‘To paraphrase a military maxim, it was not the force of the attack but the surprise.’
Zoe laughed huskily. ‘Will you counter with a thrust of your own?’ She rubbed her hand under his scrotum and along his erect shaft. ‘You are armed.’
‘I thought you found my attentions wearisome.’
‘So I do.’ Zoe closed her legs. ‘Do you worship me?’
‘Yes.’
‘If I decreed that you should not?’
‘I would disobey.’ He slipped his hand between her thighs.
‘Beg me.’
He licked her nipples; still erect, they tightened into hard knots.
‘Beg me. Beg to worship me. Beg for my naked flesh.’
‘Lover, adoration, morning star . . .’
Zoe grabbed her lover’s pulsing member and squeezed hard. ‘I will take your essence this time, little slave. But you must ask for permission. How will you ask for it?’ She spread her legs suddenly. ‘Here, let me bring you in first.’
Her lover moaned. ‘Oh, light, adoration . . . ohhh, take my soul’s nectar . . . oh, perfection . . .’
Zoe ran her nails along his flank. ‘When it happens this time, will you swear to die for me?’
‘I will,’ said Michael Kalaphates drunkenly. ‘My love, I will.’
‘Oh . . . you . . . wicked!’
‘Here is my understanding of what is afoot,’ said Mar when Haraldr had finished his rambling, frantic exposition. They stood in what appeared to be a large park just south and west of the Forum of Constantine; cypresses towered in orderly rows and a pool shone dully a hundred ells away. ‘First of all, you must remember that the Empress herself did not importune you to murder anyone. I know the woman, Maria, though to my regret not as well as you do, and I believe I do no slander to the lady when I say that her beauty is matched by her volatility, her impetuousness, her wantonness. Forgive me, comrade, but she is reputed to be a woman of great passions and little discretion. I hope I am not wounding you, but when she was only a girl – this was eight years ago, when I was only a Decurion of the Guard – when she was only a bud, she took a lover, a distinguished Senator and military commander. I cannot say with certainty who murdered this man, but she was known to have visited him in his apartments shortly before he was found stabbed to death. Of course, the Empress protected the child and the scandal was suppressed, but I have always suspected that Maria killed the man. I suspect that now she thinks she is acting in Her Imperial Majesty’s interests, as I do not question her love for our Mother the Empress. But I do not think she is acting at her Imperial Majesty’s request.’
Haraldr’s head ached from the metallic buzzing and his body seemed weightless. ‘The Empress said that Maria would ask me a question in her name. And the rumours. You know how it is imputed that the Empress had a hand in … in the death of her husband.’
Mar’s face hardened. ‘How do you know that Maria asked you the question the Empress intended? And forget the libel of the streets and the theatres. I can tell you for certain that the Empress had no part in the death of Romanus, because I pulled his body from the bath in which he had drowned. May the Mother of Heaven forgive me, but the Emperor was under the care of his physicians, and besotted in spite of that. He must have fallen and hit his head. Perhaps he never should have been allowed to bathe alone, but that was no treason.’
Doubts still flocked like quarrelling ravens. Was Mar performing his own drama? And yet what he said about Romanus could well be true.
‘I think there is something else you don’t understand. That was why I had to see you tonight.’ Mar held his hands up and examined his huge yet elegant fingers as if he were himself impressed by the marvel. ‘If I had known what I do of you now, I would have behaved differently when we first met. Then I saw you as some sort of renegade, a man who did not understand our devotion to our Father and his Imperial dignity, a royal whelp who thought he could plunder the wealth of Rome merely to serve his own ends. I thought to teach you a lesson, intimidate you, use my knowledge of your background to frighten you into obedience. I didn’t know then that you were a man of honour. Tonight I am certain that your devotion to our Father is as great as my own. I no longer mistrust you. But I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you will begin to trust me.’
This was not a Norseman speaking; this was the oiled tongue of a eunuch. But why was Mar wagging a praise-tongue if he held the sword over Haraldr’s neck?
Haraldr had expected at best the fury of Mar’s anger; perhaps a final mortal struggle. But Mar surprised him with an intense yet even stare. ‘What you would gain, Manglavite Haraldr, is the honour of defending a worthy Emperor against a malignancy so foul that it threatens every life in the Roman Empire, our own included.’
Haraldr could agree that the Emperor was worthy of defending. ‘I have told you of the plot I suspected,’ he invited.
‘You say that Maria’s words were “Sever the head of the Imperial Eagle”. Perhaps she meant Joannes, not the Emperor. It is often said that the Orphanotrophus Joannes is the grotesque head atop the body of Rome. There are many who love our Father who would like to see his brother out of the way.’ Mar paused ominously. ‘The Orphanotrophus Joannes is evil. He does not serve our Father, despite his lavish protestations. He serves himself. Joannes has already designated you a plaything in his evil game.’
Haraldr weighed his desperate hope that Maria’s crime was lesser, perhaps excusable, against the fierce love he had seen on Joannes’s face when the giant monk had spoken of his brother, the Emperor. ‘How would Joannes profit by opposing our Father’s wishes? As I understand it, a eunuch would not be permitted to rule Rome.’
‘The eunuch Joannes will soon have enough power to have a porter from the wharves crowned Emperor to sit on the Imperial Throne as his surrogate. And when he acquires that power, no man or woman in Rome, including our Father, even including our purple-born Mother, will be safe. That is why we must work together to oppose him.’
Haraldr looked down at the hard winter turf, listening to the appeals of two voices, neither one of which he could trust. Was it possible that Joannes’s fierce love was for his own power, the power that only for the present he saw embodied in his brother? And if Mar were correct, then Maria’s crime was only that of using him to defeat a monstrous evil. But could he trust Mar?
‘I’m not asking you to accept my word on this,’ said Mar, addressing Haraldr’s reticence. ‘You needn’t believe that the man I killed tonight was Joannes’s spy. I can offer you proof that Joannes has already moved against you with far more deadly intent.’
‘Why would he move against me, if, as you say, I am already his plaything?’
‘He intends to make you a considerably more pliant instrument. As I say, I can offer you proof. You risked your life to parlay with me tonight. If you meet me tomorrow night at the Chrysotriklinos, you will risk nothing further.’
Haraldr nodded. His men would live to see their homes; he would live at least another day. That was vastly more than he had expected when he had ventured into this snowy night.
The stocky, dark-eyed little man had never known his real name, but as long as he could remember, his people – his people being his fellow denizens of the notorious Studion slums – had called him the Squirrel, and as far as he was concerned, Squirrel was his name, and his identity: quick, darting, able to climb anything. And perhaps he was a bit erratic, too, because in the Squirrel’s business a man could not afford to develop recognizable patterns. The Squirrel stood at the entrance to the vast, colonnaded, terraced square called the Augustaion. He looked without awe or interest past the enormous brick column that rose from the centre of the square, thrusting up the huge bronze equestrian statue of some long-dead Emperor, now green with age, frozen in perpetual hubris, his great right arm pointing to the east, his left hand cradling a globe symbolizing the entire earth. The Squirrel did not care to know that this Emperor had been Justinian, who half a millennium ago had commanded an Empire even larger than that established by the great Bulgar-Slayer, an empire on three continents, stretching from Persia to the Pillars of Heracles, from the Alps to the far reaches of the River Nile. The Squirrel had no wish to know that Justinian’s
