‘He knew you, didn’t he?’ said Maria. Haraldr’s eyes registered the shock. Maria was also gifted, perhaps dangerously so. Haraldr wished that Zoe had not left them alone. He felt unsure of himself with her now; in the light of the candle she was not the same friend he had grown to love during the long summer afternoons. She was the lover he had known on those endless nights. He knew what she wanted, the unmasking of the secret that separated their questing souls, and he still could not give it to her. ‘No.’ Haraldr could not look at her. ‘He did not know me.’
Maria looked down and her fine, dark lashes seemed to work at vanquishing tears. When she looked up again, there was a kind of tragic acceptance on her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they are going to dance.’
The dancers, a troupe of twenty beautiful young women dressed much like Maria, except in more colourful and less precious silk, formed a ring, their arms interlocking to form a continuous chain. To the music of flutes and cymbals they began to sway, first at the hips, sensually, then incorporating their entire bodies with fluid undulations of their locked arms and precise movements of their feet. Slowly they built to ever more elaborate, frenzied rhythms, movements added to movements until the ring swayed, twisted and spun like a top with the power to change its shape endlessly.
Soon younger men and women, many quite drunk, began to form rings of their own, swaying and whirling with less grace but equal fervour. Maria impulsively grabbed Haraldr and led him to one of the rings on the terrace below him. They spun about with a large group for a while, and then the circles broke into fours, and finally couples were left to their own improvisations. The music whistled and chimed to an elaborate climax. The night was a blur of flashing silk and candlelight. Maria soon outpaced Haraldr and moved in with the professional troupe, her grace almost the equal of theirs and her undulant hips and bared legs even more erotic. On and on she went, her eyes and teeth shining fiercely.
Finally the music stopped to offer the exhausted dancers relief. Maria came to Haraldr, her breasts rising and falling rapidly and her forehead wet. She wrapped her arms around him and he could feel that her passion had only been momentarily diverted. She looked up at him, her eyes still on fire. ‘I would give my soul to make love to you tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you give me yours?’
He held her to him. ‘I know what I must say to you,’ he said. Tell her, he pleaded with himself. Every inhibition was gone at this moment – the oaths to Norway, the risk of exposure, the fear of her betrayal – and yet that truth had never seemed more deeply buried in his breast. If he told her, everything would change between them. And he loved her too much at this moment to want to change anything.
Maria’s eyes teared as she waited. Finally she dropped her head. ‘Why? I will share anything with you. If you are a criminal, a traitor, a slave, if you have a wife, a queen, a whore, I don’t care. I have to know who you are. Don’t you see what it means that that is so important to me? I want to know how to place you within my life. I will do anything you want me to. But I have to know.’ She looked up at him again. At that instant Haraldr realised that they both stood on some great precipice, and they could either leap from it wrapped in one another’s arms, or walk away from that brink separately, strangers for ever. He could only answer that fate with silence.
‘I have told you everything,’ she said, her voice the plaint of some small, doomed animal. She shuddered with a single sob, released him, and ran madly across the terraces, her legs pumping and her fists attacking the night air.
‘You are an angel of the Lord,’ said Constantine as the noseless monk dabbed the cut over his eye with a wet cloth. ‘I apologize for regarding you as another cutthroat. Who knows how long I would have lasted out there.’
‘I followed you,’ said the monk. ‘They lied back there. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon. He was once . . .of our lavra. He is in trouble. Men in Constantinople. We monks protect our own.’ The monk’s voice had the curious resonance of the noseless; he spoke as if it took a great deal of time for his words to travel from his brain to his mouth.
‘So why have you helped me?’
‘Because he is a friend of mine. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon.’
Constantine decided not to pursue the matter; the noseless monk was a not too bright Good Samaritan, and perhaps he thought that Constantine was someone who could help his friend with his legal problems. And perhaps Constantine could. ‘Can you take me to see Brother Symeon?’
The noseless monk nodded and turned into the night, adeptly picking a path through the jagged bases of the spires. The darkness was overwhelming. It was as if the monk’s single taper were a candle adrift in a vast dark sea. The monk moved swiftly and Constantine’s heavily fleshed chest ached. Brother Symeon awaits, he told himself as he grimly pursued the black shape before him. The key to all Rome may be out there in this hideous night. They began to climb, scrambling over tortured, worn rocks. The air was suddenly cooler in pockets. To his left Constantine glimpsed a few glowing portals. He imagined the jagged presence of the cones around him without actually being able to see them.
‘The ladder . . . needs repair,’ said the noseless monk. He thrust his taper towards a weathered wooden lattice that climbed into the blackness. ‘Watch that the steps don’t break. You being . . . big.’ Constantine heard the old wood creak beneath him as he climbed. After what seemed an endless, purgatorial ascent the monk paused ahead of him and the timber beneath his foot groaned, cracked and sagged. Constantine’s foot flew out into the dead void and his shoulders seared with pain as he suspended his ponderous bulk from his burning hands. Where he found the will to pull himself to the next rung, he could not say. Perhaps the Hand of the Pantocrator.
The monk helped him over the ledge. Constantine guessed, from the condition of the ladder, that Brother Symeon was a true eremite who never ventured from his cone cell. He probably raised his food and water up with a rope.
‘Brother Symeon,’ called the noseless monk as he stopped beneath the tiny hewn door. ‘Brother Symeon … I have brought… a man … to help you. A man from . . . Constantinople . . . Brother Symeon?’ Constantine heard no answer. ‘Brother,’ called the monk to Constantine, ‘come. Brother Symeon . . . will see you.’ Constantine ducked beneath the entrance, scraping his head against the rough lintel. He could straighten up inside the cell. The noseless monk held his taper out so that Constantine could see Brother Symeon. Constantine moaned with shock and despair and his knees went out from under him, pitching him to the rough stone floor.
The fountain resembled an enormous pine-cone; the surrounding cypresses echoed the intricately perforated marble shape. Water bubbled with a musical, faintly chiming sound. Maria was standing in the pool, her chiffon underskirt pulled up to her knees.
‘Maria.’
Maria turned. Her eyes seemed shrouded, swollen. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘You asked me once why I wanted to cause you pain. Now I ask you. Why?’ She thumped her breast with a tight fist and glared. ‘If there is some vengeance that you want now, my breast has no more armour. No need of armour. The knife is in it. Twist it if you want.’
Haraldr waded in after her and she stood erect with her breast out, as if challenging him to a combat. He put his arms around her and pressed her warm cheek to his. Then he held her away and found her eyes.
‘I told you once I was from an important family in Norway. That was no lie, but not all the truth. I am the rightful King of Norway, uncrowned only because I have not returned to claim what is mine.’
Maria held him as if he were the last thing she would ever hold in her life. She kissed his face and neck with wet passion, her tears spilling onto his robe. ‘I knew you were no land man, no mere nobleman,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it the first time we talked. I knew you bowed to no one.’ Then Maria stiffened with shock. ‘Mother of God,’ she murmured as if greeting death. ‘When must you leave?’ Just as suddenly, she smothered him again. ‘I will go to this Norway with you,’ she murmured hotly. ‘I will be anything. If you have a queen, I will be your concubine. . . .’