Joannes fell to his knees and pounded his chest until it seemed the walls would shake. ‘Take me!’ he pleaded to the altar. ‘Take me in his stead!’
Tzintzuluces continued to soothe Joannes. ‘Please. We must. He has so little time.’
Joannes mastered himself with a great effort of will. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, his giant arms trembling with an animation of their own. ‘Yes. We must . . .’ His voice trailed off to a strangled sigh and he slumped to the floor.
Tzintzuluces returned to the kneeling, quaking Emperor and whispered to him. The Emperor began to speak in rattling syllables punctuated by gurgling sounds; it was obvious that the same enormous courage and physical will he had shown against the Bulgars would be necessary simply to complete the ritual he now undertook. ‘Most Holy Lord . . . King of Kings,’ he pronounced torturously, ‘may you find me … a worthy sacrifice . . . accept me to Your unstained Bosom . . . receive me in pure grace . . . when I have achieved … my consecration.’ The Emperor lifted his bobbing, bloated head to the priests. ‘I am . . . your . . . willing . . . sacrifice.’
The priests simultaneously signed him with the cross and began a long, mournful, slowly rising and falling chant. When they had repeated the invocations of the Lord’s Sacrifice, they gently removed the Emperor’s purple robe and placed over him a rough woollen mantle. They removed the Imperial Diadem from his head and with scissors clipped away his hair and beard. Finally they signed the cross over him again and stood away. It was a miracle of sorts that the bloated corpse could continue to kneel without assistance. And yet as Haraldr watched the shorn face of the former Emperor, Autocrator and Basileus of the Romans, now a simple monk about to humble himself before the Pantocrator to whom all men must bow, he realized that the newly initiated Brother Michael’s eyes glowed with a happiness he had never before seen on the Emperor Michael’s face. ‘I am … ready … to begin my . . . journey,’ Michael said raspily, tears of profound joy streaming down his waxy, stubbled, hideously swollen cheeks.
Halldor came to Haraldr’s side; he alone seemed in command of his emotions. His cloak and armour were drenched from a renewed downpour. ‘You had better come,’ he whispered. Haraldr followed him outside into the courtyard.
The woman stood alone in the rain, her fur cape beaten down by the pelting cold drops. Haraldr did not recognize her tortured face until she spoke. ‘I must see him,’ said Zoe. ‘I must see him before--’ The Empress collapsed to her knees and pounded the sodden earth. ‘I must--’ Haraldr lifted Zoe to her feet and brought her beneath the shelter of the narthex arcade. He nodded at Halldor to take care of her while he went back inside the church.
Michael had been moved to a cot, and Haraldr was certain he had already completed his life’s journey. But his head rolled and his gleaming dark eyes opened into the light. ‘Hetairarch,’ he gasped. ‘The Pantocrator . . . asked you … to give . . . me back . . . my life. Now he has accepted . . . that life. Bless you.’ Haraldr gripped Michael’s monstrous dropsied fingers. ‘Your wife,’ Haraldr whispered to him. ‘Your wife wishes to see you.’
The pain returned to Michael’s eyes and he shut them as if the light pierced them with awls. ‘Lord God, help me. I cannot . . . oh, Lord.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘She must remember me … as I was. Tell her it is not her shame . . . but my own.’ Haraldr let go of Michael’s hand and rose from his knees. Let him die in peace, he decided, let her have the beauty of her memories. He turned and walked outside.
Haraldr took Zoe in his arms and whispered in her ear. ‘He says it is not your shame but his own. Can you understand why he cannot--’ Zoe slumped, her head fell back, and a terrible cry seemed to emerge from her distended neck rather than from her distorted mouth. Haraldr cupped her head and brought her face next to his. ‘Try to understand. Remember the man you loved.’ Zoe’s neck went limp and she collapsed. Haraldr left her in Halldor’s arms and rushed back into the church.
Joannes knelt at his brother’s cot, his huge head on Michael’s chest, his entire body heaving with sobs. Michael’s head lay to the side, motionless. The monk Cosmas Tzintzuluces turned to Haraldr, his dark eyes transformed with an ineffable joy.’ ‘Brother Michael has been accepted into the arms of the Pantocrator,’ whispered the monk.
The rainbow colours of the assembled dignitaries of the Imperial Court had been replaced by robes of black sackcloth. Even the vast octagonal dome of the Hall of Nineteen Couches, wreathed in golden vines, was dulled by a mourning sky that pounded the clerestory windows with cold rain. Only one man was privileged to wear colour at this ceremony. The Emperor, stretched out on a gilded bier, was for the last time attired in the purple-and-gold robes of the Autocrator, the gold-and-pearl Imperial Diadem on his head. Michael had lain in state for three days, and in the chill of the hall his features had settled into a pale, claret effigy of the man who had once held hegemony over the entire World. The Orphanotrophus Joannes kneeled beside the bier, as he had without motion, without sustenance, for the entire three days.
The Patriarch Alexius signed over the body and nodded to the Parakoimomenos. The Parakoimomenos lifted his shrouded face slowly, as if the gravity of his task had turned his head into a ponderous granite effigy. The rain tapped faintly at the windows far above, and the great, still hall seemed suddenly colder. The Parakoimomenos’s thundering voice rent the stillness with icy, knifing blows. ‘Arise, O King of the World, and obey the summons of the King of Kings!’ The Parakoimomenos’s words pealed through the huge dome and returned just as he began again. ‘Arise, O King of the World, and obey the summons of the King of Kings!’ After the third repetition of the grim summons it seemed as if the dome would split from the shattering force of the resounding commands.
As the Emperor had wished, the procession to his final resting place in the Church of the Anargyroi was a simple one. Michael was borne from his bier as the Christ had been from Calvary, in the arms of those who loved him and had served him. Haraldr stood between the entranced Orphanotrophus and the steely-eyed Grand Domestic Isaac Camytzes; the body, drained of fluid, seemed so light that Haraldr was not conscious of a burden.
The people waited along the Mese, silent, wet, a colourless mosaic of tens of thousands of pale, stunned faces against the light-consuming backdrop of their coarse black robes and capes. Yet as he passed, Haraldr felt and heard an unmistakable undercurrent, a murmuring like a cascade of snow from a distant peak, and he realized how dangerous Joannes’s immobilizing grief had become. Why had Joannes refused to allow the Caesar to appear in the procession? It was evident that the people who had come to bid their Emperor farewell were confused, even angry. And understandably so. Who would lead them? Did the Orphanotrophus now propose to have himself crowned against all laws of state, God and nature?
Cosmas Tzintzuiuces stood by the simple porphyry sarcophagus that waited to the left of the Church of the Anargyroi’s golden altar. The blazing candelabra proclaimed the resurrection. The pallbearers lowered the body into the crypt. The Parakoimomenos stepped forward again and called out, ‘Enter, King of the World, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords calls you!’ He paused until the church was still again, and even the candies could be heard sputtering beside the altar. ‘Remove your crown.’
The Patriarch Alexius stepped forward and removed the gold-and-pearl diadem from Michael’s head. He placed the helmet-like crown on a silk pillow presented by a priest and accepted a simple purple silk band from another pillow. He slipped the purple band around Michael’s brow and signed three times over the corpse’s chalky forehead. Then he stepped back and the marble lid was lowered. As soon as the face of the Emperor, Autocrator and Basileus of Rome had vanished for ever from the world he had once ruled, Joannes turned and fixed his dark, barely discernible gaze on the Imperial Diadem.