old wood creak beneath him as he climbed. After what seemed an endless, purgatorial ascent the monk paused ahead of him and the timber beneath his foot groaned, cracked and sagged. Constantine’s foot flew out into the dead void and his shoulders seared with pain as he suspended his ponderous bulk from his burning hands. Where he found the will to pull himself to the next rung, he could not say. Perhaps the Hand of the Pantocrator.
The monk helped him over the ledge. Constantine guessed, from the condition of the ladder, that Brother Symeon was a true eremite who never ventured from his cone cell. He probably raised his food and water up with a rope.
‘Brother Symeon,’ called the noseless monk as he stopped beneath the tiny hewn door. ‘Brother Symeon … I have brought… a man … to help you. A man from . . . Constantinople . . . Brother Symeon?’ Constantine heard no answer. ‘Brother,’ called the monk to Constantine, ‘come. Brother Symeon . . . will see you.’ Constantine ducked beneath the entrance, scraping his head against the rough lintel. He could straighten up inside the cell. The noseless monk held his taper out so that Constantine could see Brother Symeon. Constantine moaned with shock and despair and his knees went out from under him, pitching him to the rough stone floor.
The fountain resembled an enormous pine-cone; the surrounding cypresses echoed the intricately perforated marble shape. Water bubbled with a musical, faintly chiming sound. Maria was standing in the pool, her chiffon underskirt pulled up to her knees.
‘Maria.’
Maria turned. Her eyes seemed shrouded, swollen. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘You asked me once why I wanted to cause you pain. Now I ask you. Why?’ She thumped her breast with a tight fist and glared. ‘If there is some vengeance that you want now, my breast has no more armour. No need of armour. The knife is in it. Twist it if you want.’
Haraldr waded in after her and she stood erect with her breast out, as if challenging him to a combat. He put his arms around her and pressed her warm cheek to his. Then he held her away and found her eyes.
‘I told you once I was from an important family in Norway. That was no lie, but not all the truth. I am the rightful King of Norway, uncrowned only because I have not returned to claim what is mine.’
Maria held him as if he were the last thing she would ever hold in her life. She kissed his face and neck with wet passion, her tears spilling onto his robe. ‘I knew you were no land man, no mere nobleman,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it the first time we talked. I knew you bowed to no one.’ Then Maria stiffened with shock. ‘Mother of God,’ she murmured as if greeting death. ‘When must you leave?’ Just as suddenly, she smothered him again. ‘I will go to this Norway with you,’ she murmured hotly. ‘I will be anything. If you have a queen, I will be your concubine. . . .’
Haraldr held her to him and looked up at the brilliant mantle of stars. They were falling now, the two of them, falling from those heights, and while there was fear, there was also a joy he had never imagined. ‘I have no queen. And everything in my soul wants to make you my queen.’ He paused and stroked her hair lightly and listened to the sibilance of fate’s warning as he plunged through the stars; could she hear it? ‘But there would be terrible dangers for you on the journey. And I see you here, in the light and sun and beauty of Rome, and it breaks my heart to see you there, in a night that lasts for months, with the rough men of my court, in the shrieking cold of our winter. I would die to see the light go out of your eyes.’
She clutched his robe and looked at him with a new blue flame. ‘Would I have a life here without you? I have seen the beauty of Norway in your eyes, and there is no place on earth where winter is not followed by Persephone’s return. There are rough men in our court, too, Hetairarch, even if their words are oiled.’ She pulled his mouth to hers and whispered before she let their lips touch. ‘And if the night is long, then we will kindle a fire inside it that will burn for ever.’
Maria pressed her breast tightly to Haraldr’s, and he could already feel her naked body next to him, beneath thick down covers, in the Royal Hall of Norway at Nidaros.
‘Brother Symeon . . . has not . . . been well.’
Constantine gasped and clutched at his throbbing chest. Not well? Brother Symeon, who sat against the wall opposite the door, his legs crossed in front of him, was a pile of bones to which still clung not even a few desiccated shreds of flesh; apparently mice were agile enough to scale these heights even if dogs weren’t. The scavengers had left some tattered fragments of the late Chartophylax’s coarse wool habit. Constantine watched in astonishment as the noseless monk ladled water into the skull’s gaping, intact jaws; apparently the demented monk had tied the bones together with leather cords as his skeletal companion had begun to fall apart, sinew by rotting sinew. Constantine recovered his wits quickly enough to decide on a course of action. ‘Do you think Brother Symeon is well enough to talk to me?’ he asked the monk. ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb him.’
‘He’s . . . expecting you,’ said the monk somewhat irritably, as if this were a fact any fool should have known.
‘Brother Symeon,’ said Constantine, ‘I believe that I can help you if I may presume to examine your correspondence.’ Constantine hoped that the monk would communicate Brother Symeon’s assent. But after a moment the monk turned to him and stared, as if Constantine’s reply were now expected. ‘I seem to be having difficulty hearing Brother Symeon,’ Constantine told the monk. ‘If you could perhaps help me by relaying his words . . .’ The monk swivelled his head to Brother Symeon and shrugged. He waited a moment and turned back to Constantine. ‘He’s talking as loud as he can!’ shouted the monk to deafening effect in the bell-shaped cell. ‘Can’t you hear him!’
Constantine reflexively put his hands over his brutalized ears and whispered, ‘Yes. Yes, I heard him. That was quite loud enough. Brother Symeon, thank you for your gracious invitation to examine your documents.’ He began to cast his eyes about the cell – whatever possessions the Chartophylax had left behind surely would be easy enough to locate -and hoped that he had not overestimated Brother Symeon’s hospitality. Apparently he had not; the monk said nothing as Constantine walked over and picked up the simple wooden box that rested on the floor just to the right of Brother Symeon. Despite an unadorned exterior, the little casket was sealed with heavy, engraved bronze hinges and a sturdy bronze padlock. Constantine paused and considered his words very carefully. Finally he said, ‘Brother Symeon, if you please, would you ask your brother there to hand me the key to this lock?’
The monk swept dust from the floor, pried up a little stone slab, plucked the key out, and delivered it to Constantine. Praying fervently to the Pantocrator, Constantine inserted the key and turned the lock and was rewarded with the firm unlatching of the mechanism.
The box was lined with lead sheets and the papers were loose inside it. Constantine sat on the floor and held the taper so that he could read. After a long while he shifted and said, ‘Interesting, Brother Symeon. I can see that you were quite blameless in that matter. And I can assure you that the responsible authorities in Constantinople will soon know of your innocence.’ Indeed they will, thought Constantine. In addition to the usual eremite meanderings about ‘the uncreated Light’ and other such theological musings, Brother Symeon had chosen to preserve an account of his own fall from grace. Apparently he had discovered the evidence of the ‘bastard child’ and communicated the secret to Father Katalakon, who had gone to Joannes with the information, apparently over the objections of Brother Symeon. Joannes had immediately incarcerated Father Katalakon in the Neorion and had dispatched some thugs to transport poor Brother Symeon to the same location. But Brother Symeon had been hidden by his brethren and then spirited off to the sanctuary where he had ended his days.
Constantine went back through the parchments, certain that the crucial letter had to be among these documents. But no. He peeled away the lead lining and found nothing. He went through the parchments again. Then he almost burst into a sob at the realization. Joannes had the letter. Still, all was not lost. It was conceivable that Father Katalakon still lived. No. But just the knowledge of the crime Joannes had committed, and the secret he suppressed, would be useful. No. Suddenly Constantine knew the utter despair of his position, sitting here in the hot Cappadocian night with an addle-brained, noseless monk trying to pull secrets from a pile of stinking bones, while his nephew might already be chanting the Psalter on some distant island. He wanted to let soothing, desperate tears flow, and yet he told himself that a man of ability does not succumb to such predicaments.
Constantine thrust his taper out into the cell; were there perhaps other caskets? No. Then something glimmered in Brother Symeon’s tattered habit. There. Behind the empty rib cage. Yes, it was large enough. Yes. Indeed, yes! ‘Brother Symeon,’ began Constantine, his voice tremulous with excitement, ‘I am ready to return to Constantinople to plead your case. But in order to do so, I must take with me that letter you have sealed in lead sheets and sewn into the lining of your frock. Please excuse me while I remove it.’ Constantine crawled over beside the skeleton and reached warily; he prayed to the Pantocrator that he would not knock Brother Symeon’s
