Terror of Constantinople (9 page)

    ‘Then, I suppose we just wait on events,’ I said. ‘What the Dispensator actually wants of us will no doubt be revealed in time. For the moment, we carry on as if we hadn’t noticed anything odd – and look around for means of a quick getaway if things turn horrid.’

    ‘You can forget thoughts of escape,’ Martin replied with flat bitterness. ‘Getting back from Pavia to Papal territory was nothing compared with this. You can’t get across the city without the right stamp on your permit – let alone get out of it. And you can bet that, long after there’s no bread in the shops, the old eunuch and his police will be grinding away like a watermill.

    ‘I don’t like this place,’ he whispered, now in Latin. ‘I never asked to be sent back here. I know my duties, but I shan’t rest easy until we see Naples again – if we see Naples again. Let us praise God that our families are safe.’

8

The chair that collected me put us down inside the main hall of the Ministry building. This was a squat, overblown cavern of a place, faced inside and out with carved granite and white limestone. Hundreds of offices on floor after floor faced inwards to that main hall. Except on the higher floors – and then above eye-level – I don’t think there were any windows that faced outwards. Business was transacted there in a constant glow of lamps. The offices were places of unending gloom.

    Light streamed down into the hall from a circle of windows set into the base of the dome. The floor was covered in a giant mosaic showing the sufferings of the damned in a Hell that seemed to owe more to the Old Faith than to anything in the teachings of Holy Mother Church.

    Clerks hurried about bearing thick files. Some of them stood in corners in whispered consultations with men dressed in black. These were big, powerful men, with obvious body armour under the cloaks that covered them from head to foot. They moved with confident swaggers as they tapped at the sheets of papyrus offered them by the clerks.

    A couple of the big men who stood together looked over at me and opened a conversation with one of the clerks that I was sure must relate to me.

    Once he’d finished helping me from the chair, Martin stood quiet and very still beside me. His body almost radiated fear and depression.

    There had been a change of plan. We were now invited to lunch with Theophanes. He himself had been waiting for us with only one clerical assistant for company. This was the man I’d seen yesterday, though I’d given him no attention. A little man with dark eyes and the hooked nose of the East, he looked like a younger, slimmer, unmutilated version of Theophanes. He spoke only in reply to his master, and then in a rapid and very correct Greek.

    After another elaborate display of courtesy, and theatrical flourishes that nearly floored me with the wafts of rose and sandalwood perfume they sent in my direction, Theophanes led the way on foot to a restaurant in the square outside the Ministry.

    On the way in, I hadn’t noticed the little crowd gathered outside. All women and the elderly, they stood silently in the scorching glare of the sun. Some held up placards with names written on them. We attracted a few odd looks from these people, but most turned their faces away, refusing to acknowledge the grave but slightly mocking greeting Theophanes went out of his way to give them. They in turn were ignored by those who passed around them.

    ‘They are the relatives of certain persons the Great Augustus has been compelled to regard as traitors,’ Theophanes said, answering my unasked question. ‘Their own evident age and poverty remove them from suspicion of wrongdoing. And the presence among them of several monks dissuades us from enforcing the laws against riotous assembly.’

    I looked away from the gathering. Just across the road from the Ministry, on a patch of watered and neatly tended grass, was a small statue of the official who, back in the days when the Emperor Julian had tried to restore the Old Faith, had shut down the Ministry. He’d turned the clerks into the street and started burning their files.

    Then Julian had been killed on his Persian campaign, and the next Emperor, Jovian, had re-established the Ministry. The official had apparently committed suicide while awaiting arrest and questioning. But his statue remained, though with much of the inscription on its base chiselled out.

    Around the neck of this statue, someone had managed to tie a wooden placard. There were public slaves fussing about with ladders and knives to remove the thing. It was too far away to read the words. No one else was stopping to read them. Theophanes gave the placard a brief glance as we passed by, and added a mild comment about the need for greater vigilance in these days of tribulation.

    Once in the restaurant, we were shown directly into a private room on the upper floor. Slaves there bowed silently to us, and waited on us with a deft and practised ease. It was a very decent lunch – fresh bread, light fish and uncooked vegetables, and a couple of pleasant wines.

    ‘I have taken the liberty of drawing up your permit myself,’ Theophanes said, putting down his goblet of crushed ice and fruit juice. He beckoned to his assistant, who came forward with a folded sheet of parchment. It bore a large seal. With it was a gold medallion that would save me the trouble of carrying the document about with me.

    ‘As befits one of your status, it is an open permit with no restrictions, so long as you keep within the safely of the walls. I have decided that, as you may wish to visit an unknown number of libraries and other places of scholarly interest, there is no point in placing any limits on your movement within the City. You will doubtless find the streets of Constantinople far safer than those of Rome. Even so, I advise you to take reasonable care if you choose to go out at night. You should at least inform the doorman at the Legation of your probable movements. I will speak with him myself. I think you will find him a useful point of contact in my absence.’

    ‘I have yet to meet the Permanent Legate,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure he will wish to thank you for your invaluable kindness in these matters.’

    Theophanes looked at me. His face creased in a benevolent smile, his eyes seemed to look straight inside me. ‘If His Excellency should decide to call you to his office,’ he said, ‘you will be in my debt for passing on my best wishes and my reminder that we have much routine business to transact.’

    He changed the subject, asking me about England. He knew the Great Constantine had been declared Emperor there, back in the days before my people had gone in and smashed everything up. Since then, it had dropped out of the literature. The best information he’d been able to find was of a place without sunshine and inhabited by black dwarves and Germanic barbarians.

    Could that be true? he asked in a voice that sounded just a little naïve.

    ‘Your Magnificence will surely—’

    ‘Do please call me Theophanes,’ he broke in with a confidential smile. ‘I would not have one of my dearest friends stand on ceremony in private.’

    ‘Then Theophanes,’ I took up, ‘you will surely know that England is divided into a number of kingdoms, all with shifting frontiers. My own part, Kent, is presently blessed with King Ethelbert, who is a firm convert to the Faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. He rejoices in the friendship of the Church mission to his realm, and is untinged by the faintest trace of heresy.’

    And untinged, I thought to myself, by the faintest tinge of anything else beyond a taste for other men’s wives and generally for getting his own way. My strongest memory was of a drunken savage, leering up at me with a gelding knife in hand. It was only because dear old Maximin had turned up at the last moment that I had been packed off to Rome.

    Doubtless, he found Bishop Lawrence and the other missionaries useful when it came to lording it over the other kings. Without that – and without Queen Berthe to nag him into church come Sunday – he’d have had the whole mission stuffed into the first ships out of Richborough.

    But I continued with the sanitised version of the man’s doings in Kent. Theophanes prodded me along with short supplementals that showed a far greater knowledge than he was willing to admit.

    ‘Of course,’ he said at length, ‘we have never officially accepted the loss of the Western Provinces. With the extinction of the Imperial line in the West, sovereignty devolved in full upon our own Emperor in Constantinople. Whenever possible – as, most importantly, in the time of the Great Justinian – we have been eager to restore Imperial rule in the West. Our recent embarrassments in Italy do not affect the solidity of the restored Empire in Africa. You will find this rebellion by the African Exarch a trifling matter set against what has been achieved there.

    ‘We have plans to extend our rule from southern Spain. That the barbarian King who rules much of that Province has converted out of heresy will not prolong his sway over the many multitudes of the orthodox who sigh for their rightful allegiance.’

    ‘So you’re thinking of a reconquest of Britain?’ I asked, trying to keep the derision from my voice. I’d have thought the Slavs running wild below the Danube, and the Persians marching in from the east, would have been more important items on the Imperial agenda.

    ‘I am not sure if the present correlation of forces would permit a reconquest,’ Theophanes said smoothly.

    Too right there! I thought. My people took by the sword, and will hold by the sword. Given a choice between Ethelbert and a swarm of Greekling tax gatherers, even I’d go back and fight.

    But Theophanes continued. It was as if he’d read my thoughts.

    ‘A military intervention so far into the West would not be convenient at present,’ he said. ‘But it is most edifying to learn about the progress of civilisation in regions we had almost given up for lost. Do tell me, though,’ he asked lightly, ‘would it be fair to say that your King Ethelbert was a friend more of His Holiness in Rome than of the Lord Exarch in Ravenna?’

    ‘If Ethelbert has even heard of Smaragdus, I’ll be surprised,’ I said emphatically. ‘Given the present chaos among the Franks, and the state of the roads passing through their territories, a journey from Rome to Canterbury is at least three months. Missionaries can do it easily enough. To put the sort of pressure on Ethelbert you can put on the Goths in Spain would take another Julius Caesar, let alone another Justinian.’

    Theophanes smiled. He now turned to Martin, with questions about the political and theological position of the Celts. Was there any chance their own Church would accept communion with Rome
via
Canterbury? Or was the national hatred between them and the English too great to allow of reconciliation?

    Martin gave closed and cautious answers to the questions. He said he’d left Ireland when he was ten and hadn’t been back since.

    I couldn’t see why he should so want to avoid discussions of Ireland. The place was of no importance to anyone. I just assumed it was that tooth troubling him again. He’d been sucking it and wincing ever since Corinth. I’d have a dentist to him once I could get my own bearings in the City.

    Theophanes gave up on the questioning – but not without exacting his own price.

    ‘I have no doubt’, he said to Martin with a sympathetic smile, ‘you will find Constantinople a more friendly place than you did when last here with your father.’

    He stopped a moment to relish the sudden strain on Martin’s face. ‘You may not be aware’, he added, ‘that the Professor of Rhetoric Anthemius is no more.’

    He smiled gently as Martin’s face changed colour. ‘It was found last month’, he continued, ‘that the Illustrious Professor way paying too little attention to his ancient books, and was circulating material that appeared to touch on criticisms of the Great and Ever Victorious Augustus. His
Sample Oration of Plato to Dionysius
was the seal of his doom. He was closed into a bread oven beside the University with a fire stoked very slow. His cries, I am told,’ Theophanes added, ‘were as musical as his declamations.

    ‘The teaching assistant who denounced him has just received his share of the estate. This may include some of your own former property. Perhaps you would care for an introduction? We shall, I have no doubt, meet to discuss such things.’

    ‘He accused my father of heresy,’ said Martin in a dreamy voice, his eyes looking inward. ‘When that failed, he bought up the debts of our academy, and forced us into bankruptcy. He put in a bid for me at the slave auction.

    ‘But roasted alive – and for
that
oration?’ Martin took a long draught of wine. ‘He must have written that before I was born. It’s the one where he doesn’t use the letter
gamma
for the whole middle section. He used to deliver it every Easter.’