Neither of them heard the slight stirring of the silk curtain, or the lithe footsteps in the night.
‘I will see him, Nicetas.’
The eunuch bowed and the doors slid shut behind him. Maria turned to Ata, her palmist. ‘This is Giorgios. The one I like.’ Ata grinned; his teeth were very bad, though he could not have been much older than thirty. He stood up, smoothed the wrinkles out of his robe, touched his hand to his forehead, bowed, and also left the room. Giorgios was shown in a moment later. He wore the uniform of the Imperial Scholae: an embossed gold breastplate over a short-sleeved crimson tunic, and a short leather kilt. His tanned face was flushed with exertion; he probably had been riding.
Maria kissed him on the forehead and brushed his blond curls back. ‘Why did you come? Is Alexandros with you?’
Giogios eyes were wild, like a pursued stag’s. He stammered. ‘I … I love you. My every thought is of you. You consume me. I can’t bear to watch you.’ His neck corded. ‘I can’t eat any more. Do you . . . love Alex?’
‘Alexandros disgusts me. He is a boor.’ There was no expression on Maria’s face. She was as serene as a marble Aphrodite but more beautiful.
Giorgios blinked rapidly, as if he had been slapped. ‘Then why . . . why . . . ?’
‘I want to inflict upon you the pain you will cause me to suffer.’
Giorgios blinked again.
‘Ata says that for me fate and love have crossed once before. Though he could not know it, he is right. Now he says that my next crossing will bring together fate, love and death. He says that a man will destroy me with his love. A fair-hair. Perhaps you are that man.’ She paused. ‘I am almost certain that I love you.’
Giorgios wavered as if he would topple. It was a moment before he could speak. ‘I would never … I adore you, I worship you, I would die before--’
Maria put her fingers to her lips. Her eyes were like blue flames. ‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘Now go. I won’t see you for several days. But know that when you are thinking of me, I am thinking of you. Now go.’
Giorgios made his way to the vestibule with intoxicated steps. As the eunuchs slid the ivory-inlaid doors open, he turned and looked at Maria pleadingly. ‘I am sleeping with Alexandras tonight,’ she told him.
‘That hole is no deeper than a man’s member, said Halldor. His words were whipped by the stinging, salted gust. ‘But many a man has fallen to his death within it.’ He nodded at Haraldr, staring morosely out over the deep blue swells of the Rus Sea. ‘It’s a good thing that Khazar girl went off for Kherson. She only had him for five days, but by the end of that time I feared for him more than I did when he was in the death-square with Hakon.’
Ulfr smiled fondly. Three weeks ago they had sailed out of the broad estuary of the Dnieper into the Rus Sea, and they had dispatched the contingent of twenty boats bound for Kherson. Haraldr had arranged transport for the Khazar girl, and when he had bid her farewell, he had kissed her all over her face and hair, and then tears had visibly streaked his face as he watched her ship disappear into the eastern horizon. Many of the men present had been shocked by this weakness in their new hero; a warrior was supposed to bid his woman farewell with a smile and a wise remark. Let her do the pining. But Ulfr himself knew how a poet’s heart was, and he had gone among the men to explain that the same passion that had crushed Hakon’s chest like a bird’s made Haraldr’s own breast tender to a woman’s touch. Within a few days it became the fashion among the Varangians to lament lost loves they had hardly thought about for months.
Haraldr remained statue-still in the prow. Gleb looked at him, then at Ulfr and Halldor, and spat. ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘he is about to meet a woman who will make him forget all the rest.’ He paused for effect. ‘The Empress City.’ He gestured south, where the coastline was just a dark, greenish line on the horizon. To the west the ascending sun punched a brilliant hole in a seamless sheet of smoked blue. ‘By mid-morning we’ll reach an opening on that coast. It’s a strait the Greeks call Bosporus. At the end of it, half a day’s sail south, is the Empress City. I’ll never forget my first sight of her.’
‘Look. Another one,’ said Halldor. He faced the stern and pointed into the steel-hued sky. A messenger pigeon made one last spiralling turn before heading off to the southwest. ‘That’s the fifth bird the Grik ambassador has sent out since yesterday morning.’
‘He’s telling them to prepare our welcome,’ said Gleb.
‘What nature of welcome?’ asked Haraldr. He had left his lonely perch while Ulfr, Halldor and Gleb had been distracted by the pigeon. ‘That’s what troubles me.’
‘Well, I’m glad something besides that girl troubles you,’ said Gleb. He spat and smiled like a father forgiving a foolish son. Then his malleable face puckered with concern. ‘I’d say we’re in danger. If only because there’s no knowing the mind of these Greeks. They’re a nervous people, they’ve never trusted the Rus, and this business with their Manglavite, which they surely know of by now, has got to alarm them. It’s obvious from the way their ambassador has acted.’
Indeed, thought Haraldr. For the past three and a half weeks the Byzantine trade ambassador had rebuffed every attempt at communication with the curt message ‘maintain course’. In fact, they had seen neither the ambassador nor the interpreter, Gregory, since leaving St Gregory’s Island.
‘Can we fight them?’ asked Ulfr.
Gleb tugged at his doughy jowls. ‘Long before I made my first trip down the Dnieper, a Rus fleet attacked the Greek navy right in front of the Empress City. But these were swift warships manned by thousands of Varangians; Swedes, I believe they were. Even then the Greeks were able to call on their lightning from heaven and set the water on fire. They say you could walk across the shores of the Bosporus for a rowing-spell and your feet would never touch anything but the bodies of sailors, both Greek and Rus. Ten ships returned to Kiev. That’s when the Emperor and the Great Prince decided a treaty was preferable to such slaughter.’
‘Then that treaty will protect us,’ said Ulfr hopefully.
‘Unless they view the death of their Manglavite as a breach of that treaty; indeed, an act of aggression against the very Emperor whom Hakon served,’ added Haraldr.
‘We don’t even know who the Emperor is now,’ said Halldor. ‘It’s fairly certain that Basil Bulgar-Slayer is dead.’ The Bulgar-Slayer had ruled Byzantium for so long that he had become a legend, even in the far north, long before Haraldr had been born. ‘All we know beyond that are reports of mutterings made by Hakon when he was drunk, of a second and even third Emperor after Basil Bulgar-Slayer, and something about a “bitch-whore” who has had a very great hand in this succession of Emperors.’ Halldor looked around at the group and gave his usual insouciant shrug. ‘There are times when a man finds himself far from shelter on a moonless night, with his tinder wet. There’s nothing he can do but wait for the sun.’
Haraldr envied Halldor his innate calm as much as he hated his own gut-churning helplessness. He was no Halldor, but he knew that Halldor was right. They could only wait. And watch. ‘Who’s got the sharpest eyes?’ he asked Gleb. ‘Send him up the mast.’
Gleb snapped an order, and Blud, a young Slav oarsman, clambered up the mast like a monkey and stood atop the single cross-spar from which the billowing square sail was suspended. Blud waved happily at his comrades below and then intently began to study the empty Rus Sea.
‘Bosporus.’ Gleb pointed to the now clearly visible fissure in the green band of headland. He called out for the following ships – at last count there were one hundred and fifty-four vessels remaining of the close to five hundred that had left Kiev – to make a broad starboard turn and close up formation. The sun was rising to its zenith and the water glittered. The sky was an immaculate cerulean. Soon it became apparent that the Bosporus was a good fourth or even third of a rowing-spell in width. Dozens of small boats with square and triangular white sails cruised along the coastline. Scattered clusters of white buildings gleamed on the high, grassy, tree-spotted escarpments of the nearest shore; some of these apparent suburbs of the Great City were more extensive than any town Haraldr had ever seen, save Kiev. After an hour or so the Bosporus narrowed to several thousand ells. The immense buildings scattered on the headlands became clearly visible; domes like those of Yaroslav’s cathedral, though much larger, rose from yew-coloured woods.
‘A-heaaad! A-heaaad! Off the prow!’ Blud looked like a mad seabird leaping up and down on the cross-spar, flapping his free arm and screaming himself purple. Haraldr dashed to the mast, grabbed a rope, and pulled himself up the timber spire.
At first it seemed like a necklace on the water, flashing in the sun. Within a few minutes the jewels could be distinguished as gilded, swoop-necked prows. Dragons, like the ships of Norse kings. But there had been only a handful of such ships in the entire north. Now there were hundreds out there, spread across the entire width of the Bosporus.
