The Logothete licked his lips. ‘I would like to mediate your differences. As a servant of Rome, I am concerned with reducing fissures at the level of government you now occupy. And I believe that the Orphanotrophus currently finds himself in a posture that would encourage him to forge alliances on terms quite favourable to his newly won friends.’
Haraldr drained his cup and handed it to the hovering eunuch. Thank you, Logothete. The wine was excellent. At some time I should like you to advise me on how I can import this vintage. You may tell the Orphanotrophus that I have received his … invitation and am considering a reply.’
Haraldr walked back past the Mystic Fountain; he was detained by the greetings of half a dozen dignitaries along the way. He looked enviously at a gull soaring in the lapis-lazuli sky and wished he could enjoy the beauty of this day and setting without the grasping company of the elite among Rome’s elite, who merely seemed to increase in avarice, insincerity and dissimilitude the higher they rose in their multihued hierarchy. Even the women seemed to have lost the joy of flirtation and approached their prospective liaisons with the grim intensity of grizzled field commanders. Of course, there was a battle to be won on that field as well, Haraldr reminded himself.
‘Hetairarch.’ The wife of the Senator and Proconsular Patrician Romanus Scylitzes ambushed Haraldr in front of the gleaming silver door of the Triconchus, the domed palace that faced the Mystic Fountain on the east. She was blonde, elegant, with small, perfect Grecian features and a beauty curiously enhanced by the evidence, found in small creases about her eyes and lips, that it had recently begun to fade. Her husband was the most notorious windbag at court, reviled by even the pompous Hellenes, with whom he affected intellectual kinship. ‘You will think me silly when I tell you my husband is watching us.’ Haraldr looked around and located the vigilant husband. The white-haired Senator and Proconsular Patrician, surrounded by his posturing cronies in the Attalietes Dhynatoi clique, was indeed conducting a clumsy clandestine surveillance; each time he sipped from his cup his eyes darted over the rim of the goblet and allowed him a glimpse of his wife. ‘Please do not think that I presume,’ she stammered, her cheeks flushed in vivid contrast to the high, pearl-studded white collar of her scaramangium. ‘He is watching to see if I do as I am told. He wants me to thank you profusely for stemming the tide of the Bulgar advance – I’m sorry that I cannot quite remember the phrase that compared your feats to those of Alexander – but I am to thank you because our own estates in Thessalonica theme were spared a great loss by your bravery.’
‘Tell him I accept his gratitude and am greatly pleased by the emissary he has sent to express it.’ Haraldr understood now; the Emperor had granted Haraldr one third of the tax revenues from Paristron, Macedonia and Thessalonica for the next five years, and apparently the land magnate Scylitzes was hoping for some kind of reduction in the amounts his estates owed. ‘However, I cannot intervene in the matter of his taxes, which I understand have already been reduced by various connivances.’
Scylitzes’s wife almost purpled with shame, and Haraldr was sickened by the imminence of her tears. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘You were only performing your filial duty. I should have been more gracious.’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head and appearing to gain control of herself. ‘It is we who should be ashamed. He would not approach you on this issue because he would never deign to speak personally to a--’ She blushed again.
‘Barbaros,’ offered Haraldr. He watched the insufferable Scylitzes spew forth his putative eloquence in accompaniment to the spouting of the fountain. ‘So with all those words at his avail, he must send his wife to speak for him. I appreciate your liberality in delivering his request.’
‘He … he says I should offer myself to you if necessary.’
‘Would you?’
‘You would not accept.’
‘I would accept your offer. I simply would not agree to reduce his taxes, because I could not in fairness accept so much from him and give back so little in return.’
The woman smiled at the flattering reprieve from both her husband’s demands and the prospect of having this giant rip her in two, although she now wondered if the barbaros’s tongue was capable of other subtleties. ‘You are a kind man, Hetairarch,’ she said, bowing slightly as she returned to her flatulent spouse.
For a barbaros, Haraldr told himself, completing her thought. He was about to find some excuse to make to the Parakoimomenos when he noticed that even Scylitzes had been rendered momentarily speechless. He walked around to the fountain to see what marvel had occasioned this miracle. Maria. He watched her emerge from the ambulatory surrounding the Sigma. She did not wear her usual revealing costume but instead had donned a white scaramangium and pallium in spite of the heat. Still, there was the same sensual, graceful insouciance in her walk that arrested both men and women. Haraldr watched the eyes of the dignitaries as they studied her, and he realized that Maria was considered, much like him, an exotic, undeniably puissant force but also dangerous and unsavoury. Because of her openness and candour, she had come to represent all the secret schemings and scandals locked in their own far less honest breasts.
She saw him and came directly for him, her face glowing and her fierce blue eyes wet. She held out her hands but did not embrace him. ‘I will not burden you with my questionable repute among these august personages,’ she said, smiling radiantly but with tears now rolling off her lashes. Haraldr wanted to hold her but reasoned that she knew the manners of this court far better than he.
‘I am sorry I have not been able to see you,’ Haraldr said. ‘This new office requires all my time. I am fortunate to be able to enjoy – if that is the word – even a quasi-official function such as this. But of course you are always with me. You were with me there.’
She shook her head and the tears ran down her cheeks. ‘I am so glad you are alive. Just knowing that has made each day a joy.’
‘Do you know that you saved my life?’
‘But I didn’t,’ she said happily. ‘You went in spite of my warning, and yet you are alive.’ She looked up at him as if beholding the miracle of his resurrection. ‘My dreams are meaningless.’ She said this with such great happiness and relief that Haraldr decided not to tell her about the creek, and the king who had waited beyond it.
‘You saved me because your soul helped me forward when there was nothing else,’ he improvised, a distortion that was less profound than the truth.
‘You do not have to say that,’ she said. ‘What you told me before you left was enough.’ Suddenly her eyes doubted.
‘That was true,’ he told her,’ and still is. Why, in fact, I survived out there I do not know for certain. But you were indeed with me then.’
‘Yes. That has the resonance of truth,’ she said, drawing herself up and projecting her breast with wry self-confidence. She seemed very girlish and keen, perhaps more like Anna. ‘Since you have been gone, I have spent much of my time listening for the truth.’
‘And what have you heard?’
‘A great deal.’
‘Will you tell me?’
Her eyes were utterly clear and guileless, like a completely still fjord. ‘I want to very much. You are the reason I have begun to hear these things, or if not hear them for the first time, at least begin to listen to them.’ She smiled at him and shaded her marble-hued forehead against the sun. ‘One thing I know is that I have always put the act of love – or perhaps in my case, act of hate – before the idea of love. What you said about flesh coming between our hearts is true. You know the love I have here’ – she patted her abdomen with both hands -’but I want you to feel the love I have here.’ She touched her fingers to her breast. ‘And for all my … experience with the other love, I do not know much of this’ – she pressed her fingers against her heart – ‘love.’