Terror of Constantinople (47 page)

    ‘I don’t suppose you could see how I was nearly pissing myself with fright as I sat there with Alypius, half expecting at any moment to be dragged to the basement. Afterwards, as I walked home, I realised I’d been got there so that Alypius could pass on a warning from Theophanes against further snooping.

    ‘But it was the note from Theophanes next morning about that cot for Maximin – that plus your own uncharacteristic behaviour with the wine and opium – that aroused my suspicions.

    ‘You killed the old Court Poet, didn’t you? Theophanes knew you’d done it, and put the frighteners on you by shoving me in that room. I imagine you told him you could brave any horrors he might subject you to in the dungeons. But you couldn’t face me, and he had me there ready at hand, just in case that was needed to break you.’

    But for the occasional breeze and the faint sounds of the city and those passing and re-passing ships, we sat in silence. Martin looked at me and opened his mouth. Then he looked down again. At last, he found his words.

    ‘The old eunuch threatened to expose me in front of you. He said you might be roped into the trial. He said he couldn’t guarantee your safety or that of Maximin. You’ve seen for yourself the terrible looks and words he can manage when he isn’t trying to charm.’

    ‘The man was Court Poet under Maurice,’ I said. ‘I suppose he had a hand in smashing you and your father up.’

    I poured out more wine for us, and drew my cloak about my legs. Martin looked up at me and smiled.

    ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to come back to Constantinople. I knew it would be a disaster. Even so I really did hope, before we arrived, that I could stick close by you and behave as if I’d never been here before. Then the eunuch had us to lunch and made me dig up all those memories of what happened before.’

    ‘You mean’, I asked, ‘that Professor of Rhetoric done over on some more than usually inventive charge of treason?’

    ‘That’s the one,’ said Martin. ‘He led the pack against my father. It wasn’t all his own money he put up to pay off our debts. But he collected it. He issued the bankruptcy petition when we couldn’t pay. You should have seen his face when we met in court.’

    Martin closed his eyes and thought back to that dreadful day. He wasn’t up to explaining the details of the case as it unfolded. But I managed to reconstruct for myself that the Anthemius petition had been an excuse to involve the tax authorities. Without Anthemius to push them, they’d have waited, reasonably sure the tax bill would be paid. With the matter in court, they had to hurry forward to grab what they could. That had allowed the ban on enslavement for debt to be set aside.

    They’d got their cross petition granted without a hearing and without any hope of appeal or delay of execution.

    Martin and his father had gone in as free men. They emerged as bound slaves. People they knew turned from them as they were marched along the street to the market. His father had collapsed and died as he stood on the slave block. Anthemius had made a derisory bid for Martin – the sort of bid that pulls down the final selling price.

    ‘I couldn’t get Anthemius,’ Martin continued after another reverie, ‘but I could make a start on the others. I might never have acted at all, but for an accident.

    ‘I was called in by Theophanes a few days after your first brush with Priscus in that restaurant. We met in his office, where he told me of his concerns for your safety. We agreed that you were still very young, and without any experience of City ways. He asked me to keep an eye on you – not spying, you understand. I’d never have spied on you. He just wanted me to guide you away from trouble and report any possible dangers to him in advance.

    ‘When I was still considering whether I could in conscience do as he wanted, he was called out of the room. I’d seen my security file on his desk as I sat down. He forgot to take it with him. So I had a good look.

    ‘We’d already discussed the bankruptcy, and he’d explained that there was nothing he could do after so long to ensure any restitution of property. But I knew the file must contain the names and addresses of the people Anthemius had got on his side. I committed all the details to memory and then rearranged the file so it wouldn’t look as if I’d touched it.

    ‘I was lucky. I’d no sooner got everything right than the eunuch came back into the room.’

    I took another sip of wine. Where this sort of thing was concerned, there must have been more intelligent lapdogs than Martin. He’d waited, he explained, until Theophanes ‘must have’ forgotten his carelessness with the file. The evening after he brought Maximin to me, he’d put his plan into execution. He’d followed the Court Poet as he went out on the pull, and bashed his head in with a half-brick.

    Afterwards, he had shambled round the outer central districts of Constantinople, covered in blood and doubtless apologising out loud to God, before tripping over the bundle that turned out to be Maximin.

    Somehow – Martin swore he couldn’t think how – Theophanes had known he was the killer.

    Their next interview I’d already guessed. Once Martin was broken down by all the terrors Theophanes could imply with a turn of his mouth, it had been agreed that the murder would be overlooked. Of course he’d also impressed on Martin the need for much closer surveillance of me and regular reports. So it had all gone from there.

    I should have been outraged. But one has to be reasonable. No harm had been done. Perhaps Martin had even kept me out of danger, which might not have been the case if I had been spied on by some copying clerk who might actually have stumbled on something.

    ‘Tell me, though, Martin,’ I asked with a sudden thought. ‘Did Authari know about the killing?’

    ‘He grabbed me as I came back into the Legation,’ he said. ‘He helped me get the blood washed off. It was then that we noticed you were missing. He was a truer friend than I’d ever realised,’ he added mournfully. ‘And we had so little time to be friends  ...’

    ‘Very well,’ I said, fixing Martin in the eye, ‘I am hurt. But I forgive you.’

    He swallowed. ‘Thank you, Aelric,’ he said. ‘That does mean much to me. I know that God will be less forgiving. I have committed the most unpardonable sin. That means  ...’

    For a moment, he had lost me. I’d forgiven him for the betrayal. But now that he’d mentioned it, I thought to pull rank and give general absolution. Then again, Martin had never really accepted me as the Pope’s representative in anything. But it was only for a moment he’d lost me.

    ‘Oh, as for the killing,’ I said, cutting off his talk of hellfire, ‘I shouldn’t worry about God. The man was fair game by any custom. And having looked through some of his poems, I can’t say you deprived the world of genius or even taste.

    ‘Is the work finished yet?’ I asked. ‘Are there any remaining on your list?’

    ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Theophanes did say he would see to them. But nothing has happened yet.’

    ‘Well,’ I sighed, ‘you’ll have to leave them until your next visit. This time tomorrow, you’ll be with Maximin across the water in Chalcedon.’

    ‘I’m not leaving the city without you,’ Martin insisted again. ‘It was my prayers that got us out of the Yellow Camp. I committed my soul to God and myself to His service. I don’t yet know what that service must be, but I feel it concerns you. As you said to me outside the walls, we came together, and we go together.’

    Its oil exhausted, the lamp suddenly went out. We sat a while silent in the darkness.

    I gave up for the moment. There was no point trying to reason with a man in the grip of religious mania. I changed the subject.

    ‘We bury Authari tomorrow morning,’ I said. ‘Is the body prepared?’

    ‘Yes,’ Martin answered. ‘I’ve explained to Gutrune about the need for a sealed coffin. She was upset – her people like the more showy Arian ritual, where everything is on view. But I told her it was your will.’

    Since Authari had stood in for the Permanent Legate, Theophanes had given me the body of the slave who’d been poisoned by the stuff on my robe. He’d stand in for Authari. No one would ask what had become of his body.

    ‘How about flowers?’ I asked. ‘I want the church alive with the things.’

    ‘I scoured the city this afternoon,’ Martin assured me. ‘Everything is arranged.’

    At least that would go right. I thought.

50

I stepped out the following morning into a fully militarised City. The Ministry guards around the Legation had been withdrawn. They no longer served any good purpose, and were needed elsewhere. But the street junctions were now barricaded and guarded by the Circus Factions. Shopkeepers and craftsmen strutted about in makeshift armour, carrying swords of varied provenance. Those without swords carried whatever could be adapted into weapons.

    It wasn’t an army for trusting in the field – not against the forces massed outside the walls. But it might lend itself to days of vicious street-fighting.

    Whatever his other failings, Priscus did seem to know his military stuff. He even won a couple of battles, Martin had told me. One of them, to be sure, he’d won by reporting the opposing general to the Persian King for treason. He’d delayed his attack until the man was being impaled with his sons.

    Still, credit where it was due – Priscus was a better man on the battlefield. Perhaps Phocas should have trusted him with an army.

    With Martin, I pushed my way through the crowds and stood on the sea wall looking across to the Galatan shore.

    At last, a heavy chain had been stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn. Nothing would be able to get close to the least impregnable stretch of defences. Even so, the size of the army Heraclius had positioned at all other points was a dispiriting sight. Tents covered the Asiatic shore. A steady stream of boats struggled back and forth across the choppy waters to the unwalled suburbs of Galata. There, among the trees and houses, the sun glinted on armour and bright swords. In the far distance – I had to strain to see against the sun – a whole body of mounted troops cantered off towards the Thracian suburbs.

    Someone beside me turned and asked if I knew how much food had been stockpiled against a siege. I gave a noncommittal answer. I knew that Martin and Authari had made sure to fill our own lower rooms with enough dry goods and beer to last for months. The Legation itself could have supplied a small town from its storehouses.

    Fuck the City. Whatever else happened, I and mine were unlikely to go hungry.

    Someone else said he’d come from the land walls. The army there was even larger, he said. He added that the guards had been issued with orders to let no one out. The City gates were now barred against a siege. No exit permits were being honoured. Even a party of missionary monks had been prevented from leaving.

    ‘That can’t possibly be true!’ the man beside me said. ‘The work of evangelising the barbarian is a duty for the whole Empire. No civil war can interrupt the Godly Work.’

    ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ snarled the man who’d volunteered the news. ‘Because if you are, I’ve got a bigger sword than yours, and I know how to use it. I tell you – every fucking gate is shut. The whole world is sealed off from us.’

    ‘My dear Brothers in Christ,’ I intervened, eager to see if my status had more than token meaning, ‘my poor colleague the Patriarch Thomas is lying on his bed of sickness even as you speak. In this moment of sadness, we have more than a duty of love to each other.’

    The man pursed his lips and carefully chose his words.

    ‘My Lord,’ he said with a little bow, ‘I regret to inform you the Patriarch is not long for this world. He took a turn for the worse last night. Not even wine steeped with a single hair from the head of Saint Andrew could revive him. The doctors have abandoned hope.’

    ‘I am fully aware of these tidings,’ I lied. I looked down my nose at the man, and continued:

    ‘In these last days of the world, the Dark One himself dares to walk the streets of the city. Yes!’ I cried as I pointed at a conveniently black slab of granite cemented into the battlement – ‘The Dark One himself is abroad!’

    There was an impressed murmur at this, and several members of the crowd stepped back from the slab.

    I would have said more. With my dramatic gesture, though, I’d caught sight of flabby old Nicias in one of the gibbets. Still dressed in the robe he’d worn in the Imperial Box, false teeth rammed upside down in his mouth, his horribly twisted body swayed in the breeze.

    ‘And so,’ I ended lamely, ‘it is the duty of all good citizens to utter no words that may contribute to demoralisation of the people. Come, Martin,’ I said, eager to get away. ‘We have work of the highest importance.’