I opened my eyes at dawn on my first morning in Miklagard, awakened by the cooing of doves outside my window. Young Piotr was already up and laying out my clothes. He was a good lad, lent to me by Ingigerd, of course. Was part of his job to spy on me? Probably.
The ambassadors’ hostel was a big stone pile built around a courtyard, and we occupied one small room on the second floor. Other rooms housed a miscellany of men whose clothes and speech alike were foreign to me. I had met a few of them at dinner last night. (Dinner was a skimpy affair of cold lamb, a few limp vegetables, and some vile tasting wine that they call retsina. God knows what they put in it.)
Yesterday, on the way to the hostel, which lay near the Forum of Constantine, Psellus had led me and Piotr at a fast clip down the Mese, the central avenue of the city, where an immense stream of humanity—more people than I had thought lived in all the world together—flowed and eddied through one vast plaza after another. Columns taller than pine trees. Enormous bronze and marble statues so lifelike that they looked as though they might speak. Immense jets of water that shot into the air like the geysers of my homeland and fell back into wide marble basins. My jaw, I’m embarrassed to say, hung open the whole way, while my guide rattled off the names of this and that emperor, this and that saint, at a mile a minute. Psellus, as I was to learn, was an enthusiastic teacher—of anything to anyone—who, in all the years I knew him, never stopped talking except to draw breath.
I was half dressed when Piotr motioned me to sit so he could change the dressing on my wounded shoulder. He had barely begun when our minder knocked upon our door, bustled in without waiting to be invited, and began to speak. “Off to the palace, Gospodin Churillo.” (He spoke Greek to me but seemed to take enormous pride in dropping in the occasional Slavonic word.) “Had your breakfast yet? No? Never mind we’ll get something from a stall. Mustn’t keep the Logothete waiting.”
“The log—?”
“The Logothetes tou dromou.” He pronounced the words slowly with exaggerated movements of his mouth as if speaking to a child or an idiot. And this was only the first of dozens of unpronounceable titles that I must learn to wrap my tongue around. “Minister of the Post and Foreign Minister all in one,” he explained. “His department includes the Interpreters’ Bureau and the Office of Barbarians, and a great deal more besides. An important man. My superior.” His pride was unmistakable. “He will need to examine your credentials and schedule your audience with the Emperor.”
“Barbarians, sir?”
“Yes, well, ah, that is to say, you.” He made a wry face and looked slightly uncomfortable.
Leonidas, my fellow slave, had called me that, and always with a sneer. For you must understand that the Greeks divide the world into two halves—themselves and everyone else. And everyone else is barbaros. When it was only Leonidas, I could ignore it. Now I was in the midst of a city where the meanest inhabitant might consider me only one rung higher than an ape or a performing bear.
“Come on, then.” Psellus was already out the door.
It’s a longish walk from the Forum of Constantine to the Brazen Gate—the domed guard house with its three massive bronze gates which forms the entrance to the Great Palace on its landward side. A score of scowling blond warriors clad in scarlet tunics with long-handled axes on their shoulders mounted guard on either side of the entrance. The Varangians! Suddenly my heart was in my mouth. Was he here—the man I must kill? I stared at the impassive, helmeted heads. That tall fellow? Him? No, no, not him.
“Come along, gospodin,” Psellus said impatiently and shot me a quizzical look. What did he see in my face? Obediently, I followed him through the vestibule, watched from above by the glittering eyes of two vast faces shaped from bits of shining glass. “Justinian and Theodora,” Psellus named them, leaving me to wonder who they were. And then we emerged into the palace grounds.
The Mega Palation, the Great Palace of Constantinople. How can I describe it to you, this city within a city? Five square miles of palaces and pavilions linked by lush gardens and tree-lined walks, where exotic plants grew and plumed birds strutted, where more of those astonishing geysers leapt and splashed. Everywhere were guards in gilded armor; everywhere secretaries and messengers hurried on nameless errands; everywhere officials robed in silk swept along, their juniors swimming behind them like schools of brilliantly-colored fish; everywhere the echo of footsteps and a constant susurrus of whispered conversation. We followed a twisting, turning path through this confusion of color and sound—Psellus with chest thrust out and head high, looking neither right nor left and me stumbling along behind, my head on a swivel, trying to see everything at once. The memory flashed through my mind of that long-ago day when, a lonely Iceland farm boy of sixteen, I had gone to the Althing and been astonished by the crowd. You could drop the Althing into a corner of these grounds and never notice it.
We came at last to a two-story building of pink and blue veined marble surrounded by a quiet garden and Psellus ushered me inside. The Logothete’s office was spacious but very plain. The walls on three sides were lined with books. On the fourth wall hung cases where butterflies were fixed behind panes of glass. One window was open to the fresh spring air. Behind an ebony desk inlaid with ivory plaques, the Logothete sat, bending to his work. A small man, dressed in a plain brown tunic, he was balding with a great expanse of forehead, a small beard on his chin, fifty years old perhaps. With long delicate fingers he was pinning a large specimen, brilliant with black and orange wings, to a board. Only when he had got it to his satisfaction did he look up. “A beauty isn’t it? From my own garden. One of the boys caught it yesterday evening.”
Psellus cleared his throat and launched into a preamble little of which I understood. It came as a rude shock that the Greek these educated men spoke to each other was a far cry from the rough sailor’s Greek I knew. Psellus had been talking baby talk to me, the barbarian. After a moment, the Logothete waved him to silence and favored me with an inquiring smile. I determined to make the best impression I could and began my carefully rehearsed speech detailing the virtues of the sweet-tempered, affable, and beautiful Princess Yelisaveta (the vicious little bitch!) and how her loving parents, though heartbroken at the thought of parting from her, desired a suitable marriage for her. I drew from my wallet a small painted portrait of her, which considerably softened her needle-sharp nose and chin. The Logothete took it in his long fingers, looked at it a moment and set it down beside the butterfly: two lifeless specimens side by side. I produced also a list of the gifts that would accompany her when the happy day should arrive.
The Logothete looked at me long and hard until I had to lower my eyes. “You’re young to be entrusted with such a mission. I wonder they didn’t send old Oleg who visits us often.” I had a story prepared for this but he didn’t give me a chance. “Never mind. Your audience is scheduled for a week from today, although one can never be certain. Sometimes circumstances…” He left the thought unfinished. “Young Psellus here will tell you everything you need to know. I leave you in his capable hands. A pleasure to have met you, gospodin. We’ll see each other again, I’m sure. And that leaves only the small matter of the douceur.” He used a word I didn’t know.
“Excuse me, Excellency?”
“The douceur, the gratuity. Good God, how plainly must I say it, the gift.”
“Allow me to explain, Excellency,” Psellus broke in. “Gifts that open doors, Churillo. Surely you understand. Without a gift nothing happens. It’s how things work.”
“A bribe!” I exclaimed, using a low word I did know. They both had the grace to look embarrassed. I emptied my purse on the Logothete’s desk; I only had some thirty or forty pieces of silver. “If that’s not enough I can go back to my rooms.”
“This will be quite sufficient,” the Logothete said in his precise way. “Thank you.”
“And it all goes to you?”
“Not at all. It goes up, it goes down, it spreads itself around. It is the oil that lubricates this great machine. Stay among us long enough, Churillo Igorevich, and you will understand.”
“I hope I will.”
I felt his eyes on my back as I left the room.