Constantine cleared his throat. ‘My esteemed brother, am I to understand that there is a threat of rebellion in the streets?’
Joannes glared at Constantine and did not answer. He turned to Michael. ‘Nephew, you must console our purple-born Mother before grief overcomes her. And the proclamation must be delivered before the people can gather tomorrow.’
‘Yes, my master,’ said Michael without even a hint of irony. He bowed and departed on his errand.
‘Keleusate.’ The eunuch, cloaked in black, bowed and withdrew as Michael rose to his feet. He hardly recognized Zoe. Her face was swathed in a black veil; only her eyes and the few rudely shorn strands of blonde hair that fell onto her forehead were visible. And the eyes were those of an ancient woman. Michael had known that she was perhaps old enough to be his mother; now her eyes might be those of his grandmother. He had never been shocked at the notion of bedding his uncle’s wife, but now he could not imagine how he had slept with this crone.
‘My little boy,’ Zoe croaked in a voice as weary as her visible soul. Michael wanted to cringe as she came towards him. He watched her black-gloved hands reach out and for a fleeting instant wondered if the hands beneath them had become dry, cracked, spotted with age. And then he could only think, Better these hands than those that would handle me in the Neorion. To his enormous relief Zoe only maternally stroked the hair at his temples. ‘My little boy,’ she said again.
Zoe indicated for Michael to sit on the couch opposite hers; again he was flooded with relief. ‘I know what you have come for, my child.’ Now her eyes seemed powerful, alert, even slightly sensual. ‘Of course you will have my endorsement as our new Emperor. You are, after all, my son – if not of my loins, then of my heart.’
Michael steeled himself for the proposal he knew he had to make. ‘I know it is monstrously audacious for me to presume, and an inexcusable transgression upon the sanctity of your grief, but my soul begs me to ask. Will you take me as your husband?’
Zoe’s laugh, coming from behind her veil, was gentle and yet also slightly evil. ‘I would soon weary of the role of Jocasta to your Oedipus, my son.’ Zoe clasped her gloved hands and set them in her lap. ‘No, I do not want you as my husband. But I will endorse your Imperial pretensions, for a price that carries no carnal obligations. What I must have from you in exchange for my endorsement is a guarantee.’ Michael nodded, ready to offer anything in return for her somewhat unexpected and wholly welcome refusal of his offer. ‘You must promise to shield me from even the slightest hint of a threat from Joannes. Remember, you will not be protected by the status of husband to the purple-born. Remember that I have my own considerable resources in this court. If I even suspect an intrigue involving the Orphanotrophus, I will withdraw my acquiescence in your sovereignty and unleash the fury of my people upon you.’
Michael was jolted by his sudden realization of what her refusal of his troth had cost him, even if only temporarily. Damn! She was still not one to challenge. But it was as Constantine had said. There were many steps to their goal. ‘You have my guarantee, and the devotion that even a son could not offer you, my Mistress, my Mother.’
‘Very well, my little boy. Now kiss your Mother’s hand and leave her. The Empress must compose a proclamation to the people of her city.’
‘I grieve for her,’ said the purple-born Augusta Theodora. She seemed more thoughtful than mournful, her blue eyes focused on the ice-slick marble floor. Theodora wore a purple silk cape lined with sable; the single brazier in her apartment provided little heat. Except in extreme cold, she rarely fired the huge hypocaust furnaces that circulated warm air under the floor. ‘I cannot grieve for him. Not after the pain he caused her.’
‘He will be judged at the tribunal at which all souls are judged, my child.’ Alexius, Patriarch of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith, waved his beringed, lithely powerful fingers as if absolving the dead Emperor himself. He sat on a silk couch and was swaddled in a huge ermine cloak dotted with gold velour crucifixes. ‘I pray that in death the Pantocrator who has sat at his side will take him to His bosom. He was a good man, used to bad ends.’
‘To what ends will his successor be used, Father?’
Alexius smiled wryly. ‘I am pleased to see that your contemplation of the Lord’s Mansions has not deterred you from occasionally giving thought to the Imperial Palace.’
Theodora’s eyes snapped up from the floor. For that moment they seemed every bit as quick and potentially lethal as the Patriarch’s prowling irises. ‘From time to time I remember the cross we have discussed, Father. However, I do not think it is time for me to carry that burden to my Golgotha.’
‘Nor do I, child. It might surprise you to know that when I crown this Caesar for the second time tomorrow, I intend to do so with vastly more enthusiasm than I was able to summon on the previous occasion.’
‘That you are crowning him is no surprise, Father,’ said Theodora, a taunt in her inflection. She had become comfortable enough with Alexius, and had seen his own temporal needs clearly enough, that she no longer restrained the sharp tongue with which she dissected almost everyone else. ‘Your eagerness to do so does surprise me.’
Alexius’s thin lips compressed with a virtual smirk of self-satisfaction, as if he not only approved of Theodora’s impudence but credited himself for it. His rich tenor also betrayed his good spirits. ‘It will be quite an unusual ceremony. I wish you could be there to see it, my child. But I believe it will hasten the day when you will see the same ceremony from the ambo of the Mother Church. Tomorrow Joannes will leash an Emperor in front of all Rome, but I do not believe that his creation will suffer that collar blithely. The master and his pet will soon be at each other’s throats. The master will of course prevail, but his wounds may render him quite vulnerable to an attack from another quarter.’
Theodora’s eyes were as hard as sapphires. ‘And what then, Father? It occurs to me that the beast we had hoped to set upon Joannes is now sojourning in Italia, and it is not likely he will return to Rome for some time.’
Alexius smiled amiably. ‘Mar Hunrodarson is gone from Rome, my child, but he has not left our heart. I still say a prayer each day for his heathen soul.’
The transition of power was completed three days later in the Hagia Sophia. The day was so dark that the bronze lamps and rings of candelabra suspended from the dome had to be lit; the lights hovered in the vast space like clusters of stars. After Michael Kalaphates received the Imperial Diadem from the Patriarch Alexius and was acclaimed as Emperor, Autocrator and Basileus of Rome, he was escorted from the silver-sheathed ambo to a throne set on a porphyry platform at the far end of the church. The new Emperor seemed numbed, distant, like a victim walking away from some great catastrophe. When he reached the throne, he motioned to the Parakoimomenos, who seemed to have aged ten years since the burial of the previous Emperor. The Parakoimomenos nodded at his own staff of eunuchs. The great church echoed with a murmur of astonishment as the eunuchs brought forth two portable thrones and set them on either side of the Emperor’s broad, canopied throne. The Emperor gestured, and Zoe, dressed in her widow’s veiled black, seated herself on the left-hand throne. ‘I am your servant,’ said Michael very clearly, and then he took his seat beside the purple-born Empress. One dignitary far back among the vestitores muttered aloud when Joannes, dressed in his monk’s habit, then appeared and sat on the throne to the right of the Emperor, but the protest was lost amid the rising surge of more carefully whispered asides. ‘My master,’ said Michael in acknowledgement of Joannes, his homage spoken clearly enough to be heard over the speculation of his subjects.