The Mosaic of Shadows

About the Author

Tom Harper is the author of The Mosaic of Shadows, Knights of the Cross and Siege of Heaven. He studied medieval history at Oxford University and now lives in York.

Visit Tom Harper at www.tom-harper.co.uk

for Marianna

muse

Acknowledgements

Two noble historians, a princess and a knight, were indispensable companions in this project. Anna Comnena’s Alexiad and Sir Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades (both published by Penguin) provided the historical core of the story, and there were few days when I did not refer to one or both of them. Both works were as enjoyable as they were rigorous, and in the general chronology of events, particularly the battles in Holy Week, I have followed their leads as closely as possible.

As with Alexios Komnenos and his empire, a wise marriage and supportive family were invaluable in realising my ambitions. My Greek parents-in-law offered hospitality and valuable feedback on the draft manuscript, while my mother was always on call for scriptural or religious references. My sister Iona accompanied me on my inter-continental research trip, and was frequently summoned out of libraries to provide a classical anecdote or Greek translation. As for my wife Marianna, from the moment she provided the original idea she has had an immeasurable influence as fan, critic, proof-reader and muse.

Out of the family fold, Jane Conway-Gordon encouraged this at an early stage, and proved that the Byzantines have nothing to teach her about the shadowy arts of agenting. Oliver Johnson at Century was a generous and convivial editor, as well as doing duty as a relocation consultant. The vast resources of the Bodleian library in Oxford unfailingly turned up the most obscure works which my meandering researches demanded; I could not have written the book without them. Many friends in Oxford and London provided much-needed relief from the work, and in the process probably learned far more about eunuchs than they ever wanted.

For a thousand years after the fall of the West, the empire of Byzantium, centred on the great city of Constantinople, perpetuated the living, unbroken legacy of the Roman empire. It reached the peak of its latter-day power in 1025 under the Emperor Basil II, but a dozen weak and corrupt successors squandered his accomplishments until the very existence of the empire was under threat. In these circumstances, a dynamic, young leader named Alexios Komnenos rose to the imperial throne from a cabal of the powerful military families, and through hard-fought campaigns and cunning diplomacy managed to reassert the strength and glory of Byzantium. But he was not unopposed: Turks, Normans, Bulgarians, Germans and Venetians constantly pressed at his borders, while contenders from within his own and rival families schemed recklessly to usurp his throne. With the Turks in particular advancing ever further into the hinterland of Asia Minor, Alexios was forced to beg the estranged Pope in Rome to provide soldiers to buttress the faltering Byzantine armies. Much to his surprise, and subsequent alarm, he got them: the Pope preached the first crusade, and tens of thousands of western knights mobilised to descend on Byzantium.

The language of Byzantium was Greek, but through all its history its citizens referred to themselves as Romans. Any peoples beyond the empire’s borders were considered barbarians.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

C P Cavafy

tr. Keeley and Sherrard

α

It was evening when the axe-wielding barbarians arrived at my door. The sun was sinking behind the western ramparts, casting the sky and all below it in copper. In the windless air the canopies and awnings of the queen of cities were still as the myriad towers and domes above them, yet by only inclining an ear you would have met the gentle, sustained notes of the chants which swelled out from the hundred surrounding churches. All day the tide of humanity had run high in the streets, the denizens of Byzantium gathering to mark the feast of Saint Nikolas and to watch the Emperor process through their midst; now that tide was slowly ebbing, slipping back into the arcades and tenements from whence it had come. I sat on my roof and watched them go, sipping a welcome cup of wine after the week of fasting.

Zoe, the younger of my daughters, announced the barbarians. From the corner of my eye I saw her face emerge from the opening at the top of the ladder, concern and puzzlement creasing the smooth skin below her piled ringlets.

‘There are men to see you,’ she said breathlessly, still standing on the ladder. She paused, reconsidered. ‘Giants. Titans. Three of them, with enormous axes – and one like Prometheus, with a beard of fire.’

My daughter has always been given to poetry, though I notice it more often now.

‘Will they fit through the door?’ I asked. ‘Or should I mount my winged steed and fly up to look them in the eye?’

Zoe pondered this. ‘They can come through the door,’ she allowed.

‘And through that opening you’re standing in?’

‘Perhaps. But they might break the ladder,’ she added. ‘Then you’d be stranded up here.’

‘Then they can buy me a new one.’

Zoe’s pouting face vanished, and a riotous noise erupted from the room below. Perhaps she did not exaggerate, for I could hear an almighty stamping, the tread of men who wield their feet like hammers and would flatten even the seven hills given half a day’s march. The ladder trembled, and I could imagine the rungs bending like fresh boughs under the burden of that weight. I waited for the wrench of splintered wood and tumbled watchmen, but my ladder – solid, Bithynian oak – held fast, bore them up out of the darkness and into the fresh, evening air on my roof.

There were three of them, as Zoe had said, and as she had said they were giants. All wore long coats of mail hanging to their knees, girded with broad leather belts and hung with heavy, iron maces. On their shoulders they carried great twin-headed axes, which not even the perilous ascent of the ladder had unseated. Even without the insignia of their legion, a blue square of fur-trimmed cloth fastened below their necks, they were unmistakable. Varangians, elite guardsmen of the palace and protectors of the Emperor. Though I rose slowly to greet them, the wine in the cup I held was suddenly much agitated.

‘You are Demetrios Askiates, the revealer of mysteries?’

The nearest of the three giants spoke. Like his companions, he was fair-skinned, though our sun had ravaged his complexion everywhere save by the rim of his collar, where it was still the shade of milk. His hair was the colour of fire, such as nature never bestowed upon our people; a mane hanging over his ox-like shoulders. He was, in short, a perfect specimen of that race which inhabits the frozen island of Thule – Britannia, as our ancestors called it when they held sway there – though he was long since departed, I thought, judging by the confident edge to his Greek.

I nodded an answer to his question, feeling the absurdity of my self-styled epithet before this brutal, unadorned power. The Varangian, I thought, would not unveil a mystery: he would crush it to powder with his mace, or slice through it with a stroke of his axe like Alexander at Gordion. What, I wondered nervously, would he do with me?

‘You are called to the palace,’ he said. Where his left hand played along the haft of his axe, I noticed a string of notches in the dark wood, unbroken almost from butt to blade. Were those the number of his victims?

I nodded a second time, and then – in my confusion – involuntarily twice more. ‘Why?’

‘That,’ said the Varangian heavily, ‘will be revealed when you’re there.’ Under the thick beard, I thought I saw his mouth twitch.

There was still light in the sky as we came outside, but already the shopkeepers’ tables were drawn indoors, and the crowds of the day reduced to a scattering of hurried figures. Few would care to be caught abroad after dark, when the Watch came out. And fewer still would want to be found near the phalanx of guardsmen – a dozen more – who were, to my shock, drawn up in the street outside my house. That would do little for my reputation among doubtful neighbours, I thought ruefully. No wonder there were no children playing games in the road, no fruit-sellers and sweet-merchants hawking their wares.

It was some half hour’s walk to the palace, but with a company of armed Norsemen at my back, and their red-headed captain silent before me, it felt ten times longer. Mingled glances of pity and suspicion fixed upon me from the passers-by: he did not wear chains, they observed, but nor did he dress as one who warranted such a retinue. Everywhere we walked the day was fading, with only lingering scents to tell what had passed: the stench of tanners and dyers, the warm homeliness of the bakers, the blood of the butchers and – as we at last reached the head of the avenue – the thick sweetness of the perfume-sellers.

The marbled arcades of the Augusteion were ahead of us now, with the palace gate beyond it and the vast dome of the great church on our left. The questions which clawed at my mind had reached a ringing intensity, yet were suddenly thrown into still greater confusion as the captain turned abruptly to his right, away from the palace and down a long street whose wall, I could see, was formed by the vast rim of the hippodrome. A greaved forearm against my shoulder steered me helplessly down into the darkness after him.

‘The palace is that way,’ I called, extending my already harried strides.

‘The palace,’ retorted the captain over his shoulder, ‘has many gates, and not all of them serve for everyone. The fishmongers, for example – they keep to their own gate. To keep out the stink,’ he added pointedly.

The walls now above us were pocked with arches and embellished with all manner of pagan and holy statues, extending far out of sight in every direction. We came under them and passed through an iron gate, a lesser entrance left curiously unlocked. For a moment we were in darkness, giddied by the echoing slap of our feet on the stone; then the purple sky opened above us and I felt warm sand trickling through the straps of my sandals. We were in the arena, on the racetrack still chewed and furrowed from the day’s activity. It was empty, but the silence of a hundred thousand absent spectators only served to press the vastness upon me further, while before us a host of shafts and columns bristled from the central spine like a sheaf of spears.

‘Come,’ said the captain, his words muted in the oppressive expanse. He led me across the track, our feet crunching in the yielding sand, and up a narrow staircase cut through the spine. Now we were directly below the thrusting monuments, as if between the fingers of a giant hand, and for a single ludicrous second I imagined the hand closing around us in a stone fist. It was a ridiculous vision, but I could not keep from shivering.

My escorts, stout though they were, showed no more inclination than I to delay there. More steps brought us back down onto the arena floor, now on the far side of the stadium; we walked some way along the track, across to the opposite wall, and up another flight of stairs between the ranks of empty benches. These stairs led onto a terrace; the terrace, in turn onto more stairs which doubled back on themselves so often I felt dizzied. The sky was all but invisible now, only a shade removed from complete darkness, and already one horn of the crescent moon was pricking up behind the walls, but the soldiers’ pace was unflagging. It was with much tripping and stumbling that I mounted the last few steps to emerge, breathless and disoriented, onto a broad balcony high above the race track.

‘Welcome to the Kathisma,’ said the Varangian captain, and though my lungs faltered from the climb I somehow found the air for a heartfelt gasp. True, I had been told I was going to the palace, but I had expected a side-door and a clerk’s desk in one of the public courtyards; not this, not the Kathisma. This was the imperial loge itself, the dais where the Emperor paraded his untouchable majesty to the world – his world – and received its acclamation. I myself had seen him here a hundred times, though only from great distances.

One of the guards drew flame from an alcove and touched it to the lamps which hung from the ceiling. Fire sparked in the glass, and was in an instant echoed back a thousand-fold: off the golden chains which held the lamps; off the golden mosaics set between every archway; and off the golden throne which stood, empty, in the middle of the room. Suddenly I was surrounded by a great host: the flickering silhouettes of a hundred kings and heroes leaped out of their gilded background, while from above the great charioteers of old seemed to be driving their horses hard down upon me, as if coming for Elijah.

‘You are Demetrios, the unveiler of mysteries? The illuminator of shadows? The master of the apocalypse?’

The voice which called me was mellow, like honey, but at its first words I cowered like a kitten, for it seemed it came from the walls themselves. There was neither menace nor malice in its tone, but it was with a trembling heart that I turned my gaze upon its source – and for a moment feared that indeed the wall had come alive, for I saw instantly a figure moving forward out of the golden shadows. Only as he came into the light could I see the substance of him: the sumptuous robes stitched with the gems and insignia of high office, the round head, the beardless face as smooth as a girl’s. His eyes were very bright, glistening in the lamplight like the oil in his dark hair as he stared intently upon me.

‘I am Demetrios,’ I stammered at last.

‘I am Krysaphios,’ he replied elegantly. ‘Chamberlain to his serene majesty the Emperor Alexios.’

I nodded slowly, saying nothing. The ritual with which I usually greet my clients would have seemed pathetic in this august place, and there was something in the eunuch’s eye which proclaimed that he already had the measure of me.

‘You unravel the riddles which perplex other men, I am told,’ he said. ‘You reveal what was hidden, and give light to the truth.’

‘The Lord has blessed some of my efforts.’ I answered with more humility than I might normally have felt in those efforts.

‘You found the Eparch’s daughter, when her family had already arranged her funeral,’ prompted the eunuch. ‘That was well done. I have need of such talents.’

He had been holding his hands clasped behind his back; now he extended a fat palm towards me. The skin was fleshy and soft, but there was no softness in what it held, in what he offered me. At last I began to see why he might have brought me here, why my unorthodox skills might be necessary to him. There was much of which I remained wholly ignorant, I knew, but if the matter involved the palace, and commanded so urgent a secrecy, then it must touch on the highest possible authorities. And possibly, I thought absently, the richest possible fees.

The item which Krysaphios held was about as long as the span of a man’s hand, as thick as his finger, and formed from a wooden shaft with an iron tip, which had first been hammered into a crude block and then filed into a fearsomely sharp triangular point. This point, and a good half of the protruding shaft, were encrusted with a wine-coloured stain that should, sadly, have been far less familiar to me than in fact it was. The frayed remnants of what might have been feathers were set around the blunt end.

‘An arrow?’ I guessed, holding it cautiously between my fingers. Despite its size it was unexpectedly heavy. ‘But it seems too short for such a purpose – it would have fallen off the bow well before it was tensed.’ I thought furiously, aware of the eunuch watching me. ‘From a siege engine, a ballista, you could fire it, perhaps, but that would be like harnessing a plough to a dog.’ I became aware that I was speculating too much aloud, and too much from ignorance, neither good professional practice. ‘However – it is a weapon, I deduce, or at least a tool which has been used as such.’ The dried blood told me that much – and more. ‘Recently, I should say.’

Krysaphios sighed, and for the first time I saw lines of tension beneath his marble skin.

‘It was shot,’ he said, ‘like an arrow but with immense power – how we do not know – at a guardsman today. Such was its force that it passed through his armour and deep into his ribs. He died almost immediately.’

‘Extraordinary.’ For a moment I grappled dumbly with his words – they seemed nonsensical. Or perhaps it was my exposition of the weapon which had been nonsense. In the interim, while I struggled, I reached for the well-worn safety of aphorism.

‘What a tragedy for the soldier,’ I mumbled. ‘And for his desolated family. My prayers . . .’

‘Your prayers can wait for the church,’ snapped the eunuch. ‘The soldier is an irrelevance. What is significant,’ he added, pressing his plump fingers together, ‘is that when he died he was standing, in a public street, as close as I am now to you, beside his master. The Emperor.’

I had been wrong again, I chided myself. The fees for this commission would not be rich – they would be truly beyond all imagining. If, of course, I could earn them.

I began tentatively. ‘You want me to find out who attempted the assassination of the Emperor?’ The words sounded no less ridiculous in my mouth than they had in my head, but I saw the eunuch nodding nonetheless. ‘Someone has tried to kill him, and I am to catch that man?’

‘Do you think yourself equal to the task?’ asked Krysaphios dryly. ‘Or have I called the wrong man from his drinking? The Eparch assured me I had not – though I naturally did not tell him the entire truth of your commission.’

‘I can meet the challenge,’ I said, with a confidence that I would regret the next morning. ‘But at what cost?’

‘Your fee, Askiates? I believe we can meet it.’ The eunuch wore the graceless smirk of one who can be deliberately careless of money. ‘Double, even. Two gold pieces a day should afford your time.’

‘It was not the cost to you that concerned me,’ I snapped, irritated by his easy confidence that I could be bought so easily. ‘Though I could hardly do this for less than five gold pieces a day. What of the danger to me? I doubt this was the work of a tradesman with a grievance, a candlemaker who thought his taxes too onerous or a grocer whose balance was found crooked.’

‘Are those your natural quarry?’ jeered Krysaphios. The flickering gold panels behind him seemed to burn colder. ‘Tradesmen who steal a coin or two when their customers are too dull to notice? If you wish to keep their company, Askiates, I can have the Varangians return you there now. Rather than winning glory and the gratitude of an Emperor.’

‘The gratitude of an Emperor counts for little when he’s dead. And the hatred of his enemies a great deal.’

‘If you do your job properly the Emperor will not be dead. And if he does die, the hatred of his enemies will be the very least of your concerns. Have fifteen years dulled your memory so much? The fires? The looted churches? The screaming women debauched in the streets?’

I was nineteen years old when the last Emperor fell, with a young wife and a newborn daughter in my house; I had not forgotten it. Nor that the usurper of those days, whose entry to the city had supplied the pretext for the rapine frenzy that followed, was now my prospective employer, his holy majesty the Emperor Alexios. My eyes hardened at the thought, but the caution I met in Krysaphios’ gaze kept me silent.

‘Some things have been done which should not have been done,’ he said, as if reciting his confession. ‘And others which ought to have been done differently. But we have had fifteen years of peace since those dark days, and for that we should be thankful. We can build towers and walls beyond number in this city, put ten thousand men on her ramparts, but there will only ever be a single life which stands between peace and ruin. Surely that, for a man with two maiden daughters especially, is worth preserving.’

I could have struck him for drawing my daughters so casually into his web of persuasion, this half-man so haughty one moment and so devious the next, but with Varangians about me and nothing to gain by violence, I kept my fists at my side. Besides, he spoke the truth. I inclined my head in surrender, though hating myself for doing so.

Krysaphios gave a wolfish smile; evidently he relished even this trivial victory. ‘In that case, Master Askiates,’ he said conclusively, ‘you had better make sure the Emperor stays alive. For three gold pieces a day.’

If I was to lay myself hostage to the fortunes of a doomed Emperor and an unscrupulous eunuch, I consoled myself that at least I had secured favourable terms.

β

Krysaphios had been keen for me to begin by questioning the imperial household, the men most likely to profit from the Emperor’s death, but I insisted on first visiting the site of the act. Thus, next morning, a chill dawn found me outside the house of Simeon the carver, overlooking the arcades of the Mesi near the forum of Saint Constantine. Many of the ivory carvers had their shops here, with the emblem of the crossed horn and knife hanging from their arches; the house of Simeon, I guessed, was the one with the shuttered windows, the locked gate, and the two Varangians standing at the door, helmed and armed. The neighbours setting out their wares, I noticed, were careful to ignore them.

I crossed to the far side of the road and crouched low over the marble paving, scanning its grey-veined surface for signs of the murder. I had heard rain in the night as I lay sleepless in my bed, but I held out hope that blood would not wash away so easily. The stone was cold against my bare knee, and there were plenty of feet to tread heedlessly on my fingers as the morning crowds flowed around me, but I kept my eyes close to the ground until I found what I was looking for, a faded patch of pink stained into the white marble. Was this where a loyal guard had unwittingly given his life for his Emperor, I wondered, or merely the residue a hasty dyer had dripped onto the street?

‘This is where he fell. I was standing behind him when he was hit.’

I looked up, to see the creased, blue eyes of a Varangian peering down on me. The axe on his shoulder gleamed like a halo beside his face, though the skin was too coarse and lined to be that of a saint. His straw-coloured hair was streaked with grey, and although he stood as tall as any of his race, he seemed old for a guardsman.

I scrambled to my feet. ‘Demetrios Askiates,’ I introduced myself.

‘Aelric,’ he answered, holding out his spear-hand in greeting. I took it gingerly, and felt thick fingers clasp tightly around my wrist. ‘The captain’s waiting for you in the house.’

‘But this is where the soldier fell?’ A nod. ‘Was it sudden?’

‘Like lightning. All I saw was him on the ground, stuck in the side like a boar and bleeding his life out. In no more time than you’d need to blink. And straight through his armour, too,’ he added in wonder. ‘Like it was made of silk.’

‘His right side or his left?’

The guard turned to face up the street, clearly mimicking the last steps of his dead companion, and thoughtfully lifted a hand to his right breast. ‘This one,’ he said slowly. ‘The side where the Emperor rode.’

‘So the arrow must have been fired from high up, or it would never have passed over the Emperor on his horse, and from across the street – from the carver’s house.’

‘Where the captain’s waiting for you,’ prodded the guard, the merest hint of impatience edging his voice.

‘Stand here, then. I want to see what the assassin saw.’ I walked slowly back across the road and up the steps between the columns, to the barred gate on the carver’s door. Little light fell within, but I could see the scaly gleam of ringed armour not far back.

‘Demetrios Askiates,’ I called, putting my face up to the bars. The carver would have mounted them to protect his home and his goods; now, I suspected, they were become his prison.

‘I know who you are, Demetrios Askiates,’ said a gruff voice from inside. He stepped into the slatted light by the door, the red-headed Varangian captain of the previous night, and I saw his vast fist turning a key in the lock. The door swung inwards, opening onto a dim room filled with every manner of trinkets, reliquaries, mirrors, and caskets. Rich men and women would pay handsomely to own one of them, but in the present circumstances they put me more in mind of a tomb, a crypt, than of conspicuous luxury.

‘The bone scratcher’s upstairs,’ said the captain. ‘Lives over his workshop.’ He jerked a thumb up at the ceiling. ‘We’ve got two apprentices up there too. And his family.’

Had they been kept captive all night, I wondered, as I climbed the steep steps in the corner. I came onto the first floor, another large room covered in white shavings as fine and deep as snow. Long tables stood in the centre, still strewn with abandoned tools and half-finished artefacts, while tall windows looked out over the sloping tiles of the arcade’s roof. Beyond it, I could just see the top of a helmet: Aelric the Varangian, standing where I had left him.

‘The arrow wasn’t fired from here,’ I said, to myself as much as to the captain who had thudded up behind me.

We mounted to the next level. Here woollen curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into private spaces; I brushed through them, to the front of the building where more windows – shorter, now – again looked down onto the street. We were at some height, but still there was only a narrow gap between the edge of the arcade and the dome of Aelric’s helmet. I beckoned the captain to come and stand beside me.

‘Were you there when he was killed?’ I asked, naturally slowing my speech for the benefit of his foreign ears.

‘I was.’

‘And could you see – was he standing directly beside the Emperor’s horse?’

‘He was.’

‘And do you think,’ I persisted, ‘that an arrow could be fired from here and pass over something the height of a horse – and maybe its rider too – yet still strike a man standing in the horse’s shadow?’

The captain frowned as he stared out of the window. ‘Maybe not,’ he grunted. ‘But then I don’t know any arrow that would go through a coat of mail, whether a horse was in its path or otherwise. Ask the carver.’

‘I will,’ I said, more abruptly than was wise to this axe-bearing giant. ‘But first I want to examine the roof.’

‘The carver and his apprentices were on the steps outside when we found them,’ countered the captain. ‘None of them would have had time to get down from the roof so soon.’

‘Then maybe they weren’t responsible.’ I pushed through another curtain, into a back room where there stood a table and some stools, with a ladder leading to a trap door in the ceiling. Climbing swiftly, I shot back the bolt which held it fast and emerged, shivering, onto the roof. Broken only by low balustrades, it stretched to my left and right, joining together all the houses on this side of the Mesi in one elegant line. It would have been easy, I thought, for the assassin to escape down any of their stairs. Before me I could see Constantine the Great atop his column in the forum, only a little higher than I, and behind him the domes of Ayia Sophia, the church of holy wisdom. Wisdom, I thought, that I could well use.

Turning my eyes downwards, onto the street, I could see Aelric again, still standing impassive amid the thronging traffic. Though he seemed even smaller from this height, I could yet see much more of him than from below, even when others passed beside him. And likewise he me – he waved a salute as he noticed me peering down on him.

‘Yes,’ I murmured to myself. This was where you could have shot an arrow at the Emperor, and hit the ribs of a guardsman beyond by mistake. I knelt by the parapet which lined the edge of the roof. There were scratches in the stone, I saw with rising excitement – and there, just at the base of the wall where moss grew in the shaded cracks . . .

‘Date stones?’ The Varangian captain had followed my eyes and caught what I had seen, a small scattering of date-palm seeds; now he tipped back his head and gave a great, bellowing laugh. It was not a comfortable sound.

‘Congratulations, Demetrios Askiates,’ he said, picking up one of the pips and tossing it in his free hand. ‘You’ve found a murderer who shoots like Ullr the huntsman, and has a taste for dried fruits. Miraculous!’

The captain stayed with me while I interviewed the carver and his family; I doubt it put them at their ease. The carver, a thin man with fine hands, trembled and stammered his way through a simple enough story: that he had been in his shop all morning, while the apprentices worked upstairs; that they had all three of them gone out to the arcade to watch the Emperor pass; and that they had been dumbfounded to be seized by the Varangians moments later – they had not even seen the soldier die, though they had noticed a commotion on the far side of the street. The carver chewed on his nails, twisting and tearing at them as he swore that he had locked the gate behind him, that nobody could have crept in while he was outside. His wife had been upstairs, he explained, and he had had thieves before, even on holy saints’ days curse them. Now, he said mournfully, he was forced to be ever vigilant. At that the Varangian captain snorted, which did nothing to soothe the carver.

The apprentices had little to add, though it took me the better half of an hour to establish so. They sat back sullenly on their stools and said nothing that was not prompted, regarding me for the most part with the inscrutable gaze of adolescence. Yes, they had been hard at work in the workshop before their master called them down to watch the procession – he was a fair man, they said, though demanding in his craft. He might have locked the door – they did not know, but he often did: he had a terror of thieves.

‘Was the door locked when you came in?’ I asked the captain, after I had dismissed the boys.

‘I wasn’t the first in. Aelric was.’

‘Can you ask him?’

The captain’s face, never reserved at the best of times, said plainly that he thought this a worthless task for an officer of the Emperor’s bodyguard, and I fancied he made even more noise than usual stamping down the stairs. I let it pass as the carver’s wife came into the room. She was younger than her husband, with a darker complexion and a fuller figure, though she dressed modestly and wore a scarf low over her face, casting her eyes in shadow. Her children were with her – two girls, very young, and a boy of about ten, none of whom would look at me. Behind them, I saw the dividing curtain twitch, and the carver’s two dusty feet protruding below the hem. Was he simply a jealous husband, I wondered, or were there secrets he did not want told?

I opened with an innocent enough question. ‘Are these all your children?’

‘Three of them,’ she said, so quietly that I strained to hear. ‘I have a son, apprenticed to another carver, a friend of my husband’s, and two married daughters.’

‘And you and your children were watching the parade from the window yesterday?’

She nodded silently.

‘Did you hear anyone else in the house at the time – someone mounting the stairs perhaps?’

She shook her head, then saw fit to add almost in a whisper, ‘No-one is allowed up here but the family. My husband is very strict on it.’

Between the ever-vigilant carver, the locked gate, and the family on the uppermost floor, Odysseus himself would have struggled to creep through this house.

‘And did you see – or hear – something that could have been an arrow loosed from near here?’ I pressed.

‘The procession caused much noise, much cheering and shouting.’ She frowned. ‘But perhaps there was a crack from above, just before the soldier fell across the road. As the Emperor was passing our window.’

‘A crack from above,’ I repeated. ‘Were you up on the roof at all yesterday morning? Hanging laundry or taking some air or . . .’ I paused, hearing the distant sound of boots on the stairs. ‘Eating fruit?’

Another shake of the head. ‘We do not go onto the roof.’ It was as though Moses had commanded it thus on the stone tablets. ‘Urchins and vagabonds play there. Some of the other shopkeepers and craftsmen allow them up when they should not. We keep the roof-door bolted.’

The noise on the stairs reached a crescendo, and the Varangian captain came striding into the room, almost tearing the curtain from its hooks as he did so.

‘The gate was locked,’ he said abruptly; then, turning to face the cowering children and their mother: ‘Do you like dates?’

‘Whoever fired the arrow must have come up through one of the other buildings and along the roof,’ I told the captain. We were in the workshop, and I kicked up great clouds of bone shavings striding around the room in thought, while the Varangian leaned on the table and played with a small chisel that was like a toy in his hands.

‘And will you spend your day asking every shopkeeper on the street whether he saw a fearsome assassin wander up his stairs, with a mythical weapon and a bunch of dates?’

I thought on this. ‘No,’ I decided. For three gold coins a day, I reasoned, such errands should be beneath me: Krysaphios would not want his treasure squandered. ‘You can do it.’

The captain’s red face flushed darker, and with a sudden movement he drove the chisel hard into the table. The fine point snapped at the impact. ‘Take care, Master Askiates,’ he bellowed, hurling the broken tool into a corner. ‘The Varangians serve to protect the Emperor’s life and to destroy his enemies. I have fought at his side in a dozen desperate battles, where the blood ran like rivers in the wilderness and the carrion-birds feasted for weeks. I will not be found begging gossip off merchants.’

Sunlight shone through the windows, and myriad fragments of dust and ivory swirled in the light as the Varangian and I stared at each other in silence. He glared at me with fury, one hand on the mace at his belt, while I levelled my eyes and tensed my shoulders. And in the brittle hush between us, there came the slight sound of an unguarded sneeze.

We both spun to the stairs from where it had come. There, just beyond a shaft of light and dust, was one of the carver’s young daughters, sitting on the bottom step and chewing a length of her dark hair. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her dress, and twisted her hands in her skirt as she looked shyly across at me.

‘I was on the roof yesterday,’ she said quietly. ‘Mamma doesn’t let me, but I was.’

At these simple words I almost jumped across the room, but I controlled myself enough to walk slowly over to her, a broad smile fixed intently on my face. I knelt down in front of her so that our heads were almost level, stroked her arm, and pushed some of the hair out of her face.

‘You were on the roof yesterday,’ I repeated. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Miriam,’ she said, looking down at her hands.

‘And what did you see on the roof yesterday, Miriam?’ Although I had assumed an easy, carefree tone, my face must have shown that every sinew in my body was tensed with expectation.

And doomed to frustration; she shook her head, and giggled softly to herself. ‘My friends,’ she said. ‘We play.’

‘Your friends,’ I echoed. ‘Other children? How about a man, a man carrying a big bow and arrow, like a soldier. Like him, perhaps,’ I added, gesturing to the Varangian behind me.

But again she shook her head, more vigorously this time. ‘Not like him. We played. Then Mamma found me and was cross. She hit me. I got a bruise.’ She began to lift her skirts to show me, but I hastily tugged them down over her legs: there were certain things I did not need evidenced.

‘And was this long before you watched the big procession?’

She considered this seriously for a moment. ‘No. She hit me and then we looked at the purple man on the horse.’

She seemed as though she might say more, but at that moment we heard her name being called from above, her mother sounding far less demure than when she’d spoken with me. Miriam hopped up off her seat, opened her eyes very wide and put a finger to her lips, then turned and ran up the stairs. Her bare feet made no sound on the smooth stone.

‘Well,’ said the captain, folding his arms over his barrel of a chest. ‘He shoots like lightning, he eats dates – and he’s invisible. How do you unveil an invisible man, Askiates?’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said shortly, ignoring his taunts. ‘There are men I must see.’

‘Not invisible men, then?’ Clearly he found this infinitely amusing.

‘Not invisible men.’

‘Aelric and Sweyn will go with you. The eunuch commands that you be guarded at all times.’

‘That’s impossible.’ I wondered how much Krysaphios wanted me guarded, and how much watched. ‘The men I am seeing are not those who would speak freely in front of palace guards.’ Nor indeed welcome their company at all.

I expected the captain to protest, to offer the argument that those who would avoid the guards were those who ought most encounter them, but he did not; instead he merely shrugged his shoulders.

‘As you choose,’ he grunted. ‘But if you want to give the eunuch his report, you will be back at the palace by nightfall. Otherwise the Watch will have you – and have you flogged for breaking the curfew.’

The thought did not appear to trouble him.

γ

I crossed the road, turned onto a side-street and plunged down the hill, heading for the merchant quarters and the Golden Horn. The path was steep and winding, frequently breaking into short flights of stairs where the slope was too treacherous, and I was grateful that the ashen skies had not yet delivered up their rain or I would have been upended many a time. The walls around me were sheer and tall, broken seldom by doors and never by windows: they were the fortified courtyards of Venetian traders, who kept their wares, like their lives, locked away from sight. Occasionally a slave or a servant slipped through one of the stout bronze gates, but more often the street was deserted.

Gradually, though, my surroundings became less imposing, the buildings first unassuming, then modest, and finally humble. Shops appeared, crowding the alley with wares and smoke and the shouts of their owners, boasts of quality and promises of bargains unimaginable. Now I had to push my way through, resisting every manner of blandishment and enticement, while the upper storeys of the buildings reached closer and closer together, until I could imagine myself in the high basilica of an enormous church. So, at last, I came to the house of the fletcher.

‘Demetrios!’ As I stooped under his lintel, he put down the fistful of feathers he held and rose, limping out from behind his table to embrace me like a brother.

‘Lukas.’ I clapped my arms around his back, then retreated a step to let him take the weight off his twisted leg. ‘How does the trade go?’

Lukas laughed, pulling a bottle and two cracked mugs from under his table and splashing out generous measures of wine. ‘Well enough to give you a drink. As long as Turks and Normans keep their women mothering sons, there’ll be targets enough for my arrows.’ He leaned forward. ‘And there are rumours, Demetrios – rumours of a new war, of a great barbarian army coming to drive the Turks back to Persia.’

‘I’ve heard those rumours too,’ I acknowledged. ‘But I’ve heard them every month since you and I fought by the Lake of Forty Martyrs, and all I’ve ever seen come were adventurers who turned on us as soon as they had our gold, or visionary peasants.’

Lukas shrugged, and poured more wine. ‘Barbarians or no, I’ll still have a living. My masters at the palace have never reduced their order in a dozen years.’

We talked on for some minutes, swapping memories old and new, some shared but mostly separate, until – in a silence – I pulled Krysaphios’ mysterious missile from the folds of my cloak.

‘What do you make of this?’ I passed it to Lukas. ‘Could you make me a bow that could fire it, and with enough venom to pierce a steel hauberk?’

Lukas took the arrow in his hands and examined it closely, squinting in the dull light. ‘A bowyer could build you a bow that would fire it,’ he said, carefully. ‘If you wanted a toy, a plaything for your daughter. Perhaps she needs to fend off importunate suitors?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But this arrow would make a dangerous toy – someone could injure themselves on it.’ He stroked a finger over the encrusted blood. ‘Indeed, it seems someone has.’

‘Someone has,’ I agreed.

‘Someone, perhaps, who was wearing a steel hauberk?’ Lukas watched me shrewdly.

‘Perhaps.’

Lukas handed back the arrow. ‘No. If you fired that from a bow, you would be lucky to see it stick in a tree. There’s no weapon I know that could make it so lethal.’

I put the arrow back in my cloak, glad at least that the Varangian captain was not there to scorn this latest failure.

Lukas asked me to stay, but the day was drawing on and I did not want the first day of Krysaphios’ gold to have yielded nothing. For three hours I tramped the streets of the Platea, hunting out every mercenary and informer I could remember in all the holes they frequented. None could conceive of such a weapon as I sought, though all expressed interest in owning one should I find it. Some tried to guess my true purpose; others blustered, and swore they could cut down a man, hauberk or no, for a fair price. One was mad, and tried – without conviction, thankfully – to stab me. At length, sitting on my own in a grim little tavern chewing some pork, I decided that if the collective memory of the brigands and hired swordsmen I’d seen could not solve this riddle, the answer must lie further afield, beyond the realm of our Byzantine knowledge.

I was right: it did. But not so very far beyond our realm. It resided, I discovered, in a small tavern behind the quay of the Hebrews, in the person of a very short, very round man, with oily skin and a miserable vocabulary.

It was pure chance that I found him. I had gone to the tavern to find a soldier named Xerxes, a Saracen I had half-known in worse times. If the weapon came from the east, I hoped he might know it. He did not, but before I could make excuses he had brought me to his table and forced me to join him in the rough wine he was drinking. It tasted like stewed pine-bark, and I held the cup well in front of my mouth to hide my grimace as he introduced the companion he drank with, a fat Genoese named Cabo who shook my hand vigorously and blew spittle in my face.

‘Demetrios used to sell his sword-arm,’ explained Xerxes, resurrecting a past I preferred to forget. ‘Now he sells his brain. I don’t know which earns him less.’

‘Never as much as it’s worth,’ I assured him, though three gold pieces were already coming to seem overgenerous.

‘Cabo’s much cleverer,’ Xerxes told me. ‘He was in the business too. Now he’s a respectable merchant.’

‘What do you trade?’ I asked. I hardly cared, but talking kept me from having to drink.

Cabo gave a knowing leer from under thick eyebrows. ‘Silks. Gems. Gold. Weapons. Whatever men will buy.’

‘Cabo doesn’t like the imperial monopolies,’ added Xerxes with a wink. ‘He thinks they’re an abomination before your God. He’s like an evangelist.’

‘Weapons,’ I murmured, ignoring Xerxes. ‘I’m seeking a weapon.’

Cabo’s head lifted a fraction; his eyelids drew closer.

‘Are you?’ said Xerxes. ‘Returning to your old ways?’

‘A sword for ten gold pieces.’ Cabo spoke slowly, and I guessed he would have just enough Greek to haggle for the goods and officials he needed. Drink and women too, perhaps.

‘That’s more than a legal profit,’ I observed. ‘And I already have a sword. I need a bow.’

‘A bow for five gold pieces. Scythian. Very strong.’

‘The bow I need must be very strong. Stronger than any bow yet made, yet short enough to fire an arrow no longer than man’s arm. Strong enough to fire through steel.’

‘And to sink a trireme with one stroke, and to fly as far as the moon,’ said Xerxes. ‘Cabo is a businessman, Demetrios, not a conjurer. You’ve sold your brain once too often – there’s nothing left.’

‘I can sell you such a weapon.’ Cabo wiped the perspiration from his bald skull, and rested his fingers on the table, perhaps noticing that the cup had started to tremble in my hand. ‘For seven pounds of gold.’

‘Seven pounds of gold? You could buy an army with that?’ Xerxes thought it a jest and waved for more wine, but I was deaf to his interruption.

‘Do you have the weapon now?’ I asked.

Cabo shook his head. ‘Maybe in six months. Maybe in eight.’

‘And what would such a weapon be like?’ I did not try to hide my overweening interest; I hoped it would convince him my intentions were serious.

Cabo, for his part, did not hide his suspicion, but he had a merchant’s instincts and could not resist. ‘It is called tzangra, a crossed bow. Like a ballista, but a man can hold it himself. It will break open armour for you, if that is what you need.’

‘And by what miracle of invention does it do that?’ My blood and my breath both beat faster.

Cabo creased his forehead as he deciphered my question, then grinned and tapped the side of his head. ‘By magic.’

‘Genoese magic?’ I had never heard of such a weapon among our people.

Cabo nodded.

‘And do all men have them in Genoa?’

A shake of the head. ‘Very expensive. Difficult to make. But possible to get, if you want. If you pay. Five pounds of gold now. Two more when I have it.’

I left his offer unanswered for a moment, feigning consideration while the sweat began to bead again on Cabo’s scalp. At last: ‘I shall think on it.’

‘Why? Did you leave your five pounds of gold at home?’ Xerxes was petulant; perhaps he worried that I truly might have such riches at my command.

‘I gambled it on a horse at the hippodrome,’ I told him. ‘I need to collect my winnings.’

As I rose to leave, a final thought struck me.

‘Tell me, Xerxes,’ I said, dropping a copper coin onto the table for my part of the wine. ‘It’s been too many years since I retired. Where do the foreign mercenaries ply their trade now?’

‘In Paradise,’ said Xerxes sullenly. ‘On the road to the Selymbrian gate.’

‘Who’s the best?’

Xerxes shrugged. ‘None of them. You know what they do. Every week there’s a new cock on the dunghill. Go there and ask: someone will find you. Or cut your throat.’

At that Cabo laughed, spraying wine all across the table.

Dusk was falling without a sunset as I entered the street. I was weary – it had been an age indeed since I had covered so much ground in a day, and unearthed so many long forgotten acquaintances, but the relief of having found even a single link in the chain helped my tired legs mount the hill, past the walls of Ayia Sophia and into the broad arcades of the Augusteion. A dozen ancient rulers gazed down on me from their perches: some benevolent, some wise, some forbidding, each as he would have history know him, but I ignored them all. I passed the great gate on my right, and made for a small doorway in the far corner of the square where two Varangians stood, crested plumes on their helms and axes. One of them, I saw, was Aelric, the guard who had stood on the patch of blood for me that morning.

He raised his axe in greeting. ‘Come for the eunuch? They said you might.’ He looked up at the fading sky. ‘And never too soon.’

‘I’m here to see Krysaphios. He will want to know my progress.’

‘More than ours, I hope.’ Aelric gave a mock frown. ‘I never climbed so many steps as I did today. Sigurd had us up every house on the street asking if they’d allowed an assassin past.’

‘Sigurd?’

‘The captain. He said you ordered it.’

‘Did he? Did you find anything of interest?’

Aelric shook his grizzled head. ‘Only a girl suckling her child, who didn’t pull her dress up in time when we came in. Nothing to interest the eunuch.’

‘Speaking of whom . . .’

Leaving his companion on guard, Aelric led me through the door into a narrow arcade lining an orchard. The fruit trees were barren now, their branches spiny and white, but birds still called from them. We passed an enormous hall on our left, its vast doors fastened shut, and came through into a second atrium, where we skirted along another, broader corridor. We turned again, and soon I was lost in a labyrinth of halls and passages, columns and porticoes; of fountains, gardens, statues and courtyards. The very air itself was bewildering, sweet as honey and scented with incense and roses; warm as a summer’s day, though outside we were in the depth of winter. The trickling of streams, the murmur of conversation and the chime of hushed instruments filled my ears; golden light spilled from the doorways we passed, framing the images of this separate world like icons. Every room was thronged with people: senators dressed in the robes of the first order; generals in their armour; scribes and secretaries under mountains of parchment. I saw noblewomen laughing in discrete circles, and petitioners with the drawn look of those who have waited long hours in vain. It was like a vision of Paradise, and through all of it I moved silently, unseen and unheeded.

At length Aelric brought me to a stone courtyard. It seemed older than the parts we had been through: here the mosaics were cracked and the walls were bare, save for the carved heads of imperial ancestors in their shallow niches. The sounds of the palace were dulled, and the perfumes in the air now had to contend with the stink of the city. The arcades were empty, excepting a lonely figure sitting on a marble bench, who rose gracefully to his feet as I approached. Aelric, I suddenly realised, had vanished.

‘The Varangian captain thinks you are a fool, who dissipates his time in conversation with tradesmen.’ Krysaphios stepped languidly towards me. A lamp burned from its bracket in a pillar beside him. ‘And then provokes his employer by abandoning the escort I ordered.’

‘If the Varangian captain knew the least thing about finding a murderer,’ I said slowly, ‘then I might have cause to care what he thought.’

‘He says you had his men banging on doors asking futile questions all afternoon,’ Krysaphios pressed. ‘The imperial bodyguard. I wonder, Askiates, if you have sufficient imagination for your task.’

‘Imagination enough to find a weapon that no-one else knew.’ Briefly I described the tzangra of which the Genoese Cabo had spoken. ‘And I imagine that this foreign weapon had foreign hands on the string.’

‘A mercenary?’ Krysaphios thought on this. ‘Possibly. You yourself would know of such things, would you not?’ He watched the guarded anger sweep my face. ‘I know your story, Demetrios Askiates. I may not know the least thing about finding a murderer, but I am accomplished in the art of pinning a man to his past. Even a past he would rather forget – or hide.’

I said nothing.

‘However it may be.’ Krysaphios opened his palms to show me he did not care. ‘The hands on the bowstring may have been foreign, but the spirit that willed them there, I am certain, is of far closer origins.’ He reached into an alcove, where a roll of parchment lay scrolled up next to a statue. ‘I have had my clerks prepare a list of all who might profit from an empty throne.’

I took it.

‘A long list.’ Headed, I noticed with a shiver, by the Sebastokrator himself, the Emperor’s elder brother and the penultimate power in the empire. Perhaps Krysaphios and Sigurd were right – perhaps I should keep to the company of the merchants and shopkeepers I knew.

‘A long list,’ Krysaphios agreed. ‘A list that could incite riot and rebellion if it were seen by those whose names appear. Look on it closely, and commend it to your memory.’

I held the paper close to the light and studied it with a furious intensity. Many of the names were familiar to me, though others were wholly anonymous. All the while Krysaphios stood silent, watching me, until at last I handed the list back.

‘Repeat it,’ he commanded.

‘I can remember well enough, without reciting it like a schoolboy.’

‘Repeat it,’ he insisted, his eyes flashing. ‘I have paid you for your mind, Askiates, and I will know what is in it.’

‘You have paid me for the results I will bring you. And what am I supposed to ask of these people? “Are you responsible for the attempted murder of the Emperor? Do you own a fantastical Genoese invention called a tzangra?” Besides, what nobleman would even deign to speak with me?’

‘You will be given the necessary introductions. As for what you should say, I would not dream to instruct you. You, after all, know all that can be known about finding murderers. Come and tell me tomorrow. Now if you will not recite my list, go. One of the guards will see you home.’

He balled up the paper in his hands and dropped it into the bowl of the lamp. It burst into flames and blazed in the glass, then quickly crumbled to ash.

δ

In the halls of the palace I had thought myself in heaven; the next morning, I was in Paradise. Or at least the place which bore its name: it did not merit the comparison. Once, I’m told, there had been fields here sloping up the long hill, green with wheat and fat with pasture, but those were long gone. The crops had been ground into dust, the grazing beasts slaughtered, and the extremities of the bloated city had spread inexorably over them. It was not a slum, but more a wilderness of shacks and broken shelters, where those who had used all their resources of strength and money to reach the city could collapse within its walls. Many never left, and with the watchtowers of the garrison so close at hand, it was inevitable that certain trades, those which always thrive among the poor and desperate, would flourish.

Such was its reputation, but it seemed unremarkable enough as I picked my way over the ruts and broken stones of the Selymbrian road. Children played in the roadside; wizened women hobbled along with great mounds of cloth on their backs, and every few paces there would be a gaunt, sun-scorched man sitting in front of a tray of nuts or dates or dried figs. One of these I approached, squatting down to look him in the eye.

‘I seek a man for a dangerous task,’ I said, using the age-old formula of the profession.

The man squinted at me, while a beetle crawled over his leg and onto the tray of figs. He seemed to be concentrating, grappling with a silent dilemma; then suddenly a fistful of fruit was thrust before my face.

I shook my head impatiently. ‘No, thank you. I seek a man . . .’

I ceased talking as a second handful of figs appeared beside the first. The man was scowling now, shaking his arms in frustration.

A belated thought struck me. ‘Do you speak Greek?’

The continued silence was answer enough. I raised my hands in apology, pushed the fruit away from me, and rose to leave. Ten paces away I felt a sharp stinging as a pebble struck me on the back of my leg, but I let it pass.

I walked slowly on down the road. Three or four times I tried to raise a passing traveller or hawker in conversation, but I was beyond the frontiers of civilisation: none spoke anything but barbarian tongues. I would have to return with a translator, I thought; I knew a few who frequented the harbours and sold their services to merchants. Though that would leave little of the day for visiting Krysaphios’ dignitaries, and he would likely hear of it if I did not.

A tugging on the hem of my cloak returned me to the moment, and instinctively I clapped a hand on my purse to ensure it was safe. It was, and I earned a reproachful gaze from the ragged eyes of the child who had appeared beside me.

‘Do you understand me?’ I asked, more in bemusement than hope.

To my surprise, he nodded.

‘You do?’ Another nod, and the flash of white teeth. ‘Do you know where I can find a man? A dangerous man?’ I mimed a couple of sword strokes through the air.

The boy considered this, then nodded a third time. ‘Elymas,’ he said, his voice chirping like a young chick’s. ‘You see Elymas.’

‘Elymas?’

‘Yes. You see Elymas.’

I had kept a wary distance from him, but now I allowed him to grab my hand and tug me away, off the road and down a thin alley between rough rows of dwellings. I tensed, my eyes darting in all directions in anticipation of an ambush, a robbery. I had too many of Krysaphios’ gold coins with me for comfort, and I was unarmed save for the dagger in my boot. But the urchin before me, in his tattered tunic and bare feet, skipped on heedless, leading me deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of ramshackle homes. Now I began to feel the weight of the area’s reputation, began to feel the hostile eyes examining me from behind the splintered planks and frayed sheets which served for doors and windows. The groups of men we passed at the roadside would stop their conversation and stare insolently, while women sat with their legs lying open and offered indecent suggestions. My only solace was that none of it showed the least effect on the boy.

He brought me to place where an old woman sat by a damp fire, stirring a black pot and muttering gibberish to herself. Next to this was a makeshift tent, a wide bolt of purple cloth draped over two sticks which formed a doorway. The fabric looked remarkably like that used for decorating the streets during imperial processions, though I did not say so.

‘Elymas,’ said the boy, and ran off.

I watched him vanish behind a pile of rubble, which might have been somebody’s house, and felt an overwhelming urge to follow. But I had come this far: I would take the final step, however ill-advised and reckless. Ignoring the crone by the fire, now giggling like a demon, I crouched down nearly to my knees and crawled into the tent.

The cloth must have been of a fine weave indeed, for within its folds all was darkness, though smoke from the neighbouring fire had somehow managed to choke the black air. I coughed; my eyes watered, and I snatched my hand to the knife at my ankle as I heard a movement beyond.

‘Elymas?’ I challenged.

There was a wheezing from the back of the tent, and the fluid sounds of a man clearing his throat.

‘Elymas,’ a voice answered at last. It spoke hesitantly, uncertainly, and did not sound Roman.

‘Do you understand Greek?’ My feet were flat on the ground, still poised to spring, but I had lowered the knife.

Elymas did not answer. My hopes sank. Then, in the silence, a dog barked twice, so near to me that my sword arm flew up in a blocking arc. The movement unbalanced me, and I toppled back clumsily onto the sandy floor.

‘Do not be afraid,’ said Elymas, his voice devoid of all comfort. ‘Sophia answers all questions.’

‘Sophia?’ Not the hag by the fire outside, I hoped.

The dog, from somewhere close to Elymas, barked twice more. My eyes were slowly growing used to the gloom in the tent, and I could now make out the dim shape of a hunched old man, his white beard like a ghost in the darkness, sitting cross-legged before me. One hand rested on a black shadow next to him, which might – but for the barking – have been taken for a cushion.

‘Sophia,’ repeated my host, and again the dog barked twice.

A ludicrous notion entered my thoughts. ‘Sophia is your dog?’

Two quick barks were the apparent, improbable confirmation of this truth.

‘And Sophia will answer my questions?’ I wondered if perhaps there was more than wood on the fire whose smoke had filled my lungs. ‘And, naturally, she speaks Greek.’

This time there was only a single bark.

‘What does that mean? She does not speak Greek?’

Two barks.

I looked around for the door flap, which had unaccountably fallen shut. What would Krysaphios say if he knew I wasted my time and his gold conversing with performing animals?

I saw Elymas pat his bitch affectionately on the flank. ‘Not speak,’ he said brokenly. ‘Understand.’

I stared at him venomously. ‘She understands Greek?’

Two barks protested she did.

‘Tell me then, Sophia,’ I began, wondering how far I was willing to take this charade. ‘Can I find a mercenary for hire near here?’

Sophia looked at me disparagingly, then put her head between her feet and huffed through her nose.

‘What?’ I demanded, caught between impatience and the spell of this unlikely dream.

Elymas was wracked by a silent fit, rocking back and forth on his haunches. When it had subsided, he stuck a bone-thin finger into the sand before him and inscribed a circle, with a smaller circle, two eyes and a mouth within it.

Long experience of charlatans, as much as the clarity of his picture, gave me the answer. ‘You want money for speaking to your dog?’

A pained expression crossed his face; he shook his head vigorously, and pointed to the bitch.

‘Your dog wants money for me to speak to her?’

Sophia raised her jaw a fraction, just enough for a couple of weary barks. Internally abusing myself as an idiot, I drew an obol from my purse and tossed it into the sand in front of the dog.

She eyed it haughtily, then turned to lick her backside.

With the utmost reluctance, I added a second obol. Still she paid me no heed. A third obol followed, and then – swearing there would not be another – a silver keration.

Sophia turned back to me and gave two contented barks.

‘Now,’ I said heavily. ‘Can I find a mercenary near here?’

Two barks, though even a dog might have known that. I would demand far more for my coin.

‘Where can I find them?’

I earned scornful looks from dog and master. ‘Can I find them on the Selymbrian road?’

One bark.

‘Near the road?’

Two barks.

I paused, unable to think of any landmark which would help direct this line of questioning. ‘Are there many men who can help me?’

One bark.

‘Only one man?’

Two barks.

‘Is he a barbarian? A Frank?’

One bark.

‘A Roman? Like me?’

Two barks.

‘And this man will find me a mercenary?’

Two barks.

‘Does he have a name?’

Two barks.

Again I halted, as I came against the immutable fact that without a name or a location, this dog could tell me nothing. Nothing, in fact, that I did not already know or guess – and that, of course, was the nature of its trick. I had been a fool to convince myself that it could be otherwise, to succumb to the smoke and darkness and gnomic utterances of this false magician. I shuffled backwards, shooting the bitch a final, evil glare.

And in that second where we met each other’s gaze, I swear I saw the dog lift her head, open her mouth, and say quite distinctly: ‘Vassos.’

My jaw sagged in astonishment. ‘Vassos?’

Two dainty barks.

‘A man named Vassos?’ I repeated, edging forward. ‘The man I seek is named Vassos.’

And with two final barks, the dog turned her back on me and began chasing her tail.

I stumbled into daylight reeling from the strange encounter, my mind locked in a tussle of doubt and wonder. The woman with the pot had vanished, her fire now little more than embers; I breathed in deep lungfuls of cool air and hoped it would blow through my head also. During my uncommon career I had sought information from every rank of life, from city officials to notorious criminals, and often I had implored God for revelation; never, though, had I spoken with a dumb animal. What could I do but see how her story was resolved?

It soon emerged that she had done me a great service – more than many human informants have rendered me. Although I spoke no Frankish, nor Bulgarian nor Serbic nor any other of the immigrant languages of this place, the name ‘Vassos’ was like a charm: no sooner did I speak it to those I passed than comprehension lit up their faces and they gestured animatedly in one direction or another. I was led gradually westwards, through endless alleys of broken hovels towards the walls, until at length a gypsy loitering by a well pointed directly over my shoulder and said definitively: ‘Vassos.’

I turned to see a house, itself remarkable enough in those surroundings. It seemed far older and better constructed than anything else around it: it might once have been a farmhouse, when these were virgin fields, but it was decayed and charmless now. Whoever owned it, though, had money enough to put a stout oak door on the hinges, and iron bars across the crimson-curtained windows.

I rapped on the door, wondering what business I disturbed inside. There was no answer.

‘Vassos,’ said the gypsy across the street, watching me and laughing.

I hammered the door a second time. Still it did not move, but in the corner of my eye I noticed one of the curtains tremble. I ran to it, just in time to see a woman’s head vanish behind it.

‘Vassos!’ I called, trying to pull back the curtain through the bars. ‘Vassos?’

‘No,’ said a voice within. ‘No Vassos. No Vassos.’

‘Where is he?’ I let the curtain go and stepped back from the window. There was a silence, but my retreat was rewarded when strong arms drew open the curtain to reveal a heavily painted face glaring out at me. Her dress was a fragmented patchwork of different cloths, none bearing the least relation to the other, and tied like a girdle under her breasts so that they thrust forward toward me. There were red calluses around her mouth, and a scratch on one cheek. Her eyes were hard as glass.

‘No Vassos,’ she repeated emphatically. ‘Vassos work. Work.’

‘Tomorrow?’

She lifted her shoulders, deepening the cleft between her breasts yet further. ‘Tomorrow? Tomorrow.’

‘I will come tomorrow.’

Whether she understood me or not, the conversation was finished; the curtain shut and the house fell silent.

I spent the afternoon sitting in the courtyard of a minor noble, watching his fountain and playing with his cat. Every hour his steward would emerge to assure me I would be received imminently, but that lie soon tired. I preferred the honesty of the slum dwellers. I had chosen to start at the bottom of Krysaphios’ list, hoping that there I might merit at least a dubious welcome, but that proved a false hope, and as it was a fasting day I could not even prevail on the steward for a drink. At last, with the shadows lengthening, I left for the palace. Krysaphios was undisguisedly unimpressed with my day’s work; so too, when I arrived home, were my daughters.

‘You’re always home after dark now, Father,’ Helena accused me. ‘And late for supper.’

‘“The dutiful daughter greets her father with the food of her hands,”’ I quoted, smiling.

‘The dutiful wife,’ corrected Helena sharply. ‘The daughter might well be in bed when her father chooses to appear.’

I settled into my chair, and took a spoonful of the stew she had prepared. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘The stew is delicious.’ It was – she had her mother’s gift with food. ‘But my paymasters at the palace keep me working hard, and they pay me enough that one day I will not have to work so hard. Then we can have supper on time.’

‘Is the palace beautiful, Papa?’ asked Zoe, slurping her food like a soldier. ‘Is it filled with fountains and light?’

‘It is. Fountains and light and gold and laughter,’ I said, and described as best I could the few corners I had seen. It needed little embellishment to make Zoe’s eyes go wide with wonder.

‘I thought the kingdom of God was for the poor.’ Helena had been staring down at her plate while I spoke, saying nothing, but now she lifted her head contemptuously. ‘I thought the Lord God would pull down the mighty from their thrones, and scatter the proud in the evil of their hearts. How can you work for such a tyrant, who glories in the trappings of sin?’

‘I can work for him because his life is as valuable as any other man’s.’ We had argued this the previous night. ‘And because in my lifetime he is the only ruler who has not brought us to the brink of ruin. He may feast in golden halls and drink from scented cups, but he keeps the borders secure and his armies far from the city. To my mind, that is enough.’

Though I believed what I said, I could understand the contempt in Helena’s eyes, for I could hear my words sounding as hollow to her as they would have to me at that age. I remembered the monks who raised me preaching poverty and humility as they grew fat on the orchards I tended, and the way I burned at the injustice of it. Was I now grown into just another apologist for the orthodox?

Clearly Helena thought so; she rose from the table with a crashing of plates and chairs, and marched stiffly out of the room.

Zoe watched her go. ‘She wants a husband,’ she said, with the blithe indifference of a twelve-year-old. ‘That’s why she’s angry.’

‘I know,’ I said wearily. ‘And I will do something soon.’ I speared a piece of vegetable onto my knife. ‘But she should guard her tongue concerning the Emperor. He has many ears, many spies.’

And I, I thought as I lay in bed that night, was one of them.

ε

It was close to midday by the time I found Vassos’ house again; I had spent the morning making some arrangements, then discovered that his neighbours were less obliging with their directions when the supplicant came accompanied by four monstrously armed soldiers. With that in mind, I approached the sturdy door alone.

This time there was no need to knock. The lone gypsy who had been outside before was now augmented by a triad of youths with bruised, insolent faces; they loitered below the windows and stared at me through lazy eyes.

‘I’m here to see Vassos,’ I said, as pleasantly as I could.

‘Vassos busy.’ It was the boy nearest me who spoke. He must have been in a dozen knife-fights at least, judging by the scars, but it was the pimples which truly disfigured him. He wore a green tunic clasped with a leather belt, and as he spoke one hand drifted ominously behind his back.

‘Vassos is not too busy to see me.’ A gold nomisma appeared between my fingers, almost as if by accident, but when the youth leaned forward to stare closer it vanished. I opened my empty palm to him with a disingenuous shrug.

‘Vassos will see me,’ I repeated.

‘Vassos see you.’

The boy stretched out an arm and banged three times on the door; it swung inwards silently. With a mock bow and a sneer, he signalled me to enter.

As I came into the dim room I saw that the boy had not been making idle excuses for Vassos: he had indeed been busy, and seemed only just to have concluded the business, for he was wrapping a cloth about his bloated waist and wiping sweat from his black-haired chest. Next to him a woman was pulling a dress up over her breasts, showing not the least concern for modesty. On the couch behind them a second girl lay stretched out on her belly, shamelessly naked and glowing with a sheen of perspiration. For a moment I allowed myself to admire her openly, thinking to persuade Vassos of my complicity; besides, it was years since I had felt that pleasure, and I had the God-given desires of any man. Then I noticed the red lines scratched down the curve of her back, the slender width of her hips and the smooth skin on the flesh below her shoulder: she could not be much older – if at all – than Helena, I realised. Sickened, I looked away.

‘Not to your taste, eh?’ Vassos misread my look. ‘Don’t worry, I have more. What do you prefer? Peasant girls from the provinces who fuck like mules? Dusky Arabians from the court of the Sultan, versed in the seven hundred ways of pleasuring a man. Golden-haired virgins from Macedonia? If you’re feeling patriotic, I even have a Norman wench, on whom you can revenge the treachery of their race. Though it will cost you extra if I cannot use her again.’

I stared at this ogre standing half-naked before me. Long, thick hair fell over his brutish shoulders, framing a face whose flattened nose and heavy cheekbones seemed more suited to a bull than a man. He wore a thick, golden chain around his neck, and rolled it between fat fingers as he spoke. It was with great restraint that I did not hit him immediately.

‘I’m not after girls,’ I said shortly. ‘I seek . . .’

‘Boys?’ Vassos’ fat lips contorted into a leer. ‘I can do boys for you, my friend, if you enjoy Corinthian pleasures. Sometimes indeed I savour it myself – I must understand the tastes of my clients, you know. But it will take a little time – the boys are kept elsewhere.’

The girl who had been dressing herself when I entered had left the room, but now returned carrying a cup heavily crusted with coloured stones. She gave it to Vassos who drained its contents in a single gulp, leaving only a small trail dribbling down his cloven chin. He dropped it heedlessly on the floor, impervious to the clatter, and in the pause, I spoke again.

‘Not boys. I seek men – and not for carnal pleasures. For dangerous tasks. I understood you could provide them.’ It now seemed a faint hope: a lesson for trusting so much to the words of a charlatan and his dog.

But Vassos had gone very still. ‘Men for dangerous tasks,’ he mused. ‘More dangerous than turning their arses over to you?’

‘Men’s work, not whores.”

‘I can sell you men for any task.’ Vassos delivered each word with slow consideration. ‘Any task which pleases me. But I do not know that I like your task.’

‘Others may have paid you for similar,’ I suggested.

‘The business I do with others is my own affair. The business I do with you . . .’ He thought on this. ‘I choose not to do with you. You know the watchwords and you speak of danger, but I think you are the danger, my friend. Please leave my house.’

‘I need to know if a man hired some men of you, perhaps in the last week or month. I will pay handsomely for the knowledge.’ Again I allowed the gold coin to appear and disappear in my hand.

Vassos simply laughed, an ugly laugh that stirred the girl on the bed to look up, wide-eyed. ‘You can buy my whores, and treat them as you pay for them, but you cannot buy me with your magician’s gold. My reputation,’ he explained solemnly, ‘is everything. Now go.’

‘Tell me who you’ve hired mercenaries to,’ I persisted. ‘Tell me and . . .’

My plea was interrupted by a piercing whistle, as Vassos stuck two fingers between his yellow teeth and blew hard through them. ‘You will leave my house,’ he said, smirking. ‘Vassos’ hospitality is legendary, but it is not to be abused. I will have my boys see you out.’

Still I did not move. I heard the sound of running footsteps, then shouts of alarm and the noises of a scuffle. A puzzled look passed over Vassos’ face, but before he could act the door came crashing open and two giant bodies burst in. They moved like lions in the arena, bounding beyond me in a single stride and hurling Vassos into the stone wall behind. The back of an axe drove mercilessly into the fat of his stomach and he howled in agony; the skirt he wore slipped from his haunches and fell to the floor, exposing his shrivelled loins. Then he found the shaft of another axe pressed hard against his neck, almost crushing his throat in, and the wailing stopped.

A third figure stepped in through the shattered door. He was little more than a shadow against the daylight, but already the vast trunk and menacing arms were familiar to me: Sigurd, the Varangian captain. He leaned his axe against a chair and unstrapped the mace from his belt, hefting it in his broad hands as he approached the pimp cowering by the wall. The girl who had brought Vassos’ cup screamed at the sight of him, and fled behind a curtain into the next room, while the girl on the bed sat up dazed, heedless of her nakedness.

Sigurd looked at her, at the bony ribs and breasts scarcely plumper than a boy’s. He picked up the cloth that Vassos had worn and threw it over to her.

‘Cover yourself,’ he told her shortly. I doubt she understood him, for I guessed it would have been Vassos’ custom to use foreigners and immigrants for his vile purposes, but she clutched it to her chest and wrapped her bare arms over it. That seemed to satisfy Sigurd.

‘Now,’ he said angrily, turning to Vassos. ‘You have an ugly face, but I can make it uglier if I try. Who hired the men who tried to kill the Emperor?’

I winced; it was not the tack I would have taken. But I did not have a fearsome mace in my hands, and two of my lieutenants pinning Vassos to the wall. I kept silent and watched.

‘I never hired men to kill the Emperor,’ gasped Vassos, his voice now curiously high-pitched. ‘I love the Emperor. I . . .’

Sigurd cut him short with an open-handed slap across his left cheek. The Varangian wore many rings, and his hand came away smeared with blood.

‘You do not love the Emperor,’ he told Vassos. ‘I love the Emperor. You would have killed him for a fistful of silver.’

Vassos glared at him with undisguised hatred, and tried to spit in his face. But the axe-haft was too tight against his throat, and he succeeded only in leaving a gob of spittle and blood hanging from his chin.

Sigurd eyed him with contempt. ‘You should never do that,’ he warned dangerously. ‘If your slime had reached me, I might have seen to it that nothing ever came out of your mouth again.’ He held out his mace with a rigid arm, and pushed its spiked ball so close to Vassos’ lips that he was forced to suckle it like a baby.

The girl on the bed stirred. ‘There was a monk.’

So unexpected was her contribution that Sigurd jerked the mace away, tearing the corner of Vassos’ mouth. The girl was shivering – from fear, I guessed, for she had pulled a blanket over her and was no longer shameful to look at – but her voice carried the ring of certainty.

‘A monk?’ said Sigurd. ‘What of him? A Roman monk?’

The girl shrugged, the blanket sliding from her shoulder. ‘A monk. I was here. Vassos let him use me for free because he paid so much money.’ Her voice was desolate. ‘He took me like a boy. Like an animal.’

Sigurd took this news in silence, and – to judge from the tinge in his cheeks – embarrassment at hearing her degradations. In the ensuing silence, I spoke gently.

‘What is your name?’

‘Ephrosene.’ She seemed surprised to be asked.

‘Where are you from, Ephrosene?’

‘From Dacia.’

‘How long have you been in the city?’

She shrugged again, but this time caught the sliding blanket. ‘Six months? Eight?’

‘And you say there was a monk. How long ago?’

‘Three weeks. Maybe four. He came several times. After the first time I tried to hide when he came, but sometimes he came unwarned. Sometimes Vassos dragged me out for him.’

‘And did he come just for you?’

A tear ran down her face; I crossed to the bed and sat beside her, putting an arm around her thin waist.

‘It’s all right, Ephrosene,’ I told her. ‘You’re safe from him now. From the monk, from Vassos, from everyone. Look at Sigurd,’ I added, pointing to the Varangian, whose mace never wavered before the pimp’s mouth. ‘If he protects you, who can harm you?’

The girl wiped her cheek, and smoothed her hair back off her face.

‘The monk came for soldiers. I was his entertainment. He wanted four men to travel with him – and a child.’ She bit her lip, while the three Varangians and I looked on, disgusted; we could all of us imagine why he would have wanted the child.

‘Did he explain his purpose with the soldiers?’

She shook her head. ‘“A dangerous task,” was all he said. He paid much gold. Vassos was pleased. He bought me a silver ring.’ She shuddered.

‘And when was the last time you saw him?’

She thought for a moment. ‘The monk, two weeks ago, I think. He came to meet the Bulgars, to take them away with him.’

‘And did you know these Bulgars?’

‘No.’

‘You had never seen them before?’

‘No.’

Her tears had stopped now; I pulled my arm from around her and made to stand up. But Ephrosene had not finished.

‘I saw one of them afterwards, though. Vassos called him in. He had another task for him.’

I froze. ‘Recently?’ I did not hide the urgency in my voice. ‘Did you see this Bulgar recently?’

To the surprise of every man in that room, the girl actually laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said simply. ‘He was here this morning. I saw him as he left. Just before you came.’

There was an instant of dumbstruck silence in the room; then, before I could move, Sigurd had whipped the mace out of Vassos’ mouth and put his face very close to the pimp’s head; so close that his beard must have tickled Vassos’ neck.

‘What did you tell the Bulgar to do, you shit?’ he demanded. His voice rasped on Vassos’ ear like a lathe. ‘Where can we find him?’ He looked down at Vassos’ sagging belly, and further down below his waist, caressing the flesh like a lover with the end of his mace. ‘Where?’

Vassos seemed to have lost much of his will to speak, but once Sigurd had grudgingly allowed him to don a tunic he was willing to lead us to a place where we might find the Bulgar. As we emerged from the house I saw Aelric, standing watch over the three youths who were – with several more gashes and bruises to their bodies – lying bound in the street. Sigurd ignored them, and sent Aelric with Ephrosene to find a convent where the nuns could tend her; the rest of us accompanied Vassos ever deeper into the tangled alleys of the slum quarter. The three Varangians marched as one, crunching out their tread in perfectly measured time and keeping the prisoner always between them; I hurried along behind.

‘Are you armed, Askiates?’ asked Sigurd, looking back. ‘You do not want to reach God’s kingdom too soon. There are some mysteries you may not want revealed to you yet.’

‘I have my knife,’ I answered, breathing hard.

‘You need a man’s weapon in these parts.’ Slowing his stride, Sigurd took the mace from where it swung at his belt and passed it back to me. I took it in both hands, almost overbalancing with the weight of it.

‘Can you use that?’

‘I can use it.’ Or at least, I could have once in my past. Those days were long ago, though, and it had been many years since I swung such a weapon in anger. Now my arms ached simply to carry it.

‘We need to capture this Bulgar alive,’ I reminded Sigurd. ‘We must discover what he knows.’

‘If he knows anything. There are ten thousand mercenaries in this city, and the word of a weeping whore is a poor guarantee that this Bulgar is the one we want.’

‘Indeed.’ But a monk who hired foreign mercenaries from a man like Vassos was unlikely to purpose any good with them: that alone made him worth finding. And as Vassos swore – despite Sigurd’s encouragement – that he knew nothing of the monk’s whereabouts, the Bulgar might be our only link with him.

The buildings around us were now grown larger. Before, we had been in a shanty town of houses that never were, but here was a place where old houses had fallen from respectability into disrepair and ruin. The streets were narrower, and the lowering ramparts hid the pale December sun from our sight. I could see faces all around us, peering out from behind broken windows and rubbled walls, but the street remained empty. Perhaps the sound of the Varangians’ boots had driven the populace indoors, but I doubted they would fear us when they saw how few we were. Sigurd looked back at me, and I saw my own thoughts mirrored in his worried eyes: this long, narrow road was like a mountain pass, the perfect situation for an ambush. And in Vassos we followed a treacherous guide.

We walked on, and I had begun to convince myself that I was imagining dangers where there were none, when a desperate scream tore through the silence of the alley. In an instant I was in a crouch, my hands raised with Sigurd’s mace; ahead of me the three Varangians had their axes poised to strike. I stared into the dark doorways and alcoves around me but saw nothing; no arrows raining down from above, and no attackers charging against us. I remembered Sigurd’s jest two days ago about the invisible assassin, and suddenly it was not so funny: perhaps after all we did face an enemy from beyond this world.

The scream came again, echoing in our ears, and I knew that – whatever else might await us – this was someone very much of our world. It had come from further along the road, and without pausing to think I broke into a run. The mace was light in my hands now, borne along by the surge of danger and excitement in my veins, and I was past my companions before they had even begun to move.

The houses ended abruptly, and the road emerged into what might once have been a pretty square. A round fountain was at its centre, seemingly dried up long ago, for weeds and mosses grew around it and the basin was riven with cracks. But it was not abandoned: a man stood on its rim, dressed in a leather tunic and standing almost as tall as Sigurd. He had his back to me, and was looking down into the fountain where another figure lay. A bloodied sword dangled from his hand.

I shouted a challenge and hurtled towards him. He spun around, surprise giving way to a snarl of defiance on his round face, and raised his sword to meet me. He was faster than I’d expected, but I was committed to my attack: as I came near I dropped my right arm back and swung it hard over my shoulder, aiming to smash my mace into his knee and fell him. But I was too slow; it was ten years and more since I had plied my trade on the battlefield, and the occasional brawl had kept neither my speed nor my strength at a pitch for defeating a mercenary. He parried my swing, crushing his sword down onto the handle of my mace and driving it clear of his body. He missed my hand by inches, but the blow served his purpose. My arm was jarred numb by the stinging impact of his blade, and the mace fell from my fingers.

Now I was exposed, too close to my opponent to retreat and without defence. Anticipating a second blow from his sword I looked up, but again he outwitted me: pain exploded through my jaw as he kneed me hard on the chin. I reeled back a step and fell flat on my back, feeling the ache in my spine and tasting blood in my mouth.

My enemy leapt down from his perch on the fountain and stepped towards me, his sword humming in the air as he took two expert swipes to steady his arm. I scrabbled desperately for the dagger at my ankle, but he saw what I did and stamped his foot down on my hand. Two fingers cracked, and I screamed, even as I saw him lift his sword over my neck for the killing stroke.

But he never struck. A new sound bellowed out in the square around us, a savage cry howled forth with a terrible anger. It was the cry Quinctilius Varus must have heard as he saw his legions hacked apart in the German forests, the cry that met the Caesar Julius as he sailed up the great rivers of Britannia, the cry of an unconquerable warrior revelling in his barbarity. A giant axe-blade sliced through the air above me and swept the waiting sword from my enemy’s grip. It clattered harmless to the ground a few feet away, and the hands which had held it were still clasped empty above me as the second blow struck, knocking the mercenary backwards so that now it was he who lay winded on the ground. Strong arms held him down, while a red-faced Sigurd stood over him and held an axe to his throat.

‘Move, and you lose your head,’ he said, breathing hard.

I looked around, dazed. ‘Is this the Bulgar? Is this the man Vassos brought us to find?’ I shook my head, trying to clear some of the pain. ‘Where is Vassos?’

Sigurd glanced around the square, and swore so angrily that I thought he might decapitate the captive in sheer frustration. Vassos was gone, presumably slipped away in the struggle.

‘This is the Bulgar,’ said Sigurd. ‘Or at least, so the pimp told us. That was when we started running. None too soon,’ he added, with a reproving glance in my direction.

I was heartfelt in my agreement. ‘Not a moment too soon. You saved my life.’

‘Saved you from yourself,’ muttered Sigurd. ‘Carrying a mace doesn’t make you a Varangian, Demetrios. You were a fool to charge in.’

A groan from within the fountain reminded me what had prompted my impulse; I crossed to where the Bulgar had stood on its lip and peered down. The figure I had seen was still there, and I doubt he had moved an inch since I joined the battle, for his bare limbs and white tunic were covered in blood, and there were deep gashes in his leg. He lay with his knees pulled into his chest and his arms clasped about his head, making not the least sound.

‘I saved someone in my turn, at least.’ I stepped into the fountain and knelt beside him, lifting one shoulder as tenderly as I could to glimpse his face. He whimpered as I prised his hand from his eyes, but as it came away I almost lost my grip so great was my shock. This creature, this man whom the Bulgar warrior had been dismembering when I attacked, was not a man at all, but a mere boy whose hollow cheeks still bore the downy hairs of the first beard. He was solidly built for his years, but those must have been fewer even than the girl Ephrosene’s.

‘A child,’ I murmured, astounded. ‘The Bulgar was trying to kill a child.’

‘Maybe he tried to pick his pocket,’ said Sigurd. ‘There’s a purse on the ground over here.’ He stooped to pick up the leather bag and hooked it onto his belt. ‘Not that the whoreson will be needing it now. Maybe the boy fucked his sister. Who cares.’

I was about to argue the point, but Sigurd had already forgotten the boy in the fountain and stepped back to regard his captive.

‘Get him to his feet,’ he ordered. ‘And bind his arms behind his back. I’m going to march you all the way to the palace with my axe at your neck,’ he told the Bulgar. ‘If you so much as stumble your head will lose the company of its shoulders.’

‘What about the boy?’ I asked. ‘He needs help – he’ll bleed to death otherwise.’

‘What about the boy?’ Sigurd shrugged. ‘I’ve already detached one of my men trying to redeem a petty whore, and had that pimp Vassos escape from me. I’ll see this Bulgar at the palace in chains whether he’s the man who tried to kill the Emperor or a pilgrim who got lost on his way to the shrine. I won’t lose him by using my men as stretcher-bearers for a pickpocket who chose his target poorly. And you,’ he added, stabbing a finger into my chest, ‘should clean that blood off your face and come with us, if you want the eunuch to think he spends his gold wisely.’

‘I’ll come to the palace in my own time,’ I said fiercely, taking a step backwards. ‘And that will be when I’ve found this boy a clean bed and a doctor. On my own, if I have to.’

‘On your own, then. If you go south down that street, you should meet the Mesi.’ Sigurd picked his mace out of the dust, scowling to see the gash in its handle, and returned it to his belt before prodding the prisoner forward. With his lieutenants flanking the captive, he marched away, and I was alone in the square.

My head was wracked with pain, and my right arm still numb, but I somehow managed to lift the boy into my arms and carry him out of the basin where he lay. My steps were awkward and faltering; I feared that at any moment I would topple forward and do the child yet worse injury, but with frequent recourse to the support of the surrounding walls I made some headway out of the square and down the hill. Now I could see a sliver of the main road at the end of the alley, and I hurried as best I could to reach it. Although it was a cool day and I was still in the shade of the buildings, sweat began to sting my eyes and trickle down my nose; my beard itched unbearably. My arms and back too demanded that I pause, that I sit down and rest them if only for a minute, but I suspected that once the boy was on the ground I would never raise him up again. I cursed Sigurd and his heartlessness; I cursed Vassos and his Bulgarian thug, and I cursed myself for risking my commission with the palace just to carry a dying boy a hundred paces closer to death.

In a haze of pain and fury, I reached the road. There I succumbed, and collapsed against a stone which proclaimed I was exactly three miles from the Milion.

‘Are you well?’

I opened my eyes, which had drifted shut for a second. I was sitting at the edge of the Via Egnatia, my back supported by the milestone, with the boy’s head resting in my arms. His face seemed peaceful – more peaceful than the rest of his ravaged body, at least – but pale, and clammy. When I touched a hand to his cheek it was fearfully cold.

‘Are you well?’

I looked up to meet the insistent voice. It was a drayman, his face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, standing before a cart loaded with clay pots. He spoke in a kindly voice which, after a moment’s confusion, I answered.

‘Well enough. But the boy is in a perilous state. He needs a doctor.’

The drayman nodded. ‘There is a doctor at the monastery of Saint Andrew. I can carry your boy there on my cart – my journey passes it. I am going to the cemetery.’

‘I’m trying my best to avoid the cemetery,’ I said with feeling. ‘But I would be grateful to go as far as the monastery.’

We lifted the boy carefully onto the cart, laying him over the jars of incense and unguents, and set off, travelling as quickly as we dared without aggravating his wounds on the rutted road.

‘What are your perfumes for?’ I asked the drayman, thinking the least I could do was reward his help with conversation.

‘For the dead,’ he said solemnly. ‘The embalmers use them.’

We walked the rest of the way in silence, though mercifully it was a short enough journey. The drayman pulled his cart through the low arch of the monastery gate into a cloistered, whitewashed courtyard, and we laid the boy out on the flagstones. I gave the man two obols for his aid; then he left me.

A monk appeared and stared at me disapprovingly.

‘We are at prayer,’ he told me. ‘Petitioners are heard at the tenth hour.’

‘My petition may not wait that long.’ Too exhausted to argue more decisively, I merely jerked my thumb to where the boy was lying. ‘If the Lord will not hear my plea until then, perhaps your doctor will.’

It may have been a blasphemous suggestion, but I was past caring. The monk tutted, and hurried away.

The tinny bell in the dome of the church struck eight, and monks began streaming out of the chapel in front of me. All ignored me. I watched them pass with ever-mounting fury, until I thought I would roar out my opinion of their Christian charity to their self-regarding faces. But just then a new figure appeared, a servant girl in an unadorned green dress, with a silken cord tied around her waist. I was surprised to see her, for I would have thought the novices could do whatever chores she performed, but she seemed to have noticed me and for that I was grateful.

‘You asked for a doctor?’ she said, looking down on me with none of the humility or reserve expected of her sex and her station. I did not care.

‘I did. Can you find me one?’ I forsook the usual forms of courtesy. ‘This boy is dying.’

‘So I see.’ She knelt beside him to put two fingers to his wrist, and laid her palm against his forehead. Her hands, I noticed, were very clean for a servant’s. ‘Has he lost much blood?’

‘All you can see.’ One entire leg was cased in crusted blood. ‘And more. But fetch me a doctor – he will know what to do.’

‘He will indeed.’ She spoke as immodestly as her apparel, this girl, for she wore no palla to wrap her head and shoulders. Though truly, she could not be called a girl, I realised, for her uncovered face and bright eyes held a wisdom and a knowledge that only age can inscribe. Yet she wore her black hair long, tied behind her with a green ribbon like a child’s. And like a child, I saw, she showed no sign of obeying me, but continued to stare with the tactless fascination of the young.

‘Fetch me the doctor,’ I insisted. ‘Every minute brings him closer to death.’

At last my words showed some effect: the woman stood and looked towards an open doorway. But instead of hurrying away she turned, and with astonishing termerity began to upbraid me.

‘Make haste,’ she commanded. ‘You’ve carried him this far, you can carry him these last few paces. The monks here are afraid to touch the dying – they think it pollutes them. Bring him inside where we can wash his wounds and get some warmth into him.’

I was almost dumb with surprise. ‘Surely only the doctor will know if it’s safe to move him.’

She put her hands on her waist and stared at me in exasperation. ‘She will, and it is,’ she said curtly. ‘I am the doctor, and I say bring the boy inside so I can clean and bind his wounds before he slips beyond us.’ Her dark eyes flashed with impatience. ‘Now will you do as I say?’

With the colour of shame rising under the bruises on my face, I humbly obeyed. Then, when that was done, I fled to the palace.

ς

I had never seen the dungeons of the palace before, and I would not hurry to see them again. A guard led me down a twisting stair, deep underground, to a chamber lit only by torchlight. Massive brick piers rose out of the floor and arched overhead like the ribs of a great sea-beast, while on the walls between them hung scores of cruelly shaped instruments. In the middle of the room were a roughly hewn table and benches, where a group of Varangians sat and diced. Even seated, they had to take care to keep their heads from cracking on the black lamps above them.

Sigurd threw a handful of coins onto the table and looked up. ‘You’re here,’ he grunted. ‘Finished playing the Samaritan, have you?’

‘The boy’s with a doctor,’ I answered coolly. ‘Where’s the Bulgar?’

Sigurd tossed his head towards a low archway behind him. ‘In there. Strung up by his arms. We haven’t touched him yet.’

‘You shouldn’t have waited for me. His knowledge may be urgent.’

Sigurd’s face stiffened. ‘I thought the eunuch paid you by the day. Anyway, we didn’t wait for you – we waited for the interpreter. Unless, of course, you speak the Bulgars’ language?’

I shrugged my surrender, though Sigurd had already turned back to his game. He did not invite me to join it, and after a moment of awkward pause I retreated out of the lamplight into a dim corner. There I kept silent, and tried not to hear the dismal sounds drifting into the guardroom.

You could not measure time in that mournful place, but I must have spent almost an hour watching Sigurd’s humour rise and fall in balance with the number of coins in the pile before him. Then there came a sound from above, and I peered up the curling stair to see a constellation of tiny flames descending, dozens of lamps processing down like a swarm of fireflies. Slaves in silken robes held them aloft, unwavering despite the uneven ground beneath: they filed along the periphery of the vault until they were like an inner wall of shimmering silk and fire around us. At their tail came two who did not carry lamps, one in the crimson mantle of a priest; the other in a rich gown of blazing gold threads: Krysaphios.

All the Varangians were on their feet, the silver and dice swept invisibly into their pouches.

‘My Lord,’ said Sigurd with a bow. He wore humility clumsily, I thought.

‘Captain,’ answered Krysaphios. ‘Where is the prisoner?’

‘In the next room. Contemplating his wickedness alone. We need an interpreter.’

‘Brother Gregorias has devoted his life to the Bulgar tongue.’ Krysaphios indicated the priest beside him. ‘He has transcribed the lives of no fewer than three hundred saints for their edification.’ That, I thought, should give him the requisite vocabulary of torment. ‘If your prisoner has anything to say, he will decipher it.’

‘The prisoner will talk,’ said Sigurd grimly. ‘Once I’m done with him.’

We left the eunuch’s silent retinue in the main chamber, and stooping passed through a low tunnel into the adjoining cell. I followed Sigurd, Krysaphios and the priest Gregorias in. Here the air was closer and more unpleasant; but more uncomfortable still, I suspected, was the prisoner. His arms were hung on thick hooks above him in the ceiling, so that only his toes touched the floor: he swayed a little backwards and forwards, and moaned gently. His clothes had been torn away, leaving only a narrow strip of linen around his hips, and his wrists bled where the shackles bit into them so that he seemed to me uncannily like Christ in torment on his cross. I shivered, and banished that blasphemous thought immediately.

‘Demetrios.’ I saw Krysaphios staring at me. ‘You are the paid expert in these matters – find out what the man knows.’

I was an expert in quizzing petty thieves and informers in the marketplace, not tearing out confessions in the imperial dungeons. But before my patron I could not be seen to falter. I stepped forward and immediately found that I did not know where to look, whether to the priest or the prisoner. My eyes darted dumbly from one to the other, and I could mask my confusion only by crossing my arms over my chest and taking deep, contemplative breaths.

‘A monk hired you from a man named Vassos,’ I began at last, addressing the wretched Bulgar. No sooner had I spoken, though, than my thought was disrupted by the quiet monotone of the priest, intoning crude foreign syllables into the captive’s ear. I stammered a little, and began again.

‘Three weeks ago this monk contracted you to murder the Emperor. You were to use a strange device, a barbarian weapon they call a tzangra, to murder him in a public street, on the feast-day of the holy Saint Nikolas.’

There was a pause while I waited for the translation to catch up with the commanding gaze I had fixed on him. The priest went silent, and four pairs of ears were poised for an answer. Only the chime of Sigurd’s ringed armour broke the hush in the room.

The Bulgar lifted his face, and looked at us all contemptuously. He spoke one word, and none of us needed the priest to explain its meaning. ‘No.’

I sighed theatrically. ‘Ask him if he follows our faith,’ I told the priest.

The Bulgar ignored the question, but after some urging from the interpreter he acknowledged that he did.

‘Tell him, then, that he has sinned,’ I continued. ‘But tell him that Christ preaches forgiveness to those who confess their sins. Tell him that in Vassos and the monk he has served evil masters, masters who have betrayed him. We can help him.’

‘We can help him screaming to his grave,’ interrupted Siguard, but I waved him to be silent and hoped the priest would not translate his words. Nonetheless, I saw the Bulgar’s eyes dart towards the Varangian as he spoke.

‘As long as he stays silent, he will never escape this dungeon.’ Although the prisoner’s continued silence frustrated me, I was at least learning to speak over the constant murmur of the translation. ‘But the monk and Vassos are free to drink and whore and contrive their plots. Why should he suffer while men of far greater evil do not?’

There was a rustling of silk as Krysaphios stirred. ‘You do not seem to have his ear, Demetrios,’ he observed. ‘Or perhaps the finer points of your rhetoric are lost in the foreign tongue.’

I worried that none of my companions understood the time it takes to pry information from an unwilling informant, however helpless and confined he might be. Krysaphios must be accustomed to seeing his will executed immediately, not waiting for an immigrant criminal to choose to speak. I feared he would soon demand more corporal approaches.

‘Tell us how you attempted to kill the Emperor,’ I insisted, renewed urgency in my voice. ‘Tell us what the monk wanted, why he bought you to do this terrible thing.’

The Bulgar’s head had sagged while Krysaphios and I argued, but now he lifted it again. He opened his mouth and swallowed; I thought he would speak, and was about to call for water when – with a convulsive jerk of his body – he spat. There was little strength in the effort, and near as I was it still landed short of me.

I stepped backwards, and gave a tired sigh of frustration. This would take many hours, and they would feel all the longer for having Krysaphios at my shoulder.

Too long, it seemed, for one man: as the Bulgar’s spittle struck the floor, I heard a growl from behind me. With a single stride Sigurd had crossed to the prisoner and kicked his feet from under him; the Bulgar swung back like a pendulum, and screamed as the manacles bit deeper into his wrists. The cloth was ripped from his waist so that he hung naked and exposed, while Sigurd pressed his face very close to the man’s throbbing cheek. The axe glinted in his hands.

‘My friend Demetrios appeals to your sense and reason,’ he hissed angrily, not waiting for the interpreter to follow his words, ‘but I appeal to something to which you might actually pay heed. You tried to kill the Emperor, you Bulgarian piece of filth. You would have lifted a usurper onto the throne. Do you know what we do to usurpers in this kingdom?’ He let the axe slide like a razor over the man’s face. ‘We pull out their eyes and slice open their noses, so they are too deformed for any man to acclaim them Emperor.’ He stepped back thoughtfully, then almost casually drove a fist into the man’s taut stomach. He howled again and rattled in his chains. ‘Did you tell him that, priest?’

The interpreter nodded violently, trembling under Sigurd’s savage gaze.

‘Then tell him also,’ he continued, ‘that if we really want to be sure that the usurper will never trouble us again, we don’t stop with his face. Oh no.’ He laughed malevolently. ‘We take away his manhood, make sure that he’ll be forever barred from becoming Emperor, and barred from inflicting any vengeful bastards on us either.’ He took his axe in both hands and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘Of course you could never have sat on the throne, Bulgar, but perhaps I should practice for when I catch the man who would. Shall I do that? Shall I turn you into a eunuch? Condemn you to playing the bitch if ever you want the least pleasure again in your miserable life?’

He glanced down below the prisoner’s waist, and allowed derision to enter his face; I shot a quick glance at Krysaphios, but his smooth face remained wholly opaque. ‘I could make you quite valuable,’ Sigurd said with a leer. ‘Not like some Armenian boy whose parents have simply squeezed his balls back where they came from. I can turn you into a carzimasian, as pure as a girl with not a shred of your flesh remaining. You’d fetch a higher price then than you ever did as a mercenary.’

He affected to tire of his monologue and fell silent. Even the priest, who had translated every word, seemed to be shivering: I think Krysaphios was the only one of us who did not cower at Sigurd’s threats. Certainly the Bulgar was paying attention, his eyes fixed in terror on the evil curve of Sigurd’s axe which jerked and twitched bewitchingly as he spoke. The axe which was now raised as high in the air as the dungeon would allow, hovering over Sigurd’s shoulder like a vengeful angel waiting to strike.

‘No,’ I protested, but my mouth was dry and the words barely scraped forth. And too late: the axe swung down in a flashing arc and struck thick sparks from the stone floor; the prisoner screamed like an animal and thrashed about in his chains. Fresh blood ran down his wrists and the priest yelped in horror. But no blood fountained from the Bulgar’s groin, and no gruesome lump of flesh was lying limp on the floor. The axe must have passed inches before his body.

Sigurd lifted his blade from the stone and eyed it curiously. ‘I missed,’ he said, surprised. ‘Shall I try again?’

He had to kick the priest to translate this, but even before he had spoken a torrent of words began to spew out of our prisoner. The shock of his near emasculation had shaken something loose within him: he sobbed and ranted as though a demon possessed him, and I was glad of the chains which restrained him. Only after much soothing talk, and after Sigurd had retreated well into a corner, did he slow his speech enough that the translator could make sense of it.

His name, he said, was Kaloyan. Yes, he had worked for the pimp Vassos, mostly collecting debts and beating girls who no longer wished to work for him, sometimes protecting them from men who became angry or refused to pay. Occasionally he would do something else, something more dangerous, for Vassos was a man with ambitions and he enjoyed the thought of having a private army. Mostly, though, they were a ragged bunch of former soldiers and strongmen, who drank and brawled with each other when not called upon to fight professionally. Until, that was, the monk arrived.

‘Describe him,’ I said tersely, my fingers clutching the hem of my tunic in anticipation.

‘He cannot,’ answered the translator after a brief exchange. ‘He says the monk always wore a hood, always, even in the forest.’

‘In the forest?’ I realised I was disrupting the story. ‘Never mind. What did the monk want?’

‘The monk wanted five men. The pimp provided them, Kaloyan was one. He took them to a house in the forest, where for two weeks he trained one of them in the use of a strange weapon, a barbarian weapon the like of which Kaloyan had never seen.’

‘Was it a tzangra?’ I asked, describing it as best I could.

‘Yes,’ said the interpreter. ‘Just so. It could shoot through steel. Kaloyan wanted to try it, but the monk guarded it jealously and let no-one but his apprentice use it. Once one of Kaloyan’s companions tried to steal it while the monk was sleeping. He did not leave the forest alive.’

‘So Kaloyan was not the assassin.’ I could not know whether to be elated or confused by how close I had come. ‘Does he know the one who was?’

I saw the Bulgar shake his head weakly. ‘He never knew him before,’ the priest confirmed. ‘Vassos found him somewhere in the slums.’

‘Did the monk say what he purposed with the weapon? Why he went to so much trouble to train another man in its use?’ My questions were coming faster now, for every word the Bulgar spoke demanded explanation, and the frustration of the long pauses while the interpreter spoke first with the prisoner and then formed his phrases was beginning to wear on me.

‘The monk never told them his purpose, and he did not welcome questions. All he said was that he had a powerful enemy whom he wanted removed, and he could not do so himself.’

Another thought struck me. ‘So if he trained only one of them in the use of the tzangra, what were Kaloyan and the others for? Did he fear for his safety?’ Did the monk have other enemies of whom we knew nothing?

‘Not for his own safety.’ The interpreter puzzled at something the Bulgar had said. ‘He was afraid that the apprentice would flee away if he had the chance.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Surely the monk paid well enough, if he could afford a quartet of bodyguards.

An even longer pause. ‘Because of his age. He was little more than a boy, the Bulgar says, and wild, untameable.’

I heard the ringing thud of metal on stone as an axe-head fell to the ground. The interpreter flinched; the Bulgar screamed, though it was only Sigurd dropping his weapon. It was some moments before there was calm again, and all that time I strained with a burning impatience to ask my final question.

‘A boy?’ I said at last. ‘The assassin was a boy? Has the Bulgar seen him since?’

It seemed an age while my words were echoed into the Bulgar tongue, then while the interpreter frowned in concentration at the long answer he was given. He curled a finger through his beard and eyed me nervously, sensing the importance that had settled on this last question, though in no way understanding it.

‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘He did see him again. He says he tried to kill him this morning.’

ζ

I was running out of the dungeon almost before the priest had spoken, out past the blank ranks of lamplit slaves, up the twisted steps, and into the mercy of the cool air in the courtyard above. There were shouts and footsteps behind me but I did not care: I had held the assassin in my arms only hours ago, had saved him from an almost certain death. I looked about at the great columns enclosing me like a giant cage, and realised I did not even know my way out of the palace.

‘Where did you take him?’

I spun around to see Sigurd emerging from the stair behind me. He was breathing heavily, though still could hold his axe with a single hand.

‘To a monastery.’ I hesitated, suddenly thinking what he might do to the boy who had tried to kill the Emperor. Of course a murderer deserved death – but I had saved his life, and I had not shaken the soldier’s superstition that you buy a man’s life only with a small piece of your own.

‘Which monastery?’ Sigurd demanded. ‘Christ! The boy might already be gone. There’s no time.’

‘The monastery of Saint Andrew. In the Sigma district.’

‘Follow me.’

His armour jangling like shackles, he led me at a run through the corridors of the palace. The scribes and noblemen we passed stared but said nothing; no guards challenged us. Doors opened before us as if by some unseen hand, and sometimes it seemed that a room which I had seen cast in darkness as we approached was bathed in light when we arrived. Then the lamps became scarcer, the stairs steeper. There was little life in this part of the palace, and that, mostly furtive-faced slaves scurrying past with their eyes cast down. I hastened to keep close to Sigurd.

At length the columns and marble floors gave out and we came into a low tunnel. Sigurd nodded to the brick vaults above our heads.

‘The hippodrome.’

We passed under it in silence, our footsteps mute on the sandy floor. There was a gate at the end and Sigurd had the key: beyond it I could hear sounds of life, of laughter and labour, and smell the warm odour of horses.

‘Hipparch!’ bellowed Sigurd. ‘Hipparch! We need two horses, saddled and bridled.’

‘Late for your mistress again?’ A tall man, elegantly dressed, stepped into the square of the stable yard.

‘At least I have a woman, you horse-fucker.’ Sigurd clapped him on the shoulder. ‘But she will have to wait.’

The hipparch raised his eyebrows. ‘So urgent? I have two mounts awaiting the logothete’s dispatches.’

‘Then the dispatches can wait too. Send a boy to the chamberlain and tell him we’ve gone to the monastery of Saint Andrew, in Sigma.’ A thought struck him. ‘You can ride, can you, Demetrios?’

I could, although galloping a horse bred for the imperial post through the darkening streets of the megapolis was not something I was practised in. It taxed all my luck and concentration merely staying upright on the beast, and it was a mercy that with the day ending the crowds were gone, and that the emerging watchmen had the wit to retreat into the arcades as Sigurd and I thundered past.

We arrived at the monastery, Sigurd sliding off his horse and crossing swiftly to the gates. They were locked, but the butt of his axe-shaft was soon pounding out notice of our arrival loud enough to reach the ears of the dead in the distant necropolis.

A small door set within the gate cracked open a finger’s breadth.

‘Who’s there?’ Suspicion and fear had driven all trace of sleep from the speaker’s mouth.

‘Sigurd, captain of Varangians and guardian of Emperors. You keep a boy with you who I need to see.’ Sigurd shouted the words like a challenge in the arena.

The monk, to my surprise, found sufficient moral indignation to resist.

‘The monastery is closed for contemplation and prayer. You may return in the morning. No-one passes the gate during the hours of darkness.’

‘I have almost lamed two of the logothete’s finest horses to come here.’ Sigurd was working himself into a powerful frenzy. ‘I will not now sit on your doorstep.’ Without warning, he lifted his boot and slammed it into the wooden door; there was a yelp of pain as it swung inwards.

We stepped through, Sigurd scraping his shoulders on the frame. Inside a monk was rubbing a bruised shoulder, and cursing us with words that no man of God should know, but we ignored him as I led the way across the courtyard to the arched doorway where I had left the boy. Forestalling Sigurd’s axe, I knocked.

‘One day your patience will betray you,’ Sigurd fretted as we waited in the cold darkness. ‘If this doctor’s in there, let me call him out.’

‘One day you’ll knock down the wrong door,’ I told him, ‘and find so many enemies your axe will be blunted before you can kill all of them.’

Sigurd shrugged. ‘Then I’ll beat their heads in with the haft.’

‘And leave another to clean their wounds.’

We both looked to the door, which had silently opened to reveal the woman doctor to whom I’d entrusted the boy. She held a candle, and wore only a long woollen shift which left her arms and feet entirely bare. There were rises in the fabric where her nipples pressed against it: the sight of them stirred something within me, but the look on her face was of pure anger.

‘What do you mean by hammering down the monastery gates at this hour, and then calling me from my work? If you must profane the laws of God, you might at the least respect the business of healing.’

‘We seek the boy who was brought here this morning,’ said Sigurd, before I could offer an apology. ‘Is he here?’

She gazed at him contemptuously, while my heart raced to hear the answer. Had we come so close, only to be denied our prize by my compassion?

She tossed her head. ‘He’s here. He could hardly have left. He cannot stand, let alone walk. At the moment he sleeps.’

‘We must see him. Immediately.’ Sigurd’s voice was heavy with menace. ‘We come on palace business.’

Two flames were reflected back in the doctor’s dark eyes. ‘The Emperor himself cannot raise a sick boy to health simply by his command. The boy is feverish and delirious. At the moment he is sleeping, and that is probably the most wholesome thing he has done in a month. Unless you are the man who sliced so deeply into his leg, you would tremble to wake him.’

‘Lady, I am the man who stopped the Bulgar from killing him.’ Sigurd’s voice was loud now, and he stepped forward so that he almost touched her. She was minute before him, like Andromeda beneath the Kraken, but she did not waver.

‘No,’ she said. ‘While the boy sleeps, you wait.’

‘What if he escapes by the back door?’ Sigurd was in retreat, now, but he would not surrender until he was satisfied.

‘There is no back door, Captain – only two high windows through which you would struggle to fit your forearm. Good night.’ And blowing out the candle, she left us in darkness. On the far side of the door I heard a bolt shoot home.

Sigurd stood very still, staring at his axe where it caught the moonlight.

‘You can’t chop your way in,’ I warned wearily. I sat down on the step and leaned my back against the base of a column. ‘And the boy won’t move. What can we do but wait?’

Sigurd clearly had many ideas, but with a reluctant growl he at last laid his weapon on the stone floor and made a seat beside it.

‘We don’t move,’ he warned me. ‘And we don’t sleep. Anyone who comes out of that door before dawn will find my axe through their throat.’

I did not ask what would happen to me if I failed to stay awake.

I hesitated to talk with Sigurd after that, but when half an hour had passed in silence I risked the hope that the chill air would have numbed his anger a little.

‘Your zeal in defence of the Emperor is like something out of legend,’ I said quietly, thinking he could ignore me if he chose. ‘No wonder he prizes his Varangians so highly.’

‘Only the English.’ Sigurd stared moodily at his fist. ‘There were others in the guard, Rus and Danes and their sort, but he expelled them because he could not trust them.’

‘Why the English?’ I was genuinely curious: to me one fair-headed barbarian giant seemed much like another.

Sigurd grunted. ‘Because the English are the only men who will hate the Emperor’s enemies as if they were his own. I will tell you. Fifteen years ago, at a battle near Dyrrachium, the Normans trapped a company of Varangians in a church. At first they offered gold, and riches, if the English would desert the Emperor and join them in battle, for they knew of our fame in war, but the Varangians refused. Then they grew angry, and threatened to slaughter them to the last man if they did not surrender, but still the English defied them. So at last they set fire to the holy sanctuary where they had sought refuge, and razed it to the ground. Not one man escaped. We would rather the Normans burn us alive than surrender to them. That is how deep the hatred goes.’

‘But why? Why leave wives as widows, when they could have been safely ransomed after the battle?’

Sigurd leaned forward. ‘Because the Normans killed our king and stole our country. Their bastard duke tricked and lied his way onto our throne, then laid the land waste.’

‘When was this?’ He spoke with such a savagery that it could have been yesterday.

‘Thirty years ago. But we do not forget.’

‘You would have been a child thirty years ago, no more than five or six years old. The same as me.’

A sound from the door behind us broke off our conversation. Before I could even turn my head Sigurd was on his feet and lifting his axe, poised to strike. I had a flash of panic that he would behead some innocent monk attending a call of nature, but it was not a monk, nor yet the boy escaping: it was the doctor. She had wrapped a stola around her shoulders, covering the indecency of her shift, and held two steaming clay bowls in her hands. Had it been me, I thought, I would probably have dropped them in the face of a lowering Varangian, but she simply set them down on the floor before us.

‘Soup,’ she said. ‘I thought you might be cold. I did not want to find a pair of obstinate men with frostbite in the morning.’

Sigurd resumed his seat, and we tipped the hot food eagerly down our throats. The lady stood over us, watching, until we had wiped the bowls clean with the bread she gave us. To my surprise, she did not then retreat inside with them; instead she smoothed her skirts under her legs and seated herself on the steps between us.

‘It’s cold out here,’ I warned, my clouded breath illustrating my words.

‘Indeed,’ she agreed. ‘Too cold for two men to sit here all night keeping an unconscious cripple from wandering out of his bed.’

‘We do not merely guard against his escape. There are men out there who would ensure he never left his bed again, if they could reach him.’

‘And what do you want with him then?’ she pressed. ‘To offer him prayers to speed his recovery?’

‘Justice,’ said Sigurd harshly.

‘Tell me, how did you come to be a doctor?’ I interrupted, hurriedly pushing the conversation into less contentious grounds. ‘And in a community of monks at that? I am Demetrios,’ I added, aware that none of our unruly meetings had yet yielded an introduction. ‘This is Sigurd.’

‘I am Anna. And I am a doctor care of a wise father and a crass lover. My father taught me to read and learn the knowledge of the ancients – the texts of Galen and Aristotle. My lover, to whom I was betrothed, chose to abandon the marriage at the last minute. After that humiliation, none would marry me, so after the tears I chose this profession. I had friends who had suffered at the hands of incompetent surgeons, men who knew no more of a woman’s body than of a camel’s. I thought I could do better.’

She pressed her palms together, and in the moonlight I saw that despite her cloak she was shivering.

‘Do you think me shameless?’ she asked. ‘Telling near strangers my intimate history?’ She leaned forward. ‘I see a dozen patients a day, and every one of them asks me my story. You grow used to it.’

‘You could tell them you were inspired by the example of Saint Lucilla,’ suggested Sigurd gruffly.

Anna laughed. ‘Perhaps that would have been easier. As for the monks, their typikon commands them to provide a hospice with doctors who can minister to all the sexes. Usually there are two of us, but my colleague died last spring and they have not replaced him. So I do the work of two.’

I nodded. ‘And is that better than marriage?’

Again she laughed. ‘Mostly. Sometimes men propose it, but it is hard to be stirred by a man when you have searched the contents of his bowels for evil humours. The monks, of course, fear that I will pollute their thoughts, and keep their distance as much as they can.’

Probably they thought her a perfect succubus, hovering in their tormented dreams, but I did not say so.

‘And what of you?’ she asked. ‘The strange man who brings me dying youths in the morning, and demands them back in the evening. Do you work for the Emperor, like your companion?’

‘I work for myself,’ I said stoutly.

‘No man works for himself.’ I was surprised by the force of her statement. ‘Men work for greed, or for love, or for vengeance or for shame.’

‘Then I must work for greed, I suppose. And for other men’s revenge.’ I thought on this. ‘In this case, the Emperor’s.’

‘And how, Demetrios, did you become the angel of the Emperor’s vengeance?’

I gestured to the monastic walls around us. ‘I started in a place much like this, a monastery in Isauria. My parents sent me.’

‘Did the life of a novice agree with you?’

‘The food was plentiful, and regular. I had a taste for butter, which my parents could not provide, so I stayed.’

‘But not forever?’

I shook my head. ‘When I was fifteen I ran away to join the army. I wanted to kill Turks and Ishmaelites.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. The generals were too busy using their armies against each other, trying to put themselves on the imperial throne. The only chance I had to kill Turks was when we fought a lord who had hired them as mercenaries. I did not want to die with an arrow in my throat because our noble families had carried their feuds across the empire, so I went to work for myself. At least I could choose my causes. A merchant hired me to guard him and I failed, so to save my reputation I found his killers and killed them myself. Then I discovered others needed similar services.’

‘So you were a bounty hunter?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘Not a proud occupation, but a lucrative one. And as my name spread and my clients grew more illustrious, the burden of the work moved from exacting revenge to revealing the guilty. Clerks who stole from their masters, uncles who abducted their nieces and held them hostage, sons who killed their fathers for the inheritance.’

‘And how did your wife view your profession?’

I looked up sharply. ‘What of my wife?’

‘What of the ring on your finger?’

She pointed to my right hand, where I still wore the thin lover’s band I had first put on sixteen years ago. I had been nineteen, flushed with love and excitement and the weight of my first-earned coins in my pocket: I had insisted we go to the grandest goldsmith on the Mesi, though all my new riches afforded only the least of his jewellery. Later I found that he had swindled me even of that, that it was merely a cheap alloy coated with gold, but by then it was on my finger and I was too proud to take it off. Even now.

‘My wife is dead. She died seven years ago, haemorrhaging from her womb.’

Unexpectedly, Anna reached over and took my hand in hers, stroking it softly. ‘I’m sorry. I should not pry.’

‘You wouldn’t know where not to pry if you didn’t ask,’ I said struggling with the calm and discomfort I felt in her touch. There was a stab of disappointment when she let go.

‘Besides,’ I said. ‘I’m speaking too much.’ That was a rare complaint, but – like the touch of her hands – I was finding it at once unnatural and relieving. There was something about this woman’s confidence that invited confession. ‘Sigurd must be bored hearing me prattle about my past.’

We both looked over to him, and Anna stifled a giggle. It seemed I had indeed bored the Varangian, so much so that he lay with his head against the column, fast asleep.

I thought Anna would be cold, or tired, but she made no move to leave; we talked on through the night in hushed voices, until at length even my eyes began to drift closed. The pauses between my sentences lengthened, and once it was only a playful slap on my knee that kept me from joining Sigurd in the world of dreams. Anna stood, stretching her arms above her so that her body pressed tight against her cloak.

‘I should sleep,’ she said. ‘There will be other patients to see tomorrow, as well as the boy. There is a spare bed in the infirmary if you want to come in out of the cold, Demetrios.’

Though there was not the least implication of lewdness in her plain words, I still blushed.

‘What about Sigurd?’ I asked.

Anna leaned over and put the back of her hand against his cheek. ‘He’s warm enough.’

‘He comes from a frozen island at the edge of the world.’ I wondered why I stiffened when I saw her touch his face. ‘He probably grew up in castles built of ice.’

‘I’ll lay a few more blankets over him. He’ll come inside if he wakes up cold.’

Anna left me in the infirmary, having assured me that there were no lepers or plague-ridden unfortunates beside me. Huddling under the covers I was soon lost in dreams, until the cock crowed and the monks filed into their chapel, and Sigurd came thundering through the door swearing he would be delayed no more.

η

The boy lay motionless on his bed, wearing only a plain tunic over his bandages. A damp cloth was stretched over his forehead so that he looked almost like a corpse prepared for burial, though his blue eyes opened wide with fear when he saw Sigurd and me looming over him. I was disconcerted to see that I had slept in the bed next to his all night.

Sigurd frowned at Anna, who stood at the boy’s feet and showed no intention of leaving.

‘We won’t torture him,’ he said. ‘Just talk.’ He rubbed the back of his neck; I guessed it was stiff from a cold night on a stone pillow. ‘But there are things to say which you should not hear.’

To my relief, in all our talk the night before Anna had never pressed me for what we wanted with the boy. Now, though, she folded her arms across her chest and met Sigurd’s ill-temper square on.

‘You cannot talk to him,’ she told him. ‘Not without me.’

‘I will talk to him, lady, whether you want it or no.’ Fatigue and frustration did not sit well with Sigurd. ‘And if I say that you will not be part of it, then either you will go outside until I call for you, or I will have my men drag you down to the imperial dungeon to learn obedience.’ A dozen Varangians had come to the monastery at dawn, taking up stations at the doors and gates to the obvious alarm of the monks.

Anna hardened her grip on the bedstead. ‘And which of you speaks Frankish?’

Now both of us stared at her in confusion. ‘Frankish?’ I echoed. ‘Why should either of us speak Frankish?’ I could see from Sigurd’s silence that he no more knew the tongue than I.

‘Because if you don’t, you may as well talk to a fish. I spent all day with the boy yesterday, and all he spoke or understood was Frankish.’

‘And you, of course, spoke and understood it too.’ Sigurd’s face boiled with fury, but Anna simply shrugged.

‘Enough. So near to the gates I see many pilgrims in my work; many are Franks. A doctor who cannot get her patient to tell her their ailments is unlikely to work many cures.’

There was a hostile silence. Curse the monk, I thought, for employing this barbarian rabble of Bulgars and Franks. Whether he’d worked deliberately, or with the only men he could find, he had thrown every possible obstacle into our path.

‘We’ll take him to the palace,’ said Sigurd at last, his voice alive with anger. ‘One of the secretaries will speak Frankish. And we should keep the boy somewhere he can’t escape.’

‘If you move that boy, least of all into a prison, he will be dead before sunset.’ Anna was unmoved by Sigurd’s temper; indeed, she seemed to draw strength from it and breathe it straight back at him.

‘He should die anyway.’ Sigurd was now squeezing his fist around his axe-shaft, as if crushing a man’s neck; I feared that soon the violence in his words would manifest itself in his hands. ‘For his crime, death is the only justice.’

‘We do not want the boy to die.’ I spoke forcefully, glaring at Sigurd and Anna together. ‘If the doctor says we cannot move him, then we will not move him.’ I gestured around the room: its few windows were small enough that a bird could hardly have flown through them. ‘If we have a guard on the door, and another within, the boy will be safe from harm and barred from escape. Now as we have waited a long night to speak with him, and as every minute we waste gives time and aid to the Emperor’s enemies – with whom this boy is our only link – I propose we use Anna’s gifts immediately.’

Sigurd’s chest swelled so tight I thought he might burst free of his armour. He clashed the greaves on his forearms together, then slammed a fist onto the wooden table beside him.

‘I will go to the palace and find someone who speaks Frankish,’ he said, his voice brittle with bridled anger. ‘Someone trustworthy. What you choose to do before I return is your own business, Askiates, but you will answer for it alone.’

‘I will answer to the man who pays me,’ I said. I was growing bored of Sigurd’s rages, though I never imagined he did it in bluff. ‘And he does not pay me for dallying.’

With a final, derisive snort Sigurd stormed out of the room, berating his men for imagined inadequacies as he passed them in the courtyard. Then all was still: through the window I heard the low tenor of the monks’ liturgy.

I looked at Anna, shame clouding my face. ‘I apologise for his temper. He has too much faith in fists and swords, and a consuming regard for his duty.’

She gave a thin smile. ‘You’re not to blame. But if you want to make best use of your time, you had better leave too.’

‘What? Did you not hear what I told him? I need to speak with the boy immediately.’

‘You’ll learn more from the boy if you sit out there on the steps. Look at him. You and the guard have frightened him half to death – and death was already far too near for comfort.’

It was true. While we talked the boy had shrunk beneath his blanket, and now he clutched at the pillow like a mother. His eyes were clenched shut.

‘Tell me what you want to ask him,’ Anna insisted. ‘Tell me, then leave me alone with him.’

For a moment I hesitated, searching her face for signs of treachery. Could I trust her? If word escaped that a boy had come within a hand’s breadth of murdering the Emperor, and was now quartered here in the monastery, there would be uproar. None of us would be safe, myself not least. But by facing down Sigurd I had committed myself – and my trust – to Anna: she would have to know all, unless I wanted him to return triumphant. That was not something my pride would admit.

With a deep breath and a pounding heart, I told Anna everything. The assault on the Emperor; the pimp Vassos; Kaloyan the Bulgar and the strange monk who employed him; and how we had found the boy. I even told her about the tzangra, the barbarian weapon of miraculous strength, for I was particularly eager to learn what the boy knew of it. When at last I had finished I took her advice: I walked outside, staved away the suspicious glances of Sigurd’s guardsmen, and settled myself on the steps in the fresh morning air. There I waited.

Anna reappeared before Sigurd, thankfully. She smiled her greeting, but much of the playfulness had gone from her face, and she grew more serious still as she began to speak. I listened with few interruptions, prompting her only for the occasional detail. The story was dismally unexceptional, almost mundane, and I had few doubts that whatever the constraints of her language, it was in essence the truth. Only one facet of it struck me as false, and I had Anna go back and press the boy until I was satisfied with his answer. Then I rose to leave.

‘Won’t you wait for your friend?’ Anna asked. ‘He should be back soon.’

Or not. I doubted he would have the loan of any more of the hipparch’s beasts after the use we had given them in the night.

‘I think it would be wiser to leave. There are elements of the boy’s story I must investigate.’ And it would irritate Sigurd immeasurably to find me gone. ‘I suppose Sigurd will tell you exactly what he demands, but on no account let him take the boy away from here.’

Anna bared her teeth. ‘Let him try.’

‘Good.’ The boy was too valuable to be left in the care of gaolers and torturers, and wounds like his would rot into his bones in the foetid dungeon air. Nor could I shake off the mounting sense that part of my life was now invested in his.

‘I will be back this evening, or maybe tomorrow.’

‘I shall look forward to it.’

Strangely warmed by those parting words, I left the monastery and hastened towards the city, keeping off the main road to avoid any encounter with Sigurd. I visited the docks, the workshop of Lukas the fletcher, and a man who sold me three withered gourds; then I retired to the fields near the western walls, where I passed the afternoon straining my shoulders and frightening a watching flock of crows. Finally, weary but satisfied, I made my way back to the palace.

Aelric, the grey-haired Varangian, was at the gate; he smiled when he saw me.

‘It’s as well you came to my door, Demetrios. Your name has been spoken often in the palace today, and rarely with favour.’

‘Sigurd?’

‘Indeed.’ Aelric shifted the weight of his axe a little. ‘He swears you are an agent of those who would harm the Emperor. That is, when he does not curse you for a mercenary intent only on impoverishing the treasury.’

I snorted; I had heard enough gibes about money. ‘And why does Sigurd fight for the Emperor? Is he a Roman, fighting to preserve his ruler and his nation? No. He fights for the same motives as all the other Patzinaks, Turks, Venetians and Norsemen in our legions: gold, and glory. Many would say they were the only things worth fighting for.’

A dark look crossed Aelric’s lined face. ‘Do not doubt Sigurd’s devotion to Byzantium, Demetrios. He takes the gold and cherishes his glory, as every warrior should, but he loves the Emperor like a monk loves his God. If the Emperor was hemmed in by countless hosts of enemies, and all was lost, Sigurd would be the last man left standing beside him – whether there was gold to pay him or not. Of how many Turks and Patzinaks could you say that?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘A believer may be blessed, but a zealot is dangerous – and his love too easily turns against itself. Anyway, I came to speak with the chamberlain, Krysaphios, not with Sigurd.’

‘You have a gift for him, do you?’ Aelric peered at the bundle I held under my arm. It was broad and flat, and wrapped about with sackcloth; it might have been a painted icon, though it was not.

‘Something he will want to see,’ I said. ‘If I am not banned from the palace for wanting to keep valuable witnesses alive until they have told their tale.’

Aelric nodded. ‘Krysaphios will see you.’

With a last suspicious glance at my package, he opened the gate and led me within the palace. Again we passed through myriad courtyards and burnished chambers, but it was different to my last visit: now none of it felt quite so magnificent as it had before. The splash of the fountains seemed quieter, the perfumes in the air less fragrant, the faces on those we met more tightly drawn.

I never saw Aelric speak to anyone, but Krysaphios was waiting for me. He stood where we had last met, in a colonnade lined with the marble heads of antique dynasties. His lips were thin with anger, and even before I had crossed the open square he met me with sharp words.

‘The Varangian captain swears you have done great mischief, Demetrios. You were hired to discover the Emperor’s would-be assassin, not hide him in the sanctuary of a monastery. If, indeed, this barbarian catamite is truly the one we seek.’

I had had enough of this sort of talk for one day. Without deigning to reply, I pulled the sacking from my bundle, lifted it to my shoulder and pressed on the lever. The eunuch’s eyes widened in terror as he guessed my purpose; he prostrated himself on the floor in an undignified sprawl, as – with a humming crack – the bolt from my weapon sprang into the air. It went many paces wide of him and struck a bust, shattering the stone face into countless broken fragments.

I could hear the running footsteps of guards behind me, but I had made my point. I lowered the weapon, and spread my arms wide in innocence.

Krysaphios raised himself to his feet, his shimmering robes creased and streaked with dust, his golden hat knocked crooked. His smooth face was ridged with fury.

‘Do you presume to enter this sacred place and murder me?’ he shrieked. ‘Shall I have you chained in the dungeons, for the torturers to tear you apart inch from inch? How dare you aim such a weapon at me, I who sleep at the feet of Emperors and guide the fate of nations? You might as well turn it on my master himself.’

‘Did you shit yourself?’ I had intended my antic to get his attention, but now we were both beyond the control of our feelings. ‘This is the weapon which was turned on your master, which came within a hand’s breadth of breaking open his skull like that marble head. I, Demetrios, discovered it. Just as I discovered the boy who wielded it against the Emperor four days ago. If you think a barbarian berserker would have done so well, one who would sooner slice off men’s heads than hear their secrets, then employ him next time.’

I turned my back and looked to the bronze doors. A line of Varangians – not Sigurd, thank God – barred it, their axes raised before them. Suddenly I wondered if I had not made a terrible miscalculation.

‘Demetrios.’

Krysaphios’ call stilled me, but I kept my gaze away from him.

‘Demetrios.’

The timbre of his voice was moderated now; he seemed to have mastered his anger. Reluctantly, I turned to face him.

‘You cannot expect to shoot your bow at the parakoimomenos and see me laugh it off as a jest.’ He may have subdued the violence in his voice, but it still burned in his face.

I smiled a grim smile. ‘Believe me, eunuch – if I had shot my bow at you, you would have breath neither to laugh nor curse.’ I lifted a hand to quell his retort. ‘And nor would I, I know. I do not threaten you; I merely comment on the miraculous accuracy of this foreign weapon, this tzangra. And its awesome strength.’

Krysaphios looked to the shards of statue on the floor by his feet. ‘That was the Emperor’s mother,’ he chided me. ‘Carved from a relic of antiquity. He will be displeased.’

‘He would be more displeased if it had been his head the arrow struck.’

I walked forward to Krysaphios and held the bow out for his inspection. It was an extraordinary weapon, much as the Genoese merchant had described it in the tavern, yet somehow more elegant and more lethal in form. Curved horns arced out like wings from the end of a shaft, which was carved at its butt to fit snug in a man’s shoulder. There was a channel routed down the middle to grip the short arrow, and a levered hook behind it to hold the string taut. As I had discovered with my gourds that afternoon, it was wondrously easy to learn to aim it, but a wrench on the shoulders to nock the bowstring. No wonder the assassin had only been able to loose one shot.

‘And you found this with the boy?’ Krysaphios plucked at the string, but could scarcely move it. ‘Sigurd did not tell me that.’

‘The boy had hidden it near the harbour. He told me where it was and I retrieved it.’ What he had really told me, at least at first, was that he had thrown it into the sea, but I refused to accept that he would discard so priceless a weapon. ‘He calls it an arbalest.’

‘And how did he come by it?’ Krysaphios’ tone was urgent now; he paced the tiled floor restlessly, kicking at bits of the broken statue with his toe.

‘The boy spoke only Frankish; I had his story through an interpreter. There were many things she did not understand, or could not make understood, but I think I have the bones of his story. He came here as a pilgrim some time ago; with his parents, I think, though they are dead now. After their death he survived in the slums by thieving and begging as he could. Then, a month back, a man found him and offered gold to accompany him. He was led to a meeting with a monk, who took him with four Bulgar mercenaries to a villa deep in the forest. For two weeks there the monk trained him in the use of the arbalest – as you have seen, it takes to men’s hands with miraculous ease. When they returned, he was told to climb atop a building on the Mesi and murder the Emperor as he passed. Yesterday he received a message that he should collect his payment by a certain fountain, but as he arrived he was attacked by a Bulgar and almost killed. There we found him.’

‘Why the boy? Why use him for this task when four stout mercenaries were at hand? Surely they would have been more suited to wielding this weapon?’

I had pondered the same question through the afternoon. ‘There are places a boy can go unnoticed where full-grown men would be challenged. Many children played on the roof of the carver’s house – one other making his way there would have aroused no suspicion. And after the event, he would have been easier to be rid of.’

Krysaphios seemed satisfied with my theory, though he said nothing. Instead, he raised a finger on his right hand and a slave appeared from behind a column.

‘Send word to the gaoler. Tell him to extract from the Bulgar prisoner everything he knows of the boy; also the location of this villa in the forest where he was trained. It may be that this foreign monk still has business there.’ The slave bowed low and ran off, and Krysaphios turned back to me. ‘Did the boy describe the monk?’

‘He said he had dark hair, like mine, but tonsured. His nose was crooked, as if he had once brawled, but the rest of his features were square and harsh. He said they spoke the same tongue. I did not press him more, for he was still weak from his wounds. I thought there would be time for that later.’

‘Less time than you think.’ Krysaphios folded his arms. ‘A great danger is approaching our city, Demetrios, and when it breaks over us we will need all our strength to defy it. If we do not find this monk within the fortnight, he may work a mischief that will ruin us all. The Emperor is the head atop the body of our nation, and if he is gone we are merely a carcass before carrion.’

‘What danger?’ Krysaphios had spoken almost as though the seven angels had sounded their trumpets, and the ten-horned beast was risen to engulf us. ‘Are the Normans coming again? I have not heard the armies assembled on the Hebdomon, nor seen the Emperor ride out to war. Surely if such a terrible danger was near, he would go to meet it, not invite it upon us?’

‘The nature of the threat, and how the Emperor forestalls it, are not your concern,’ said Krysaphios darkly. ‘You should address yourself to finding those who would kill him.’

‘I have.’ No eunuch was going to unsettle me with dire mutterings, and I have ever bridled at being told I am unworthy of knowing tantalising secrets. That, perhaps, is why I took up my profession. ‘I have found the boy who would have played the assassin, and the weapon he used in the attempt. By doing it so promptly, I have even saved your purse a little.’

‘My purse is deep enough. And do you really think you have succeeded, by finding a frightened boy and his barbarian plaything? What of the monk? Do you think this was a mere whim of his, and that having failed he will now trudge back to Frankia? He had money enough to buy four bodyguards, a villa and this marvellous weapon – did he collect that from alms-givers? And what would he profit from the death of the Emperor? Someone must have supplied him the money – someone who would gain much if the throne was empty. Someone who is unlikely to change his mind because his first attempt failed.’ He snorted. ‘You have not discovered anything, Demetrios: you have but picked up the first link in a long and tangled chain. Will your pride allow you to drop it so soon?’

He may have had a woman’s voice and a cripple’s body, but his mind and tongue were those of a serpent. And he knew men’s hearts: I would not give up his commission, for I saw as well as he that it was barely started. To claim success now would be to mimic the physician who removed the leper’s arm and declared him cured. But I would not concede that too easily.

‘If I am to continue, I will need certain accommodations. The Varangians must obey me when they accompany me. The boy must be left in the care of the doctor at the monastery where he currently lies: our chain may be twisted, but he is the only link we hold and it is a fragile link. And you must confide in me . . .’

I broke off as a slave came running out of the shadows, the same slave whom Krysaphios had sent to the dungeon. He did not defer or hesitate, but fell to his knees immediately before the eunuch.

‘Mercy, Lord,’ he stammered, before even given leave to speak. ‘The gaoler has opened the Bulgar’s cell. He is dead.’

The Bulgar still hung by his wrists, as I had seen him the day before, but now his chin was slumped on his chest and his legs sagged under him. The front of his tunic was washed through with blood, almost as far down as his waist, and when I tipped back his head I saw why. Someone had taken a blade to his throat and opened his neck across almost its entire width. No air bubbled from the hanging flaps of skin, and my hand came away dry.

‘The blood is hard,’ I said. ‘This was done some hours ago, maybe even last night. Has no-one been in here since then?’

‘He was to go without food all day. To spur his appetite for answering questions.’ Not even this horror could take the sting completely from Krysaphios’ voice.

‘No-one entered after your lordship left him,’ said the gaoler. And the Varangians guarded him all night.

I turned to Krysaphios. ‘It seems you were the last one to see him alive, then. After Sigurd and I had left for the monastery.’

‘Not the last, Demetrios.’ The eunuch’s eyes were cold. ‘Surely a man of your powers can see that unless he was a most accomplished acrobat, the Bulgar did not do this to himself. And the weapon which did this is gone. Whatever you say to the contrary, gaoler, someone has been in here.’

‘Someone who wanted to ensure that the Bulgar could betray no more secrets,’ I agreed. ‘And someone who wanted to send us a message.’

‘A message? Other than that he wanted the Bulgar’s silence?’ Krysaphios was impatient.

‘A message that the palace is no defence, that he – whoever he is – can strike wherever he pleases. If he had wanted to do it in stealth, he could have taken the Bulgar down from his chains and left the knife beside him, to make it seem he had killed himself. Whoever did this walked in under the eyes of the guards. And wants us to know he can do so again.’

Krysaphios turned to the Varangian who stood in the doorway. ‘Find your captain and have him double the Emperor’s guard tonight. Then search the palace grounds – it may be that this assassin is still hiding in our midst.’

I had my doubts, but kept them silent. ‘What about the boy?’ I prompted. ‘If our enemies feared for what the Bulgar might reveal, how much more must they worry about the boy?’

‘Sigurd is keeping the watch at the monastery, and has more men than he needs for the task. You may join him if you wish.’ Krysaphios moved towards the low-arched door. ‘I must tend to the Emperor.’

‘I will go home.’ It had been two days since I had seen my daughters, and though there had been other nights when I did not return, it always troubled them. And me. ‘Tomorrow I will see what further mysteries the boy can reveal.’

‘If he lives. Remember, Demetrios, we do not have much time to untangle this conspiracy. Two weeks before the danger is upon us.’ Krysaphios gave the dangling body a final, searching look. ‘Perhaps even less.’

Still I did not know what looming evil might force this urgency. But if it could draw such a tremor into the voice of Krysaphios, the eunuch who slept beside Emperors and guided nations, then I knew that I, too, feared it.

θ

My daughters were uncommonly restrained when I returned home: Helena was in her bed and would only mumble when I looked in on her, while Zoe prepared me some cold vegetables with inconsequential chatter. At breakfast the next morning, however, I felt the full force of Helena’s censure.

‘You neglect your duties as a father,’ she complained. ‘What if a Norman marauder had come in the night and snatched me away? What if I had used your absence to elope with the blacksmith’s son?’

‘What of it? You didn’t. And my first duty is to put bread in our bellies.’ I chewed noisily on my breakfast to emphasise how seriously I took my obligations.

‘If you are never here to protect me, you could at least trouble yourself to find me a man who will.’

‘I’d rather have the bread.’ Zoe bit into her own slice, and winked at me across the table. I tried to force a stern look, to rebuke her for antagonising her sister, but I fear I lacked conviction.

‘The spice-seller’s aunt came to visit yesterday, to discuss her nephew,’ continued Helena imperiously. ‘And the day before. I think she despairs of ever finding you.’

‘She may never come again,’ Zoe added. Her face was solemn. ‘Then you’ll be a spinster forever, Helena, condemned all your life to sit at your loom and weave. Like Penelope.’

I swallowed the crumbs in my throat. I knew that the spice-seller’s family had been making enquiries after Helena, and that I should have approached his mother to bargain for her dowry, but there rarely seemed to be the time for it. ‘If the spice-seller’s aunt comes again and I am away, you have my permission to agree a dowry with her.’

‘And what if I agree something extravagant? What if she claims her nephew to be the most expensive gold can buy, and I acquiesce?’

‘Then,’ I said, wiping my mouth, ‘you will be grateful that I worked so hard I could afford it.’

There are men I know who eat separately from their womenfolk; many authorities, indeed, damn the practice of commingled meals as an invitation to strife and discord. If I heeded them I would be lonely indeed, but there are times when I wonder if I would benefit from a greater respect for tradition.

At the very least, though, it prepares me for encounters with argumentative women. Such as I found when I reached the courtyard of the monastery of Saint Andrew.

‘You cannot see the boy, and you certainly cannot remove him.’ Anna, the doctor, stood with her hands folded across her chest and her feet set apart. Her hair was tied back under a plain linen scarf – more modest than I had seen before – but she still wore her green dress. The silken belt rode high on her hips and plunged in a ‘v’ between them, drawing my eye immoderately low, and it was that which unsettled me as much as her uncompromising tone.

‘Is he near death?’ That did not bear contemplation.

She tossed her head. ‘Do you have so little faith in my skills, Demetrios? Do you think a woman cannot – or should not – exercise the gift of healing?’

‘Women hold the gift of life; I should think healing is a paltry business to master after that.’

‘Your Keltic friend does not think so.’ She gestured to Sigurd, who stood with three of his men by the door glaring at every monk and novice who passed. ‘I have heard him talking.’

‘He’s a barbarian. But if you have healed the boy, I need to speak with him.’ I had determined that I would seek out the villa in the forest, where the monk had trained the boy. ‘Is he fit to ride a horse?’

Anna stared at me with open scorn. ‘Two days ago he was almost hacked to pieces; today you want to know if he can ride a horse? If he tries hard, he can just drink a little thin soup. There is only one being who could heal him as quickly as you want – and I have the monks in the chapel begging His intervention.’

‘Then at least let me talk to the boy.’

‘You can talk to him when he’s recovered.’

I swung round. It was not Anna who had spoken, but Sigurd; he had ambled down from his station by the door and was eyeing me with disapproval.

‘Sigurd?’ His intervention caught me unguarded. ‘Yesterday you threatened to drag Anna to the dungeons because she would not let us see the boy. I thought you were as eager as I to finish this business.’

Sigurd conceded nothing, did not even blush. ‘Thomas is too valuable to be pushed beyond himself, Demetrios. Our task is urgent – so urgent that we cannot risk losing him.’

I scowled, for I did not think he had decided on all this for himself. And I did not like the thought of Anna and he conspiring together against me. It made me feel betrayed. And, unjustifiably, jealous.

It would have been hard enough to haggle my way past Anna, for there was something in her manner which deterred all argument; against her and Sigurd I was impotent.

‘I will return tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you will have managed to work your cure. Maybe even as well as a man,’ I added, spitefully.

I regretted those final words – and the furious anger in Anna’s face that had met them – all the way to the docks. Of course I cared not an iota that she was a woman and a doctor: I had only wanted to sting her, as her alliance with Sigurd had stung me, just as Zoe used to poke Helena until she screamed when they were babies. My motives were just as childish.

With my foul mood thus firmly set, I passed my morning with merchants and factors, with stevedores, foremen and pilots, in a far-fetched attempt to discover when and how the tzangra had entered the city. The smells of fish and sewage which infested the wharves soured my humour still further, as did my predictable failure to turn up any new information. Whores propositioned me – perhaps, even after so many years, there was something of the soldier still in my stride – and peddlers begged a moment of my attention for their wares: perfumes just arrived from India; honey from the bees of Epirus; relics of the saints found in the desert, preserved so immaculately that they might have lived yesterday. I came perilously close to breaking the fast with a man furtively carrying a wineskin under his cloak, but I resisted. I had no need for more reasons to rebuke myself.

The clamour and hassle battered me all morning, until at last I broke. I dredged Krysaphios’ list of dignitaries from the corner of my mind where I had ignored it, and considered the names it held. Another lesson of my time in the army: if you make no progress with the task appointed, do it precisely the way your superior commands. Half the time at least, he will care far more for obedience than success.

Earlier in the week, I had tried to start with the lowest rank on the list and been resoundingly shunned; this time I would go to the opposite extreme. The name rose easily from my memory, and my peevish temper found grim delight in the prospect of an afternoon wallowing in righteous frustration. Nor did I need to ask where he lived: on a day when my every question drew a negative, even I could probably find the Emperor’s elder brother.

He did not live humbly, of course, but in a palace built out on terraces over the wooded hillside above the harbour. It had once belonged to a man named Botaniates, who had had the misfortune of being Emperor when the Komnenos brothers – Isaak and Alexios – decided the imperial diadem would suit one of them better. Alexios took the throne; Isaak got the house, though from the size of it you might have thought he had won both.

To my surprise, my name alone took me past the first gate, and into an atrium where dozens of hopeful supplicants played at dice on the flagstones. Many of the games looked well advanced, and I feared I would lose more than a few obols before my time arrived, but almost immediately a slave in an ochre tunic ushered me through a narrow door and into an inner courtyard, beyond the envying glances of the less favoured.

‘I will tell the Sebastokrator you have come,’ he said, excusing himself.

I paced around the courtyard, waiting. A two-tiered arcade ran around its edge, but I saw no-one in the galleries. The only light came from a square of grey sky high above me, distant and remote, but a little sun must have crept in at times, for a vine had managed to climb some way up the northern side. Its thick stem coiled around the marble pillars, branching and spreading across the face of the wall as if desperate to escape into the air above, while the withered leaves it had shed were left unswept on the cracked tiles below. I doubted the Sebastokrator spent much time here. It was a mournful place, silent and sombre.

Except in one corner. Most of the walls were crumbling and faded, but here there was a bright mosaic, newly laid and vivid even in the dull half-light. Still alone, I crossed the broken floor to look closer. It was a striking work, a triptych of bold colours whose subjects seemed to leap from their gilded background. The subject was unusual, too. In the first panel, a white-bearded man watched as a woman held a fair-haired baby to her breast; sheep grazed in the background, and three angels sat at a table laden with fruits. The second, central panel was a dramatic contrast: now the old man stood with his arms aloft, a firebrand in one hand and a knife in the other, poised to strike the helpless child bound before him on a wooden table. His eyes were wide with a terrible fervour as he stared out at his unseen audience, and by some trick of the artist the knife seemed to stretch forth from the picture, reaching almost into the air above me. A young boy with dark skin and tousled hair stood beside the man; despite the horror of the scene he witnessed, he seemed to be laughing.

The violence of the image was mesmerising, but I pulled my gaze away and looked on to the third panel. Now harmony was returned, and the old man’s eyes were kindly again. He had wrapped his arm around the fair-haired son and was pointing him towards green hills in the distance. The sheep had returned, and the angel was blowing on a trumpet in the clouds. But it was not all innocence, I saw, for in the lower corner of the picture the tousle-headed boy was fleeing into darkness, his face cast down and a scorpion pricking at his bare heels.

‘Do you like the mosaic?’

I started; for a second I thrilled with the fancy that the voice had come from the very picture itself. Then I turned, and saw that a new arrival had crept up behind me. He was shorter than I and a little older, with light hair and a thin beard. There was something martial in his thick arms and broad shoulders, but he was dressed simply in a white dalmatica. He seemed an unlikely clerk – but too forward for a slave.

‘It paints a vivid picture,’ I answered. So vivid, indeed, that it still addled my thoughts. ‘So real it might almost draw the censure of the church. The artist must have a singular talent.’ I considered it again, still unsure of whom I spoke to. ‘But the subject confuses me.’

‘It tells the story of Abraham and his sons.’ My companion pointed to the first panel. ‘Here he and Sarah rejoice at the birth of their son, Isaak, prophesied by angels when all thought Sarah barren. In the second picture, Abraham is poised to sacrifice Isaak, as the Lord commanded to test him. Finally, Abraham embraces Isaak as the future of his line.’

Much of that I had guessed, but elements of the iconography confused me. ‘Who is the dark-haired child who looks on in the middle image, and flees away at the last?’ I asked.

‘The child is Abraham’s bastard son, Ishmael, born to him by the slave-woman Hagar. In the last picture he is cast out by Abraham, expelled into the wilderness.’

I shivered, for suddenly the images seemed every bit as dangerous as the wild-eyed man wielding the dagger. I did not need Krysaphios’ familiarity with palace gossip to guess its meaning, still less in the very house of the Sebastokrator Isaak, whose father had overlooked him for the imperial throne in favour of his younger brother. Merely to think that he, like Abraham’s rightful heir, might eventually be restored to his inheritance at the expense of his brother was almost certain treason. I wondered whether the Emperor Alexios had visited this room in his brother’s palace.

But I had little time to think on allegory, for my host had stepped away to examine some detail in the picture, and as he moved his white gown rode up over his ankles to reveal a pair of mismatched boots. One was black, but the burnished leather of the other – identical in form – was unmistakably red.

Only one man in the empire wore red boots, and only a handful of others had the right to wear a single such boot in honour of their kinship with him. In an instant I was prostrate on my knees, touching my forehead to the floor and reciting the imperial incantations like a liturgy. I had seen too many pretenders and usurpers to believe that any man deserved the abasement that ritual demanded, but never had I imagined I would stand in the Sebastokrator’s palace discussing the merits of his artist. I fastened my eyes on the floor, and prayed he had not taken offence.

‘Get up, Demetrios Askiates.’ To my untold relief, there was amusement in his voice. ‘If I had wanted your oblations, I would have met you wrapped in my jewelled lorum, and with pearls dripping from my crown, so that you could not have doubted my rank. I wished to meet you as a man, not a slave.’

‘You expected me, Lord?’ I had never had to address such an exalted man before, and I struggled for the correct forms. I suspected his deliberate informality had its bounds.

‘For the past three days. I had word from the palace that you were engaged to discover the brigands who tried to murder my dear brother, the noble Emperor. I greatly hoped to speak with you.’

‘Why, Lord?’

‘The bureaucrats and slaves at the palace would withhold things from me, Demetrios. That is how they keep their fingers mired in power. But some facts are too important to serve merely to buttress the pride of eunuchs – facts regarding the safety of my brother, for example. We Komneni trust in our own, for who else will protect with the ferocity of kin?’

Clearly his trust was not shared with Krysaphios, for there were six of the Emperor’s siblings, and a scattering of his cousins and children on the eunuch’s list.

‘Kinsmen can be jealous,’ I observed. Whatever the factions at the palace, I was here to test Isaak for treachery, not to confide in him. ‘Absalom led an army against his father, King David. Simeon slaughtered Shechem and all his kin. And as Cain, not every man is his brother’s keeper.’

Isaak spun about. ‘And do not forget that Shadrach was cast into the furnace because he refused to obey his lord. I summoned you because I am my brother’s keeper, Demetrios Askiates; I share all the burden of government with him, and I must know if he is in danger.’

‘A wicked man might think you had cause to hate him.’ I was walking the precipice here. ‘That you nursed an injury that your father chose him, rather than you, his eldest son, to take the throne. Such a man might – mistakenly – approach you, hoping to enrol you in his conspiracy, to play on the bitterness he presumed.’

Isaak spread his hands wide, unconsciously emulating the towering figure of Abraham in the mosaic behind him. ‘Bitterness? That was fifteen years ago, and it was agreed by all the leading families that my brother Alexios was the better candidate. I would need a deep heart indeed if I was now still able to squeeze bile from it.’

‘And no-one has tried to whisper otherwise in your ear? None have hinted that if you coveted the throne, they might help you get it?’

‘None until you.’ Isaak pursed his lips. ‘No, Demetrios, there are always flatterers trying to persuade me that my station is inadequate to my merits, but they say so only because they think it is what I would hear, because they think that if I did strike against my brother they too would gain by hanging on to the hem of my robe. I ignore them, and try to keep them from crossing my threshold.’

If that was so, then he had made a strange choice for his mosaic. But I had pressed the Sebastokrator too far already to impugn him further.

‘You do not think any of these sycophants might intend genuine mischief?’

‘No. None of them would chance raising his own hand against the Emperor simply for the right to sew a few more rubies onto his robe, or to win another farm in Scythia. Who would risk the ultimate crime, the ultimate punishment, unless he stood also to win the ultimate reward?’ He must have seen the suspicion flare in my eyes. ‘Yes, you say: I could win the ultimate reward. But I do not want it.’

‘Do you know any who do?’

‘The Emperor’s daughter Anna, my niece, is recently come of age, and is betrothed to the heir of the man whom my brother deposed. He might feel he has a double claim to the throne, through both father and father-in-law, and he is of an age when men are often the victims of overwhelming impulse. My brother-in-law Melissenos once coveted the purple and had himself proclaimed Emperor, before recognising that he could not contend with me and my brother.’ Isaak tipped back his head and laughed at the incomprehension on my face. ‘Too many names for you, Demetrios, all twined and tangled together? There is not one of the great families which has not touched the purple at some time or another, and we marry each other with indecent frequency. Even if you confined your search only to those with a claim to the throne, you could fill the Hall of Nineteen Tables three-fold with them. Now tell me what you have found, so that I can inform my brother. The bastard eunuch tells him nothing.’

‘The bastard eunuch pays my wages,’ I retorted. Then, foolishly provocative: ‘If the Emperor wishes to hear what I have found, and cannot get it from his chamberlain, then he can summon me himself.’

I looked hesitantly at the Sebastokrator, wondering whether I had given too great an offence. His face was cold, certainly, but not malicious.

‘You clearly understand little of the ways of the palace,’ he said curtly. ‘Do not think that merely because my brother is the Emperor, he can do as he pleases. He is hemmed in by a thousand petty restraints: traditions, protocols, conventions, precedents and promises. He is no more a free man than the slave who rows his barge. His power is brittle, and faces threats far more subtle than an assassin’s arrow. He cannot be seen to antagonise his counsellors by usurping their authority.’

‘No more can I.’ The Lord God knew I had no allegiance to Krysaphios, but his world was murky enough; I dared not stray into realms of betrayal.

The Sebastokrator Isaak pursed his lips. ‘You disappoint me, Demetrios Askiates. I had heard that you, uncommonly among men, were prepared to drive your own path. To know when the call of a higher authority befitted a judicious confidence. Clearly I was wrong.’

Without awaiting an answer he turned and marched out, ignoring the hurried bow I thought it wise to offer. As I brushed the dust off my knees, I wondered whether I had made my first enemy within the palace. It was a discomfiting thought.

ι

The following day I again wanted to take the boy Thomas to the forest, but again Anna refused. Likewise the next day, and if there was one consolation to the delay, it was that I made steady progress through Krysaphios’ list of nobles. As I had expected, I learned nothing from them, but at least my obedience muted the eunuch’s criticisms when I reported to him. I contemplated travelling to the forest without the boy, trying to find the place where the monk had trained him by description alone, but the answers the boy gave my questions were so vague I doubt I could have found my own feet by them. And on the third day Anna sent word – grudging, even in the mouth of the novice who bore her message – that the boy was sufficiently healed to travel.

We left before dawn. Sigurd and his company of Varangians met me outside my house, their horses’ flanks steaming in the cold air. Father Gregorias accompanied them, for it appeared the little priest spoke Frankish as well as Bulgar, and had been co-opted into accompanying us as our translator. On the empty street corners the Watch still prowled, enforcing the curfew, but they stepped back respectfully as our cavalcade cantered past, offering hurried salutes to these barbarians riding out of the dawn mist.

We stopped at the monastery. A dozen Varangians fanned out in a half-circle around its gate as Sigurd and I dismounted to fetch the boy. A handful of monks straggled across the courtyard, perhaps collecting the night soil from the cells, but otherwise no-one moved. I was tense, scanning every rooftop and architrave for unexpected movement, for I had grave misgivings about taking the boy out of his seclusion and into the public thoroughfares beyond. It would be many months before I forgot the sight of the gash across the Bulgar’s throat, and whether it had been the work of the elusive monk, his agents, or some higher power, I did not think they would rest while their failed assassin lived in captivity. But I had spent three days fruitlessly antagonising merchants and nobles: if the boy could lead me to the house where he and the monk had trained, then perhaps there I would find something to guide my search. And I did not want to cause Anna undue risk.

Anna was already awake, wrapped in a heavy, woollen palla and bustling about purposefully with a small chest of medicines.

‘This is the salve to rub on the wounds,’ she told me, pointing to a small clay pot. ‘And in this bag are clean bandages. You should replace them after each day’s riding. There’s some bark in there as well for him to chew on if the pain is too great. If you find fresh water in the forest, you can rinse his leg with it.’

I scowled; the early hour, a lack of food, and the tension of the moment had soured my stomach. ‘I have fought in a dozen battles,’ I reminded her, ‘and seen men march twenty miles after them with worse wounds than the boy’s. I do not need lessons in field medicine.’

She ignored my petulance. ‘Sigurd knows my instructions; he can see to Thomas. And keep him well fed. He needs to regain his strength.’

‘Indeed.’ Although I did not wish the boy ill, the last thing I wanted was for him to be restored to full health while we travelled. If he escaped, I doubted either of us would long survive it.

All this time the boy had stood mutely in a corner. Anna had found him a monk’s coarse tunic, which sat high on his tall frame, and a thick cloak; now she kissed him on the cheek, pulled up a fold of the cloak to mask his face, and pushed him gently towards me.

‘You’ll want to hurry,’ she said, peering out of the open door. ‘The sun will be risen soon.’

That thought had been uppermost in my mind too, yet I delayed a moment further in the unlikely half-hope that I too would merit a kiss. I shook my head in wry reproval. I was thinking like an adolescent, I chided myself, not like a grown man, a father and a widower.

I led the boy outside. He did not resist as I slipped rope manacles over his wrists and tied them fast, leaving enough slack between them that he could steady himself in the saddle. My horse was nervous, perhaps absorbing my mood, and I patted her neck to try and calm her fidgeting as Sigurd effortlessly hoisted the boy up so that he sat before me. I glanced about, ever wary of danger, for now shutters were beginning to be thrown back, and figures could be seen moving behind the windows. I looked at the boy in front of me and imagined him squinting down the stock of the tzangra from the ivory-carver’s rooftop as the Emperor’s retinue processed past. Was there another man, even now, taking the same sighting?

I kicked my horse over to where Sigurd conferred with Aelric.

‘We’ll make for the gate of Charisios,’ he announced. ‘It’s the fastest way.’

‘Too obvious,’ I argued. ‘They may be watching it. We should take the gate of Saint Romanos, and cross the river further upstream.’

Sigurd glared at me. He had a leather sling for his axe, I noticed, hanging from his saddle just before his knee. ‘They? Who are your they? Do you think we face an army of darkness with spies on every corner? A lone monk and a handful of Bulgar mercenaries cannot be everywhere.’

‘If we delay any longer they will find us without trying. Krysaphios agreed that in matters of practicality, my decision would prevail. We go to Saint Romanos.’

Sigurd pulled back on his reins, and rapped a fist against his bronze greave. ‘This is what prevails, Demetrios: the power of a man’s arm. If our enemies await us, let them come.’

‘Your arm will be as feeble as your armour against the weapons these men wield, unless we meet them at a time of our choosing. Have you spent so long tramping the corridors of the palace, Sigurd, that you’ve forgotten the importance of reconnoitring your adversary?’ I spurred my horse forward, before he could retaliate. To my relief, I heard the clatter of hooves following on behind me.

We rode as swiftly as I dared with the invalid boy on my horse, through the dirty light and waking streets of the morning, until we reached the gate of Saint Romanos. At the sight of Sigurd the guards waved us through, and soon we were out in the broad fields which stretched away from the walls. The harvest was long since gathered in, but teams of men and boys were there with their oxen, ploughing under the old year’s stumps and chaff. The rising sun was wan through the grey clouds, but the unaccustomed effort of riding soon had me pulling my cloak back off my arms, and then bundling it into a saddlebag altogether. We had slowed our pace to avoid aggravating Thomas’s wounds, and I could enjoy the freshness of the morning as I tried to ignore Sigurd’s lowering bulk ahead of me. He had not spoken to me since we left the monastery.

The jangling of iron to my left turned my head, and I saw that Aelric had come up beside me. Despite his fading hair and his lengthening years, he sat comfortably in the saddle, humming something I did not recognise.

‘You’ve upset the captain,’ he said, breaking off his tune. ‘He’s a warrior – he doesn’t care to be reminded that he’s as much the Emperor’s ornament as his huscarl. Parading to impress ambassadors and nobles sits uncomfortably on him when he’d rather be killing Normans.’

I glanced nervously forward, but either Sigurd could not hear or would not show it. ‘I’ve heard he has no love for the Normans. He told me they stole your kingdom – as they stole the island of Sicily from us, and would perhaps have taken Attica if the Emperor had not defied them.’

Aelric nodded. ‘Thirty years ago, they came, and even the mightiest king that ever ruled our island could not resist them. Sigurd was only a child then, but I was a man, and I took my place in the king’s battle-line.’

‘You fought the Normans?’ Though there was yet a wiry strength in Aelric’s arms, it was hard to imagine this genial grandfather hammering foes with his axe in the mountains of Thule.

‘I fought their allies,’ Aelric corrected me. ‘The Normans conspired to invite a Norse army into the north, while they skulked in the southern sea which divides our island from their country. We fought two great battles by the rivers of the Danelaw; we lost the first but won the second. As the Norse king discovered, it’s only the last battle that matters.’

I was already lost, for he seemed to make as many fine distinctions between Norsemen and Normans and the Northmen of Thule as the ancients once made between their feuding cities. But they must have been distinct in his own mind, for he continued without hesitation.

‘That second battle, that was a warrior’s day. I killed seventeen of them myself, yet while a single man stood they would not leave the field. Even Sigurd remembers it.’

I craned my head back in my saddle. Sigurd was riding in silence immediately behind us, an ill humour still written across his face.

‘You were there?’ I asked, braving his antagonism. ‘But if it was thirty years ago, you must have been too small even to lift an axe.’

Sigurd lifted his chin contemptuously. ‘I carried an axe at an age when you probably slept in a crib,’ he informed me. Then, too proud to resist the story: ‘But I was there at the battle. I was only six, but my father, who fought for our King Harold, brought me there and left me under a tree behind our line.’

‘Sigurd saw more of it than most,’ Aelric interrupted. ‘More than us who couldn’t even see our elbows for all the death about us.’

‘I remember I saw the banner of their king, Harald the Land Waster, held aloft when all his army was routed.’ Sigurd’s rough voice was strangely wistful now. ‘His bodyguard hacked and parried all who came, marooned in a sea of English warriors. When he fell they fought on, and when at last the fighting was done and our men came to retrieve his body, they first had to pull away seven corpses who had fallen protecting him. Later I discovered that they learned their war craft here, in Byzantium, serving as Varangians.’

Normans and Norsemen, and now two King Harolds: was it just that the barbarian words all sounded alike to my unfamiliar ear, or were they all named identically?

‘I thought you said the Normans stole your kingdom. Yet now you say you eventually defeated them.’

‘We defeated Harald and the Norsemen in the north,’ said Aelric. ‘But a week later William, bastard duke of the Normans, landed on our southern shore. We marched the length of the country and brought him to battle, but we were too weary and they fought with the desperation of men without retreat. They killed our king, and took his throne. As I said, the last battle is the only one that matters.’

‘So you fled their victory, and came here?’

‘Not immediately.’ Aelric paused a moment to scratch his grey beard. ‘For three years the Bastard contented himself despoiling the south, gorging his accomplices with morsels of our land and fastening his grip on power. Then he came north. Some of our lords who had pledged themselves to him rebelled, but too late: they could not withstand the army he led, and one by one they were destroyed, or surrendered. The Bastard turned the fertile country along that coast into a wasteland: bodies lay in the streets by their thousands, and some of the living grew so hungry they gnawed on the bones of the dead. There was not one village or field that he did not raze to the ground, not one ounce of food he did not tear up and burn before our eyes. Then he invited the Danes to come and ravage our shores, so that those few shoots of life which had survived the first devastation were uprooted and consumed. After that there was no life left in the north: a man could ride through the wilderness for days, and never hear a single voice but his own. That was when I came to Byzantium.’

‘And I too.’ Sigurd’s face was pale under his bronze helmet, and his eyes twitched as if beyond his sway. ‘The Normans came to our village one evening; they killed my father and entered his house. All through the night I could hear my mother and my sisters screaming, and at dawn they were dead. I could not even bury them, for the Normans turned our home into their pyre. I was taken away by my uncle, first to Caledonia, then across the sea to Denmark, and at last, by way of many roads and rivers, to this city.’

He wiped a gauntleted hand over his cheek, then grasped his axe just below the head and pulled it from its sheath.

‘You see these notches, Demetrios? These are the number of the Normans I have killed since then.’ He snorted. ‘Or at least, the number I have killed since the last haft snapped from all the wood I carved out of it.’

‘It could still be worse,’ Aelric observed. ‘Look at the eunuch.’

‘Which eunuch?’ I asked, failing to understand his meaning.

‘The chamberlain, Krysaphios.’

‘What of him?’ In his dress, his manners, his language, he seemed as pure a Roman as I had met. ‘He did not come from Thule, did he?’

It was an innocent question, but Aelric and Sigurd laughed so loudly in response that their horses bucked and shied in alarm. ‘From England,’ Sigurd repeated. ‘Why, Demetrios, do you see a resemblance to us?’

I thought of the eunuch with his smooth, olive skin and hairless face, next to these blistered, shaggy, blue-eyed giants. ‘Not much.’

‘Krysaphios had his own encounter with the Normans,’ Aelric explained, subduing his merriment. ‘When he was a young man, he lived in Nicomedia.’

‘It was Malagina,’ Sigurd interrupted.

‘I heard Nicomedia, but it does not matter. It was in the reign of Michael Ducas, more than twenty years ago. One of the Emperor’s Norman mercenaries named Urselius proved treacherous, as is their habit, and turned against the man who paid him. He took many of the Asian provinces before he was finally captured, and during his rising there was much looting and barbarity. The rumour I have heard is that one night some of Urselius’ Norman army captured Krysaphios, then just a boy, and took him to their camp.’ There was no humour in Aelric’s face now. ‘When they released him in the morning, he had become a eunuch.’

It was not the first time I had heard such a story, for I knew that the western barbarians found the third sex at once fascinating and repellent; that many derided us for our reliance on them, and believed our whole race to be tainted by their manlessness. It needed little imagination to think what torment a gang of mercenaries, filled with drink and such beliefs, might effect on a hapless prisoner. If that had been the ordeal Krysaphios suffered, I could only admire the will he must have had to turn it to his advantage, to attain the rank he now enjoyed.