Read Online King's Man by Tim Severin - Free Book Online

aboard. But, according to my colleagues in the guard, the drungarios, the admiral of the fleet, refused. He baulked at taking so many barbarians on board his ships, and Harald had made matters worse by stating that he would not take orders from a Greek commander. The deadlock was resolved when Harald offered to use his own vessels, the light monocylon, and base them at Dyrrachium. From there he would send them out as escorts for the merchant ships and to patrol against the enemy.
     
    With Harald gone, I returned to my previous duties with the guard and found that the whispers about Michael's ill health were
     
    true. The young emperor was afflicted by what the palace physicians tactfully called 'the holy sickness'.
     
    I first noticed the symptoms when Michael was dressing for the festival which celebrates the birth of the White Christ. With five other members of the bodyguard, I had escorted Michael to the imperial robing chamber. There the vestitores, the officials who solemnly place the imperial regalia on the Basileus, ceremonially opened the chest containing the royal garb. The most junior of the officials took out the cloak, the chlamys, which he solemnly handed to the next most senior in rank. From hand to hand the garment was passed until finally it reached the senior vestitor, who reverently approached the waiting Basileus, intoned a prayer, and settled the cloak on the emperor's shoulders. There followed the pearl-encrusted stole, the jewelled gloves, the chest pendant. All the time the Basileus stood motionless until the crown was presented to him. At that moment, something went awry. Instead of leaning forward to kiss the cross on the crown, as ritual demanded, Michael began to tremble. It was only a slight movement, but standing behind him we, the members of the escort, could see that his right arm was shaking uncontrollably. The vestitor waited, still proffering the crown, but Michael was paralysed, unable to move except for the trembling of his arm. There was complete silence as the interval lengthened and everyone in the room stood still, as if frozen in place, the only movement the rapid shaking of Michael's right arm. Then, after the time it takes for a man to empty his lungs slowly seven or eight times, the arm slowly grew still, and Michael resumed full control of his body. Later that day, as if nothing had happened, he joined the procession along the garlanded streets to a service at the church of Hagia Sophia, then held several formal receptions in the Great Palace at which senior bureaucrats received their Nativity gifts, and in the evening appeared at a great banquet in the lausakios, the dining hall of the Great Palace. But the Orphanotrophus must have been advised of the emperor's brief moment of paralysis, because the normal seating arrangements had been modified. Michael was seated alone at a separate ivory table, on view to all his noble guests, but no one could come close to him.
    'They say this kind of sickness is caused by demons in the brain,' Halfdan commented to me as we were removing our ceremonial armour later that evening in the guardroom.
    'Maybe,' I replied. 'Yet some people see it as a gift.'
    'Where's that?'
    'Among the ski-runners in Permia,' I said. 'I spent the winter with the family of one of their wise men, who sometimes behaved in the same way as the emperor, only it was more than just his arm trembling. Often he would fall on the ground and lie without moving for as long as an hour. When he woke up again, he told us how his spirit had been visiting the otherworld. It could happen with the Basileus.'
    'If it does, the Christians won't believe he visited any spirit world,' Halfdan grumbled. 'They don't hold with that sort of thing. Their saints show up on earth and perform miracles, but no one travels in the opposite direction and comes back.'
    My analysis turned out to be correct. As the weeks passed, Michael's eccentric behaviour became more pronounced and the episodes lasted