulfr, jabbing their knives futilely like performers in a mime. One of them yelled something about Varangians who slept with goats.

  Ergodotes, former cook and newly appointed vestitore to the Imperial Caesar Michael Kalaphates, stabled his mule in the courtyard of the little inn on the outskirts of the Venetian quarter. His principal concern on this night was the unsavoury proximity to foreigners; these Venetian sailors were scoundrels at the least, and most likely carried plagues that would make a healthy body rot like a melon left out in the sun. Well, they probably wouldn’t be up this far unless they ran out of rats and dogs to eat down where they were.

  As far as the other so-called danger was concerned, why worry? He was now the trusted servant of a demigod, out on the Lord’s good business for his holy master. Ergodotes flipped a copper coin at the stable boy, strolled behind the inn, and identified the entrance to which he had been directed.

  The house behind the inn was a curious ruin, perhaps an old chapel of which only the basement remained; the plaster was completely peeled off, and only the bare bricks, set with thick courses of crumbling mortar, remained. The wooden roof stuck on top of this decaying foundation was of much more recent vintage than the brick walls but was not in considerably better condition. The door was solid and new, though, sturdy oak studded with iron braces and nails. Ergodotes knocked three times, waited, then knocked once.

  Ergodotes thought he would collapse from the stench when the door was opened; he assumed the occupant must live atop a sewer or never discarded his own slops. And the shrieking and howling quite unnerved him.

  ‘Come in before the demons snatch you!’ The man inside chortled. He was short, fantastically obese, with a head as smooth and round as a marble sphere; this sphere pivoted back and forth on his neck as if run by some sort of clockwork mechanism. ‘Come in here!’ The fat man chortled again, as if even his most mundane pronouncement were a source of great mirth. He waddled through the small dark vestibule of the dwelling, his stained tunic out before his stupendous belly like the sail of a Genoese merchantman.

  The main room resembled the factory of a chemist or pharmacologist, a complex jumble of vials, jars, bowls, mortars and pestles, with all sorts of dried and fresh leaves, berries, chunks of rock and dried mushrooms scattered among the utensils. Jars of reptiles stood in rows against one wall, and against the opposite wall were wicker cages full of howling monkeys.

  ‘Well, you knew the street, you knew the knock, you knew this was me, because who else would be here!’ The fat man chortled yet again. He needed to squat only about a palm’s width in order to seat his amorphous rump upon a backless chair. ‘Let’s hear who you are and what you want!’

  Ergodotes explained his mission. When he had finished, the fat man whistled a tune for some time, his head swivelling periodically. ‘That’s a big one,’
he finally said, for the first time looking crestfallen. ‘But I’d like to add him to my collection, you’re certain I would!’ He laughed wildly and the monkeys went into virtual hysterics in response. ‘When did you say you’d bring the money!’

  Ergodotes finalized the details, getting a lengthy, chuckling discussion of how the poison would work and how his ‘specialist’ would deliver it to the ‘acquisition’.

  ‘One thing,’ asked Ergodotes when he was satisfied that everything else had been taken care of. ‘How do we stop if we must change our plans?’

  ‘You can’t do that!’ said the fat man, howling as if it were the funniest thing he had said all night.

  ‘Provocations,’ said Haraldr. ‘Four incidents last night, yours, and two others already tonight. He looked at Ulfr searchingly. ‘There is a plan here.’

  ‘Well, they’re getting nowhere,’ said Ulfr. ‘Was anyone hurt tonight, other than the ache in Askil’s head?’

  ‘Hedin had his leg cut,’ said Haraldr. ‘That’s what concerns me, that there is no apparent reason for these quarrels. Ulfr, the Studion is like no place we have ever known. The palace, for all its splendour and vastness, is like a court in the north, only more complex. The Studion is like a dense, almost impenetrable forest, with its own laws, its own warnings, its various hidden lives that can suddenly appear to challenge one’s own.’ He pointed down the street at a vista of towering, brutely simple brick buildings, ramshackle balconies, reeking lanes, and wretches sleeping on the streets. ‘They are doing something out there, and we don’t know what. But we are certainly part of it.’

  The Caesar looked out on his empire; a doe loped into a clearing and then darted back into the thick brush. On the Golden Horn, the sails were like bits of coloured paper. Michael turned away from the window.