The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [127]
The doors to the throne room were double, and made of worked bronze. They were opened by two officers of the ceremonial guard with their gilded cuirasses and gold-covered lances and shields. He knew one of them to be the deputy Protospatharios: Astorre had found him off duty two days before and joined his dice party and brought him back drunk for some food. Nicholas showed no recognition, and neither did the officer. Side by side with Doria, he entered the room.
White and gold. The vault over the range of slim, pillared windows was diced with gold and edged with a moulded cornice of delicate ovals and palmettes. Below, a dais and two backless ivory thrones glimmered in reflected light, soft as spun syrup. The floor was patterned in marble and where it stopped on the walls there were frescoes of past emperors and their consorts and children; arch-browed, stem-nosed, bow-mouthed; their heads buckled with diadems; their names and titles lettered into the spaces between the assorted quills of their sceptres.
The big chamber was crowded with people. No, lined. He and Doria were the only supplicants. A deep carpet, woven with pomegranates and peaches and pepper trees, crossed the marble before them from the door to the dais. He saw Doria’s eye caught by its possibilities; and saw him change his mind. No. The duel was over, for the moment. For the moment, Doria needed to gather his resources to do what he did best. To project his charm towards the dais, the thokos upon which the Emperor David and Helen his Empress were seated.
Put yourself in the other man’s place. The Emperor had chosen to receive them straight from the ceremony of the Easter service, and wore still the formal jewelled mitra, the gold and purple dalmatica with its broad stiffened bands. In his left glove he held the Imperial sceptre, and the right, on his knee, held the orb. On his feet were the scarlet buskins of Imperial dignity, there to be kissed. He smelled of incense and there was about him still, in his immobility, the remoteness of mystical experience, together with an awareness of ancient and unquestioned power. I am the Basileus, the Grand Comnenos, Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans and of Perateia. Where is Genoa? What is Florence?
Inside the robe was a full-bodied man in early middle age with fair, rosy cheeks shaped by a trimmed golden beard, lightly curling. Above the combed and curving moustache was a nose of Roman grandeur and eyes which were at present languid and empty of warmth. They rested, without changing, on the envoys before him. They moved on to dwell, for a moment, on the boxes and packets which had followed the envoys into the room. There is almost nothing in this world we have need of. But where tribute is customary, we shall accept it.
Only so far, on such evidence, could one judge the Emperor. Put yourself, then, in the place of the Empress, sitting beside him. She was here, why? Not from greed: she had not deigned to glance at the boxes. Then, doubly to impress the Imperial dignity upon the Latins whose help the Empire had been forced to solicit? After all, Trebizond had sent Michael Alighieri to Florence. Trebizond had joined its appeal to the others whose envoys were being bundled through Europe by Fra Ludovico da Bologna, bane of Julius; friend of Doria.
All her attention at this moment, as the two envoys stood bowing before her, was on the Genoese consul, and not on Nicholas. And Doria, discreetly, was permitting his admiration to be seen. Indeed, it was deserved. After nine children, Helen Cantacuzenes was less than slender, but the long metalled tunic gave her body a sheath that became it. Above its high jewelled