walk where He has walked? Let us suggest to her that with respect to her purple-born stature, we would not dream of offering this Caesar to her children without her blessing and sanctification. And in further acknowledgement of her Endowment by the very Hand of the Pantocrator, we would humbly beseech her to take this child, this Caesar, to her bosom, metaphorically to suckle him with the milk of her impeccable Macedonian lineage, and formally adopt him as her son.’
The Emperor considered the matter for a remarkably brief interlude. His chin was set, his gaze decisive. ‘This is well conceived, my dearest brother and most faithful servant. I can only offer one caution as to this enterprise. If the Empress forms a personal enmity for our nephew, the plan will not work.’
‘Yes. I have dispatched him to her chambers this very evening, to dine with her and convince her of his merits, feeling that even if you did not signal your approval of this proposal, he might at least tell us something of her activities and intentions. He was quite quaking at the prospect, but I am certain that his boyish charms will arouse her maternal inclinations.’
The Emperor stood. ‘How much lighter is my load than it was an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Come and embrace me, my Peter, my rock.’ The Emperor held out his arms and clutched the giant monk to his own thick chest. He was astonished when Joannes suddenly burst into tears.
She awoke to his kisses on her neck. She rolled over and took him in her arms and felt the length of his body against hers and pressed her breasts to his hard chest. Haraldr held her head and whispered in her ear. ‘You had a night vision,’ he said soothingly. ‘Why did you cry out?’
‘I dreamed of you,’ said Maria in a voice like a hot breeze. They were so warm together, beneath silk and down, the heated floor baking the cold from the marble walls of her bedchamber. ‘I often dream of you.’
‘Are we lovers?’
‘Often.’
‘Did I hurt you this time, to make you cry?’
‘No . . .’She shuddered against him.
‘Why were you frightened?’
She would not answer; she nuzzled his neck and gripped his shoulders tightly. ‘Make love to me again,’ she said gently, raspily.
‘Tell me what you saw.’
‘It was . . . frivolous. A vision with no meaning.’
‘Then tell it.’
She paused to bite him on the neck. ‘Very well.’ She relented, hoping that her acquiescence would indeed render the vision frivolous. She pushed away from him slightly. ‘I saw you sailing across a cold black sea with hundreds of ships in your wake. A man who was with you pointed to the heavens, and thousands of ravens tittered overhead, until they were like a cloud that blocked the sun.’
‘A portent of death. What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I cried out, and your kisses carried me away from the shores of sleep.’
‘Were you afraid that you would share my fate?’
‘Perhaps I was afraid that I would not.’ She gathered him in her arms with a fierce passion. ‘Make love to me.’
It began again, on a sea made of light, boundless, their frantic arms drawing each other into a single atom of being, this common soul expanding until it embraced all time, all creation. ‘I … love . . . you!’ she screamed in her moment of paroxysm, and then she drifted slowly to his chest and wrapped her arms around him again.
Their kisses made him hard again before he had even left her. This time they clung to each other, flesh dissolving flesh, sleepwalkers meeting in a dream, lips to the other’s ear, waiting for some enchanted revelation. ‘Love . . . love . . .’ she said, her voice quavering. He waited, deciding he would not tell her of his love this night, might never tell her; but of course she already knew. She moaned softly and whispered again. ‘Tonight the world has changed for ever.’
‘Yes,’ he admitted, controlling his voice. ‘I feel that.’
‘No, you do not know how I mean that. It is not just these two breasts, these two souls locked within. It is a thousand thousand souls for a thousand years.’
He took her face in his hands and found her gaze with his. ‘I know,’ he told her, and in that moment he saw, like a distant image against an azure sea, the reflection of a raven as it tracked across the blue depths of her eyes.
‘Look, Nephew, I have provided you with a final treat. Finish your pastry and you will see it.’ Zoe raised her hand at the hovering eunuch who had reached for her empty little silver dessert dish. ‘Away!’ She looked at Michael Kalaphates and shrugged. ‘I do not know who is responsible for training the servants I am sent. Perhaps your uncle the Orphanotrophus Joannes. In any event, whenever Symeon finally instructs one in the proper decorum, he is snatched away and I am plagued with some new oaf. This one only arrived this very afternoon. Perhaps he will improve his performance.’
Michael Kalaphates swallowed the last of his dessert and smiled effortlessly. He studied the images chased on his silver plate and laughed. ‘You remembered my fascination with pagan scenes. This is a satyr, I believe you once told me, and this lovely creature, though she is as pale as her aureate spectre beside you, is a maenad.’
‘You remembered,’ said Zoe happily yet demurely. ‘We found we had much in common in Antioch, did we not? I am so pleased that your uncle has permitted you to renew our acquaintance.’ She cast her eyes at the servant.
‘Although I am virtually terrified by the boldness of what I must remark, let me humbly beg you that our acquaintance be given the opportunity to ripen into friendship. I will beseech the Holy Virgin each night that before I have pined away each of my days, I might be invited to sup with you again. Until then I will mourn, deep-eyed Hera, that I am for ever cast down from your Olympian immanence.’
Zoe laughed huskily, perhaps erotically. ‘I have enjoyed this interview, Nephew. You may be certain that we will be more than strangers in the future. In the meantime I will propose to your uncle that you be offered a dignity more in keeping with your charm and intellect. Now I must regretfully ask you to take your leave.’
Michael stood, bowed, and withdrew with his arms folded across his breast, his eyes seeming to plead what protocol, and the presence of Joannes’s spies, dictated that his tongue could not. Zoe nodded and the bronze doors slid shut on the shimmering vision of his Mother. Michael passed quickly through an ante-chamber dazzling with mosaics, and was escorted by a chamberlain down a series of hallways that turned twice before ending at another set of bronze doors. The Khazar guards at the gate to the Empress’s apartments halted him; their komes carefully eyed Michael, then pulled a marker out of a little tally board before he finally opened the doors. ‘May I visit the Virgin of Kamilas to give thanks?’ Michael asked the komes, referring to a palace chapel near the Gynaeceum. The koines reached for a document resting on the stone barricade and read it with dark, darting eyes. Finally he looked up and shrugged. ‘It is permitted.’
The little church consisted of two apses stuck on the first storey of a larger building used for wardrobe storage. Michael proceeded to the altar of the Holy Mother of Heaven, who floated serenely in the midst of a mosaic applied to the half dome of the apse. He stepped inside the silver chancel screen and placed a single silver nomismata on the gold altar table; metal against metal made a dull, mysterious ring in the absolutely still chapel.
Michael did not hear the priest until he materialized, seemingly as magically as the Holy Spirit, by his side. The priest picked the coin off the altar with slender, cadaverous fingers. He turned about, and Michael followed him into a little room full of sacramental candles. The priest pulled a battered, rusty knife out of his cloak and pried a slab of marble pavement from the floor. He lit one of the candles and handed it to Michael.
The first part of the passage was through raw earth; Michael cursed the gummy soil that quickly dirtied his best silk. After forty fathoms the dirt tunnel intersected what appeared to be the basement of a long-razed palace; a few bits of plaster still clung to the ancient brick vaults. Michael transited the unbearably dank basement to a crumbling perimeter wall, crawled through a small opening, and entered a stone-walled passage so narrow that he had to walk sideways. This ran for fifty fathoms before ending in stone stairs that climbed almost as steeply as a ladder. At the top of the stairs Michael perched himself precariously on a little ledge; a door that looked like it had been designed for a small child was just at his left. He removed the key from his boot, unlocked the door and squeezed through into a treasury of little-used chalices, porcelain cups, glass basins, bronze lamps and icons. The antechamber beyond was empty, and the lamps had been extinguished. He took a second key, quickly unlocked a
