off the bronze lamp. ‘Damn him! Damn him! We will be his hostages as long as he lives!’ Michael’s face was crimson, and his eyes had a curious opaque glaze. He exhaled sharply through his nostrils, twice in rapid sequence. ‘I have been considering a plan along with an … associate of mine. It is quite dangerous. I will understand if you wish to hear no more of it.’
Constantine opened the door quietly and checked outside in the hall, then came back in the room. His forehead was perspiring, but there was grim purpose in the set of his jaw. ‘They took the manhood from between my legs,’ he said softly. ‘They did not take the manhood from here.’ He thumped his well-larded chest. ‘Tell me about this plan.’
‘Blood! Blood!’ The girl stood as naked as Eve and shook her dirty burlap tunic in Ulfr’s face. She spat, made a punching motion with her fist, then pointed at Askil Eldjarnson and rattled off a string of words that Ulfr guessed he wouldn’t have known even if his Greek was as good as Haraldr’s. He did recognize one of the words, however: ‘Rape.’
Ulfr looked down at the shrieking, gesticulating girl; she had greasy brown hair and teeth like a glacier rift. Another word he could understand: ‘Virgin.’ She pounded on Askil’s chest and spat in his face. ‘Look at her, Komes Ulfr,’ said Askil calmly but mournfully. ‘She has lice. And breasts like kneecaps.’ The gangly, thin-faced Icelander spread his hands in a gesture of incredulity. ‘If a man visits the butcher, why would he pay for the meat and steal the entrails?’
Ulfr nodded sympathetically. The girl was sixteen, if a day, and if there was a woman of sixteen summers in the Studion who was still a virgin, whether she wanted to be or not, she deserved to be appointed one of these Christian saints. Blood had been smeared on her tunic and around her pubic area in an improbable quantity; she was saying she had been raped, not sacrificed to Odin. Ulfr guessed she was a precociously shrewd whore with a clever new cheat; he would tell the men to watch out for yet another Studion snare.
‘Varangian devils!’ yelled another woman, a toothless, soot-faced hag of indeterminate age. ‘Devil sent you, Devil take you back!’ Ulfr could not understand everything shouted by a burly man with a dirty rag over one eye, but the essence of it was that in addition to raping children, Varangians also fornicated with the Emperor. Ulfr looked around. More than a dozen people had congregated, most looking on silently with sullen, flickering eyes. Something was wrong. People in the Studion wouldn’t assemble on a filthy street corner in the dead of night to involve themselves in an ordinary misery like the putative rape of a young woman. And the younger men – six, seven of them – were too well fed to be from the sounding blocks. They were professional trouble-rousers from down near the seawall, not the ragged beggars and petty thieves that afflicted this area.
‘I’m going to pay her something for her virtue,’ said Ulfr to Askil in Norse. He had reached inside his wallet for a coin when a swaggering, swarthy young man of no more than twenty-five walked up and put his arm around the girl and said, ‘I am her father.’ Ulfr nodded at the word
The girl snatched the coin and ran off, vanishing so quickly into the putrid shadows that it was as if she had never existed. Her ‘father’ stood open-mouthed for a moment and then scurried off in search of her. Ulfr looked at the crowd and told them in Greek to ‘be off. The burly man, the old hag, and two others went growling and mumbling into the night. Ulfr noticed that the band of toughs had swelled to a dozen. He was just about to tell Askil to unsheath his long sword.
A motion and a blur from the crowd. Askil grunted and fell to his knees and the stone plopped on the fetid pavement at his feet. Ulfr brought his long sword shrieking out of the sheath. He had no recourse. They had been attacked, and now they had to kill, or the life a Varangian would not be worth the dung on the streets of Studion.
Ulfr studied the flashing blades that now ringed him. Knives. No swords, no armour, no spears. He asked Odin to guide him to the most deserving victim and instantly whirred his blade halfway through the neck of one of the tallest toughs. The rest looked at the gushing, twitching body and reconsidered their boldness. Askil was on his feet, his long sword unsheathed. He charged and scattered half a dozen into the night. The rest backed away slowly from Ulfr, jabbing their knives futilely like performers in a mime. One of them yelled something about Varangians who slept with goats.
Ergodotes, former cook and newly appointed vestitore to the Imperial Caesar Michael Kalaphates, stabled his mule in the courtyard of the little inn on the outskirts of the Venetian quarter. His principal concern on this night was the unsavoury proximity to foreigners; these Venetian sailors were scoundrels at the least, and most likely carried plagues that would make a healthy body rot like a melon left out in the sun. Well, they probably wouldn’t be up this far unless they ran out of rats and dogs to eat down where they were.
As far as the other so-called danger was concerned, why worry? He was now the trusted servant of a demigod, out on the Lord’s good business for his holy master. Ergodotes flipped a copper coin at the stable boy, strolled behind the inn, and identified the entrance to which he had been directed.
The house behind the inn was a curious ruin, perhaps an old chapel of which only the basement remained; the plaster was completely peeled off, and only the bare bricks, set with thick courses of crumbling mortar, remained. The wooden roof stuck on top of this decaying foundation was of much more recent vintage than the brick walls but was not in considerably better condition. The door was solid and new, though, sturdy oak studded with iron braces and nails. Ergodotes knocked three times, waited, then knocked once.
Ergodotes thought he would collapse from the stench when the door was opened; he assumed the occupant must live atop a sewer or never discarded his own slops. And the shrieking and howling quite unnerved him.
‘Come in before the demons snatch you!’ The man inside chortled. He was short, fantastically obese, with a head as smooth and round as a marble sphere; this sphere pivoted back and forth on his neck as if run by some sort of clockwork mechanism. ‘Come in here!’ The fat man chortled again, as if even his most mundane pronouncement were a source of great mirth. He waddled through the small dark vestibule of the dwelling, his stained tunic out before his stupendous belly like the sail of a Genoese merchantman.
The main room resembled the factory of a chemist or pharmacologist, a complex jumble of vials, jars, bowls, mortars and pestles, with all sorts of dried and fresh leaves, berries, chunks of rock and dried mushrooms scattered among the utensils. Jars of reptiles stood in rows against one wall, and against the opposite wall were wicker cages full of howling monkeys.
‘Well, you knew the street, you knew the knock, you knew this was me, because who else would be here!’ The fat man chortled yet again. He needed to squat only about a palm’s width in order to seat his amorphous rump upon a backless chair. ‘Let’s hear who you are and what you want!’
Ergodotes explained his mission. When he had finished, the fat man whistled a tune for some time, his head swivelling periodically. ‘That’s a big one,’ he finally said, for the first time looking crestfallen. ‘But I’d like to add him to my collection, you’re certain I would!’ He laughed wildly and the monkeys went into virtual hysterics in response. ‘When did you say you’d bring the money!’
Ergodotes finalized the details, getting a lengthy, chuckling discussion of how the poison would work and how his ‘specialist’ would deliver it to the ‘acquisition’.
‘One thing,’ asked Ergodotes when he was satisfied that everything else had been taken care of. ‘How do we stop if we must change our plans?’
‘You can’t do that!’ said the fat man, howling as if it were the funniest thing he had said all night.
‘Provocations,’ said Haraldr. ‘Four incidents last night, yours, and two others already tonight. He looked at Ulfr searchingly. ‘There is a plan here.’
‘Well, they’re getting nowhere,’ said Ulfr. ‘Was anyone hurt tonight, other than the ache in Askil’s head?’
‘Hedin had his leg cut,’ said Haraldr. ‘That’s what concerns me, that there is no apparent reason for these quarrels. Ulfr, the Studion is like no place we have ever known. The palace, for all its splendour and vastness, is like a court in the north, only more complex. The Studion is like a dense, almost impenetrable forest, with its own laws, its own warnings, its various hidden lives that can suddenly appear to challenge one’s own.’ He pointed down the street at a vista of towering, brutely simple brick buildings, ramshackle balconies, reeking lanes, and wretches sleeping on the streets. ‘They are doing something out there, and we don’t know what. But we are certainly part of
