emptied the fluid into a washbasin he kept beside the machine’s ponderous, brass-pillared base for precisely that purpose. Even though the hourly whistle did not sound at night, he hated the insidious ratcheting of the mechanism that caused a small statue of a beast – a different one for each hour – to appear in a miniature arcade. Visible now was a bear, indicating the ninth hour of the night. Dalassena looked at the erect gold creature (its finely modelled little paws clawed the air) with his usual vague dread, a psychic burden he carried so habitually that it seemed to press on his shoulders physically, bowing him forward like an aged porter. Three hours until the first hour of the morning, five hours until he would once again be at his office in the Palace. He hated this reminder of the routine that had chained him, but the clock had been a gift from the Senator and Magister, Nicon Attalietes. So he was obliged to display it prominently in the office he kept in his home, the hilltop palace that he had acquired through the generosity of Senator Attalietes and his circle.
But for a moment at least, Dalassena was free from time and its irksome herald, sound. His wife Eudocia had long since succumbed to the oppressive gaiety of their evening at the Palace of the Zonaras; the price of being among the Dhynatoi but not of them was that one had to pretend to enjoy the social rituals that the Dhynatoi themselves disdained with weary sarcasm. His daughter, Anna, also had come home, though only an hour ago; he ached to think of the corruption of her doe-eyed innocence, but since Anna now often dined only a chair removed from the Empress, he endured the pain of her despoliation like a soldier in a field hospital stiffening against the amputation of his leg. The only sound from this quiet precinct of the sleeping city was the occasional rattle as armed guards checked locked gates, and the ghostly sough of the wind through columned arcades.
Dalassena went to his lacquered wooden writing table and removed the sheaf of dispatches that he regularly brought home and studied, as if in taking these profound drafts of his predicament he could somehow find expiation. The dispatches reported raids near Hadath and Raban; some large estates had been torched and a distant nephew of a senator had been slain. Bulgars had come across the Danube near Nicopolis and had penetrated almost to Trnovo in Paristron theme. The continuing fester of Sicily, where Abdallah-ibn-Muizz was taking Christians captive by the thousands. Libyan pirates had sacked three coastal villages in southern Crete. The successes were almost as nettling: the siege of Berki would soon be concluded now that a force of Varangians had arrived; and, most appalling of all, the victory by this new Tauro-Scythian menace over almost two hundred pirate vessels, at the very ends of the earth. Just the kind of thing that would kindle the dangerous imagination of the mob.
Dalassena clenched his still powerful fists. Madness. His generous appeal to the self-interest of the swollen-headed Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson had not brought a breath of reply; apparently Hunrodarson was unaware of the directive from the Emperor’s own offices to explore expansion of the Middle Hetairia, the less prestigious Imperial Guard that had been virtually defunct for decades and was now manned by only a few well- born fugitives from Saracen courts, ceremonially invested to reward them for converting to Christianity and swearing allegiance to the Emperor. This directive proposed to revive the Middle Hetairia to accommodate a second force of Varangians, a force that would be equal in numbers to Mar Hunrodarson’s Grand Hetairia. And this initiative had not been sponsored by Mar Hunrodarson; Dalassena was certain of that. No, he reflected, Hunrodarson has taken to making his appeals to the Logothete of the Dromus, with all these not entirely unfounded claims of massive civil discontent in the city and his continued lobbying for another Varangian unit to be posted outside the palace; even Hunrodarson is reluctant to invite any more of his
Dalassena shuffled through his writing cabinet, took out his pen and ink and a sheet of Alexandrian paper, and laboriously scripted a note to the Domestic of the Hyknatoi – one of his key subordinates in the Imperial Taghmata – instructing him in the course of action they should now take. He decided he had better use his personal seal on the document, rather than the official stamp of his office. As he fingered the small, cone-shaped stone implement, he noticed that traces of wax had been left on the face, and he picked the engraved surface meticulously clean. Had his wife Eudocia been using his seal again, perhaps to place orders with the Vestiopratai, the imperially licensed dealers in silk garments; wasn’t it enough that she had one eunuch silk merchant who called weekly? That was simply not acceptable; the woman was determined to make a travesty of his marital dominion.
Bardas Dalessena pressed the stone seal into the glimmering hot wax, then put his writing instruments away and savoured silence. Within seconds he had completely forgotten the diatribe he had intended for his wife.
The sound of steel striking brass echoed through a cavern. Haraldr felt the pain and wondered how he had come to sleep with seals, slippery seals, soft, down-covered seals, their bodies underneath and atop and beside him. But seals did not have furless arms or legs or great hanks of wet hair. Still, seals could smell like this.
Again the noise in the cavern, but this time it was someone screaming. Haraldr struggled to raise his torso, and bodies slithered away from him. He saw the whore, her face paint smeared into a blurry mask, and then the dancer. Around they went, pulling hair, grunting and squealing. Haraldr dragged his legs from under a bedding of flesh punctuated with bulging breasts, jutting buttocks, and staring, wheat-thatched belly furrows. He shook the whore; she had to stop screaming. But she wasn’t screaming. Haraldr struggled to his feet. The brass was shattering inside his head.
The courtyard looked like the aftermath of a terrible battle; the wreckage of Euthymius’s stage was scattered amid a vast carpet of naked men and women, their clothes and empty containers of various intoxicating beverages. Odin, the herons of forgetfulness must have plucked every mind last night, thought Haraldr, his stomach retching and his head bursting with hot metal and the horrible shrieking. Then he saw the actual source of the screaming, an olive-skinned dancer rising above the prone but obviously not totally incapacitated form of a wild-haired Varangian. At first Haraldr assumed that only an excess of pleasure filled the dancer’s throat, but then he saw it too.
It had been a Varangian, when it had forearms and calves and bowels and genitals and a head. It now hung naked, six feet off the ground, from its own small intestine, which had been wrapped around its waist and then tied to the balcony above, so that the truncated body spun slowly within one of the broad, soiled, white plaster arches of the courtyard arcade.
Haraldr bent over and let the bitter alcoholic bile surge over his tongue and onto the pavement. The vomit filled his nostrils and he retched some more, choking and sputtering like a child. Another woman screamed, and a Varangian began to shout.
Haraldr held his hands to his screeching head. The screaming and shouting became a chorus. Ulfr came running; he had remained sober to guard the gold, along with a few of the most devoted disciples of Kristr among the Varangians, who would neither drink for pleasure nor fornicate. They had been at their posts in the strong- room all night.
‘A message has been left,’ said Ulfr as he stood over a disembodied arm lying on the stone pavement a few ells from the corpse. The stiff, purple forefinger had been carefully arranged to point directly at a large, algae- tinted terracotta jar resting a few ells away against the inner wall of the arcade.
Haraldr looked inside the jar and gagged. Steeling himself, he reached in. His trembling fingers found a single, grotesquely slippery lock of hair; the bowel-knifing touch told him that the rest of the scalp had been flayed to the bare skull. He forced back the bile and commanded himself to bring the head up. He stood and looked with uncomprehending terror into the face: no lips or ears, a shrivelled, bruise-coloured penis in place of the nose, and a rosy testicle in each eye socket. A piece of parchment was clenched between bloody, grimacing teeth. Shaking from head to toe, nauseated beyond anything he had ever imagined, Haraldr prised the teeth open, removed the parchment, and clawed with bloody fingers at the crimson wax seal. He read the message, crushed it in his hand, fell back against the wall, and slumped to the ground, holding the bloody skull against his chest like a boy cradling the dead body of a beloved pet.
One by one they entered, their robes of glossy white silk stiff with gold thread, to stand at their places around the polished ivory table. But the black-frocked Orphanotrophus Joannes did not acknowledge or even see them. He had gone home to Amastris. He smelled the dust of Asia Minor in the hot summer wind and heard the buzz of the locusts.
‘But I did the sums.’
‘You can’t have finished all of them,’ his mother had said. She held the lump of cheese in her hands,
