‘Uncle, I am delirious,’ said Michael, doffing his scarlet bonnet in respect. ‘I only wish that your solicitude for my comfort had not inspired you to place me so far from the arduous toils and manifold concerns of the Imperial Palace. For to help you heft the burdens of our beloved Empire would in some small way relieve the enormous incumbency of gratitude your copious generosity has placed within my breast. As surpassingly splendid as these comforts are, it would equally gladden my heart to know that I could be immediately – yea, instantaneously – at my uncle’s summon should he need even the merest assistance.’
‘This is where I need you, Nephew, resting, contemplating, building the reservoirs of strength and wisdom that you will need for the sake of all Rome should you ever be required to wear the Imperial buskins. Like the worthy stylite perched atop his column who praises the Lord with his utter immobility, your service is in your patience and sedentary devotion, as precious to the Pantocrator as the bustling about of all the Imperial Taghmata. Now, Nephew, brother, I must bid you farewell, and leave you to the pleasures your Father and I have long sought for you.’
Michael and Constantine watched Joannes pound off on his powerful stallion, then walked through the bronze doors of the residence, admired the fountains in the inner courtyard, and found a small reception room that had only one door. Constantine looked about in the hall before he quietly shut the door behind him.
‘Can you trust any of the servants?’ asked Constantine in a low voice.
‘Yes,’ said Michael. His scarlet boot distractedly nudged a ram-shaped bronze lamp set on the small marble hearth. ‘I brought my old cook, Ergodotes, and made him a vestitore. I am certain he is reliable.’
‘Good. You have someone who can get information in and out.’
‘Have I not you as well?’ Michael seemed surprised.
Constantine cleared his throat. ‘I had rather hoped you might ask me to live here with you.’
‘Uncle!’ Michael beamed and embraced his uncle. ‘Of course! I had not even dared to suggest you join my luxurious exile. You will make this elegant incarceration not only tolerable but also amusing!’
‘And perhaps productive.’
The shadow crossed Michael’s face again. ‘Yes. What concerns me now is that our “Father” might recover sufficiently, if only temporarily, to regret his acquiescence to Joannes’s scheme. Then’ – Michael looked at Constantine with vulnerable, pleading eyes – ‘this situation is more dangerous than I had expected. I am a decoration, so to speak, that could quickly become unfashionable.’ Michael erupted and viciously kicked the head off the bronze lamp. ‘Damn him! Damn him! We will be his hostages as long as he lives!’ Michael’s face was crimson, and his eyes had a curious opaque glaze. He exhaled sharply through his nostrils, twice in rapid sequence. ‘I have been considering a plan along with an … associate of mine. It is quite dangerous. I will understand if you wish to hear no more of it.’
Constantine opened the door quietly and checked outside in the hall, then came back in the room. His forehead was perspiring, but there was grim purpose in the set of his jaw. ‘They took the manhood from between my legs,’ he said softly. ‘They did not take the manhood from here.’ He thumped his well-larded chest. ‘Tell me about this plan.’
‘Blood! Blood!’ The girl stood as naked as Eve and shook her dirty burlap tunic in Ulfr’s face. She spat, made a punching motion with her fist, then pointed at Askil Eldjarnson and rattled off a string of words that Ulfr guessed he wouldn’t have known even if his Greek was as good as Haraldr’s. He did recognize one of the words, however: ‘Rape.’
Ulfr looked down at the shrieking, gesticulating girl; she had greasy brown hair and teeth like a glacier rift. Another word he could understand: ‘Virgin.’ She pounded on Askil’s chest and spat in his face. ‘Look at her, Komes Ulfr,’ said Askil calmly but mournfully. ‘She has lice. And breasts like kneecaps.’ The gangly, thin-faced Icelander spread his hands in a gesture of incredulity. ‘If a man visits the butcher, why would he pay for the meat and steal the entrails?’
Ulfr nodded sympathetically. The girl was sixteen, if a day, and if there was a woman of sixteen summers in the Studion who was still a virgin, whether she wanted to be or not, she deserved to be appointed one of these Christian saints. Blood had been smeared on her tunic and around her pubic area in an improbable quantity; she was saying she had been raped, not sacrificed to Odin. Ulfr guessed she was a precociously shrewd whore with a clever new cheat; he would tell the men to watch out for yet another Studion snare.
‘Varangian devils!’ yelled another woman, a toothless, soot-faced hag of indeterminate age. ‘Devil sent you, Devil take you back!’ Ulfr could not understand everything shouted by a burly man with a dirty rag over one eye, but the essence of it was that in addition to raping children, Varangians also fornicated with the Emperor. Ulfr looked around. More than a dozen people had congregated, most looking on silently with sullen, flickering eyes. Something was wrong. People in the Studion wouldn’t assemble on a filthy street corner in the dead of night to involve themselves in an ordinary misery like the putative rape of a young woman. And the younger men – six, seven of them – were too well fed to be from the sounding blocks. They were professional trouble-rousers from down near the seawall, not the ragged beggars and petty thieves that afflicted this area.
‘I’m going to pay her something for her virtue,’ said Ulfr to Askil in Norse. He had reached inside his wallet for a coin when a swaggering, swarthy young man of no more than twenty-five walked up and put his arm around the girl and said, ‘I am her father.’ Ulfr nodded at the word father and smiled sardonically. Very well. He produced a copper follis and held it out to the man; the girl swatted it away. ‘Silver!’ shouted the father, who now caressed his alleged daughter’s bare flank. Ulfr deliberated. His instinct was to offer Hunland steel as payment due this impudent little thug, or better still, break him with his bare hands. But he remembered what Haraldr said about how cheap trouble was in the Studion, and how dear the cost might be to put an end to it if it ever got out of control. He produced a silver nomismata.
The girl snatched the coin and ran off, vanishing so quickly into the putrid shadows that it was as if she had never existed. Her ‘father’ stood open-mouthed for a moment and then scurried off in search of her. Ulfr looked at the crowd and told them in Greek to ‘be off. The burly man, the old hag, and two others went growling and mumbling into the night. Ulfr noticed that the band of toughs had swelled to a dozen. He was just about to tell Askil to unsheath his long sword.
A motion and a blur from the crowd. Askil grunted and fell to his knees and the stone plopped on the fetid pavement at his feet. Ulfr brought his long sword shrieking out of the sheath. He had no recourse. They had been attacked, and now they had to kill, or the life a Varangian would not be worth the dung on the streets of Studion.
Ulfr studied the flashing blades that now ringed him. Knives. No swords, no armour, no spears. He asked Odin to guide him to the most deserving victim and instantly whirred his blade halfway through the neck of one of the tallest toughs. The rest looked at the gushing, twitching body and reconsidered their boldness. Askil was on his feet, his long sword unsheathed. He charged and scattered half a dozen into the night. The rest backed away slowly from Ulfr, jabbing their knives futilely like performers in a mime. One of them yelled something about Varangians who slept with goats.
Ergodotes, former cook and newly appointed vestitore to the Imperial Caesar Michael Kalaphates, stabled his mule in the courtyard of the little inn on the outskirts of the Venetian quarter. His principal concern on this night was the unsavoury proximity to foreigners; these Venetian sailors were scoundrels at the least, and most likely carried plagues that would make a healthy body rot like a melon left out in the sun. Well, they probably wouldn’t be up this far unless they ran out of rats and dogs to eat down where they were.