CHAPTER 4: Under a String
The fires in Constantinople had dwindled to embers, but the city's heart still smoldered. Markos stood on the southern ramparts near the harbor, watching the Venetian ships drift in like carrion birds. The clink of armor and the occasional bark of Varangian patrols echoed in the chill morning air. Every breath he took was smoke-laced, and every soul he passed wore the hollow expression of betrayal.
He was still a kentarchos, a centurion of sorts, within the Varangian Guard his command only a handful of hardened Northmen and Byzantines loyal more to coin than crown. But loyalty now was a slippery thing. The city, under the puppet rule of Alexios IV Angelos, had lost all semblance of authority. Markos knew it. His men knew it. And so did the vultures feasting on its flesh.
He found himself summoned to a meeting in the Boukoleon Palace, one of the few halls still echoing with courtly ceremony. The opulence remained—marble inlays, golden mosaics, silken banners—but it was all a facade. Sitting atop the lion-headed throne was Alexios IV, a pale, bloated youth with darting eyes and trembling fingers, beside the vacant gaze of his blind father, Isaac II.
Markos approached with ceremonial stiffness, his crimson-plumed helm under his arm. The Varangians at the door slammed their axes in salute.
"You summoned me, Your Majesty," Markos said, bowing low. His Ionian-accented Greek remained clear despite the swelling tension in his throat.
Alexios IV's gaze flitted to his advisors before settling on the centarchos. "Yes, yes... Captain Markos. We have heard good things. You... held your section of the Blachernae walls bravely during the riots."
"I obeyed my duty, Majesty."
"Good... Good," the young emperor stammered. "We may require more such obedience. There are whispers, Captain. Whispers of sedition. Even within the guard."
Markos said nothing. He was aware of the growing unrest. Food shortages, unpaid soldiers, Latin arrogance—seeds of revolt were already taking root. It wasn't whispers that disturbed him. It was what they screamed.
"And you, Captain," croaked a voice beside the throne. It was Isaac II, his milky eyes staring through time. "What do you believe of these Latins? Do they guard us or consume us?"
Markos hesitated. He thought of Galata. The docks. The gold promised. The soldiers laughing in foreign tongues.
"I believe they will not leave, Your Majesty," he answered finally.
Silence hung thick in the room. Alexios IV waved him away with a trembling hand, mumbling something about loyalty and oaths. Markos saluted and turned, catching the eyes of another officer waiting near the archway.
Ioannikios Skleros, fellow kentarchos, a veteran of Anatolia and a lot more older than Markos, approached him as they exited. His once-blond beard was streaked with gray, his lamellar bearing the scuffs of years.
"They call us to swear to cowards and whores now," Skleros muttered.
"You spoke to the emperor?"
"He wants loyalty bought in gold he does not possess. And we guard what? A shell."
They walked together down toward the barracks in silence. Markos remembered fighting alongside Skleros during the Pecheneg skirmishes years ago, when Markos was a teen but quickly rose to the ranks because of his luck and intelligence. Back then, the Empire still held an illusion of stability. Now even illusions were broken.
By midwinter, the city's mood had curdled. The nobles cursed the Latins. The clergy murmured prophecies. The common folk spat on the very name of Angelos.
It was then that
Whispers grew: Alexios IV had stopped paying the army. The treasury was bare. The people howled for justice, and the Varangians were stretched thin.
The lamps had not yet been lit across the imperial district when the shouting began in the inner courts of the Blachernae Palace. Rumors swirled like vultures above a carcass — of locked doors, of palace guards bribed or coerced, of a dagger drawn under imperial tapestries. In the torch-flickering gloom of the barracks in the northwest quarter, Markos, Centarchos of the Varangian Guard, stood over a training dummy, sword in hand, sweat beading on his brow from an evening's drill. The silence that followed the commotion was more telling than any horn — it was the silence of something sacred being broken.
The door burst open with a bang, scattering the lamplight and slamming against the stone wall. It was Skleros, a fellow centarchos, ruddy-faced and breathless. His helmet, plumed and dented, hung beneath his arm like a discarded relic. Ash and sweat clung to his skin. His voice was grim and breathless.
"It's done," he said, not bothering to cross the room. "The golden lamb is butchered. Alexios is no more. Mourtzouphlos sits on the throne now."
Markos blinked. He lowered his spathion slowly, the blade clinking softly against the stone floor. The name rang hollow in his ears — Alexios Doukas Mourtzouphlos, a man of sharp eyes and sharper ambition. A courtier. A shadow who smiled too much. The man who once whispered counsel in Alexios IV's ear now wore the basileus' purple.
For a long while, Markos said nothing. He walked to the tower's edge, its parapets overlooking the distant glow of the City's heart. From the barracks tower, he saw them — the first curling wisps of smoke rising near the Mese, a scream carried by the wind, the telltale flicker of flame behind shuttered windows. Already, looters had taken to the streets under the pretext of loyalty to the "new emperor." Loyalists of the deposed Alexios were being hunted or bribed. The Varangians had received no orders yet, and that troubled Markos more than anything.
He leaned against the cold stone, watching Constantinople bleed beneath a veil of stars. "So this is how Rome dies," he murmured. "Not to barbarians at the gates, but to cowards within again."
Behind him, Skleros shifted uncomfortably. "They say the Latin envoys have been expelled. And the treasury... gone. Stolen or spent."
By morning, purple banners stitched with the imperial tetragram had been torn down from the outer gates of the Great Palace. In their place, Mourtzouphlos' personal sigil — a black eagle on crimson — hung above the Chalke Gate, the traditional entrance of emperors. It was a message of consolidation: the boy-emperor was gone, and the city would now be ruled with clenched fists, not trembling hands.
Mourtzouphlos wasted no time.
Within the first two days, palace eunuchs loyal to Alexios IV were rounded up and vanished. Those within the imperial treasury were accused of theft, of inviting the Franks into the city with bribes — whether it was true or not mattered little. The dungeons filled again with whispers. Mourtzouphlos appointed his own men to the court's key positions — men from minor families, some barely literate but unquestioningly loyal. Atop the Senate steps, he proclaimed a new edict outlawing all factions and gatherings sympathetic to the Latin alliance. Crowds gathered, wary and bruised from years of incompetence, and listened to his speech laced with promises of purification and vengeance.
He wore the loros now — heavy, bejeweled, and inherited not by right, but by bloodshed. His voice rang over the forum like a hammer on bronze.
"We are not their tributaries! We are not the slaves of the West! Constantinople shall stand as she always has — unbent, unconquered!"
The crowd roared, but many in the Varangian Guard remained still.
Markos watched from the edges of the Milion Arch, hands on the pommel of his spathion. Around him, his fellow officers exchanged uneasy glances. The Varangians had always served the throne — but which throne? Their oath was to the emperor, not necessarily to justice. That was the flaw of mercenaries with conscience.
Later that day, the imperial edict came to the barracks in the form of an armed courier. All soldiers of the palace and outer defenses were to swear anew their loyalty to Alexios V Doukas or face dismissal — or worse. Markos took the scroll from the courier's shaking hands and brought it to the megaron, the long hall of the Varangian quarters. By torchlight, he read it aloud to his weary men.
One of them, Sigurd of Hedeby, spit on the ground. "They want our axe for a man who slit a boy's throat in his sleep?"
"Or let someone else do it," said Skleros. "Which is worse."
Markos looked at the scroll, then at the eyes around him — Norsemen, Saxons, Greeks, and a few Rus, all bound by their honor to a city crumbling in on itself.
"We swear to the throne," Markos said finally, his voice low, "but I say this now — if the new emperor seeks our swords to bleed the city further, let him feel the edge of them."
That day, he stood guard again at the Boukoleon gates, but the faces had changed. Alexios V Doukas, now emperor, met with the Varangians in private. He walked with purpose, voice firm, hands calloused. He made no pretense of divinity.
Markos entered the hall, armor caked in soot.
"Captain Markos," the new emperor said.
"Your Majesty."
"You served under fools. I will not pretend to be a god. But I will defend this city with steel, not coin. Will you?"
Markos nodded. "I will."
And in that moment, the oath Markos swore felt heavier than any before. The war was not over. And the shadows had not yet spoken their last.
As time passed, tension inside Constantinople crackled like dry leaves underfoot. Ever since the Latins had been allowed inside the city's walls, disorder stalked the streets. The Varangians remained dutiful at their posts by orders of Markos and some officers who took matters in their own hands, though now more often faced with skirmishes from the citizens they once swore to protect. Among them, Centarchos Markos stood resolute, though the fire of conviction in his heart waned beneath the weight of betrayal. The palaces of emperors stood gilded and proud, yet behind the walls of Blachernae and the forum of Constantine, desperation brewed.
Weeks passed since the coronation of Alexios IV and Isaac II. Markos had met both emperors in fleeting moments—Alexios IV, young and uncertain, had asked the Varangians for loyalty in the face of his Latin benefactors; Isaac, blind and ghostlike, muttered prayers that no god seemed to hear. Markos, armored in lamellar and crimson cloak, bowed as expected, but doubted inwardly. Even among his own—other centarchoi, some of Norse and Saxon origin—murmurs of Latin duplicity and imperial weakness grew louder with each passing day.