of the butchers and – as we at last reached the head of the avenue – the thick sweetness of the perfume-sellers.
The marbled arcades of the Augusteion were ahead of us now, with the palace gate beyond it and the vast dome of the great church on our left. The questions which clawed at my mind had reached a ringing intensity, yet were suddenly thrown into still greater confusion as the captain turned abruptly to his right, away from the palace and down a long street whose wall, I could see, was formed by the vast rim of the hippodrome. A greaved forearm against my shoulder steered me helplessly down into the darkness after him.
‘The palace is that way,’ I called, extending my already harried strides.
‘The palace,’ retorted the captain over his shoulder, ‘has many gates, and not all of them serve for everyone. The fishmongers, for example – they keep to their own gate. To keep out the stink,’ he added pointedly.
The walls now above us were pocked with arches and embellished with all manner of pagan and holy statues, extending far out of sight in every direction. We came under them and passed through an iron gate, a lesser entrance left curiously unlocked. For a moment we were in darkness, giddied by the echoing slap of our feet on the stone; then the purple sky opened above us and I felt warm sand trickling through the straps of my sandals. We were in the arena, on the racetrack still chewed and furrowed from the day’s activity. It was empty, but the silence of a hundred thousand absent spectators only served to press the vastness upon me further, while before us a host of shafts and columns bristled from the central spine like a sheaf of spears.
‘Come,’ said the captain, his words muted in the oppressive expanse. He led me across the track, our feet crunching in the yielding sand, and up a narrow staircase cut through the spine. Now we were directly below the thrusting monuments, as if between the fingers of a giant hand, and for a single ludicrous second I imagined the hand closing around us in a stone fist. It was a ridiculous vision, but I could not keep from shivering.
My escorts, stout though they were, showed no more inclination than I to delay there. More steps brought us back down onto the arena floor, now on the far side of the stadium; we walked some way along the track, across to the opposite wall, and up another flight of stairs between the ranks of empty benches. These stairs led onto a terrace; the terrace, in turn onto more stairs which doubled back on themselves so often I felt dizzied. The sky was all but invisible now, only a shade removed from complete darkness, and already one horn of the crescent moon was pricking up behind the walls, but the soldiers’ pace was unflagging. It was with much tripping and stumbling that I mounted the last few steps to emerge, breathless and disoriented, onto a broad balcony high above the race track.
‘Welcome to the Kathisma,’ said the Varangian captain, and though my lungs faltered from the climb I somehow found the air for a heartfelt gasp. True, I had been told I was going to the palace, but I had expected a side-door and a clerk’s desk in one of the public courtyards; not this, not the Kathisma. This was the imperial loge itself, the dais where the Emperor paraded his untouchable majesty to the world – his world – and received its acclamation. I myself had seen him here a hundred times, though only from great distances.
One of the guards drew flame from an alcove and touched it to the lamps which hung from the ceiling. Fire sparked in the glass, and was in an instant echoed back a thousand-fold: off the golden chains which held the lamps; off the golden mosaics set between every archway; and off the golden throne which stood, empty, in the middle of the room. Suddenly I was surrounded by a great host: the flickering silhouettes of a hundred kings and heroes leaped out of their gilded background, while from above the great charioteers of old seemed to be driving their horses hard down upon me, as if coming for Elijah.
‘You are Demetrios, the unveiler of mysteries? The illuminator of shadows? The master of the apocalypse?’
The voice which called me was mellow, like honey, but at its first words