Zoe waved her hand as if the entire scandal were a wisp of stagnant air to be fanned away. ‘No. I can see that you don’t know.’ She parted her bow-shaped, blood-red lips in a curiously triumphant pout, inhaled as if to speak, and then paused, savouring her coup. ‘We’re going to Jerusalem,’ she finally said. She fluttered her hand frivolously. ‘My devoted husband commands it, so I must obey. Should I have occasion also to submit myself to the sinful pleasures of Antioch and the appalling decadence of the Levant on this holiest of ventures, it would simply be as the dutiful wife of our Holy Emperor Father.’
Then I am bid to suffer these scourges at your side, my blessed Mother,’ said Maria, her eyes cast down in mock humility. Then she looked up earnestly. ‘But isn’t it in truth dangerous?’
‘I think not, at least once we leave Roman soil. The Caliph is reputed to be most gracious. And’ – Zoe drew the word out with a delicately salacious flourish – ‘we are to have a special guard attached to our regular military escort. Those Tauro-Scythians who have made themselves so rich, and the monstrously acquisitive Nicephorus Argyrus so much richer.’
Maria felt as if the blood in her face had been sucked away by a shrieking dry winter wind. She could only stammer. ‘I -I – Mother . . .’ Her teeth began to chatter slightly.
‘Little daughter! The Tauro-Scythians are such . . . luxuries! They amuse us.’ Zoe placed her arms around Maria. ‘You have never been afraid of northern barbaroi before, and you have even met the commander of these men. Why, you said he was partially civilized, in a grim sort of way. I do remember.’
‘I fear he is too grim for me. I have had dreams.’
‘Ohhh . . .’ Zoe let the exclamation breeze through her lips. ‘I am so … stimulated by your dreams, Maria. Had I had your . . . imagination when I was your age, perhaps I would have been more . . . deliberate in my choice of companions.’
‘Mother, these dreams bring me no pleasure.’ But Maria realized that there was even now a residue of the ecstasy she had known in the dream garden, and that her memory of that passion was all the more vivid because of the horror that had followed. ‘No, that is not entirely so. There is pleasure and there is terror. My dreams offer love and death, twined so tightly that you could not get a knife between them. Perhaps death is the ultimate desire.’
Zoe’s icy amethyst eyes seemed to darken, like crystal pools shadowed by a cloud, as she thought of her own troubles. ‘Yes, little daughter, love and death are but the different sides of one coin. How well your Empress Mother knows the truth of that.’
‘You may not.’ John the frog-faced interpreter held the document against his chest as if he were a woman shielding her bare breasts. ‘I have translated each word exactly as written.’ He fixed his eyes defiantly on the ceiling.
‘Let me read!’ snapped Haraldr in Greek so that the Topoteretes would hear.
The tough-eyed, leather-skinned Topoteretes, who had been absorbed in studying Halldor’s sword, looked up in surprise. After a moment he barked at the surly, black-frocked interpreter, who sulkingly handed the paper to Haraldr.
Haraldr studied the claret script. He made out the term for the Emperor, and also another Greek word that troubled him. ‘It says something about my going by ship,’ he told Halldor and Ulfr. ‘My previous journey to the Emperor’s Palace did not require a sea voyage.’
‘I smell the raven-slime,’ said Ulfr. ‘They could plan to take you to a place of imprisonment. I’ve heard they frequently exile their own to islands from which there is no escape.’
‘Or just feed you to the lobsters,’ offered Halldor.
Haraldr decided he would balk on this issue. He tapped John on the arm; the interpreter jerked it away indignantly.
The dam Haraldr had built against his rage and frustration could hold no longer. He leapt to his feet, grabbed John’s gown at the chest, and with one hand jerked the astonished interpreter over his head; his other hand quivered over the pommel of his sword, waiting, if necessary, for the Topoteretes.
‘Ask the Topoteretes why they are transporting me by sea! Ask him!’
To Haraldr’s surprise the Topoteretes laughed, his head back, showing big white, horsy teeth. He even poked Halldor and gestured, showing how much he appreciated this treatment of the interpreter. ‘Ask him!’ shouted Haraldr to his red-faced, flailing captive. The interpreter translated frantically, and Haraldr, recovering his control, dropped him hard on his feet.
The Topoteretes shrugged and explained. The interpreter stepped back and made the sign of the cross; he spoke in unsteady Norse. ‘He says they want to receive you in the palace harbour. It’s more appropriate.’
Haraldr looked at Halldor and Ulfr. He raised his eyebrows quizzically.
‘I think we can trust our friend the Topoteretes,’ said Ulfr.
Yes, thought Haraldr, I can assume I am going to the palace. But has Mar sent for me, or is it Joannes? Do Mar and Joannes work in concert? Then all of the pieces shifted and he felt a sudden tranquillity, almost as it had been when he was a boy struggling to learn the runes and suddenly he had made sense of it all. Fate alone would greet him at the end of this day’s voyage, and the masks destiny wore were not important. If he died, it would be a better end than remaining the wealthiest prisoner in St Mama’s Quarter. If he returned, it would be with the answers to these devilling questions.
A small warship waited at one of the commercial wharfs in St Mama’s Quarter. Haraldr was actually greeted by the kentarchos, the captain of the ship, a wiry man of about thirty who wore a bright brass breastplate embossed with a lion. The kentarchos told Haraldr he could roam the deck freely; Haraldr studied the great throwing engines with the bewildering complexes of gears, ropes, pulleys and windlasses, then went to the bow and examined the ornate bronze spout, shaped like a bellowing lion, that could belch forth the terrifying flames he would not have believed in had he not already seen their devastating effect.
The warship passed the enormous harbour boom and the foreboding grey tower and skirted the tip of the finger of land that thrust the Great City into the sea; in ancient times, Haraldr had learned, this entire peninsula had been called Byzantium. The sun parted the slate-coloured base of the roiling cotton clouds, projecting a broad shaft over the eastern prow of the city, and Haraldr once again gaped at the thrilling panoply of glistening domes.
The ship docked at a wharf next to a large, blocky gatehouse projecting from the towering seawall. Soldiers armoured like the Topoteretes and clearly under his command joined Haraldr’s escort and led him up wide marble steps to a series of grass-and-ivy-covered terraces lined with stone statues, some of them as startlingly lifelike as the ones Haraldr had seen in the city, but others standing stiffly at attention, arms at their sides. As he walked among the stone figures Haraldr noticed that their eyes had a strange life force, as if they were filled with visions of distant realms and other times, times before there were men and only gods inhabited the earth. For how many aeons had men preceded him up these steps, beneath this stony scrutiny?
The terraces climbed to the Imperial City within the Empress City. Haraldr had seen the palaces from a distance, and yet then they had seemed a miniature world too fantastic to be real, like looking into a knothole and finding a splendid city inhabited by elves. Now this world surrounded him in its dazzling actuality, the rows of carnation- and sulphur-coloured marble pillars towering above him like gleaming stone forests, the spray from the fountains turning into crystal fragments that melted against his face. He wondered at an enormous golden building made of domes fanning out like the petals of a flower, cyan-blue ponds teeming with darting orange fish, marble cypresses carved into foliate traceries so delicate that it seemed they would crumble in the breeze; in the distance shimmered a vast silver dome, huge enough to swallow a dhromon. Chalk-white avenues fanned out in the sun, swarming with eunuchs in silk, soldiers in armour, and occasional groups of ladies who seemed to float along in the coral-tinted shade of endless porticoes.