‘Oh,’ said Maria, the elegant line of her lips scrolling with amusement, ‘I had rather a fantasy of the Tauro-Scythian that night. As I recall, I saw to it that he was rough with his hands.’
Anna blushed profoundly. ‘Please, Lady, tell me what this man has done for his name to be posted by the Chalke gate. They haven’t cut off his hands, I beseech the Holy Mother.’
Maria smiled, thinking that it was time that bright, spirited little Anna learn a woman’s pleasures. She needed to think of someone suitable, someone gentle yet vigorous. Perhaps Isaac would know.
Anna’s face pressed next to Maria’s, and the braided loops at the sides of their heads touched. ‘Holy Mother!’
The bulletin was framed and set in the usual marble niche. Maria read the florid script with mock gravity. ‘Varangian champions defend Christendom at edge of the world; restore Roman riches to furtherance of Glory of Christ the King. Varangian Nordbrikt, his arm strengthened by the Mother of God, single-handedly vanquished the infidel.’
‘They say he’s now rich enough to buy Nicephorus Argyrus’s palace!’ blurted Anna.
‘Anna,’ said Maria musically, ‘you suddenly recall the man?’
Anna smirked. ‘Yes.’ Then her face dropped. ‘My father isn’t happy about this Tauro-Scythian’s success. I heard him.’ She sighed, trying to imitate the mysterious note of melancholy that so often crept into Maria’s discourse. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever have him to a banquet in our chambers.’
‘No,’ answered Maria. She pulled the shade back and motioned the carriage on. ‘I fear the Tauro-Scythian’s enemies have multiplied as rapidly as his riches.’
Maria settled back against the cushions and closed her eyes as the carriage rumbled up the Mese, the city’s main artery. Extraordinary. The dream had been months ago. And how vivid it had been. Perhaps more than a dream. Perhaps a vision like those of the prophet Danieclass="underline" the fair-hair, the fleet of ships manned by spectres, a chest of gold as brilliant as the sun. But there were other dreams. No. She could not recall them. Would not. Fair-hair haloed by horrible black flocking creatures, frozen waters dark as onyx, awakening with fear on her tongue. Had she some gift of prophecy? There were many in the city who claimed it, but, as with virtue, that gift was much more often claimed than possessed.
Maria opened her eyes and clutched her hands tightly together. Yes. The fair-haired barbaros was a harbinger of death, but she had not seen if the death that haloed his golden head was his own or that of another. Maria started; it was as if an icy finger had suddenly brushed her cheek. She whipped her head, expecting Anna’s cheerful confession of the prank, but Anna had slid across the seat to peer intently through her own window. Maria touched her faintly rouged cheek as if daubing a wound, and shuddered that she found nothing but her own silken warmth. Tonight in the Hagia Sophia she would pray to the Mother of God that the fair-hair not visit her dreams again. And pray for his soul, because in her silent heart she would pray that it was his own death she had foreseen.
‘Who is he?’ asked Thorvald Ostenson, centurion of the Grand Hetairia, fourth in command of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. The leather fittings of Ostenson’s new gold breastplate creaked as he came round the chair on which the man sat, hunched over, his back trembling in soft heaves like the belly of a small, wounded animal.
‘This pitiful head upon whom the ravens have chosen to defecate belongs to John Choniates, a petty tax officer from the Anatolian theme.’ Mar Hunrodarson folded his arms atop his writing table and studied the wretch who sat before him.
The man’s eyes were pools of vitreous red surrounded by enormous purple bruises, and his chin was as raw as fresh meat where his beard had been plucked. His short, stiff fingers were swollen and caked with blood.
‘So why are they feeding these little mice to Varangian lions?’ asked Ostenson. ‘Don’t the ball-less paper-stuffers know that we are already overburdened with felons above the rank of patrician, and our strength is short as it is? Besides, a Varangian takes little pride in playing a broken reed like this. The men are malingering when they’re asked to perform these inconsequential interrogations.’
Mar looked up at Ostenson; he had just promoted the lanky, straw-headed farm boy from Iceland to centurion. Mar had learned his lesson with Hakon. When he had seen to it that Hakon was elevated to the honour of Manglavite, he had thought that it was more important to find a man who was suitably vicious – something Mar knew couldn’t be taught -than to look for intelligence in his key subordinates; Mar had reasoned that he had enough wits for all five hundred members of the Grand Hetairia and then some. Well, Mar also had the wits to know when he had been wrong. Ostenson was part of Mar’s new strategy to surround himself with men who did not run out of words after axe, ale and cunt. This new centurion had the keenness to understand the intricacies of Roman power, if he were taught well. And it was clearly time for the education of Thorvald Ostenson to begin.
‘Ordinarily I would have flatly refused the use of my offices to execute sentence on such a menial bureaucrat,’ explained Mar to his coarse-featured but sharp-eyed subordinate. ‘But here my own objectives are served.’ Mar paused like a rune-mentor. ‘You understand the significance of Anatolia and the rest of the Eastern themes, do you not?’
Ostenson nodded. He knew that the Anatolian theme was the richest of the eighteen Asian themes, or provinces, that comprised the breadbasket of the Empire.
‘The wealth of the Eastern themes,’ continued Mar in a pedagogical rhythm he had learned from listening to the endless discourses in the Emperor’s chambers, ‘is not simply the endless sacks of grain they provide the Imperial granaries, or the yet more extraordinary harvest of taxes they provide the Imperial Treasury. It is military manpower. By this I mean the thematic armies.’
Again Ostenson signalled his understanding. Each theme was able to mobilize a highly competent citizen army, both to protect its own borders against minor incursions as well as to supplement the Imperial Taghmata, the Constantinople-based standing professional army, in times of major conflict. Fully mobilized, all of the thematic armies could quintuple; the size of the Imperial Taghmata.
‘And you understand the system of inalienable military freeholds, then?’ asked Mar, certain that his new centurion had not troubled himself with such arcane details; Ostenson’s bewildered eyes quickly confirmed his doubts. ‘Well,’ Mar continued, ‘understand that these citizen soldiers cannot magically transform their hoes into spears and their burlap tunics into armour. If you travel through Asia Minor, as I have, you are struck by the prosperity of the small farms, strip after endless strip of shimmering grain and dewy pasture. For centuries Roman law has required each of these prosperous small farms, which are the freeholds of the peasants who work them, to provide and equip one soldier to remain in readiness for service in the thematic army. The Emperors have long understood that Roman power is dependent on the survival of these military freeholds, so for centuries they have enforced laws strictly banning purchase of the freeholds by the Dhynatoi.’
Ostenson’s eyes narrowed. The Dhynatoi not only wallowed in the centuries-old fortunes provided by their vast landholdings but also dominated the Roman Senate and had placed their stooges in many of the most important Imperial military commands. The Dhynatoi were vain, ostentatious and insufferably arrogant; when one of them occasionally ran foul of his own kind and ended up in Numera Prison, the Varangian centurions would cast lots for the privilege of attending to him.
‘Unfortunately,’ Mar went on in the wry tone he used when he criticized official policy, ‘recently these laws have proved difficult to enforce. The peasant freeholders, who are called upon all too frequently by the Imperial tax collectors, as well as by their local military commanders, wish to elude these obligations by illegally selling their farms to the Dhynatoi. The Dhynatoi, for their part, are only too willing to purchase these properties illegally, which they acquire by the hundreds, even thousands, and consolidate into vast estates.’