small bronze door bordered with embossed eagles, and, at the end of a featureless but aromatic hallway, parted the dark silk curtains.
The bed beneath the great gilded dome reminded him of an altar: the gold-brocade canopy thrust up by twisting golden columns; the scarlet curtains threaded with thousands of tiny Chi-Rhos, the monogram of the Christ. He approached the bed with excruciating precision, then reached out, his hand steady, and flung the curtain aside.
‘Wicked Nephew,’ said Zoe. She was naked except for her rings, her heavy breasts and sensuous belly thrust out, the jewelled fingers of her left hand beside the shaped, golden pelt between her legs. With her right hand she reached out and touched Michael’s face. ‘Take that filthy thing off.’
Michael stripped frantically and fell on Her Majesty, his face buried in her breasts. She laughed in great throaty peals. ‘Yes, little Nephew, I shall have you to dine again. That is, I shall have you dine upon me. You would have been a surpassing thespian, my little slave. I believe that your odious uncle is even now receiving a favourable report from his spy.’ She pushed him away and sat up, her hands cupping her own breasts. ‘Now tell your precious mother about this clever scenario in which you are to play the buffoon. Symeon has heard the most fantastic rumours.’
Michael eyed the Empress’s pubic triangle while he hurriedly spoke. ‘He wants to make me the Caesar.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you must adopt me first. I am to … charm you.’
Zoe fell back with the force of her laughter. She writhed with mirth for a moment and then reached up and kneaded Michael’s scrotum. ‘My little boy,’ she said, puckering her lips facetiously. ‘My precious little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘Suck at my breast, my little cherub!’ She let him go, arched her neck, and pressed her voluminous white bosom upwards, a finger at the tip of each thick, erect, porphyry-coloured nipple. ‘There, my child, my paps will give you life!’
Michael’s attention to her breasts calmed Zoe, reducing her boisterous laugh to gentle moans. She began to slide her pelvis over the silk sheets in snakelike motions. ‘Love slave,’ she said with a moan, ‘you must now play Sophocles’s tragic hero and enter your mother’s womb.’ She lifted his head. ‘Come to me, little Oedipus. I shall not even make you bawl for my favour. Give me your essence.’
Michael eagerly lowered himself between the twitching Imperial legs. Zoe wrapped him with her gorgeous limbs. ‘Ah, my little slave’ – she sighed – ‘my precious tiny Caesar, my dear Nephew and soon adopted son.’ She gasped and fought for control as his buttocks pumped above her loins. ‘Listen to me, little one. Once you are named my husband’s heir, you must reward the uncle who has enabled this delicious . . . incest. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes . . . yes,’ he began to wail. ‘Reward . . . unnnh . . . Joannes . . .’
Zoe pulled her knees forward, reached back behind her buttocks, and wrapped her thumb and forefinger around Michael’s thrusting member. She squeezed, first firmly, then so painfully that he stopped his motion and looked at her with watering eyes.
She pressed her lips towards him and whispered, her words hot on his heaving chest. ‘I want you to kill him.’
‘I thought it might be instructive for you to see this, Manglavite Haraldr.’ Joannes selected an instrument from the table and held it towards the light. ‘You might be called upon to spend more of your time here in the Neorion.’ He looked back over his shoulder, his eyes almost invisible inside his grotesque head. Then he walked over to his subject, his step heavy, his boots resounding in the sinister chamber. The naked man was chained between two bloodstained stone pillars, his legs spread slightly; a long wooden rail, supported by ropes that could be raised or lowered on pulleys, supported his arms. Two assistants waited dutifully beside the wretch. One was tall by all but Norse standards and had the charred blue skin and short, wiry black hair of Afrikka. The other was a small, noseless Armenian; Haraldr had been told that condemned prisoners might prolong their lives by assisting in the punishment of others.
‘Interrogation, Manglavite Haraldr, is an art superior to that of the painter, the carver in stone, even the goldsmith who chases pure images of the Virgin with skill and delicacy.’
Joannes pointed to the helpless wretch who in his terror had already deposited faeces and urine on the bare stone floor. ‘This inert clay, capable only of the most basic human responses, is the raw material from which I will fashion an object of both beauty and utility in the eyes of the Sacred State we both serve. Though some might perceive our creation as fearful, even repulsive, remember that the most hideous acts of cruelty are beautiful to the Pantocrator when they serve to create martyrs to our Glorious Faith, or when such acts serve to punish the condemned souls who have rejected His Sacraments. If the fiery lakes of Hell are beguiling to our Lord because they purify his Heavenly Empire, then we His servants must find pulchritude in the interrogator’s designs, for by them do we purify the Earthly Empire.’
Joannes turned quickly to face Haraldr, elbows whirling rigidly as if he were the enormous toy top of some evil Titan. ‘You, Manglavite Haraldr, are privileged to apprentice yourself to this art.’ He whirled back to face his raw material, a man of about twenty-five – or perhaps thirty-five? – with short dark hair and a patchy black beard. It was impossible to tell who he might have been, what his character was, for Neorion had already taken the humanity away from him, as it did everyone, victim or victimizer, who entered its grim portals.
‘Like any artist, the interrogator must carefully consider where to begin. The novice tends to strokes that are too delicate or, conversely, too broad. I rather prefer to’ – Joannes nodded to the blue man, who seized the victim’s head in his huge, dark fingers – ‘begin with an unexpected flourish, a conundrum to delight the eye of irony.’ Joannes took a short knife resembling the instrument of a surgeon and held it to the man’s mouth; the dark eyes above the gleaming blade glared with a kind of noble defiance and Haraldr asked Odin to help this man die well, and quickly, for he deserved a good death.
‘When a man undergoes interrogation, the object of greatest concern to him is his manhood. He is least fearful for his oral cavity and the organs therein, for he knows that he must be left his tongue if he is expected to provide us with the verse we have so arduously prompted him to compose.’ With a deft, instant motion, Joannes began to carve around the man’s mouth, and in a mere moment he flung aside a small, bloody mass like a piece of rotten fruit. The Armenian scrambled after the discarded flesh and dropped it into a large wooden bucket.
Haraldr fought his swoon and surging gut. The poor victim jerked his head as much as he could, and his exposed, reddened teeth chattered while blood poured down his chin. He was in every other way intact, but he was already in countenance a cadaver, a fleshless skull.
‘But a man still speaks credibly without lips,’ said Joannes. He stepped back and appraised his work. ‘The interrogator, like the artist, knows when his work is finished, for that is when the object he has created praises the Pantocrator in the voice he has intended for it.’ Joannes reached down and grabbed the man’s penis. ‘This creation of mine can already praise the Pantocrator by informing us who is arming the rabble of the Studion.’ The man rolled his head with the great, gaping bloody smear where his mouth had been but said nothing. ‘If we take the testicles, as was my fate, we leave the means but not the desire. If we take the penis, we leave the desire but not the means.’ Joannes yanked on the penis and sliced it cleanly away. He turned and showed the bloody, limp member to Haraldr.
‘Perhaps I should perform this alteration on you Tauro-Scythians.’ Joannes grinned, an obscene, heavy- lipped smile more terrible than his scowl. ‘I am concerned that yours, and those of your henchmen, will trouble you more than this is troubling our friend here.’ He tossed the penis into the Armenian’s bucket, then wiped his hands on a towel offered by the blue man. ‘The slut Maria, with whom you are enjoying yourself, is a chronic malefactor, a delinquent whose immoral licence flaunts every standard and expectation of a Christian community. She is anathema to all who worship the True Light of the World.’
‘She is not anathema to our purple-born Mother,’ said Haraldr.
Joannes could scarcely conceal his astonishment. Haraldr Nordbrikt was challenging him. Haraldr Nordbrikt and the Hetairarch Mar Hunrodarson, fowl of the same feather. But to his face! Even the Hetairarch was not so carelessly impudent. But that was the difference between the two; the Hetairarch was much more clever, and more dangerous. And that was why Haraldr Nordbrikt’s tongue would not earn him lodging in the Neorion that very evening. ‘Someday,’ growled Joannes, ‘you may be asked to assist me with the whore Maria in this place. I enjoy working with women. I often ask them which set of lips they are most loath to part with. It becomes quite easy to
