bony hip, the eunuch extended the spidery fingers of the other. The Topoteretes placed the documents in the eunuch’s outstretched hand. The eunuch unfolded the packet with the very tips of his fingers, as if the pages had been dipped in fresh dung. He was clearly less impressed than the previous inspectors; he brusquely flipped through even the purple-tinted document. But the eunuch did pause over a plain-coloured sheet, and something he read caused one of his thin, seemingly painted-on eyebrows to quiver slightly. That was the only reaction he betrayed. Without a word he folded the packet, turned, and walked off.
‘You follow him,’ commanded John the interpreter in his sourest tone. ‘And don’t try any more stupid
The eunuch never once looked back to see if Haraldr was following. He left the great hall and, after a long, winding transit over marble-paved corridors, stopped in front of heavy wooden double doors laced with gilt trim. He pulled a yellow silken cord that dangled near the door frame; to Haraldr’s astonishment the doors slid silently open, as if they ran on greased tracks. Without even looking at Haraldr, the eunuch rolled his eyes towards the aperture.
The room was bright and strangely warm and humid; marble benches and compartments lined the walls. Two young boys dressed in short white tunics waited by the doors. ‘Clothes,’ said one of the boys in a heavily accented attempt at Norse. With motions he indicated that Haraldr should take his clothes off. They don’t bathe a man before they toss him in a dungeon, thought Haraldr with constrained relief. Still, he could not escape the sensation that death, however perfumed and silk-frocked, stalked this place. He remembered what Gleb had said. The Griks were never straightforward about anything.
Haraldr stripped and was shown through a door at the end of the room. He was greeted by a blast of hot, steamy air. His eyes watered and for an instant he thought he would be attacked. Then the wonder of the place hit him. The large domed chamber was almost completely filled with a brilliantly blue pool; at the bottom of the pool was a shimmering illusion, a twining green garden depicted with multicoloured bits of tile.
Haraldr luxuriated in the cleansing heat and the cold water; how long had it been since he had enjoyed a steam bath? The pain at the back of his head subsided to a dull ache and he began to reassemble his scattered wits.
When he had finished bathing, Haraldr was towelled and combed and rubbed with scented oil, then dressed in a long tunic of very fine white silk; the high collar was crusted with heavy embroidery. Back in the marble hall, two eunuchs, both of them surprisingly stout, waited for him along with the birch-thin eunuch who had led him here originally. His head cocked in annoyance, the spindly eunuch cast his eyes over Haraldr as if he had been forced to look at a mutilated corpse. He turned to the other two and compressed his thin lips in an attitude of bored, barest approval; then his wretchedly bony shoulders shuddered slightly and he minced off.
The two big eunuchs flanked Haraldr and each firmly but decorously took an elbow. The hallway eventually turned into a large, sun-flooded arcade. Haraldr squinted out over a blazing expanse of white marble. He could see patches of peacock-blue sea framing a massive temple-like structure several hundred ells away. Then he turned to his left. He gasped and knew for certain where he was.
Spread out over a gentle slope was a glittering jewel box that was an entire city. Fantastic, multicoloured buildings stood on verdant terraces laced with neat rows of flowering trees, shimmering azure ponds and pools, and beds of vermilion blossoms. Scores of domes, held aloft by columns of brilliant jade-green marble or deep plum-coloured porphyry, forming swirling patterns so deft and intricate that they seemed to have been painted against the backdrop of the sea and sky. Here in a magical city within the Great City was the home of the Emperor.
The eunuchs tightened their grip and led Haraldr towards the prodigious building straight ahead; six white columns, so huge in girth that were they hollow a man could build a comfortable cottage within them, thrust up to a marble roof at a dizzying height. Beneath the portico, two-storey silver double doors, embossed with fierce- visaged, armoured eagles, were surrounded by a perfect, motionless semicircle of powerful, dark-eyed men in burnished steel breastplates and steel helms. Haraldr observed the guards’ dusky, foreign features with a sharpness in his breast; these men were Khazars, from Serah’s homeland. The armoured arc split momentarily to allow Haraldr and his escort to pass. The enormous doors slid open as silently as those in the bath.
Paradise. It was not simply the vastness of the hall; a bowman could not have shot the length of the jewelled cavern and the ceiling, coffered with elaborate gold beams flecked with silver medallions, soaring like a fantastic sky. It was the supernatural sumptuousness: pearl-white marble columns topped with plum-coloured capitals wreathed with carved vines and flower buds, candelabra that looked like lacy silver clouds dotted with glinting ice crystals, curtains of braided ivy, garlands of pink roses, hanging tapestries stitched with lustrous flowers.
The entire back of the hall was cloaked with a vast purple curtain damasked with hundreds of huge eagles embroidered in gold. Forming a sort of funnel beneath the hangings were two ranks of soldiers in golden armour, bearing standards topped with golden eagles and dragons. A single figure stood at the very end of the funnel, in front of a now-visible seam where the two halves of the curtain met. Haraldr’s heart leapt to his throat.
This man was as tall and broad as Hakon. He wore a golden breastplate and a plumed golden helmet with metal cheek pieces folded over his entire face, concealing all save glints of blue behind the eye slits. A Varangian Guard, certainly, and very likely Mar Hunrodarson himself.
The Varangian stood perfectly motionless, an immense silver-bladed broad-axe inlaid with elaborate gold niello pressed to his chest. Like a rodent mesmerized by a snake, Haraldr was drawn to the eerie glimmer of life visible within the eye slits, expecting some evidence of malice or recognition. But the guarded irises were so still, they might have been bits of glass.
The curtain drew aside slightly and the eunuchs led Haraldr past the rigid Varangian. The rest came like a fantastic dream. He was in a vast, rose-scented, many-domed hall echoing with an unsettling, powerfully sonorous music that pulsed within his very bones. The hail was filled with a living rainbow, hundreds of utterly motionless, silk-sheathed, bejewelled figures arrayed in perfectly concentric semicircles, each ring a different dazzling hue. The rainbow was broken in the middle by a great massing of incandescent gold: a throne the size of a small building flanked by two large trees with leaves of delicate gold; gem-bright birds perched in the gilt branches. As Haraldr approached, the birds tittered and called in a supernatural melody, cocking their brilliant heads and flapping their wings. Haraldr came to the terrifying realization that the birds were in fact jewels, creatures of enamelled gold to which somehow the Griks had given the power of both movement and voice. Then the beasts came to life from behind the trees and the blood drained from Haraldr’s face and his knees buckled. Lions! Creatures of the gods! The great beasts rushed forward to devour him, tails pounding the ground and huge jaws gaping. They roared like the trumpets of doom, and Haraldr reflexively felt for the pommel of the sword that he had been forced to leave back in the barracks.
The lions halted as if the gods themselves had turned them to stone. Reason tried to command Haraldr’s whirling senses. Not stone but metal. The lions were incredible metal creatures, just like the birds. But this deduction did nothing to assuage fear. What wizardry, or, more frighteningly, what knowledge did this Emperor possess?
The huge throne was covered with a purple satin canopy and encrusted with gemstones and iridescent white pearls. The giant god who might have occupied this grandiose furnishing was not present. Instead, a mechanical man sat to one side of the vast cushion. His body was metal. No, he was swathed in a full-length tunic of stiff purple brocade covered with mazelike courses of gems and precious spangles and flocking eagles of flickering gold thread. He wore a jewelled, helmet-like cap, and no winter sky was as thick with stars as this cap was with gemstones; they spilled from the crown in sparkling runnels that streamed down the mechanical man’s eerily human cheeks. The device’s eyes were agates polished to a watery sheen. Kristr! Not agates. These eyes moved! They were wet with life. This was a living man! No, not a man. A god. Perhaps all-conquering Kristr himself.
The two eunuchs threw Haraldr to the floor and prostrated themselves alongside him; this ritual of
