Joannes’s eyes seemed to retreat to the black depths of his skull. ‘I believe you have just refused my offer, Hetairarch,’ he said with an ominous rumble. ‘I hope you will reconsider. I would hate to see a life of real account to Rome sacrificed for the sake of two who have merely plundered what others have built.’ Joannes signalled for the eunuch hovering near the entrance to the loggia to show Haraldr out. ‘Goodbye, Hetairarch Haraldr,’ said Joannes. ‘Remember this in parting: my course against the Emperor, the Emperor whom I myself have created, and whom I have the power to recast in whatever mould I choose, is irrevocable. But this failure to concur over a price seals nothing between you and myself. I will gladly offer you time and opportunity to renegotiate. Perhaps I can offer you some flexibility concerning the first and last matters you mentioned. As I said, you are a man of great account to the glory of Rome.’
Haraldr bowed. ‘And I will consider at greater length the matter of price. But remember this, Orphanotrophus. Unlike our Emperor, I am not your creation.’
‘Black. It was as if the veil were a dark pane over my eyes, as if the blackness of my robes had fouled the entire world.’ Zoe laughed bitterly. ‘I actually thought that one day I would remove my black to enter my bath and find that my skin had taken the colour. Like a Libyan.’ She pressed her hands to her cheeks as if her touch could ascertain that her skin was still its delicate porcelain white; her blond hair, shorn in mourning, had grown long enough to be braided and brought in little rows across her head. ‘I hated the colour because it could never display my grief. It was a parasite, enjoying the moment of my tragedy without feeling anything in return. If I were to wear black again, it would make my skin crawl.’
‘There is nothing dark about the vision I see now, Mother.’ The Emperor Michael did not have to invent his flattery. Remarkable, he thought. Like a flower with the ability to shrivel and die and yet return even more brilliant and succulent the next spring. He looked at her flawless skin – perhaps there were a few more fine wrinkles about the eyes, but the spring-blue irises with their gorgeous amethyst flare were as beguiling as ever – and examined the voluptuous silhouette of her simple purple-and-gold scaramangium. The dried leaf was gone. The flower had bloomed again, and desire was the fragrance about it.
Zoe held out her shapely arms and beckoned Michael to sit on the couch beside her. She curled her knees up around him and stroked his hair. "Did you miss your mother’s caresses?’
Michael burst into tears and cried for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Zoe held him and waited until his paroxysm had subsided to whimpering sniffles. She kissed his temple and said, ‘I am certain you didn’t miss your mother that much, my little boy. What has that man done to you?’
Michael gave Zoe the particulars, punctuated with deep sobs, of Joannes’s new protege. ‘Uncle Constantine … the Nobilissimus, I mean, says we must challenge Joannes now. . . . I am utterly rigid with fright . . .Mother.’
‘What is the Nobilissimus’s plan?’ asked Zoe, her voice calm and her eyes as placid as a pond. She no longer feared death. She only feared black next to her skin.
‘He intends to provoke him to treason. I … I think it is quite a dangerous game.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said Zoe. ‘Your uncle the Nobilissimus is a very shrewd man, and his tactic here is quite astute. He simply encourages Joannes to manifest the very intentions that Joannes is bent on to begin with. Clever.’
‘But . . . Mother, what if he is encouraged … too much?
Joannes could have me struck down at any moment. He might . . . do it himself.’
‘He will not as long as the Hetairarch is attendant upon you.’
Michael sniffled deeply. ‘Do you think the Hetairarch is that . . . loyal? He and Joannes have come to some sort of understanding, due to all the work Joannes has done in the Studion.’
‘He has no love for Joannes. Do not presume that his loyalty is limitless, but you can be absolutely certain that he will intercept any attack made on you in his presence. It is a Tauro-Scythian thing about honour. I should think you would already have enough evidence of his reckless devotion to the purple.’
‘You are right, of course. Securely placed between the Hetairarch and the Nobilissimus, I have nothing to fear.’
‘And your mother will always be here as well.’ Zoe pressed her thighs more tightly against Michael. ‘Now, can we imagine just for tonight that you are a big enough boy to be your mother’s husband?’ Zoe’s hand slid across the lap of Michael’s purple scaramangium, her slender white fingers marching across the gold-thread Imperial Eagles. When her fingers had completed their reconnaissance, Zoe put blood-red lips to Michael’s neck. ‘Yes,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘I can see that you have become quite a big boy.’
The Monastery of Kauleas was one of the largest of scores of such establishments in Constantinople. The entire complex took up two city blocks. Four multistorey wings contained monks’ cells, storerooms, refectory, infirmary, kitchens, library and bath; these enclosed a large central court, in the middle of which was a substantial pale red-brick church topped with several large domes. This palace of worldly denial had been built a century and half earlier, during a period of fervent religious construction, commissioned by a Dhynatoi family as their private spiritual retreat. The original owners had been forced to sell the monastery more than a century ago, shortly after a great famine (not because their finances had suffered due to the poor harvest but because they had soon thereafter proved incapable of managing the vastly expanded estates they had patched together by buying up, for next to nothing, the freeholds of starving peasant farmers). The purchasers were another Dhynatoi family, and they maintained the establishment in great splendour for decades. But a succession of increasingly dissolute scions had neglected and gradually plundered the establishment, selling off the marble revetments and ivory-bound books and gold fixtures, and allowing the population of monks, which had once numbered in the hundreds, to dwindle to less than a dozen. The family had finally given up the property three years ago; the typicon had been signed over in the Neorion as a penitential act. The current owner was the Orphanotrophus Joannes. In three years Joannes had neither visited the establishment nor allowed anyone else to enter its gates, except to have the remaining monks cleared out and new locks installed on all the doors.
But this evening the venerable Monastery of Kauleas once again teemed with activity. More than a hundred armoured Thracian guardsmen bustled about in the weed-choked courtyard, assembling the new brotherhood in orderly rows just in front of an arcaded, three-storey wing of monks’ cells. The new brotherhood numbered in the hundreds. They wore the dyed linen or wool tunics of the city’s small merchants and tradesmen, and indeed they were: grocers, butchers, shoemakers, fish sellers, silk weavers, soap makers, curds vendors, pepper grinders, silversmiths. All of them responsible guilds-men whose greatest indulgences were several glasses of wine one night a week in their local tavern, and attendance whenever possible at the races in the Hippodrome; they were family men who ordinarily would not be expected to abandon their wives and children for a life of contemplation.
But something was wrong with this group. Most of the brothers’ tunics were spotted with blood, and some of them were torn. All of the brothers kept their feet precisely together and held their hands rigidly behind their backs, but often their knees swayed and their heads lolled, and they would not straighten up until the Thracian guardsmen prodded them with their spears. The brothers’ faces seemed like hideous painted masks, with huge, bruised eyes. On closer inspection, none of them had noses. Only freshly carved slits crusted with dried black blood.
The rows were finally assembled. The one man present who wore actual monastic garb stood in front of these new brothers, his novitiates. Strangely enough, Joannes’s deeply socketed eyes, glimmering with reflected torchlight, were the only distinct features of his huge, shadowed face. Joannes studied his unfortunate novitiates for some time before he addressed them.