get some answers from these Griks for a change.
The interpreter stared sullenly. Haraldr noticed that his head and face were freshly shaven; with his smooth skin John looked like a pink frog.
‘Where?’ Haraldr repeated.
‘City,’ said John, as if answering an insistent, squealing child.
Inside the walls! Haraldr’s breast drummed. He snapped for one of the Byzantine servants – or were they spies – who were always loitering around. With hand motions he indicated he wanted a washbasin and clean tunic.
‘That won’t be necessary,’ snapped John.
Haraldr’s stomach plunged like cold lead. In his sweaty, torn tunic the only place he would be fit to be received would be in a slave-gang. Or a dungeon. Well, he would not let this black-frocked frog march him off, He continued to motion to the servants and sent them twittering on their errands. John stared angrily but said nothing. The Topoteretes walked over and spoke to the interpreter, who rattled on irritably and pointed at Haraldr. Many
The Topoteretes shrugged and went back to studying the drilling Norsemen.
Halldor walked up. ‘I’m going into the city,’ Haraldr told him. ‘You’ve got command until I return; Ulfr is your marshal and counsellor. You know the drill schedule, so keep to it. I’ll be back.’ The servants brought up the washbasin and one of Hakon’s silk tunics, and Haraldr splashed water on his face and towelled dry. When he looked up, Halldor was still observing him earnestly. ‘Yes. If I don’t come back,’ Haraldr concluded, ‘you have the command permanently.’
The mounted escort wound through the narrow streets of St Mama’s Quarter, looping around the back of a domed church, huge by Norse standards but relatively small in relation to the surrounding buildings. As the stone- paved avenue straightened out, Haraldr could see an expanse of mowed grass ahead. He looked up and gasped.
The great land wall, which traversed the width of the peninsula on which Constantinople had been built, had been only partially visible as they had sailed into St Mama’s Quarter. Now, from an unobstructed head-on view, it seemed like a vast, tiered, many-towered city unto itself. The first line of defence, a moat as broad as a small river – it was partitioned by a series of dikes that enabled it to climb up and down the gently rolling hills – would alone have been the engineering miracle of the north. Just beyond the moat was a brick parapet about as high as the walls of a Rus city; then a broad, graded path; and finally a second wall of unimaginable dimensions; the alternating courses of stone and brick rose a good twenty ells and were studded with massive stone turrets at regular intervals. Beyond this colossal defence was the main wall.
This third wall was at least as tall as a Norse dragon-ship stood on end and yet the towering rectangular fortresses set against the sheer brick-and-stone surface at intervals of sixty ells (they looked like the teeth of some world-devouring beast as they ran off into the distance as far as one could see) were twice as tall again; each of these Titan-made towers was a soaring castle capable of defending an entire city the size of Kiev. Perhaps the gods had built these defences, but not even the gods would dare come against them.
A small, open gate framed by carved stone beams punctured the great wall. Several officials in long silk tunics – one of the silk-clads seemed to be a eunuch – examined the documents presented by the Topoteretes, then began to question him insistently. The eunuch looked at Haraldr and shook his head. The Topoteretes pointed to something in the document and began a heated discourse. Haraldr observed that Basileus and Joannes and Manglavite figured in this argument. The eunuch protested again but the documents were returned to the Topoteretes, and he signalled his men to ride on. The escort tunnelled through the wall and emerged on a brilliant white landscape.
A stone-paved avenue more than a hundred ells wide extended beyond the wall towards the distant heart of the city. On either side of the street the three- and four-storey buildings rose like sheer cliffs, though these palaces often had marble-columned arcades at street level and elaborate balconies and rows of arched windows on the upper floors. Pack mules, wagons, slave-borne canopied litters and ordinary pedestrians jammed the street; they passed one four-wheeled carriage with an elaborately gilded, curtained, boxlike enclosure for its invisible occupants. Haraldr struggled to capture details as his escort led him down the avenue at a brisk canter: an arcade rollicking with roughly dressed men who hoisted wineskins as they disputed over board games and tossed dice; a statue of an unclothed man set into a niche above a brass-fitted oak door, so astonishingly lifelike that one could see the veins beneath his pale marble skin; a shorn black-frock, like John the interpreter, offering bread to three ragged beggars who sat on a scrolled stone bench. There were far fewer women than men about, and most of them had wrapped bright cloth veils about their faces and moved in protective clusters. But one young woman with a brightly painted face strutted alluringly alone.
The escort paused at a major intersection less than a dozen blocks into the city. Looking south, down the paved street perpendicular to the main avenue, Haraldr saw enormous, featureless, russet-brick edifices, looming some six, even seven, storeys high. People milled about on the street and stuck their heads out of the innumerable windows. For the first time Haraldr noticed that the sky over the Great City was strangely dingy. He quickly established the source of the pollution; maybe another dozen blocks due east from these buildings was a huge, gritty pillar of smoke, fouling the entire horizon. Not far away, another shaft of soot rose above visible tongues of flame; glowing cinders shot up into the roiling black column. Was the Great City on fire?
Neither the Topoteretes nor his men took notice of this catastrophe; they had been distracted by the approach of another contingent of a dozen mounted men quite similar in arms and attire to their own. The leader of these horsemen had a sweat-beaded, squarish face and red, irritated eyes, as if he had just ridden right through the smoke. The Topoteretes tipped his head deferentially, and the red-eyed man spoke with animated gestures. Then the red-rimmed eyes turned to Haraldr, widened in surprise, and he immediately gave the Topoteretes what seemed to be a brusque order. The Topoteretes produced the magical documents again and the red-eyed horseman looked at them, handed them back, and thought for a moment. He snapped to one of his men, there was some probing of saddle packs, and a length of dark cloth was finally handed to the Topoteretes. The Topoteretes then spoke to John the interpreter.
‘You have to be blindfolded.’
Haraldr iced with terror. There was no reason, unless they intended to put a blade to his neck. Two horsemen were already at his side. He reflexively pushed them away. His horse reared, and more horsemen closed around him. He threw one right out of the saddle, but a blow cracked his head. Sparks showered as he sent another Byzantine flying off his horse. Hands clutched all over him, he heard a sound like glacier fracturing and smashing into his head, and a brilliant light exploded into darkness.
Ice. He was in a huge ice cave. His head throbbed and his neck ached. How had he got back to Norway? Had he ever left? Yes. The pounding in his head had a pattern; he could think between the metallic throbs. Yes. He had left. River. City. Haraldr jerked erect. His eyes focused. Ice. Somehow the Griks had carved a room from ice. The pure white light, more diffuse than day but almost as bright, momentarily defeated Haraldr’s quest for reason. Then he shaded his eyes and concentrated on bringing his mind back. The ice was stone. Incredible stone. A dazzling white marble with sinuous blue veins. His head lolled and he strained to study the complex pattern on the floor, knowing that if he understood it, his mind would come back. The floor was paved with polished marble, a woven pattern of bands and circles of emerald and ruby-coloured marble. The light that glazed the marble seemed to come from high above. He looked up. Light flooded in from a ring of windows set at an impossible height.
‘You shouldn’t have fought.’ The frog face of John the interpreter leered at him, but he was speaking the words of the Topoteretes, who crouched over Haraldr with apparent concern. The blindfold was just a precaution.’
Just a few paces from Haraldr an excruciatingly thin eunuch with a curiously flabby, pale face abruptly terminated his conversation and minced delicately, on slippered feet, towards Haraldr’s group. With one sweep of his narrowly spaced hazel eyes the eunuch managed to look right through the Topoteretes, give the merest hint of contempt at the sight of the black-frocked interpreter, and completely ignore Haraldr. One hand propped on his
