The Curse of Babylon (10 page)

Pull yourself together!
was the advice I’d given. Now, as I watched my face go into its usual blank politeness, I tried to take it for myself. I leaned forward and touched my fringe. I could see how, before stepping out, I’d left a streak of paint just below the hairline. I took a napkin and wiped this away. I patted my hair back into place. I stepped back till I could see not only my face but also the elaborate gathering of silk across my shoulders. Seven years earlier, I’d been stealing food from Kentish pigsties to stay alive. No one looking at me now could have believed that. I was doing well. Given time, the one cloud that might blot out the sun in my heaven would inevitably pass away. Till then, I had only to keep a stiff upper lip.

I stood as if smitten by the sight of my own pretty face. It gave me the chance to see more of my follower. He was a few yards behind me, and was flinching away from someone who’d not yet sold all his clothes to buy drugs and was turning aggressive with his begging bowl. Take off that black cloak and I really doubted if he was much more substantial than the unfortunate boy I’d turned down on the Triumphal Way. He might have a poisoned dagger. Then again, if he proved as skilful with that as he had with keeping himself out of sight, I was in sod all danger.

Still heading for Middle Street, I turned into a street close by what, before I’d cut off its funding, had been the Imperial School of Rhetorical Studies. The street was so unfrequented nowadays that grass had sprouted between the cobble stones. I turned left and quickened my pace. Another hundred yards and, looking back to make sure I was still being followed, I turned right into a lane that sloped steeply down.

I’d now entered one of those places where, unless to sleep, the street cleaners never went. And why bother setting them to work in there? The poor districts of Constantinople have few streets in the normal sense. They are best described as warrens of high wooden structures, grouped round interconnecting courtyards that are often pools of sewage and of other waste sent downhill from the shambles and tanneries. Here was one of the less salubrious districts. Though crossed by an aqueduct, it had no running water. It was home to the class of festering paupers Nicetas was courting. Its main difference was not to be exclusively inhabited by the poor. By night, these courtyards were lit by a thousand torches, and swarming with multitudes, offering or on the lookout for vicious entertainment. Was it stolen goods you wanted? Or brothels filled with limbless cripples? Or sacrifices to the Old Gods? Or fights to the death between renegade slaves? Or horoscopes cast? Or slaves illegally castrated for punishment or profit? Or the comforts of a hundred proscribed and ludicrous heresies? Did you want gambling, where losers unable to pay could be dragged off and carved into a mockery of the human form? Or did you just want to breathe the air of a place from which the Imperial Government had carefully withdrawn all hope, without bothering to provide even the basics of order? If you wanted any of this, you came here.

Not, however, at this time of day. It’s often hard to say what the very poor do for a living. They still keep faithfully to the siesta. Excepting a few stunted children, who shut up at the sight of a stranger, and a sound of chickens and the occasional pig, you’d almost have thought the place abandoned. Even the dogs were asleep. Unless my follower got lucky, the worst I had to fear was the misfortune of stepping into one of those shining puddles. The sudden blast of what you stirred up could knock you backwards. I did avoid them. Scented napkin held under my nose, in I hurried deeper and deeper into this labyrinth of despair, all the time making sure to keep the sound of pursuit not too far behind.

I took myself into a courtyard from which there was no longer any exit. Imagine a mass of wooden fish boxes. Heap them up on a dockside and wait for the upper levels of the mass to lean over in an unstable equilibrium. Magnify the smell coming from them and you have some resemblance to where I now was. Time, I decided, to bring this chase to an end. I stopped and made a show of tipping more scent on to my napkin. After that, I walked noisily round a corner and got myself behind a door that had remained standing after the collapse of its surrounding wall, and waited. There was a distant sound of crying children and the unbroken squealing of pigs. The wind was blowing in my favour, and the main smell was only of brick dust and rotting timber.

For a moment, there was no other sound. The children and even the pigs had gone quiet. I began to worry that my follower had lost me. So much of a detour – and now possibly for nothing. I relaxed, stepping down from a mud brick that had begun to crumble. I’d run through various options since coming into the poor district. All of them involved a violent interrogation. I hadn’t supposed this most useless of assassins would simply get lost. Still unspotted by the surrounding filth, I could almost see the funny side of things. I was in the thin, western extremity of a slum that gradually widened until, bounded by the military docks on one side and the Jewish district on the other, it stopped just short of the Golden Horn. Unless he managed to climb one of the steep banks that kept the poor from offending the noses of the respectable, there was every chance the duffer would wander lost in here until he fell into one of the cesspools and drowned, or was knocked on the head. He’d never collect so much as a clipped copper from Nicetas.

I looked up at a sky that was as beautiful here as outside my palace. I felt a sneeze coming on. I blinked and blinked again. Yes, it was a big one. If I held back, but kept darting a glance at the sliver of sun peeping over the highest rooftop, it would be the next best thing you can manage, without drugs, to sex. Sad to think, I told myself, this would in all likelihood be the high point of my day.

No sneeze, however. Just as I blinked harder to see through the anticipatory tears, there was a single, shrill cry of fear from close by. It was followed by the sharp sound of collapsing masonry and a sudden manic barking of dogs. After another crash, I heard the laughter of many voices and another loud scream.

What a buggery day this was turning out! I put a hand on the hilt of my sword and peered cautiously from behind the door. I was completely alone. It was a neighbouring courtyard where it seemed a riot was brewing. I took out my sword and tried not to make any noise of my own while stepping from one dry patch of ground to another.

The sounds of masonry were easily explained. The Christmas earthquake that had got me and mine out of bed, and set every church bell ringing by itself, had levelled whole stretches of the poor districts. Nothing had been rebuilt yet. Few owners saw the point of rebuilding. The survivors had squeezed themselves into other accommodation. The courtyard where I’d taken shelter had been knocked about. This one bordered on one of the areas of total collapse. And here was my follower. He must have lost sight of me and taken a wrong turn. Hard to say whether he himself had been followed, or if he’d blundered into a meeting of armed trash. Whatever the truth, he’d made a rotten job of clambering over a heap of mud brick. It had collapsed on itself at first touch. Here, within the slight depression made by the falling of bricks and tangled in his cloak like a corpse in its winding sheet, my follower’s only answer to the two men who were poking at him with bits of wood was much twitching and a few muffled screams.

I waited for a pause in the entertainment and cleared my throat. A dozen dark and rattish faces turned in my direction. All was silent. Someone had already killed one of the dogs, and was holding it as a trophy. The others had scurried out of sight.

‘Oo you?’ one of the younger creatures jabbered. He held up a three-foot length of roofing timber. ‘Oo you?’ One of the others gave my follower a kick, but dropped the block of paving stone he’d carried over to use for a killing blow.

They all stared at me for a long moment. They could have tried rushing me but I knew they wouldn’t. I sheathed my sword. ‘Piss off, the lot of you!’ I said quietly. I inclined my head towards the one exit. I saw the glint of an iron knife. Not going for my sword, I frowned slightly and took a step forward. That was all it needed. Everyone knew the score. I was in my class, they in theirs. No one would lift violent hands against the irresistible and merciless force that plainly stood behind me. No one fancied being torn apart in the Circus by hyenas, or being roasted over a slow fire, or being deprived of sight and manhood and turned loose outside the city walls. I listened to the retreating patter of bare feet, then turned my attention to the struggling figure who remained.

I glanced up at the nearest building. I was aware of the scratching sounds the very poor make when something out of the ordinary has happened close by their homes. But no face showed itself from within the unshuttered squares of darkness. Taking my sword out again, I stood behind one of the many heaps of crumbled brick. I stared at the human bundle before me. Completely lost inside a cloak made light by the brick dust, it had stopped moving.

‘If you’re still alive,’ I said in a conversational tone, ‘you can get yourself out of that stupid cloak and stand up.’ After a long moment, when I began to wonder if someone hadn’t managed a killing blow, a white and trembling hand emerged through a rent in the cloth. It was followed by another. They failed to rip a larger hole and vanished again. Still swathed in the stained blackness, my follower tried to get up. After more struggling, there was a faint ripping sound and the cloak fell apart. Rolling free of it, my follower looked at me and struggled on to his knees, arms raised in supplication.

I stared across three yards of rubble into the face of the young petitioning agent who’d pissed me off that morning. There were fresh tears trembling on the lids of those grey eyes, and the freckles hardly showed on a face pale with fear. As I had back in my hall of audience, I waited until it seemed I’d say nothing at all. This time, however, there was nothing to be said beyond a statement of the obvious.

‘A bloody woman!’ I cried, aghast. Ignoring the possibility of a stain on my outer tunic, I sat heavily on another heap of bricks and dug my sword into the packed earth. Tearful, but not yet crying again, she stared silently back at me. I sighed and arranged my face into a less menacing smile. ‘Well, man or woman,’ I said, ‘you have the most wonderful capacity for slowing me down.’

Still kneeling, she dropped her arms. She smiled nervously. She managed a sort of shrug. I stretched out my legs before me and crossed them at the ankles. I’d chosen those leggings well. They really were most elegant.

Chapter 10

‘Of course they were trying to kill you,’ I said impatiently. ‘You may have noticed their attentions were somewhat less than friendly.’ Antonia, only surviving child of Laonicus of Trebizond, looked back at me in scared if slightly defiant silence. ‘However, this brings me to my next question, which is how long have you been in Constantinople? Since you haven’t yet got yourself raped or murdered, I don’t think you can have been here long.’ The tear that I’d seen welling beneath her left eye chose this moment to start its progress down her cheek. Without thinking, I reached into my inner tunic and took out a clean napkin. I passed it to her and looked down at the hilt of my sword. It had a solid, reassuring feel in my right hand. I could have written a short epic had I wanted to give the names and miscellaneous attributes of those whose lives I’d ended with its point or sharp edges. But it had no place here. I stood up, sheathed it and covered it with my outer tunic.

I sat down again and looked at Antonia. She’d controlled her tears. At this distance, and in bright sunshine, she was obviously a woman of about twenty. But it wasn’t hard to see how in male clothing, and with her brown hair cropped short and with surprise on her side, she could have passed for a young man. I cast about for something more to say that didn’t involve reminders of violence or death. ‘It is not the custom for women to lay petitions on behalf of others,’ I said with a haughty sniff.

‘Is it the custom for women to do
anything
but shuffle between bed and cooking pot?’ she answered, tears suddenly giving way to defiance. ‘I’ve told you who my father was. If you don’t want me to starve or sell my body in the street, what else can I do but take over his practice?’ She stuck out her lower lip and seemed to be expecting an answer. I sniffed again and felt the ghost of my aborted sneeze. I suppressed it and covered the effort with a frown. Rotten luck, no doubt, that plague had taken her family on its last visitation. But that was no reason why an Imperial minister should make a laughing stock of himself by hearing petitions from a woman. I looked into her eyes, and changed the subject.

‘Very well,
Antony
of Trebizond,’ I said, going back to the matter in hand. ‘You made a quick deal, once I’d hurried off, with those petitioners in their own right and promised you’d get an answer out of me before next Monday. So you followed me, waiting for the right moment to start another of your interminable petitions.’ I stopped and smiled. ‘Most enterprising, I have to say. Did you insist on payment up front? Or did you agree on payment by results?’

She swallowed and looked back at me. ‘If those men had money to spend on agents,’ she said in a voice that tried and failed to sound manly, ‘do you think they’d have walked here all the way from Pontus?’