Theodore ushered Haraldr back to the lavishly cushioned couch. He waited, smothered in down and plied with wine, for what seemed an hour. Then the brocade was lifted away and Maria appeared with heart-stopping suddenness. She wore a coat of pale blue silk trimmed with white ermine; the collar of snowy fur came up to her chin, and her skin seemed like the whitest marble against it. Her raven hair was loosely pulled back and set in a single braid.
‘I am sorry. Our Mother wished to speak with me.’ She looked at her slippers, the same white silk with pearl beads that she had worn to the banquet at Antioch. There was no intimacy in her voice. It was as if Hecate – Haraldr sucked in a breath almost audibly at the memory of what lay beneath that coat – had never happened. ‘We are only two days from Nicaea. In a week we will be in the Queen of Cities. I long for my home. Do you miss your home?’
‘Yes.’ For the first time in weeks Haraldr thought of the debt he must pay to the kings in whose footsteps he followed. And yet how could he leave her now?
‘Do you remember the stadium in Daphne?’
‘Yes. I remember everything at Daphne.’
Perhaps her cheeks became more deeply tinted, perhaps it was the play of the braziers on her usual glow. ‘Together we heard the echoes, the acclamations to the heroes of ancient Hellas and old Rome. When we return to the Empress City, you will be the hero of new Rome. In the streets they will sing your name.’ She looked up at him for the first time. The intense blue of her eyes was always a fresh marvel. ‘Who will one day walk in those ruins, to listen for your name? Will they be as we were, lovers in search of their own fate?’
Haraldr felt the surging in his breast and the stirring in his loins. She acknowledged . . . them. Or was it no longer them but a single being, a new soul born in that terrible instant? ‘I know my fate,’ he told her softly.
‘Yes. So do I.’ She stood suddenly. ‘Come to my bed.’
Haraldr struggled to his feet and reached out with a trembling hand.
Maria stepped away. ‘No. You must promise not to touch me except where I touch you. You cannot ask me except what I ask you.’ Then she touched his hand with the hot brands of her fingers.
The partitioned chamber in the Imperial Pavilion had room for little more than a large wooden bed frame covered with thick down quilts. There was no light from lamps or braziers but the room was quite warm. Maria stood and held Haraldr’s hand in the darkness for several minutes. He could hear her breathe occasionally, but the silence was otherwise absolute. It was as if they were alone in the vastness of Asia Minor. Her touch seemed to fill him with a warm liquor that quickly dissolved his bones.
She dropped his hand, and he could see the motion and hear the sigh of silk as she removed her coat. He could sense that she was naked. Her vague form vanished and the quilts were ruffled by a breeze. From the bed she said, ‘Come to me like Heracles.’
Haraldr stripped as naked as the statue and found his way to the bed. He lay down carefully, unwilling to break the strange spell she was casting. After a few minutes she took his hand again. She sighed, or perhaps it was a muffled, tiny sob. Then she began to explore his arm.
Time became suspended. She traced every vein, every indentation, the outline of every muscle, and he in turn claimed the same territory from her. How long did they float through black oblivion before she stroked his nipple and pressed her satin palm against his huge pectoral? How long before her fingers crept to his belly and his to her wet fur? And then the ritual repeated, this time with lips instead of fingers. They had long ago passed the stars; there was no heat except their own. Finally she held over him, just as she had in Hecate, but this time she lowered her nose to his, the fine-tipped nose he now knew like his own flesh. Perhaps it was a freak of the shadows, perhaps not, but her eyes seemed to light from within and he could see the lapis gleam. ‘You are my angel,’ she whispered. ‘My avenger and my destroyer. I love you.’ Then she settled and brought him inside her.
How long they rocked on that warm, impossibly brilliant sea, he also did not know. This time it was slow, endless, a complete dissolution of the flesh. At the end they shuddered only slightly but in perfect concert, and ceased to be. They were utterly exhausted.
‘Who are you?’
Haraldr started: he must have dozed off. Had it been a dream?
‘Who are you? You are no land man from Rus.’
Haraldr felt her eyes on him, and reality reconstituting his body, if only because for a moment he had actually considered telling her everything, not merely the cryptic affinity he had offered Serah. But the oaths he had taken to that secret were too strong, the risk too great even for love. And then he realized a stunning new truth, that this new love, Maria, also commanded his silence: in Maria’s arms he wanted to remain Haraldr Nordbrikt. In her arms he wanted to end the flight that he had begun at Stiklestad, to stay here among the Romans, to become civilized, to serve his Mother and Father. And to love her, here, for ever. He knew that he could not indefinitely share both these loves, Norway and Maria, yet he would lose them both if he told her now. So for now he would offer her the only truth he could. ‘I cannot tell you who I am.’
She wrapped her arms tightly around his back and pressed her lips softly to his neck. He nuzzled her lustrous hair and whispered in her ear. ‘Who are you?’
Maria kissed Haraldr on the lips and then released him and rolled away from his body. ‘I do not know,’ she said.
Her voice was so plaintive that Haraldr reached out for her with pain in his heart. What sorrow was hidden so deeply? But Maria sat on the edge of her bed and draped her coat over her shoulders. ‘It is almost time to prepare for our day’s journey,’ she said wearily. ‘You must leave.’ She turned to face him. ‘My last question is for our Mother. To it you can reply only yes or no.’
Haraldr sat up and stroked the raven’s plumage. She threw her arms around him and kissed him fiercely, as if it were her last. And then she pushed him away and stood up, her arms wrapped against some inner cold. ‘Our Mother asks if you will, when she commands, sever the head of the Imperial Eagle.’
IV
‘Keleusate.’ The eunuch’s voice clattered like broken porcelain on the bare marble floor. Mar Hunrodarson lifted himself to his knees in response to the invitation but did not rise to his feet. This was a calculated act of protracted obeisance; the purple-born Augusta Theodora could still look down on him as they spoke. Theodora’s thin lips, drawn like a string across her small face, flattened into a wry suggestion of a smile. The pale blue eyes sparkled like ice in the cold room, as if the giant Hetairarch were merely a callow suitor whose attentions Theodora found too fervent and clumsy.
‘Hetairarch.’ Theodora held her arms out and extended her long pale fingers towards the Hetairarch’s shoulders, as if she were a conjurer commanding him to rise. Again the eyes flashed, droll and challenging. Theodora turned swiftly and reclined on her couch. ‘Keleusate,’ offered the eunuch again; he gestured for Mar to sit on the blue silk couch opposite the Augusta.
‘You are accompanying our Father to Thessalonica?’ Theodora’s question was rhetorical. ‘How unseemly that he did not greet my sister or her rescuers on their return, leaving their reception to the offices of his brother, Joannes. I understand that he has not even sent her a message of welcome. And now it seems that my sister embarrasses his piety to such a degree that he must flee to the arms of his saint before he can even look upon her again.’