Haraldr tried to imagine what it would be like to awaken each morning in the hell of the Studion and look up at the great palaces on the hills. ‘Hope,’ he said at length. ‘Well, I will continue to bring you this gold, because I do not think a full belly will deprive anyone of hope. But I also believe I can send you the kind of hope you are talking about. The messenger of this hope will be an immense black bird.’
The Blue Star looked at him as if he were mad.
‘Hetairarch Haraldr Nordbrikt.’ Joannes stood in greeting and Haraldr reflected that nothing was more hideous than Joannes’s smile; he looked like a horse baring its teeth. Joannes waved Haraldr to the simple canvas chair; Haraldr had to concede that the Orphanotrophus’s office evidenced only industry, competence and self-denial.
Joannes’s face settled into its usual glower after the ordeal of the smile. ‘Hetairarch, I will not mince words with you. I have been wrong about you and have wronged you grievously; I will not pretend that an apology or a snivelling ingratiation would have meaning to a man who has overcome myriad obstacles, some of my own design, to rise more quickly than any . . . outsider before him. Now that the former Hetairarch, Hunrodarson, is out of the way, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making you my ally.’ Joannes placed his fingertips together and brought his huge face forward until his brutish, smooth chin hovered above the deformed digits. His voice, though restrained, seemed to pound the walls. ‘I want to deal with you. I want to make a gesture of good faith.’
‘And what would that be, Orphanotrophus? Would the serpent permit me to inspect its fangs as a gesture of its good faith? We Norsemen are naturally curious, but we are not by nature fools.’
Joannes tilted his cathedral of ringers forward. ‘I want the gesture to be of your choosing.’
‘Then I shall arrange for a delegation from the Studion to talk to you, Orphanotrophus. Their request will be your gesture.’
Joannes nodded soberly. ‘I am willing to address the grievances of the Studion.’ Joannes dipped his head for a moment, his eyes fading into deep shadows. ‘May I show you something, Hetairarch?’
‘I have seen as much of Neorion as I care to see, sir.’
Joannes sneered, apparently at himself. ‘I should have known a man of your intrepidness would not be persuaded by such displays. No, what I have in mind is a display that I feel will coerce your intellect, since your passions are clearly beyond my influence. Did you not say you Norsemen are curious? What I have to show you may explain the Roman Empire, and perhaps my own actions, more completely and convincingly than anything else you have seen in your time among us.’
Joannes collected two resined tapers and a small bronze oil lamp in the ante-chamber of his office. He led Haraldr down the long hall of the Magnara basement; the Orphanotrophus walked in enormous lunging steps that flung his black frock out behind like the billowing sail of some death-ship. He turned left at a small corridor, unlocked a small, very dirty bronze door at the end of the little hall, and led Haraldr through the usual maze of the Imperial Palace’s subterranean passageways. They emerged at a heavy, steel-banded door with two locks. Joannes lit the tapers from the oil lamp before they entered.
The light flickered up into a vault perhaps three storeys high but no wider than a man’s arm span. Without a word Joannes led Haraldr along what seemed a fairly steep decline. The vault curved noticeably as it descended, and soon Haraldr understood that this was some sort of enormous spiralling gallery, not unlike the chambers of a conch shell, that descended into the earth. On they went, to the accompaniment of dancing shadows and Joannes’s scraping boots. For a moment Haraldr fancied that they would find the Bulgar-Slayer down at the end of this gallery, sending up Imperial Chrysobulls to his still devoted people. Or perhaps the embalmed corpse of Constantine the Great, attended by ancient eunuchs. Haraldr’s imagination yielded to a sobering chill. What would he see? Was there a place more horrible than Neorion?
The ceiling lowered and the curves became tighter, until it seemed that the gallery could no longer turn in its own width. Finally the descent stopped at a wall. A bare, flat stone wall beneath a ceiling that now almost grazed Haraldr’s head. Joannes turned suddenly, his face a surface of deep, shadowed craters and smooth, jutting boulders. This is the secret of Rome, Hetairarch.’ His voice echoed like a demonic oracle. ‘Tell me what you see.’
Haraldr’s flesh crawled. Surely Joannes had not arranged for his confederates to follow them down; the Orphanotrophus would be the shield behind which he would fight his way up. ‘I did not come here to play at riddles.’
Joannes passed Haraldr silently and ascended until the roof of the spiral gallery became sufficiently elevated that he could thrust his taper up over his head. He turned again to Haraldr. This is the treasury built by the Autocrator Basil, called the Bulgar-Slayer. There was a time when what you see here was a glittering warehouse of the wealth the Bulgar-Slayer’s armies brought back from the ends of the earth. Chests stacked to the ceiling, full of gems, tableware, silken garments, Oriental carpets, heathen idols . . . Hetairarch, I do not have words to describe the wealth that was amassed here.’ Joannes shook his head. ‘Gone. Gone before my brother even lowered his head beneath the Imperial Diadem. What the Bulgar-Slayer’s brother Constantine did not gamble away, his successor Romanus squandered.’
Haraldr could not contain his wonder. ’But how? This . . .’ He gestured at the huge expanse they had explored. ‘How, even in a century of spendthrift--’
‘When an Emperor sends a fleet of dhromons to the pillars of Heracles because he desires a certain type of large fish to feast on, as Romanus did, when instead of exacting tribute from the Pechenegs, an Emperor pays them a ransom, when an Emperor supports whole establishments of monks in a fashion that a Magister of Rome would find profligate, then even a mountain of gold is not enough. You want to see where it went, Hetairarch? Look inside the churches and monasteries, look at the silver ciboria and gold icons revetted with gems, and the larders of the monks stuffed with pickled fish and black caviar from Rus; look inside the palaces of the Dhynatoi with their golden thrones and mosaic ceilings, look at the estates that the prostitutes of the Phanarion have purchased in Asia Minor because the powerful men of Rome are as generous with their favours as the harlot is with hers. But do not look here, Hetairarch; do not look about these empty vaults for the treasure of Rome. Because the people of Rome have stripped Rome bare.’
‘Your Dhynatoi accomplices and their attendant parasites have stripped her bare. I do not see the Bulgar-Slayer’s missing gold on the streets of the Studion.’
Joannes dropped his head wearily. ‘What would you have me do for the people of the Studion, Hetairarch? Do you think I can levy the Dhynatoi to provide a palace for every wretch in the Studion? You would be surprised how much of the Dhynatoi’s wealth is owed to merchants like your friend Nicephorus Argyrus, and how much of the wealth of merchants like Argyrus is owed to the Venetians and the Genoese. Rome used to seek her wealth throughout the entire world, from the pillars of Heracles in the west to the gates of Dionysus in the east. Now the rest of the world comes to Rome to leech our wealth. Rome has forgotten that her destiny is at the ends of the earth.’ Joannes waved his wing-like arms expansively, and the movement of the torch in his hand sent shadows racing through the empty galleries. ‘Hetairarch, do you think the walls of Constantinople can produce wealth, or can even protect that wealth without the attendant Empire? To conquer is to produce wealth. To rule is to produce wealth. To win the right to tax is to produce wealth. And that right, that power, is not won in the great houses along the Mese, or among the gardens of the Imperial Palace, or even beneath the golden dome of the Hagia Sophia. It is won at the ends of the world!’