Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Haraldr took a deep draught of unmixed wine. Spectacular but explainable; he had recently been shown the complex hydraulic lifts that raised the Emperor’s throne and had held in his hand one of the clockwork birds that had once bewitched him. Abelas was a wizard, but a wizard at mechanical stunts and sleight of hand. Haraldr drank again, relieved. He had feared that Abelas might have access to the spirit world. Fortunately that was not the case.

  The organs flourished briefly and Abelas emerged again, a plain-looking man, perhaps late in his third decade, in a loose white scaramangium. He held up his hands for the crowd’s acclaim and snakes coiled from his fingertips. He shook the snakes off and, in a prodigious, catlike leap, bounded to the Empress’s table, almost weightlessly dodging the litter of plates and goblets with his dancing feet. He planted himself in front of Lady Manganes and leaned his torso far over her, seemingly in defiance of both anatomy and gravity. His hair seemed darker and his black eyes burned in the candlelight. ‘Who are you?’ he asked her.

  Lady Manganes, a fleshily attractive woman with a spark in her own eyes, smiled mischievously. ‘Anna Manganes,’ she said, a hint of invitation, and fear, in her voice. Abelas whirled his arms in front of her face and made a motion as if pulling her soul right out of her body. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Salome,’ said Lady Manganes in a voice quite unlike her own. She seemed to listen for distant music, and rose, swaying, tapping imaginary cymbals with her hands. Then she leapt onto the table and began to whirl, faster and faster, and yet her feet never disturbed a single utensil. Abelas let her go on for a moment and then touched her head lightly, at which she stopped and climbed down to her seat. Abelas leaned over her again. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Lady Manganes,’ she said, shrugging.

  Abelas bounded across the table and stood in front of Haraldr, the fulfilment of a dread that everyone at the table had experienced. Haraldr glanced for a moment at Maria and saw her bite her lip; was it possible that she had engineered this trick? Haraldr vowed to resist whatever wizardry Abelas used to induce the trance; he had heard of old women from Biarmaland, seeresses who had similar powers to command other minds. ‘Who are you?’ asked Abelas. Haraldr met the furious eyes, as black and deadly as hot pitch. ‘Hetairarch,’ said Haraldr. The hands whirled and Haraldr saw the rings flashing around him like dozens of brilliant moths. It is the hands, the lights that compel, thought Haraldr. He focused on Abelas’s eyes and pulled his consciousness away from Abelas’s darting fingers. ‘Who are you?’ Haraldr’s eyes flashed knowingly at Abelas. ‘Hektor,’ he said, so as not to spoil the wizard’s show. He was trying to figure some stunt to perform when Abelas crouched over him and placed his hands on Haraldr’s shoulders. They both shuddered from the jolt. Abelas’s eyes retreated and then plunged like arrows into Haraldr’s soul. This man knows me, Haraldr told himself with utter certainty. This man knows who I am. Not simply that, but everything, things that I do not even know. Abelas nodded drunkenly, as if in affirmation of a truth so terrible, it made even him swoon. For a long moment Haraldr and Abelas remained locked in the dance of fate. Then the illusionist dipped his head as if to kiss Haraldr on the cheek. ‘We are both merchants of destiny,’ he whispered to Haraldr in a harsh, frightened voice. He danced away and leapt to the stage. ‘The Hetairarch has suggested a fitting climax to my vision,’ he declared to the entire crowd.

  The candelabra above the stage began to spin, slowly at first, then so fast that it was dizzying to follow the lights. Abelas was gone. His voice seemed to come from above the tables. Slowly, in a mesmerizing cadence, he began the story of the Creation. A nearly naked man and woman came on the stage, and it was obvious that they were merely actors. The light was distracting, whirling. Creatures and foliage appeared around Adam and Eve, somehow mechanically propelled onto the stage. Then a fish flew through the air, out over the audience, too brilliant to be a bird in some sort of guise, or even a lantern; many people pointed and watched. The characters on the stage vanished in an instant of flickering light, but some of the images lingered, like ghosts, a moment longer.

  The lights of the spinning candelabra were joined by other lights, and all were in motion. ‘Go to the end,’ said Abelas. Haraldr did not notice that a Senator’s wife had moaned and fainted only a few places down from him. Much of what followed was clearly a spectacular enactment of Revelations: the opening of the seven seals, the blowing of the seven trumpets, the horsemen of doom, the lamb and the beasts and the naked whore. Yet there were evanescent glimpses of less substantial things, great fires, and the star named Wormwood that glowed above the stage for what seemed a long while, perishing everything below.

  Finally the stage cleared again and Abelas appeared alone. He reached up towards the spinning lights and began to describe the city of New Jerusalem. His arms and hands seemed to weave a tapestry-like image of the pearl gates and streets of translucent gold; the crowd gasped as if his hands were indeed building this marvellous city before their eyes. Haraldr saw only Abelas’s flashing rings. Then Abelas intoned, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ and Haraldr could no longer blink away the fire in Abelas’s cupped hands; the flame grew, expanding into a great, golden, shimmering globe that seemed to engulf the courtyard; the voices around him exclaimed in a chorus and Haraldr knew that they all shared this vision. The light within the globe became brilliant, almost blinding, and Haraldr remembered what Abelas had whispered to him, not the thing that he had heard but the thing that had been whispered when he was unaware he was hearing. ‘Look for the dragon,’ the voice had said. A point of darkness, like a black star against a golden sky, grew until its huge wings spread over the globe of light like an obsidian dome, and he felt the cold gust of doom, and the brilliant light vanished.

  Haraldr shook his head. The vision faded into the reality of candlelit tables and silken dignitaries. Where had he been? Had Abelas entranced him from the moment their eyes met? The stage was completely dark, and Abelas was gone. The crowd was in a frenzy of speculation about, and recapitulation of, the wonders the illusionist had shown to them. Husbands attended women who had fainted, two men were almost to blows over something, and many simply sat in drunken, bemused awe. Then Haraldr realized that Maria was crying.

  Constantine rubbed his eyes. The oil-lamp cast spooky shadows over the rock walls of the scriptorium; were he the timid type, he probably should have begun to see demons crawling about the place. As it was, the demons were the doubts crawling about his mind. He closed the volume of archives he had just finished with; a poof of dust rose from between the wooden covers like a small djinn spiriting forth. He looked over the shelves, hoping against hope that he had missed something. No, he had been through all of them and found nothing. He wondered how late the hour was, and where he would go in the morning. This had seemed so promising: the looks in the monks’ eyes this afternoon. That was what was wrong. They had certainly heard of the man, and yet there was no record here. No, this was the place. He could hire soldiers in Caesarea and return and demand the monks’ cooperation. He could arrange a loan there, certainly, to pay the mercenaries. Suddenly the shadows did bother him. If the brothers had lied, it was not safe here. He remembered with a start that he had left his mule tethered to the ladder all this time.

  Constantine picked his way nervously through the darkened galleries. At one point he reached a cul-de-sac and for a moment thought he would panic. Tombs. He hated being inside these rocks. He reached the chapel and was startled by the growl. No, snoring. The monks did slumber before the Lord’s sanctuary was complete, but they slept beside their work. Constantine crept outside and set the lamp on the ledge and gingerly descended the ladder into what seemed a well of darkness. When he reached the base of the spire, he looked up at the light on the rock balcony above him and decided he should go back up and risk climbing down with it; otherwise he was blind in this strange and now pitch-dark otherworld. Then he glanced around the base of the ladder and realized that his mule was gone.

 
Constantine climbed arduously back up the ladder and retrieved his lamp. But as he set out on foot he quickly regretted having gone back for it. The shadows that danced around him, in and out among the spires, were more terrifying than any stumbling in the dark could possibly be. Where was he going? Surely there was an inn somewhere, or some cenobites who remained awake; he would pay them to lodge him. If only he could see a light.

  Cold water seemed to drain through Constantine’s bowels. Who was there? The same thieves who had stolen his mule? Constantine parried with the lamp as if it were a sword, thrusting it towards the craggy folds at the base of a cone. He saw red, feral eyes vanish into the night. Wild dogs, possibly more vicious even than thieves. He would have to get a loan in Caesarea now, simply to pay for his passage home, once he had reimbursed the mule’s owner.

  The scraping again. Constantine looked about the ground for some good stones to throw at the dogs; why hadn’t he at least brought a staff? The black blur flashed from the shadows and punched the breath from him. His lamp spilled and burning oil washed over the rocks. Hands clutched at his cloak and probed for his purse. He rolled into the dust, gasping for air, the hands now pummelling his head. He forced himself to his knees and pounded back with his chubby fists, eliciting muffled groans from his assailant. The two men, entirely unknown and virtually unseen by each other, traded blows in the fading light of the spilled oil. Constantine’s chest and arms seared with fatigue but he still flailed with unexpected force. The assailant fled, a clattering shadow disappearing into the night.

  Constantine remained on his knees, gulping the dry, dusty air. His head ached and his temples thumped with raging blood. Even in his distress he could hear the footsteps behind him and he whipped his head around. The figure was over him and he looked at the face in the last flickering light of the spilled oil and screamed.

  ‘He induces a trance, like a soothsayer,’ said Maria. ‘That is commonly done. His skill is that he can make hundreds of people see it at once. He has learned the ways of the mind, and how to make the mind see what it wants to see. He leads your mind to its own fantasies. But most of what you saw were tricks, to make you susceptible to the final illusion.’ Maria stretched her arms across the little dessert table and grasped Haraldr’s hands. Zoe had set up the tables all across the porch of her villa, as well as on the terraces descending to the Bosporus. The entire hillside twinkled with candlelight like a miniature city; the stairs, marked with glowing silk lanterns, were brilliant boulevards. There was no moon and the sea was sable-black.

  ‘Nevertheless, you cried at what you saw.’ Haraldr wondered if she had seen some new vision of his fate. Or perhaps her own.

  ‘At what I let myself see. I saw the fire and the raven because I dreamed these things. Because I am afraid for you. Not because they will happen but because I care for you. Because I . . .’ She trailed off, the missing words obvious. ‘You saw the dragon at the end, because that is your Norseman’s myth. But you are the only one who saw it. We all saw the light of New Jerusalem because we have all been in the Mother Church, and Abelas persuaded our minds to see it again. Abelas is very gifted, some say dangerously so. Do you know that he was escorted to his ship by his own Allemanian guards and has already sailed off in the dark? He worries that people who saw terrible things will try to kill him. The church would like to see him out of the way because he casts doubt on the veracity of miracles. And he will probably be mad within a year. I would say his art will soon be lost, and even the chronologists will be too frightened to record all of what we have seen.’

  Haraldr clutched Maria’s hands. What she had said about Abelas had, as she would say, ‘the resonance of truth’. But if Abelas had the gifts of a soothsayer or seer, he could without question see into time. And he had known Haraldr, had seen him born, had seen him die, had seen the last dragon fly at the end of time. And perhaps, Haraldr thought, Abelas saw my soul unmasked.

  ‘He knew you, didn’t he?’ said Maria. Haraldr’s eyes registered the shock. Maria was also gifted, perhaps dangerously so. Haraldr wished that Zoe had not left them alone. He felt unsure of himself with her now; in the light of the candle she was not the same friend he had grown to love during the long summer afternoons. She was the lover he had known on those endless nights. He knew what she wanted, the unmasking of the secret that separated their questing souls, and he still could not give it to her. ‘No.’ Haraldr could not look at her. ‘He did not know me.’

  Maria looked down and her fine, dark lashes seemed to work at vanquishing tears. When she looked up again, there was a kind of tragic acceptance on her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they are going to dance.’

  The dancers, a troupe of twenty beautiful young women dressed much like Maria, except in more colourful and less precious silk, formed a ring, their arms interlocking to form a continuous chain. To the music of flutes and cymbals they began to sway, first at the hips, sensually, then incorporating their entire bodies with fluid undulations of their locked arms and precise movements of their feet. Slowly they built to ever more elaborate, frenzied rhythms, movements added to movements until the ring swayed, twisted and spun like a top with the power to change its shape endlessly.

  Soon younger men and women, many quite drunk, began to form rings of their own, swaying and whirling with less grace but equal fervour. Maria impulsively grabbed Haraldr and led him to one of the rings on the terrace below him. They spun about with a large group for a while, and then the circles broke into fours, and finally couples were left to their own improvisations. The music whistled and chimed to an elaborate climax. The night was a blur of flashing silk and candlelight. Maria soon outpaced Haraldr and moved in with the professional troupe, her grace almost the equal of theirs and her undulant hips and bared legs even more erotic. On and on she went, her eyes and teeth shining fiercely.

  Finally the music stopped to offer the exhausted dancers relief. Maria came to Haraldr, her breasts rising and falling rapidly and her forehead wet. She wrapped her arms around him and he could feel that her passion had only been momentarily diverted. She looked up at him, her eyes still on fire. ‘I would give my soul to make love to you tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you give me yours?’

  He held her to him. ‘I know what I must say to you,’ he said. Tell her, he pleaded with himself. Every inhibition was gone at this moment - the oaths to Norway, the risk of exposure, the fear of her betrayal - and yet that truth had never seemed more deeply buried in his breast. If he told her, everything would change between them. And he loved her too much at this moment to want to change anything.

  Maria’s eyes teared as she waited. Finally she dropped her head. ‘Why? I will share anything with you. If you are a criminal, a traitor, a slave, if you have a wife, a queen, a whore, I don’t care. I have to know who you are. Don’t you see what it means that that is so important to me? I want to know how to place you within my life. I will do anything you want me to. But I have to know.’ She looked up at him again. At that instant Haraldr realised that they both stood on some great precipice, and they could either leap from it wrapped in one another’s arms, or walk away from that brink separately, strangers for ever. He could only answer that fate with silence.

  ‘I have told you everything,’ she said, her voice the plaint of some small, doomed animal. She shuddered with a single sob, released him, and ran madly across the terraces, her legs pumping and her fists attacking the night air.

  ‘You are an angel of the Lord,’ said Constantine as the noseless monk dabbed the cut over his eye with a wet cloth. ‘I apologize for regarding you as another cutthroat. Who knows how long I would have lasted out there.’

  ‘I followed you,’ said the monk. ‘They lied back there. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon. He was once . . .of our lavra. He is in trouble. Men in Constantinople. We monks protect our own.’ The monk’s voice had the curious resonance of the noseless; he spoke as if it took a great deal of time for his words to travel from his brain to his mouth.

  �
�So why have you helped me?’

  ‘Because he is a friend of mine. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon.’

  Constantine decided not to pursue the matter; the noseless monk was a not too bright Good Samaritan, and perhaps he thought that Constantine was someone who could help his friend with his legal problems. And perhaps Constantine could. ‘Can you take me to see Brother Symeon?’

  The noseless monk nodded and turned into the night, adeptly picking a path through the jagged bases of the spires. The darkness was overwhelming. It was as if the monk’s single taper were a candle adrift in a vast dark sea. The monk moved swiftly and Constantine’s heavily fleshed chest ached. Brother Symeon awaits, he told himself as he grimly pursued the black shape before him. The key to all Rome may be out there in this hideous night. They began to climb, scrambling over tortured, worn rocks. The air was suddenly cooler in pockets. To his left Constantine glimpsed a few glowing portals. He imagined the jagged presence of the cones around him without actually being able to see them.

  ‘The ladder . . . needs repair,’ said the noseless monk. He thrust his taper towards a weathered wooden lattice that climbed into the blackness. ‘Watch that the steps don’t break. You being . . . big.’ Constantine heard the old wood creak beneath him as he climbed. After what seemed an endless, purgatorial ascent the monk paused ahead of him and the timber beneath his foot groaned, cracked and sagged. Constantine’s foot flew out into the dead void and his shoulders seared with pain as he suspended his ponderous bulk from his burning hands. Where he found the will to pull himself to the next rung, he could not say. Perhaps the Hand of the Pantocrator.