The Curse of Babylon (2 page)

‘Haven’t you been told, Ambrose,’ I croaked, ‘that the inquiry won’t be resuming today?’ He really should have guessed that much. He hadn’t, of course. Are jailors always stupid? Or have I been invariably lucky in the various places of confinement I’ve known? I called on every ounce of strength left to a man of ninety-eight. After one failed effort, and one slight worry that I’d pulled a muscle, I sat up in bed and shuffled myself round until my feet were resting on the floor. ‘You’ll soon have your formal orders,’ I said, now in better voice. ‘You’re to get all my stuff packed up and moved to the monastery round the corner.’ I managed a toothless smile. ‘Now, what have you brought me for breakfast?’

I watched his face turn from bafflement to a snarl of hate. ‘Is that all you can think about?’ he asked in a voice that was supposed to scare me. ‘
Breakfast
?’

‘A very important meal,’ I replied in a voice that I knew might send him over the edge. My head was clearing of the dream, and of the poppy fumes that had sent it. I looked about for my stick. Ambrose had knocked it out of reach, worthless pig that he was. My false teeth of ivory and gold were still where I’d left them on the bedside table. Those could stay put. But I did reach for my blond wig. I could do with that to keep the chill from soaking in through my scalp. And it was more provocation of my own to a man who, still spraying abuse at me with every breath, knew that such power of compulsion he’d had over me was now ended.

I looked at the covered tray the boy had brought up with him. The smell would have made a dog vomit. ‘Ooh, nice runny cheese, if my nose tells right,’ I said. ‘The monks of Saint Anastasius won’t spoil me like this!’

Ambrose pushed his bleary face close to mine. ‘Don’t think you’ve got away with it,’ he snarled. ‘You’re a murdering bastard – and I’ve now found the proof.’ He stopped, presumably giving me time to fall to pieces. Instead, I was coming properly back to life, and could feel my spirits rising like the sun itself at the thought that I’d soon be out of this ghastly place. I popped my teeth in and smiled. Ambrose stood up. ‘There’s a hole on the seventh stair down,’ he gloated. ‘It’s a fresh hole. I wonder what was pushed in there, and
why
?’

Dear me – the low beast had finally done his homework! I couldn’t have that. Nothing he said now could unstitch the deal I’d made. But he could still raise an unpleasant stink. He might even try his hand at blackmail. Yes, he was the type for that. I licked my upper teeth into place, and smiled again. ‘Oh, Ambrose, Ambrose,’ I said in my most emollient tone, ‘this isn’t a day for unpleasantness. We must soon take leave of each other. I like to think that, in spite of one or two disagreements, we have forged an unbreakable bond of friendship. Why not join me in a last shared drink?’

A
last
shared drink? There hadn’t been a first! The way he’d been at my breakfast ale without asking, it was a wonder I hadn’t seen to him months before. But it was nice ale, and he’d not pass up a last chance to thieve his half of it. Following his usual custom, he swaggered over to the window. He pulled its shutter fully open, and shouted something vulgar to anyone who might be passing by beneath it. This done, he hitched up his robe and began a piss that would leave a stinking puddle on the sill.

‘I should have known you’d get off,’ he said bitterly. ‘Your sort always do. Lord High Bishop Theodore himself ain’t nothing up against you people.’ He’d splashed someone again. He leaned forward to look out of the window. ‘What the fuck do you expect, walking so close to the wall?’ he shouted. He turned bitter again. ‘If there was any justice in this world, your penance would have been a flogging that broke every bone in your shrivelled old body. Theodore himself telled me no less.’

His lecture and his piss would last a while yet. The door was barely ajar, and his boy was waiting outside. I shut my eyes and told myself that ninety-eight was no great age. I opened them and stood up. Avoiding the board that always squeaked, I crept over to my writing table and took a lead box from under a heap of papyrus too mildewed to be used. Back to the bed I silently tottered. I poured myself a cup of ale and, unable to see them as more than a blur, dropped two crumbling tablets into the jug. It was new ale, and the slight foaming of the tablets wouldn’t show once they were dissolved. I took another look at Ambrose and added a third. I frowned at hands that wouldn’t stop trembling. Thanks to that, I’d nearly added a fourth and fifth.

He was finished. Wiping pissy hands on his robe, he turned to face me. ‘Right, Brother Aelric,’ he called out with fake jollity, ‘where’s me drinkie?’ I smiled again and pointed at the jug. I watched him drain it in a single gulp. He slapped it down on the bedside table and let out a long and appreciative burp. ‘Fucking good stuff!’ he said. ‘Too good for an old sinner like you.’ He thumped his chest and let out another burp. He put both hands on the table and screwed his face up. He now managed a long fart. ‘Lovely tickling of my piles,’ he explained. He noticed a stray sheet of papyrus on the table. ‘Don’t you write in nothing but Greek?’ he snarled with a sudden return to the nasty. ‘Ain’t Latin fancy enough for you?’

Not answering, I smiled into my own cup. It was
very
good stuff, and it wasn’t the ale I had in mind. Its first effects would be a slight fever before he turned in for the night. Considering his bulk, that might not show till morning. Not long after, the fever would take proper hold, and be joined by griping pains. Another day, and the pains would turn unbearable. Come nightfall at the latest, and there’d be a sudden and catastrophic voiding of blood and failure of every organ. Any Greek physician would know exactly what had been swallowed. In this dump on the edge of civilisation, death would be put down to a visitation of the summer pestilence. There would be much lamentation in public over the body, and much private rejoicing. Until he was replaced, there would be no more starving and beating of prisoners less fortunate than wicked old Aelric – no more compelled sucking off of his rancid member, no more stamping about the monastery by someone whose proper employment in life should have been pushing a dung cart.

I’ll grant he’d kept some curb on his inclinations where I was concerned. I might nowadays be called Brother Aelric: no one dared, even so, to take me as other than the Lord Alaric. But some of his abuse had been most impertinent. More to the point, he was on to me. I couldn’t have that.

Ambrose burped louder. ‘Righty ho!’ he laughed. ‘Time to be off. I’m told there’s a flogging to be done.’ He snorted. ‘That nutter downstairs has been playing with himself again. I ask you – wanking in a monastery!’ He walked heavily to the door. He turned back to me before leaving. ‘It don’t matter shit who your relatives are,’ he said, as if he’d been reading my thoughts. ‘I’ll make the whole world see you for what you are.’

I’d like to see him try, I told myself. But I made no outward answer. He gave me one last glare, before walking out and slamming the door. I waited for the sound of his key in the lock, then took out my teeth and got back into bed. ‘Ho hum! Ho hum!’ I heard him shouting on the stairs, no longer for my benefit. ‘It’s a bad world, I’ll have you know – oh, a bad,
bad
world!’

I thought of going back to sleep. It would be Ambrose who supervised my packing later in the day. I’d need to be rested for that. I didn’t want anything smashed or stolen. And I’d need to keep him from any search of my belongings. He might find my bronze cloak pin. That would be an embarrassment. But sleep was out of the question until I’d covered my tracks. I threw the blanket aside. Scowling, I looked at the wide-open shutters and climbed back to my feet. I filled the jug from my washing bowl. I swirled the water round and round, before tipping it from the window. I filled it again and let it stand. With the rest of the water I scrubbed my hands. General washing could wait till I was out of here. I might even demand a bath. I’d like a bath.

But, silly old me! I’d dropped my box of poison. Luckily, it didn’t burst open. Instead, it bounced under the writing table. The act of bending down sent all the bones in my upper back into a popping sound that disturbed me. Rather than going back to bed, I sat down at the writing table and looked out through the window. Being locked away on the top floor had its advantages. It freed me from the inevitable smells of a city built without sewers. It gave me a better view than any of my jailers had. I looked east over the low huddle of roofs, some tiled, most thatched, to where the wall marked the city’s boundary with the Kentish forest. The sun was fast rising above the topmost branches of the trees. I put up a hand to shade my eyes and continued looking south-east. Though far less dense and unbroken than it seemed, the forest stretched from here to Dover and the sea. Beyond that lay France and then Italy and Rome. Far beyond that lay the New Rome and its Empire which, for almost two lifetimes, I’d done more than anyone else to hold together.

I thought of my dream. You won’t read about the Battle of Larydia in any of the histories. It had, even so, been the turning of the tide in the first of our two great wars of survival. It didn’t let us clear the Persians out of Syria. It didn’t stop them from taking Egypt. But all the shattering defeats we later inflicted on them had been made possible by what happened at Larydia. Because of that, we finally recovered our losses. Because of that, we made their empire into a protectorate. Because of that, when the second great war came along out of the blue, we, alone of those they attacked, held back the illimitable Saracen flood. Yes, we lost Egypt and Syria again – this time apparently for good. We may soon lose the African provinces. But, again and again since their first attack, the Saracens have smashed against the southern border of the Home Provinces. Each time, they’ve been thrown back, and with horrifying losses. So long as the lesson we learned at Larydia stays in mind, we’ll keep the Saracens out.

I thought yet again of the boy. I had no reason to feel guilty. You can walk about Constantinople, staring at native and borrowed monuments to three thousand years of victories. Mostly, you can look away and ask what all those men fought each other for, and how their fighting and dying had added one grain to the sum of human happiness. The battle we fought at Larydia saved the Empire and its precious cargo of the only civilisation worth respecting. Or, if you want to be less pompous, that boy and all the others were fighting for their God and for their land. I did tell them that at the time. To be sure, they kept the land. No one there – on our side, at least – died in vain.

I thought forward to the end of our Persian War. I thought of how, with the Lord High General Radostes beside me, I was the one who identified the Great King’s dismembered body. At last, his own people had turned on Chosroes, and had starved him and tortured him, and dumped him, still alive, in a field latrine. Over hills and fields, and skirting the edge of a baking desert, the General and I had ridden for days in hope of taking him alive. We got there just too late. His killers bought their lives from me with his crown. That I’d presented to Heraclius, and got a pat on the head for the effort. I’d then been sent off with it, to crown a puppet in the Emperor’s name. I can’t say an age of peace and plenty had followed our triumphal ceremony in Jerusalem. But our victory at Larydia did allow us to make the best of things.

I sat up straight and, as if made stronger by the rising sun, turned to my desk. I pushed aside the pens and inkwell and papyrus. With fingers that moved slightly later than I’d willed them to, I managed to get the cloth bag undone and took hold of what it contained. The first time I held this, it had been in one outstretched hand. Now it needed both hands, and a tensing of aged back muscles, to lift it into the sunlight.

I beheld the fabled Horn of Babylon. Men had killed for this. Men had died for it. Men had sometimes worshipped it as a god in its own right, and sometimes as a vessel of godly power. Who had originally made it, and when, and for what purpose, were questions I hadn’t been able to answer when I was in a position to ask them of others. It was a waste of time to ask them now. All that could be said for sure was that, in its form, it had been made as some kind of vessel. You could argue whether its bowl had been made to hold wine or to collect blood from a sacrifice. I had no doubt it had been
used
for both.

I say I beheld it. Even if it didn’t now have the colour and sheen of rotten teeth wet with spittle, I’d not have been able to see the marks that covered it inside and out – not with my old eyes. But, if I ran a thumbnail over it, I could still feel the mass of characters, each one resembling nothing so much as the footprint of a tiny bird on wax. I couldn’t read them. Though men had done well out of claiming otherwise, I doubted anyone had been able to read them in the past thousand years. I doubted anyone knew the name of the winged god they surrounded. So much fuss over an object steeped in mystery!

I sniffed and looked up. I’d left a cup of barley juice on the table. Without my falsies to keep my lips firm, I slobbered much of this on to the blanket I still had round me. I must have made a disgusting sight, but the taste was strangely cheering. I could easily guess what fancies had drifted the day before through the mind of poor old Theodore. But the past only hurts you if you let it. The opium had betrayed me. Awake and in my proper mind, I’d make sure the past stayed exactly where it belonged.