Tim Severin - King's Man

The heavy infantry and the armoured cavalry were the last to leave. For their departure the Basileus himself attended the ceremony. It was a brilliant spectacle. The four palace regiments collected their battle standards from the church of St Stephen and the church of the Lord after the flags had been blessed by the priests, then formed up to march along the Triumphal Way. In front of them rode the heavy cavalry, coloured pennants fluttering from the tips of their lances. Each trooper wore a padded surcoat of heavy felt over his armour, and his horse was similarly protected with a jacket of stiffened leather and a mail breastplate. They looked formidable. Finally came my old regiment, the Palace Guard, on foot and surrounding the Basileus on his charger. They would proceed only as far as the Golden Gate, where the emperor would say farewell to his troops, then the Palace Guard would return with the Basileus to the Palace to carry on their duties.

Michael himself looked sickly, his face grey with fatigue and strangely bloated. I was reminded of the appearance of his predecessor, the murdered Romanus, at his funeral, which was the last occasion on which the Guard had marched along the Triumphal Way. Then there had been near silence. Now, as the imperial army set out for war, there was music. For the only time in my life I heard an orchestra on the march — drums, pipes and lyres — even as I wondered if I was seeing history repeat itself, and Basileus Michael was being slowly poisoned in some sort of labyrinthine court intrigue.

I left for Italy by sea a week later with Harald and his war band. Once again Harald's Norsemen had been assigned to serve as marines, perhaps because they had won fame for their actions against the pirates, but also as a reprimand for their Norse obstinacy about conforming to the army rule book. The result was that for the next two years we were given only a peripheral role in the campaign to regain a former jewel of the empire — the great island of Sicily.

Our enemy were Saracens from North Africa. For more than a century they had ruled the island after overrunning the Greek garrison. They had established a thriving capital at Palermo, and from their Sicilian bases they raided the empire's province of southern Italy and, of course, their ships menaced the sea lanes. Now the Basileus was determined to drive back the Saracens and restore Sicily to his dominions. George Maniakes, promoted to the rank of autokrator, was the man to do it.

He began with an invasion across the straits at Messina. Harald's war band was there to protect the southern flank of the landing, so I was a witness to the expertise of the imperial troops. The light cavalry had been rehearsing for weeks, and the attack went flawlessly. They arrived off the landing beach soon after dawn in specially built barges. Ahead of them three shallow-draught dromons, packed with archers, cruised up and down the shallows, forcing back the Saracen cavalry which had assembled to deny the landing. When the imperial landing craft touched land, the sailors lowered the sides of their barges, and the light cavalry, already mounted, clattered down the ramps. They splashed through the shallows, formed up and charged up the beach. The Saracens turned and fled. For the next ten days a steady stream of transports, barges and warships shuttled back and forth across the straits, bringing more troops and supplies, and very soon an imperial army of ten thousand men stood on Sicilian soil.

Maniakes himself crossed over on the fourth day. It was a measure of his professionalism that he saw no need to indulge in heroics by leading the attack. He and his general staff went ashore only when his command headquarters had been set up, ready to receive him. It was there, when he called a war council of his senior officers, that I first laid eyes on him.

There are times, I believe, when the Gods play tricks on us. For their amusement they create situations which otherwise would seem to be impossible. Trdat had told me that the ancient Gods of the Greeks did the same, and relished the results. The meeting between Harald of Norway and George Maniakes was one of those moments which we ordinary humans describe as coincidences, but I believe are mischievously arranged by the Gods.

How else, I ask myself, could two men so similar have been brought together, yet each man be so unusual that he was unique. Harald, as I have described, was a giant, half a head taller than his colleagues, arrogant, fierce and predatory. He struck fear into those who aroused his anger, and was a natural leader. George Maniakes was identical. He too was enormously tall, almost an ogre with his massive frame, a huge voice, and a scowl that made men tremble. He also radiated absolute authority and dominated his surroundings. When the two men came face to face for the first time in the imperial command tent, it was as if no one else was in the room. They loomed over everyone else. Neither man could have imagined he would ever meet someone so like himself, though one was blond and the other dark. There was a long moment of surprise, followed by a pause of calculation as the two men took the measure of one another. Everyone saw it. We sensed that they made a temporary truce. It was like watching two great stags who encounter one another in the forest, stop and stare, and then cautiously pass one another by, neither challenging the other, yet neither giving ground.

Harald's war band, it was confirmed at the council, was to patrol the Sicilian coast and make diversionary attacks on Saracen settlements. Our task was to discourage the local Saracen commanders from sending reinforcements to their emir, who could be expected to mass his forces near Palermo and come westward, hoping to drive the imperial army back into the sea. To meet that attack, Maniakes and the tagmata would march inland and seize the highway which linked Palermo with the wealthy cities of the east coast. Once the highway was under imperial control, Maniakes would turn south and march on Catania, Augusta and the greatest prize: Syracuse.

The Gods arranged another coincidence that day which, in its way, was a foretaste of what was to come for me and for Harald. Harald, Halldor and I were leaving the council tent when we saw four or five men coming towards us on foot. From a distance they looked like Norsemen. Indeed at first we thought they must be

Varangians; they certainly seemed to be Varangian in size and manner. We took them to be volunteers who had recently arrived from Kiev or from the lands of the Rus. It was as they drew closer that we saw differences. For one thing they were clean-shaven, which was unusual. For another their weapons and armour were not quite what we ourselves would have chosen. They carried long swords rather than axes, and though their conical helmets were very like our own, their chain-mail shirts were longer, and the skirt of the mail was split in the middle. It took a moment to understand that these warriors were dressed for fighting from horseback, not from ships. Our two groups stared at one another in puzzlement.

'Greetings! To which company do you belong?' Halldor called out in Norse.

The strangers stopped and eyed us. Clearly they had not understood Halldor's question. One of them answered in a language which, by its tone and inflection, I recognised. Yet the accent was so strong that I had difficulty in understanding. Several words were familiar, though the meaning of the sentence was confused. I summoned up the Latin that I had learned as a lad in an Irish monastery and repeated Halldor's question. This time one of the strangers understood.

'We ride with Herve,' he said in slow Latin. 'And you?'

'Our commander is Harald of Norway. We have taken service in the army of the Basileus.'

'We also serve the Basileus,' the warrior replied. 'They call us Frankoi.'