thousands of sweating backs who laboured at his command. If the master builder was not there to lash and cajole and inspire his labourers once again to put their shoulders to the load even when they were slumped with weariness and exhaustion, then no edifice would rise. And for all the labourers of Joannes’s new Rome now knew, the master builder was a phantom, a man who could no longer appear in public, even for the briefest ceremony. Theotokos. Today’s incident in front of the Hagia Sophia could have been the end. Yes. That serious. Fortunately the
The
Joannes shook his massive head as if awakening from a bad dream. That was what was insufferably offensive about these fair-hairs in the palace! The time one spent dealing with them added to nothing, and took away from matters of real importance! Look at him, sitting here fuming at pasty-faced pirates from Thule when history waited! Time, passing inexorably, demanded his answer.
Joannes brought his massive splayed arms down on his writing table, and the impact echoed through the empty corridors of the Magnara basement. Where was the answer? Where? And then like the voice of an angel, the answer came to him. Extraordinary. Was it possible? Perhaps it was. And yet to do it would be more difficult than passing the entire peninsula of Byzantium through the eye of a needle. Who could do that? Not even a conjuror. But perhaps … In the silence of the night the angels whispered again, and Joannes heard. Yes. Love. Love, which had created the entire world out of the formless abyss, had brought light to eternal darkness, and had vaulted the endless waters. Love had done it once. And might do it again. Love. And luck.
‘What do you dream about?’
Halldor’s eyes snapped open. He groggily pieced together the Greek sentence. Had he been asleep? How long? Odin! Well, it was no feather bed being Komes of the Middle Hetairia, particularly now that Haraldr was almost always occupied with his Manglavite duties, whatever they were. Ulfr, thankfully, handled the considerable burden of administration, but it was still Halldor who had to pound the excruciating ceremonial discipline of the court into five hundred swaddling-new guardsmen, most of whom still couldn’t tell a lofty patrician from a lowly exarch or find their way from the Magnara to the Chrysotriklinos. It was sufficiently taxing to make a man fall asleep next to a woman as beautiful as this.
‘You were dreaming. I can tell.’ The lady’s blue eyes reflected the glowing candelabra far over her head.
Halldor pulled his legs up so the bulge in his robe wouldn’t be so prominent.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she said, laughing. ‘I am not a virgin.’
No, you’re worse, thought Halldor, you’re the wife of some official whose title Halldor couldn’t exactly pinpoint; the essential fact was that the husband had been exiled for several years as temporary special Strategus of some theme halfway to Vinland. The lady had issued Halldor an invitation to dine with her, and as some irascible old Magister had pointed out to him, it would have shamed the lovely woman had he refused; surely even a semi-pagan Tauro-Scyth understood that it was his Christian obligation to console the lonely ‘semi-widow’. So after a suitably proper five-day interval, during which the prospective liaison had become the titillation of half the ladies at court, here he was. Asleep, with nothing consummated.
‘Did I bore you?’ she asked, stroking his long blond hair with fingers like slender ivory flutes.
Halldor smiled at her. Her lips were as exquisite as a Greek Aphrodite’s, her hair almost pure gold in the lamplight. Her breasts swelled against her silk scaramangium. He touched his lips to her ear, inhaling the scent of roses and fresh meadow flowers. ‘When . . . did you . . . ever . . . bore a man?’ Halldor surmised that his Greek had been fluent enough when she threw her arm around his neck and crushed her breasts to his with an embrace as tight as a shipbuilder’s vice. He finally prised his mouth away from the tender aggression of her lips to ask the salient question. ‘Where . . . would you like . . . to do this?’
‘In my bath,’ she said, gulping, her eyes glittering.
The child looked up, his black eyes mesmerized by the sight of the giant fair-hairs and their woman. He hastily stripped the tattered rag from the torso of the fallen man and vanished. Squirming clusters of large rats continued to work on the face and toes of a fresh corpse only a few ells away. The fallen man groaned. Mar held Haraldr back. ‘A pox blotch,’ he said. ‘He will be dead soon, anyway.’ Haraldr looked about, searching for an instrument of mercy. He saw a large piece of scorched masonry that had crumbled from the ruined, fire-gutted building to his right. He picked up the big stone and walked over to the now-naked, softly breathing man. Haraldr gasped; the man’s face and most of his body were a mass of pustulant sores. Only the feverish eyes were human. They reached out and the man moaned. ‘Holy . . . cherubim . . . save me.’ Haraldr looked at the tittering, fearless rats, waiting only for him to step back before they began to nibble on living flesh. He brought the stone smashing down on welcoming eyes.
Mar held Flower in his arms. She had bravely agreed to come along and identify the Physician, if possible; she had not reckoned on this. ‘This is where they come to die, when even the streets turn them out,’ said Mar, as if anything could explain this. A man entered the intersection, his frock as black as the charred shells of the tenements that towered above him. The bearded monk bent over another corpse, one of half a dozen or so lying about in the muck, and silently arranged the stiff, chalk-hued arms. ‘They come here to die because they know the monks will find them,’ said Mar. ‘Over there’ – he pointed north – ‘is the Studius Monastery. They have a fraternity of monks who do nothing but retrieve and bury the corpses that here are shunned by even the dirt.’ Mar walked over to the monk and bowed, then handed the serene-looking man some gold coins. The monk dipped his head perfunctorily and continued his work.
Mar took Flower’s hand and looked at Haraldr. He spoke in Norse. ‘When you see the live creatures of the Studion, you will understand why I have taken us through the refuges of the dead.’
They soon came among the living. A dark alley opened up onto a fairly broad avenue, which in spite of its breadth was almost completely canopied by jutting, enclosed wooden balconies and makeshift platforms that in many cases joined over the streets. The stench of human excrement was overpowering. The surface of the street was spongy, and to his horror Haraldr realized that it was paved with well-trodden mud, rubbish and sewage, perhaps to the depth of an ell. Beneath the precarious wooden canopies and reeking, slimy facades clustered hundreds of supine forms. The lucky ones were covered with straw; most of the rest, many of whom had bare skin showing through their rags, were huddled together in scores of human mounds, each several ells high. Haraldr was incredulous. ‘Won’t the ones at the bottom suffocate?’ he asked Mar.
‘Look again. They are not piled on one another but on mounds of garbage. The heat of decay keeps them warm.’
They began their stroll through Hell. The clumps of bodies stirred from endless wet coughs and moans. A man, his scalp covered with great black scabs, squatted in the street, groaning and clutching his knees. Two boys, perhaps ten, kicked at a solitary old man. A naked, filth-blackened child stood by a sleeping man and woman, wailing.
Block after block of this. A man, his greasy tunic thrown up, rutting like a dog with what appeared to be a very young girl, almost a child. In one tenement there was a party; two men stuck their heads out of a window and tried to drop bits of their flaming tapers on the bodies huddled below. A naked woman squatted on a wooden balcony and urinated. A boy of fourteen, perhaps, handless, his mouth covered with sores, offered the Norsemen a sex act he could perform with the stump of his slender wrist.
Haraldr could scarcely believe his reeling senses. He had seen pockets of misery in Hedeby and Kiev, the offal-strewn, muddy streets crowded with cutpurses, charlatans and crippled beggars. But the Studion was beyond his experience, beyond imagining. Now he understood why he had been blindfolded on his initial entry into the city, and why these wretches would attempt to burn their own dwellings. This offended the gods, and it should offend man. He had known the Empress City to be wanton, even cruel. But this was an infection of the body, a great corruption that would contaminate everything she touched. And yet the monk who came to bury the outcasts of the Empress City was a part of her, too; no Norseman would have had that kind of courage or devotion to the souls of
