pushed at the furnace’s fire door. It opened with a metallic scraping sound. She extended her arm and felt the wooden door of the surrounding closet. She prayed that it would not be locked. She pushed. It was. How long would it take to cut out the lock? She would have to right herself and somehow get the furnace out of the way. Was that possible? She thumped the door in frustration.
The door flew open, and light burst like flame through the fire door. A face loomed, a demon waiting at the gates of Hell. A ghost, a spectre of the damned. Symeon.
‘Mistress,’ whispered the ancient eunuch. ‘Let me help you.’ He gave her his fragile yet surprisingly powerful hands and pulled. Like a serpent in dirty red silk, Maria slid head first into the storage room adjacent to the heating closet.
‘Symeon. You are truly the angel of my deliverance. Is it true about our Mother?’
‘Yes.’ Symeon seemed concerned but not desperate. ‘They have shorn her and sent her away. But I expect her return shortly. The city has risen to defend her.’ Now Symeon was troubled. ‘Mistress, your Tauro-Scythian has been taken to Neorion. I am afraid his execution has already taken place.’
‘That cannot be. It cannot be. It simply . . .’ No, she told herself. His light has not gone out. No. Maria looked around the storeroom. Zoe had stockpiled hundreds of jars of her skin emollients and beauty unguents and face paints. ‘Symeon,’ whispered Maria, ‘I have to make myself presentable. And I am going to need your help.’ Symeon nodded with timeless grace.
Haraldr moved his fingers. The pain shot through his arms. He moved his toes. It was a start. The poison had left his entire body without feeling. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. When he had first awakened, he had not been able to see or hear. He still could not see. But he could hear now, though he wished he could not, and so he knew where he was. Neorion. His eyes felt as if daggers were piercing them, but he could not move his arms to touch his bloody sockets. He could not feel his arms, actually, but his fingers had moved. He still had a tongue, though, but so dry and swollen that he could hardly breathe.
It was as if the halls were trumpets that amplified every noise, every scream. The Neorion was a vast conch, and the scream that started at the top would wind its way down and enter the ears and shatter inside the head so that the screamer died in one’s brain, clawing for life in a stranger’s skull. Things crawled out of the sludge and onto his legs and chest, and he could not pick them off. They bit him often; were they also chewing his shoulders? He prayed they would kill that man.
The fire exploded in his face, and when they jerked him to his feet, he thought they had ripped his arms off. He tried to see them and butt with his head, but they kept the flame in his face and he could smell his hair burn. Demons! This was the Hell of Satan! Demons ripping his arms off! He slammed into the wall, trying to crush the creature beside him. They screamed in their demon tongue. Pechenegs! Haraldr slammed again and again against the wall and they beat him about the head, and the flames seared his face and dozens of arms grappled around him. He knew now that he was not blind. He could see them screaming. Then a flash and he could see nothing.
When he awoke, he wondered if knives had been stuck in his neck and shoulders. He could see the interrogation chamber clearly, as if pain were a glass that distorted his thoughts but placed his vision in sharp focus. Four smooth-faced Pecheneg guards stood by while the two Pecheneg interrogators prepared their instruments. He cursed the gods who had lured him to this ignoble death and did not ask for their help. Then he remembered the wretch from the Studion he had seen butchered in this very room, and he felt the man’s soul still lingering, offering him courage.
The shorter of the two Pechenegs, a man with brown chancre scars on his face and wide-set black eyes, picked up a steel brazier full of glowing coals and held it beneath Haraldr’s face. The heat seared his nostrils and baked his forehead. Haraldr tried to swat the fire away, and he realized that he was hanging off the ground, suspended by his bound hands; his arms were pulled up behind his back in an excruciating posture. He jerked his feet up, but they were held fast by chains and his ankles burned. He glared futilely at the instruments of darkness. Two irons the width of a woman’s little finger rested in the coals; the brands were white-orange at the sharpened tips. The second, taller Pecheneg put on thick leather smith’s gloves and rotated one of the irons. Embers flew up into Haraldr’s face. In some corner of his mind he observed the senseless humour of that; the last thing a man who is about to be blinded sees is flying sparks. No visions of golden cities, no final sunset.
The door slid open and the Pechenegs turned. A fifth guard brought in a fowl on a spit and a basket of fruit. The two interrogators set the brazier at Haraldr’s feet and descended on the food with the rest; they placed the plucked bird on their table and sliced the nearly raw meat with the blades of their trade. One of them turned and made some joke about Haraldr in his guttural tongue. The rest began to eat noisily.
‘That is not enough.’ The commander of the Neorion’s Pecheneg garrison was a tall, ugly Asian, probably of mixed Saracen blood; his broad nostrils were in grotesque opposition to the sinister verticality of his long, hooked nose and dour, drooping chin. He pointed to the three gold solidi the elderly priest had placed on the table. ‘This prisoner is …
The priest, who wore the gold-embroidered shawl of a deacon of the Mother Church, emptied his purse with frail, trembling hands. Three more solidi spilled onto the table. The garrison commander grinned again. ‘Very well. But you don’t have much time. They have already gone to work on him.’ The priest and nun crossed themselves quickly.
A single Pecheneg led the priest and nun up the dismal, mysteriously cold, endless flights. The wolf-shaped oil lamps seemed to struggle against the damp and darkness, the flames pitiful and stunted. At the tenth landing the Pecheneg knocked on the steel door, the security grate slid, and finally the door screeched open and offered up the reek of death. The priest and the nun were admitted to an ante-chamber a short distance down the icy hall. The black steel double doors of the interrogation chamber faced them. The five Pecheneg guards played a game on the floor with knucklebones. The priest gave each Pecheneg a copper nomismata. Two of them got up and slid the immense double doors open.
The two interrogators were sharpening their blades again, having dulled them on their dinner. Haraldr lolled his head towards the new arrivals. A priest. His eyes teared with gratitude. The Pantocrator would also be with him in the end. Haraldr thought he had never seen anything more beautiful than the golden crosses embroidered on the priest’s shawl. The priest moved excruciatingly slowly. He gave coins to each of the interrogators and brandished his jewelled cross at them. They bowed and retreated; as part of their indoctrination they had been shown the Hagia Sophia, and subsequently they had no wish to offend any of the wizards who could bring the sun inside at night and bridge the sky with molten gold.
The old crone came forward, too, her veiled, crusted, hideous face lowered to spare her the sight of Haraldr’s bloodied head and filthy, almost naked body. The priest chanted and knelt at Haraldr’s feet. Haraldr could not understand why the priest was tugging on one of the thick hide ankle collars, looped through chains, that restrained his legs. He looked absently to his feet. The priest, now furiously chanting, clutched a dagger in his withered, corpselike hands. He was sawing away at the collars. Haraldr looked up in horror at the two Pechenegs. They busied themselves shining their new coins, then held them up to the oil lamps and played with the reflections. Who was this unlikely saviour? If he could just get his legs loose before the Pechenegs lost interest in their newfound wealth! The old crone was looking at him; she had forced her crusted eyes open. . . .
Holy Father. Just to see them again, even if he died now. They were two sapphires with fires behind them. He mouthed her name in spite of his swollen tongue. Maria’s shoulders heaved and her eyes teared, but she steadied herself. She looked over at the Pechenegs and came around Haraldr’s back. The priest had cut one of the collars loose. Haraldr’s wrists were bound but not chained, and Maria hacked at the ropes. One of the Pechenegs was distracted from his coin, focused his black eyes for a moment, and barked at his companion. They stepped forward, not yet alarmed, and peered curiously at the priest. Haraldr whipped his free leg up and cracked the short Pecheneg on the side of the head with his foot; the man fell like a drunk. The second interrogator ran for the steel doors, and Maria dashed after him and plunged her knife in his back; the Pecheneg’s arms shot out sideways and he turned and looked at her in amazement. He shouted as he fell. Haraldr pulled desperately and the bonds at his wrist loosened as the doors slid open. One of the guards looked in. Maria stabbed at him but her knife clattered
