The Varangian

by Bruce Macbain

  Suddenly Selene felt as though she were going to faint—the heat, the smell, and maybe the fact that she was newly pregnant with our third child. She tottered and grasped Olympia’s hand to steady herself. “Oh,” cried Zoe, full of consternation, touching her pale cheek with moist fingers, “forgive me. You ladies want a cold drink, don’t you, and something to eat. I’ve kept us here too long. We’ll go out into my little dining room.”

  They sat around a small table, sipping chilled white wine and eating pastry stuffed with dates and nuts. The heat and the smell followed them even here, but compared to the mixing room it was bearable. When, Selene wondered to herself, did those unfortunate slaves get to rest and sip a cool drink?

  “You see why I told you to wear light clothing, my dears,” said Zoe. “I always do, when I can. I hate court costume, so heavy, so confining, I’m sure you agree with me. And don’t ever swaddle your children the way I was, wrapped in brocade so stiff I couldn’t move. I’ve hated it all my life. But, of course, one can’t always choose for oneself.”

  The two women murmured agreement. No, thought Selene, this was a woman who had had very few choices in her life, and none of them good. What if she had tried to poison John, or her first husband, as rumor had it. Could you really blame her?

  “I hope your children are well?” Zoe continued amiably, pouring herself another glass of wine. “They say there’s fever in the countryside, I do worry. And your husbands? Fitting well into their new positions? Both so young, but so capable. Thank God for them. Psellus’s wise counsel and Odd’s martial valor. Where would we be without our Guardsmen and their brave captain, whom we had not known above a month ago?”

  Did the woman not realize, Selene wondered, that she had met Odd five years ago when he came to them posing as the ambassador of Rus? Or again, when he and Harald and the others ransacked these very apartments and arrested her servants on John’s orders? Did she really not know that this was her husband? Or was it something else—the convenient amnesia of a ruler who has survived a revolution?

  “The Varangians are devoted to your dynasty, ma’am,” Selene replied fervently, “and my husband will lay down his life for you.”

  Zoe smiled sweetly, then raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Selene, my dear, we’ve known Olympia’s family for years, of course—very prominent in the city. But you are a mystery to me. Where do you come from? Who are your people? How did you meet your husband? I know you’ll pardon my curiosity…”

  This was the question she had hoped would not be asked, but there it was. Lie now, she told herself, and you’ll go on lying forever. She looked at Zoe levelly. “I met my husband in a taverna where I supported my family by gambling. We come from the countryside, out on the Mese beyond the Church of the Holy Apostles. My mother was a healer, a midwife, and had some skill in reading the future. Some unkind people called her a witch. My father was a physician, a man who sought to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, a student of alchemy. He spent his life trying to turn base metal into gold—without success, I’m afraid.”

  Olympia shot her friend a panicked look. To be interested in alchemy in a theoretical way was one thing, many people were, but to actually practice it—that smacked of paganism.

  Zoe’s smile congealed. There was a long moment’s silence.

  And then Zoe leaned back and let out a full-throated laugh. “Alchemy! But it’s exactly what we do here. Mixing, heating, distilling, purifying, all to turn something base into something perfect of its kind. It’s a noble pursuit. It’s how I worship God. I’m sure it was the same with your father.”

  Selene let her breath out slowly. “He was a very religious man.”

  “Then I am sorry not to have known him. More wine, my dear?”

  They sat together for another hour, while Zoe drank glass after glass of wine and gave voice to a rambling monologue. “Let me speak to you as a mother, I feel that I am—yours especially, Selene, since you have none. We women are weak, we must use all our wiles, all our weapons. I’ve learned that lesson in a long and unhappy life.” She dabbed at her eyes with a corner of her napkin.

  And what about her sister Theodora’s long and unhappy life, Selene thought, in that nunnery to which the young Zoe had condemned her? No mention of her.

  “It’s only faith in Christ that has sustained me through the dark times,” Zoe went on. She crossed herself and her eyes turned momentarily upward. “He and I talk, you know. One day I will show you my own little Christ, he tells me things, warns me of danger by changing his color. It’s the truth, you’ll see. But the dark, dangerous days are over, aren’t they? Now, at last, I look forward to a little happiness, to finding a true man who will love me—dare I hope for it? I’m not so old yet, am I? Still desirable? But it’s lonely here at best, you know. I would rather have been some tradesman’s wife, living in honest poverty, than Empress of Rome. I envy you your freedom, Selene. Gambling in the taverns—what an exciting life you’ve led.”

  Selene, in spite of herself, felt a growing sympathy for this vain, eccentric, vulnerable woman. Still, she would never be at ease in her company. She had seen that flash of rage, of cruelty. Never forget, she warned herself, that this is a woman with the power of life and death over us all.

  “And now, my dears,” said Zoe, setting down her glass and snapping her fingers for the servant, “I will let you go home to your husbands. I must take my bath and then I have other business to attend to. The Empire doesn’t run itself, you know.”

  As they departed, she planted a motherly kiss on their foreheads and gave them each a basket filled with bottles of scent and lotion. “You’ll visit me again, of course. We women have so much to talk about.”

  They had arrived in mid-morning and it was now it was well past noon. Outside the gate, before they mounted their carriages, the two friends embraced. They hardly knew what to think about this strange morning. Were the dark days over? For Zoe, for the Empire, for their husbands, for themselves?

  43

  The General Returns

  On the eleventh of May, less than two weeks after those terrible three days of revolution, Constantinople put on its gayest clothes to celebrate the founding of the city by Saint Constantine the Great. One of their most joyous festivals, it is a day of parades and street dancing, of chariot races and wild beast fights in the hippodrome, of neighbor visiting neighbor, of Emperors—or now Empresses—showering the crowd with coins. Both inside the palace and out, people seemed determined to honor the day with a gaiety that was almost desperate, to banish the past with its horrors, and sink themselves in enjoyment of the present with a collective sigh of relief.

  For the occasion I organized an exhibition in the hippodrome of my Varangians going through their military exercises and dueling with ax and sword—not to the death, of course, as those old Romans used to do, but still exciting enough—and the crowd loved it. We were the heroes of the day. I stood in the Imperial box with the other luminaries of the court and drank in the cheers. At my side was Selene, beautifully gowned and coifed, and Gunnar, four years old, dressed in a scarlet tunic and cloak, standing at attention with his face drawn into a stern expression, just like a Guardsman. My heart swelled to see him. What a warrior he would be someday.

  I wondered, though, who all the cheering was really for. Was this outpouring of love more for Zoe or for Theodora? Was some of it for me, who had led this same crowd in battle to retake the palace? Or was it for Maniakes, the hero of Sicily, unjustly abused by the hated Paphlagonians, and now standing among us, gaunt and grey-faced, but with his flashing black eyes undimmed by his ordeal?

  Let me back up a bit. To quote Psellus, for the first time in our lives we saw the transformation of the women’s quarters into an Emperor’s council chamber. Zoe and her sister liked to hold court in the Golden Hall, not far from there. Neither of these old ladies was interested in riding the flying throne in the Magnaura, which Theodora complained gave her a nosebleed. Each of them sat on her own throne, but The
odora’s was placed slightly behind Zoe’s. Every morning save Sunday the chamber was crowded with courtiers, senators, officials high and low, and hordes of petitioners. There were lawsuits to be settled, questions of public interest, audiences with foreign ambassadors, and so forth. Officials—sometimes Psellus, sometimes another—did most of the talking, but the Empresses would occasionally ask a question or offer a comment.

  Needless to say, each Empress had her faction, her throng of sycophants and favor-seekers. Zoe, of course, had grown up in the charged atmosphere of the court, heavy with intrigue, jealousy, and smoothtongued flattery. From babyhood it was the air she breathed. To Theodora this was all absolutely new. But she was learning.

  Psellus was in Zoe’s faction, but I knew he was already regretting it. He fretted constantly about her recklessness with money, her lavishing of huge gifts on all and sundry. She had always been this way, except when her husbands had barred the treasury door to her. Now there was no holding her back. I found it hard to complain because I was one of those who greatly benefitted. Selene and I found ourselves rich beyond imagining. I, the poor Icelandic farm boy, who had once gazed wonderingly at a worn silver coin given to me by my brother, who got it from some merchant captain. It was a coin stamped with a man’s gaunt, bearded face and inscribed with strange letters. “From far-off Miklagard,” my brother had said, “wherever that is.” Well, I had lost that coin years ago but never the memory of it. Now I had chests full of them. We hardly knew what to spend it all on.

  But if I was rich, Harald—if he was still alive—was rich no longer. Just a few days after Constantine’s blinding, one of his people confessed to knowing that a huge stash of gold, siphoned from the treasury by the Paphlagonians and Harald together, was hidden somewhere on Constantine’s property. I had him dragged from his monk’s cell and questioned him myself. And what a sad spectacle he was—halting, trembling, his sightless eyes bound with oozing bandages. It took little persuading to get the truth out of him. In a cistern in back of his house we found five thousand, three hundred pounds of gold. Enough to supply even Zoe’s mad generosity for a very long time.

  He confessed that John and he had siphoned it from the treasury over many years.

  “Did anyone else know about this?” I asked him.

  “Harald found out somehow. He claimed it was as much his as ours and he treated it as his own. What could we do?”

  “And he spent it?”

  “He helped himself from time to time. What he spent it on I don’t know. Women, I suppose, like all you barbarians.”

  I said nothing to anyone about Harald’s part in this massive theft. I only had Constantine’s word for it and what was the point anyway? It would only bring more dishonor on the Guard. But news of the discovery couldn’t be kept secret, and it was soon known all over the palace and then the city.

  I have already mentioned Maniakes. For two years he had languished, chained to the wall in a tiny cell that stank of piss beneath the palace. Ignored, forgotten, his estates confiscated, his wife and children dispossessed. Harald and I had visited him once, you will recall, after our return from Italy. After that, I never saw him again. If Harald did, I didn’t know about it. But now, by order of Zoe, he was a free man. At the very first morning levee that Zoe and Theodora presided over, he was brought into the hall. They had dressed him in decent clothes, but they hung on his frame like rags on a scarecrow. His fleshless face was disfigured with sores. He was bent at the waist after two years in a cell where he could not stand up straight, and he walked with a strange gait, lifting his feet high at each step as though he could not adjust to the absence of the heavy shackles that had weighted them down. I hardly recognized in him the man I remembered. There was dead silence in the hall as he shambled forward. The mob of perfumed and elegant courtiers shrank from him as from a plague victim. No one spoke until Theodora half rose from her throne and let out a cry of “Holy Mary, who is this poor creature?”

  Zoe flashed her most beautiful smile. Indeed, there was something childish and embarrassing in the way she had arranged this ‘surprise’. She addressed him in a loud, clear voice. “General, you have been shamefully abused. Know that your enemies are destroyed and now your country needs you. We pray God that your health has not been broken because it is Our wish that you lead an army to Italy with all possible dispatch, punish the rebellious Lombards and Normans, restore Imperial rule to the country, and govern it with the rank of Catepano.”

  Then she ordered an attendant to fetch the general’s military cloak and his sword. She stepped down from her throne, hung the sword belt over his shoulder, and pinned the cloak with her own hands.

  The courtiers, on cue, cheered long and loud, myself among them.

  Maniakes blinked, almost like a man waking from a dream. He pulled his face into that scowl of authority that I remembered so well, and replied in a husky voice that he would sail within the month and wreak God’s own vengeance upon the empire’s foes.

  Uppermost in Zoe’s mind, I think, was not so much the condition of Italy but the necessity of getting Katakalon’s soldiers out of the city. They had fought on the losing side in the revolt, gained nothing from it, and were growing more unruly by the day. I, thank God, would not be going. As Commandant my place was here with the Empresses. But the Varangians would send a contingent. I would have to think of who I wanted to command it.

  Two weeks later, while ships and troops were still being readied, who should knock on my office door but Halldor.

  I eyed him sternly. “You’ve been off duty without leave, you and Bolli. I can sack you for that.”

  There was nothing hang-dog in his manner. “In that case, Odd Thorvaldsson, we’ll be on our way back to Iceland, won’t we, to our families and farms.” (He didn’t have to add: “Which is more than you’ve got to go home to.”)

  “What do you want, Halldor? Make it quick, I’m busy.”

  “I come with a message from Harald.”

  “Harald! Where is he?”

  “Ah, he has a small place out in the fields, a bolt hole for just such times as this. You don’t need to know where. He wants to make a bargain with you.”

  “Harald and I have nothing to bargain about.”

  “He wants to go with the army to Italy. He wants a command.”

  “To command Varangians? You’re joking. I’m saving that plum for a friend, not an enemy. Many are begging me for it. Why should I give it to Harald?”

  “Because you know he can stand up to Maniakes.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You don’t trust that Greek, do you? He’s an angry man, an ambitious one.”

  “So is Harald.”

  “Precisely. So let them watch each other. Wouldn’t you rather know where Harald is than have him on the loose, up to who knows what? Let Harald do what he does best, wage war. Let him recoup a little of his honor and his fortune, and then you’ll see no more of him. You have his word on that. And it would be a gesture of reconciliation that the whole Guard would be glad of. Harald still has friends, you know. And his only crime was to defend his Emperor, which he was sworn to do.”

  “Not quite. He also stole a great deal of gold—which we have found.”

  “I know nothing about that, and if he did so what? Stealing’s what they all do here, you know that.”

  “Maniakes would have to agree,” I said, “and why would he? They didn’t get along.”

  “The general needs a victory. He knows Harald’s worth on the battlefield. You have no one else who even comes close.”

  I searched for reasons to refuse. “Zoe could forbid it.”

  Halldor smiled. “I’m sure you can talk the old lady around.”

  “Is Harald fit for service? How is his knee?”

  “He’s mending. Be fit as a fiddle soon.”

  “You and Bolli would go with him?”

  “Wouldn’t that please you? Bolli, as it happens, is ill. I would go.”

  I was silent for a lon
g moment. In spite of myself, I could see some sense in what Halldor proposed. “Harald must ask me in person and swear an oath of loyalty,” I answered finally.

  “Done,” Halldor replied and moved toward the door. There he paused and turned back. “How did you do it—the throne?”

  “Ah,” I winked at him, “let that be my secret.”

  Once again, dromons and transports filled Boukoleon Harbor. It wasn’t only Katakalon’s force that was being sent back, but all the Household Cavalry regiments and all the mercenaries as well. Anatolia was emptied of soldiers. Again Maniakes and Harald, both in splendid armor, stood on the deck of their flagship, looming over everyone else by a head. Around Maniakes stood his old Khazar bodyguard, one of them my friend, Moses the Hawk. And Harald now commanded three hundred Varangians.

  He had come to see me at the barracks in St. Mamas, causing quite a stir among the men as he limped along the corridor, leaning heavily on Halldor’s shoulder. He was pale and clearly in pain; not quite as mended as his friend had promised. Some Varangians turned away from him, but others came forward to greet him with sympathetic looks. A few even cheered. He ignored all alike and made straight for me, where I sat in the dining hall, finishing my dinner.

  I nodded him to a chair. “You look like you need to sit.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  “As you like.”

  “What oath do you want from me?”

  I had given this a good deal of thought and talked it over with Gorm and some of the others I trusted. I’d sent word to Zoe and met with Maniakes. “That you will serve at my pleasure. That you will obey Maniakes’s orders in all things. You will take only as much loot as someone of your rank is entitled to, and when the campaign is over you will depart from the Empire and never come back.” It was like drawing up a contract—a thing we Icelanders are good at. I hoped I hadn’t left him some loophole.

  “And who shall I swear this by?”