Haraldr’s head spun and he sat meekly on the edge of the table. He was the new boy at court who had taken a profound thrashing from the reigning tough. And that was all he was; no son of the gods, no king from kings, not even leader of five hundred Varangians.
‘I hope this proves to you that I am not the one who wants you dead,’ said Mar, his voice even if not genial. ‘It was I who made certain that no one meddled with the investigation into Hakon’s death. A fair ruling was all I sought, and I helped to see that you got it.’
Mar confidently turned his back on Haraldr. ‘Hakon was a buffoon. I had reason for encouraging his rise at court. But he had become a liability, even an affront to the Imperial dignity. And I was appalled when I learned that he was going to sacrifice five hundred good men in another of his foolish cheats. If you hadn’t killed him, I would have.’
Mar turned and placed both hands firmly on Haraldr’s shoulders. There was nothing remotely suggestive in the gesture.
‘Yes, your life is in danger here, but not by my hand. It would hardly be in my interest to kill you.’ Mar grinned tightly. ‘I have use for you.’
Mar threw back his head. The grin spread over his entire darkly flickering countenance before he lowered his gaze and fixed his glacial eyes on Haraldr again. ‘Yes, Haraldr Sigurdarson, Prince of Norway. I have use for you.’
The building had been an old Roman inn, and it stood between crumbling, centuries-old brick tenements. The street in front had stone kerbs, but the ancient pavestones were invisible beneath a thick layer of silt and rubbish. A sailor in a ragged fustian tunic sat against the building’s soiled marble facade, his head ducked between his knees. A prostitute paced before him, her face painted as garishly as a wooden puppet; she seemed at least fifty years old. The music of some kind of stringed instrument came from inside.
Alexandros and Giorgios had consumed enough courage at Argyrus’s to cast aside boldly the filthy sheet that served as the inn’s front door; Maria followed. There was but a single large table, and no one was having sex on it; half a dozen Venetians howled as they gathered around a furiously attentive young man rapidly and deftly pounding a huge knife blade between his spread fingers. Less interested in the game were four or five prostitutes and another dozen sailors who milled beside the row of marble basins that had, in better days, dispensed food to the establishment’s patrons. The current habitues scarcely acknowledged the new arrivals; they discreetly gestured to one another while taking furtive glances. One man plucked tentatively at a lute.
Maria watched a sailor slip his hand inside the coarse linen tunic of one of the whores and knead a sagging breast. ‘I am so disappointed,’ Maria said. ‘Perhaps we have come on one of their Saints’ days.’
‘We have seen enough,’ said Giorgios, slurring slightly. At that moment the sheet over the door swept aside and at least two dozen people and assorted creatures burst through the arched doorway so convulsively, it seemed that the little inn had somehow ingested them in a single gulp: sailors in coarse tunics; more affluent traders in relatively cheap export-grade silks; some young, not unattractive, prostitutes; several musicians with lutes and pipes; yapping dogs, screaming monkeys and a small spotted panther on a leash. The music shrilled in frantic circular rhythms, and almost immediately a woman whirled on the table; after a very short performance one of the silk-clad Venetians wrestled her to the floor and began removing her robe.
Maria’s eyes ignited. Several of the newly arrived traders noticed her, shouted curiously among themselves for a moment, then gestured for her to dance. Alexandros took her arm and urged her towards the door but she pulled away. She unwrapped the long, scarf-like, jewelled pallium that covered her sheer tunic at both front and back, and threw it at Giorgios. She leapt onto the table.
The Venetians backed away slightly, thunderstruck by this vision faintly cloaked in almost transparent white silk. Maria began to dance slowly, with the sinuous control of a professional. The tunic restricted the movement of her legs, so she pulled it high on her hips and knotted it. As she spun more rapidly the truncated garment hiked up farther, and her black pubic triangle teased her audience. Two traders began to close in on the table. Alexandros swept his cloak aside and slowly drew his short sword. A hand reached out and Maria kicked at it. A dozen hands grasped for her,
Alexandros and Giorgios savagely hacked the Venetians with their swords. Somehow Maria kicked herself free and leapt from the table onto Giorgio’s back. They were able to retreat behind Alexandros’s whirring blade, but only because Maria’s gem-studded pallium had been dropped in the melee and most of the Venetians considered it an equally valuable and far less fiercely contested prize. Three of them lay bleeding on the floor while the rest ripped the garment to shreds and scrambled after the loose baubles.
Alexandros and Giorgios – with Maria still on his back -raced uphill, in the direction of the still-glimmering spine of the city. After half a dozen blocks they stopped and ascertained that no one was following. Giorgios wrapped Maria in his cloak; her tunic was in tatters. Her face betrayed nothing, but her eyes were startling, their hue visible even in the dark. ‘There is a lovely park just a little farther up the hill,’ she said. It was as if nothing at all had happened back at the inn.
The park was a small, nicely maintained refuge in the midst of a cluster of upper-middle-class town houses; a ring of cypresses shielded a little pool and an adjacent marble pavilion. Maria spread Giorgio’s cloak on the neatly mowed lawn. ‘Alex’, she said, ‘go to the corner and watch for the cursores.’ The cursores were the city’s nocturnally vigilant police force. Alex looked quizzically between his friend and his lover, then shrugged and walked away.
Maria feverishly removed Giorgio’s clothing. For a moment she reverently caressed his painfully erect shaft. When he penetrated her, she gasped as if stabbed, and her fingernails brought blood from his back. They rolled ferociously in the grass, and her moment came quickly. She screamed, a short, sharp note, then clung desperately to Giorgios. ‘Holy Mother, how I love you,’ she gasped. She fell silent and licked his neck and wondered to herself, I do love Giorgios. But why did I just feel the Tauro-Scythian deep inside me, like a knife in my womb?
II
They are the offal of the Empire, the horseman observed to himself, the effluence of the stinking sewers in which they spend their days hiding from the sun and the police. Armenian peasants, Selucid mongrels, mutilated criminals, all of the outcasts who have come to the Empress City to exist as human cockroaches, two-legged insects who scurry from the dark alleys at night to cut purses and throats. The horseman counted five of these nocturnal predators; they had set a barrier of refuse across the narrow, unlit side street, a trap for any citizen foolish enough to stray near the putrescent arteries of one of Constantinople’s largest slums. But the horseman, who was in his own way a denizen of the night and the less decorous recesses of the city, had seen them even before they discerned his giant silhouette against the distant backlighting of the Magnana Arsenal. He made no attempt to alter his course.
Hooves clamoured on ancient paving stones, then quieted as they slowed on the silt and trash that had begun to bury this forgotten, reeking little lane. The five waited, listening for the hoofbeats of an escort, and satisfied themselves that their victim was alone. But when they distinguished the black-frocked figure and the huge head, they postponed their assault, wondering if this was the man who rode in the night. They whispered their confusion, and the horseman, who had learned to make out murmured confidences across a room full of tittering dignitaries, smiled and listened.