Emperor reached almost reflexively for the pail and began to sponge the filth and bird excrement from the feet and legs of David the dendrite. He caressed the man’s rough brown ankles and worked the sponge in between gnarled toes. The Emperor’s eyes were stricken, tender, above all grateful.
After he had carefully towelled David’s feet the Emperor turned to Symeon. The stylite had lived atop a single stone column for thirteen years now – the Emperor reflected on the holiness of this number, that of the twelve apostles plus their Lord. That Symeon the stylite had blessed the world with healing grace was beyond any doubt; hundreds of miraculous cures had already been attributed to his touch. In exchange Symeon had surrendered his own flesh; his toes, eaten away by the maggots that lived in the filth – his own filth – at his feet, were raw nubs. Delirious with joy at beholding the evidence of this sacred act of mortification, racked with guilt over the crimes his own flesh had lured him to – yea, even to the very fires of perdition – the Emperor fell upon Symeon’s grotesque, filth-encrusted feet; he kissed these feet, he bathed them with his tears, he salved them with the golden oil of St Demetrius.
Finally the Emperor turned his tear-stained face to Tzintzuluces. He fought to control his sobs. ‘You know why the Pantocrator has struck me down with the lightning bolts of this madness that visits me, ever more frequently, do you not?’
‘Why, Brother?’ asked Tzintzuluces softly.
‘I engaged in adulterous intercourse with her, even as I served her husband Romanus, the same Romanus who preceded me beneath the Imperial Diadem, even as I served him in the capacity of servant and friend.’ The Emperor snorted and struggled for air. ‘Suspicious of the rumours that attended our flagrant and unlawful – yea, unholy – dalliance, her husband and my Emperor questioned me of these matters and’ – here the Emperor began to wail – ‘upon the Holy Relics I denied my crimes! If not damned before, there I threw my immortal soul into the fiery lake!’
Tzintzuluces crossed himself with a quick, frantic gesture.
‘There is more,’ said the Emperor, his eyes now fixed with an expression of utter horror, as if he saw before him the demons who attended the gates of Hell. ‘They murdered him. It was not my hands that forced his head beneath the waters of his bath, but those hands acted in my interest. I know now the foul crime upon which my throne was raised. I will never escape the torment of that knowing!’ The crypt echoed with the Emperor’s shattered voice, as if the gates of Hell had now opened and the damned shouted forth, begging for release.
Tzintzuluces’s face mirrored the terrible fear that racked his Imperial disciple. His lips parted with a curious slurping sound but he could say nothing. The Emperor stared at him, a drowning man who had just realized that his saviour on the shore had no rope, no bit of flotsam to throw to him. And then Symeon spoke. His voice was shockingly elegant, as if he were an actor rather than a self-mutilated hermit. ‘Because you have listened to your wife and eaten from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account.’
The Emperor, still on his knees, looked with shadowy, pleading eyes at Symeon. Symeon answered with barking syllables that echoed against the gleaming plaster vaults of the crypt. ‘And Cain sayeth to the Lord, “Thy punishment is heavier than I can bear; thou hast driven me today from the ground and banished me from thy presence. I shall be a vagrant and wanderer on the earth and anyone who meets me can kill me.” And the Lord answered: “No.” ‘ Here Symeon’s voice boomed mightily. ‘ “If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged sevenfold.” So the Lord put a mark on Cain.’
The Emperor pressed his hands into his eyes. ‘I bear the mark,’ he whispered, his horror barely audible.
Symeon torturously bent his withered, arthritic legs and dropped to his knees beside his Emperor. ‘Though your sins are scarlet, they may become white as snow; though they are dyed crimson, they may yet be like new wool.’ He finished in a low, wondrous tone.
Tzintzuluces gave silent praise to the Pantocrator for the wisdom of the stylite. ‘The sight of a woman is like the venom affixed to a poison arrow,’ he whispered to the Emperor. ‘The longer the venomed barb remains in the flesh, the greater the infection of the corruption it carries.’
Symeon’s voice rose again, a booming concert to Tzintzuluces’s note of caution. ‘And the angel of retribution sayeth this of the whore of Babylon, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication. “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her plagues. For her sins are piled high as Heaven, and God has not forgotten her deeds. Pay her back in her own coin, repay her twice over for her deeds!” ‘
Tzintzuluces realized that with the help of the thrice-blessed Symeon he had now found a voice of his own, a wonderful palliative for his Imperial novitiate’s terrible distress. ‘If your right eye is your undoing,’ he intoned richly, ‘tear it out and fling it away; it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for the whole of it to be thrown into Hell. If your right hand is your undoing, cut it off and fling it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for the whole of it to be cast into perdition!’
‘You have fornicated with the harlot clothed in purple and scarlet!’ boomed Symeon. ‘Now heed the warning of Jehovah’s messenger and come out of her!’
‘Cast the woman out!’ thundered Tzintzuluces in a voice he had scarcely known he commanded. ‘Let not even the sight of her poison your immortal soul.’
‘Cast the woman out!’ David the dendrite added his chorus to his colleagues’ ringing admonitions.
To the Lord of the Entire World, the Emperor, Autocrator and Basileus of the Romans, even the massive brick walls of the holy crypt seemed to tremble with the echoes of the righteous yet ultimately merciful wrath of the Pantocrator. ‘Cast the woman out,’ the Emperor said weakly, his agreement lost amid the clamouring oaths of the Holy Men.
Nicetas Gabras lifted the lid of the exquisitely granulated gold box and studied the seal on the rolled parchment tucked inside. ‘No,’ he said. He opened the second box, this of silver chased with what appeared to be, from Haraldr’s vantage (seated behind his writing table) a hunt scene. ‘No,’ Gabras pronounced even more emphatically. The last box was blue enamel with red floral patterns. ‘No!’ Eustratius, Haraldr’s newly appointed chamberlain, turned to his master. He almost imperceptibly raised the silver tray that held the three boxes and bowed slightly. Haraldr looked at Gabras and raised his unscarred right eyebrow. Gabras ran the tip of his tongue very quickly between his lips and pulled reflexively at each long, silver-hemmed, silken sleeve of his tunic, as if he weren’t certain that the garment fitted properly. ‘The eidikos, rank disputor,’ said Gabras briskly. ‘Actuarius, rank protostrator. A vestitore. None of them men of immediate consequence. I will defer indefinitely their urgent requests for interviews with the Manglavite Haraldr Nordbrikt.’
Haraldr nodded at Gregory to indicate that he understood the Greek. Then he nodded at Gabras, who tipped his bulbous head, draped with long thin blond hair, at the chamberlain Eustratius; the willowy eunuch turned and walked out the door with curious, toe-bouncing strides. Haraldr dully praised Odin and Christ for the endless distractions of his new office, household and fame, an opiate of details that were meaningful only because they momentarily contained the pain and fear. He focused on the words, the bewildering ‘Roman system of titles and dignities’.
She had used him, of course, to an end so hideous that the memory of the words still froze his flesh to his bones: sever the head of the Imperial Eagle. He had fled from her bed like a man fleeing a demon in a dream, hoping that as much as his night with her had been an incorporeal vision, so, too, would its nightmare conclusion. He had not seen either Maria or the Empress in the week and a half since they had tried to make him the agent of their treason; mercifully protocol had shielded him on the road, and since the arrival of the Empress’s huge caravan in Constantinople, neither woman had left the Imperial Gynaeceum. But what madness had kept him from going to Joannes as soon as he had returned? The intent of the two Valkyrja had been clear enough: the head of the Imperial Eagle was the Emperor, and how many times had Haraldr heard it implied that this Empress had already murdered one husband, as well as the rumours that she had been neglected by her new spouse? And yet he had been unable to accuse the Empress of such a conspiracy, much less sentence Maria to the inevitable ‘interrogation’ in Neorion. Now it was quite likely that the plot had been uncovered – why else would the Emperor have been absent on his wife’s return, and why were the two women virtual prisoners in their own apartments? And how soon would it be before the two silk-sheathed Valkyrja implicated him with the length of time he had concealed their terrible intentions? He had been mad to spare Maria, even for a moment, even after an eternity of her seduction. When the Emperor returned, Haraldr could only throw himself before the mercy of his Father and beg that his pledge-men be spared. But she had doomed him. And she had known that when she had led his soul
