‘I had an extraordinary conversation with our Emperor this morning. I am certain that madness is the will of Divine Providence, and is given us either to scourge us or to allow us to enter into a state where we can more closely know God. Yet I also think madness is sometimes passed in the blood, from generation to generation of the same family. The Emperor’s uncles were both mad, though in one case it was a demonic possession, while the other was a fury of true repentance. But this Emperor is quite the maddest of all. And the most adept at concealing his madness behind the masks of reason, intellect and dissimulation. Quite extraordinary. He has embraced the most profound heresies. Even the Bishop of Rome would consider our Emperor a heretic. The Emperor insisted in the Mother Church that Joseph might have attempted carnal congress with the Mother of God.’
‘But you did not awaken me in the middle of the night to tell me of this heresy, did you, Father?’
‘No, child. Today our Emperor revealed to me that the child born to your sister Eudocia on Porte was a daughter.’
Theodora leaned forward so abruptly that it seemed she was going to leap at Alexius. ‘He knows?’
Alexius smiled thinly. ‘I think he does. He pretended to know only the rumours of the birth. But he posited that the child was a daughter, and now you have confirmed it.’
Theodora flushed with anger and embarrassment; Alexius was maddeningly clever. ‘Perhaps he was only playing the same guessing game that you are, Father.’
‘Perhaps. We had better hope that he is. It is clear that he intends to marry the last Macedonian and bring forth his own dynasty, something his equally mad relatives were unable to do.’ Theodora was so pale, her face seemed tinted with blue. ‘Yes, my child, I think that you will soon have to shoulder your cross. And while I do not think it is time for your climb to Golgotha to begin, I think it is time that we prepare for your entry into Jerusalem.’
The dhromon of the Thematic Fleet of Sicily approached the harbour boom in the moonless night. The captain ordered the oars shipped, and the huge vessel drifted sideways and thudded against the log bumpers. The prisoner, chained and gagged, a black sack over his head, was loaded into a skiff along with an escort of six thematic marines. The small boat was lowered on the other side of the boom. With four of the marines at the oars, the skiff moved away towards Neorion Harbour. It came alongside a small dock just inside the boom; the dhromons of the Imperial Fleet were dark silhouettes off to the right of the little-used stone jetty. Four Khazar guards waiting on the quay communicated the correct password and hoisted the passive body up onto the dock. The prisoner, still attired in the now-fouled silk tunic of his rank, resisted briefly when the Khazar guards slipped a large leather bag over his entire body and carried him off on their shoulders. The four Khazars carried their package quickly through the streets that angled among the military warehouses of the Neorion district. Twice the escort was confronted, then passed along by sentries. The Khazars came around the back of Neorion Tower and halted before the black steel gates. Their pass was accepted and they moved their prisoner up the dank, reeking stairs to the interrogation rooms on the tenth level. The prisoner was tied face up on a wheel-like wooden rack, and the Khazar guards left the prisoner with the interrogators, two smooth-faced Pechenegs who worked-silently over their instruments at an adjacent table, honing blades and setting out leather straps.
The Emperor Michael arrived a quarter of an hour later. He wore the scaramangium, pallium and diadem of his rank. When the Pecheneg interrogators had finished their prostrations, the Emperor signalled for them to leave. The huge steel doors slid and clanked. The prisoner breathed in even, shallow wheezes. Michael walked round the wheel for a moment; as he did, he placed his hands in front of his chest and touched the tips of his fingers together again and again in light, rapid movements. He closed his eyes and became very still and his entire head and torso inclined forward very slowly, as if he were a wax sculptor’s model gradually slumping in a fierce heat. Then his eyes popped open and his dark irises struck out at the bloodstained floor, as if the shafts of pure malevolence they projected were all that prevented his collapse. He stared for a long moment, and then his hand shot out and jerked the sack from the prisoner’s head. The prisoner’s eyes blinked in the lamplight. ‘Father,’ whispered the Emperor. ‘It is time for you to repent.’
Stephan Kalaphates, recently recalled Droungarios of the theme of Sicily, was a small, paunchy man; his belly, distended over the rack, quivered like an aspic. He was tightly gagged, but his dark eyes, writhing head, and gurgling throat conveyed the terror, outrage and astonishment of his strangled words.
Michael prodded his father’s bound hand with trembling fingers. ‘Look, Father, your hands are still dirty.’ Stephan stopped writhing and merely glared at his son in mute fury. ‘I remember how you used to take me down to the shipyards, as if to see you smear pitch on the sides of boats was some great marvel, like watching the Emperor in procession. I hated the pitch. I could not get the stink of it off no matter how I washed. Those men and you stank of it. Those men and you showed me the stinking vat of hot pitch and said I would burn in it because I touched myself. And then you tarred it! You tarred it!’ Michael’s face was livid, and he grabbed his crotch violently. ‘Because I did that! For doing that! I do it all the time, Father, and God has not punished me. I touch it all the time, Father! I touch it in God’s presence. I place the Pantocrator’s hand on it!’ Michael leered over his father like a drunken man, and Stephan’s head jerked up and down, cracking against the hard wooden wheel. ‘Mother touched it too. Mother cleansed me. Mother still touches it. And I still touch her.’
Michael ran his hands down his stiff, jewel-studded pallium, his fingertips grazing the raised gems as if they were women’s nipples. ‘I am a splendid Emperor, am I not, Father? My people love me. They do not call me, as they do you, “the pygmy playing Heracles” or “the ass costumed as a Droungarios”. They call me their father. Their beloved father. The light of their world.’ Michael stared into the oil lamps on the grim stone wall behind the rack. He cocked his head once to each side. The Pantocrator and I are together inside a light. Do you know that we have talked about our fathers, not the Holy Spirit who begat us, but our worldly fathers. His father was a tradesman, a good carpenter who loved his son and never fouled His mother. I told Him how you had scourged and mocked me and what you had done to my mother, and He told me what I should do so that you might repent and be cleansed. So that you will no longer stink of pitch.’
The Emperor exhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Stephan’s head resumed its grotesque protest, pounding the wheel with sickening thuds and hideous, thwarted cries. ‘Shut up, Father!’ Michael blinked his eyes in furious concentration. He turned away from the struggling figure on the rack. ‘I know he isn’t the only unclean father,’ he said to someone else. ‘I know that the other father tried to trick me. He tried to get me to tell him our secret. He thought he was so clever. He doesn’t want me to have my new mother.’ Michael leaned his head back and issued a strange, barking laugh. ‘He tried to tell me that you lied to me! He tried to tell me that you are Satan!’ The strange laugh again. ‘He is Satan! They are all Satan! They don’t want me to have my new mother! They are all going to have to be cleansed!’
Michael smiled as he listened to the echoes in the chamber of death. When he could no longer hear them, he tapped on the door to signal the interrogators. The steel doors opened and the two Pechenegs entered. Michael nodded at them and they removed the appropriate instruments from the table, walked to the rack, and ripped Stephan’s robe from the hem to the chest, leaving his spasming legs and pulsing, flaccid abdomen fully exposed. ‘I am going to see mother,’ Michael said. ‘I am going to tell her that you will never foul her again.’ Michael turned and left the interrogation chamber before the Pecheneg eunuchs began the incision around his father’s scrotum.