strangers. The beauty and virtue of this ravishing city were beyond imagining, and so was her unspeakable evil. Perhaps that was also true of Maria.
Halldor draped the thick linen towel round his waist and waited. The steam glazed the green marble benches with a film of condensation and clouded the plastered vault overhead. Halldor enjoyed this Roman ritual, particularly when there was a woman waiting at the end of his sweat. When he had assessed that the foul humours – whatever they were – had been expunged from his body, he mopped his body with the towel and entered the next chamber. The large pool was almost obscured by steam, like one of Iceland’s natural hot pools on a winter day. He heard a splash and saw a vague diffusion of pink.
Halldor rinsed himself in the tub adjacent to the pool and then walked carefully down the opus-sectile steps; he could see a mosaic pattern on the bottom of the pool but could not make out the motifs. The water was cool but not chilling.
‘They say you are a great seafarer.’ Her voice was crystalline, delightful. Halldor began to suspect that he would want to dine here more than once. He wished the steam would clear so he could get a look at her. In his arms she had felt like one of those statues come to life, each curve perfect. ‘Can you cross the water that separates us?’ she asked, her voice ringing delicately against a domed ceiling with a large glass oculus in the middle.
Halldor stroked easily; he had learned to swim at three summers. He touched the far end of the pool and wiped at the water in his eyes. ‘You didn’t navigate properly.’ Halldor reached towards the teasing voice and made brief contact with slippery flesh. She thrashed away. Suddenly he could feel her against his back, her breasts and thighs sliding by. This time he got hold of an ankle and pulled her into his arms. ‘You have been netted,’ he said. She laughed and pressed her entire body against his and kissed him, letting the water drain from her lips like a thin, aphrodisiac oil. ‘Yes,’ she said, laughing, ‘but do you think you can spear me?’ Then she ducked out of his arms and swam away.
The filth-paved road turned abruptly left, into the triangle created by the southward sweep of the Marmora coastline before it met the Great Wall of the city. ‘We have met all the honest folk of the Studion,’ Mar said in Norse, motioning back towards the long, dark boulevard of misery they had just traversed. ‘Let us now go among the liars, thieves, cheats, whores and murderers.’
The buildings here were better maintained, with plaster and wood patchwork frequently visible, though whole facades of crumbling brick and rotting wood also awaited repairs that might never be made. Signs, and even an occasional statue, appeared here and there above the arcades of dingy inns and food shops. Prostitutes, their faces virtually painted on, prowled like cats. ‘Pretty thing. Eminences,’ said one sourly as she passed, eyeing Flower enviously; beneath her caked-on powder, large boils raised pale welts.
Cutpurses ran beneath the arcades in shadowy packs, and they soon became bolder, swarming into the street to run about the Norsemen like crazy jackals trying to determine whether a lion was sufficiently wounded to permit an attack. At an intersection five or six whores held a man upside down by his quivering legs; another garishly painted woman sat by his head with a rock, bashing his teeth out. ‘Cheated her,’ explained one of the women to the gathering crowd.
The inns became larger, and crowds milled in the street; a man in silk passed, accompanied by more than a dozen retainers all wearing swords and cheap steel breastplates. ‘I get you best price for the girl,’ squeaked a voice that seemed to come from Haraldr’s elbow; he never saw the source. An old man completely blinded by cataracts pounded on Haraldr’s chest and vanished into the crowd. A woman smiled, her rotted teeth like old wood between her brilliantly painted lips.
Flower clutched at Haraldr. Mar had turned away and was bent over a young man who had fallen to his knees; he grasped the man’s forearm in his huge fist. ‘The Squirrel,’ Mar hissed. ‘Your hand in my cloak told me you must know where I can find the Squirrel.’ The foiled cutpurse said nothing; his boyish face reddened and scowled. The crowd began to cluster. There was a snap, and the cut-purse howled and cradled his arm; Mar immediately grasped the other arm. ‘When I finish with your arms, I’ll start with your fingers. That might be a permanent disability in your profession.’ The thief whimpered and blurted, ‘The Devil’s Walking Stick!’ Mar let him stumble off through the crowd.
The Devil’s Walking Stick was an inn situated in an ancient building several blocks closer to the seawall. The name derived from a trident carved in relief, apparently centuries ago, on the stone above the arcade. The street in front of the inn was almost solidly packed with boisterous, shoving young men and a few beleaguered whores. ‘Cutthroats, the lot,’ said Mar, who had virtually hidden Flower inside his cloak. ‘If anyone makes a move towards you, kill them. You cannot expect to bluster past this kind simply because we are Varangians and might reduce the entire Studion to cinders if one of us is harmed here. These men don’t care. They care about the next quarter of an hour and whether it will offer a strong draught and a tight cunt.’
Haraldr and Mar walked side by side through the crowd, their huge shoulders forming a virtual arch over Flower. Hard eyes and scarred faces turned towards them, but the bodies moved aside. They walked beneath the arcade and through the arched doorway of the inn. The air was smoky and redolent of cheap wine and unwashed men. A dice game was under way at the nearer of two large tables; a great cheer accompanied each roll. At the farther table the centre of attention was a small, dark-eyed man wearing an absurd-looking, brand-new brimless silk bonnet like those that were just coming into fashion with the Imperial courtiers. ‘I rescued a miserable cut- purse from the Numera the other day,’ said Mar. ‘He’s over there. I’m sure he can tell me where to find the Physician. Stay with Flower. Remember what I said. They will try to insult you, and perhaps even our Father. Ignore the words. Watch the hands and the feet.’
Mar shouldered through the crowd. The game came to a temporary halt. Flower trembled, her head hidden beneath Haraldr’s arm like a frightened bird under its mother’s wing. Dangerous, snakelike eyes began to examine the partially hidden female form beneath Haraldr’s cloak. Mar reached the table and greeted the man in the red bonnet. A group of men at the near table, already turned to face Haraldr, stood up. They wore cheap silk and clearly fancied themselves successful rogues. The tallest was a giant among Romans; his dark beard stuck out like a shelf, and his eyes sparkled.
‘Let us have a look, Eminence.’ The man’s voice was deep, even unthreatening. He nodded at his fellows. ‘We’ll pay good for just a look at her.’ Haraldr gripped the pommel of his short sword; he wished he had worn Emma. But Mar had warned him that a byrnnie might inhibit the quickness he would need in these streets.
‘He’s dumb as a goat,’ said a smaller man with a sharp white streak in his dark hair. ‘You might as well pay to see a turd walk as see a Varangian talk.’
‘Well, there’s one . . . no, two turds just walked in here!’ a third said, chortling.
‘Shut up!’ barked the big man. ‘He knows what we’re saying.’ The big man swayed as if he would take a step forward, and Haraldr prepared to take his head off. But the man’s legs spread wide and he set himself, as if to declare his observance of a border between himself and the Norse giant. ‘Your Emperor will be dead soon,’ he said, his eyes grim. ‘He’s abed now, dying. He’s not shown himself to us or seen our Mother in all the new year. We’ll put our own man up there before we let a corpse rule us while the unholy monk Joannes grinds us beneath his boot. Now you’ve seen Studion, Eminence. Do you think your Varangians can stop us if we get a will about us?’
Haraldr was taken aback. He had expected simple aggression, not the strange conviction of this criminal. The Emperor’s dying? It was true that he had not been in the city to welcome his wife, or the men who had saved her, and that there had been no procession on his return. But Haraldr had assumed that the Emperor was eluding his wife’s treachery; after all, he could not simply throw the purple-born into Neorion. But this was certainly a new facet to the complex structure of Haraldr’s doubts. If the Emperor was dying, then Joannes, no longer shielded by his Imperial relation, might indeed be driven to extreme measures in order to maintain his power. But why hadn’t Mar told him this? That insight into Joannes’s motives would have been much more convincing than this journey into Hell.
Haraldr watched while Mar, who had concluded his conversation with the red-bonneted man, made his way back through the crowd. He quickly responded to his impulse. ‘If a man wanted to … talk more of this, for whom would he ask?’
Now the big man did his own calculating. Finally he put his coarse, broad palm to his beard and compressed the springy mass. A large sapphire with a four-pointed star flashed from a thick finger. ‘The Blue Star,’ he said simply, then bowed curtly, turned, and sat down.
Out in the street, Mar pointed east. ‘Odin favours our enterprise. My friend had an associate who knew
