The torso and head of a small boy rolled up to him in a little wooden cart. Haraldr looked into the brown eyes of this partially disembodied waif; they were frightening in their voracious, almost feral need, and yet their honesty affected Haraldr more than fawn-eyed supplication. He reached into his purse and gave the boy a silver nomismata; suddenly the boy’s eyes had a heart-breaking innocence. As if by magic, a dozen boys appeared. Haraldr quickly distributed the rest of his coins, finally holding up his empty purse to show he had no more. The boys vanished, quarrelling among themselves.
Haraldr remembered the way, the alley behind the row of wooden buildings. Why was he going here? he wondered briefly. But he knew. Maria had left his heart wounded and withdrawn, but she had left his body eager and questing. The sexuality of the Empress City was not hers alone; she had only initiated his seduction, not consummated it. And every woman he held in his arms from this moment on would be the answer to Maria’s treachery, the denial of fate’s caprice, reducing her at last to the anonymity of remembered flesh, and that alone. He exited the alley and saw the large, freshly plastered facade straight ahead. He went to the dark wooden door and knocked. The viewing grate slid aside. He had to wait for a while, and considered leaving. Then the locks rattled and Anatellon the charioteer virtually exploded in his face.
‘Haraldr Nordbrikt! Esteemed Manglavite and Slayer of Saracens!’ Anatellon took Haraldr’s arms in his rock-hard fists. ‘You honour us, sir! Please, please come in!’ As Anatellon ushered Haraldr inside, he giggled in his curious, genial fashion. ‘You don’t even need to tell me, esteemed sir. You’ve come for my Alan girl.’
‘I don’t care who was at fault here. This should have been brought to me. This is something the Manglavite and I should have settled among ourselves.’ Mar slapped his hands flat against his writing table. He looked at Centurion Thorvald Ostenson, and then addressed the uniformed Varangian standing next to Ostenson. ‘It’s fortunate for you that no one was seriously hurt. But I need to impose some kind of penalty because I simply cannot afford to have the men of the Grand Hetairia quarrelling with the men of the Middle Hetairia. I’m going to confine you for two weeks and fine you five silver nomismata. And you can tell your comrades that the penalties for future violations will be considerably more onerous. We are not here to settle personal grudges.’ Mar gestured at Ostenson to show the Varangian out.
When the Varangian had left, Ostenson closed the door again and studied Mar, frank, farm-boy astonishment on his ruddy face. ‘May I speak, Hetairarch?’
‘I didn’t appoint you Centurion because I thought you were a fool. Go ahead.’
‘Hetairarch, that was a very minor incident, and one that did not take place in the palace precincts. Some Varangians of both the Middle and Grand Hetairia were drinking at the same inn, and one of the Manglavite’s men lured this man’s whore away by flaunting the gold in his purse. And it wasn’t just the whore they were fighting over. The men resent that the members of the Middle Hetairia are in most cases wealthier than them.’
‘I am aware of that, Centurion. That is why I want to make certain that whatever feelings of ill will that presently exist are not exacerbated.’
Ostenson still looked astonished. ‘Hetairarch, I don’t see how our interests are served by allowing the Middle Hetairia and the Manglavite to presume such importance.’
‘We are working with the Middle Hetairia towards a common objective. As soon as my plans are complete, I will explain them to you fully, and you will understand. In the meantime I need harmony among the two divisions of the Varangian Guard, and I am charging you with that responsibility. I myself will be working closely with the Manglavite Haraldr Nordbrikt.’
‘Hetairarch.’ Ostenson paused and then decided to test the limits of his relationship with his commander. ‘Hetairarch, when this common objective is achieved, won’t it be dangerous to have so strengthened Haraldr Nordbrikt? He is already a hero in the city. You cannot drink anywhere without hearing his name. Saracen-Slayer. Saracen-Slayer. I think he has the potential to be a dangerous rival to you, and you are merely encouraging his rise.’
It happened too fast for Ostenson’s comprehension. He saw Mar leap to his feet and lunge towards him, and then felt the huge force of inertia as he flew into the wall behind him.
When he came to, he was leaning against the wall, his feet outstretched, his head hammering. Mar was sponging the back of his neck.
Mar pulled Ostenson to his feet. ‘Never presume what I am or am not doing, Centurion,’ he said evenly.
The Bogomil twisted a lock of his long stringy hair and looked earnestly at Maria, with all sincerity trying to avoid so much as a glance at the jewelled icon of the Virgin hanging on the wall behind her; he regarded such images as manifestations placed upon this earth by Satanael, the eldest son of God, to confound those who truly believed in God and his two younger sons, Christ and the Holy Spirit. ‘The Antichrist,’ the Bogomil intoned in response to her question, ‘will be Satanael in his final form. When he is vanquished, the entire world will blaze with flame and a hurricane of wind and dust will scour the earth and raze the very mountains and obliterate the valleys, and all that will remain will be as flat and white as a sheet of parchment.’
‘How marvellous.’ Maria tried to envision that glazed, featureless, bone-white surface. Perhaps death was an all-consuming white light, she fancied to herself, not the darkness she had so often imagined. But of course these were the fables of heretics. She smiled at the gentle fanatic who sat on the carpet opposite her; before his conversion to the Bogomil sect the young man had been an idle Dhynatoi scion whose only passions were dice, polo horses and betting on races in the Hippodrome; he had often kept company with Ignatius Attalietes. ‘So why do you Bogomils oppose the sacrament of marriage?’ she asked, steering the impromptu sermon towards another of her favourite subjects.
‘It is impure. The unchaste love of a man for a woman is an act of obeisance to Satanael, who created the physical world.’
‘But if God perfected Adam, who gave life to Eve, who was seduced by Satanael and gave birth to Cain and a daughter you Bogomils call Perfection … I am correctly stating your beliefs, am I not?’
The Bogomil nodded. His placid, dreamy eyes blinked once, then twice, suddenly wary.
‘So if a perfect woman resulted from the illicit union of Satanael and Eve, was there not an element of purity in their congress?’
‘But Satanael and Eve were not joined in the sacrement of marriage. Nor was there love between them.’
‘Exactly. So Eve and Satanael fornicated as beasts do, and yet their spawn was a perfect woman child.’
‘And accursed Cain.’
‘I am only suggesting that the woman fornicated and conceived a daughter who was without sin. I do not care what crimes your Satanael urges men to commit.’
‘Satanael is prompting you to say that.’
Zoe appeared beneath the carved stone lintel of the door that connected Maria’s ante-chamber to the Imperial apartments. She clapped her hands. ‘Little daughter! You have confounded the heretic!’ The Empress walked over and rustled the Bogomil’s hair; he shrank away from her as if Satanael himself had reached forth his hand. ‘You would do better with the Euchitae, my darling,’ Zoe said to Maria. ‘They abhor the world of the flesh while permitting every kind of sexual excess.’ The Bogomil shot to his feet and scurried out of the room without another word. Zoe looked after him with mock despair. ‘Why is it that our invitations to Paradise are invariably extended by men with a peculiar, one would almost say, unnatural, horror of women?’