EMPRESS: The Secret History of Anna K by Greg Olear

Author:Greg Olear
Format: epub, pdf

XXXI

The Fugitives

BY NOW, THE CAREFUL READER CAN APPRECIATE JUST HOW precarious and mercurial are the forces that make and unmake Emperors (and also, by extension, Empresses!). Consider: If my great-uncle Isaac Komnenos chose not to read a bad weather event as a portent of disaster and a vote of no confidence by the Almighty, perhaps Constantine X does not assume the throne. If Michael VII were a different sort of man—or, to be more precise, if he were not a different sort of man—perhaps Eudokia does not see the need to marry Diogenes (or to import Maria to Constantinople from T’bilisi in the vain hope that her beauty would inspire his perverted carnal passions). If Diogenes does not insist upon a great military victory, perhaps Michael does not ever take the purple. If the unruly forces of Bryennios do not rape and pillage just beyond the walls of the Queen City, perhaps he becomes Emperor, and he and not Alexios Komnenos reigns for thirty-seven years. Fate is fickle. When emperors fall, they fall hard, and they fall fast. Dégringolade can be set in motion by the slightest push from the smallest personage.

A fourteen-year-old girl, say.

When she took her stand against his sadistic advances, and especially when she followed through on her macabre proposal, Irene had won her husband’s grudging respect. From that night on, Alexios stopped visiting her bed-chamber; a few months later, he left for war, and was gone for two years, returning home only for brief visits as he crisscrossed the Empire. My mother was happy in this interval to reclaim her chastity; despite his spiteful pronouncement on their wedding day, she had not warmed to the alternative style of intercourse. While she had technically committed patricide, her conscience was clear. In her view, her father Andronikos was in a state of perpetual suffering, a sort of existential purgatory, from which agony her brave actions relieved him. This was a mercy-killing; mercy-killing requires sangfroid, it requires great courage, and like the valiant warrior engaging a stronger opponent, or the pious martyr braving the pyre, she had risen to the occasion. Irene was proud of what she had done. When Alexios left for his campaigns, the change in her personality was marked; in his absence, she comported herself like a mature woman of twice her years, the very model of equipoise. Her days of simpering were over. While she remained quiet and disdainful of undue attention, she was now possessed of a regal serenity. In short, my mother was worthy of the station to which she would soon ascend, and in which ascension she would prove a prime player.

Irene was surprised and not a little scared when she was summoned into the Empress’s Loge at the Hagia Sophia to meet with Maria. The relationship between my father’s wife and his lover was not strained as much as it was nonexistent. The Empress had not said more than a few words to Irene in the latter’s lifetime; a perfunctory congratulations after the wedding, perhaps, and not much else.

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