Byzantium

‘So will you dance with the Hetairarch?’ Little Maria smirked surreptitiously.

‘How did you know he was coming?’

‘I have been asking. Do you know who else is coming? That Saracen prince who wants to be Caliph of Egypt.’ Little Maria lowered her voice to a ridiculous hiss and steered her blue-green eyes about the room. ‘They say the Emperor may even appear.’

I doubt that, Maria thought to herself, not wanting to spoil the girl’s anticipation. It was enough that Zoe had been freed to entertain at her villa on the Bosporus, and that Her Majesty was conducting the event with the zeal of old. Maria only hoped that Zoe herself would not presume that the Emperor might attend her ball.

‘Mistress, do you think I might be seduced this evening?’ said Little Maria blithely.

Maria reached over and gave Little Maria’s long blond braid a sharp pull. ‘Not tonight, little flower. When you are ready to be plucked, I will find someone appropriate to seduce you.’

‘Well, there it be, Worship. If you can find yourself this Charto-whatever out there, then you knows your way around better than me. And I’ve been running these ugly humped demons out here for two indictions. It’s madness, Worship. I’ve seen it all happen, and it’s madness. Kept me busy, though.’

Constantine looked through the shimmering, late-summer heat that cloaked the Cappadocian valley. Incredible. Of course he had heard of it, but he had imagined a few dozen of these desert dwellers. Incredible. Spread out to the horizon was a land of dull almond and bronze colours, tortured by wind and rain into thousands and thousands of jagged, tooth-like spires, all of relatively uniform height, all crowded in dense, disordered row after row. The landscape in itself was something of a marvel, but what was truly remarkable was that this fantastic expanse of weathered stone was a city. Not a town or a village but a city of homes carved into these cone-shaped limestone spires; it was hard to distinguish a single spire that was not pocked with small square windows and rectangular doors and even large recessed balconies. The rock city crawled with life; brown- and black-cloaked monks scrambled up and down the wooden ladders that led to their perches, and the roads that ran into and around this strange metropolis were crowded with these eremites and their donkeys, laden with sacks of provisions and clay jars of fresh water or wine. Thousands of cooking fires further smudged the hazy atmosphere. Constantine could see a monk beating a rug on one of the balconies. The scene was not of this world.

Constantine tried to compose himself. The heat and dust were suffocating. He would die before he could possibly find one old monk out there. But he could not allow himself that despair. He was a man of ability. And a man of ability would use his superior intellect to conquer this forbidding, holy otherworld. Constantine wiped his drenched face with his dust-soiled veil. The Chartophylax, coming here, would go to a world he knew. Books. Manuscripts. Eremites would not have these things, at least in any abundance. Only a church would. Constantine squinted over the spiky terrain. Certainly some of the larger, more complex porches indicated chapels, but there were bound to be scores, probably even hundreds. ‘My esteemed sir,’ he asked the camel driver, ‘where ,would one find the largest chapel in this district?’

The camel driver spat into the floury dust. ‘There, Worship.’ He pointed to a large conglomeration of blunted cones that seemed much like a ragged, natural version of the piled-up, multiple domes of an Orthodox cathedral. This rock chapel was a good eight stades distant.

‘And where might one find a donkey and some water jugs?’

‘You’re in luck, Worship, as it is my cousin who sells mules to the eremites down there.’

Constantine looked out over the sweltering, tortured city of denial and told himself that the Hand of the Pantocrator was indeed upon this enterprise.

‘I am emphatically certain that his wife’s father had an Armenian on his mother’s side.’ Theophano Attalietes, wife of the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes, hefted, with a motion of her left elbow and entire vast bosom, the trail of her jewelled and gold-embroidered scarlet pallium as if the garment were some sort of volume bearing the genealogies of everyone present. She looked imperiously down her fat, painted nose at the almost as grotesquely splendid wife of another Senator. ‘By the Lord’s Hand, woman, he allowed his daughter to marry a merchant. And he has had Venetians at his home!’ As far as Theophano Attalietes was concerned, the matter was settled. She and her gaggle of bejewelled Dhynatoi cronies would not greet Andronicus Diogenes or his wife, despite the fact that Diogenes owned two dozen separate estates in Asia Minor and his father had been a distinguished general under the Bulgar-Slayer.

‘I am faint,’ muttered Theophano, who appeared about as faint as a charging bull. She nudged her companion and nodded towards the gilded presence of Nicephorus Argyrus. Snapping her fingers quickly, she organized her eunuchs and ladies-in-waiting, all of them attired in white silk, into a gleaming mother-of-pearl wall before her, lest the preening merchant attempt to approach her. She could have strangled her husband, Nicci, for having had anything to do with that man, but at least that was over. At least her baby, Ignatius, had not been forced to marry one of the disgusting merchant’s bastard daughters. ‘I am bleeding for our Empire!’ Theophano erupted. ‘Do you see it, or have the demons been sent to test my incomparable piety!’ She nodded her round, adipose head with frantic bobbing motions. ‘The brute! The Tauro-Scythian brute! He is in the costume of a stable boy, and with the Imperial Crest on his breast!’

‘He … he is … rather well spoken,’ offered the wife of Senator Scylitzes timidly but nonetheless suicidally. ‘He . . . he did . . . save our Emperor.’ Theophano turned to Madame Scylitzes like an executioner. ‘Woman,’ she intoned in an acid voice, ‘the Emperor’s horse also served him in battle. We do not invite the horse to walk among ladies of ancient and noble lineage, nor do we consider the beast “well spoken” simply because it can stamp its hoof three times when its master utters the word three. I suggest that you endow an icon to the Mother Church, woman, and pray to the Holy Mother to be released from your untoward empathy for savages.’

‘I believe your costume has drawn the ire of Theophano Attalietes,’ said Nicephorus Argyrus to Haraldr; they were close enough to catch a few words of the woman’s exclamations. Haraldr had worn the controversial new men’s fashion to the Empress’s ball, a thigh-length tunic worn with hose. ‘Or perhaps it is merely your fair complexion.’ Argyrus pointed to Theophano among the cluster of tongue-wagging Senatorial wives. ‘Do you realize I could arrange for you to own that fat sow before this evening is over?’

Haraldr laughed. ‘I would sign over to you my entire fortune for the privilege of not owning that.’

Argyrus gestured theatrically at the vast interior court of the Empress’s villa; the colonnaded square was variously filled with set tables, a stage, fountains buried beneath trays of delicacies and silver ewers of wine, and a glittering crowd of hundreds of dignitaries in a display of silks and jewels beside which an Imperial coronation paled. Bonnets and pearl collars framed the beefy jowls of the magnates, and silk parasols held by uniformed eunuchs shielded the painted faces of their ladies from a sun that had already disappeared behind the court’s soaring peristyle. ‘There are more prejudices here than gold earrings,’ Argyrus said. ‘The Dhynatoi of undilute blood – or so they think – look down on the Dhynatoi who have an Armenian or Persian in their history, but then any Dhynatoi from the Eastern themes looks down on the Dhynatoi from the western themes, and all the Dhynatoi look down on a merchant like myself, though I could buy any one of them. Needless to say, you barbaroi do not deserve consideration. Then there are the eunuchs, who think they are quite above everybody except another eunuch who holds a higher office. The priests, meanwhile, look down on the monks, whom they consider unwashed primitives, and the monks look at everyone else as sinful. The civil bureaucrat despises the military man, and of course the military man despises everyone except for the Seljuk warrior, whom he secretly admires. The Hellenes at court consider everyone else untutored louts, and everyone else considers them pompous, heathen windbags. It is a miracle that anyone in Rome talks to anyone else.’ Argyrus looked around and tipped his gold goblet towards the peristyle. ‘A friend of yours has arrived. Someone who really has risen above all this.’

The level of noise was too high to hear the comments Maria inspired, but she clearly created a ripple of sensation in the crowd. Haraldr had wondered what new innovation would distinguish her attire, since her Greek- style costume had already inspired many imitations. This time she wore a dancer’s uniform, except that her short, thigh-length tunic was cut from embroidered white silk and her long underskirt was of sheer chiffon and slit to the waist. The sight of her scarcely veiled legs gave Haraldr a queasy feeling in his stomach. The thought of wanting her that much frightened him.

‘Hetairarch, have you ever considered making a wife of our Helen, our Maria?’ Argyrus eyed Haraldr’s frown warily. ‘I hope I have not presumed on our friendship.’

‘No. I have . . . thought of it.’