King's Man Read Free

died in any one of his palaces — they all had swimming pools - but he had chosen to expire in the largest and most sprawling of them, the Great Palace. Standing close to the tip of the peninsula of Constantinople, the Great Palace had been extended and remodelled so many times by its imperial occupants that it had turned into a bewildering maze of chambers and anterooms. Erecting ever grander buildings was a fascination bordering on mania for each occupant of the purple throne. Every Basileus wanted to immortalise his rule by leaving at least one extravagant structure, whether a new church, a monastery, a huge palace, or some ostentatious public building. Romanus had been busily squandering millions of gold pieces on an immense new church to the mother of his God, though it seemed to me that she already had more than enough churches and monasteries to her name. Romanus's new church was to be dedicated to her as Mary the Celebrated, and what with its surrounding gardens and walkways and fountains — and the constant changes of design, which meant pulling down half-finished buildings — the project had run so far over budget that Romanus had been obliged to raise a special tax to pay for the construction. The church was not yet finished and I suspected it never would be. I surprised myself by realising how easily I was already thinking of Romanus in the past tense.
    'Change into a dry uniform and join the detail on the main gate,' the duty officer ordered when I reported to him. No more than twenty years old, he was almost as edgy as the physician who had attended the dying emperor. A Greek from one of Constantinople's leading families, his family would have paid handsomely to buy his commission in the Life Guard. Merely by placing him inside the walls of the palace, they hoped he might attract the attention of the Basileus and gain preferment. Now their investment would be wasted if a new Basileus decided, out of concern for his own safety, to replace all the Greek officers. It was another deception so characteristic of palace life. Byzantine society still pretended that the Hetaira was Greek. Their sons prided themselves on being officers of the guard, and they dressed up in uniforms which denoted the old palace regiments — the Excubia, the Numeri, the Scholae and others - but when it came to real work our Basileus had trusted only us, the foreigners, his palace Varangians.
    I joined twenty of my comrades at the main gate. They had already slammed the doors shut without asking permission of the keeper of the gate, whose duty it was to supervise the opening of the main gate at dawn, close it again at noon, and then reopen it for a few hours in the early evening. But today the death of the emperor had removed his authority and the keeper was at a loss to know what to do. The decurion decided the matter for him. He was refusing to let anyone in or out.
    Even as I arrived, there was a great hubbub outside the gate, and I could hear thunderous knocking and loud, impatient shouts.
    'Glad you've got here, Thorgils,' said the guard commander. 'Maybe you can tell me what those wild men out there want.'
    I listened carefully. 'I think you had better let them in,' I said. 'It sounds as though you've got the Great Patriarch outside, and he's demanding admittance.'
    'The Great Patriarch? That black-clad old goat,' grumbled the guard commander, who was a staunch Old Believer. 'Lads, open the side door and allow the monks through. But hold your breath. They don't wash very often.'
    A moment later a very angry group of monks, all with chest-length beards and black gowns, stormed through the gap between the doors, glared at us, and hurried off down the corridor with a righteous-sounding slap of sandals and the clatter of their wooden staffs on the marble floor slabs. In their midst I saw the white-bearded figure of Alexis of the Studius, the supreme religious authority of the empire.
    'Wonder what's brought them down from their monastery