Hord understood. ‘Who is she?’
‘Her name is Sclerena. She is the niece of the Emperor’s first wife. They have a touchingly intimate relationship.’
Hord shook his head. ‘So he goes to all this trouble, telling us that he is inspecting this highly important construction project, and sets this table and serves us whatever we wish so we won’t grumble while he ploughs his niece. And he has only been married for three months.’
The chamberlain appeared at the head of the table and cleared his throat. ‘Sirs, Mistress Sclerena sends you a small token of her esteem for her Emperor’s guardsmen and Senators.’ A dozen young women in diaphanous white tunics pranced into the yard and began a sensuous, whirling dance. ‘This Sclerena is apparently a very clumsy builder,’ said Halldor. ‘I am beginning to think that this construction here will require frequent inspection and supervision.’
Hord and Ulfr laughed and joined the newly minted Senators in pounding a rhythm on the table. Some of the dancers had already begun to leap onto the table when Haraldr appeared and stood at his place setting. He was dressed in the robe of the Hetairarch, the office he had agreed to assume temporarily for Zoe’s new husband. Beside Haraldr, resting
on the tabletop at the level of his hip, was a pudgy, apparently disembodied head. The head made a few ridiculous faces and then sprang onto the table, propelled by the suddenly revealed, squat body of a dwarf. The dwarf sprinted the length of the table, pausing along the way to swat the rumps of two dancers. He halted dramatically in front of Scylitzes and made motions, as if drawing out his own tongue. He turned his rear end to the Senator and made loud farting sounds, then sped off, as if propelled by his feigned flatulence. He lay beneath the legs of one of the dancers and stuck his tongue out obscenely. Finally the dwarf leapt off the table and ran into Sclerena’s house.
‘Who was that?’ asked a stunned Ulfr.
‘That is Theodocranus the Dwarf,’ said Haraldr. ‘He was a famous buffoon in Adrianopolis and promises to succeed here as well.’
Halldor looked down at the Senators, who were still in hysterics over the diminutive clown and were already emulating a few of his more vulgar gestures with the dancers. ‘I believe he already has,’ said Halldor wryly. ‘This Theodocranus the Dwarf is likely to be our next Senator. How do you know him? He doesn’t seem like one of Maria’s friends.’
‘He is my petitioner.’ Haradlr folded his arms and smiled smugly.
‘What?’ Ulfr groaned. ‘Now we will be forced to stay here, but in the Numera Prison instead of the Numera barracks.’
‘So you think,’ said Haraldr confidently. ‘I believe the Emperor will find Theodocranus a man of exceptional eloquence.’ This statement was greeted with incredulous head shaking, and Haraldr sat down to share his insight. ‘I have observed that the Emperor hates dealing with anyone who reveals any kind of serious intent. If a minister comes to him with a well-conceived plan to drive the Seljuks out of Taron theme, the Monomach will scowl and throw that minister out before he can finish the introduction to his discourse. But send a one-legged comic in there to stutter the latest banter from the market-place, and the Monomach is all ears. I believe Theodocranus will get the Monomach’s attention in a way that I never could.’
Haraldr watched the dancers for a while, hoping that Theodocranus was having a successful interview. After a quarter hour of waiting, the Imperial Chamberlain approached. ‘Hetairarch, His Majesty would like to see you.’
Haraldr was escorted into the modest hall of the house, then to a dressing chamber where the Monomach stood in his purple scaramangium and smoothed his luxuriant silver hair. Theodocranus stood on a chair placed directly in front of the Emperor and held up a bronze mirror for his sovereign. He had just begun a ribald jest about the Emperor’s notorious sexual appetite. ‘The Emperor visited the Imperial stables,’ prattled Theodocranus in his warbling voice. ‘He saw that one of his prize stallions couldn’t hump the mare he had been penned to stud. The Emperor asked the stallion what was wrong and the stallion said, “I am afraid of losing it in there.” The Emperor pulled his out to show the stallion and said, “I’ve put this in many a mare of my own, and look, it is still here.” The stallion’s eyes grew wide when he saw how the Pantocrator had endowed the Monomach, and he said to the Emperor, “Well, if mine was that big, I certainly wouldn’t be worried about losing it, either!” ‘ Theodocranus clapped his stubby hands and Haraldr winced. The Monomach clutched his stomach in a paroxysm of mirth, finally tumbling to the floor in comic rapture.
Haraldr waited until His Majesty had recovered his breath; however, the Emperor seemed in no hurry to get to his feet again. Finally Haraldr said, ‘Majesty, has Theodocranus mentioned to you the matter--’
The Monomach held up a powerful, squarish hand. ‘Yes, yes, Hetairarch, my dear little friend here has presented the matter with a delicacy and subtlety you would do well to emulate. And therefore I have agreed to consider the matter.’ Haraldr waited while the Emperor wiped the tears from his eyes; His Majesty remained on his haunches. ‘Oh, well, quite,’ said the Monomach, suddenly remembering what he had just said. ‘I am amenable to the matter if your Mother Zoe is. You know how devoted I am to her happiness. Yes, I fear you are becoming too sober-minded here, Hetairarch. Perhaps you do need a winter in Thule to help you appreciate the delights of the Imperial Court.’ The Emperor held out his arms to Theodocranus, who bounded into the Imperial embrace like a small, cuddly child. The Monomach covered the dwarf’s squat face with friendly kisses. ‘Now, my little friend!’ The Emperor chortled with renewed enthusiasm. ‘Tell what I did when a dozen naked whores awakened me in the middle of the night!’
Maria’s hand felt like a dry, warm cloud in his. She led him up the gently rolling slope towards the back porch of her villa. Along the narrow path, grapevines grew in neat, perpendicular rows, and she paused and stooped to examine a cluster of dark, heavy grapes polished like agates by the bright late-afternoon sun. Maria plucked one and popped it in her mouth. ‘I will drink from this vine again,’ she said. ‘I know I will.’ She clutched Haraldr and gave him a kiss, wet and sweet with the juice of the grape. ‘When we visit from Norway.’
Haraldr held her and stroked her thick, silky black braids. He had not even brought her Argyrus’s uncharacteristic offer of a good price for her villa; he knew that she would need this place as a symbol and a hope when she was so far from home. ‘We have not been given leave yet,’ he told her. ‘We may yet drink this harvest. This winter.’
She tilted her chin up against his chest. Her eyes were more perfectly azure than the sky. ‘I am not melancholy about leaving,’ she said defensively. ‘You do not need to lift my spirits with such doubts. Zoe has already given her permission once. And I am ready to sail. I would like to give you a child before I am an old woman.’
Haraldr kissed her forehead and shared that vision. They held each other tightly and rocked in the breeze. After a while Maria turned her chin up again. ‘I can hear your troubles pounding away in your chest, King Haraldr. Are you thinking about the lifetime of cares I will bring you?’
‘I am worrying about beginning that lifetime. I am . . .’ He squinted into the sun. ‘I am worried about the length of that lifetime.’
Maria pulled loose and took his hand again and led him to the steps on the sunny southern porch, which afforded them a panorama of the glitter-sprinkled cities to the south-west and the vineyards and cypress groves to the east. She sat beside him and looped her arm in his. ‘Tell me what concerns you,’ she said. ‘Leave nothing out.’
Haraldr watched a dhromon slide past on the Bosporus, banks of oars dipping leisurely, the red-and-black hull and deadly golden spouts vivid. His sigh was his preface. ‘Zoe is not the same Zoe. So much has happened to her.’
‘I know things are different with her. And I have not been able to ... I don’t know. I have forgiven you for sleeping with her, which is the least I can offer, since you have forgiven me ... Mar. But I cannot ...
I knew she was opposed to you, and I thought I understood. But for her to then take you to her bed, when she knew that I still loved you. And she knew that you still loved me. I cannot forgive ... I know it is wrong, and I know I will one day understand. But it is hard for me now.’ Maria found his hand and twined her fingers in his. ‘It is of no consequence. You will obtain her leave, and if you do not, I will. I persuaded her to embrace her sister, and they are still as thick as thieves, particularly now that the insatiable Monomach has found a new amusement. I can certainly persuade her to release me.’ Maria kissed Haraldr’s temple. ‘So I am confident that we will soon begin our lifetime. Why do you worry that our time together will be brief?’ She asked the question matter-of-factly, almost gaily.
Haraldr hung his head and looked at his boots. ‘I have made the east-journey. I grant you that our return will not be as dangerous as our coming, since the Pecheneg horde will not expect us, and our ships will be light and few enough that we can more easily avoid the cataracts. But it is still an enormously dangerous journey.’
Maria jabbed Haraldr in the ribs. ‘I am worried about encountering your little love, the Princess Elisevett, when we arrive safely in Kiev. She is probably not so little any more. She might try to poison me. And you might be smitten by her again.’
‘That was a boy’s love.’
‘Well, hers was not a girl’s trick. You still don’t believe that she was really a virgin? When I was fifteen, I could play the false virgin very well myself.’
‘I don’t think she was playing.’
‘I can see you are still smitten with her. So that is what I am worried about. What else?’
The grin fled from Haraldr’s face. The sun seemed strangely cold, as if the white fire had turned to ice. ‘My enemies in Norway are very powerful. I have to overcome them before our lifetime can begin.’
‘Look what you have overcome here in Rome,’ said Maria with high-pitched incredulity. ‘You are a legend here. Here? Throughout the world. These men will flee when they hear your name. And don’t tell me that these foes won’t be daunted, simply because they are Norsemen. Mar and his men were Norsemen, the most feared in the world.’ Maria threw her hands up in exasperation.
‘That is here. Norway is where I lost ... I lost my strength. I am afraid I will lose it again. Even Olaf could not defeat these men.’
Maria nodded slowly, knowingly. ‘Olaf,’ she said softly. She paused for a moment, considering her words. ‘Haraldr, have you ever considered that perhaps you might be a greater man than Olaf? That perhaps Olaf, however brave and heroic he was, might have had neither your wits nor your strength. That perhaps Olaf blundered at Stiklestad and lost everything, and that you had no part in it except to be a brave boy trying to be a man. You did not lose that battle or your throne. Your brother Olaf did!’
‘Perhaps that is what troubles me. That I will be a greater king than Olaf, and yet someday will also blunder more gravely, and cost many people everything. Perhaps cost your sons their lives.’
‘At least you admit that we will probably survive long enough to have sons.’
Haraldr smiled ruefully. ‘I have never told you this. That night at Zoe’s, when Abelas performed, he called me a “merchant of destiny”. I feel the power of my fate to command the collective fate, and it has begun to frighten me.’
‘I felt your fate the first time I looked into your eyes. Do you remember? At Nicephorus Argyrus’s palace. That look we exchanged at the table. It chilled me and excited me at once. That was when I decided I had to make love to you.’ For a moment Maria sounded like the old Maria, wild and spooky. ‘I thought you would bring me a new, all-engulfing darkness, a more excruciating prison in which I could conceal my soul. Instead your destiny brought me to the light. Your star is a bright and joyful one. That is what your destiny brings.’
Haraldr stood up, still unsatisfied, unable to resist her persuasion while he sat next to her. He could not face her eyes. ‘What if I were killed trying to reclaim my throne? You would be alone, in a strange and distant place. I cannot bear to think of it.’
‘I would marry Halldor!’ Maria laughed out loud.
Haraldr turned, a look of relief on his face. ‘I would want you to,’ he said eagerly. ‘I am serious. To think of you alone ... I would come back from the dead to prevent that.’
‘If I were to die at the hands of your Pechenegs or to be flung into the Dnieper, who would you marry? Elisevett?’
Haraldr’s face immediately furrowed with pain. ‘I would marry no one! I would mourn you for the rest of my life. I would wither and die. I would suffer every time I looked at a woman.’
‘So I would be condemned to an eternity of looking down from Paradise and knowing the unhappiness in your breast?’ Maria’s lips twitched with amusement.
Haraldr shook his head, as if that terrible fate were virtually imminent. ‘How could I ever replace you?’ he asked plaintively. ‘It would profane your memory. I would never let someone else displace you from my soul.’
Maria shot to her feet, her eyes on fire. She grabbed Haraldr’s arm and turned him to face her. ‘Do you think anyone could ever remove you from my soul?’ she shouted angrily. ‘Even after a lifetime? Even after a thousand men had had me?’ She shook her fist at him. ‘How can you imply that one woman could take me from your breast? I will always be inside you. Even if I never touch you again, I will touch everyone you touch for the rest of your life.’
Tears ran down Haraldr’s cheeks. ‘I did not mean that. I only mean that it would be unbearably painful to live a lifetime with someone else, when I would always remember that our time was so short.’
Maria brushed at his tears with her lithe white fingers and put her arms around him. ‘Time?’ she murmured. ‘There is no time. There are only the moments when we are together. That is all the time there ever was, and ever will be. How can you measure that much time?’
That night Maria dreamed it all: the ravens and the fire and the king beyond the creek and the beardless king vanquishing the bearded king. When she awoke, however, she remembered only the last. It was still dark, and she slid next to Haraldr and pressed her naked flesh so tightly to his that he finally roused from his own dreams. ‘Darling,’ she whispered, still partially entranced by drowsiness, ‘I remembered the name of the beardless king. It is William.’ She kissed him on his shoulders and neck. ‘But it will happen after we are both dead. And we will be together then, in the purest golden light.’
Haraldr was fully awake. He smelled her hair and whispered in her soft, warm ear. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I dreamed that we were always together, and that the light you have lit in my soul was never quenched.’ Their lips almost touched, and they paused and felt each other’s warm, moist breath. ‘I have never loved you more than I love you at this instant,’ said Haraldr.
Symeon raised a hoary eyebrow. ‘Hetairarch,’ he said in his imperturbably decorous voice, ‘if you do not have a handkerchief, might I offer you one? Or several.’ Haraldr looked at Symeon with curiosity, decided that the old chamberlain was anything but senile, and accepted three of the soft, embroidered linen handkerchiefs from Symeon’s translucent hands. Without further preliminaries Symeon nodded at the doorkeepers, and they slid open the bronze doors to Zoe’s apartments.
Haraldr immediately understood Symeon’s strange consideration. The ante-chamber was like a dry steam bath; there was even a mist of intensely pungent smoke in the air, as if every form of incense known to the Orient were being burned. The large adjoining reception chamber was the obvious generator of this atmosphere. Half a dozen servants worked at three large tables, tending rows of smoking braziers, heating flasks, grinding herbs and sealing bottles. The heat from the braziers would have brought a camel to its knees. Zoe was once again in the business of perfume and unguent manufacture, which according to Maria was her habit when she was neglected in love.
Haraldr had already had to mop his drenched face twice before Zoe appeared. She was as mirac
ulous as ever, her skin like smooth marble, moist but not wet from the heat. She wore a red scaramangium cut from silk so sheer that no contour of her body was left to the imagination. And the contours were as beguiling as ever. But the eyes were different, more opaque, set at an angle slightly oblique to him as she addressed him. ‘Hetairarch . . . No, I don’t like that for you. King Haraldr is much more suited. Such a secret to conceal from your mother. Had you told me during our dalliance, who knows what madness might have possessed me.’ She led him into her bedchamber. The arcade facing the sea was shuttered despite the beautiful late-summer day.
Haraldr was glad to have the heat as an excuse to mop his brow again. She had not spoken of their affair since that single conversation after his return from the Bulgar War. Then he realized he should be relieved; Zoe never leapt at what she really wanted. Like a true Roman tactician, she always leapt at something less important first. He decided to humour her diversion. ‘Yes, Majesty, many opportunities were probably lost that night.’
Zoe laughed. ‘My queen to your king. We should have been very wicked together. Could you have loved me?’
‘Yes. I believe I have expressed my love for you in different ways since then.’
‘Could you make love to me again?’
‘Majesty, I am in love with Maria. . . .’
‘You will never marry Maria.’ Zoe’s eyes were glacial.
‘Majesty . . .’
‘Do you know what my skin feels like in this heat?’ With magical grace Zoe slipped her scaramangium over her head and stood as naked as Eve. Her vast white bosom, set off by erect lilac nipples, was as astonishing as ever. Her pubic triangle was flossed with gold. She cupped her breasts in her hands, and approached Haraldr. ‘Think what these would feel like hot and wet on your thighs.’ She pinched her nipples and ran the tip of her tongue over her crimson lips. ‘Perhaps you could kill my husband and add Emperor to your titles.’
Byzantium - A Novel Page 86
