‘Surely there should be nothing they would do to trouble us in any event. Krysaphios tells me they are here as our allies.’
Sigurd eyed me as a teacher with a peculiarly obtuse student. ‘When ten thousand foreign mercenaries are camped before the city walls, you do not trust to kind words and noble intentions. Particularly if they are as duplicitous and greedy as the Franks. The Emperor will not believe they are his allies until they have defeated his enemies and returned to their own kingdoms. Until then, he will treat them like a tame leopard — with good will, and great caution. Otherwise, he may find one day that they have bitten off his hand and more besides.’ He scratched his beard. ‘But I cannot waste time educating your credulous ignorance, Demetrios, for I must get my company ready to call on the Franks tomorrow. We will be escorting the Emperor’s ambassador, the estimable Count of Vermandois.’
‘The Count of where?’
‘Vermandois.’
‘I know that the Emperor’s lands stretch far across the world, but that does not sound like a Roman place.’
‘No.’ Sigurd grinned. ‘It’s in the kingdom of the Franks, not so far from my own country. The Count is the brother of their king, apparently.’
‘And he’s the man the Emperor chooses as his emissary to the barbarians?’
‘He has been here some weeks as the Emperor’s honoured guest. An unfortunate shipwreck deprived him of a grander entrance. His time here has convinced him to swear loyalty to the Emperor, for here at last he has found a man who respects his position with all the riches and women he deserves.’
‘He’s been bought.’
Sigurd fixed me with a warning stare. ‘He has, Demetrios, he has. As have you.’
I had, but my price was a sorry trifle against what the Count of Vermandois — Hugh the Great, as he styled himself — must have commanded. He appeared before us the next morning an hour late, clothed in a robe whose very fibres seemed spun from pearls and emeralds. His skin was pale and smooth, like silk beneath his golden hair: doubtless he meant to look magnificent, almost angelic, but his eyes were too cold, too petulant for that. Nor did his beard flatter him, for it seemed a recent creation: a thin, uneven affair which would not have looked amiss on an adolescent.
He did not speak to us, but mounted his horse in a haughty silence at the head of our column. There must have been fifty Varangians in a double file, headed by Sigurd looking magnificent in his burnished mail and helm. The guards’ customary axes were in slings by their sides, and they carried instead fine lances, tipped with pennants which rippled in the breeze. At their rear, Father Gregorias and I — dressed in a monk’s mantle — were a less than fitting tail for the glorious cohort.
We kicked our horses into a trot and rode out of the palace, out through the Augusteion and down the broad Mesi. Our pomp drew crowds, convinced that this must herald an appearance by the Emperor, though when they saw that it was no Roman who led our column but in fact a barbarian, their shouts became jeers, and they turned their backs on us. No longer did they recede out of our way, and our lines became ragged, uneven, as each man drove his own path through them. I had worn my hood, for anonymity as much as warmth, but now I tipped it back so those around me could see I was of their race. It seemed to ease my way a little.
At the Gate of Lakes we halted, in the shadow of the new palace where, according to rumour, the Emperor Alexios preferred to keep his private quarters. Sigurd bellowed a challenge, and a fanfare of horns rang out from the tower as the gates swung open. It was a grand spectacle, though whom it impressed besides the Count I do not know.
We passed under the arch and out of the city, keeping close to the placid waters of the Golden Horn. It was almost two miles to the village where the barbarians were billeted, but in all that distance we saw hardly a soul. No-one worked the fields or shared our path; not so much as a single hen pecked at the roadside, and no smoke rose from within the dwellings we passed. I remembered Aelric’s talk of the desolation wrought upon his country by the Normans, and shivered to think that it might happen here.
Soon, though, there were many signs of life ahead: the smoke of a hundred fires, though it was only midday, and the smells that men and horses bring wherever they settle. I could see a cordon of mounted soldiers stretched out across the landscape, spaced like the towers which crowned the city walls. As we came near, one of them challenged us.
‘Who travels this road?’
‘The Count Hugh the Great,’ answered Sigurd. ‘And his escort. Here on an embassy from the Emperor. Much good may it do us,’ he added under his breath.
‘You’ll need patience,’ observed the sentry. We were close enough now that I could see he was a Patzinak with a scarred face and narrow eyes, from another of the Emperor’s mercenary legions. From the time I had spent talking with Sigurd and Aelric, I knew even the Varangians bore them a grudging respect.
‘Have the Franks hired you as their guardians?’ asked Sigurd. ‘You should be protecting the Emperor, not these whoresons.’
‘We protect them from themselves,’ the Patzinak said with a toothless grin. ‘They come in the name of the cross, they say, so we keep their souls free from the cares of the world beyond. Like the walls of a monastery.’
‘Or a prison.’
‘Or a prison.’ The Patzinak pulled his horse aside, and waved us past. ‘Strange enough, we had a scuffle with some of them last night. They said much the same.’
We rode on, into the makeshift town which had descended onto our plain like the new Jerusalem. They had been here only four days, but already the earth was ground to mud by the passage of a thousand feet, and the trees had been felled for kindling. Blacksmiths had constructed rudimentary forges under canvas awnings, and sparks flew through the blue smoke as they worked against the ceaseless demands of arms and horses. Peddlers of a dozen races proclaimed their strange and multifarious wares, while on every corner of this tented city women shouted offers which, in any tongue, were readily understood. Many of them, I saw, were our own people, who clearly had bribed or crept their way through the Patzinak cordon.
At length we came to what had once been the village square, now covered with a vast tent. The knights who stood grouped before it seemed larger, stronger than the haggard creatures we had seen before, and there was a stiffness in the way they held themselves. On a crude post behind them, beside the pavilion door, was draped a banner emblazoned with a blood-red cross and a slogan in barbarian characters: ‘Deus le volt.’
‘Thus God wills it,’ whispered Father Gregorias in my ear.
‘Does He?’
The Count Hugh dismounted, grimacing as his fur boot settled in the mire. Sigurd and the nearest Varangians followed.
‘Halt.’
A guard by the door angled his spear across the Count’s path and spoke brusquely. The Count responded with anger, though to little effect.
‘He says none are allowed in his lord’s chamber bearing arms,’ explained Gregorias. ‘The Count replies that it demeans his honour to be denied his vassals.’
Honour or no, he at last agreed that the Varangians would wait outside while he conducted his audience with the barbarians. Gregorias and I pushed forward.
‘My secretaries,’ said the Count curtly. ‘So that none may falsely represent what is said.’
The guard eyed us as warily as he had the axe-wielding Varangians, but allowed us to pass into the gloom of the tent. It took some moments for my eyes to adapt, for the only light within came from a three-branched candlestick on a wooden chest, and the dimly glowing coals of an iron brazier. Behind the pole which supported the coned ceiling there was a splintered table, where two barbarians sat on stools arguing; otherwise, the room was empty. The Count strode into the open space in its midst, the only place where he did not have to stoop, while Gregorias and I perched ourselves on a low bench by the door.
Everything that followed they said in Frankish, but by peering at Gregorias’ quick scribbling, and with the odd whispered explanation where his hand lagged their mouths too far, I managed a fair understanding of what passed.
In the time-hallowed manner of ambassadors, the Count began by announcing himself. ‘I am Hugh le Maisne, second son of Henry, King of the Franks; Count of Vermandois. .’
