“It’s all right, brother, I am here to make this right, as best I can,” Magnus said, speaking in Anglo-Saxon. I nodded and stepped out of his way.
Magnus stopped just in front of Chira. The other three approached, went down on their knees, bowed their heads, and held up the objects they were carrying.
“I am Magnus of Normandy,” began Magnus in stilted, accented Greek. “The man who assaulted you is my distant kinsman. He has no other family and so it falls to me to offer you the weregild for his offense. He did not have much but now it is all yours. There are clothes, ornamentation, and money. You will receive it, please.” He gestured and the men held the items closer to her.
Chira could not hide her surprise. She glanced at me briefly, and I nodded, so she accepted the offering with thanks. Basina’s attendant and a young servant woman relieved the men of their load—and then gave them a look suggesting they should leave now. Magnus saluted Chira with a fist to his chest. His men rose, turned on their heels, and marched out.
Since I had seen for myself that Chira was safe, and it would have been awkward for me to remain as the sole male, I left with Magnus’s group.
As soon as we were outside the bathhouse, Magnus turned to me to ask my cause for being here.
Seeing an opportunity to forge a connection, I said, “This woman has done me a kindness in the past and I am concerned for her well-being”—and I said it in Magnus’s own dialect of Norman.
He was pleasantly surprised to hear his mother tongue spoken. “What is your name?” he asked. “You have a familiar accent.”
“My name is Tristan of Dintagel,” I said. “I spent a year of my youth in Normandy seeking my fortune, before coming east to join the Varangian Guard.”
He gave me a peculiar look. “Tristan of Dintagel?” He glanced over his shoulder at one of his men, who was simultaneously exchanging looks with the other two men. “Are you a man of great exploits?”
“You must ask the Emperor his opinion on the subject,” I said, “as his is the only opinion that matters to my salary.”
Magnus stared at me a moment longer and then laughed along with his men. “It is a pleasure to meet someone who speaks as we do,” he said, and held out a hand to exchange peace with me. I returned to my post having agreed with him that we would break bread together the next time our duties allowed it.
Later that day I found access to Chira again, to find her resolute to finish her DEDE on this Strand, and as I had finished my own DEDE I returned here while she was still in Constantinople. She should be home within a day. The wound on her thigh will probably require modern medical treatment and leave a permanent scar, but seems unlikely to cause permanent disability.
Respectfully submitted,
Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons
Exchange of posts by DODO staff
on “Constantinople Theater” ODIN channel
DAYS 1790–1797 (LATE JUNE, YEAR 5)
Post from LTC Tristan Lyons:
Gang, I wanted to raise a topic of interest in case anyone else being Sent to C’ople can confirm what I just saw, or gather more info.
Long story short is that I was hanging out there with Magnus of Normandy, whom many of you will have heard of as one of the more senior Varangians. Not so much in terms of formal rank as the respect in which he’s held by the other VGs, which is saying something given he’s a Norman. I had crossed paths with him a couple of days earlier and he had taken an interest in me and suggested we dine together.
As everyone knows, it’s against SOP to make casual social connections with historicals, since only bad things can come of it (unless you’re a Lover or a Closer, in which case it’s part of your job description). So I was hesitant to accept Magnus’s invitation. But as I said, he’s a respected leader in the VG ranks, and I’m pretty junior. So the invitation was an honor, and it would only have raised more questions and suspicions if I had just blown him off.
Further complicating the scenario is that Magnus (who, for all his status in the Guard, has a vaguely manic “ah, WTF” aspect) decided we should dine not in the VG mess hall, nor even in the taverns the Guard tended toward, but that we should head down to the Venetian neighborhood because he “liked the smell of maritime industry” or something.
I went with him, just the two of us, and we got a lot of freaked-out looks from the Venetian traders and their families because we were, you know, the Emperor’s Guards, coming into a Venetian neighborhood while the Venetian navy was parked across the Bosporus threatening to attack the Emperor . . . but obviously nobody was going to mess with us. We sat down at an outdoor table overlooking the harbor, and had a conversation that on the surface seemed like just polite “get to know you” stuff. My cover story was designed to stand up under exactly this kind of testing. It is that I came from a pretty obscure location in England, that I had family connections in Normandy, and had spent some time there when younger, which was how I came to speak the dialect. He probed me a little on that. This made me a little nervous since I’d been in that part of the world (Collinet, specifically) 150 years earlier and so I couldn’t cite specific names or incidents to back up my story. But “my” village and his are some fifty kilometers apart, which is enough separation to blur things quite a bit, and he had left when fairly young, so there weren’t any smoking guns. Basically, the cover story seemed to pass muster and we moved on to other chitchat about the day-to-day workings of the VG and rumors about the Crusaders and what they were up to.
After we’d had a few drinks and a good dinner we stood up and began to head back to the barracks. But we’d only gone about a hundred strides when he turned to me and said, “Would you like to go see your namesake?”
Having no idea what he was talking about, I agreed. We were near the border of the Venetian quarter, but now he led me back into the heart of it. We walked for about a hundred yards through winding streets. The sun was setting (time of year was midsummer, sunset was late). We came to a Roman Catholic church where vespers were under way. This is the Church of St. Bartholomew for those of you who would care to visit it. Later it was destroyed on all of the Strands I’m aware of, so it doesn’t exist in our present. Point being, for purposes of this story, its west entrance was lit up by the sunset when we arrived.