Tim Severin - King's Man

At the great Forum of Amastration we wheeled left, and half a mile further on the cortege entered the Via Triumphalis. Normally an emperor processed along this broad avenue to the cheers of the crowd, at the head of his victorious troops, as he displayed captured booty and files of defeated enemy in chains. Now Romanus was carried in the opposite direction in a gloomy silence broken only by the creaking wheels of the carriage which carried his bier, the sound of the horses' hooves and the muted footfalls of hundreds upon hundreds of the ordinary citizens of Constantinople, who, simply out of morbid curiosity, joined in behind our procession. They went with us all the way to the enormous unfinished church of Mary the Celebrated that was Romanus's great project, and where he was now the first person to benefit from his own extravagance. Here the priests hurriedly placed him into the green and white sarcophagus which Romanus had selected for himself, following another curious imperial custom that the Basileus should choose his own tomb on the day of his accession.

Then, as the crowd was dispersing in a mood of sombre apathy, our cortege briskly retraced its steps to the palace, for there was no a moment to be lost.

'Two parades in one day, but it will be worth it,' said Halfdan cheerfully as he shrugged off the dark sash he had worn during the funeral and replaced it with one that glittered with gold thread. 'Thank Christ it's only a short march this afternoon, and anyhow we would have to be doing it anyway as it's Palm Sunday.'

Halfdan, like several members of the guard, was part-Christian and part-pagan. Superficially he subscribed to the religion of the White Christ — and swore by him — and he attended services at the new church to St Olaf recently built near our regimental headquarters down by the Golden Horn, Constantinople's main harbour. But he also wore Thor's hammer as an amulet on a leather strap around his neck, and when he was in his cups he often announced that when he died he would much prefer to feast and fight in Odinn's Valholl than finish up as a bloodless being with wings like a fluffy dove in the Christians' heaven.

'Thorgils, how come you speak Greek so well?' The question came from one of the Varangians who had been at the palace gate the previous day. He was a recent recruit into the guard.

'He licked up a drop of Fafnir's blood, that's how,' Halfdan interjected. 'Give Thorgils a couple of weeks and he could learn any language, even if it's bird talk.'

I ignored his ponderous attempt at humour. 'I was made to study Greek when I was a youngster,' I said, 'in a monastery in Ireland.'

'You were once a monk?' the man asked, surprised. 'I thought you were a devotee of Odinn. At least that is what I've heard.'

'I am,' I told him. 'Odinn watched over me when I was among the monks and got me away from them.'

'Then you understand this stuff with the holy pictures they carry about whenever we're on parade, the relics and bits of saints and all the rest of it.'

'Some of it. But the Christianity I was made to study is different from the one here in Constantinople. It's the same God, of course, but a different way of worshipping him. I must admit that until I came here, I had never even heard of half of the saints they honour.'

'Not surprising,' grumbled the Varangian. 'Down in the market last week a huckster tried to sell me a human bone. Said it came from the right arm of St Demetrios, and I should buy it because I was a soldier and St Demetrios was a fighting man. He claimed the relic would bring me victory in any fight.'

'I hope you didn't buy it.'

'Not a chance. Someone in the crowd warned me that the huckster had sold so many arm and leg bones from St Demetrios that the holy martyr must have had more limbs than a centipede.' He gave a wry laugh.

Later that afternoon I sympathised with the soldier as we marched off for the acclamation of our young new Basileus, who was to be pronounced as Michael IV before a congregation of city dignitaries in the church of Hagia Sophia. We shuffled rather than marched towards the church because there were so many slow-moving priests in the column, all holding up pictures of their saints painted on wooden boards, tottering under heavy banners and pennants embroidered with holy symbols, or carrying precious relics of their faith sealed in gold and silver caskets. Just in front of me was their most venerated memento, a fragment from the wooden cross on which their Christ had hung at the time of his death, and I wondered if perhaps Odinn, the master of disguise, had impersonated their Jesus. The Father of the Gods had also hung on a wooden tree, his side pierced with a spear as he sought to gain world knowledge. It was a pity, I thought to myself, that the Christians were so certain that theirs was the only true faith. If they were a little more tolerant, they would have admitted that other religions had their merits, too. Old Believers were perfectly willing to let people follow their own gods, and we did not seek to impose our ideas on others. But at least the Christians of Constantinople were not as bigoted as their brethren further north, who were busy stamping out what they considered pagan practices. In Constantinople life was tolerant enough for there to be a mosque in the sixth district where the Saracens could worship and several synagogues for the Jews.

A hundred paces from the doors of Hagia Sophia, we, the members of the guard, came to a halt while the rest of the procession solemnly walked on and entered the church. The priests had no love for the Varangians, and it was customary for us to wait outside until the service was concluded. Presumably it was thought that no one would make an attempt on the life of the Basileus inside such a sacred building, but I had my doubts.

Halfdan let my company stand at ease, and we stood and chatted idly among ourselves, waiting for the service to end and to escort the acclaimed Basileus back to the palace. It was then that I noticed a young man dressed in the characteristic hooded gown of a middle-class citizen, a junior clerk by the look of him. He was approaching various members of the guard to try to speak to them. He must have been asking his questions in Greek, for they either shook their heads uncomprehendingly or ignored him. Eventually someone pointed in my direction and he came over towards me. He introduced himself as Constantine Psellus, and said he was a student in the city, studying to enter the imperial service. I judged him to be no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, about half my age.

'I am planning to write a history of the empire,' he told me, 'a chapter for each emperor, and I would very much appreciate any details of the last days of Basileus Romanus.'

I liked his formal politeness and was impressed by his air of quick intelligence, so decided to help him out.

'I was present when he drowned,' I said, and briefly sketched what I had witnessed.

'You say he drowned?' commented the young man gently.

'Yes, that seems to have been the case. Though he actually expired when he was laid out on the bench. Maybe he had a heart attack. He was old enough, after all.'

'I saw his corpse yesterday when it was being carried in the funeral procession, and I thought it looked very strange, so puffed up and grey.'

'Oh, he had had that appearance for quite some time.'

'You don't think he died from some other cause, the effects of a slow-acting poison maybe?' the young man suggested as calmly as if he had been discussing a change in the weather. 'Or perhaps you were deliberately called away from the baths so someone could hold the emperor underwater for a few moments to bring on a heart attack.'

The theory of poisoning had been discussed in the guardroom ever since the emperor's death, and some of us had gone as far as debating whether it was hellebore or some other poison which was being fed to Romanus. But it was not our job to enquire further: our responsibility was to defend him from violent physical attack, the sort you block with a shield or deflect with a shrewd axe blow, not the insidious assault of a lethal drug in his food or drink. The Basileus employed food-tasters for that work, though they could be bribed to act a sham, and any astute assassin would make sure that the poison was slow-acting enough for its effect not to be detected until too late.