Byzantium

canopy. His other hand pulled her robe up and the silk seemed to dissolve over her arms, and she shivered when he touched her hard nipple. She floated on the pool, the water warm.

He tossed her like a doll and she faced him, he standing, she poised, weightless, legs wrapped around him, sensing the searing gristle just beneath her. She lowered herself and he was like a shaft of rock covered with hot unguent, sliding deep. She pressed her milky breasts to his chest, pulled his silky hair, and kissed his soft golden eyebrows, her tongue darting over the hard ridge of the pale pink scar. She rocked and rose, and the birds made a single noise like the note of a golden hymn.

Her scream shattered the glassy leaves and brought the night like a black hammer. The obsidian head of her lover leered, his horrible beak tittering and the nacreous beads of his eyes reaching for her soul. She screamed and screamed again, and her lover’s wings rose up like storm clouds. She awakened.

‘Mistress,’ lilted the eunuch Nicetas. He stood at Maria’s bedside, a silver tray and golden goblet balanced on his slender fingertips. ‘Mistress, would you care for your draught?’ The Mistress of the Robes usually requested this narcotic when she awakened in the night, if she did not have a companion to ease her nocturnal anxieties.

Maria looked around the bedchamber. ‘No, Nicetas, light a lamp.’ Nicetas found the brass lantern on the dresser and lit it with his own oil lamp. ‘Is our Mother awake?’

‘Yes, Mistress.’ The blessed Mother was often awake, since she was so rarely rendered pacific by the attentions of her husband.

Maria put on her beryl-green robe and padded down the marble hallways in her silk slippers. She paused before the eunuchs who guarded the Empress’s ante-chamber and was nodded past. The ante-chamber was brightly lit by the silver candelabra; the floor of opus sectile resembled a meadow of crocus and hyacinth. Two more eunuchs in lacquer-stiff silk greeted her and went softly to the huge ivory doors, incised with the Imperial eagles, and slid them slightly apart. After a moment one eunuch turned and nodded, and Maria crossed the room.

Columns of white-veined Carian marble supported the soaring golden dome of the Empress’s vast bedchamber; the walls were revetted with alternating panels of deep red porphyry and moss-green Thesallian marble. Maria observed that the Empress had expanded her cosmetics factory. Three servants attended tables covered with vials, jars, mortars and pestles, and rows of braziers simmering dozens of pungent-smelling potions.

‘Little daughter!’ cried the Empress Zoe as she swept across the room to greet Maria, her flawless white arms extended, her sheer gauze gown clinging to her full yet youthful form like a windblown cloud. She drew the small clay jar in her hand beneath Maria’s nose – it smelled vaguely of whale oil -and then dabbed with her fingers, gently massaging a cool cream into Maria’s forehead. ‘This is new. It will erase a frown as if an angel had passed over your face.’

Maria acquiesced; was not Zoe’s own unsurpassed pulchritude proof that her endless cosmetic inventions had merit? Still, the Empress’s obsession was desperate, as if she believed her beauty might flee in the night if she did not remain awake concocting ways to preserve it. Of course, Maria acknowledged that she, too, would be as vigilant when she reached the Empress’s age. She hated to think of herself as prune-faced and desiccated, no longer able to contort her lithe spine against the supple body of a young athlete. But perhaps she would not live that long.

Zoe stood back and admired Maria. ‘Already the care has been absorbed from your skin.’ She handed the jar of ointment to a servant. ‘I guess you have heard?’

‘That the Senator and Patrician Andronicus Cametus has been murdered by one of his conquests? It’s not entirely true; the boy’s father was the assailant. He hid in the Senator’s bath.’

Zoe waved her hand as if the entire scandal were a wisp of stagnant air to be fanned away. ‘No. I can see that you don’t know.’ She parted her bow-shaped, blood-red lips in a curiously triumphant pout, inhaled as if to speak, and then paused, savouring her coup. ‘We’re going to Jerusalem,’ she finally said. She fluttered her hand frivolously. ‘My devoted husband commands it, so I must obey. Should I have occasion also to submit myself to the sinful pleasures of Antioch and the appalling decadence of the Levant on this holiest of ventures, it would simply be as the dutiful wife of our Holy Emperor Father.’

Then I am bid to suffer these scourges at your side, my blessed Mother,’ said Maria, her eyes cast down in mock humility. Then she looked up earnestly. ‘But isn’t it in truth dangerous?’

‘I think not, at least once we leave Roman soil. The Caliph is reputed to be most gracious. And’ – Zoe drew the word out with a delicately salacious flourish – ‘we are to have a special guard attached to our regular military escort. Those Tauro-Scythians who have made themselves so rich, and the monstrously acquisitive Nicephorus Argyrus so much richer.’

Maria felt as if the blood in her face had been sucked away by a shrieking dry winter wind. She could only stammer. ‘I -I – Mother . . .’ Her teeth began to chatter slightly.

‘Little daughter! The Tauro-Scythians are such . . . luxuries! They amuse us.’ Zoe placed her arms around Maria. ‘You have never been afraid of northern barbaroi before, and you have even met the commander of these men. Why, you said he was partially civilized, in a grim sort of way. I do remember.’

‘I fear he is too grim for me. I have had dreams.’

‘Ohhh . . .’ Zoe let the exclamation breeze through her lips. ‘I am so … stimulated by your dreams, Maria. Had I had your . . . imagination when I was your age, perhaps I would have been more . . . deliberate in my choice of companions.’

‘Mother, these dreams bring me no pleasure.’ But Maria realized that there was even now a residue of the ecstasy she had known in the dream garden, and that her memory of that passion was all the more vivid because of the horror that had followed. ‘No, that is not entirely so. There is pleasure and there is terror. My dreams offer love and death, twined so tightly that you could not get a knife between them. Perhaps death is the ultimate desire.’

Zoe’s icy amethyst eyes seemed to darken, like crystal pools shadowed by a cloud, as she thought of her own troubles. ‘Yes, little daughter, love and death are but the different sides of one coin. How well your Empress Mother knows the truth of that.’

‘You may not.’ John the frog-faced interpreter held the document against his chest as if he were a woman shielding her bare breasts. ‘I have translated each word exactly as written.’ He fixed his eyes defiantly on the ceiling.

‘Let me read!’ snapped Haraldr in Greek so that the Topoteretes would hear.

The tough-eyed, leather-skinned Topoteretes, who had been absorbed in studying Halldor’s sword, looked up in surprise. After a moment he barked at the surly, black-frocked interpreter, who sulkingly handed the paper to Haraldr.

Haraldr studied the claret script. He made out the term for the Emperor, and also another Greek word that troubled him. ‘It says something about my going by ship,’ he told Halldor and Ulfr. ‘My previous journey to the Emperor’s Palace did not require a sea voyage.’

‘I smell the raven-slime,’ said Ulfr. ‘They could plan to take you to a place of imprisonment. I’ve heard they frequently exile their own to islands from which there is no escape.’

‘Or just feed you to the lobsters,’ offered Halldor.

Haraldr decided he would balk on this issue. He tapped John on the arm; the interpreter jerked it away indignantly.

The dam Haraldr had built against his rage and frustration could hold no longer. He leapt to his feet, grabbed John’s gown at the chest, and with one hand jerked the astonished interpreter over his head; his other hand quivered over the pommel of his sword, waiting, if necessary, for the Topoteretes.

‘Ask the Topoteretes why they are transporting me by sea! Ask him!’

To Haraldr’s surprise the Topoteretes laughed, his head back, showing big white, horsy teeth. He even poked Halldor and gestured, showing how much he appreciated this treatment of the interpreter. ‘Ask him!’ shouted Haraldr to his red-faced, flailing captive. The interpreter translated frantically, and Haraldr, recovering his control, dropped him hard on his feet.

The Topoteretes shrugged and explained. The interpreter stepped back and made the sign of the cross; he spoke in unsteady Norse. ‘He says they want to receive you in the palace harbour. It’s more appropriate.’