the blade touched his throat. ‘You want to kill me, little bitch. Look, it is only a thumb’s width. Kill me.’ She grimaced and let the knife drop. Mar looked into her mesmerizing eyes: the rage, the danger, the invitation. He knew his purpose for coming here now. Why had he concealed it from himself? He brought his lips close to hers, and she did not recoil as he had thought (hoped?) she would. He grabbed her hair and pulled her to him and kissed her, and she pressed back, her lips angry yet soft, the kiss that had made him sleepless a hundred nights. Then she pushed him away. Tell me!’
Mar ripped her cloak off, revealing a sheer silk tunic; her nipples were erect beneath the mistlike drape. She looked at him and pulled her hair slick against her head and held it, and for a moment she had the utterly wild aspect of a blue-eyed panther. She dropped her hands and placed them on the draped neckline of her tunic and pulled down and ripped the garment from her shoulders. The silk settled at her ankles like falling eiderdown. ‘Set me free,’ she said.
Mar stared at her, his desire a great engine in his throbbing chest. If Haraldr Sigurdarson wanted to fight over her, he would kill him. He was a hundred times a man in every way except that he had never been able to take a woman. And now he would. He studied her body again, reality exceeding even memory; she had had him so close then, now there was nothing about her he did not desire.
She helped him undress, silently looking in his eyes the entire time, her face inscrutable. She took him to her bed and he was hard. ‘My fair-hair,’ she said, pressing down on him, demanding what he had hoped to plunder. Her breathing was quick and harsh. ‘Destroy me,’ she said raspily. ‘Set me free.’ She clutched at Mar’s hair. ‘Let him live.’
Maria ground her pubis against him until he grimaced with pain. ‘I like it, my fair-hair, I like it . . .’ She clutched his head to her breasts. ‘Bite me! Harder!’ She arched her spine and growled like a cat. ‘Harder! Make me bleed!’
Intoxicated beyond any sense he had ever known, Mar took the soft skin of her breast between his teeth and ripped and tasted the blood. And then his loins exploded.
They breathed in a furious contrapunto. Mar fell quickly from the precipice of passion, disgusted with himself, not because he had taken another man’s woman but because he had fouled himself. What had been different this time, he wondered, to make him do it? Did he really hate Haraldr Sigurdarson that much? Or was death closer than he thought? His genitals felt cold and filthy with her wetness. She was a whore. He pushed Maria away and retreated from her bed.
Maria sat up and smeared the blood over her breast like a fascinated child. She watched Mar dress. ‘I liked it,’ she said in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from some great distance. ‘You were as inept as a thirteen-year-old boy. I have seduced boys with beardless chins and had to teach them. Now I have taught you. It is all for my pleasure. As you say, I am quite addicted to it.’
Mar looked at her as if she were a leper. ‘You are mad and empty,’ he said, pulling his boots on and then standing to confront her. ‘You are like the western sea, with this great force, this great tempest, but like the sea you rage alone, in emptiness and in silence, without meaning, unless a man dares to challenge you. Every man who loves you is a fool. I was a fool to come here.’
Maria watched Mar leave. There was a high-pitched sound in her ears. She felt as empty as the sea Mar had described. There had been no pleasure, only the gift of pain she had demanded. She had hated it, and herself, and it had not set her free.
Alexius, Patriarch of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith, appeared in a burst of white silk and gold embroidery. Behind the luminous Patriarch, through the briefly opened bronze doors to his personal apartments, Mar caught a glimpse of servants clearing the silver and gold settings of the Patriarch’s breakfast table. Mar fell to his knees and lowered his forehead to a red carpet sprinkled with delicately woven gold chrysanthemums. A sweet incense filled his nostrils.
‘Rise, Hetairarch.’ Alexius beckoned with his ring-laden fingers. ‘Rise up.’ It was a strange, powerful face, the feminine lips contradicted by the hawklike nose, the eyes still, guarded, but fearsome nonetheless.
‘Father, you honour me--’
‘Nonsense. It is my pleasure. Since His Majesty is no longer able to join me for breakfast, I often feel that I am losing conversance with the secular arms of our glorious Empire. I welcome this opportunity to conduct a private and, indeed, intimate interview.’
Alexius showed Mar through a series of ante-chambers and Patriarchal offices; the bustling secretaries with their armfuls of documents and the hurrying dignitaries in silk and gold seemed little different from the officials of a major Imperial Bureau. The difference, Mar noted, was that here there was a powerful uniformity of purpose, a sense that these officials served, with unstinting obedience, but one master.
‘I thought we might converse in my church,’ said Alexius. ‘I am intent on redeeming your soul for the Pantocrator, you know. So I will ask for His intervention. It is hard to deny Him in the Mother Church.’ They entered a short, vaulted hallway that opened onto the south arcade of the Hagia Sophia. Alexius walked to a heavy marble balustrade and gestured into the vast chamber of golden light that extended beyond, above and below them; everywhere Mar looked, scintillae of colour accreted into architectural forms and then dissolved into light again. This is Rome, Mar told himself, a huge structure so disguised by the multiplicity and splendour of its parts that it is impossible to tell what is solid, real, and what is illusion. But one must not be dazzled by the lights. There were real walls, real columns here. And if a man had the intelligence to identify and the temerity to remove the critical supporting structures, he could bring even this edifice down.
‘It is quite fragile,’ said the Patriarch, almost as if he had opened a window into Mar’s mind. ‘Look.’ He pointed to the massive pier at the end of the arcade, one of four that thrust up the soaring central dome. ‘If you focus through the light, you can see how it is inclined backwards.’ Mar squinted; the pier indeed tilted noticeably, as if the weight of the presumably incorporeal gold dome were crushing down on it. ‘When I walk in here each morning,’ said Alexius, ‘I am in awe that God has permitted the dome to stand through another day.’ Alexius looked about the enormous golden shell with an unexpected warmth and familiarity, as if he were watching a small child he would some day have to send off to life, war, love, disappointment, death.
After a moment the Patriarch turned to Mar, the beasts in his dark eyes finally unleashed. ‘This is my fortress,’ he said, his voice even but now much deeper in resonance, almost supernaturally compelling. ‘It is the most powerful structure on earth. Its strength is not in the mass of its walls but in their fragility, the fashion in which they are transformed by the light of day into the pure light of God’s Eternal Being. Some day men, perhaps with means we cannot dream of today, will defeat the walls of this city. But how can anything defeat the light in which the Pantocrator reveals himself to men?’
The dragon of Nidafell, thought Mar. The last dragon will consume even the light of the Pantocrator.
Alexius’s eyes retreated. ‘I see I have failed to move you with talk of God. Let us then talk of Rome, and what we must render to, if not our Caesar then to the powers that have given us a Caesar.’
Mar looked up into the golden carapace that seemed more an opening than an enclosure. Perhaps there was a power to this light. It enabled the Patriarch to speak with the direct tongue of a Norseman instead of the oily mendacity of the Roman courtier.
Alexius raised both wiry eyebrows. ‘And who are we, Hetairarch?’
‘The Varangians of the Grand and Middle Hetairia.’
Alexius nodded his head. ‘That is no small thing. One thousand warriors of proven, and more importantly, feared ability. And even more importantly, already quartered inside the palace gates, indeed surrounding the person of the Emperor. But do the Scholae, Excubitores and Hyknatoi of the Imperial Taghmata’ – these were all elite palace regiments – ‘share your resolution? If not, they would certainly deter the swiftness of your thrust. Perhaps with fatal consequences for all involved.’
‘Of course you are correct in your reservations,’ answered Mar. ‘If we had to defeat the Imperial Taghmata,’ he said, slightly smirking with the boast, ‘the endeavour might take us several days. By then the people would have become aroused and could possibly create a situation that would force us to accept any candidate they proposed. However earnest the intentions of the simple folk, we might be left with another unsuitable candidate. But if the Imperial Taghmata were convinced that both the people and other . . . powers were resolute in their wishes, they would acquiesce to our coup.’
‘An artful hypothesis, Hetairarch. But you fail to calculate the most significant of Rome’s many powers, if only because in that power is the will of the Pantocrator manifest in human form. I mean the purple-born. And is
