The final act of the extended drama was played in the Hippodrome. The Emperor was allowed to refresh himself in his apartments beforehand, and then he joined Haraldr and his retinue to climb the marble staircase to the Imperial Box. While the dignitaries prepared for his entrance the Emperor took Haraldr aside. It was not the first time they had talked privately; after the battle they had discussed the engagement as one warrior to another, and they had relived the fragile, immortal instant when the conjoined wills of just two men had somehow broken the collective wall of the Bulgar army. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this day’s apotheosis, the Emperor seemed even more human than he had in that earlier interview. ‘It is often said that it is less fatiguing to win victory on the field than it is to celebrate that victory in Constantinople,’ he told Haraldr softly, with a wistful little smile. Then two Patricians appeared, to escort him into the Imperial Box.
Haraldr followed and looked out on the scores of thousands of people who filled the stadium. The elongated oval race path was completely obscured by the Bulgar prisoners, who stood mute and motionless within the ring of the Khazars. Amid this beaten mob emerged the ancient columns and obelisks and statues set upon the stadium’s central spina: a great bronze bull; a beautiful woman said to be the Helen of the Iliad; a naked Aphrodite and an armoured Ares; grotesque demons and a soaring bronze column formed of three twined serpents.
The Hippodrome was silent. The Emperor made the sign of the cross three times. He nodded at the request of the Parakoimomenos, and the voukaloi stood and chanted the Roman hymn of victory: ‘Let us sing to the Eternal God most high, for Pharaoh’s chariots he hath cast in the sea . . .’When the singing had been concluded, the stadium fell silent again. The Bulgar Khan Alounsianus was brought into the box and the swarthy Logothete of the Dromus threw the vanquished ruler down on the Imperial Dais and pressed his mutilated face against the gold-embroidered purple Imperial boots. The Emperor stood, his face to the crowd, and placed first one boot and then the gilded tip of a ceremonial spear against the Khan’s neck. Down on the floor of the Hippodrome, the Khazars shoved the rest of the Bulgars into the sand, forcing them to emulate their Khan. The crowd reacted with manic, earsplitting glee. Haraldr saw in the sad eyes of the Emperor little taste for this ritual humiliation, demanded by ages-old protocol and the psychic needs of a frightened populace.
Haraldr thought again of how only a single step had separated these two men, the triumphant victor and the mutilated vanquished. He realized that if he had halted at that moment, when it had seemed that all that was left was to die well, then the Khan would be standing here now, displaying to the captive populace of Rome the head of their Emperor. What had pushed him on when even Odin had wearied of his fate? Perhaps Maria, and yet perhaps she had only been an agent of some greater fate, a destiny so profound that even Norway was only a part of it, a destiny that now encompassed all Rome, perhaps the entire world-orb. But even as he saw the huge dimensions of that fate and felt himself drawn towards its whirling vortex, his soul was chilled with an equally profound foreboding.
Haraldr looked across the stadium, oblivious to the leaping, chorusing mob in the seats, and watched the setting sun spill over the roofs of the great city like a golden lacquer. The dust stirred by the grovelling Bulgars rose in a faint fog to cast an eerie, apocalyptic dusk over the proceedings. Destiny whispered to him in that haunted twilight, an ineffable confusion of riddles and replies. The gods commanded me to save Rome that day, thought Haraldr. Will they perhaps one day ask me to destroy Rome? Today I vow to serve this Emperor well. Yet why does my soul tell me that there will come a day when I will throw the sightless face of a Roman Emperor into the dust?
Giorgios Maleinus considered himself quite gifted at his profession. A tall man who suffered from a rheumatism of the joints that was making him progressively shorter as he neared his sixth decade, he drank too much and had few illusions about his social standing in the city; he knew he’d never even be permitted to buy an exarch’s diploma, and for that matter he didn’t give a phoney saint’s splinter whether he ever got to stand in the same room as the Emperor or not. The fact that he was, at this moment, in a room face to face with the Emperor’s brother proved how much all those cooked-up titles were worth. Yes, the swollen-heads at court came and went, but Giorgios Maleinus was always in business: the business of buying cheap and selling dear.
‘Eminence,’ said Maleinus, his inflection deceptively rustic, ‘I would like to invite you as my guest to see the property. Make your own judgement of the facilities. When you compare what you see to the price I am asking, you will consider yourself Fortune’s favourite.’
Fortune’s favourite, thought Constantine bitterly. The Emperor’s miraculous recovery was Fortune’s boot in the ass. His poor nephew the Caesar was in virtual exile, denied even the privilege of entering the palace. It wasn’t fair, either; perhaps the Caesar hadn’t been a hero in the Bulgarian campaign, but no one had given him the chance to be.
‘Excuse me, Eminence,’ said Maleinus, rubbing at his swollen red nose with his stiff fingers, ‘but would you like to see the property?’
‘Ah, quite. Tell me why this superlative establishment is offered at the price one might expect to pay for a rocky hillside and a wooden chapel?’
‘Well, Eminence, you’re not a man to toy with, that is certain, so I will give you the truth in the sight of the Pantocrator. The monastery on the Isle of Prote once enjoyed a generous typicon drafted under the Bulgar-Slayer, may the Pantocrator keep his soul, and it grew surpassingly wealthy, some say under the patronage of someone in the Bulgar-Slayer’s family; they don’t say who. Apparently the patron died and the typicon was not renewed. Now, just so you can’t say Giorgios Maleinus concealed the entire truth from you, the reason the typicon wasn’t renewed is because there was a bit of a scandal out there.’
‘Really?’ said Constantine, faintly interested. At least some outrageous rumour would enliven this dirt merchant’s pedestrian presentation. Constantine looked out of the window of the virtually non-functional office he had been so generously granted in the palace complex – the view was of the blank south wall of the Numera – and longed for Antioch.
‘Yes, Eminence. It seems that the Chartophylax of this monastery, an ancient fellow, got it into his head that the Brother Abbot of the establishment was actually a demon. They say this old book-buzzard murdered the Brother Abbot and fled to Cappadocia. I think the sin of Sodom was about the place, and that was the cause of the trouble. But whatever, the Emperor wouldn’t renew the typicon, and the establishment was out of business. But I’ll tell you, Eminence, though the monks have been gone for four or five years, the establishment is a jewel in the diadem of the Pantocrator, so to speak. You’d just have to clear out the bird’s nests and you would be back in business.’
‘So why hasn’t someone already bought it for this “immorally scant” price you have mentioned, arranged for a new typicon, and reaped the bounty of Prote? Surely anyone with even minor influence at court could obtain a new charter.’