Terror of Constantinople (39 page)

    Phocas returned to his desk. He motioned me forward. He looked at the wine jug beside him, sighed and looked away.

    This wasn’t the jolly creature who’d charmed me during lunch at the Circus. It wasn’t the hieratic image who’d presided over the races. It was the bureaucratic, supremely powerful Ruler of the World – or whatever of it still paid attention to His Word.

    Phocas took up a sheet of parchment. On it was a list of names, all with black marks against them.

    ‘Do you see these names?’ he asked in a smooth voice. ‘Every one of these is of someone who wants to be Emperor in my place. Do you want to be Emperor?’

    ‘No, Your Majesty,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘I’m just a barbarian, here on business for Holy Mother Church.’

    ‘Perhaps I believe you,’ came the reply. ‘I didn’t want to be Emperor when I was your age. Fate can play strange tricks on a man if he lives long enough. But I do believe you. People like you don’t want to be Emperor. All you ever want to do is to feast on the rotting entrails of the Empire.’

    Phocas took up another sheet of parchment. It was covered on one side in a tiny Latin script.

    ‘Alaric of Britain,’ he began, speaking Greek in a voice of quiet menace, ‘I have in my hand a signed request from the Exarch in Ravenna for your immediate removal to his presence. You are accused of a fraud on the Sacred Treasury.’

    He pushed the sheet towards me. I read it with freezing insides. My knees shook with the unexpected shock. My idiotic associates had sold half the shares in that Cornish tin shipment to a consortium of Jews and Armenians backed by the Exarch. His agents in Cadiz had got wind of our scheme. It was they who had bought the shipment. They had then observed the reloading of the ships.

    The Ravenna contract had been voided. The tin was forfeit. My associates had decamped from Rome to take shelter in Pavia with the Lombards. I was wanted for questioning and trial in Ravenna.

    ‘You do realise, I think,’ Phocas continued in a more conversational tone, ‘that you are in the technical sense a traitor. I could have you flayed alive in the Circus for this. And that’s without dragging up another matter from outside Ravenna that I may still regard as pending.’

    He got up again and went over to a cupboard. He took out a golden key from his robe and opened the ivory doors. Inside was what looked like a golden birdcage. This he pulled out on a sliding shelf.

    It was a cage. But instead of real birds, it contained three golden and ivory figurines of birds. He pulled at a wheel and pushed a lever. As he stood back, there was a whirring of little gears, and the room was filled with the sharp, artificial singing of birds.

    It was an odd accompaniment to a death sentence. Oh, if you set aside the bathing and more frequent changing of clothes, the main difference between Phocas and the Great One was that the second had to rule somewhat more by persuasion than the first. This man could, if he pleased, do the most awful things to me.

    But the chances were that it didn’t please him. If he’d managed a shock just as great as I’d had in the Great One’s tent, I was recovering much faster. I was angry at how those duffers back in Rome had, despite my urging, overreached themselves. I was vaguely apprehensive of a crushing fine. But I didn’t really expect I’d be used any time soon as a warm-up for the chariot races.

    ‘Come over here,’ said Phocas, speaking softly. He beckoned me close. ‘Come and stand by this little miracle of workmanship. Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said, pointing through an opening under the cage at a spinning wheel. ‘It was made for Justinian whose grand design was to reconquer all the lost Western Empire.

    ‘Do you know that, following the reconquest of Italy, he even had plans drawn up for an assault on Britain?’

    We looked a while at the little birds. I watched in fascination as they opened and shut their mouths and fluttered their golden feathers.

    Phocas spoke again, now in Latin. ‘I want to know what really happened in the Great One’s camp.’

    So that was what he wanted. I stepped back to gather my thoughts – those artificial squeaks and trills were beginning to annoy after their first surprise.

    ‘No, Alaric,’ said Phocas, pulling me gently forward. ‘You will watch these birds as you answer. Speak into their sound. And you’ll speak softly. I’m not deaf yet.’

    I thought quickly. What to do? On the one hand, repeating the lies Theophanes had imposed on the world would probably put us both straight under the Ministry. On the other hand, the truth wasn’t much to his advantage. And disclosing it might not be much to mine, if Theophanes should survive to hear about it.

    That was if Phocas chose not to take against me on account of it.

    ‘You were observed, you know,’ Phocas prompted me. ‘You were seen from the Monastery of St Euthemius as the three of you came away from the Great One.

    ‘An ant doesn’t fart in this Empire but I don’t get some wind of it. Don’t you imagine otherwise. I want to know what happened with the Great One,’ he said, dropping his voice still lower. ‘I want the full truth. I know when people are lying to me. Give me the truth if you rightly understand your interest.’

    I swallowed and took what seemed the least risky option.

    ‘I will tell you everything as it happened, Caesar,’ I began. ‘But I want your promise that you will not act against anyone who may emerge from my story without full credit.’

    Phocas creased his face into a nasty smile. ‘You presume to ask an Emperor for his word?’

    ‘No, sir,’ I said, ‘I ask for your word as an officer in the Danubian Army.’

    As a rule, one doesn’t bandy words with a creature like Phocas. You give him what he wants and when he wants it. If you think that it may not show you in the most favourable light, you still give it to him – but do so while licking the man’s instep and begging for mercy.

    But, you see, I didn’t think that approach was likely to work. The previous day, however, he’d been willing to play the part of one simple man talking to another, to the exclusion of the sophisticates and yes-men who generally surrounded him. That might still take his fancy.

    There is a time for abasement, and a time for playing along. I had no choice but to keep my nerve and take a chance on the latter.

    ‘Your word as a soldier,’ I added, ‘will be quite enough for me.’

    Phocas turned back to his artificial birds. He spoke slowly, as if recalling distant thoughts and feelings.

    ‘I’ve not been asked for that in over eight years in this den of lunacy they call an Empire. And fuck-all good my word as a soldier did poor Maurice,’ he added bitterly. ‘I broke my military oath when I raised the Danubian Army against him. I broke my word when I promised him his life, and the lives of his sons. I broke my word when I promised his widow and daughters that I’d spare them.

    ‘And now, as my enemies gather to destroy me, you expect me to give you a word of honour that has any meaning?’

    ‘I want your word, even so,’ I persisted.

    He looked hard at those pretty birds. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘You have my word that neither you and your secretary nor my ever faithful accomplice-in-crime Theophanes will come to harm as a result of what you tell me. But I want the truth – and only the truth.’

    I gave it to him. I left absolutely nothing out.

    ‘So you fucked her, and with her father looking on?’ he asked with a suddenly admiring grin as I finished. ‘I’d like to have seen that. My darling son-in-law Priscus would have had trouble keeping his hands off you afterwards. You can be sure of that!’

    He fell silent. I was still alive.

    The wheel began to run down, and the birds now wheezed and trilled in falling notes.

    ‘Would you like to go back to Canterbury?’ Phocas asked suddenly. I couldn’t keep the look of astonishment off my face as I stared back at him.

    ‘I know all about Canterbury,’ he added. ‘Your penis may have saved you with the Great One. It nearly got you killed with Ethelbert when you got that daughter of his chief man up the duff.

    ‘I could write to Ethelbert, you know. I’m told he’s started calling himself an Emperor, doubtless egged on by those Roman priests. If I wrote to him as my Brother in Purple, he’d have you back with open arms. Would you have me do that?’

    I opened and closed my mouth. I swallowed, wondering what on earth I was supposed to reply to this. If he’d asked about the geography of India, I’d not have been more completely astonished.

    But Phocas stood silent, his eyes burning into my face, looking for something I couldn’t imagine was required. Then he whispered so gently I had to bend forward to catch the words: ‘This conversation did not take place.’

    As the birds fell finally silent, he changed back to Greek and said in a louder voice:

    ‘I understand that His Excellency the Permanent Legate has been murdered, and in his own bedroom. Am I correct in believing that you found the body and established that it was murder?’

    ‘Yes, sir,’ I answered.

    ‘Well, this,’ said Phocas, ‘– and I put it mildly – is an embarrassment. I had need of His Excellency at least to stay alive, and preferably to be on speaking terms with me. Now he’s dead, we’ll have to find the killer. I’ll not have any difficulties with Rome.’

    Phocas returned to his desk and took up a sheet of parchment. He held it away from me.

    ‘I am told you have some ability in these matters. That is more than I seem able to say for my Semi-Divine son-in-law. I therefore appoint you Investigator of the Death. You will work together with Priscus. However, you will be in sole charge of the investigation. Any advice or resources he cares to give you may be taken or rejected as you see fit. You will report directly to me as often as I call for you.

    ‘I want the case solved within a reasonable time. I’ll not ask more than that for the moment – but I want someone I can put on public trial and then execute.’

    He paused, looking again at the parchment sheet.

    ‘I also have need of a new Permanent Legate. There is no time for sending to Rome. The most eligible local candidates for an Acting Legateship are all out of the city. Therefore’ – he pushed the parchment sheet towards me – ‘I appoint you, Alaric of Britain, Acting Legate until such time as a replacement can be obtained from Rome.’

    ‘But Caesar,’ I cried – I hadn’t expected this – ‘I’m not ordained. I’m not even of age to be ordained. How can I accept your commission?’

    ‘You’ll accept my commission,’ he said, now cheerful again, ‘because I’m the Emperor. My word is law. If I wanted, I could hang the present incumbent and make you Patriarch of Constantinople. I could very easily make you Patriarch of Antioch, now there’s a vacancy.

    ‘If His Holiness in Rome has any objections, they can be handled when communications are reopened. And bearing in mind the lack of any other candidates, I can’t see how he will object. It’s either you or some slimy Greek cleric who really would raise eyebrows in the Lateran.’

    I looked at the commission. Its ink barely dry, it looked chillingly formal.

    ‘He shall be regarded’, it read, ‘as the Representative and Plenary Agent in all matters, both spiritual and temporal, of His Most Sacred Excellency the Patriarch of Rome.’

    No mention, I noted, in all the surrounding verbiage, of a ‘Universal Bishop’. I wondered if I’d be expected to raise that issue before this whole ghastly comedy was played out.

    There is a limit to how far you can argue with any emperor. I’d already pushed Phocas further than anyone else had dared in years. I bowed my acceptance of the commission.

    ‘So, Your Excellency,’ Phocas laughed softly, ‘I’ll not trouble you yet with any request for your benediction. But I’m sure you’ll have much to discuss over your brotherly kiss with His Holiness of Constantinople.’

    He went over and pulled the door open. Theophanes almost fell into the room. He steadied himself and entered. Martin followed at some distance behind him with the other secretaries.

    Phocas handed the commission to one of them, who read it to us in a loud flat voice.

    Theophanes stiffened slightly, then made a grave bow in my direction.

    Martin almost fainted with shock, clean forgetting his own duty to bow.

    As we shuffled out into the sunlight of a cold autumn morning and made towards our chairs, I turned to Martin.