‘You see, Mistress, interruption of the effluent phlegms that produce these desires is the reverse of the procedures that stimulate the sexual inclination. One must simply manipulate the organs with careful consideration of vortices that regulate the discharge of the vital humours. Mother of God willing, we have every reason to assume that you will be relieved of your grievous and insolent inflammation before the hour of Compline.’
The Empress of the Romans, Zoe the Purple-Born, ordered her face towelled by white-robed Leo, her eunuch vestitore, and considered for a moment the advice of this new specialist in the treatment of sexual disorders. The deathly pale, long-faced eunuch physician, who always seemed to perspire above his upper lip, was in countenance alone dour enough to dissipate the carnal appetite. But as for his procedures, Zoe seriously had to consider that perhaps she had exhausted the knowledge of these learned charlatans. What good had the specialists done to facilitate marital relations with her late husband, Romanus? The endless applications of aphrodisiac ointments prescribed by these experts had done nothing to restore virility to the senescent manhood of a white-haired windbag. And now that she herself required the reverse procedure, due to her present husband’s persistent neglect of his marital obligations, their success seemed equally unlikely. Michael. No, she would not think of him any longer. The disappointment was too acid.
‘Maria,’ asked Zoe, ‘what do you think of this physician’s ambitious promulgations? In your experience is desire physical, something that can be manipulated by pressure on the offending internal organs? Or is it rather spiritual and therefore beyond the probing fingers of our learned specialists?’
Maria puckered her brow, cracking the dried cosmetic paste the Empress had applied all over her face. She sat on a gilt camp stool set in front of the Empress’s portable Magyar steam bath; only Zoe’s flushed face was visible at the top of the round leather cabinet that enclosed the Imperial body. ‘I am certain that it is both. Of the two components of desire, the physical is easier to assuage. The spiritual element of desire, however, can lead one to overcome even a physical repulsion and enjoy the love of a man who is fair neither in limb nor in countenance.’ She idly dipped her finger in the silver bowl of rose water set on the cabinet beside her chair. ‘I have never loved both the spiritual and physical aspects of the same man, at least not at the same time. Who knows? Perhaps that is an explosive combination of elements, like the ingredients of liquid fire. It would incinerate the soul. But I have never met a man who, having aroused my body, was sad enough to arouse my spirit.’
‘How interesting, little daughter.’ Zoe reclined her head towards the crimson silk canopy of the bathing pavilion. The lamps had already been lit; the sun had just vanished behind the peaks of the Taurus. ‘Do you realize that you have lately come to speak of your amorous pastimes with the most curious melancholy? I advised – no, implored – you to bring some sort of… diversion with you to prevent just this sort of malaise. And this ceaseless wandering in the wilderness would have taxed the virtuous patience of Moses, the chosen of God. It is the vastness of Asia that afflicts the mind with such lassitude and apprehension.’
‘I felt this emptiness before we even departed the Empress City.’
‘Oh, well, little daughter, you certainly must know that the brighter the flame of passion, the more rapidly the fuel of desire is consumed. Your problem is that you stoke the flames too quickly and awaken in the middle of the night to find that your bed is cold.’ Zoe relaxed as the steam dissipated the road weariness in her back. Michael. She could not elude him. He was the heat that still fevered her nights. If only Joannes had not quenched Michael with lies about Romanus (not lies . . . you watched as they held his head under … he came up once, gasping, eyes bright). Zoe felt an internal cold, the jeopardy of her immortal soul, as the memory flew by her like a dark comet. But they were lies in the context of her love for Michael and her people. Even Joannes had known that. Joannes. To have had the man who seared her soul wrenched from her scorching grasp by the malignancy she found repellent beyond all else: Joannes. He is the one who has banished me to this life of saintly contemplation. So contemplate I will, though of matters saintly it will not be.
‘Mistress?’ asked Maria. ‘Is my own melancholy infectious?’
‘I was thinking,’ said Zoe with a frown that indicated she was still thinking. ‘The Tauro-Scythian. The homes of my own personal Varangian Guard. Haraldr something – I think they all have the same family name, all probably having had the same father. Anyway, he of pirate-slaying fame.’ Zoe’s voice was almost chilling in its deliberation. ‘We have so rudely neglected him, shut up in here with our tittering little birds like Anna and that dreadful Hellenist bent on ransacking the library at Antioch.’
Maria looked down at the thick blue carpet. She had not dreamt of the Tauro-Scythian harbinger of death since they had left the Empress City. And peering out at him several times a day through the curtains of the Imperial carriage, she had come to see him as simply another oversize barbaroi curiosity. But to look in his death-filled eyes again? She realised that she had seen the doom in his icy irises even that night at Nicephorus Argyrus’s; for a fleeting moment she wanted that tragedy deep inside her, and her womb stirred. But this man would not be a harmless pet like Giorgios. He was a murdering savage from Thule. She had lied to her Aunt Theodora. Out here, in this barren post-apocalyptic vastness, she realised she was afraid of death, and always had been. Her entire life had been driven by her fear of death’s ineluctable darkness. ‘Is it wise?’ she asked. ‘Are we not convinced that he is an informer for Joannes?’
‘Symeon assures me that he is,’ said Zoe with bland indifference. She needed no further proof; her Chamberlain Symeon, a vestitore to her uncle, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, for decades, had so many ears in the palace precincts that he would know if a mouse squeaked in the Triclinium (a largely unused ceremonial pavilion) late at night. ‘He says that Joannes himself sponsored the Tauro-Scythians under this Haraldr in the Sacrum Consistorum. And later this Haraldr met Joannes alone at Neorion.’
Maria crossed herself quickly at the mention of the gruesome tower. ‘Then we have been laudably prudent in excluding him from your presence so far. Why would we now wish to invite this snake into our gilt cage?’
Zoe arched her perspiration-slickened eyebrows. ‘Except for Symeon and Theodore and Leo and you, darling, I am surrounded by Joannes’s spies as a fishmonger in his booth is by his stinking fish. Besides, I am not suggesting that we uncover our metaphoric bosoms to this Cyclopean menace Haraldr whatever, or even our physical breasts. It’s simply that there is a primitivism, a … vigour to his race that I find . . . enchanting. We will converse with him, beckon him to share drink with us perhaps, and encourage him to speak to us of his perpetually frozen homeland’ – here Zoe smiled maliciously – ‘and any other matters we may find to our interest.’
Maria offered her own bewitching smile for the first time since the morning sun had glared over the snowcaps of the Taurus. Zoe, she reminded herself, had been Basil the Bulgar-Slayer’s favourite niece, and while Zoe’s father had been a blathering sophist with the sole ambition of totally depleting, within the providentially brief three years of his reign, the bulging treasuries his older brother had won in a glorious half century of relentless conquest, Zoe had been the heiress to the Bulgar-Slayer’s strength and wiles. Yes, this evening would be amusing, after all. She and her beloved Empress would give Joannes’s Tauro-Scythian busybody all the information he could stuff within his thick skull.