and told him they were going to burn it off, and then they had tarred it! His father and those men had tarred it so that he could not touch it! It had not burned off like his uncles’, like they had said it would, but it had burned! And the Caesar had run home and told his mother (he and the Pantocrator so loved their mothers, they were so alike in that), and she had taken him to the baths and sponged him herself, as she had when he was smaller, and she had touched it again and again and cleansed it. And she had not let his father put his stinking hands on her after that. Never again. The Caesar stroked himself and realized that once he had destroyed Joannes, the Pantocrator wanted him to destroy his father.
‘Nephew, I am ready to hear of this plot.’ Joannes settled himself into the long, rectangular marble tub. ‘This tub is not sufficiently deep,’ he said. ‘It was made for smaller men. You would find it comfortable.’
‘Who is it that poses this threat to me?’
‘The conspirators were not named, Uncle. But the attempt is known in some detail. The Vlach cheese you are so fond of is to have a poison introduced. Indeed this may be a mere charade, but would it not be prudent to avoid this cheese until more is known? Our Holy Empire can hardly afford the loss of its most devoted servant because of tainted cheese.’
‘Yes,’ rumbled Joannes. He splashed water over his torso and then opened the lid of his soap box. ‘I think we affront Providence if we take lightly such warnings, even if only founded on hearsay. You have shown prudence, Nephew, a quality I had not thought previously to ascribe to you. Perhaps we should discuss enabling you to attend to some duties of state.’ Joannes removed the soap from the box and studied it for a moment.
‘The prospect lightens my heart,’ said Michael, his heart racing and his arms trembling beneath the water.
Joannes dipped the soap in the water and lathered the small, yellowish, tallowy brick in his hands. ‘This soap is my most sinful luxury. While I am certain that the Pantocrator has scourged my skin with this eczema to instruct me in Christ-like humility, I am tempted beyond redemption by the soothing properties of the emollient ingredient. A chemist skilled in pharmacology prepares this especially for me each day. This was just delivered this very night. I quite forget all cares when it relieves the torment of my affliction.’
Michael was so cold, he thought his teeth would chatter. Why does he go on so much, unless he knows? But why does he lather the soap if he knows it is a deadly poison? Joannes began salving the lather over the purple blotches on his left arm. Michael was astounded by the surge in his loins. In a moment he might ejaculate.
‘Yes, Nephew, one can grow dangerously complacent at the word
Ice spread from the nape of Michael’s neck down his back. Was it too late to stop it? What if the ingredient only made him ill? If he knew, how could he go on lathering? No. It would work. Caesar. Emperor. Basileus. Autocrator. Light of the World. His hand in that of the Pantocrator.
‘Yes, the science of toxicity, which has an undeniable social utility, has few truly learned practitioners. There is one specialist, however, who has advised me on the use of certain paralytics that are useful in interrogation. I consider him the one true artist in his field, though you would not find him aesthetically pleasing in his own right. He is an immensely fat man.’
There, in centuries-old baths where pagans gambolled in an ancient yellow glow, the Pantocrator spoke to Michael Kalaphates, as He had beneath the limitless golden dome of Hagia Sophia: ‘Save yourself. As I forgave from the excruciations upon My cross, so I shall ask the Father that you be forgiven.’
‘Uncle, Uncle, Uncle!’ Michael shrieked like a dying beast and thrashed from the pool and fell to his knees beside the marble tub, his naked back as wet and trembling as a newborn foal. ‘Save yourself! Oh, Theotokos, save yourself, the soap is poisoned!’ Michael seized the lathered lump from his uncle’s hands, clutched at it desperately, and lost it to the floor. ‘Oh, Uncle, Uncle, Uncle, I would sooner die myself – I will die myself! Oh, Theotokos, oh, Uncle!’ He wailed desperately, like a widow keening and, with his face to the opus-sectile pavement, shoved the soap into his mouth, his limbs mad, flailing, the tentacles of an octopus pulled from the depths to die on a rock. The scent of his urine mixed with the foul, fatal bitterness of the soap.
Joannes stood above him, terrible in his nakedness. He extended his distorted arms, a demon retrieving a soul from the very bosom of the Christ. He grasped his nephew’s hair and jerked back. Michael’s neck twisted and his terrified eyes rolled, to gaze into the face of death. Joannes snatched the soap from Michael’s foaming jaws and threw it into the pool. ‘The soap is not poisoned, Nephew. I will not be dead as soon as you would hope, nor, unfortunately, will you. Your soul will be taken piece by piece, according to the schedule I set, in the Neorion.’ Joannes wedged his knee into Michael’s back and pulled harder on his hair. ‘You might mercifully accelerate that schedule by telling me who is in this with you.’
Michael Kalaphates, Caesar of Rome, stared ahead into the darkness and saw the fading golden arms of the Pantocrator begin to reach out to him again. The slut!’ he screamed. The slut commanded me to do it!’
‘Let him see me now,’ said the woman’s voice. She was not the same woman he had spoken to in the crowd. This woman’s voice was calm, grandmotherly, but with a timbre of great authority. Haraldr’s hands ached but his head was clear. The blow had not concussed him, only blackened his vision for a few moments and brought him to his knees; the thugs had been able to tie his hands and feet and slip several cloth sacks over his head. Thrown into a cart of some sort, a blanket or carpet over him, he had jolted over the streets for half an hour. He had heard the faint whoosh of flames, some distant shouting, animal noises. The can had turned many times.
The sacks were slipped off his head and Haraldr blinked into the torchlight. He was seated on the floor in a small, neatly kept room. The woman was standing. She was short, white-haired, with the inflated features of a woman whose beauty had aged into plumpness. She wore a threadbare, but clean, sleeveless linen tunic; her substantial bosom pressed against the fabric. Beside her, in a simple wooden chair with a curving back, sat a man, even older than she was. His eyes were milk-white with cataracts. Behind the aged couple, looking down over their silvery heads, stood the Blue Star.
‘I am the Blue Star,’ said the old woman.
Haraldr blinked. ’You. . .’
The old woman reached back and snatched the ear of the big man and pulled him forward until his jutting beard seemed to perch on her shoulder. This rascal is my son. He uses my name; it protects me. Confused you? Confusion is my livelihood now, you might say. I must be known, and yet not known. This devil helps me with that.’ She released the ear and batted her son’s cheek. ‘That’s all he’s good for.’
The Blue Star dropped her hand to the head of the old man and caressed his wispy white hair. This is my husband. He doesn’t hear, either.’ She turned back to her towering son. ‘I let the boy know what I am about.’ She looked at her son sharply. ‘So he won’t blunder into something!’ She came around and studied the bindings of Haraldr’s hands. ‘Cut him loose,’ she ordered her son.
Haraldr rubbed his hands and ankles and looked up at her. ‘The Blue Star,’ she began, acknowledging his evident curiosity, ‘is the name that the people of the city once knew well. This . . .’ The woman, with some difficulty due to the tight fit, pulled her tunic down almost to the nipple of her left breast. The birthmark on her ruddy, fleshy breast was not blue but a faded brown that might have been deep purple once, and not a perfect star but indeed had five somewhat irregular points. ‘The Blue Star. They saw it – believe me, they all did, from the Bulgar-Slayer down to the porters. In the Hippodrome. I could do things on a galloping horse you couldn’t do on a gymnasium floor if you spent a lifetime trying. One foot, one hand, my leg up, leaps from one horse to the next. To start, to titillate them. Then swords and fire and what have you. I have seen two Emperors crowned. You have heard nothing like the way they acclaimed me in the Hippodrome.’ For a moment Haraldr saw the young athlete’s eyes, and he imagined the beauty she must have been, the spectacle of her. And then he saw Maria, her beauty, still alive, still vivid, and he realized he could not see her old like this, could not see a time when she would not be fresh and in his arms.
The Blue Star was an old woman again. ‘One day, during a practice stunt I had done a thousand times, I fell. I could not get up. I walk now but with pain and difficulty.’ Her head bobbed slightly. ‘Everything gone, the silks, the town house, snatched away by God. I came back here, where I had started. This man taught me that I had lost nothing.’ She bent and kissed the old man’s head.
‘These are my people, Varangian. Devils, whores, thieves, vagrants. They were his people too. The
