light.
Cold water seemed to drain through Constantine’s bowels. Who was there? The same thieves who had stolen his mule? Constantine parried with the lamp as if it were a sword, thrusting it towards the craggy folds at the base of a cone. He saw red, feral eyes vanish into the night. Wild dogs, possibly more vicious even than thieves. He would have to get a loan in Caesarea now, simply to pay for his passage home, once he had reimbursed the mule’s owner.
The scraping again. Constantine looked about the ground for some good stones to throw at the dogs; why hadn’t he at least brought a staff? The black blur flashed from the shadows and punched the breath from him. His lamp spilled and burning oil washed over the rocks. Hands clutched at his cloak and probed for his purse. He rolled into the dust, gasping for air, the hands now pummelling his head. He forced himself to his knees and pounded back with his chubby fists, eliciting muffled groans from his assailant. The two men, entirely unknown and virtually unseen by each other, traded blows in the fading light of the spilled oil. Constantine’s chest and arms seared with fatigue but he still flailed with unexpected force. The assailant fled, a clattering shadow disappearing into the night.
Constantine remained on his knees, gulping the dry, dusty air. His head ached and his temples thumped with raging blood. Even in his distress he could hear the footsteps behind him and he whipped his head around. The figure was over him and he looked at the face in the last flickering light of the spilled oil and screamed.
‘He induces a trance, like a soothsayer,’ said Maria. ‘That is commonly done. His skill is that he can make hundreds of people see it at once. He has learned the ways of the mind, and how to make the mind see what it wants to see. He leads your mind to its own fantasies. But most of what you saw were tricks, to make you susceptible to the final illusion.’ Maria stretched her arms across the little dessert table and grasped Haraldr’s hands. Zoe had set up the tables all across the porch of her villa, as well as on the terraces descending to the Bosporus. The entire hillside twinkled with candlelight like a miniature city; the stairs, marked with glowing silk lanterns, were brilliant boulevards. There was no moon and the sea was sable-black.
‘Nevertheless, you cried at what you saw.’ Haraldr wondered if she had seen some new vision of his fate. Or perhaps her own.
‘At what I let myself see. I saw the fire and the raven because I dreamed these things. Because I am afraid for you. Not because they will happen but because I care for you. Because I . . .’ She trailed off, the missing words obvious. ‘You saw the dragon at the end, because that is your Norseman’s myth. But you are the only one who saw it. We all saw the light of New Jerusalem because we have all been in the Mother Church, and Abelas persuaded our minds to see it again. Abelas is very gifted, some say dangerously so. Do you know that he was escorted to his ship by his own Allemanian guards and has already sailed off in the dark? He worries that people who saw terrible things will try to kill him. The church would like to see him out of the way because he casts doubt on the veracity of miracles. And he will probably be mad within a year. I would say his art will soon be lost, and even the chronologists will be too frightened to record all of what we have seen.’
Haraldr clutched Maria’s hands. What she had said about Abelas had, as she would say, ‘the resonance of truth’. But if Abelas had the gifts of a soothsayer or seer, he could without question see into time. And he had known Haraldr, had seen him born, had seen him die, had seen the last dragon fly at the end of time.
‘He knew you, didn’t he?’ said Maria. Haraldr’s eyes registered the shock. Maria was also gifted, perhaps dangerously so. Haraldr wished that Zoe had not left them alone. He felt unsure of himself with her now; in the light of the candle she was not the same friend he had grown to love during the long summer afternoons. She was the lover he had known on those endless nights. He knew what she wanted, the unmasking of the secret that separated their questing souls, and he still could not give it to her. ‘No.’ Haraldr could not look at her. ‘He did not know me.’
Maria looked down and her fine, dark lashes seemed to work at vanquishing tears. When she looked up again, there was a kind of tragic acceptance on her face. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘they are going to dance.’
The dancers, a troupe of twenty beautiful young women dressed much like Maria, except in more colourful and less precious silk, formed a ring, their arms interlocking to form a continuous chain. To the music of flutes and cymbals they began to sway, first at the hips, sensually, then incorporating their entire bodies with fluid undulations of their locked arms and precise movements of their feet. Slowly they built to ever more elaborate, frenzied rhythms, movements added to movements until the ring swayed, twisted and spun like a top with the power to change its shape endlessly.
Soon younger men and women, many quite drunk, began to form rings of their own, swaying and whirling with less grace but equal fervour. Maria impulsively grabbed Haraldr and led him to one of the rings on the terrace below him. They spun about with a large group for a while, and then the circles broke into fours, and finally couples were left to their own improvisations. The music whistled and chimed to an elaborate climax. The night was a blur of flashing silk and candlelight. Maria soon outpaced Haraldr and moved in with the professional troupe, her grace almost the equal of theirs and her undulant hips and bared legs even more erotic. On and on she went, her eyes and teeth shining fiercely.
Finally the music stopped to offer the exhausted dancers relief. Maria came to Haraldr, her breasts rising and falling rapidly and her forehead wet. She wrapped her arms around him and he could feel that her passion had only been momentarily diverted. She looked up at him, her eyes still on fire. ‘I would give my soul to make love to you tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you give me yours?’
He held her to him. ‘I know what I must say to you,’ he said. Tell her, he pleaded with himself. Every inhibition was gone at this moment – the oaths to Norway, the risk of exposure, the fear of her betrayal – and yet that truth had never seemed more deeply buried in his breast. If he told her, everything would change between them. And he loved her too much at this moment to want to change anything.
Maria’s eyes teared as she waited. Finally she dropped her head. ‘Why? I will share anything with you. If you are a criminal, a traitor, a slave, if you have a wife, a queen, a whore, I don’t care. I have to know who you are. Don’t you see what it means that that is so important to me? I want to know how to place you within my life. I will do anything you want me to. But I have to know.’ She looked up at him again. At that instant Haraldr realised that they both stood on some great precipice, and they could either leap from it wrapped in one another’s arms, or walk away from that brink separately, strangers for ever. He could only answer that fate with silence.
‘I have told you everything,’ she said, her voice the plaint of some small, doomed animal. She shuddered with a single sob, released him, and ran madly across the terraces, her legs pumping and her fists attacking the night air.
‘You are an angel of the Lord,’ said Constantine as the noseless monk dabbed the cut over his eye with a wet cloth. ‘I apologize for regarding you as another cutthroat. Who knows how long I would have lasted out there.’
‘I followed you,’ said the monk. ‘They lied back there. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon. He was once . . .of our lavra. He is in trouble. Men in Constantinople. We monks protect our own.’ The monk’s voice had the curious resonance of the noseless; he spoke as if it took a great deal of time for his words to travel from his brain to his mouth.
‘So why have you helped me?’
‘Because he is a friend of mine. The Chartophylax. Brother Symeon.’
Constantine decided not to pursue the matter; the noseless monk was a not too bright Good Samaritan, and perhaps he thought that Constantine was someone who could help his friend with his legal problems. And perhaps Constantine could. ‘Can you take me to see Brother Symeon?’
The noseless monk nodded and turned into the night, adeptly picking a path through the jagged bases of the spires. The darkness was overwhelming. It was as if the monk’s single taper were a candle adrift in a vast dark sea. The monk moved swiftly and Constantine’s heavily fleshed chest ached. Brother Symeon awaits, he told himself as he grimly pursued the black shape before him. The key to all Rome may be out there in this hideous night. They began to climb, scrambling over tortured, worn rocks. The air was suddenly cooler in pockets. To his left Constantine glimpsed a few glowing portals. He imagined the jagged presence of the cones around him without actually being able to see them.
‘The ladder . . . needs repair,’ said the noseless monk. He thrust his taper towards a weathered wooden lattice that climbed into the blackness. ‘Watch that the steps don’t break. You being . . . big.’ Constantine heard the
