Byzantium

‘What does Joannes say?’

‘He is holding them back for the time being. As usual, his real interest is obscure. I think he might use the Rus to bargain with the Dhynatoi, then give them up. If Joannes and the Dhynatoi ever came to an accommodation, I would fear for my sister’s life.’ Theodora pursed her thin spinsterish lips. She was tall, with an angular frame and a disproportionately small face; her immature, pinched features gave her the aspect of a small child grown into middle age without ever ripening into womanhood. Though she was younger than her sister, the Empress Zoe, Theodora often seemed old enough to be Zoe’s mother. ‘How is my sister?’ she asked.

‘Unhappy. Her husband has not spent the night with her for almost a month.’

‘I had hoped she would find . . . peace with him. After Romanus . . .’ Theodora paused and scraped at the coarse stone with her silk slipper. ‘Are you happy, darling?’

‘I think I am in love.’ There was a curious melancholy to this pronouncement.

Theodora smiled, though her face seemed capable only of irony, never genuine mirth. ‘Is it one of them, or both?’ She peered down into the unkempt yard directly beneath the balcony. Alexandras and Giorgios looked like little boys foraging; they were peeling the thick layer of ivy from the weatherworn statue of an ancient Roman deity. ‘I could tell immediately that the brown-eyed boy is in love with you.’

‘He is the one,’ Maria said numbly.

‘Darling, you know I have always tried to refrain from judging you. But will you be careful? I think of my sister and how different everything might have been. . . .’ Maria knew that Theordora was referring to her older sister, Eudocia, who had conceived a child out of wedlock, given birth in a convent, and had died shortly thereafter. The baby was always said to have been stillborn, though Maria sometimes wondered if it had been adopted by a simple family, and now, oblivious of its Imperial destiny, lived a far happier life than its mother ever could have enjoyed.

‘I know all the precautions,’ Maria said. ‘There is even a physician from Alexandria who specializes in the field.’

‘I don’t mean those precautions, darling, or even the measures one must take to guard the heart. I mean the precautions of the soul.’

Maria nodded vaguely and studied the line of Rus ships in the harbour.

‘It shames heaven. Kristr forgive me, but it shames heaven.’ Ulfr shook his head and stared.

The Great City blazed away in the night. How many lights? Enough to make it like day down by the wharves where the porters still struggled with sacks and barrels and bales, enough to turn the enchanted crown of the city into a dazzling universe. Drapes and garlands of winking lights spread over the hills as far as one could see. The stars in the glassy black night were barely visible in comparison.

Haraldr let the boy stand for him before this vision; the man, the commander of a fleet, had given his orders and slipped off to await the day. The boy stood in the inky night and saw a dream – every Norse boy’s dream of distant, magic Miklagardr – become real.

‘Haraldr!’ Gleb hobbled frantically across the hold, his face lobstered. His breathing was virtually apoplectic, and he had to clear his throat several times before he could speak. ‘It’s Lyashko. He’s a merchant from Novgorod and a fool. . . .’

Haraldr quickly remembered who Lyashko was; he was as big round as he was tall, with a blunt nose and a greasy bald head. He’d made trouble ever since St Gregory’s Island, lagging behind and then sailing out of sight ahead of the file until Haraldr had threatened to chain both him and his equally foolish pilot. After that he had simply sailed up every day to grumble about ‘incorrect headings’.

‘Yes, the very one,’ Gleb said, seeing the recognition in Haraldr’s eyes. ‘He’s got himself and his men drunk. Says he’s going into the city to find Greek whores. Perun strike me if he didn’t threaten my life when I tried to stop him!’

Haraldr left Gleb far behind as he sprinted along the bridge of lashed-together Rus ships, hurdling railing after railing. Damn fool Lyashko. After they had entered the harbour that afternoon Haraldr had been called upon by an official announced as the ‘Legatharios to the Prefect of the City’, a pale, emaciated man dressed in the most intricately embroidered silk robe Haraldr had ever seen; though the Legatharios had merely gazed into some metaphysical distance throughout the interview, his interpreter (the first Norse-speaking Byzantine they had met who was not a eunuch) had issued a long set of directives Haraldr and his men were expected to observe under the Byzantine-Rus treaty. The Byzantine officials had expressly instructed them to lash their ships together and remain anchored in the middle of the harbour until a complete inventory of their cargoes and crews could be taken; any vessel leaving the rank was to be considered, in the interpreter’s words, ‘a brigand, and will be dealt with as such by elements of the Imperial Fleet’. Haraldr had spent the rest of the day making certain that every shipowner and pilot understood the Byzantine orders. A single ship out of formation and the lurking dhromons might be provoked into attacking the entire Rus fleet.

Haraldr must have leapt over a hundred railings before he saw the crews that had crowded the ships next to Lyashko’s. He moved through the jabbering, excited throng, and the exclamations of ‘It’s him, It’s him’ and ‘Hakon-Slayer’ and ‘Mighty-Arm’ began to circulate. He reached the gap in the line of lashed-together ships and looked across the murky water. Nothing.

‘He left like that, Jarl!’ said a gnarled old pilot with an eye patch, slapping his hands briskly. ‘Nobody could stop them! Elovit, there’ – he pointed to a boy with linen wrapped around his arm – ‘took a good cut. They’da killed us!’

Kristr damn Lyashko. Haraldr continued to search the black water between the line of Rus ships and the harbour, but he could discern nothing; the lights from the harbour didn’t illuminate the entire stretch of water, and even Lyashko wasn’t enough of a fool to go in with a lantern shining from his mast.

‘Close this gap! shouted Haraldr. ‘Get a torch or a lantern up on every cross spar and keep them burning. We’ve got to convince the Griks there’s only one renegade!’

Halldor and Ulfr arrived, both out of breath. Halldor made sure that Haraldr’s order started down the line. ‘Find a healer for this boy,’ Haraldr told Ulfr. He looked out over the water again and thought he saw the silhouette of a Rus river ship against the fringe of light spilling from the docks. But the fleeing shape slipped back into the night.

Lights began to appear from the mastheads of the Rus ships. As if in response, rows of lanterns appeared before and behind the Rus ships at a distance of several hundred ells. Haraldr watched the flaring lamps with utter horror. The lights were paired, one from each mast of the mighty dhromons. The beasts were stirring in the night.

The dhromons bellowed as they had during the day, but their lights remained motionless, a still, precise constellation against the dark water. Haraldr searched the brilliant formation for movement. The beasts bellowed again. Again Haraldr saw the darting grey silhouette of Lyashko’s ship.

Two lights began to move, passing the motionless row of similar pairs. They were tracking in the direction of the evanescent silhouette. The twin lights moved swiftly, heading east almost a thousand ells away.

In an instant the night became day. With a whooshing, roaring sound, a liquid comet, a searing, exploding rainbow of fire, arced over the water. The huge flame-spitting snout of the dhromon glared like molten gold. At the other end of the terrible arc, Lyashko’s ship exploded in a volcanic pillar of flame.

The storm of fire almost immediately wilted the rigging of the Rus ship and the human forms that for an appalling instant could be seen staggering within the inferno. Daylight burst again, and the water itself began to burn around the red-veiled shape of the boat. Before the brilliance of the second fiery rainbow had faded, a third spout of flame arced from the dhromon in a monstrous exhalation.

Lyashko’s ship, laden with wax, simply exploded. A ball of fire thundered back into the sky and rolled towards the vault of heaven. Only splintered timbers were left to be consumed by the flaming waters.

The rows of twin lights, their work done, winked out, leaving the blazing slick to light the pall like a solitary, eerie eruption from the darkest depths of the sea.

Haraldr spent the rest of the awful night staring out at the incandescent city from the prow of his ship. The dragon I have slain, he told himself, was merely a toy of the mind, a creature of my thoughts. Tonight I have seen real dragons, the creatures wrought by men, and they are infinitely more terrifying. And how, if I must, will I ever slay them?

The backs of the porters glistened, doused with the heat of the high afternoon sun. Haraldr stood uneasily