‘She asks if you can trust me. . . .’
‘I understood, Gregory.’ Haraldr looked at Zoe. ‘With my life,’ he said in Greek.
Zoe nodded slowly and graciously, then lifted her crimson hem and whirled. ‘Daphne!’ She plucked a leaf from the tree and pressed it to her cheek. ‘Dear little Daphne. Do you know her story, Komes Haraldr?’ Haraldr shook his head. ‘Daphne was the fairest nymph who lived in this, the fairest place on earth. Apollo, son of Zeus, devotee of beauty, looked down upon her as he rode in the chariot of the sun. Struck by mad longing, he leapt to earth and pursued her! She fled in terror to save the lovely flower of her chastity!’ The ladies seemed highly amused by this passage. ‘But Apollo was swift and relentless! He was upon her, his golden shaft poised to pierce her with the wound from which there is no recovery! Was there no pity among the gods! Daphne pleaded and sobbed, and good Gaea, Mother of the Earth, was stirred to mercy. “Poof!” Gaea decreed. Even as Apollo held her in his arms, Daphne bloomed into the very tree we see here!’ Zoe pressed the leaf to Haraldr’s lips. ‘You see, she still has the freshness of a virgin.’ Zoe turned to her ladies. ‘And she will be fresh and pure for ever, for that is the reward for woman who has never known man.’ Haraldr was startled; the Empress had been so gay a moment before. Zoe whirled again. ‘Ah,’ she said, the lust returned to her voice, ‘but to have loved Apollo even once, to have felt the heat of his golden arms!’
Despite the frivolity of the tone in which the Empress had told her tale, Haraldr sensed that the Romans still had a reverence for their old gods. He looked about at the wonders of Daphne. Behind the laurel tree stood a row of columns, half toppled, with fragments of architraves forming zigzag patterns; the crocus-veined marble was chipped and weathered and spotted with lichen. Beyond these ruins was a perfect grove of ancient cypresses set as formally as the row of columns, and above these cool, dark spires unfolded a tumbled-down city of enormous crumbled columns and jagged walls and ruptured towers and curious rows of small stone terraces, all of it set as if by giant hands into the garland-scattered limestone cliffs. The old gods, the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, had lived here once.
‘Nephew!’
Michael Kalaphates strode among the Imperial party, his sparkling robe of white Hellas silk far superior to the tunic of Syrian silk he had worn the previous night. Kalaphates knelt and kissed the Empress’s hand. She clasped his shoulders and raised him up, then turned and whispered to the youthful, full-jowled eunuch, Leo. Although the Empress gave no signal that Haraldr could discern, the ladies stepped away from her. Haraldr was confused; he wondered if he should stay and guard his mother, or offer her his own discretion.
The hand on his arm was as light as if a butterfly had settled there. Maria smiled up at him without guile, her coiled hair almost touching his upper arm. The crimson lips, the pearl teeth; he shuddered perceptibly at the thrill of her presence. You will be with me.
‘May I use your name?’ she asked. Did the multihued, ethereal lights of Halogoland have a sound? If so, her voice was it.
Haraldr nodded. ‘May I call you by your name?’
‘Certainly, Har-aldr.’ The weight of her hand increased minutely. ‘And perhaps you will think of another name for me before we leave Daphne.’ Her tone was an invitation.
Yes, thought Haraldr, your name is already snow-breasted goddess.
‘May I show you Daphne?’ White silk dazzled as she waved her ivory fingers towards the ruins on the heights. With Gregory, the unseen voice, following behind them, they crossed to a paved path that rose in a series of worn stone stairs flanked by small, disarrayed columns. Birds sang and a green lizard scampered from atop a chunk of white stone carved with a floral pattern. Soon the rows of cypresses draped them in cool misting shadows.
‘Did you enjoy our mother’s tale of how Daphne gave her name to this place?’
‘I found it quite beautiful. A skald will often use a tree kenning to describe a lovely woman.’
‘Ken-ning. I’m afraid that word does not translate into the language of Homer.’ Gregory elaborated in Greek. ‘Oh, yes, when a poet likens one thing to another. “He went on his way like a snowy mountain.” So the Bard spoke of fair-helmed Hektor, because his size and ferocity and, some would say, his arrogance put him above other men.’
There was no dominant tone here that could guide Haraldr. Was she teasing him, or was there a threat in her bewitching melody? Had Hektor been too arrogant, too bold, and if so, was Hektor/Haraldr considered to share the same faults? ‘Yes, a kenning is much like that, though not entirely so. Take this example: raven-flocked laurel tree of the golden sea cliffs.’
Maria stopped for a moment and looked up at him. Her silk-sheathed breast brushed momentarily against his sleeve. ‘Whatever might that be?’
‘You. The lovely laurel tree, with hair as dark as the raven’s breast, who comes from the Great City where the mountainous walls that face the sea are golden in the sun.’
Maria simply looked at him for a very long moment. It was as if her eyes were mysterious chasms with blue lights in their depths. She turned and guided him up the steps and out of the cypress grove.
Incredible, thought Haraldr. How could such things be built and then discarded? Men would not abandon such a place, only gods. The huge marble structures clung to the cliffs, dappled all over with flowering vines and lacy ivy. Haraldr and Maria and Gregory walked towards two broken towers surrounded by the glacier-like rubble of their former magnificence.
‘Rome built this,’ said Maria. ‘The old Rome that rose by the river Tiber in Italia.’
‘But you are the Romans.’
‘We are the new Romans.’
The ruins of the towers lay in huge ashlar blocks among which berries and flowers had begun to grow. Here and there were fragments of carved human forms, a muscular leg, an arm and shoulder, a partial head covered with short curly hair; it was as if here the old gods had waged their last battle, their bodies now frozen amid the titanic wreckage of that ultimate struggle. ‘The old Romans,’ asked Haraldr, ‘what happened to them?’
Maria stooped to caress the ancient stone face of a beautiful young man, a fragment so curiously lifelike that it seemed as if the delicately parted marble lips might take in air and restore a blush to the weathered cheeks. ‘Travellers who have visited the old Rome make the cross of Christ the King when they talk of it, so vast is that tomb, as vast as the Queen of Cities, yet peopled only by spirits and demons and slinking dogs. All like this. Stade after endless stade, all like this. A vast sepulchre. So sad. To think of them . . .’ Maria touched the stone youth’s lips. ‘They were flesh as we are, soft lips . . . dust. All to dust.’ She drew back as if the lips had burned her fingers, or, perhaps, as if they had stirred to life.
She took his arm now, curling her elegant, statue-smooth fingers just above his elbow and pulling him next to her so that her silk flank swished against his. Haraldr was stirred and yet the awe, the holiness of the place, overwhelmed him. He looked up at a wall covered with carvings of young men; naked athletes, not armoured warriors. Maria led him beneath an arch that pierced the wall and descended a dozen steps into a brilliant field of light. Haraldr gasped; what was this place? It was a vast, long field of unkempt grass and shrubs surrounded by row upon row of steps. No, seats, as if for a thing-meeting. But there was room enough here for every man in Norway, it seemed.
‘The stadium,’ said Maria. ‘For the games.’