had split into the two persons who now so desperately struggled to achieve a single voice. He felt the hot dust on his lips and lay again on his back, the pain still in his testicles, his arms strapped to his sagging cot so that he would not loosen the ligature. Michael, dear little Michael, crawled, stumbled, shakily stood and gurgled beside him. The infant grabbed for his brother’s finger, caught hold and held, cooing with delight. And the love entered Joannes, and the pain vanished.
Back in the Neorion Tower, watched only by a corpse without eyes, the huge black-cloaked shoulders of the monk trembled with sobs. ‘Michael, Michael, dear little Michael,’ he murmured, choking with grief. ‘Now you are afflicted and is there nothing I can do to succour you?’
So you are not keeping company with either of those boys?’ As she waited for Maria’s answer the Augusta Theodora sipped from a goblet fashioned of embossed gold leaf pressed between clear glass. She was fond of elaborate table settings, but otherwise the apartments in her country palace were almost barren; the only decoration on the dull terre-verte marble walls of her dining chamber was a small enamelled icon of the Virgin, framed in gold.
‘No.’ Maria paused for a silver forkful of fish. ‘It was a mistake. They say that love is a flower that can only bloom once. If it withers without bearing fruit, there will never be another blossom. My first man was a mistake, and so all of the rest have been.’
‘I wish you could forget about that, darling. No one blames you.’ Maria took several silent bites while Theodora watched her expectantly. ‘I think you might be happier if you tried to remain chaste,’ Theodora finally said. ‘And as much as I am concerned about your journey, darling, I feel that this pilgrimage will be a salve to your soul. Allow the Christ to fill your heart. The Patriarch has helped me to see that when we love the Christ, we are never without love.’ Alexius, Patriarch of the One True Oecumenical, Orthodox and Catholic Faith had become Theodora’s spiritual adviser and personal friend during her exile.
Maria ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Alexius is as determined as Joannes to keep you and your sister apart.’
‘My sister is determined to keep us apart. She will always blame me for Romanus. That I refused him and she was forced to marry him. I thought that it would all be buried in the same crypt as Romanus. But it will always be there.’
‘Joannes is responsible for this breach. He never could stand up to the two of you together. He told the Emperor lies about you, and the Emperor repeated them to Zoe. You believe anything from the mouth that drinks your soul.’
‘Emmanuel says that the Emperor has not taken that draught for some time. Perhaps on this pilgrimage she will have an opportunity to consider who truly loves her and who is merely using her.’ Theodora frowned like a troubled child.
‘I know how much she loves you. That is really the reason it was so easy to turn her against you.’ Maria tapped her goblet with her fingernail, a staccato pecking that went on for almost half a minute. ‘It is strange how thin the membrane of love is,’ she finally said, ‘and how precariously it withstands the pollutants of the soul. Sometimes when I am with a man I love, I feel that I can reach inside him and find only decay.’
‘Darling. Some day you will find the proper kind of love with a man. Give yourself time to find the Christ’s love, and then you will find a man’s true love.’
Maria chattered her front teeth in minute, nervous little clicks. ‘I feel that on this journey I will find a resolution. I will either fill my soul, or my being will completely evaporate, like a dead lake. But I will not be this empty, cold thing any more, a shell with no light inside. My palmist, Ata, told me that soon love, fate and death would collide in my life. I am not afraid to die, because I am already dead. But once before I die I would like to love a man and not feel the rot in his soul.’ Maria looked at Theodora almost belligerently for a moment, and then her face slowly began to contort. She burst into tears.
III
The world was a reflection in a copper sheet. The dust stirred by the horses’ hooves swirled up into the dust already suspended in the air like a dry, chalk-fine fog. The approaching horses of the scouts merely added to the choking ochre cloud.
The scouts, dark, wild-eyed men called akrites, wore jerkins of quilted cotton over short linen tunics. There were four of them, silver helmets dulled to brass in the dusty pall. They rode directly to the Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores, bowed in their saddles, and began talking with animated gestures. Haraldr had difficulty with the dialect – the akrites were from Armenikoi, a theme half-way to Khoresm – but he understood. A Saracen raiding party, fair-sized, was just ahead.
‘It appears that the Saracens have positioned themselves to block the Cilician Gates,’ came the quick, effortless translation.
Haraldr pushed his helmet back, wiped the grit from his forehead, and smiled at Gregory Zigabenus, the interpreter who had accompanied the Rus trade fleet. ‘I understood some of that already, Gregory.’ Then he said in Greek, ‘Because you . . . teach well.’ He added his own silent thanks to Odin and Kristr for this gift of the little eunuch. The assignment apparently had been by chance, but the adventuresome, unfailingly cheerful Gregory was as welcome as a third hand in a single combat. Like every Roman, Gregory was mute on the subject of the Emperor and his immediate circle, but otherwise he had been a continuing education in what Joannes had called ‘the shoals of the Roman system’. And strange waters – not to mention dangerous – they were indeed.
Haraldr looked down the road up which he had just ridden, along with two dozen horsemen of the Imperial Excubitores. The graded path, here only wide enough to draw a wagon through, wound down through the russet haze towards a dull, brownish-grey plateau ringed by the slightly darker convolutions of the Taurus Mountains as they rose to their snow-crested heights. He had never imagined so much land, or so little beauty. And yet the mute austerity of the terrain bespoke the power of the Romans. For almost six weeks, at a clip that surely measured at least two and sometimes three rowing-spells a day, the Imperial entourage had traversed territory not unlike this. Not as dusty, certainly; farther to the north the peaks were less precipitous and the pastures still held some of summer’s verdure. But the distances, the isolation on many stretches, surpassed anything imaginable even on Norway’s barren central plateau. Yet, most remarkably, just when one thought that the Romans had finally run out of folk with which to populate this prodigious domain of theirs, the endless road (paved as neatly and much more sturdily than the floor of a Jarl’s hall) would enter the tree-rimmed perimeter of yet another pasture; pass through the rich, dark, relentlessly cultivated communal fields and orchards speckled with ripe fruit; and lead them to the clustered mud-brick, thatch-roofed huts of yet another Roman village. The industry of these provincial Romans, lost in this frightening vastness, was something to behold; hoeing their autumn harvest of vegetables, chopping wood for winter, sacking grain, bundling fodder, driving their massive oxen to and fro, they had coaxed a bounty from a wasteland that a Norse farmer wouldn’t give a piece of silver the size of his fingernail for. And yet, as Gregory had explained, many of these proud, busy people preferred to become rich men’s slaves because of the burden of Imperial taxes on free peasants.
‘The Domestic wonders if you wish to go forward with them. He says if you do, you will see a Roman ambush.’
Haraldr turned to Nicon Blymmedes, Domestic of the Imperial Excubitores: thick-chested, wiry-limbed, about two score years old. Blymmedes was accompanied by two dozen mounted soldiers wearing waist-length mail shirts and conical helms, with their bows and tooled-leather arrow quivers slung over their backs. The rest of their vanda, a company of about two hundred strong, were footmen who had disappeared up ahead, seemingly swallowed by tortured rock and swirling dust clouds.
‘Yes, thank you, I will,’ said Haraldr directly to the Domestic. He had come to like the hawk-nosed, constantly frowning Blymmedes. The Domestic, unlike so many of these endlessly scheming Romans, seemed solely concerned with doing his own job properly – no, perfectly – and seeing that his subordinates performed with similar punctiliousness. Yet he was eager to teach, and he had accepted Haraldr as a fellow warrior with perhaps a different philosophy of warfare but of considerable aptitude in martial affairs.
The small contingent started up the steeply climbing roadway. Blymmedes fell back between Haraldr and Gregory and began another of his tactical discourses, vigorously illustrated with his leather-tough hands. ‘You see,
