seemed that in Rome a confirmed spy was almost as valuable as a trusted friend. Every now and again, however, he had to resist the urge to stroll downstairs and literally tear Gabras in two in front of his entire staff of cringing eunuchs and maidservants. ‘Gregory,’ shouted Haraldr to the corners of the huge palace, ‘are you ready to go a- viking with your Norse comrades?’ Gregory shouted back, a muffled response, and after a few moments the little eunuch appeared at the far end of the ante-chamber; he wore a linen cape and dragged a Norse-style hide gear bag. ‘In battle storm we fear no lee!’ he exhorted with a self-deprecating flourish.
Haraldr grinned at Gregory’s kenning. ‘You are the first Roman Norseman,’ he told Gregory affectionately. Haraldr looked at Gabras, who was still directing his own campaign, and had an inspiration. ‘Chamberlain,’ he barked, ‘leave this! You are going to war!’ Gabras looked as if he had just had a knife plunged into his ribs. ‘Yes. You could be useful. My interpreter and brave comrade here, a veteran of much combat, needs a batman to carry his bag to the front. You are appointed to this position. Any delay in obeying this order will be punished by regulations governing the conduct of the Middle Hetairia.’ The astonished Gabras quickly capitulated to Haraldr’s icy eyes and attached himself to Gregory’s gear bag as if he had been born to the position.
Haraldr waved for Maria to follow him upstairs. He walked quickly ahead of her to his vaulted, candlelit bedchamber. His Alan girl stood in waiting, her sinuous body sheathed in white silk and her opal-grey eyes anxious. He kissed her marble-smooth white forehead and sent her out. She walked gracefully past Maria, looking at her keenly, almost like one stallion appraising another.
‘She is like a white leopard I saw once,’ said Maria raptly, apparently unable to contain her admiration for an equally splendid female. ‘You must be beautiful together, your gold and her ivory.’
‘Yes,’ said Haraldr, ‘and tonight when she wraps her panther legs around me, she will truly regret that it may be the last time. Not because she loves me – she hardly knows me -but because I have kept her well. And I have grown to see the beauty in the simple truth of that.’
Maria looked terribly pained; at exactly what he did not know, but he was pleased to see her anguish. She bowed her head so that he could no longer see. ‘I am a mean bitch. I did not want to speak of those things.’
‘No. Let us speak of love. Your lovers and my lovers. I have a new mistress now. When I am in her arms, I do not always think of you.’
Maria looked up with a faint hope written on her face. ‘I always think of you.’
‘Even when you are tearing flesh with some new gallant?’
‘There was a lover. That once. I did it to … I will not lie and say I did it for you. I did it to save myself. But there is no one now. I am empty.’
‘You have made your own bed, Mistress. If it is empty, then that is your own doing.’
‘Yes.’ She seemed to have made some decision, like a traveller who looks back on his home and knows in that instant he will never return. ‘I came to speak of a dream I had in that bed.’
Haraldr felt fear like a brief, sudden gust in the room. Her dreams, if they were to be believed, had a curious prescience. It was quite likely, given her strange, sad soul, that she was one condemned to see ahead in time. A seeress, of sorts, though apparently she could not induce the trance. ‘Speak of it,’ he told her.
She described the dream, the ravens, the king beyond the creek, and the wound in his neck. When she had finished, she added, ‘I did not think it was important to tell you, because I thought it was really about me. That I missed you.’ She shook her head blindly, as if trying to toss some terrible thought out of it, and a tear streamed across her temple. ‘I wanted to kill you once. I thought you were the messenger of my death. You know that. But I don’t want you to die.’ She looked up with brimming eyes, her lips contorting horribly.
She clenched her fists until her knuckles burned welt-red and then dropped her arms to her side as if drained of every feeling. Her voice fell; the whispered words seemed like a cry from an abyss: ‘I could not live knowing your soul was not somewhere in this world.’
He reached for her, not so much from pity but from knowing that her fiery touch would perish this strange new incantation. But she was cold, almost lifeless, and when she fell against him sobbing, she was not an Aphrodite with searing, snake-stealthy arms, but a small girl in need of chaste comfort. And somehow he touched her lonely, flickering soul in a way he never had when he had felt himself deep inside her. He pushed her away and held her hands, afraid that at any moment the heat and light that obscured her real being might return. ‘I promise you I won’t die out there,’ he told her.
‘I am frightened.’
‘So am I,’ admitted Haraldr. ‘But nothing in life is certain. Even destiny must sometimes stray from its own path.’
‘Or perhaps destiny misleads us into thinking it has strayed.’ Maria wiped her nose inelegantly, and Haraldr could not keep himself from holding her again.
‘You must go,’ he told her. ‘There is too much our hearts must say to each other to again place the barrier of our naked breasts between them. I will come back to you.’ She drew away from him with her own understanding of this new, virgin troth. She clutched his hands one last time, then dropped them and silently fled to the door. But beneath the ornate lintel she paused and turned awkwardly, as if her emotions had finally confused her limbs. She looked back at him, the blue eyes like a fjord on the last dying day of summer. ‘If I do not return,’ he told her, answering the question on her sad child’s face, ‘then I want you to know that I died loving you.’
The City of New Rome did not sleep. In the hours of the waning night it began to migrate from the street corners and anxious family enclaves to the Forum of Constantine. From the districts of Petrion and Xeropholios, from Phanarion and the Venetian Quarter, from Blachernae where the Great Land Wall meets the Golden Horn, from Sigma and Deuteron, even from the Studion they came, the guildsmen and labourers and merchants and vagrants and petty bureaucrats, gnarled old women who had not been outside their homes for years, babies at their mother’s breasts, they all came to watch the invincible armies of Imperial Rome go forth against the Bulgar horde.
Dawn. Polished breastplates, scarlet tunics, golden standards and banners emerged in the first diffusions of daylight. The Imperial Taghmata had already assembled in a great procession along the avenue of the Mese, extending down to the Chalke Gate and the Imperial Palace complex. Behind the mounted regiments the Imperial baggage train and the supply wagons of the Taghmata jammed the Augustaion and the precincts of the Magnana Arsenal; the mules were even wandering into the open atrium of Hagia Sophia. The head of the armoured column waited beneath the statue of the Emperor Constantine in the Forum. The enormous bronze Emperor, his countenance patinated with the centuries, stood atop seven massive drums of porphyry. A crown of rays, like shafts of sunlight through a cloud, haloed his godlike features, and he stood with the trail of his simple tunic draped over his left arm, his right arm raised as if exhorting his people. He faced east, searching for the rising sun that would send the armies of Rome west to meet the enemies of his great city and the vast empire that he had founded.
The crowd that now ringed the Forum and surrounded every building, filled every street, yard and park as far as one could see, issued no ringing acclamations. They were subdued, their anxiety a low, buzzing rumble like a distant windstorm. They waited to see if Rome would have a champion in this terrifying hour of need. And beneath the statue of the first great Christian Emperor of Rome, the aspiring champions contested that honour.
‘The Caesar must lead!’ Michael Kalaphates’s face crimsoned like the flushed eastern horizon as he tried to restrain his voice. ‘I have been acclaimed by the people and crowned by the Patriarch. That is my claim to ride out first!’
Bardas Dalassena reined his Arabian, as equally white and gorgeous as the Caesar’s mount, his muscular forearms corded with tension. ‘You yourself acknowledge that I have supreme command.’ The Grand Domestic grimaced. ‘When the Emperor is present, he leads the procession because of his stature as supreme commander, and that alone. None of his other offices pertain to this protocol.’
‘That is specious,’ replied Michael, his horse now circling Dalassena’s as if the two stallions were preparing to settle the matter. ‘Nowhere in the protocols is it suggested that anyone precede the Caesar except the Emperor.
