palace coups. I would like to think that my demise would require more imagination on the part of the miscreant.’ Joannes’s Chamberlain opened the door to a hallway. As Joannes stepped beneath the lintel he whirled dramatically and faced Michael. ‘You have whetted my curiosity, Nephew. Why don’t you join me in my baths and tell me of the imminence of this danger to my person.’
Haraldr looked south. Flaming wreckage completely blocked the street. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said to Ulfr as he turned back to face the mob. ‘They have seen us. We cannot let them know that we are afraid of them, or the lives of my pledge-men will be worth nothing on these streets.’
Ulfr drew his sword. ‘An axe age, a sword age. The ravens will drink well tonight. And this mob will soon know with how many lives the corpse of a Varangian is purchased.’
‘No.’
Ulfr looked at Haraldr incredulously.
‘Not yet.’ Haraldr unbuckled his breastplate and sword belt, took off his helm and cloak, and handed all of his weapons to Ulfr. ‘Odin permitted me this once before,’ he said.
‘My friend . . .’ Ulfr trailed off. There was no use protesting; Haraldr had made too many mad ruses work in the past. But for a Varangian to perish unarmed, a prisoner, perhaps tortured, was a fate literally worse than death; his bench in the Valhol would wait, empty, until the last dragon flew.
‘I won’t deny you your place at the benches,’ said Haraldr. ‘If they come at you, take up your sword and summon the birds of death. But wait patiently for my return. I may be gone for some time.’
Haraldr walked towards the mob. Stripped of the badges of the feared Varangians, he felt strangely free, and yet terribly frightened as well, almost like a man in the middle of some prodigious dive. He could hear no voices above the fire storms. He came within spear range and for a moment wondered what it would feel like to have steel thud into his unprotected sternum.
The faces had the frightening uniformity of misery. Pale, deep eyes, mournful lips, angry jaws. Men, many women as well. Burlap, cheap tattered linen, rags. Stringy, filthy hair. Scars, sores. A cleft palate, a man on bare stumps. They shifted as he approached, their silence as awesome as the stillness in the Mother Church. A middle-aged woman came forward and stood a step in front of the rest. Vividly Haraldr saw the Hound at Stiklestad, that step beyond the howling wall. And his brother’s last steps.
‘Why are you burning the Studion?’ she demanded, her eyes flashing. She had a long, worn face, a face that never had had a chance at beauty and was now past the age for it.
Haraldr was stunned, and then he realized what she meant. Of course. Two birds with one arrow. Joannes had ordered the Studion burned and knew that the people would attack the Varangians as the agents of that calamity. ‘We Varangians did not set these fires.’
The crowd erupted, as angry as a tempest. Fists shook and spears bobbed up and down. The woman screamed over her comrades. ‘See what they think of your lies!’ The crowd seemed to lift her towards Haraldr. His pagan roots surfaced and he feared the spirit world he would enter without his sword.
They were around him, the white heat of death. He was clawed and punched, and the woman was pushed into him. She glared up with gritted, decayed teeth. ‘Is there another reason why you should not die, Varangian?’ she shrieked. He looked at her eyes, thinking she was not the face of the Valkyrja he had imagined, and spoke the words that needed no prompting from any god. ‘The Blue Star.’
The woman’s hate-filled eyes were suddenly as wondering as a child’s. She thrust her arms into the air, screamed, and began to push the crowd back. The mob slowly quieted until the huge flames that were consuming their homes could be heard again. ‘What business do you have with the Blue Star?’
‘I want to plead my case, to convince the Blue Star that we Varangians did not fire the Studion. I think I know who did order this.’
The woman stepped back and studied Haraldr for a moment. Then she shrugged and led him through the crowd. Haraldr looked out across the expanse of faces, feeling another kind of Roman power, far different from the power he had felt at the coronation of the Caesar, but perhaps, in a strange way, greater. And he knew in that moment that the two powers of the Great City would some day come to a bloody reckoning.
As Haraldr had suspected, the Blue Star was among his flock, herding them from behind, his bulky form towering above the rest, his shelf-like beard jutting out proudly. Haraldr looked at the silly, silken little henchmen beside their leader and wondered if he had done the right thing in so boldly confronting this very petty street prince.
‘So you want to see the Blue Star,’ said the big man. He held up his hand so that the sapphire ring was visible.
Haraldr nodded; the man’s manner convinced him he had made his final mistake in the middle realm.
The Blue Star looked at Haraldr for a moment and dipped his head. That was the last thing Haraldr saw, the Blue Star nodding at him.
Naked, Joannes gave credence to the Bogomilist heresy that man was created in the image of Satanael, not God. The smooth, hairless, white wax skin draped a demonically distorted form: the great, swelling knees and elbows; the breastbone that curved like the chest of an enormous, feather-less bird; the penis a solitary, pathetic little pod dangling beneath an immense, shovel-like pelvis. A torturous embroidery of scarlet eczema ran from his wrists to the shoulders of each arm.
‘I do not like to stay long in the dry heat,’ said Joannes. He seemed curiously at ease. He slumped against the marble bench and languidly waved his grotesque hand through the mist of steam. ‘The wet heat does not deprive the skin of its oils.’
Michael looked at the mosaic that circuited the walls of the steam room. Joannes’s apartments were in one of the oldest buildings in the palace complex, constructed in a time when different fashions and canons of beauty had prevailed. Like this mosaic. A woman and man walked before a graceful portico, the architecture convincing in its substance, the human forms swelling with the glories of the flesh, the green and gold leaves behind the buildings almost rustling with the breeze. It reminded Michael of Antioch, where ancient revelries of the flesh were still redolent in the hot nights. How different from today’s Rome, the harsh, attenuated forms one saw in art, the airless ether that allowed only the spirit, not the flesh, to breathe. He looked at his uncle. Joannes’s deep sockets were blank, lids folded over the deadly irises. What could he know of old Rome, him with his tiny, vestigial penis, his blind disregard for the beauty and splendour around him? Why did he then live amid the echoes of a pagan world he could never touch even in his imagination? That was obvious. During his residence in the cenobium Joannes had come to despise the church and even its symbols. And that was why the Pantocrator, His voice rising among the hosannas of the seraphim in the Hagia Sophia, had decreed that Joannes, a monk without faith, should die.
‘Uncle, I am quite wilted. May I wait for you in the steam room?’ Joannes nodded assent, his eyes still closed, his huge head lolling. Even the seven-headed beast has its moment of repose, thought Michael. He rose and entered the large vault that contained both the warm tub for washing and the cold pool for swimming. Lit by candelabra, the mosaics around the wall, all secular scenes, took on a sacredness, and Michael knew that even in this place the Pantocrator was still with him, guiding him. He saw the wooden box on the broad marble rim of the tub. How clever. The foolish conspirator would have brought the soap as an offering. But this was so subtle, so intricate. The Caesar was clever enough to rule Rome; this was proof. Even if Joannes did suspect him, he would never anticipate this. Strangulation, perhaps, or a knife concealed in a towel. Fool. When Joannes was dying, he would have the moment to know he had been a fool, to look into the laughing eyes that had cast him into the fiery lakes.
Michael entered the pool. Yes, stay at a distance, when the convulsions begin summon the servants. He will be seen to die untouched. The water was so vitalizing, made him feel so alert. He stroked and floated. Would they crown him again? Yes, they would have to. No longer merely the Caesar but Emperor, Basileus, Autocrator. His hand in that of the Pantocrator. Michael found himself growing erect. He fondled his stiffening penis and enjoyed the silky, surreptitious thrill. He remembered as he often did how his father had hit him for that, when he had found the Caesar – Michael had always been the Caesar, wasn’t that clear, just as the Christ had always been the Lord? – touching himself at the public bath in Amastris, the filthy, cheap one they had to go to, carrying their own pails and greasy soap and dirty linen towels. Not simply beat him, his pitch-stinking fist crashing into the Caesar’s face; his father had told the men at the shipyard, and they had held him over the nauseating vat of caulking pitch
