Byzantium - A Novel

by Michael Ennis

  Haraldr maintained his desperate vigil, trying to will her back. His soul was cold to the core, and yet somewhere a light flickered. He struggled for that light, as he had when it had meant his own life.

  The tips of her fingers twitched slightly. And then the life came back, slowly; her hand no longer simply rested in his but knew his touch. She pressed his fingers as weakly as an infant. Her head rocked and her eyes fluttered beneath her scorched lids, and then the miracle, the thing he had willed and prayed for, a glimmering like sapphires hidden among ashes. He squeezed her hand gently and leaned over her.

  ‘My darling, my lifetime.’

  ‘Don’t . . . look ... at me,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘I am ... a cinder.’

  Haraldr struggled to control himself. His entire life was here in these blessed few moments, to be lived with dignity or squandered in futile tears. ‘You were never more beautiful to me than when you played the old crone in Neorion,’ he whispered, fighting his tears with all his force. ‘Until now. Now I see the soul without any artifice, and it is more dazzling than any sight I have ever seen.’

  Maria’s body shuddered and her breath came in short, uneven gasps. Her eyes closed but she fought her way back. ‘Darling,’ she whispered, ‘you must . . . know this. That day ... we wondered if death could tell us ... if our souls had been true to us ... or had only worn masks.’ She fought again for breath. ‘I know . . . now . . . that my soul has never lied to me . . .or to you . . .’ Her throat rattled and her head rolled from side to side, but her eyes became lucid again.

  Cold tears burned Haraldr’s raw face. ‘I believe more than anything in the truth of your soul. To you and to me. Your soul will always be in my soul. You will touch whomever I touch for the rest of my life--’ The gates of resolve shattered and he broke down. ‘Oh, my love, I would give anything if God would exchange our fates. Oh, God, I did not mean to kill you.’

  ‘Stop this,’ she hissed, tilting her head up with an enormous will. ‘You were my miracle ... my resurrection. Listen to me. I have seen what follows the fiery end of the world. It is not the darkness I lived in before you came inside me. Death is not dark. There is the light . . . There is only light. You promised me, darling . . . now I promise you. I will come to you and hold you again. Even after the last black dragon flies. I promise you I will hold you in the light. There is only light . . . And only . . . love . . .’

  Maria’s head fell back from the great effort of speech. Haraldr felt the strength ebb from her hand, but he would not let her go in the darkness. He spent the long hour to the dawn in a lifetime of memories, smelling her dark hair and feeling her white skin and hearing her crystal laugh.

  Just as the sun brought pink life over the death-fouled Bosporus, Maria’s head turned to him. She did not open her eyes but her lips moved several times. Somehow she formed the words. ‘The king . . . beyond the creek . . .’ Her head rolled back. A short while later she whispered, ‘Love,’ and a smile flickered over her face.

  The sun rose above the green banks of Asia and glittered the water. A brilliant shaft slanted over the railing and struck Maria’s crusted face. Her eyes opened and Haraldr clutched her hand tightly and leaned over her. The colour of her irises was like some rare and impossibly lovely blue gold. Then Maria simply closed her eyes, and Haraldr felt her soul leave her body and enter his.

  Epilogue

  Northumbria England 25 September 1066

  The trumpets sounded and the ducks flocked skywards from the calm surface of the River Ouse. As if by this command, the egg-blue mists began to lift. The Norsemen began to leap over the sides of their dragon-ships and assemble on the damp, grassy flats beside the river; there were enough of them to populate an entire city. The clearing air had the dry fragrance of a lingering summer that would not yield to fall. The day would be hot.

  The King of Norway waited on the bank, his diamond-sharp blue eyes sweeping over the long rows of lean, swooping-prowed Norse dragons. The most powerful invasion force the world had yet seen awaited his bidding. His army gathered in a vast cordon, his court men crowding next to him, eager for the honour, their banners, limp in the quiescent air, proudly set. The warriors fanned out in a vast cordon that blanketed the tree-dotted slopes to the north. The King waited for their jubilant banter to fall to a reverent hush.

  ‘Comrades!’ bellowed the King. ‘Northmen! Men of Ireland! Men of Scotland! Men of Flanders! Men of England!’ He waited for the answer.

  ‘Alvardr Haraldr! Hradskyndir Haraldr! Hrodaudiger Haraldr! Haraldr Hardraada! Haraldr Hardraada!’ The gale of Norse acclaim was mixed with the oaths of the other tongues. Ducks raced overhead, their startled protests unheard. A golden sliver of sun shimmered on the horizon.

  ‘Brave comrades!’ The King’s seamed face blazed with the force of his words. ‘Five days ago we showed England the iron fist of our allied might! The corpses of the fyrd of Northumbria built a bridge for you across the River Humber!’ The army exploded in another chorus of triumph, and King Haraldr waited until the echoes vanished. ‘Today we go to Stamford Bridge to accept the victory we won at Fulford Gate! We come to accept all of England north of the Ouse.’ Again the chorus of triumph. ‘But today we must show England the open hand of our just intentions! We have come to rule, not to pillage! We have come to govern, not to slaughter!’ The army cheered with lessened enthusiasm. Haraldr looked around at the sea of blood-eager faces that could have inundated him in an instant if they did not at this moment worship him. He caught the sparkling blue eyes of Eystein Orre, the ferocious, already legendary ‘orcock’, his fiercest commander, the man who had annihilated the English rear and centre in the overwhelming victory at Fulford Gate. The man who reminded Haraldr of the untroubled glories of his own youth. The man who would be husband to the King’s firstborn, his most beloved, his daughter Maria. Eystein dipped his shaggy blond head in understanding. If necessary, he would second his King in this.

  Haraldr turned to the other young man, whose martial spirit he did not have to rely on but without whose understanding he could not endure. His son and heir, Olaf, did not need to nod his approval; this had been the precociously wise Prince’s counsel the previous night. Haraldr sought the love in his son’s lucid blue eyes and considered the legacy Norway’s King was now forging for his people. A mighty northern Empire, at last on the verge of unification. Eystein Orre with the sword to preserve it, quiet Olaf with the wisdom to govern it. And, of course, Maria. Eystein and Olaf would be their own men, and that was all Norway would need. But in his daughter Maria, the King himself would live on.

  Haraldr waited for the half-hearted cheers to erode into the inevitable murmur of relatively polite grumbling. Then he signalled for his stewards to unlace the leather thongs that tightly cinched his byrnnie. The stewards lifted his byrnnie away from him like foundry workers removing a plaster caste from a statue. The King emerged in a glass-smooth blue silk tunic, and his army buzzed with astonishment. ‘Warriors! I do not need armour to accept hostages and appoint governors. So I leave behind my Emma, the woman who has been truest to me in battle. Besides, the day will be hot. And this lady’s tight embrace would boil me like a fat goose in a kettle!’ The King stroked his thickening middle to illustrate the reason for the tight fit. The army followed with a vast exhalation of laughter. Eystein Orre stepped out of his byrnnie and the fashion of the day was established.

  As the Norsemen stripped off their body armour – they retained their helms, spears and swords, as they would on a journey to a market or church - the English Pretender Earl Tostig sought Haraldr’s ear. ‘My Lord,’ he said, his ruddy forehead scowling, ‘I do not advise this. I have ruled over Northumbria myself, and if the English are the most untrustworthy of folk, the Northumbrians are the most untrustworthy of Englishmen.’

  Haraldr studied Tostig’s perpetually tormented face. He often wondered what fate had encouraged him to care for this difficult man, whom he had disliked so much at first. Tostig’s offer to sponsor a conquest o
f England, against Tostig’s own brother King Harold Godwinnson, had seemed preposterous as well as treacherous at first. And yet as Tostig’s case had unfolded, as Haraldr had learned how he had been favoured for the succession by old King Edward, only to be undone by his rivals at court, Haraldr had pitied him. And when he saw the man’s remarkable, unwavering love for his wife, Judith, the sister of the Duke of Flanders, he had begun to like him. (If only Haraldr’s love for his Queen Elisevett had been as constant.) And finally it had been Ulfr who had convinced King Haraldr that Tostig was a man who would be true to him. Ulfr. God in Heaven, if only Ulfr could be here! What fate had taken dear Ulfr on the eve of the triumph he had so long laboured for, even during the times when his King had lost hope?

  ‘It is a risk I must take,’ Haraldr told his English ally. ‘I learned that bitter lesson in Denmark. To rule without the affection of a people is to wage endless war. Crush the army, yes. But the people are won with fairness and mercy. However, I do not entirely discount the risk you remind me of.’ Haraldr recalled the portents that had pursued his great fleet like screeching gulls throughout the long voyage from Norway. Someone had dreamed of ravens perched on the stern of each ship; another man had seen a wolf precede the English armies, a Norseman in his bloody jaws. Haraldr himself had spoken to his dead brother Olaf in a dream and had received a foreboding of danger; but then perhaps that was merely his own fear of conquering where Olaf had never dared. All great ventures spawned great anxieties; so far the ravens had fed only on English corpses. Still, when fate cautioned, only a fool laughed. How ancient were the scars of that truth on his weary heart.

  Haraldr beckoned to Olaf and Eystein Orre. ‘My eaglets!’ he said in greeting to their unlined, ready faces. ‘I go to accept a surrender, which is a duty appropriate to a man who has been bowed by five decades. I want to leave behind my strength, however. I will take most of the allies and half our Norsemen with me; that should be sufficient to impress the English. But I want my best Norse fighters to remain here and guard the ships, without which we are all lost. Eystein, you will command them in my absence. And, of course, Olaf, you must also stay. I go to grasp the future. But without my brave and able eaglets to nurture it, that future will be as good as stillborn.’

  Eystein and Olaf gave their assent, and Haraldr Sigurdarson, King of Norway, the greatest warrior of his age, made the announcement to his army. Overhead in the warming sky, a line of ducks soared south in a sharp, dark vee.

  The last butterflies of the season still frolicked over the verdant banks of the River Derwent. Stamford Bridge, the crossroads leading to the city of York, was less than a rowing-spell away across the gentle green land. Haraldr walked with his new Marshal Styrkar and the Earl Tostig. The unarmoured army behind them was almost ten thousand men, a loose, lazy formation that frequently lost many of its constituents to the beckoning meadows and cooling river.

  ‘You know this William the Bastard, do you not?’ Haraldr asked Tostig.

  ‘Yes. Duke William of Normandy is married to my wife’s niece.’

  ‘Do you believe that his invasion fleet has already sailed?’

  ‘They have been gathered at the mouth of the Dive for some time. The weather delays. Or perhaps William’s caution. But should they land, the Normans and their allies will only be a factor after we defeat my brother. My brother is no fool. He will turn to meet the greater threat with his strength undiminished. Duke William is an able huntsman. You are Haraldr Hardraada. My brother Harold will face you first.’

  ‘But will your brother come north to confront us, or wait in defence of London? If he is as skilled as his reputation suggests, he will wait and allow us to extend ourselves.’

  ‘He is unpredictable and moves rapidly. But if he comes north, we will have at least a week to prepare for him.’

  Haraldr nodded. ‘Whether he comes north or not, I must rely on the goodwill of the people of Northumbria to guard my back. That is why no armour can help us win the battle I am waging today.’

  The King suddenly increased his stride and walked out ahead of Tostig. The Royal Marshal Styrkar held Tostig back. ‘The King wishes to take his own counsel,’ whispered Styrkar.

  ‘I understand him,’ said Tostig. ‘I entertain my own demons. When my wife is with me, they are kept at bay. I presume his daughter does the same for him. The pretty daughter. The changeable one. Maria.’

  Styrkar laughed. ‘We say that our King and his daughter Maria are so close that there is but one life between the two of them. You can see the way their eyes go to each other at the table. They know what the other is thinking. He will begin a sentence, she will finish it. They will both laugh when no one else does. It is shame that he cannot be as close to her mother. Queen Elisevett is a fine woman.’

  Tostig’s scowl seemed to deepen. ‘Why did he take a second wife?’

  Styrkar shrugged. ‘To bear him sons. After Elisevett bore him the two princesses, she could no longer conceive. Haraldr said that he had known two women condemned to offer their love on the altar of state, and he would not permit that for his daughters. So he got the bishop to accede - he has great influence over the church, as you have seen - and wed the eventual mother of his sons without a divorce from Elisevett.’

  ‘Yes, I have met her. Tora. A noble woman.’

  ‘Elisevett still has precedence. You saw how he allowed her, and of course Maria, to sail with us as far as the Orkneys, while Tora had to bid him farewell in Nidaros. He loves Elisevett the best of his wives,’ Styrkar grinned. ‘And she loves him the best of her husbands! But it would take an Irish scribe to trace the jealousies that separate them.’

  ‘They say he has always loved a Greek woman.’

  ‘That was before I knew him. It may be one of those tales invented by the skalds.’

  The King walked ahead for a long while, alone, as if drawn to Stamford Bridge by the sun-coloured butterflies darting before him rather than the imperative of the impatient armies at his back. The day was his vindication, his ... resurrection.

  There had been so many times through these long years when he had wondered why fate had taken Maria and spared him. The constant quarrels with fractious Jarls; the long, bitter, inconclusive war in Denmark; the guilt he felt about Elisevett - circumstances that never would have come about if he were only a man and not a king. So many times he had thought of Halldor and his friend’s strange renunciation, and he wondered if Halldor had been perhaps the wisest of them all. It was Halldor who had never really recovered from that night so long ago, who had always been haunted by the burned and broken body of the one woman he had never made love to. Halldor had helped Haraldr regain his throne, and then he had gone back to Iceland, to live quietly on a farm. Haraldr wondered if Halldor had received news of Ulfr’s death yet. The road of life, so many turns.

  And yet now that road had levelled into a glorious autumn. Today would at last consummate what he had so long ago dreamed of with her. For her. This would have been Maria’s Empire, she who had left behind her own Imperial legacy to join him in what had then been only a promise, what for her had meant only death. He wondered if she approved of him now; he knew there had been many times over these years when she had not. That, too, was one of life’s strange paths, the route her spirit had taken through his life. Sometimes he could reach out and touch her; at other times he could not even remember her voice. He could never see her in her entirety, but often he could recall distinctly the parts of her, the incandescent irises, the gull-wing eyebrows, the soft white inside of her thigh. He thought of the Maria who had taken her place in his life; she was as distinct as his hand before him, not only the young woman she was now, but the infant, the child, the adolescent, every phase of her life. Even the first Maria never could have been that close, to have been created by him, to become a woman as he watched in wonder. And yet his daughter Maria could never share with him the supreme intimacy that the other Maria had shared with him. Perhaps, he often thought, the two Marias, the daughter and
the lover, were different aspects of the same soul, that through him his first Maria had so deeply touched her namesake that she lived again, to restore that joy to his breast. There were times when the two Marias were that much alike, or so he remembered, and yet times when they did not seem alike at all. There were even moments, albeit fleeting, when he thought of Elisevett as the first and greatest love of his life. In the world as it was, not as it had seemed to be so long ago beside the Bosporus, what more could a man ask from a wife, except to know that from time to time he loved her above all else? And Tora, who had given him sons and love, how could she be denied her claim to his heart? Perhaps they were all aspects of the same soul, of the great love that only youth can know, just as an old man’s shattered dreams are all fragments of the single, pure, incandescent purpose he had imagined as a young man. The dream seemed pure and whole again today, but he would give it away to the young men who could truly believe in it. But the love was not the same as the dream. The dream had faded and crumbled, and had now been restored. But the love had never faded. It was only in many different places now. She had been the source of the light, and as best he could, he had shared it with many.

  ‘Let them raid the cattle,’ Haraldr said to Styrkar, his voice edged with annoyance. ‘I will pay for whatever they plunder. But if they begin to molest the peasants, I will send my house-karls down after them.’ Haraldr watched the Norse warriors wade the reed-choked shallows of the languid Derwent, then scatter over the broad, very gradually sloping meadows on the west side of the river. Several bowshots to the north, where the little river narrowed and the banks steepened, stood Stamford Bridge, a simple structure of wooden trestles and rotting planking. The King and his retinue stood on a grassy flat about thirty ells above the dull silver water. The sun was at its zenith, the heat oppressive. Haraldr wished the wind would come up and evaporate the sweat from his soggy silk tunic.