like a whirring, relentless steel engine.
The carnage was appalling; hastily produced scimitars did almost nothing to deter the Varangian advance. The first Seljuks to fall screamed their oaths to Allah or simply ululated with surprise, but their distress was blanketed by the blaring revelry of their fellows. Only after dozens had pitched off the battlements did the change in tenor begin to spread orchestrally north, to the centre of the wall, but the crowding made a concerted defence impossible. Only the sheer weight of frantic bodies began to stop the Varangian push. Haraldr shouted to the infantryman armed with the fire blower.
The long brass tube, a glowing taper now fastened to the tip, jutted past Haraldr’s shield, a phallus far more obscene than the pig bladder Grettir still played with below. Haraldr grimaced against the intense heat as the fire streamed out. The molten lance virtually seemed to blow a hole in the first Seljuk, then splattered; Haraldr quickly stomped his boots to shake off the singeing droplets. The spout of flame swept in a slow arc across the breadth of the battlements, quickly extending its reach as flaming Seljuks plunged from the wall. Within seconds the Seljuks began to leap well in advance of the fiery tongue. When the liquid was exhausted, Haraldr looked ahead, just past the blackened bricks that defined the fire blower’s deadly range. Waiting for him was an armoured guard cordoning the white-silk-clad figure of Kilij. With Ulfr and Halldor at his side, and now almost a hundred Varangians on the walls behind him, Haraldr pushed forward across the scorched bricks. The Seljuk guard died quickly, their elegant scimitars and oaths to Allah no match for Hunland steel and Odin’s fury.
‘Kilij,’ said Haraldr. He handed his shield to Ulfr and gripped his axe with both hands. He had already calculated that the next arc of his blade would be perhaps more fateful than the blow that had killed Hakon, and yet he did not need Odin to strengthen his arm, only to assuage his fears. Before he had climbed to these walls, he had been certain that when Kilij’s head rolled into the streets, his Seljuk followers would immediately give up their cause and their captives. But now that wager seemed far less certain.
The Seljuk leader was viciously handsome, his dark, sharp features framed with a dense beard and a beautiful engraved silver helm. Holding Haraldr’s blade with his eyes, Kilij slowly knelt, removed his helm, and began a recitation punctuated with many Allahs. Haraldr ignored the appeal and stepped forward, conscious that if he had erred in his judgement, he would never escape these walls alive. He caught the Seljuk’s night-filled eyes and in Odin’s ancient voice he recited the phrase that the Mandator had taught him. The words were said to mean, ‘I am the Avenging Angel.’
Kilij lowered his forehead to bricks speckled with the blood of his guards. Atop the walls, the silence was now complete. From the city below came the wails of badly burned men. Haraldr told Halldor to hold Kilij’s head up. Halldor yanked on the glossy black hair, bringing the dark face to that of the golden angel. Kilij’s pupils became antic flying insects seeking escape from a doomed head. Haraldr lifted his axe high, his own fate as tentative as his victim’s.
To the left, down in the town below, Kilij’s desperate eyes found their sanctuary. He lifted his head defiantly and his left arm shot out, a gold-ringed finger pointing. He smiled wickedly.
Down below, on the street just inside the gate, another Seljuk ululated insanely. Kneeling at his feet was a woman in a white silk robe, her raven hair long and undone. The Seljuk who had cried out jerked the flowing tresses and forced the face of the kneeling figure to look up. Instantly numb, his upraised axe suddenly weighted with the huge burden of this revelation, Haraldr could only murmur the name once, somewhere in the last redoubt of his reason. Maria.
A second Seljuk stepped forward, touched a heavy-bladed scimitar to Maria’s neck, then raised the blade to the sky. The swordsman looked up to the walls, and Kilij grinned like death. The exchange was now stated in terms so graphic that no language would be needed. The life of Kilij for the life of the Roman woman.
Maria did not lower her head, nor did Haraldr lower his axe. Their eyes met, her blue fires perhaps pleading, perhaps challenging, clearly questioning him. A simple instinct bound his arms for a heartbeat, and then he listened to some vastly more profound intuition. He found the answer he would give her beyond love, beyond death, somewhere amid the black ice of eternity.
The only sensation Haraldr felt as his axe descended in a whooshing arc was the slight vibration of Kilij’s skull splitting and the virtually simultaneous cracking of his coccyx. The axe clanged on brick.
Halldor held the two halves of Kilij together at the shoulders, but faeces and bowels still gushed onto the bricks, and the neat seam along his chest spurted blood. In the courtyard the Seljuk executioner wearily lowered and then dropped his scimitar, stunned by his leader’s demise and utterly astonished at the huge golden demon’s ferocious disregard for the life of the woman second only to the prophet Christ’s mother. It was so quiet that the sound of the Seljuk’s blade clattering to the street seemed like a small rock slide. The Seljuk who held Maria’s hair let it slip from his fingers like a bewitched man watching the gold in his hands turn to sand. Her face radiant, her cheeks and neck flushed as if with love-making, Maria stood and stared at the vision on the walls above her.
Haraldr pulled his axe free. With each hand he grabbed a lock of Kilij’s hair but saw that the scalp would simply pull away from the skull. He found a grip on each side of Kilij’s neck. He lifted, oblivious to the horrifying scent of the spilling organs. His arms swooping wide like the giant-taloned wings from Nidafell, Haraldr raised the butchered halves of Kilij, turned to face the courtyard, and stood with arms out and elbows locked, like a hunter displaying a brace of rabbits. ‘I am the Avenging Angel,’ he told the Seljuks in their language. ‘I have come for my Mother.’
The Seljuks’ billowing robes seemed to collapse like felled tents as every man among them threw himself to the ground and pressed his lips to the dust. A frightening silence followed this huge rustling homage to the terrible golden avenger. Only one person remained standing within the Citadel, her brilliant face still lifted to Haraldr, her gem-blue eyes telling him that she was the fate to whom he had just given his reply.
No one present could remember having seen the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes walk for at least ten years. But the old man, his spine grotesquely conformed to the shape of the chairs in which he spent his days and nights, hobbled to the window. He placed his thick, gouty fingers against the marble-revetted recess and pushed his deformed nose towards the glass. He hacked wetly as he always did before he spoke. Everyone quieted. Despite his massive chest and the leonine growl with which he habitually cleared his throat, the Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes had a voice like a whisper beside a grave. ‘Dogs, whores, lepers. Look how they lick their adulterous mother’s pustulant afterbirth.’
Attalietes shuffled around to face his retinue. His thin white hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck, and his grey beard fell in sagacious disorder to his chest. A large purple blotch spread over his broad, nut-coloured forehead; his nose and cheek below his left eye were scarred by surgeries to remove similar skin malignancies. Several years ago Attalietes had sent for a specialist in facial restorations from Alexandria but had dismissed the man for reasons he would never discuss. The Senator and Magister Nicon Attalietes was not accustomed to giving reasons.
‘You get over here.’ He jerked his swollen hand at his son, Ignatius, as if he were strangling a chicken.
Ignatius Attalietes had the same indolent features as his late brother, Meletius, but as he preferred to avoid altogether the salutary effects of outdoor exercise – having hit his head badly while taking instruction at polo as a very young boy – he had a particularly spectral pallor. Boils spotted his forehead and nose, as if some mysterious demonic force had directed his skin to emulate his father’s afflictions. He lowered his head and minced towards his father.
‘Get over here, you spineless milksop.’ Attalietes batted his son’s ear. ‘Mele’s dead and you wring your wrists like the capons at court. Mele would have sent that holy turd a pile of their whoreson noses. But you. You tell me what you see.’
Ignatius inclined slightly towards the window with the vertiginous sense of a man looking into an abyss. He could see all he needed to see. Three stories below, the street was solid rabble, and for that matter every street as far as he could see down to the distant pale square of the Forum Bovis was jammed with the clamouring beasts. They were disgusting, the terrible anonymity of their ragged, brown-tunicked poverty. It was as if the sewers beside their tenements had flooded, and now the feculent sludge had filled the streets. They had set fires at many of the intersections, and the smudgy pillars were choking off the sun, deepening the vile coloration of the scene. Ignatius didn’t care any more. He was frightened. He began to sob softly beside his father’s wheezing face.
Attalietes decided not to humiliate his son further. What was the use? As much as Ignatius was a coward, Mele – he still could not believe it – Meletius had been a fool. What was he doing south of Antioch in the vanguard of the slut’s escort? No doubt the holy turd, Joannes, and his sexless brother, Constantine, were laughing richly
