Harald, who had taken a deep draught of wine, began to feel it. "Gyrgi, Georgios Maniakes, alone understands fully what went on," he said. Striving to curb the return of anger: "He and I had our quarrels, but he remains among the best men I have met down here; next to Olaf the Stout and Jaroslav the Wise, the best man I ever served."
"A vile trick they played on him," said Maria. Harald saw the color rise in her cheeks. One small hand drew into a fist. "The Empire has so few men worth anything. And then to throw this one into a dungeon!"
"Hush!" Her mother glanced fearfully at the doorway. "You are of Her Sacred Majesty's court."
"By Zeus, we will speak truth tonight," exclaimed Nicephorus. "Our servants are old and trusty folk come with us from the country. I say God will punish the Empire for its ingratitude to Maniakes."
"At least the Saracens will," drawled Harald.
Maria surprised him with a chuckle. "Why do you stay in this ungrateful place, Manglabites?" she asked.
"For gold," he shrugged.
"Now there's an honest man, father. The true Homeric insolence . . . Forgive me, despotes. I should not have spoken so familiarly. Dwelling far from court as we did most of my life, I fear I never learned proper manners."
"Why, kyria," said Harald, "what they call manners down here seems to me only . . "He broke off, feeling he approached dangerous ground. "As for the battle of Draginas," he said in haste.
When he had finished with that, Nicephorus suggested they dine. The meal was at once more simple and more subtle than most Byzantine cookery: fruits, soups, fish prepared in olive oil, well-chosen wines. Harald paid most heed to the candle glow shimmering along the curve of Maria's breast. The talk soon turned to himself, by her doing. "Will you never return home?" she asked.
"Indeed I will, when the time seems ripe. I had to flee my country, but someday I shall come home to be its king."
Her eyes widened. "One man alone dares speak of winning a whole nation?"
"It can be done," said Harald eagerly. All at once he found himself telling her of it: of his youth, Olaf the Stout and the battle at Stiklastadh; of his refuge in the wilderness, the ride across the Keel, the winter in heathen Sweden and the journey across the Baltic; of Jaroslav's folk; of warring in the marshes of Poland and on steppes where cornflowers blazed blue under an endless mournful wind; of the fleet that went down the Dnieper toward Miklagardh the Golden; of the years since, roving and lurching about the Midworld Sea, remembering even while whetted metal sang how the young beech trees had laughed in a Northern springtime.
The candles guttered low, Dorothea quietly lit fresh ones and slipped off to bed, Nicephorus kept Harald's goblet filled, while still he talked. So had he never spoken to anyone ere now. It torrented from him, a rush of years, sword blink and sea blink, horses and ships and all high longings, in that night he gave more to the girl who listened than he had ever given even to himself. He saw how she leaned forward, lips parted, to feel his pain as good men died or stood beside him on a sloping deck with spindrift in her hair. Belike the wine had somewhat to do with it for them both, but nonetheless, when much deeper in his cups he had never so laid down his soul's shield.
After he stopped, there was a long stillness. They heard church bells peal, far and icy sweet across the great slumbering beast of a city. "How you have wandered!" she breathed at last. "What have you not seen and done?"
"Much," he said, rather hoarsely. "I have not yet been hailed king at the Frosta-Thing, nor avenged Olaf, nor laid the Northlands under me, nor sailed to that western land of wild grapes and the Wonderstrands which Northmen found and lost again."
"If anyone can, it is you."
He gave her a sharp look, jarred out of his past, but saw no flattery in her. She seemed to have forgotten she was a woman and to be speaking to him as one of his own warriors might—the same scarred faithful man who called him "thou" and would say to his face that he was wrong.
"Could I but have seen a little of your world," she sighed.
"It has been ruled by war," he said. "And war is rain, mud, heat, fever, saddle sores, hunger, thirst, blisters, lice, filth, wounds, and death."
"Yet you have mastered those troubles."
"Well, one learns ways to make life in the field somewhat easier."
"Could I not?"
"If you were a man. Fortunately, kyria, you are not."
"I am only one of a hundred veiled serving ladies at court," she said, seriously and the least bit drunkenly. "Twice have I seen you there. Of course you did not notice me, but how I remember! You came in like a breath from the sea, blowing out those stale perfumes. I thought I could feel your strides ringing through the floor."
"Do you not like Her Majesty's service?"
"Well ... it seemed a chance to ... to do something new, as well as gain influence to help my brothers. But now—"
"You'll soon be wed and have your own household, kyria."
"Indeed." Her nostrils flared. "A whole house to move about in, a whole score of ignorant slaves for companion, and—no, not a whole man to myself. A half man whose work is to lick the Paphlagonian's buskins."
She rose. "Come," she said, "let us go out in the peristyle. The air indoors has gotten so thick."
Nicephorus watched owlishly as they left, too full of wine to accompany them as propriety demanded.
They stood between slim white columns, looking downhill over the city and the Golden Horn and Asia, shouldering black across the harbor. A breeze touched them, lightly as the moon did the waters. Overhead glistened a thousand stars. It was very still. Harald saw the girl's face outlined upon darkness.
"The old days were better," she said after a while. "When Artemis hunted in forests wet with dew, and the gods dreamed on Olympus, and every tree and spring and mountain was haunted by its own spirit . . . Almighty Zeus, what has the world become?"
"I think you are half pagan," he jested.
"More than half, perhaps," she said.
"From what I've heard, though, there ancients kept their own women well locked up."
"True . . . Penelope weaving the same tapestry over and over. . . . And yet she waited for a man who had wrought mightily." Maria shivered. "Best we go in again. The night grows cold."
Nicephorus nodded at them when they returned. "Do come back soon, Araltes," he said.
"Why, was that a hint he go?" laughed Maria.
"Well, I shall come back," said Harald, shamelessly adding, "Had you any particular day in mind?"
2
He joined the Skleros family one morning not long afterward for an outing in the hills beyond Galata. Nicephorus went on horseback like his guest; four brawny porters carried his wife and daughter in a litter; a retinue of slaves and servants came chattering after.
Harald felt tongue-tied, somewhat ashamed of giving himself away so much the last time. Maria must have had the same feeling, for she sat mute behind her veil. But when they passed the palace of Blachernae, she leaned out and said, "Father, you should show Manglabites Araltes the Bellerophon statue."
"Why, so I should, if he has never seen it," Nicephorus agreed. "Go on ahead, we'll come fast enough."
Dismounting, he and Harald went past the outer walls and into the Panhagia. There they stood, the hero and his winged horse, caught in one great leap; it was as if the wind of their flying still whirled through the dusky chamber, as if the horns of gods long dead blew again in heaven. Neither man spoke, they had a need of silence. .
When they were again riding, Harald said, "That is enough to make a man believe there are such horses."
"Just so," said Nicephorus. "Do you wonder that we remember that age as golden?" He tapped his brow. "Up here I know full well that they were men like us, who sweated and stank, cheated and slandered and fornicated and committed stupidities as much as any Christian. But by Apollo, in my heart I know otherwise."
"Something like that might be built again," Harald ventured.
Nicephorus shook his head and s
miled with closed sad lips. "Men cannot raise the dead. If genius is to bloom anew, it must be from virgin soil. I fear I've done Maria an ill turn, filling her head with that which is now a thousand years behind us. How can she be happy in this sated, stiffened world? She ought to live where men work toward something new."
"That may well be right," said Harald thoughtfully.
"I have had few friends. My sons were good and dutiful, but only Maria seemed to feel as I did. God forgive me, I took advantage of that."
They caught their party beyond the gate and accompanied it over the bridge and so down a wide highway between the villas of the rich. Harald brought his horse next to the litter. A curl had fallen across Maria's forehead. "That thing you ride in should be good training for shipboard, kyria," he smiled. "I myself would get seasick."
"It is not comfortable," she answered tonelessly, "but it is considered proper for a lady."
"Can it be a virtue in us barbarians that we have fewer manners?" he teased.
Her interest awoke. "Is it true what I've heard, that your Northern women go about freely, unveiled, even crossing seas with their men?"
He nodded. "My mother ruled a large estate alone after my father died. Perhaps she still does. I've heard nothing of her for some ten years now." With a tightening in his breast, Harald said roughly, "There are few such women."
"I wish I could meet her," said Maria.
Dorothea made scandalized gestures, but Harald ignored them and continued talking with the girl. The ride became short.
They halted on a wooded ridge. The attendants busied themselves raising a pavilion and setting a table. Maria sprang from the litter and walked over to a steep bluff. Harald followed, aware of how the thin garments fluttered and were flattened against her in the wind. When they stood side by side, looking down across fields and orchards and houses to the remote flash of the Golden Horn, her head reached to his breast.
Slowly, she took her veil off. "Let the servants gabble," she said with a note of scorn. "They will anyhow."
He spread his cloak on the grass and they sat down together. She drew her knees to her chin and hugged them. The wind fluttered that one stray lock of hair; the rest shone like a raven's wing in the hot light. There was a tiny beading of sweat along her upper lip.
"Have you ..." She halted. "I pray pardon. Pay no heed."
"Have I what?" he asked. His left arm brushed her shoulder as he leaned on that hand.
She flushed and would not look at him. "It was a foolish question, despotes. See, what a fleet that is coming out the Horn!"
"Well, then," he said brashly, "if you'll not tell me, I must guess. You were about to ask if I had a woman waiting for me at home."
"I was not!" she cried.
"Will you swear to that?" he grinned.
"You are being rude, Manglabites."
"I am a barbarian with no manners," he mocked. "It was not hard to guess. Every woman thinks about the same thing."
Her anger drooped. She looked almost sorrowfully at him. "Do you really think so poorly of us, then?"
Taken aback, he fumbled after a clever reply but found none. "Not all women, surely. I cannot say. I've had little to do with them."
She saw him in retreat and followed him with quick merriment. "So, a monk! A paragon of chastity!"
Lest she think him unmanly, he answered more frankly than he meant to: "Now let me finish. I have been with women, of course, but we were never ... I suppose we never understood each other. First I was a boy, and since then I have been hastening off to fight somewhere."
She said so low he could barely hear: "You must be a lonely man."
"There is no woman waiting," he said. "Unless my mother lives."
Her hand brushed across his, a touch instantly gone again. The wind soughed through the poplars and tossed them in serpentine ripples, bright beneath the sun.
"I know not what there is about you, kyria," he said. "You loose my tongue more than is seemly. What a one you must think me, clacking away like an old carline!"
"No matter. No matter . . . Araltes. I am not one to gossip to others."
To cover his bewildered delight that she had addressed him by name (was that her intention?), he shaded his eyes and peered toward the water. A train of galleys crawled on their oars like beetles. "I think those must be the supplies for Sicily," he said. "They'll have a favoring wind in the Marmora."
"In ancient days," she said, as anxious as he to speak lightly, "they could have gotten a bag of wind from Aeolus and been sure of good passage."
"At home our fishermen often buy wind sacks from the Finn," he remarked.
"Perhaps Father's guess is right," she said. "If the Achaean wind god was Northern, perhaps the Achaeans themselves were."
Harald rubbed his chin. "Well, I shall tell you. The Finn is an old man, withered as an empty wine bag, who sits in the smoke under a skin tent and cracks fleas. Even the fellow who carved Bellerophon would be hard put to make a nude athlete of him."
"He could be carven as a god of fleas, then," she suggested. "Marble fleas upon him."
"Which clump when they hop," he said.
"And have tiny chisels to bite with."
"They could be trained to work for stonecutters ..."
Dorothea was shocked at how immoderately her daughter and the Manglabites laughed, through the entire meal and afterward, and none of their words made sense! She was relieved when they went home in the evening.
Torches flared as they paused outside Nicephorus' house. "Will you not come in for a last cup?" he asked.
"No, thank you," said Harald. Maria had told him she must go early to bed because of having to attend the Empress in the morning. "I must get back. But will you and your family not come dine with me soon?"
Nicephorus studied his shrewdly. "With pleasure. I will be sure to bring my whole family."
Harald clattered back through a gloom of avenues, wondering why his head should be in such a whirl. Curse it, he thought, he knew nothing about preparing a feast, nor did his present cook. Tomorrow he must go out and buy a slave who understood such arts. No, tomorrow the Varangians would be drilling. Well, Satan sink them, Halldor could take charge of that.
3
Ulf Uspaksson sat on a bench outside the Brazen House, carving, amidst the looped vines, an elephant's tusk and beasts beloved of Northmen. Sunlight rained over him, his shirt clung wetly to the squat powerful frame and his black-furred arms were bare. He looked up as Harald's gigantic form rounded the corner. "Good day," he nodded. "I've not seen you for a while."
"No," said Harald, "I've been busy elsewhere. I only stopped here today to see how things were faring."
"Oh, thus and so." Ulf laid down his knife and mopped his low forehead. "The Caesar asked me yesterday why you had absented yourself from his reception. I lied like Mohammed on your behalf, but he remained ill pleased."
"The Caesar? Bugger him," said Harald shortly.
"Look here," said Ulf, "this cannot go on forever. You got your titles and honors for fighting and standing guard, not for moping about like a bloated bull calf. Beware lest they weary of you."
Harald glared down at the broad ugly face. "Who's the chief of this corps?" he snapped.
"Somebody must speak plain truth to you. It's common gossip that you're so smitten with some girl at court you've even stopped having to do with other women. By the nine thousand lovers of Freyja, why do you not lay her and be done?"
"Enough!" Harald's hand dropped to his sword.
"Well, marry her, then. If I did not care about your good name, and your life, I'd not have said anything."
With an effort, Harald throttled his temper and nodded. "You run off too freely at the mouth, Ulf, but I'll take it as well meant."
"I call you no fool," said the Icelander gently. "Once or twice in a lifetime, if a man is favored by a good Norn, that happens to him which seems to have happened to you. I ask naught but that you take steps to ward what you have won."
/> "Yes ..." Harald left him.
He spent the day weighing Ulf's words. Often an outsider has clearer sight. He had been seeing a great deal of Maria Skleraina these past weeks; let him own honestly that he wanted her, and that a hundred years in her company would be too short. Let him then ask her hand, by heaven! He shook his head, awed at the suddenness of his resolution. But why not, why not, why not?
That evening he appeared at the Skleros home. Invitations had quietly stopped being needful some time ago. Nicephorus and Maria were alone in the library, he resting on a couch while she read aloud to him from the Agamemnon. Harald stood silent in the doorway, listening.
" 'Now do I swear no more behind a veil
my truth shall hide like a new-wedded girl.
A shining wind shall blow strong to the sunrise,
and like a breaking wave lift to the light
something far greater than this pain of mine . . .' "
She grew aware of him. The book fell from her hand. "Araltes," she said, as if his name belonged to the poem.
Nicephorus rose. "Good evening," he said. "Come join us. Do you know Aeschylus? I swear there will never be another like—Why, what is the matter?"
"Nothing," said Harald. "Nothing wrong."
Maria's eyes widened. Her hand went to her mouth. "Araltes," she whispered, "you're not being sent away ... to the Serbian war?"
He must grin at that. John had grown much too frightened of revolt at home to dismiss the trusted Varangians. He shook his head and, awkward again, sat down on the edge of a chair."Nicephorus, can we talk freely?" he asked. "I will go," said Maria.
"No, stay." In a rush, like charging a line of pikeman: "I wish to ask for your daughter in marriage."
Harald dared not look at her, he was watching the older man, but he heard how she gulped.
"This is not unexpected," said Nicephorus slowly.
"Well, I suppose I am no good dissembler." Harald's fingers strained against each other. "But I am a king born, and rich, and can take care of my own. I can make her a queen."
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