‘You are still working?’
‘I could work for the next ten years and not repair the damage done by my . . . predecessor. I had no idea what he had done. No one did. Not even my brother. The substance of it, yes. Not the extent of it.’ The Emperor’s lustrous, dark eyes contracted for a moment, hardening. ‘Even if the Rus trade resumes, we must institute another surcharge to the window tax. The Dhynatoi will do everything they can to oppose us.’ The Dhynatoi were the empire’s enormously powerful landed aristocracy; among the myriad Imperial exactions, the window tax – based on the number of windows in a dwelling – was one of the few levies that fell more heavily on the owners of large estates than it did upon peasant freeholders,
The Empress Zoe brushed the dark curls from her husband’s forehead and again drew him towards her bed. The Emperor did not resist. He sat on the edge of the enormous sleeping couch, his back perfectly erect. He relaxed his shoulders and exhaled, audibly, through his nose. Zoe began to unlace his robe at the back. She unlaced the fine linen undershirt as well, and peeled away both layers to expose her husband’s muscle-dimpled back. She slipped out of her wrapper and pressed her breasts to his flesh. His back tensed.
‘Stay with me,’ Zoe whispered into his ear.
He turned, his face fixed with a kind of horror, as if her breasts were diseased. ‘He was murdered.’ The Emperor’s tone was now vaguely frantic. ‘Your husband. The Emperor. I am certain of it.’
‘You are my husband. You are now the Emperor.’
‘Romanus was your husband when you – when you and I--’
The Emperor seemed to strangle on the words. ‘When he asked me about us, I lied to him in the sight of the Pantocrator. I perjured myself on the holy relics. And then I turned away while he was murdered. Does mere acquiescence make the mark of Cain upon me any less indelible?’
Zoe pulled her robe over her breasts. Her recitation was ritualistic, an oft-repeated exorcism. ‘He was near death. The last of his innumerable follies was his final ablution. His doctors warned him not to bathe. He simply drowned. You saw the corpse. Perhaps the servants were . . . inattentive. But they were not assassins.’
‘They say someone held his head under. A Varangian. The Hetairarch, they say.’
‘They say? The hirelings of the Dhynatoi, who will repeat anything for a price? There are many powerful men who would have preferred a far less . . . vigorous successor to Romanus. This is how they attack you, and the men who stand between you and their obscene ambitions. If any hand held my . . . your predecessor’s head beneath those waters, it was the hand of the Pantocrator Himself. Romanus was a plague. Your hands cured me of him. Now they will cure my people.’
‘And who will be physician to my affliction?’ The Emperor stood up, pulled his robe over his shoulders, and stepped away from his wife’s bed. ‘For even if I wash seven times in the River Jordan, I cannot heal the infection of my soul.’
‘Don’t touch it!’ The arrow had drifted lazily out of I the sky like a wounded bird and clattered harmlessly on the deck. ‘It might be poisoned.’ Jarl Rognvald walked to the foredeck, crossing the planks that covered the main cargo hold. He carefully picked up the metal-tipped, neatly feathered shaft and held it up for all to see. ‘What a bowshot.’ He looked across the still, yellow river toward the startlingly green, thickly wooded bank. ‘I’d measure it over five hundred ells.’
‘Gleb!’ shouted Jarl Rognvald to his Slav pilot. ‘Call for a tight file.’
Haraldr squinted at the mysterious, dense wall of foliage. Ten days already on the river, the placid monotony of the waters like the sultry, unsettling stillness before a lightning storm. Each day with its whispered drifting warning of the hidden enemy. The eerie tranquillity of the star-flecked nights, and the creeping, subtle terror that one might awaken to find that one’s boat has drifted from anchor and thudded into the bank, into the hands of the unseen demons. (It had happened to one crew last night; the watch had got drunk, and in the moonless night no one knew until they heard the screams.) Jarl Rognvald was increasingly withdrawn when he was not preoccupied with command, staring down the river like a seeress struggling to spy the future. And for Haraldr, dreams. So many dreams here. Not only of a dying sun and blood on the land but also of a place of wind and cold and endless blackness. The voice, always that voice now, whispering, cajoling, drawing him into that deepening dark void where his fears stalked on nightmare feet. On the river, the beasts of those inner depths had become more fierce, and his fugitive soul seemed ever more distant.
Haraldr was certain he saw a glint of metal in the distance. Another. Yet another! Far ahead, the left bank lowered and the verdant screen was interrupted by a dun patch filled with colours and flashes of steel and bustling movement. ‘Larboard bank! Larboard!’ he yelled. ‘Pechenegs!’
Gleb the pilot limped along the gangplanks, coming forward to stand in the prow with Haraldr and Jarl Rognvald. He was a short, grey-eyed man who shaved his head save for a long grey lock above each ear. Gleb had obtained his limp on his first Dnieper trip, when his boat had been tossed on the rocks. After that he had lived to ‘vanquish the river’, and that was why he had taken three more trips. But it was said that Yaroslav had had to make Gleb’s sons and grandsons rich men before he could persuade Gleb to become lead pilot for this expedition. ‘A man needs the luck of the whole world to go four times down the Dnieper,’ Gleb had told Jarl Rognvald. ‘By the time he starts his fifth trip, he will have used up all the luck there is.’
‘They’ll be giving us a show now,’ muttered Gleb.
Jarl Rognvald looked at him quizzically.
‘That crew they captured,’ groused the pilot, ‘be sure that they haven’t yet killed all of them.’
A distant shout boomed across the water. ‘The famished eagle feeds at last!’
Haraldr’s stomach roiled. Several ships, oars churning, had moved up fast on the larboard. From the prow of the lead boat, gold returned the sunlight; byrnnie, helmet and gold-tinselled braided beard. Hakon.
Little had been heard from Hakon since they had left Kiev. He had communicated with Jarl Rognvald through a messenger, and his men were quietly disciplined on the water. Now, just when Haraldr was beginning to think that Hakon was simply another of his deviling dreams, here he was.
‘Jarl Rognvald, we must moor our ships up ahead!’ Hakon was commanding, not requesting. ‘The skeleton-copulators are sure to entertain us. I want them to know that we also have art-skills!’
Jarl Rognvald cocked a frosty eyebrow at Gleb.
The pilot nodded. ‘Fear is the Pecheneg’s sharpest blade. We need to show them that our steel is just as good.’
The Pechenegs had trampled a path to the river like a vast herd of giant lemmings; only a dozen or so trees at the water’s edge, stripped to mastlike shafts and curiously paired, rose above a river of human and horse heads thousands of ells wide and long enough to disappear over a hill far in the distance. The warriors had dismounted and stood in their own rough clothes as well as the plunder of a dozen other races: homespun robes with leather caps and jerkins, skin and fur tunics, spiked and conical helmets over glossy black hair, tattered Frisian cloth, byrnnies of chain mail and iron discs, even a cluster of Pecheneg potentates in silk robes and gleaming armlets. The makeshift horde erupted into a cataclysmic, shrilling, droning welcome.
Hakon’s ship drifted closer to shore. ‘Bring me the instruments on which I’ll play my ditty!’ hollered the gilded giant. Five dark little men, roped at hands and feet, were brought to the prow of the ship; the Varangians had captured some Pechenegs just outside Kiev and intended to sell them as slaves in Constantinople, if they did not find more expedient uses for them.