Mar looked around the huge, steaming, clamouring, sweat-and flame-smelling warehouse, his eyes jittering with excitement. He clenched his steel-hard fists and bellowed in the din: ‘I can already taste the raven’s wine!’
Haraldr rode alone up the hill to his palace. Despite a steady rain, the city was alive with speculation, perhaps incipient hysteria. A huge crowd had gathered in the Forum of Constantine to listen to the simultaneous harangues of various speakers with widely divergent views; one long-haired youth, probably a Bogomil, attributed the attack to the sinfulness of the city, while a grizzled one-legged old man, probably a veteran of the Bulgar-Slayer’s campaigns, recited a lurid litany of the atrocities the Bulgars were even now perpetrating on the people of Rome. Even in Haraldr’s fashionable neighbourhood, people clustered on the street corners in small, restive assemblies; their concern was an imminent invasion of the city. And it seemed as if every servant in the district was running to and fro on the street, arms laden with bags of grain and clay jars of wine and oil, as households stockpiled provisions for a siege. Some servants had even carted out large ivory triptychs or bronze sculptures to sell for ready cash.
Haraldr’s own street was no different; the chambermaid from his neighbour’s house leaned over a balcony and asked him if he had seen the Bulgar horde yet and was it true that they tortured women after they had raped them? A cart groaned up the cobbled hill, two eunuchs lashing the mule; the vehicle was loaded with three fat, snorting stoats, no doubt illegally obtained from a pork wholesaler. A woman in an expensive fur rain cape waited by the entrance portal of his palace. No, I haven’t seen the Bulgars yet, Haraldr rehearsed mentally. They are ten days’ march at least and we will certainly throw them back before they ever see Rhegium, much less the walls of the city. Go back to your husband and worry about the taxes that will be needed to pay for this campaign.
The woman walked over to Haraldr before he could dismount; her drenched cape cowled her head. She put her hand on his boot and turned her face up. Haraldr’s head snapped erect with the jolt of her hot sapphire eyes. Maria quickly took her hand away, as if she had touched a glowing brazier. She stared at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘I have no right. But I must talk to you before you leave. I must. I have been waiting.’
‘I have no time for your particular game, Mistress,’ snapped Haraldr. ‘I must play the game of war, which as you say is no less trivial than a child’s but one in which the wagers are paid in blood.’ Haraldr dismounted and stood over her. Her face was unpainted and her pale skin was beaded by the rain. ‘Perhaps you can tell me how to kill a Bulgar if he tries to make love to me.’
‘I did not come to mock you,’ she said softly, her voice like crystal drops falling from the grey, ugly sky. ‘I know I have . . .’ She inhaled and stood erect. ‘I did not come to explain myself. I can offer no apology. What is done is done. What can yet be undone, I wish to undo. What I have to say concerns your life.’
Haraldr shook his head wearily. ‘I should think I would be beyond your intrigues where I am going.’
‘Please. You know I am not . . .’ She paused, and her lips, tinted more purple than usual, trembled. ‘You know the emptiness inside me. I know you have tried to reach out to me. I am not happy in my being.’ Her face had a desperate look he had never seen before. ‘I beg you to pity me.’
Haraldr remembered something she had once said, and he wondered which eccentric star now prompted him to indeed pity her. ‘Come inside.’
Haraldr’s servants were in a frenzy, rushing about with jars and granary sacks and taking the silver plates to the basement for storage. His chamberlain, Nicetas Gabras, stood in the middle of the ante-chamber like a general directing an invasion. Haraldr just glanced at Gabras in annoyance; he had kept Joannes’ lackey on because it seemed that in Rome a confirmed spy was almost as valuable as a trusted friend. Every now and again, however, he had to resist the urge to stroll downstairs and literally tear Gabras in two in front of his entire staff of cringing eunuchs and maidservants. ‘Gregory,’ shouted Haraldr to the corners of the huge palace, ‘are you ready to go a-viking with your Norse comrades?’ Gregory shouted back, a muffled response, and after a few moments the little eunuch appeared at the far end of the ante-chamber; he wore a linen cape and dragged a Norse-style hide gear bag. ‘In battle storm we fear no lee!’ he exhorted with a self-deprecating flourish.
Haraldr grinned at Gregory’s kenning. ‘You are the first Roman Norseman,’ he told Gregory affectionately. Haraldr looked at Gabras, who was still directing his own campaign, and had an inspiration. ‘Chamberlain,’ he barked, ‘leave this! You are going to war!’ Gabras looked as if he had just had a knife plunged into his ribs. ‘Yes. You could be useful. My interpreter and brave comrade here, a veteran of much combat, needs a batman to carry his bag to the front. You are appointed to this position. Any delay in obeying this order will be punished by regulations governing the conduct of the Middle Hetairia.’ The astonished Gabras quickly capitulated to Haraldr’s icy eyes and attached himself to Gregory’s gear bag as if he had been born to the position.
Haraldr waved for Maria to follow him upstairs. He walked quickly ahead of her to his vaulted, candlelit bedchamber. His Alan girl stood in waiting, her sinuous body sheathed in white silk and her opal-grey eyes anxious. He kissed her marble-smooth white forehead and sent her out. She walked gracefully past Maria, looking at her keenly, almost like one stallion appraising another.
‘She is like a white leopard I saw once,’ said Maria raptly, apparently unable to contain her admiration for an equally splendid female. ‘You must be beautiful together, your gold and her ivory.’
‘Yes,’ said Haraldr, ‘and tonight when she wraps her panther legs around me, she will truly regret that it may be the last time. Not because she loves me – she hardly knows me -but because I have kept her well. And I have grown to see the beauty in the simple truth of that.’
Maria looked terribly pained; at exactly what he did not know, but he was pleased to see her anguish. She bowed her head so that he could no longer see. ‘I am a mean bitch. I did not want to speak of those things.’
‘No. Let us speak of love. Your lovers and my lovers. I have a new mistress now. When I am in her arms, I do not always think of you.’
Maria looked up with a faint hope written on her face. ‘I always think of you.’
‘Even when you are tearing flesh with some new gallant?’
‘There was a lover. That once. I did it to … I will not lie and say I did it for you. I did it to save myself. But there is no one now. I am empty.’
‘You have made your own bed, Mistress. If it is empty, then that is your own doing.’
‘Yes.’ She seemed to have made some decision, like a traveller who looks back on his home and knows in that instant he will never return. ‘I came to speak of a dream I had in that bed.’
Haraldr felt fear like a brief, sudden gust in the room. Her dreams, if they were to be believed, had a curious prescience. It was quite likely, given her strange, sad soul, that she was one condemned to see ahead in time. A seeress, of sorts, though apparently she could not induce the trance. ‘Speak of it,’ he told her.
She described the dream, the ravens, the king beyond the creek, and the wound in his neck. When she had finished, she added, ‘I did not think it was important to tell you, because I thought it was really about me. That I missed you.’ She shook her head blindly, as if trying to toss some terrible thought out of it, and a tear streamed across her temple. ‘I wanted to kill you once. I thought you were the messenger of my death. You know that. But I don’t want you to die.’ She looked up with brimming eyes, her lips contorting horribly. For the first time in my experience, Haraldr observed, amazed, she looks ugly. And in that moment his heart was touched. She was a woman, a human being, not a goddess after all. He had been no fool to seek her desperate, lost soul. ‘Please don’t go to this war,’ she said, sobbing. ‘I will do anything you want. I will leave Rome for ever, whatever. I will enter a convent.’ Her shoulders wrenched with sobs. ‘Please believe me. You are going to die out there. I saw it.’