Tim Severin - King's Man

But the young man's other suggestion, that I had been lured away to leave Romanus unguarded, alarmed me. If that was the case, then the Keeper of the Inkwell was certainly implicated in the Basileus's death, and perhaps the Orphanotrophus as well. I remembered how he had tried to send me on to the logothete of finance with the parchment. That would have delayed me even more. The thought that I might have been a dupe in the assassination of the Basileus brought a chill to my spine. If true, I was in real danger. Any guardsman found to be negligent in his duty to protect the Basileus was executed by his company commander, usually by public beheading. More than that, if Romanus had indeed been murdered, I was still a potential witness, and that meant I was a likely target for elimination by the culprits. Someone as powerful as the Orphanotrophus could easily have me killed, in a tavern brawl, for example.

Suddenly I was very frightened.

'I think I hear the chanting of the priests,' said Psellus, interrupting my thoughts and fidgeting slightly. Maybe he realised he had gone too far in his theorising, and was close to treason. 'They must have opened the doors of Hagia Sophia, getting ready for the emergence of our new Basileus. It's time for me to let you go. Thank you for your information. You have been most helpful.' And he slipped away into the crowd.

We took up our positions around Michael IV, who was mounted on a superb sorrel horse, one of the best in the royal stables. I remembered how Romanus had been a great judge of horseflesh and had built up a magnificent stud farm, though he had been too sick to enjoy riding. Now I had to admit that the youthful Michael, though he came from a very plebeian background, looked truly imperial in the saddle. Perhaps that was what Zoe had seen in him from the beginning. Halfdan had told me how he had been on duty when Zoe' had first gazed on her future lover. 'You would have been an utter dolt not to have noticed her reaction. She couldn't take her eyes off him. It was the Orphanotrophus who introduced him to her. He brought Michael into the audience chamber when Zoe and Romanus were holding an imperial reception, and led him right up to the twin thrones. Old Romanus was gracious enough, but Zoe looked at the young man as if she wanted to eat him on the spot. He was good looking, all right, fresh-faced and ruddy-cheeked, likely to blush like a girl. I reckon the Orphanotrophus knew what he was doing. Set it all up.'

'Didn't Romanus notice, if it was that obvious?' I asked.

'No. The old boy barely used to look at the empress by then. Kept looking anywhere except in her direction, as though her presence gave him a pain.'

I mulled over the conversation as we marched back to the Grand Palace, entered the great courtyard and the gates were closed behind us. Our new Basileus dismounted, paused for a moment while his courtiers and officials formed up in two lines, and then walked down between them to the applause and smiles of his retinue before entering the palace. I noted that the Basileus was unescorted, which seemed very unusual. Even stranger was the fact that the courtiers broke ranks and began to hurry into the palace behind the Basileus, almost like a mob. Halfdan astonished me by rushing off in their wake, all discipline gone. So did the guardsmen around me, and I joined them in pushing and jostling as if we were a crowd of spectators leaving the hippodrome at the end of the games.

It was unimaginable. All the stiffness and formality of court life had evaporated. The crowd of us, ministers, courtiers, advisers, even priests, all flooded into the great Trikilinium. There, seated up on the dais, was our young new emperor, smiling down at us. On each side were two slaves holding small strongboxes. As I watched, one of the slaves tilted the coffer he held and a stream of gold coins poured out, falling into the emperor's lap. Michael reached down, seized a fistful of the coins, and flung them high into the air above the crowd. I gaped in surprise. The shower of gold coins, each one of them worth six months' wages for a skilled man, glittered and flashed before plummeting towards the upstretched hands. A few coins were caught as they fell, but most tumbled on to the marble floor, landing with a distinct ringing sound. Men dropped to their hands and knees to pick up the coins, even as the emperor dipped his hand into his lap and flung another golden cascade over our heads. Now I understood why Halfdan had been so quick off the mark. My company commander had shrewdly elbowed his way to a spot where the arc of bullion was thickest, and was clawing up the golden bounty.

I, too, crouched down and began to gather up the coins. But at the very moment that my fingers closed around the first gold coin, I was thinking to myself that I would be wise to find some way of resigning from the Life Guard without attracting attention before it was too late.

TWO

THE THOUGHT THAT Romanus had been murdered nagged at me in the weeks that followed. I brooded on the possible consequences of my unwitting participation in a regicide and began to take precautions for my personal safety. I only ate mess food prepared by the army cooks, and I did not leave the barracks unless I was on duty or in the company of two or three of my colleagues, and then I only visited places I knew to be safe. Had my companions realised my fears, they would have scoffed at my timidity. Compared with the other cities I had known — London for example — Constantinople was remarkably peaceful and well run. Its governor, the city eparch, maintained an efficient police force, while a host of civic employees patrolled the marketplaces, checking on fair trade, cleanliness and orderly behaviour. Only at night, when the streets were given over to prostitutes and thieves, would my colleagues have bothered to carry weapons to defend themselves. But I was not reassured. If I was to be silenced for what I had witnessed in the imperial swimming pool, then the attack would come when I was least expecting it.

The one person to whom I confessed my fears was my friend Pelagia. She ran a bread stall on the Mese, and I had been seeing her twice a week to practise my conversational Greek because the language I had learned in the Irish monastery was antiquated and

closer, coincidentally, to the language spoken in the imperial court than koine, the language of the common people. An energetic, shrewd woman with the characteristic dark hair and sallow skin of someone native to the city, Pelagia had already provided me with a lesson in the tortuous ways of Byzantine thinking, which often succeeded in extracting advantage from calamity. She had started her business just days after her husband, a baker, had burned to death in a blaze which had started when the bread oven cracked. A city ordinance banned bakeries from operating in close proximity to town houses, otherwise the accident would have sent the entire district up in flames. The ashes of the fire were barely cold before Pelagia had gone to her husband's former business competitors and worked on their sympathy. She coaxed them into agreeing to supply her stall at a favourable discount, and by the time I met her she was well on her way to being a wealthy woman. Pelagia kept me up to date with all the latest city rumours about palace politics — a favourite topic among her many clients — and, more important, she had a sister who worked as a seamstress for the empress Zoe.

'No one doubts that Zoe had a hand in Romanus's death, though it's less certain that she actively organised what happened in the bathhouse,' Pelagia told me. We had met in the spacious rooms of her third-floor apartment. Astonishing to people like myself from lands where a two-storeyed building is unusual, many of Constantinople's houses had four or even five floors. 'My sister tells me that poisons of every sort are readily available in the empress's quarters. They are not even kept locked up for safety. Zoe has a mania for creating new perfumes and unguents. Some say it's a hangover from the days when she was trying to rejuvenate herself and bear a child. She keeps a small army of women servants grinding, mixing and distilling different concoctions, and several of the ingredients are decidedly poisonous. One young girl fainted the other day merely from inhaling the fumes from one of the brews.'