The Curse of Babylon (23 page)

‘Very well, dear boy,’ he said smoothly, ‘I will summarise today’s events. Do stop me if I get something wrong. But you’re the one who’s always insisted on getting the known facts straight before trying to move beyond them.’ He moved the lamp back to the middle of the table. ‘Your face has gone very pale. But I think you’ll be surprised at this latest blend. It shouldn’t even give you a headache tomorrow.’ He smiled brightly and continued in what I could see was a mocking parody of my own manner.

‘You were presented with a silver cup this morning by some person or persons unknown,’ he began. ‘Someone who announced himself as a messenger from the useless bastard Nicetas then appears to have slipped you a message, in correct form, to go off to a quiet spot outside the walls, there to be murdered. He was delayed in getting the message to you and you added to the delay by shambling about the City like a blind pilgrim. By the time you did get there, whatever ambush was arranged for you had been rumbled by Shahin, who is, by the way, one of my second cousins on the Persian side. Once you’d got yourself free, you overheard a conversation that revealed treason in high places. You also learned that Shahin is eager to lay hands on your silver cup. The girl you’d picked up along the way in your usual careless manner may indicate a connection of this plot with Nicetas.

He stopped and scratched his scalp. ‘Oh, but I’m losing track of things. Why don’t you carry on? You do these things so much better.’

I closed my eyes and stretched deliciously. He’d been right about his latest potion. Without ever announcing themselves, its effects had stolen over me as Priscus spoke. I fussed with the lamp until the flame came up brighter and took out the cup. ‘Though in good shape, this is very old,’ I said. I ran a thumbnail down the tiny lettering that covered it inside and out. ‘I saw characters a bit like these on some of the older monuments in Ctesiphon. They’d been pulled from the ruins of Persepolis and Ecbatana, and I was told they dated from the first Persian Empire – the one Alexander conquered, that is. No one can read them any more.’ I stopped and thought. ‘But I think they look more like the inscriptions I saw in the much older ruins of Babylon. No one can read those either.’ I looked harder at the cup. I was surely right. The picture, amid the writing, of a winged lion with a man’s head had a definite look of what I’d seen in the desolate silence that had been Babylon. I looked closer at the tiny face and a faint recollection of horror drifted through the back of my mind. This was my first real inspection of the cup. How could elements of it have featured in my dream? I pushed the question aside. I was drugged, and might be confusing present impressions with memory. Otherwise, hadn’t I just said I’d seen images like these before? I offered the cup to Priscus. ‘Any thoughts?’ I asked.

He sat back in his chair and put his hands out of sight. ‘Don’t pass it to me, dear boy,’ he said, raising his voice before dropping it again. ‘Shahin thinks it’s bewitched. It’s killed at least one eunuch who touched it. Sneer at me if you will, Alaric – I haven’t made it this far in life to be carried off by some wog curse. You touch it if you will. But keep it away from me.’ He laughed nervously and scraped his chair slightly backwards. ‘Have you considered, Alaric, why the box was closed on every side with such long nails?
I don’t believe it was meant to be opened.’

Anyone who’d rubbed poison over the surface of the cup was probably an amateur beside Priscus. But I let a short and pitying smile stand in place of the obvious arguments. I put the cup down before me and ran my fingers over it. ‘I’d guess, from its probable age and good condition,’ I said with pointed nonchalance, ‘it was dug out of a tomb. It has the general appearance of a drinking horn used by the Persians and probably by those who ruled the East before them, at formal occasions.’ I stopped and picked it up again. Even empty, it seemed too heavy for actual use. Also, the lettering showed no sign of the differential wearing you get when an object is routinely handled. I twisted the cup to see more of the inscription. It wasn’t possible to tell where it began, or in what direction it was supposed to go.

I sat forward again. ‘I found a body on my way out,’ I said, returning to less impenetrable facts. ‘It was dumped beside the private entrance. I’ll take your word that you didn’t leave it there. It may have no connection, but I’m told the cup was found pushed under the main gate. The nice box in which it came was scratched on one side. Let us assume that this man had been running away with the cup. He needed to get rid of it before he was caught. Perhaps he needed to get it to
me
. This is only a surmise, but it would explain the sudden and elaborate plot to get rid of me. The cup had been left in a place from which it couldn’t be recovered at once. So a murder plot was ordered as well as a burglary.’

I stretched. More than my thinking faculties had been revived. If Priscus hadn’t been sitting opposite, I’d have been more than half-inclined to go off and slap some life into Antonia. No chance of that, however. Priscus took his eyes off the cup. ‘Treason on this scale, dearest Alaric,’ he said with a return of his mocking tone, ‘and you knew nothing till its projectors hit out and nearly killed you?’

I shrugged. ‘I have spent the past six months absorbed in bullion ratios and other calculations,’ I said defensively. It was a feeble answer. Heraclius had taken the Intelligence Bureau out of my hands but I should have been aware of at least one Persian ship in our home waters. I shrugged again, now adding a fierce scowl. ‘What have
you
heard?’ I asked.

Priscus smothered a smile and looked into my eyes. ‘Alaric,’ he said, ‘you know our agreement was that I should never go outside the walls of our palace. What could I possibly have heard that you didn’t tell me yourself?’

‘Let’s stop playing games,’ I said with a genuine scowl. ‘What, if anything, have you picked up on your nocturnal wanderings through the City?’

‘Nothing, my dear,’ came his maddening answer. ‘If I’d heard cousin Shahin was about, I’d have told you at once. If you don’t believe that, let’s agree that Nicetas is somehow involved. Do you suppose the thought of him in a dungeon, maggots wriggling in the suppurating flesh of his legs, wouldn’t have got my tongue wagging?’ It was a decidedly Greek answer – argue from probabilities, rather than swear to facts. But they were strong probabilities. I looked at my wine cup. I hadn’t realised how empty it was. Priscus noticed, and reached for the jug.

I put the silver cup back into its box. That morning, I’d thought the box was ebony. In fact, it was quite ordinary wood, painted a shiny black. You could see that from the scratches on the underside. Careful not to knock it on to the floor, I reached in for the parchment slip that carried the only writing I could understand.

‘The misshapen
S
, and the spelling mistake
sekretum
, indicate a Greek who is unfamiliar with Latin – or, at any rate, with written Latin,’ I said. ‘But why go to the trouble of Latin at all?’

Priscus raised his eyebrows. ‘I bet you nearly shat yourself when you saw the message,’ he said. ‘
I know your secret!
’ He giggled and swilled wine about his mouth. I frowned, but didn’t rise to the challenge. I stared at the neat slip of parchment. Why Latin? Except the two characters not found in Greek were uncertainly written, the message was smooth and unblotted. It couldn’t have been written by a man who was on the run and desperate to tell me something. Had the message been meant for me? If not me, for whom?

I got up and pulled gently at one of the shutters. I’d expected to see the eastern sky ready for the pale glow of dawn. Events and whatever I’d taken, though, had jumbled my perceptions of time. The sky was still dark. ‘What did you learn from the man you questioned?’ I asked.

‘Much less than I can teach you about him,’ Priscus sniggered. ‘When Heraclius gave you this palace, your first act on taking possession was to free all my slaves and kick them into the street. Some of them you would have found more useful than the slobs you stuck in their place. Regardless of that, you never considered that one of them might one day be found useful by somebody else for gaining entrance. The man under your bed was called Marcian. He had a talent for snooping that I often found useful. He got past your useless household and made his way here. When I caught him by accident, he was picking the locks in your office cupboards. Despite my best efforts, he told me fuck all. He was looking for a silver cup, he told me. That was it.’

I rubbed my eyes. Priscus had lied about the headache. His drug had worn off as quickly as you might snuff out a lamp. I stood up and stretched. ‘Since I don’t fancy sleeping with your latest victim under my bed, how do you propose getting rid of him?’

Wearily, Priscus raised his left arm. ‘How do barbarians dispose of rubbish in the towns they’ve settled?’ He asked.

I shut my eyes and breathed slowly out. Antonia had rolled across the bed, but was still fast asleep. ‘How did you keep him quiet while you did
that
to him?’ I asked as quietly as I could manage. If I’d been more my usual self, I’d have been struggling not to vomit. Priscus grinned back at me in the gloom and muttered something about a ‘trick of the trade.’ I swallowed and pulled the dead man fully clear of the bed. Priscus didn’t offer any help and I didn’t ask. Instead, I got the body by its shoulders and tried to keep the leaking areas from touching the floor as I got it over to the balcony. Priscus was there already and draped a towel over the ledge. I shook my head and lifted the heavy corpse into my arms. I threw it straight over and watched as it tipped over and then over again, before landing with a faint but audible splash on the granite pavements of the Triumphal Way. It landed about a dozen feet from one of the sleeping figures and almost on top of one of the dying fires. I looked cautiously down. If anyone had noticed the new arrival, no one bothered to move.

By the time I turned, Priscus had already used the sponge and washing water left by the bed to clean up the bloody trail across the floor. I used the towel and what was left to wash the slimy blood from my own body. Over the edge went the sponge and towel. Over too went the remains of the water.

The dawn was still nowhere to be seen. But I now felt as if I’d gone the whole night through and longer. ‘Go back to your attic,’ I said to Priscus. ‘We’ll take this up again when we’ve both had some sleep.’

Reluctantly, he got up. ‘And the cup?’ he asked.

‘It goes back in a secret place only you and I know.’ I said.

Priscus arranged his face into a bleak smile. ‘Your trust in my honesty is an inspiration that I will do my best to keep in mind,’ he sneered. I smiled back at him. Priscus was a champion liar in a race of liars. I’d seen fear in his eyes, though, even he couldn’t fake.

Chapter 24

After a mostly wet April, the winter roof was now off my gymnasium. Once I’d finished scraping off the thick coat of sand that was stuck to my oiled body, I could hurry off to the bathhouse. After that, I could make a start on the morning’s work and deal with whatever accumulation had been carried over from the previous day.

Glaucus pointed at an unscraped area on my lower back. ‘A civilised man ties a cord over his foreskin,’ he said shortly.

He was starting an old argument. I twisted round with my strigil and got nearly everything off with a single stroke. ‘The ancients wrestled with other free men,’ I said lazily. ‘Young Rado, on the other hand, would feel put out if I didn’t shoot all over his chest.’ I smiled at the boy. He’d almost got himself clean enough for the steam room. He smiled back and flexed himself most charmingly. But for the pale faces already looking through the doorway, I’d have suggested another grapple in the sand.

The old trainer frowned at the stiffy that had popped up again. ‘I have repeatedly told you,’ he said, ‘exercise is
not
an opportunity for sex,’ he said. I could have told him to address that remark to the ancients. Why else do it in the nude and end it so often with wrestling? But Glaucus was Glaucus, and he’d said his piece. ‘I’ve given you lighter weights,’ he said going back to my earlier question, ‘because I don’t like the way your biceps are growing. For the same reason, I refuse you any breakfast. Your shoulders are already on the outer borders of harmony with your lower body. Just because you are a barbarian is no reason why you should look like one.’ He stood back and stared at Rado. ‘You can interpret the same to him. If he pumps himself up any more, you might as well complete his ruin as a dancing boy and cover his body with tattoos and get him kitted out as a bodyguard. From what I hear of yesterday’s adventure, you’re a fool to go about alone in the City.’

I bowed. ‘It is as you say, Glaucus,’ I said meekly. I suppressed the memories he’d stirred of the previous day. I did it too late. My foreskin rolled fully back, exposing the pink of my glans to the morning sun.