wear black again, it would make my skin crawl.’
‘There is nothing dark about the vision I see now, Mother.’ The Emperor Michael did not have to invent his flattery. Remarkable, he thought. Like a flower with the ability to shrivel and die and yet return even more brilliant and succulent the next spring. He looked at her flawless skin – perhaps there were a few more fine wrinkles about the eyes, but the spring-blue irises with their gorgeous amethyst flare were as beguiling as ever – and examined the voluptuous silhouette of her simple purple-and-gold scaramangium. The dried leaf was gone. The flower had bloomed again, and desire was the fragrance about it.
Zoe held out her shapely arms and beckoned Michael to sit on the couch beside her. She curled her knees up around him and stroked his hair. 'Did you miss your mother’s caresses?’
Michael burst into tears and cried for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Zoe held him and waited until his paroxysm had subsided to whimpering sniffles. She kissed his temple and said, ‘I am certain you didn’t miss your mother that much, my little boy. What has that man done to you?’
Michael gave Zoe the particulars, punctuated with deep sobs, of Joannes’s new protege. ‘Uncle Constantine … the Nobilissimus, I mean, says we must challenge Joannes now. . . . I am utterly rigid with fright . . .Mother.’
‘What is the Nobilissimus’s plan?’ asked Zoe, her voice calm and her eyes as placid as a pond. She no longer feared death. She only feared black next to her skin.
‘He intends to provoke him to treason. I … I think it is quite a dangerous game.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Zoe. ‘Your uncle the Nobilissimus is a very shrewd man, and his tactic here is quite astute. He simply encourages Joannes to manifest the very intentions that Joannes is bent on to begin with. Clever.’
‘But . . . Mother, what if he is encouraged … too much?
Joannes could have me struck down at any moment. He might . . . do it himself.’
‘He will not as long as the Hetairarch is attendant upon you.’
Michael sniffled deeply. ‘Do you think the Hetairarch is that . . . loyal? He and Joannes have come to some sort of understanding, due to all the work Joannes has done in the Studion.’
‘He has no love for Joannes. Do not presume that his loyalty is limitless, but you can be absolutely certain that he will intercept any attack made on you in his presence. It is a Tauro-Scythian thing about honour. I should think you would already have enough evidence of his reckless devotion to the purple.’
‘You are right, of course. Securely placed between the Hetairarch and the Nobilissimus, I have nothing to fear.’
‘And your mother will always be here as well.’ Zoe pressed her thighs more tightly against Michael. ‘Now, can we imagine just for tonight that you are a big enough boy to be your mother’s husband?’ Zoe’s hand slid across the lap of Michael’s purple scaramangium, her slender white fingers marching across the gold-thread Imperial Eagles. When her fingers had completed their reconnaissance, Zoe put blood-red lips to Michael’s neck. ‘Yes,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘I can see that you have become quite a big boy.’
The Monastery of Kauleas was one of the largest of scores of such establishments in Constantinople. The entire complex took up two city blocks. Four multistorey wings contained monks’ cells, storerooms, refectory, infirmary, kitchens, library and bath; these enclosed a large central court, in the middle of which was a substantial pale red-brick church topped with several large domes. This palace of worldly denial had been built a century and half earlier, during a period of fervent religious construction, commissioned by a Dhynatoi family as their private spiritual retreat. The original owners had been forced to sell the monastery more than a century ago, shortly after a great famine (not because their finances had suffered due to the poor harvest but because they had soon thereafter proved incapable of managing the vastly expanded estates they had patched together by buying up, for next to nothing, the freeholds of starving peasant farmers). The purchasers were another Dhynatoi family, and they maintained the establishment in great splendour for decades. But a succession of increasingly dissolute scions had neglected and gradually plundered the establishment, selling off the marble revetments and ivory-bound books and gold fixtures, and allowing the population of monks, which had once numbered in the hundreds, to dwindle to less than a dozen. The family had finally given up the property three years ago; the typicon had been signed over in the Neorion as a penitential act. The current owner was the Orphanotrophus Joannes. In three years Joannes had neither visited the establishment nor allowed anyone else to enter its gates, except to have the remaining monks cleared out and new locks installed on all the doors.
But this evening the venerable Monastery of Kauleas once again teemed with activity. More than a hundred armoured Thracian guardsmen bustled about in the weed-choked courtyard, assembling the new brotherhood in orderly rows just in front of an arcaded, three-storey wing of monks’ cells. The new brotherhood numbered in the hundreds. They wore the dyed linen or wool tunics of the city’s small merchants and tradesmen, and indeed they were: grocers, butchers, shoemakers, fish sellers, silk weavers, soap makers, curds vendors, pepper grinders, silversmiths. All of them responsible guilds-men whose greatest indulgences were several glasses of wine one night a week in their local tavern, and attendance whenever possible at the races in the Hippodrome; they were family men who ordinarily would not be expected to abandon their wives and children for a life of contemplation.
But something was wrong with this group. Most of the brothers’ tunics were spotted with blood, and some of them were torn. All of the brothers kept their feet precisely together and held their hands rigidly behind their backs, but often their knees swayed and their heads lolled, and they would not straighten up until the Thracian guardsmen prodded them with their spears. The brothers’ faces seemed like hideous painted masks, with huge, bruised eyes. On closer inspection, none of them had noses. Only freshly carved slits crusted with dried black blood.
The rows were finally assembled. The one man present who wore actual monastic garb stood in front of these new brothers, his novitiates. Strangely enough, Joannes’s deeply socketed eyes, glimmering with reflected torchlight, were the only distinct features of his huge, shadowed face. Joannes studied his unfortunate novitiates for some time before he addressed them.
‘I grew up in Amastris, on the Black Sea. In circumstances, no doubt less auspicious than many of you enjoyed in your childhood; certainly no better. I was castrated at the age of six and educated by monks here in Constantinople.’ Joannes was speaking in a curious, conversational tone, as if these men were his intimates. ‘When I was thirteen, my tutors obligated me to become a monk like themselves, and I spent the next eight years in a monastery much like this, though not so grand. Not nearly so grand. When I left the monastery, I began work as a secretary in the office of the Sacellarius. By dint of unrelenting effort I have achieved the position of your Orphanotrophus. I like to think that my office in the Magnara basement, where I serve Rome, is much like the monk’s cell where as a boy I served . . . God.’ Joannes paused and seemed to reflect. ‘I will share with you a most curious particular about myself. Since I left the monastery where I spent my boyhood, I have not set foot in a monastic establishment of any kind. Until this evening. Until you forced me to take this step.’
Joannes shook his head sadly. His glimmering eyes fixed on the arcaded tiers of monks’ cells that rose behind his audience. ‘It was in a cell like these you see here, though hardly as splendid, that I first learned that numbers were my friends.’ There was now something quite strange, quite irregular about Joannes’s voice, even his choice of words; despite the low, mournful rumble, he seemed to be a small boy offering an exegesis. ‘I surrounded myself with these new friends, numbers that I chalked on my tablet and the floor of my cell, numbers that I conversed with in the refectory as I chewed my bread. Numbers filled me with delight. They explained to me that the burdens of each day, the unending sequence of fasts and prayers and sermons and chants, had meaning to them, and that they were pleased. And as I pleased my new friends I pleased myself. I knew a sinful joy, brothers, as my friends and I gratified one another.’
A smile flickered horribly. ‘I took my friends with me to the Magnara when I went to serve Rome. And there they explained to me the meaning of Rome, as they had explained the meaning of my previous service. But Rome was not as my friends wanted it to be. Rome was like this place you see here, abandoned and neglected, as random and disorderly as a brothel. So my friends and I set to work to make Rome a thing of order and beauty. And the harder we worked, the more Rome became a place of delight to us. But there were those who envied the beauty of what we had constructed, and these delinquents began to deface the perfection of our edifice. This vandalism distracted from the symmetry and grace of our creation, so that others could not enjoy the beauty of what we had done. So that we ourselves were distracted by their depredations.’
Joannes suddenly seemed twice as huge as his arms flew up, his great black shroud like the wings of a
