or that of another. Maria started; it was as if an icy finger had suddenly brushed her cheek. She whipped her head, expecting Anna’s cheerful confession of the prank, but Anna had slid across the seat to peer intently through her own window. Maria touched her faintly rouged cheek as if daubing a wound, and shuddered that she found nothing but her own silken warmth. Tonight in the Hagia Sophia she would pray to the Mother of God that the fair-hair not visit her dreams again. And pray for his soul, because in her silent heart she would pray that it was his own death she had foreseen.
‘Who is he?’ asked Thorvald Ostenson, centurion of the Grand Hetairia, fourth in command of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard. The leather fittings of Ostenson’s new gold breastplate creaked as he came round the chair on which the man sat, hunched over, his back trembling in soft heaves like the belly of a small, wounded animal.
‘This pitiful head upon whom the ravens have chosen to defecate belongs to John Choniates, a petty tax officer from the Anatolian theme.’ Mar Hunrodarson folded his arms atop his writing table and studied the wretch who sat before him.
The man’s eyes were pools of vitreous red surrounded by enormous purple bruises, and his chin was as raw as fresh meat where his beard had been plucked. His short, stiff fingers were swollen and caked with blood.
‘So why are they feeding these little mice to Varangian lions?’ asked Ostenson. ‘Don’t the ball-less paper- stuffers know that we are already overburdened with felons above the rank of patrician, and our strength is short as it is? Besides, a Varangian takes little pride in playing a broken reed like this. The men are malingering when they’re asked to perform these inconsequential interrogations.’
Mar looked up at Ostenson; he had just promoted the lanky, straw-headed farm boy from Iceland to centurion. Mar had learned his lesson with Hakon. When he had seen to it that Hakon was elevated to the honour of Manglavite, he had thought that it was more important to find a man who was suitably vicious – something Mar knew couldn’t be taught -than to look for intelligence in his key subordinates; Mar had reasoned that he had enough wits for all five hundred members of the Grand Hetairia and then some. Well, Mar also had the wits to know when he had been wrong. Ostenson was part of Mar’s new strategy to surround himself with men who did not run out of words after
‘Ordinarily I would have flatly refused the use of my offices to execute sentence on such a menial bureaucrat,’ explained Mar to his coarse-featured but sharp-eyed subordinate. ‘But here my own objectives are served.’ Mar paused like a rune-mentor. ‘You understand the significance of Anatolia and the rest of the Eastern themes, do you not?’
Ostenson nodded. He knew that the Anatolian theme was the richest of the eighteen Asian themes, or provinces, that comprised the breadbasket of the Empire.
‘The wealth of the Eastern themes,’ continued Mar in a pedagogical rhythm he had learned from listening to the endless discourses in the Emperor’s chambers, ‘is not simply the endless sacks of grain they provide the Imperial granaries, or the yet more extraordinary harvest of taxes they provide the Imperial Treasury. It is military manpower. By this I mean the thematic armies.’
Again Ostenson signalled his understanding. Each theme was able to mobilize a highly competent citizen army, both to protect its own borders against minor incursions as well as to supplement the Imperial Taghmata, the Constantinople-based standing professional army, in times of major conflict. Fully mobilized, all of the thematic armies could quintuple; the size of the Imperial Taghmata.
‘And you understand the system of inalienable military freeholds, then?’ asked Mar, certain that his new centurion had not troubled himself with such arcane details; Ostenson’s bewildered eyes quickly confirmed his doubts. ‘Well,’ Mar continued, ‘understand that these citizen soldiers cannot magically transform their hoes into spears and their burlap tunics into armour. If you travel through Asia Minor, as I have, you are struck by the prosperity of the small farms, strip after endless strip of shimmering grain and dewy pasture. For centuries Roman law has required each of these prosperous small farms, which are the freeholds of the peasants who work them, to provide and equip one soldier to remain in readiness for service in the thematic army. The Emperors have long understood that Roman power is dependent on the survival of these military freeholds, so for centuries they have enforced laws strictly banning purchase of the freeholds by the Dhynatoi.’
Ostenson’s eyes narrowed. The Dhynatoi not only wallowed in the centuries-old fortunes provided by their vast landholdings but also dominated the Roman Senate and had placed their stooges in many of the most important Imperial military commands. The Dhynatoi were vain, ostentatious and insufferably arrogant; when one of them occasionally ran foul of his own kind and ended up in Numera Prison, the Varangian centurions would cast lots for the privilege of attending to him.
‘Unfortunately,’ Mar went on in the wry tone he used when he criticized official policy, ‘recently these laws have proved difficult to enforce. The peasant freeholders, who are called upon all too frequently by the Imperial tax collectors, as well as by their local military commanders, wish to elude these obligations by illegally selling their farms to the Dhynatoi. The Dhynatoi, for their part, are only too willing to purchase these properties illegally, which they acquire by the hundreds, even thousands, and consolidate into vast estates.’
‘So a peasant feels his lot is bettered by becoming a serf on the estate of a Dhynatoi rather than owning his own farm.’ Ostenson shook his head. ‘Then this tax gatherer is one of the bloodsuckers who are turning these soldier-farmers into slaves. No wonder the Emperor wishes to make an example of him.’
Mar grinned. In the matter of thinking like a Roman, Ostenson was a newborn. ‘The obvious deduction, which you must never make if you wish to fathom the Roman mind. It is not the Emperor but the Dhynatoi who have sent this wretch to us, bundled up with a dozen more tax officers from other districts and themes. The Dhynatoi wish to make an example of them.’
‘Why?’ Ostenson looked like a boy playing his first game of draughts with a man.
Mar’s lips contorted with sarcasm. ‘This pathetic fool officially protested that the two largest estates in his district were harbouring former peasant freeholders, now serfs on these estates, who had illegally surrendered their farms to the Dhynatoi. The local judge quickly convicted this troublemaker of fraud and extortion, and then the Dhynatoi sent him along to the Great City for Punishment, so that the message might be spread to overzealous tax officers throughout the Empire.’
Ostenson was astute enough not to have to ask why the Emperor permitted the Dhynatoi to cheat him of taxes and soldiers. Instead he raised the less obvious question. ‘I’m not certain what our interest is in serving the Dhynatoi.’
Mar nodded soberly. ‘As the thematic armies are inevitably weakened by the disappearance of the military freeholds, the Imperial Taghmata will increasingly require the support of foreign mercenaries in times of great need. And with my devotion to our Father the Emperor, and indeed to the ideals of Rome itself, I would like to see that the Roman army is served by nothing less than the finest warriors on the world-orb.’ Mar paused and flashed his perfect teeth. ‘Norsemen.’
Ostenson looked down on the quaking back of John Choniates. ‘Then there is great worth in the punishment of this doubly cursed villain. What is the disposition of his sentence, Hetairarch?’
Mar forked two fingers and pointed them to his eyes. ‘Take him to the basement of Numera Prison and blind him with irons. Then transport him to the Augusteion, chain him upside down between the pillars, and let the simple folk of the Great City show him their charity.’
Ostenson jerked the whimpering tax collector to his feet and dragged him off. This departure was immediately followed by the appearance of a decurion of the Grand Hetairia who handed Mar a rolled and sealed document. Mar looked carefully at the lead seal dangling from the cord. When he identified the author of the missive, he flipped the seal contemptuously.
Mar considered the Grand Domestic Bardas Dalassena, Commander of the Imperial Taghmata, to be, as Mar had once said, ‘a puffed-up, strutting cock who holds his position only because of the position he holds – bent over with his hands on his ankles – whenever the Dhynatoi request protection for their estates.’ The Grand Domestic had vehemently resisted Mar’s initiatives to recruit more Norsemen into the Roman army; his opposition not only reflected the traditional interests of his Dhynatoi sponsors but also his own conservative, defensively orientated approach to battle tactics. As Mar had put it, ‘Dalassena’s idea of an aggressive campaign is to bribe the opposing commander not to transgress Roman borders for a period of six months.’
Mar ripped the seal off with irritation, expecting another protest about his petitions to expand the Varangian
