‘The fault isn’t with your teaching, Jarl. You know that that has meant more than anything to me. But I have a battle-fetter that no skill of yours or mine has been able to remove. If I thought Odin could release me, then I would ask his help. But I know that the strength to break that bond has to come from within. The gods cannot answer every question in a man’s mind.’
Jarl Rognvald looked over the river for a long time. A feathery insect flew against his face and he brushed it away. Finally he spoke. ‘Haraldr, I have been a warrior all my life, and that is most of what I know of life. I am not a poet like you, and I can only tell you what I know.’ The Jarl paused and examined his hands. ‘I have been to the spirit world. Believe me. It is an inner landscape inhabited by anything the imagination can provide, and yet it is no less real for that. Each man conjures his own inner beauty, his own hidden demons, and the gods only guide him to them. Men think that when possessed by the Rage, a man becomes a beast. That is wrong. The Berserk, in fact, is a beast-slayer. He enters the spirit world and confronts the demon-beast that has held his soul captive. That beast is his fear, and when he has faced it or even slain it, when he has put his faith in his own force, his own will, then all things are possible – even miracles of the sort that are ascribed to the gods.’
Haraldr knew then that he and the Jarl had looked out on the same desolate landscape of mind and memory, and that his own spirit-journey over that strange and terrible terrain could no longer be postponed. ‘Yes. I know that a beast waits for me there, a fear as terrible as the world-devouring dragon itself. And when I awaken in the middle of the night, I am certain that if I ever face it, I will die.’
‘You are ready to face it. Even the last dragon itself. You are a poet and a warrior. You showed that the other night in the Podol. And you have learned, far earlier than most men, how bitter is the outer world when a man seals off his inner world, thinking that the demons he never confronted will no longer trouble him. You know that that is no life to be clung to, not at the cost of a pure and honest soul.’
The Jarl turned away from Haraldr and faced north, thinking of the cool emerald and azure summer in a land he would never see again. ‘Haraldr, even when you were a boy, I knew you had a mind that someday no man, perhaps even no god, could ever command. I choose to believe that Odin will guide you to your beast and help you confront it, but your own will is equally capable of leading you through the spirit world. Chosen by Odin, chosen by your own will, what does it matter? I only know that you are ready to stand before the dragon.’
Jarl Rognvald said nothing more. He left Haraldr to his thoughts and the death-dark, murmuring Dnieper.
Maria, Mistress of the Robes, fanned the eunuch away; her milky hand moved like a ghost through the thick steam. Despite her utilitarian-sounding title, she was the second ranking lady at court; only the Empress Zoe and the Augusta Theodora, who no longer resided in the palace precincts, were accorded more prestige. Maria studied a rivulet of perspiration as it descended from her cleavage to her navel. She pressed her finger into her navel and drew a liquid line to her glossy black pubic triangle. She pulled her legs up and thrust her arms between them, a curiously simian posture for a disturbingly beautiful woman. Her blue eyes were like tiny, miraculously illuminated grottoes in the heated mist. ‘Your husband’s brother has sent Irene away, she said languidly. Her voice chimed against the marble walls of the bath.
The Empress Zoe towelled her moisture-beaded breasts. ‘We are already surrounded by spies.’ She sounded drowsy. ‘And our companions are no doubt happier elsewhere. But I will miss Irene. Remind me to have Symeon send her something.’
Maria turned to the Empress, who sat next to her on the marble bench; their shoulders touched lightly. She decided not to ask the question she had considered; Zoe would speak of it when she wished. But it had been two weeks now since the Emperor had spent the night in his wife’s bedchamber. ‘Ata came to see me yesterday,’ said Maria. ‘He advises that I have neglected the amorous component of my nature.’
Zoe’s eyes opened; they had a lovely amethyst cast. ‘Ata? Oh, yes, the palmist who came to us out of the Orient, in the company of that rather charming yet woefully disenfranchised emir.’ She paused to recall the name. ‘Salah. We haven’t seen much of Emir Salah since my husband’s brother extended the generosity of our treasury. I believe he has taken his pension and has bought some estates near Nicaea. I presume this Ata still finds our court rewarding. Darling, wasn’t the Emir one of your . . . amusements?’
‘I will never allow a dark-skinned creature to crawl into my bed again. He wanted to impale me from behind like one of his goats, and when I insisted otherwise, he was finished before I could draw three breaths. He then remarked that his wives were more submissive. I told him that if he was at all representative of his race, the appropriate custom would be to have one wife for twenty emirs, instead of the other way around. I could not understand what he said next. I arranged to have him ejected from my chambers as quickly as he had spewed his dubious manhood into me. The next time I saw him, I spat in his face and told him I now presumed to have given him as much pleasure as he had given me.’
‘Little daughter! You know I worry when you are so … vehement.’ The Empress spoke gaily, but her eyes winced, showing fine wrinkles at the corners.
‘My next lover will be entirely Western in concept. Golden skin and hair. There are some Athenian types in the Scholae who so closely resemble the ancient statues that one wonders if they were hewn from stone.’ The Scholae was the elite Imperial household cavalry.
Zoe’s eyes had forgotten the moment of melancholy; her vividly red lips curled salaciously. ‘Darling, I can only assume that you have already been . . . reconnoitring. Can I also assume that my use of military terminology is rather apt? I have heard that you were a spectator at the pentathlon last week. I was intrigued at your sudden interest in athletic contests, until I learned that this was an intramural event for officers of the Scholae. All those oiled young gallants, and all of them lodged here in the palace precincts.’
‘I have found the perfect pair. Hermes and Apollo, I call them. They are beautiful, as vain as Narcissus, and insufferably arrogant. They are also inseparable, though whether it is a friendship in the style of the ancient Greeks whom they so closely resemble, I am as yet uncertain. Of course, I intend to separate them. I am dining with them both tonight.’
‘Little daughter! You are scandalous. But so deliciously . . . inventive. How I envy your freedom. Not from convention; may the Holy Theotokos forgive me, I have never been constrained by that. But to be able to make love and yet be untrammelled by love. How I envy you that.’
‘Aeifor!’ yelled Gleb. ‘The pelican roost. The fourth cataract. The most deadly.’ But the noise of Aeifor was not that of any water. It was that of a living thing, a monstrous, baleful groan, as if some titanic beast had been stirred from sleep. As the sound rose, the Rus oarsmen looked anxiously at one another. In one morning they had already passed through a lifetime of terror. The walls of giant-set stones across the river; the sucking, dizzying, mortally cold eddies; ships disappearing behind the foaming veils; and timbers showering up over the great rocks as ships exploded. The hideous flotsam, shattered strakes, cargo pods, and the limp, seemingly boneless pulp that even now chased them down the death-strewn Dnieper like shrieking ghosts. Perhaps a hundred ships and their crews had been lost already. What lay ahead?
Aeifor first appeared as a white haze over the river. A few herons and pelicans emerged like snowflakes from the mist and flew overhead in greeting. Within minutes the current began a rapid acceleration, and then huge, jagged rocks loomed towards the starboard. The pelicans swarmed. Clouds of spray boiled into the air. Between two massive, cathedral-like rock upthrusts was a vast, swirling maw.