My woman called him Georgios and had him christened thus, I being in the field with the Emperor when he was born. For this I whipped her on my return, and called him Halvdan, a good name. When he grew up, he was known by both names. With her and others he conversed in the Greek tongue, which is the speech that women and priests use there, but with me he spoke our tongue, though the learning of it came more slowly to him. When he was seven years old, my woman ate a surfeit of mussels and died; and I took no other wife, for it is a bad thing to marry a foreign woman. The women of Miklagard are worth little. As soon as they marry, they become thoughtless and lazy, and childbearing ages them and makes them fat and insubordinate. When their husbands try to tame them, they run shrieking to their priests and bishops. They are not like our women, who are understanding and work diligently and whom childbearing makes wiser and more comely. This was the opinion of all of us Northmen who served in the bodyguard. Many of us changed our wives every year and still were not satisfied.
But my son was my joy. He was shapely and swift-footed, quick-tongued and merry. He was afraid of nothing, not even of me. He was such that women in the street turned to look at him when he was little, and turned more swiftly as he grew to manhood. This was his misfortune, but there was no help for it. He is dead now, but is seldom out of my thoughts. He and Bulgar gold are all I can think about. It could have become his, if all had gone well.
When my woman died, my son spent much time with her kinsfolk, wardrobe-master Symbatios and his wife. They were old and childless, for the wardrobe-master, as befitted one who worked in the royal women’s apartments, was a eunuch. He was married, though, as Byzantine eunuchs often are. He and his wife both loved Halvdan, though they called him Georgios, and when I was away with the Emperor they took care of him. One day I returned from the wars to find the old man weeping for joy. He told me that my son had become the Princesses’ playmate, especially Zoe’s, and that Zoe and he had already fought and proved equally strong, she being two years older than he. Although they had fought, she had said that she much preferred him as a playmate to the Metropolitan Leo’s niece, who fell on her knees and wept when anyone tore her clothes, or chamberlain Nikeforos’s son, who was harelipped. The Empress Helena herself, he said, had clapped the boy on the head and called him a little wolf cub and told him he must not pull Her Imperial Highness Zoe’s hair when she maltreated him. Gazing up at the Empress, the boy had asked her when he might pull it. At this the Empress had condescended to laugh aloud with her own mouth, which, the old man said, had been the happiest moment in his life.
These are childish things, but to remember them is one of the few joys that remain to me. In time things changed. I pass over many things, which would take too long to tell. But some five years later, when I was commanding a company of the bodyguard, Symbatios again came weeping to my chamber, but not this time for joy. He had that day gone to the innermost clothing chamber, where the coronation garments were kept, and which was seldom visited, to see if there were any rats there. Instead of rats, he had found Halvdan and Zoe playing a new kind of game together, a game the sight of which had terrified him exceedingly, on a bed they had made of coronation garments that they had dragged from their chests. As he stood there speechless, they had grabbed their clothes and disappeared, leaving the coronation robes, which were of purple-dyed silk from the land of the Seres,1 severely crumpled, so that he knew not what to do. He had pressed them as well as he was able, and had replaced them carefully in their chests. There could, he said, be only one fate for him if this business was discovered—namely, that he would lose his head. It was lucky that the Empress was sick abed, for all the courtiers were in her chamber and had no time to think of anything else, which was the reason the Princess was less carefully guarded than usual and had been able to find this opportunity to seduce my son. There could be no doubt, he said, that the blame was wholly hers; for nobody could suspect a boy still in his thirteenth year of harboring such ideas. But nothing could alter what had happened, and he held this to be the worst stroke of ill luck that had ever befallen him.
I laughed at his story, thinking the boy had behaved like a true son of mine, and tried to comfort the old man by telling him that Halvdan was too young to be able to present Princess Zoe with a little emperor, however hard they might have striven to do so; and that though the coronation robes might be crumpled, they could hardly have sustained any real damage. But the old man continued to weep and moan. He said all our lives were in danger—his, his wife’s, my son’s, and my own—for the Emperor Constantine would immediately order us to be killed if he ever learned of what had happened. Nobody, he added, could suppose that Zoe had been frightened at being discovered thus with Halvdan, for she was by now a full fifteen, and of a temper more akin to that of a burning devil than of a blushing virgin, so that it could not be doubted that she would shortly start afresh with Halvdan, he being the only person she was allowed to associate with who was not a woman or a eunuch. In time the scandal must inevitably be discovered, when Princess Zoe would receive an admonition from a bishop, and Halvdan and the rest of us would be killed.
As he spoke, I began to be afraid. I thought of all the people I had seen maimed and killed for offending the imperial humor during the years I had served in the bodyguard. We sent for my son and remonstrated with him for what he had done, but he said that he regretted nothing. It had not been the first time, he said, and he was no child who required seducing, but knew as much about love as Zoe. I realized that nothing now could keep them apart and that disaster would overtake us all if the affair was allowed to continue. So I shut him up in the wardrobe-master’s house and went to call on the chief officer of the bodyguard.
He was called Zacharias Lakenodrako, and bore the title of Chief Sword-bearer, which is an office much honored among the Byzantines. He was an old man, tall and venerable-looking, with red and green jewels on his fingers, a wise and skillful talker, but sly and malignant, like everybody who holds high office in Miklagard. I bowed humbly before him, said that I was unhappy in the bodyguard, and begged that I might spend the remaining years of my service on one of the Emperor’s warships. He considered this request and found it difficult to grant. At length he said he thought he might be able to arrange it if I did him a small service in return. It was his wish, he said, that the Archimandrite Sophron, who was the Emperor Constantine’s confessor, should receive a sound drubbing, for the latter was his worst enemy and had of late been talking evil of him to the Emperor behind his back. He wanted, he said, no bloodshed, so that I must use no edged or pointed weapons against the Archimandrite, but merely stout sticks, which would make his flesh smart. He said the deed would best be done beyond the palace gardens in the evening when he was riding home from the Emperor on his white mule.
I answered that I had long been a Christian, and that it would be a great sin for me to thrash a holy man. But he admonished me like a father, explaining that I was wrong in my supposition. “For the Archimandrite,” he said, “is a heretic, and confuses the two natures of Christ, which was the reason why we first became enemies. So it will be a pious action to thrash him. But he is a dangerous man, and you will be wise to take two men to help you. For before he became a monk he was chieftain of a band of robbers in Anatolia, and is still easily able to kill a man with a blow from his fist. Only strong men, such as serve in the bodyguard, will be able to give him the whipping he deserves. But I am sure your strength and wisdom will see the matter through. Take good sticks and strong men.”