Haraldr looked south. Flaming wreckage completely blocked the street. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to Ulfr as he turned back to face the mob. ‘They have seen us. We cannot let them know that we are afraid of them, or the lives of my pledge-men will be worth nothing on these streets.’
Ulfr drew his sword. ‘An axe age, a sword age. The ravens will drink well tonight. And this mob will soon know with how many lives the corpse of a Varangian is purchased.’
‘No.’
Ulfr looked at Haraldr incredulously.
‘Not yet.’ Haraldr unbuckled his breastplate and sword belt, took off his helm and cloak, and handed all of his weapons to Ulfr. ‘Odin permitted me this once before,’ he said.
‘My friend . . .’ Ulfr trailed off. There was no use protesting; Haraldr had made too many mad ruses work in the past. But for a Varangian to perish unarmed, a prisoner, perhaps tortured, was a fate literally worse than death; his bench in the Valhol would wait, empty, until the last dragon flew.
‘I won’t deny you your place at the benches,’ said Haraldr. ‘If they come at you, take up your sword and summon the birds of death. But wait patiently for my return. I may be gone for some time.’
Haraldr walked towards the mob. Stripped of the badges of the feared Varangians, he felt strangely free, and yet terribly frightened as well, almost like a man in the middle of some prodigious dive. He could hear no voices above the fire storms. He came within spear range and for a moment wondered what it would feel like to have steel thud into his unprotected sternum.
The faces had the frightening uniformity of misery. Pale, deep eyes, mournful lips, angry jaws. Men, many women as well. Burlap, cheap tattered linen, rags. Stringy, filthy hair. Scars, sores. A cleft palate, a man on bare stumps. They shifted as he approached, their silence as awesome as the stillness in the Mother Church. A middle-aged woman came forward and stood a step in front of the rest. Vividly Haraldr saw the Hound at Stiklestad, that step beyond the howling wall. And his brother’s last steps.
‘Why are you burning the Studion?’ she demanded, her eyes flashing. She had a long, worn face, a face that never had had a chance at beauty and was now past the age for it.
Haraldr was stunned, and then he realized what she meant. Of course. Two birds with one arrow. Joannes had ordered the Studion burned and knew that the people would attack the Varangians as the agents of that calamity. ‘We Varangians did not set these fires.’
The crowd erupted, as angry as a tempest. Fists shook and spears bobbed up and down. The woman screamed over her comrades. ‘See what they think of your lies!’ The crowd seemed to lift her towards Haraldr. His pagan roots surfaced and he feared the spirit world he would enter without his sword. Christ, he wondered, where are you? Will you receive me in your paradise if I am denied the Valhol?
They were around him, the white heat of death. He was clawed and punched, and the woman was pushed into him. She glared up with gritted, decayed teeth. ‘Is there another reason why you should not die, Varangian?’ she shrieked. He looked at her eyes, thinking she was not the face of the Valkyrja he had imagined, and spoke the words that needed no prompting from any god. ‘The Blue Star.’
The woman’s hate-filled eyes were suddenly as wondering as a child’s. She thrust her arms into the air, screamed, and began to push the crowd back. The mob slowly quieted until the huge flames that were consuming their homes could be heard again. ‘What business do you have with the Blue Star?’
‘I want to plead my case, to convince the Blue Star that we Varangians did not fire the Studion. I think I know who did order this.’
The woman stepped back and studied Haraldr for a moment. Then she shrugged and led him through the crowd. Haraldr looked out across the expanse of faces, feeling another kind of Roman power, far different from the power he had felt at the coronation of the Caesar, but perhaps, in a strange way, greater. And he knew in that moment that the two powers of the Great City would some day come to a bloody reckoning.
As Haraldr had suspected, the Blue Star was among his flock, herding them from behind, his bulky form towering above the rest, his shelf-like beard jutting out proudly. Haraldr looked at the silly, silken little henchmen beside their leader and wondered if he had done the right thing in so boldly confronting this very petty street prince.
‘So you want to see the Blue Star,’ said the big man. He held up his hand so that the sapphire ring was visible.
Haraldr nodded; the man’s manner convinced him he had made his final mistake in the middle realm.
The Blue Star looked at Haraldr for a moment and dipped his head. That was the last thing Haraldr saw, the Blue Star nodding at him.
Naked, Joannes gave credence to the Bogomilist heresy that man was created in the image of Satanael, not God. The smooth, hairless, white wax skin draped a demonically distorted form: the great, swelling knees and elbows; the breastbone that curved like the chest of an enormous, feather-less bird; the penis a solitary, pathetic little pod dangling beneath an immense, shovel-like pelvis. A torturous embroidery of scarlet eczema ran from his wrists to the shoulders of each arm.
‘I do not like to stay long in the dry heat,’ said Joannes. He seemed curiously at ease. He slumped against the marble bench and languidly waved his grotesque hand through the mist of steam. ‘The wet heat does not deprive the skin of its oils.’
Michael looked at the mosaic that circuited the walls of the steam room. Joannes’s apartments were in one of the oldest buildings in the palace complex, constructed in a time when different fashions and canons of beauty had prevailed. Like this mosaic. A woman and man walked before a graceful portico, the architecture convincing in its substance, the human forms swelling with the glories of the flesh, the green and gold leaves behind the buildings almost rustling with the breeze. It reminded Michael of Antioch, where ancient revelries of the flesh were still redolent in the hot nights. How different from today’s Rome, the harsh, attenuated forms one saw in art, the airless ether that allowed only the spirit, not the flesh, to breathe. He looked at his uncle. Joannes’s deep sockets were blank, lids folded over the deadly irises. What could he know of old Rome, him with his tiny, vestigial penis, his blind disregard for the beauty and splendour around him? Why did he then live amid the echoes of a pagan world he could never touch even in his imagination? That was obvious. During his residence in the cenobium Joannes had come to despise the church and even its symbols. And that was why the Pantocrator, His voice rising among the hosannas of the seraphim in the Hagia Sophia, had decreed that Joannes, a monk without faith, should die.
‘Uncle, I am quite wilted. May I wait for you in the steam room?’ Joannes nodded assent, his eyes still closed, his huge head lolling. Even the seven-headed beast has its moment of repose, thought Michael. He rose and entered the large vault that contained both the warm tub for washing and the cold pool for swimming. Lit by candelabra, the mosaics around the wall, all secular scenes, took on a sacredness, and Michael knew that even in this place the Pantocrator was still with him, guiding him. He saw the wooden box on the broad marble rim of the tub. How clever. The foolish conspirator would have brought the soap as an offering. But this was so subtle, so intricate. The Caesar was clever enough to rule Rome; this was proof. Even if Joannes did suspect him, he would never anticipate this. Strangulation, perhaps, or a knife concealed in a towel. Fool. When Joannes was dying, he would have the moment to know he had been a fool, to look into the laughing eyes that had cast him into the fiery lakes.
Michael entered the pool. Yes, stay at a distance, when the convulsions begin summon the servants. He will be seen to die untouched. The water was so vitalizing, made him feel so alert. He stroked and floated. Would they crown him again? Yes, they would have to. No longer merely the Caesar but Emperor, Basileus, Autocrator. His hand in that of the Pantocrator. Michael found himself growing erect. He fondled his stiffening penis and enjoyed the silky, surreptitious thrill. He remembered as he often did how his father had hit him for that,
when he had found the Caesar - Michael had always been the Caesar, wasn’t that clear, just as the Christ had always been the Lord? - touching himself at the public bath in Amastris, the filthy, cheap one they had to go to, carrying their own pails and greasy soap and dirty linen towels. Not simply beat him, his pitch-stinking fist crashing into the Caesar’s face; his father had told the men at the shipyard, and they had held him over the nauseating vat of caulking pitch and told him they were going to burn it off, and then they had tarred it! His father and those men had tarred it so that he could not touch it! It had not burned off like his uncles’, like they had said it would, but it had burned! And the Caesar had run home and told his mother (he and the Pantocrator so loved their mothers, they were so alike in that), and she had taken him to the baths and sponged him herself, as she had when he was smaller, and she had touched it again and again and cleansed it. And she had not let his father put his stinking hands on her after that. Never again. The Caesar stroked himself and realized that once he had destroyed Joannes, the Pantocrator wanted him to destroy his father.
‘Nephew, I am ready to hear of this plot.’ Joannes settled himself into the long, rectangular marble tub. ‘This tub is not sufficiently deep,’ he said. ‘It was made for smaller men. You would find it comfortable.’
Yes. But I will not have need of your apartments, Uncle, replied Michael in his own silent reverie. I will sleep on the Imperial couch. With my mother.
‘Who is it that poses this threat to me?’
‘The conspirators were not named, Uncle. But the attempt is known in some detail. The Vlach cheese you are so fond of is to have a poison introduced. Indeed this may be a mere charade, but would it not be prudent to avoid this cheese until more is known? Our Holy Empire can hardly afford the loss of its most devoted servant because of tainted cheese.’
‘Yes,’ rumbled Joannes. He splashed water over his torso and then opened the lid of his soap box. ‘I think we affront Providence if we take lightly such warnings, even if only founded on hearsay. You have shown prudence, Nephew, a quality I had not thought previously to ascribe to you. Perhaps we should discuss enabling you to attend to some duties of state.’ Joannes removed the soap from the box and studied it for a moment.
‘The prospect lightens my heart,’ said Michael, his heart racing and his arms trembling beneath the water.
Joannes dipped the soap in the water and lathered the small, yellowish, tallowy brick in his hands. ‘This soap is my most sinful luxury. While I am certain that the Pantocrator has scourged my skin with this eczema to instruct me in Christ-like humility, I am tempted beyond redemption by the soothing properties of the emollient ingredient. A chemist skilled in pharmacology prepares this especially for me each day. This was just delivered this very night. I quite forget all cares when it relieves the torment of my affliction.’
Michael was so cold, he thought his teeth would chatter. Why does he go on so much, unless he knows? But why does he lather the soap if he knows it is a deadly poison? Joannes began salving the lather over the purple blotches on his left arm. Michael was astounded by the surge in his loins. In a moment he might ejaculate.
‘Yes, Nephew, one can grow dangerously complacent at the word poison, as one is constantly besieged by such threats, and as so many clumsy hands, so to speak, have sought to emulate the poisoner’s art.’
Ice spread from the nape of Michael’s neck down his back. Was it too late to stop it? What if the ingredient only made him ill? If he knew, how could he go on lathering? No. It would work. Caesar. Emperor. Basileus. Autocrator. Light of the World. His hand in that of the Pantocrator.
‘Yes, the science of toxicity, which has an undeniable social utility, has few truly learned practitioners. There is one specialist, however, who has advised me on the use of certain paralytics that are useful in interrogation. I consider him the one true artist in his field, though you would not find him aesthetically pleasing in his own right. He is an immensely fat man.’
There, in centuries-old baths where pagans gambolled in an ancient yellow glow, the Pantocrator spoke to Michael Kalaphates, as He had beneath the limitless golden dome of Hagia Sophia: ‘Save yourself. As I forgave from the excruciations upon My cross, so I shall ask the Father that you be forgiven.’
‘Uncle, Uncle, Uncle!’ Michael shrieked like a dying beast and thrashed from the pool and fell to his knees beside the marble tub, his naked back as wet and trembling as a newborn foal. ‘Save yourself! Oh, Theotokos, save yourself, the soap is poisoned!’ Michael seized the lathered lump from his uncle’s hands, clutched at it desperately, and lost it to the floor. ‘Oh, Uncle, Uncle, Uncle, I would sooner die myself - I will die myself! Oh, Theotokos, oh, Uncle!’ He wailed desperately, like a widow keening and, with his face to the opus-sectile pavement, shoved the soap into his mouth, his limbs mad, flailing, the tentacles of an octopus pulled from the depths to die on a rock. The scent of his urine mixed with the foul, fatal bitterness of the soap.
Joannes stood above him, terrible in his nakedness. He extended his distorted arms, a demon retrieving a soul from the very bosom of the Christ. He grasped his nephew’s hair and jerked back. Michael’s neck twisted and his terrified eyes rolled, to gaze into the face of death. Joannes snatched the soap from Michael’s foaming jaws and threw it into the pool. ‘The soap is not poisoned, Nephew. I will not be dead as soon as you would hope, nor, unfortunately, will you. Your soul will be taken piece by piece, according to the schedule I set, in the Neorion.’ Joannes wedged his knee into Michael’s back and pulled harder on his hair. ‘You might mercifully accelerate that schedule by telling me who is in this with you.’
Michael Kalaphates, Caesar of Rome, stared ahead into the darkness and saw the fading golden arms of the Pantocrator begin to reach out to him again. The slut!’ he screamed. The slut commanded me to do it!’
‘Let him see me now,’ said the woman’s voice. She was not the same woman he had spoken to in the crowd. This woman’s voice was calm, grandmotherly, but with a timbre of great authority. Haraldr’s hands ached but his head was clear. The blow had not concussed him, only blackened his vision for a few moments and brought him to his knees; the thugs had been able to tie his hands and feet and slip several cloth sacks over his head. Thrown into a cart of some sort, a blanket or carpet over him, he had jolted over the streets for half an hour. He had heard the faint whoosh of flames, some distant shouting, animal noises. The can had turned many times.
The sacks were slipped off his head and Haraldr blinked into the torchlight. He was seated on the floor in a small, neatly kept room. The woman was standing. She was short, white-haired, with the inflated features of a woman whose beauty had aged into plumpness. She wore a threadbare, but clean, sleeveless linen tunic; her substantial bosom pressed against the fabric. Beside her, in a simple wooden chair with a curving back, sat a man, even older than she was. His eyes were milk-white with cataracts. Behind the aged couple, looking down over their silvery heads, stood the Blue Star.
‘I am the Blue Star,’ said the old woman.
Haraldr blinked. ’You. . .’
The old woman reached back and snatched the ear of the big man and pulled him forward until his jutting beard seemed to perch on her shoulder. This rascal is my son. He uses my name; it protects me. Confused you? Confusion is my livelihood now, you might say. I must be known, and yet not known. This devil helps me with that.’ She released the ear and batted her son’s cheek. ‘That’s all he’s good for.’
The Blue Star dropped her hand to the head of the old man and caressed his wispy white hair. This is my husband. He doesn’t hear, either.’ She turned back to her towering son. ‘I let the boy know what I am about.’ She looked at her son sharply. ‘So he won’t blunder into something!’ She came around and studied the bindings of Haraldr’s hands. ‘Cut him loose,’ she ordered her son.
Haraldr rubbed his hands and ankles and looked up at her. ‘The Blue Star,’ she began, acknowledging his evident curiosity, ‘is the n
ame that the people of the city once knew well. This . . .’ The woman, with some difficulty due to the tight fit, pulled her tunic down almost to the nipple of her left breast. The birthmark on her ruddy, fleshy breast was not blue but a faded brown that might have been deep purple once, and not a perfect star but indeed had five somewhat irregular points. ‘The Blue Star. They saw it - believe me, they all did, from the Bulgar-Slayer down to the porters. In the Hippodrome. I could do things on a galloping horse you couldn’t do on a gymnasium floor if you spent a lifetime trying. One foot, one hand, my leg up, leaps from one horse to the next. To start, to titillate them. Then swords and fire and what have you. I have seen two Emperors crowned. You have heard nothing like the way they acclaimed me in the Hippodrome.’ For a moment Haraldr saw the young athlete’s eyes, and he imagined the beauty she must have been, the spectacle of her. And then he saw Maria, her beauty, still alive, still vivid, and he realized he could not see her old like this, could not see a time when she would not be fresh and in his arms.
The Blue Star was an old woman again. ‘One day, during a practice stunt I had done a thousand times, I fell. I could not get up. I walk now but with pain and difficulty.’ Her head bobbed slightly. ‘Everything gone, the silks, the town house, snatched away by God. I came back here, where I had started. This man taught me that I had lost nothing.’ She bent and kissed the old man’s head.
‘These are my people, Varangian. Devils, whores, thieves, vagrants. They were his people too. The Bulgar-Slayer. He raised many of them out of the dirt, gave them reason to walk in the Christ’s path, proved that he would not let the Dhynatoi crush them if they even lifted their heads out of the offal in the streets. Then the Bulgar-Slayer was summoned by the King of Heaven and the Studion became a hell. But we survived.’ She fixed Haraldr with cold, brilliant eyes. ‘Now we are not to be permitted even to survive.’
Byzantium - A Novel Page 52
