Terror of Constantinople (58 page)

    ‘And you think’, I asked with a sneer of my own, ‘this will make you a big man back in Rome?’

    ‘Of course it bloody will!’ he exclaimed. ‘You know as well as I do that this has been the main objective of Church policy for at least a generation. We wanted it. Now I’ve got it. Can’t you imagine the looks on every face when I flash this about in the Lateran?’

    ‘You might even get to replace Bishop Lawrence as head of the English Mission,’ I observed drily.

    ‘Oh, very witty, I’m sure,’ Silas snarled at me. He glanced at the sealed roll of parchment. ‘When I turn up with this in Rome, I shan’t be satisfied with a bishopric in somewhere like Naples or Rimini. It certainly won’t be anything in some shithole barbarian land like yours. That’s a place for sending others to, not for visiting.

    ‘I suppose you know that Pope Gregory the Saint was once Permanent Legate here,’ he continued with a change of tone. ‘It’s often been a good step towards the top job.’

    ‘If you’re after the Papacy itself,’ I reminded him, ‘you’ll need Heraclius to confirm it. And will he do that for a man who’s lately made life harder for him all over the East?’

    ‘Heraclius will have no choice but to accept the unanimous decision of the Roman Church,’ Silas said with a snigger. ‘Phocas has left him with problems that leave no Imperial room for manoeuvre in the West.’

    ‘Tell me, Silas,’ I asked suddenly, ‘tell me – why shouldn’t I kill you here and now and trade that patent with Heraclius for my life?’

    Silas did an excellent job of keeping a look of alarm off his face. ‘Because, my stupid little barbarian, I represent His Holiness in Rome. Lay violent hands on me, and you’ll go to Hell. Besides, you haven’t any sword with you.’

    A fair answer, the second one at least – though I did have a very sharp knife under my cloak.

    ‘And,’ Silas went on, with a cheerful wave of his hand, ‘because Heraclius would need rather more than a scrap of parchment to convince him that a rival for the Purple shouldn’t be killed on the spot. Some of your “soldiers” were so drunk towards the end of that glorified street brawl you led that they were still hailing you as Emperor even after order was restored.

    ‘I wouldn’t trust any promises he made to the likes of you. Even if we leave aside the little matter of the Purple, you’re a barbarian. I know you don’t like Greeks. I don’t much like them myself if truth be told. But they’ve always known how to deal with barbarians.

    ‘Let me tell you – back when your people were first smashing up the Western Provinces, there were immense numbers of you settled here in the Eastern cities. In the West, we spoke piously of integration and assimilation. We rejoiced over the prospect of your conversion to the Orthodox Faith of Nicaea and of Chalcedon.

    ‘In the East, they knew better. You can take a barbarian out of the forest, the Greeks said to us. You can’t take the forest out of a barbarian. Getting a few of the Creeds by heart doesn’t make a savage into a citizen.

    ‘The authorities sent out a message to every barbarian in the East to assemble in certain places on a certain day. There they should all receive some token of Imperial favour.’

    Silas paused for a gloating smile, then continued:

    ‘They killed every last one of you – men, women, children. They had you surrounded in the public squares. You people stood there, as trusting as beasts on their way to slaughter. You never saw the archers until they were on every rooftop.

    ‘As the West fell away, a province at a time, the East was renewed in the blood of the barbarians. The Greeks have kept an eye on you lot ever since. Therefore the need for residence permits.

    ‘Don’t suppose any deal you made with Heraclius would last the blink of an eye beyond his setting hands on this document.’

    Silas sat back and laughed unpleasantly as he doubtless recalled the massacre of barbarians all over the East.

    ‘Don’t think of killing me, my silly Englishman,’ he said at length. ‘Come back with me to Rome. Only I can get you out of here, and you’ll be useful to me there as an unfriendly but truthful witness to what I’ve done here in the city.’

    ‘That’s all very well, Your Excellency,’ I said with a mock bow at his genius. ‘There is, however, one matter that still perplexes me. Phocas has saved your life. Phocas has given Holy Mother Church what it wanted most in the world. He has made you the agent of communication to Rome. This will perhaps advance you to the Papacy. But what’s in it for him? Phocas has never struck me as a particularly charitable man. Back in his early days, he may have given a lot to Pope Gregory, but he always made sure to get flattery and hard cash in exchange. So what’s in it for our former Lord and Master and Ruler of the Universe, Phocas?’

    ‘You may ask that of the Dispensator in Rome,’ Silas said with an attempt at the enigmatic. He wasn’t to know that Theophanes had already given the same answer. Hearing it a second time rather spoiled the effect.

    Again, I didn’t pursue the question. The answer was now pretty obvious. The moment I saw the patent, all those odd conversations with Theophanes and with Phocas suddenly made sense. It was like one of those bursts of enlightenment the very religious sometimes report. Instead I moved on to the question of what had occurred in Ephesus late the previous spring. That was something I still couldn’t fit into the puzzle.

    Silas was going into an orgasm of evasion when we were disturbed by a knock at what remained of the door. One of the Legation officials looked in.

    ‘Demet— My Lord, rather,’ he said in evident confusion, ‘there are armed men to see you.’

62

The official stood back. Immediately, three soldiers stepped past him into the room.

    ‘Ah, do come in, my good men,’ Silas said in halting Greek. Now he was no longer Demetrius, it would never do for him to soil his lips with the common Greek of the streets. Like most of his sort, though, he was too grand and too idle to have paid much attention to learning the pure language.

    He turned to me and switched back into Latin. ‘You know I said I’d take you to Rome with me? Well, I lied.’

    He sat back in his chair and hugged himself.

    One of the soldiers stepped forward. He was a big man with black hair on his hands and wrists and a massive black beard broken only by the occasional battle scar. He looked nothing like the men of the City Guard I’d taken as typical of the Eastern armies. He cleared his throat and held up a slip of papyrus.

    ‘We are here’, he said in the deep, flattened Greek of the Mesopotamian provinces, ‘to see the so-called Permanent Legate of the Roman Patriarch.’

    He looked at Silas. ‘Are you that person?’

    ‘I am indeed, my good man,’ Silas said, patting his official robe to emphasise his status. ‘To be precise, I am the Permanent Legate of His Holiness the Universal Bishop. I represent His Holiness and, through him, Saint Peter himself.

    ‘Now, to business. I want to thank His Imperial Majesty Heraclius for the speed of his response to my message. You will find that this loathsome and obscene barbarian child—’

    The soldier held up an impatient arm for silence. He looked decidedly sour at Silas’s mention of the hated title.

    ‘You tell me you are the Acting Permanent Legate?’ he asked. Without bothering for a reply, he turned to his subordinates. ‘You will note’, he said, ‘the malefactor confessed his blasphemy and treason.’

    The other two nodded. One fingered his sword.

    Silas got to his feet. The easy smile had gone from his face. He looked nervously around the room. The windows were still shuttered after my orders for the room to be sealed. Soldiers blocked the doorway.

    I cast my eyes demurely down and tried to look part of the battered furniture.

    ‘My good man,’ Silas opened, with another, but failed, attempt at jollity, ‘I think we are talking at cross purposes. I said I was the Permanent Legate. If you want the
Acting
Permanent Legate—’

    He got no further. The soldier reached forward and struck him hard in the face with a fist that looked about the size and weight of a lead club.

    ‘Silence, you piece of Latin shit!’ he said, barely changing either tone or volume.

    Silas fell gasping to the floor. He put his hands to his face and drew them away covered in blood. Then he fell silent, looking up with growing horror at the dull, official faces.

    The soldier held the slip of papyrus close to his face and began intoning his orders from Priscus.

    ‘You’ve misunderstood,’ Silas gabbled, now in Latin. ‘The one you want is the yellow-headed barbarian. He’s the one you want.’

    ‘Silence, pig!’ the soldier rasped in Greek, showing his fist again. He was growing impatient at the sounds Silas was making. It was plain he knew no Latin.

    He turned to the other two soldiers. ‘Get him on his feet,’ he said curtly. ‘Each of you – take an arm. Hold him steady.’

    He drew his sword.

    ‘No!’ Silas screamed. ‘Please, in the name of God. You must take me to Heraclius. I have a deal with him. He’ll confirm you’ve made a mistake. Please—’

    He got no further. His voice was choked off by a hard sword-thrust into the guts. The soldier pulled it smartly out, wiped the blade on a cloth and sheathed it again. It was one of those smooth strokes you only see from professionals.

    Silas was on his knees again. He held up his hands, bloodier than before. He looked up at me, terror and shock stamped equally on his white face.

    ‘No,’ he croaked, still in Latin. ‘Not like this. I’ve come so far. You must tell them—’

    He fell on to his hands and tried to crawl towards me. But every move was suddenly an effort. Then he fell forward on to his face and tried ineffectually to drag himself across the boards. I continued staring down.

    The soldier looked at me for the first time. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

    ‘I am, sir,’ I replied in the smooth, unaccented Greek that I’d long since perfected, ‘Fourth Secretary to His Holiness Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople. I was here on business at the Legation when this impostor tried to extract money from the officials.’

    The soldier softened. ‘You know, people like you shouldn’t be out on the streets on a day like this,’ he said. ‘There are some wicked people about.’

    He gave me an appreciative look that went straight through my outdoor clothing. But then he remembered what I’d said about the Greek Patriarch. It didn’t do to go about propositioning clerics, even on the Imperial frontiers.

    I gave him a charming smile and said something about how the work of Holy Mother Church must go on even during a civil war.

    We all crossed ourselves at the mention of the word ‘holy’, then the soldier turned back to Silas, who was still groping his way across the floor in my direction. His bloody robe clung to him as after a heavy downpour and its delicate silk snagged on the floorboards. Strength failing, he gasped with pain at every move. But he somehow wanted to be beside me.

    The soldier waved at his subordinates. ‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ he said.

    One of them took hold of Silas by what remained of his hair and pulled his head up. There was a hiss of steel through air and a dull thud as the head was parted with a single stroke from its shoulders. Spurting blood which the soldiers moved smartly back to avoid, the body fell to the floor with a heavy thump. For a moment, it lay twitching – then it was still.

    ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, standing forward. ‘May I?’

    I took the severed head from the soldier’s hands. He stood back with a bemused respect. I held the head up carefully to avoid getting blood on my clean clothes. I’d often wondered how quickly a beheading killed its victim. Does the mind die at once when the head is severed from its body? Or does some vestige of life remain like the cooling of a stone taken from a fire?

    There were other matters, I’ll admit, more deserving of my attention. But this was a chance of knowledge that might not come up so conveniently again. I pushed my face within about six inches of the severed head.

    ‘Can you still hear me, Silas?’ I cried softly in Latin. I tapped hard on the closed eyes with the fingers of my left hand. There was a fluttering movement.

    ‘Silas,’ I repeated.

    The eyes fell open. I swear they focused for a moment on my face.