The Varangian

by Bruce Macbain

  Well, this is progress, thought I to myself. And how long will it be before I cross swords with Harald?

  Just then a chill wind ruffled the surface of the water and a shiver ran through me. Of excitement—or fear?

  2

  I Am a Barbarian

  I opened my eyes at dawn on my first morning in Miklagard, awakened by the cooing of doves outside my window. Young Piotr was already up and laying out my clothes. He was a good lad, lent to me by Ingigerd, of course. Was part of his job to spy on me? Probably.

  The ambassadors’ hostel was a big stone pile built around a courtyard, and we occupied one small room on the second floor. Other rooms housed a miscellany of men whose clothes and speech alike were foreign to me. I had met a few of them at dinner last night. (Dinner was a skimpy affair of cold lamb, a few limp vegetables, and some vile tasting wine that they call retsina. God knows what they put in it.)

  Yesterday, on the way to the hostel, which lay near the Forum of Constantine, Psellus had led me and Piotr at a fast clip down the Mese, the central avenue of the city, where an immense stream of humanity—more people than I had thought lived in all the world together—flowed and eddied through one vast plaza after another. Columns taller than pine trees. Enormous bronze and marble statues so lifelike that they looked as though they might speak. Immense jets of water that shot into the air like the geysers of my homeland and fell back into wide marble basins. My jaw, I’m embarrassed to say, hung open the whole way, while my guide rattled off the names of this and that emperor, this and that saint, at a mile a minute. Psellus, as I was to learn, was an enthusiastic teacher—of anything to anyone—who, in all the years I knew him, never stopped talking except to draw breath.

  I was half dressed when Piotr motioned me to sit so he could change the dressing on my wounded shoulder. He had barely begun when our minder knocked upon our door, bustled in without waiting to be invited, and began to speak. “Off to the palace, Gospodin Churillo.” (He spoke Greek to me but seemed to take enormous pride in dropping in the occasional Slavonic word.) “Had your breakfast yet? No? Never mind we’ll get something from a stall. Mustn’t keep the Logothete waiting.”

  “The log—?”

  “The Logothetes tou dromou.” He pronounced the words slowly with exaggerated movements of his mouth as if speaking to a child or an idiot. And this was only the first of dozens of unpronounceable titles that I must learn to wrap my tongue around. “Minister of the Post and Foreign Minister all in one,” he explained. “His department includes the Interpreters’ Bureau and the Office of Barbarians, and a great deal more besides. An important man. My superior.” His pride was unmistakable. “He will need to examine your credentials and schedule your audience with the Emperor.”

  “Barbarians, sir?”

  “Yes, well, ah, that is to say, you.” He made a wry face and looked slightly uncomfortable.

  Leonidas, my fellow slave, had called me that, and always with a sneer. For you must understand that the Greeks divide the world into two halves—themselves and everyone else. And everyone else is barbaros. When it was only Leonidas, I could ignore it. Now I was in the midst of a city where the meanest inhabitant might consider me only one rung higher than an ape or a performing bear.

  “Come on, then.” Psellus was already out the door.

  It’s a longish walk from the Forum of Constantine to the Brazen Gate—the domed guard house with its three massive bronze gates which forms the entrance to the Great Palace on its landward side. A score of scowling blond warriors clad in scarlet tunics with long-handled axes on their shoulders mounted guard on either side of the entrance. The Varangians! Suddenly my heart was in my mouth. Was he here—the man I must kill? I stared at the impassive, helmeted heads. That tall fellow? Him? No, no, not him.

  “Come along, gospodin,” Psellus said impatiently and shot me a quizzical look. What did he see in my face? Obediently, I followed him through the vestibule, watched from above by the glittering eyes of two vast faces shaped from bits of shining glass. “Justinian and Theodora,” Psellus named them, leaving me to wonder who they were. And then we emerged into the palace grounds.

  The Mega Palation, the Great Palace of Constantinople. How can I describe it to you, this city within a city? Five square miles of palaces and pavilions linked by lush gardens and tree-lined walks, where exotic plants grew and plumed birds strutted, where more of those astonishing geysers leapt and splashed. Everywhere were guards in gilded armor; everywhere secretaries and messengers hurried on nameless errands; everywhere officials robed in silk swept along, their juniors swimming behind them like schools of brilliantly-colored fish; everywhere the echo of footsteps and a constant susurrus of whispered conversation. We followed a twisting, turning path through this confusion of color and sound—Psellus with chest thrust out and head high, looking neither right nor left and me stumbling along behind, my head on a swivel, trying to see everything at once. The memory flashed through my mind of that long-ago day when, a lonely Iceland farm boy of sixteen, I had gone to the Althing and been astonished by the crowd. You could drop the Althing into a corner of these grounds and never notice it.

  We came at last to a two-story building of pink and blue veined marble surrounded by a quiet garden and Psellus ushered me inside. The Logothete’s office was spacious but very plain. The walls on three sides were lined with books. On the fourth wall hung cases where butterflies were fixed behind panes of glass. One window was open to the fresh spring air. Behind an ebony desk inlaid with ivory plaques, the Logothete sat, bending to his work. A small man, dressed in a plain brown tunic, he was balding with a great expanse of forehead, a small beard on his chin, fifty years old perhaps. With long delicate fingers he was pinning a large specimen, brilliant with black and orange wings, to a board. Only when he had got it to his satisfaction did he look up. “A beauty isn’t it? From my own garden. One of the boys caught it yesterday evening.”

  Psellus cleared his throat and launched into a preamble little of which I understood. It came as a rude shock that the Greek these educated men spoke to each other was a far cry from the rough sailor’s Greek I knew. Psellus had been talking baby talk to me, the barbarian. After a moment, the Logothete waved him to silence and favored me with an inquiring smile. I determined to make the best impression I could and began my carefully rehearsed speech detailing the virtues of the sweet-tempered, affable, and beautiful Princess Yelisaveta (the vicious little bitch!) and how her loving parents, though heartbroken at the thought of parting from her, desired a suitable marriage for her. I drew from my wallet a small painted portrait of her, which considerably softened her needle-sharp nose and chin. The Logothete took it in his long fingers, looked at it a moment and set it down beside the butterfly: two lifeless specimens side by side. I produced also a list of the gifts that would accompany her when the happy day should arrive.

  The Logothete looked at me long and hard until I had to lower my eyes. “You’re young to be entrusted with such a mission. I wonder they didn’t send old Oleg who visits us often.” I had a story prepared for this but he didn’t give me a chance. “Never mind. Your audience is scheduled for a week from today, although one can never be certain. Sometimes circumstances…” He left the thought unfinished. “Young Psellus here will tell you everything you need to know. I leave you in his capable hands. A pleasure to have met you, gospodin. We’ll see each other again, I’m sure. And that leaves only the small matter of the douceur.” He used a word I didn’t know.

  “Excuse me, Excellency?”

  “The douceur, the gratuity. Good God, how plainly must I say it, the gift.”

  “Allow me to explain, Excellency,” Psellus broke in. “Gifts that open doors, Churillo. Surely you understand. Without a gift nothing happens. It’s how things work.”

  “A bribe!” I exclaimed, using a low word I did know. They both had the grace to look embarrassed. I emptied my purse on the Logothete’s desk; I only had some thirty or forty pieces of silver. “If that
’s not enough I can go back to my rooms.”

  “This will be quite sufficient,” the Logothete said in his precise way. “Thank you.”

  “And it all goes to you?”

  “Not at all. It goes up, it goes down, it spreads itself around. It is the oil that lubricates this great machine. Stay among us long enough, Churillo Igorevich, and you will understand.”

  “I hope I will.”

  I felt his eyes on my back as I left the room.

  3

  The Throne of Solomon

  During the week that followed, I saw little of Stavko or any of the other Rus I had traveled with; their days were taken up with buying and selling in the markets. I spent those days in a waking dream. Each morning Piotr and I set out to explore the ‘Queen of Cities,’ anxiously careful to note landmarks as we went so that we could find our way back to the hostel at night. I can only liken the city to a forest where the trees are columns, the clearings are plazas, the lakes are fountains, the hills are the domes of churches. But here my simile breaks down, for it is not a green forest but a white and golden one—white with dazzling marble, golden with crosses flashing in the sun on the domes of churches. For you must know that Miklagard is a city saturated with religion. Everywhere are churches and monasteries, everywhere hordes of black-robed monks, everywhere holy men, bearded and filthy, clad in sackcloth, hung with chains, squatting on the tops of pillars. Young Piotr bowed and crossed himself at every holy man and priest we encountered, and looked reproachfully at me when I didn’t. But he would avert his eyes from those astonishing statues of the old gods, which equally inhabit the city, for he assured me that demons lived inside them.

  The city was filled with wonders. In the great square they call the Augusteum is a huge mechanical clock with twenty-four doors around the top which open at the appointed hours. Near it rises a lofty tower, intricately carved, surmounted by the bronze statue of a woman that revolves to show the direction of the wind. Here, too, is the Milion, a great arch above a milestone from which the distance to every city in the empire is measured. On one side of the square is the great domed pile of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and, stretching away from that, the hippodrome, where a hundred thousand people can gather to watch chariot races and wild beast hunts. Overlooking all, the Emperor Justinian sits astride his horse, a bronze masterpiece so tall herons build nests on his head. Piotr and I spent a whole day in open-mouthed wonder exploring this single square; and it is only one of many.

  But Miklagard is also a city of cruel contrasts. On the great thoroughfares noblemen in silk robes ride on Arabian horses and noble women peer out from gilded carriages, street musicians stroll, moneychangers sit amidst heaps of coin, the balconied mansions of the rich rise up on either hand, and the porticoes enclose shops that offer delicacies, jewelry, fine stuffs and perfumes from every corner of the world to the dense throngs of plump and well-dressed citizens who pass by. But turn the corner and you are in another world—a world where the poor—so many of them!—live in squalor where the lanes are quagmires of filth, where the corpses of animals and unwanted children lie crawling with worms, heaps of refuse buzz with flies, wild dogs prowl, and beggars reach out bony arms and snatch at your cloak as you pass by. The smell is enough to turn your stomach. Only in my years as a slave had I seen such human misery.

  Every day I wandered farther afield: to the edge of the city where the massive walls rise up, to the great harbor on the Bosporus whose soaring lighthouse looks down on the ships plying back and forth between Europe and Asia, and again to the Great Palace where I was soon to make my appearance. The guard was changing at the Brazen Gate—a company of Varangians going off duty and another coming on, looking splendid in their white leggings and scarlet cloaks, marching in step as their officer called the cadence. My fascination with the city these past days had nearly driven Harald from my mind. Now I looked, I stared, but saw no giant Harald towering above the rest—this man I had been ordered to kill, wanted to kill because he had foully betrayed me. Was Stavko wrong, then? Was this all a fool’s errand after all? Had I come all this way to kill a man who wasn’t here?

  On the day of the audience, the streets were hung with garlands and strewn with carpets as a jostling crowd of onlookers lined our route to the palace. We three ambassadors—envoys of the Caliph of Cairo, the Lombard prince of Salerno, and myself—rode on white stallions, led by servants in white livery. Behind us trundled wagons loaded with gifts. Vyshata and Stavko and twenty sailors from the Rus trading fleet were on hand to manage ours, which overflowed with marten pelts, casks of honey, and immense candles, enough to light half the churches of the city. Stavko was giving me such winks and oily smiles that I finally had to look away. I’d never been the center of so much attention in all my young life and I confess my heart was thumping. I had hardly slept the night before.

  Our destination was the Magnaura, one of many distinct palaces that together make up the Great Palace. It housed the fabled Throne of Solomon, seated on which Michael, Emperor of the Romans, would receive us.

  In the forecourt we dismounted and were greeted by the Master of Ceremonies, a handsome man with grey, ringletted hair, his body draped in maroon silk with gold brocade. He led us and our interpreters inside and down a series of vaulted galleries to the gilded doors of the throne room. My two fellow envoys walked at ease beside me, chatting to each other in low voices, looking slightly bored, like men who had been through this before and were no longer impressed. But I—my head swung this way and that, from one wall to another, all of them populated with the glowing images of saints. More than anything it was the faces I couldn’t tear my eyes from. The Romans (for this is what the Greeks like to call themselves; I will use both names for them) build these faces from tiny cubes of glass of every hue, thousands of them stuck together, the labor of the endeavor beyond belief. But none of these faces smile. The men especially: pale-skinned, black-bearded, angry, with compressed, down-curving mouths and wide, staring eyes that seem to follow you as you pass by. With a sudden shock of memory, I saw the face of my father, Black Thorvald, on that morning long ago when I found myself looking into his dead, staring eyes. Not a comforting thought.

  Then the gilded doors swung open upon the antechamber of the throne room and here was the Logothete. I almost didn’t recognize him. I had last seen him dressed in a plain tunic with no ornament, now he was gorgeously robed and wore a gold collar set with pearls around his neck. We bowed deeply to him. He spoke a few words to my two companions through their interpreters and then to me in Greek. “Churillo Igorevich, your gifts are most welcome as is your proposal for the princess’s marriage. The Emperor will consider it carefully. Of course, these arrangements are never simple. Psellus tells me that you will address the Emperor in your own words. Admirable. So rare that an envoy troubles to know our tongue. Although in your case I gather the trouble was involuntary.”

  So he had learned my story from Psellus. I had decided that I would speak in my own voice. Call it showing off, but what is a story-teller if not a performer? At least, so I had thought a few days ago. Since then I had made Psellus coach me until I knew my piece perfectly. Now, as I felt my throat go dry with fear, I wished mightily that I hadn’t. Still time to turn it over to Psellus, who was lurking somewhere behind me. But no. I was too proud, or too vain, to give up my chance to address the Emperor. And, as it turned out, much depended on that decision. More than I could have guessed.

  “So,” said the Logothete, turning away. “I hope you have a good strong voice.” I wondered what he meant by that. I would soon find out.

  We passed now from the antechamber into the throne room, a stupendous pillared hall of three aisles. Overhead swung huge crystal chandeliers, shedding just enough light for us to find our way but not enough to expose what the Greeks perhaps did not want us to see. As we entered, the courtiers in their various colored costumes, who stood in ranks along the walls, began a rhythmic chanting—the words I could not catch—and, at the sa
me moment, the hall shook to an avalanche of sound, a thundering bass that filled the air all around us and shook up my guts. It was like standing next to some great waterfall. I could not even guess what produced it. Then the curtains parted and I saw the Emperor, a small figure at a distance of some seventy paces, seated on a dais, flanked by the ax-bearing Varangians. And what I will tell now, I don’t expect anyone to believe, but it is the truth: on either side of the dais were great golden lions that opened their mouths and roared and beat the ground with their tails and also a golden tree upon which tiny golden birds chirped and moved their wings. I turned with a questioning look to Psellus, who had come to stand beside me. Nothing he’d told me ahead of time had prepared me for this.

  The Master of Ceremonies touched the shoulder of the Saracen ambassador and led him forward. At three places, where there were discs of purple marble set into the paving stones, the man threw himself flat on his face and groveled. Then the curtain closed around him, leaving him face to face with the Emperor. And all the time, the courtiers kept up their chanting, those indescribable musical notes rumbled through the hall, the lions roared and the birds sang. After some minutes, during which I felt a peculiar vibration in the floor beneath my feet, the curtains parted, the ambassador of the Caliph returned to his place and the whole thing was repeated with the ambassador of the Prince of Salerno.

  And then it was my turn.

  If any Icelander ever hears this history of mine, I beg him to forgive me. Our little country has not even a king, let alone an emperor who claims to speak with the voice of God. But you must understand what was at stake. I had come to kill my enemy, and if this was what I must do to accomplish that, then I would do it and gladly. So, yes, I threw myself down on those purple discs—clumsily—groveled with my face pressed against that cold marble and all the time imagined my father, my dead brother, my old crewmen from the Viper hooting and laughing at me. Now I was at the foot of the dais, close enough to feel the rush of air from the lions’ mouths and see the sapphires in the eyes of the golden birds. To one side was an extraordinary contraption of golden pipes and levers, with four men laboring at it, from which the music poured, and directly in front of me was Michael, Emperor of the Romans, seated on his throne, almost near enough to touch. He was not an old man—I’d been told he was still in his twenties—and his features were well-formed. But his color was sickly and his eyes, filmy and unfocussed, looked listlessly out into the middle distance. On his head was a diadem with pearl pendants that hung over his ears. His body was swathed in some indescribable wrapping of gold brocade crusted with sapphires and rubies that looked as if it could stand by itself, and his boots were of purple leather sewn with pearls. His hands were jeweled to the fingertips. Motionless, expressionless, vacanteyed, he seemed hardly a living man at all.