Tim Severin - King's Man

I was on the verge of making this decision when Pelagia emerged from the gynaeceum. She was marvelling at the luxury with which Zoe had surrounded herself, yet dismayed by the tedium of life within the women's quarters. 'They eat their meals with golden forks in there,' she said, 'but the food must taste like the ashes of the living dead.' Her remark, following so closely on my thoughts about my dilemma, made me wonder if, by taking the more comfortable path, my life would become a hollow shell; and whether, should Pelagia ever learn that I had abandoned my deeply held ambition, she would blame herself.

Even so, perhaps I would have stayed in Constantinople had not Loki strained at his bonds. There was a shaking of the ground on the evening after Pelagia and I visited the Great Palace. It was only a minor tremor, scarcely felt in the Varangian barracks. A few statues fell from their plinths along the Mese, several apartment blocks were damaged, and the city engineers had to come with ladders and hooks the next day to pull down the structures that were too dangerous. But on the Galata side of the Golden Horn the damage was far more severe. Several of the new houses collapsed as a result of shoddy workmanship. One of them was Pelagia's villa. She had just returned to her house, and she and several of her servants were crushed. I heard of her death from her sister Maria, who came to fetch me the next morning, and the two of us crossed the Golden Horn to visit the scene of the calamity. As I looked on the tumbled ruins of her house, I felt as desolate as if I was standing on the edge of a great void into which Pelagia had disappeared and from which she would never return. Numbed, I was overcome by a profound sadness that someone so full of spirit had gone, and I wondered whether Pelagia, who had believed neither in the salvation promised by the White Christ nor in my Old Gods, now existed in some other world.

Her death broke the only real link that I had with the Great City, and persuaded me that Odinn had other plans for the remaining years of my life.

Pelagia's family gathered to settle her affairs, and from them I learned that she had been very astute in investing my guardsman's salary for me. Thanks to her I was now reasonably wealthy, even without my secret share of the emir's ransom and the salvage of the Arab pirate galea, most of which had already been carried northward in Harald's ships returning from the Sicilian campaign. The following week I went discreetly to see the financier, a member of the banker's guild, to whom Pelagia had entrusted the safekeeping of my funds and asked him if I could withdraw the money as I was thinking of travelling abroad.

'No need to do that,' he replied. 'If you carry too much coin, you might be waylaid and robbed. I can arrange for you to collect your money at your destination from my fellow bankers, if the place is not too distant.'

'Would the city of Kiev be too far?' I asked.

'Not at all. I could manage to have your funds made available to you in Kiev. We have been doing an increasing amount of business there these past few years, transferring money for the Rus traders who come annually to this city. Not all of them want to travel back burdened with trade goods, struggling to haul them back upstream over the portages. They get notes of credit from me, which they redeem in Kiev.'

The banker's assurance removed my worry that Harald's departure from Constantinople might be hampered by financial complications. He too could use the bankers to move his assets from Constantinople. Now everything depended on Psellus to come up with some scheme whereby we could escape.

His cryptogram, when it finally arrived in late May, was so terse that there were just six words. It read, 'Two ousiai, Neiron, peach silk, Nativity.'

The first part was clear to me. Ousiai are small dromons, about the size of our Norse ships. Each normally carries a crew of about fifty men and they serve as fast escort vessels. The Neiron was the naval arsenal on the Golden Horn, so presumably the two ousiai would be docked there at the time of the feast of the Nativity. But I was puzzled and disappointed by Psellus's mention of the Nativity. If this was the date when he thought Harald and his men would have their chance to leave Constantinople, then my friend was more of a cloistered bureaucrat than I thought. The Nativity, the birth of the White Christ, occurs in mid-winter, and surely, I told myself, Psellus knew that December was far too late for a departure from Constantinople. The sailing weather was atrocious, and by the time we reached the river leading towards Kiev it would be in flood or frozen over. We had to leave in the summer or early autumn at the latest.

The reference to peach silk was a complete enigma. I could see no connection with warships at the arsenal.

So I went to the House of Lights. This was the most luxurious shopping emporium in the capital. Occupying a prime site on the most fashionable stretch of the Mese, it stayed open day and night, its arcades lit by hundreds upon hundreds of candles. Only one item was on sale - silk. The precious fabric was available in every grade and style and colour, whether as lengths of cloth, as complete garments, or cut and part-finished ready to be sewn together. In all the known world the House of Lights was the largest single market for silk, and the market dealers there were among the wealthiest merchants in the city, as well as the most rigorously controlled. They were obliged to report every single transaction over ten nomisma in value to the eparch of the city so that his officials knew exactly where each length of material came from and to whom it went. If a foreigner wished to buy silk, the dealer was only allowed to offer the lower grades of fabric, and he was obliged to report his customer's departure from Constantinople so that his baggage could be searched for contraband. Failure to do so would mean that the silk merchant was flogged, his head shaved in public humiliation, and all his goods confiscated.

Mindful of this strict regime, I chose the most discreet of the silk merchants' shops in the House of Lights and asked to speak with the owner. A white-haired man with a sleek, prosperous appearance came out from a back room, and the moment he saw I was a foreigner suggested that we discuss our business in private, in a back alcove.

'I'm enquiring about the price and availability of good quality silks for export,' I explained.

He complimented me on my excellent Greek and asked where I had learned to speak the language with such fluency.

'In trade,' I answered evasively. 'Mostly the shipping business.'

'Then you will already be familiar with the restrictions forbidding me to sell certain categories of silk to those who are not resident in this city,' he murmured, 'but alternative arrangements can sometimes be made. Did you have any particular goods in mind?'

'Highly coloured silks make more profit for me when I sell them on. It depends what is available.'

'At this moment I have good stocks of dark green and yellow in half-tint.'

"What about other colours? Orange, for example? That's popular where I come from.'

'It depends on the depth of the hue. I can probably find a pale lemon orange, close to the yellow I have. But the more dye stuff used in colouring the material, the more difficult it is to obtain. And, of course, more expensive.'

'If I placed an order for a specific colour, could you prepare it for me?'

He shook his head. 'The law forbids silk dealers from exercising the craft of dyeing silk. That is a separate craft. Nor can I handle raw silk. That too is a separate profession.'

I adopted a disappointed look. 'I had particularly hoped to find peach-coloured silk, for a very special client. And I could pay a premium price.'

'Let me send someone to check.'