‘I am not ready,’ said Anna. ‘Perhaps later, when I have had more . . . experience.’ She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Danielis was right. I am not a woman yet.’
Haraldr held her close. ‘You are a woman,’ he whispered to her.
Anna nuzzled him and then pushed him away gently. ‘Maria asked me to tell you something.’
Haraldr shook his head. ‘I will not talk to her until she answers a question for me.’ He set his jaw. ‘She once mentioned a certain bird to me. I must know if this bird is entirely black, like a raven, or if its plumage is of a scarlet hue.’
Anna raised her eyebrows discreetly, turned and opened the narrow door to the booth. She was gone only for a moment. Haraldrs heart pounded, his life again on a needle of fate, when she faced him again. Anna shrugged. ‘She says the bird in question is feathered like a raven.’
Haraldr felt both relieved and saddened; now he could never truly hate her. Anna reached up, brought his head down, and kissed him, seeming both relieved and sad herself. For an instant Haraldr wondered, as he often had at greater length, if Anna had a secret dread of her fair-hair gallant, if he perhaps was a risk with which she taunted herself.
‘She still loves you,’ said Anna, and then turned and ran down to the end of the alcove and danced down the stairs.
Maria’s eyes were waiting for him when he entered the booth, the blue flames blazing. Her arms were folded beneath her breasts. Her bare skin was like white marble in white sunlight. Her sexuality seemed to change the very atmosphere of the room, flooding the chamber with a thick, drowning, honey-like liquor.
‘I wanted to kill you once.’ Her voice had the strange detachment of a seeress. ‘In Hecate. The knife … it was not yours. I did not bring it for my protection.’
Haraldr felt only a tinge of surprise. He had known that, really; at the time, drunk with her, he had not wanted to think what the knife had meant, and later it had not mattered.
‘The second time I loved you, it was for her. So that you would kill for her. Not her husband. The Orphanotrophus Joannes. I am sorry I could not make the distinction more clear. We were desperate, and yet too cautious. We did not want to use his name until you had agreed. Our Mother is surrounded by spies.’
Each word was a cold stone Haraldr had to disgorge. ‘If I had understood that a service to our Mother, and Rome, was at issue, and not a love that existed only in words lost to the night, then I could have made cause with you. I had something that in my folly I thought was real, and found that it was hollow. You had something real, your love for your Empress, and yet by making a mockery of me you fouled that love. My folly is a poison that corrodes only my own breast. Your folly is a poison that seeps into the world and corrupts everything.’
Lyre music drifted up from the stage. The audience oohed at some revelation in a mime. Maria’s breasts rose and fell in a slight, irregular rhythm. ‘Yes.’ Her eyes flinched from nothing, denied nothing. ‘Yes. I am the greater fool. I betrayed you, and I betrayed myself.’
‘Liar. You do not believe that.’
‘I have told you every truth now. . . .’
‘I know nothing of you.’
A vague blush spread over her breast. ‘I know nothing of you, land man from Rus.’ Her chin tilted up. ‘You have loved a dozen women since you held me. Do you sob to each of them that they have also abused your love?’
‘And you have loved more than a dozen before me, no doubt. Did each of them earn your tearful remorse?’
Maria’s left wrist, folded over her right elbow, began to twitch slightly. ‘I ask nothing of you tonight. Not even forgiveness.’
‘But you have asked me to hear your confession. Have you Romans not priests enough to attend to those needs?’ Impulsively, Haraldr stepped towards her, unwrapped her arms, and seized her wrists. It was a mistake; he felt as if he had taken hot irons in his hands and yet was compelled by some desire entirely his own to hold them until his flesh was incinerated. He had to grit his teeth in order to speak. ‘Perhaps you have other needs.’
She resisted for a moment and then clutched at his robe, her lips savage and her teeth showing. ‘Yes, Manglavite,’ she spat out, ‘for those needs you are … superior. You are, of my dozens, by far the best. You alone drive me to madness.’ Her voice was monstrously mocking, and yet Haraldr glimpsed that she also mocked a certain truth that was too painful for her not to admit. ‘Make me your whore again, Manglavite!’ she trilled angrily. ‘Make me your whore!’
Haraldr let her go. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.
For the first time she cast down her eyes. ‘No. I am the one who has made love a currency of exchange between us. Or perhaps I mean a stick with which to strike each other.’
Haraldr’s defences sagged again. ‘Why would you wish to strike at me?’ he asked sadly. ‘What did I do to invite your . . . contempt?’
The crowd below broke into raucous laughter. Maria sighed and folded her arms back under her breasts. She looked directly at Haraldr again. ‘You have not. You have only invited my … fear.’ The audience laughed even louder. Maria gestured with her hand towards the noise; the movement of her arm and the shimmer of her gown was almost magical. ‘This is not the proper place. I want to … explain. To understand for myself.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I have a villa in Asia, just above Chrysopolis. It is a short ferry. Will you go there with me? Not tonight. Tomorrow. In the light of day.’
Haraldr nodded. Yes. Below him, the audience suddenly fell silent, and then a cymbal crashed like a tinny thunderclap.
‘This way, sir,’ said the Komes of the Excubitores.
Michael Kalaphates had an almost overpowering urge to wet himself. The marble steps of the Magnara gleamed like ice on the cold sunny morning, but he had not been asked to ascend those steps to the waiting glory of Rome. Instead he was escorted down a side ramp that sloped gradually, then seemed to plunge straight to the bowels of the earth in a series of steep, poorly kept steps. The abrupt descent ended at a long, dark corridor lit at intervals with smudgy lamps.
Parchment. That was the smell. Musty, pungent, almost palpable. Chamber after chamber full of documents; halfway down the hall, a man worked inside one of the rooms, and his lamp illuminated the endless stacks, the layered shelves of rolled parchments. A compendium of Rome’s centuries, each ancient decision, each long-forgotten act a parcel of the huge accumulation upon which each succeeding Lord of the Entire World would raise his golden throne. Men died, and yet here their deeds endured, a chorus of voices to render invincible, indisputable before man and God, the will of one man.
The long corridor ended at a plain wooden door. The komes knocked and was greeted by a small, ageing eunuch who wordlessly pointed to another door at the end of the cramped ante-chamber; most of the floor space in the room was occupied by disordered stacks and tumbled piles of rolled documents. The komes knocked on the second door. A beast seemed to growl behind the sealed portal. The komes opened the door and waved Michael in.
Michael blinked. The windowless chamber was flooded with light from a stark, functional candelabrum fashioned from a single metal band. The room was all papers and parchment, and yet not a sheet was out of place, the stacks immaculate, the rolled documents set into plain wooden boxes. The smooth, whitewashed plaster walls were unmarked by any kind of decoration, not even a solitary icon. Joannes sat in a backless chair behind an unornamented wooden writing table; the varnished surface was eroded in places. His heavy iron sealing pliers were placed neatly next to a row of rolled and sealed missives; a pile of lead seal blanks glimmered dully in a little wooden casket, a common coin that would have the power of life and death once the jaws of the Orphanotrophus Joannes’s seal-stamp had pressed his imprint into the metal.
‘Nephew.’ Joannes held out his freakish, akimbo arms. ‘Please sit.’ His spade-tipped fingers seemed to fling the dense, smoky air towards the backless, canvas-upholstered chair behind Michael. ‘You are well.’ It was strange how Joannes never asked a question, only requested confirmation.
‘Yes, Uncle. Sir.’
Joannes brought the splayed ends of his fingers together just beneath his smooth, jutting chin. ‘Let us consider you, Nephew. I see before me a young man, robust, vital, well formed indeed, of agile wit and intellectual acuity. A young man who, unlike his uncles before him, has not suffered the vicissitudes of the journey from
