The Curse of Babylon (32 page)

I heard a sneering laugh behind me. ‘Then I will say that your son’s friend has taste as well as elegance of form.’ I turned and made myself smile at Eunapius of Pylae. He licked his lips just as more white lead slid off his cheeks. He washed it down with another mouthful of wine and continued staring at Antonia. ‘Did I hear right that young Antony is from Trebizond?’ he asked with an upward motion of his eyebrows. ‘You will surely be aware that I have estates close by there. How could I possibly not have come across so fine a young man as Antony?’ The faint and satirical emphasis he put on
man
set me thinking. Either he’d seen straight through her disguise or he knew something.

Eunapius grinned and shuffled closer to Antonia. Looking surly, Theodore managed to get himself between them at the last moment.

‘My dearest friend, Eunapius,’ I said, leading him as if without thought into the crowd of braying Senators, ‘I’ve been thinking hard, ever since our last meeting, about your suggestion of mixing copper into the new silver coins. Do you really think a mixture of two-fifths would not be noticed by the people?’ He looked suspiciously back at me. I was saved from listening to more of the stupid idea he’d been putting to Nicetas by the arrival of a spotty boy, who pushed a message into his hands. We were in a place of comparative darkness and Eunapius had to move the thin sheet of wood close to his face to read what it said. I played with a fold of my toga that had come loose and pretended not to watch a face that had gone suddenly tense.

He scratched the fingernails of his right hand across the waxed surface of the message. ‘I’ll answer this in person,’ he said to the boy. He looked at me and put a crooked smile on his face. ‘My Lord will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if business calls me temporarily from the finest conversation I have yet heard in this most glittering event.’ He twisted round to see where Antonia had gone. Listening to more of his slurred chatter about the Council of Chalcedon, she was quietly steering Theodore away from the wine table.

I watched Eunapius pick his way through the room. It was a long exit. He left no one important unapproached. In every ear he whispered something of about the same length. Nobody, however, seemed to be that friendly in return. He smiled and fawned and ran his fingers over woollen senatorial sleeves. The best he got in return was the distant politeness you show to someone you might know, but whose face you can’t quite recall. At last he was between the two black eunuchs who guarded the door and the room seemed to brighten by his leaving it.

No chance yet of my own exit. I had my sleeve grabbed by someone who rambled on about a set of trusts into which he’d conveyed his property – something to do with stopping his son from giving it away to the Church. Because of that, he’d taken a bad hit from the land law and been compelled to give two-thirds away, rather than the half normally required. I listened with a pretence of sympathy. If I’d been able to understand his account of the trusts involved, I might even have suggested an approach to the Treasury for an
ex gratia
compensation payment.

‘Don’t talk to me about the Gracchus brothers!’ someone snarled softly behind me. ‘They were men from our own order. They never tried to strip us naked. If you must talk about the olden days, this young fucker’s another Spartacus. It’s now or never – now or never, I tell you.’ He gave a yelp as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The conversation behind me fell silent, before taking up again as a bored discussion of the improved strain of silkworm some missionaries had carried back from the East.

I lifted a cup from a passing tray and, like a man coming up for air, stood back from the bore who’d now taken hold of my sleeve and didn’t seem inclined ever to let me go. I was surrounded by several hundred men who looked to Nicetas to stop me from drying up all the teats on which they and their ancestors had been sucking since time out of mind. They could talk themselves hoarse about the Gracchus brothers. The Senators who’d faced down that threat to their landed position had been men of quality. Grasping, cold-blooded bastards to a man they’d been, but no one could deny they’d made Rome great in the world. These Greeklings in fancy dress hadn’t a day’s military service between them. All two hundred of them, I had no doubt, prayed nightly for Heraclius to grow sick of me. I had no doubt either that every one of them would shit himself if I showed him so much as a clenched fist.

I smiled at the bore. He was almost making sense about his trusts when the Lord Timothy came in sight. ‘Lovely to see you, dear boy – lovely to see you,’ he boomed, holding up two cups of wine as his excuse for not shaking hands. His wig was in place, and his false teeth. ‘So sorry not to recognise you today,’ he lied – ‘fish out of water and all that.’ Cold dislike in his eyes, he pushed out his lower set of teeth. He ran his tongue along the golden ridge, before sucking them back into place. ‘I believe your appearance among them always occasions a certain disorder in the poor.’ He stepped closer. ‘Such a shame, I like to say, that we cannot all get along together.’ He twisted down to blow his nose into the shoulder of his toga. He looked up and smiled. I caught sight of the dried dirt under his fingernails. ‘I really must have you for dinner one evening,’ he said with a snigger. He moved off, cups in hand. ‘Yes – I’d like you for dinner,’ he called over his shoulder.

Still listening to the man with the trusts, I looked over at Nicetas. Surely, he
couldn’t
fancy himself as Emperor? If he was too stupid to realise how stupid he was, he must know what trouble he’d raise within his family from deposing a cousin who’d showered him with favours. If not that, even he must be aware of the lack of correspondence between the glorious creature of Leander’s poem and the bloated invalid whose only victory in the Syrian campaign had come about when, incoherent from the pain of a septic haemorrhoid, he’d let his hairdresser give the orders.

And where did the Persians come in all this? I could imagine most things of Nicetas. Treason wasn’t among them. Was he an unwitting puppet? Was Shahrbaraz pulling the strings from out of sight? That would make sense of the generally swift and ruthless unfolding of the previous day’s plot. The benefit for the Persians would be the most incompetent fool as Emperor since – I had to stop here and think: in ancient times, Didius Julianus had bought the Purple at auction, but had been done away with too quickly for his full uselessness to be revealed. The only risk for the Persians was that there’d be a vacancy for Commander of the East and this might accidentally be filled by someone who knew what he was doing.

I thought about my own place in things. The previous day Simon had worked a miracle of organisation and put himself personally at risk. Did he suppose I knew about the cup and that I’d call on its awesome powers? Did he think I’d drop everything and take a fast ship to the Emperor in Cyzicus? Bearing in mind what I’d learned in the afternoon – and he might have thought I knew it already – it made sense to want me out of the way as well as getting the cup back. But why had Shahin been so reluctant to go along with killing me? Was it because he wanted to dump me, bound hand and foot, before the Great King’s throne – rather as a cat presents a wounded bird to its master? Or had I some other use? Shahin had never been one to let sex come before his wider interests.

And why was Eunapius suddenly out of fashion? If anything, I was more openly hated than ever. Questions, questions – so many questions.

Chapter 33

‘I will not
seek
the violent crown of martyrdom,’ Theodore said mournfully. Antonia had got him into a chair between two columns and was looking about for help. ‘Such things must never be sought. But if God, in His Infinite Mercy, calls me to stand witness to my faith, I shall be ready – yea, even though my belly be slit open and my intestines wound slowly out, I will never cry out but in joy.’

‘How much has he drunk?’ I whispered. I looked about the room. If I didn’t shut the boy up soon, I’d be a laughing stock as well as hated.

‘I could carry him out myself,’ Antonia said. ‘The problem is he keeps trying to kiss me every time I take hold of him.’ She lowered her voice still further. ‘Was that man with the painted face Eunapius of Pylae?’ I nodded. She looked back, disgusted and oddly alarmed. ‘When can we get out of here?’

‘Spot of bother, dear boy?’ Timothy asked, coming from behind one of the columns. He looked at Theodore, who now put his face into his hands and began rocking back and forth. ‘Dried oysters in honey,’ Timothy said with a laugh – ‘that’s what your boy needs. They’ll bring him round in no time.’ Losing interest in me, he put his flabby face close to Antonia. ‘I really don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of you yet, young man.’ She fell back before the blast of his putrid breath. She looked at me and swallowed. I scowled back at her. This wasn’t all her fault. But I’d tell her it was the moment we were alone.

‘Stay here beside him,’ I said coldly. ‘I’ll go and get some of the carrying slaves.’ Timothy could be trusted not to rape her – not here, at least.

I turned, and found myself staring at Leander. He cleared his throat. Shining with sweat, his face was twisted into an obsequious leer. ‘The Lord Alaric will surely agree with the most just observations of the Caesar Nicetas,’ he opened with slimy respect. ‘An empire that has no place for the Muses cannot be surprised when the Persians overrun its fairest provinces.’

I resisted the urge to kick him on both shins. Eunapius was beside him. While out of the room, he’d acquired another coat of paint for his face. I stopped and made myself smile at Leander. I could see that he’d shaved closely for his recital. But black stubble beneath his skin darkened the lower half of an already dark face. I spread my arms in a gesture of piety. ‘We mustn’t forget, my dear Leander, that now Heraclius is our ruler the Empire is under the special protection of Christ and the Virgin.’

That was a nice rebuke and it shut him up. Before I could hurry past him, though, I caught sight of one of the black lovelies who were never allowed to go far from Nicetas. Nipples erect, her body glistening with sweat, her mouth was open in a smile made wanton by the hashish she was chewing. I saw how her filed teeth glittered in the candlelight and watched greasy saliva run down her chin. She was a fine sight and I’d normally have regretted that this wasn’t the kind of gathering where I could snap my fingers at her and be followed from the room. But I didn’t have to wait for the smell of stale pus before my heart sank.

‘We were discussing the magnificent achievement tonight of my poet Leander,’ Nicetas said in a high and angry voice that brought a gradual end to all conversation in the room. With a loud bump, two more of his black eunuchs put his chair down a few yards from me. He opened his mouth to say more, but instead fell back and groaned as one of his monks hurried over and continued massaging holy oil into the more swollen of his feet.

I glanced left into Antonia’s strained face. She was trying to get behind a column, but Theodore had caught hold of her left hand and was babbling about the punishments he’d brought on himself in this life and the next for his many sins. That he was too far gone to remember his Greek and had lapsed into Syriac was the only consolation I could presently find. As if herded like sheep, two hundred rubbishy Senators and various hangers-on were forming a wide semicircle about us. Even if Nicetas passed out from the agony of his monk’s attentions, I’d never get through this lot without actual violence. There was nothing else for it. I wheeled about and made an ironic bow to Leander.

‘I was much inspired,’ I said, ‘by your description of how the Lord Nicetas plunged without armour into the fray at the Battle of Antioch. His single combat with Shahrbaraz was perfectly Homeric. So too your opening account of the debate of the Saints in Heaven.’ He grinned complacently and bowed to Nicetas, who was lost for the moment to everything but the manipulations of a foot that was looking the colour of an overripe fig. Someone in the crowd sneezed. Someone else laughed. ‘But are you unaware of the conventions of hexameter poetry in Latin?’ I added. Since he was a Greek of sorts, that was less a question than a provocation. I smiled and pressed on with explaining how the Roman poets had observed the rules of quantity in a language that may never have allowed it to dominate the ear, but had maintained a spoken rhythm by making accent and quantity coincide in the two last feet. It gave me the chance to insult him and every Senator in the room by quoting Vergil at length without interpreting its sonorities. Sooner or later, Nicetas would come out of his spasm of gasping moans and be glad of my kiss goodnight. He didn’t like to hear Leander mocked – and tiredness and wine and the accumulated horror of the past two days were putting me into an irreverent mood.

I looked round again at Antonia. Still caught fast by Theodore, she was trying not to notice how Timothy was bouncing about her like a bubble of lard and making obscene gestures. By listening hard, and filtering out Leander’s wooden praise for a poet he could understand no more than I could read the inscription on that cup, I managed to catch some of the whispered conversation Eunapius had begun with a Senator whose name I couldn’t recall but whose face, sharp as a hatchet, was turned steadily in my direction. He’d set everything up, he was explaining. It would be a deciding moment no one could ignore. The nature of this moment I didn’t follow. I looked about for Antonia. She was trying to keep Theodore from falling off his chair. Timothy had now given up on gestures and retired behind one of the columns, where he seemed to be surreptitiously wanking under cover of his toga. Time, I thought, to gather me and mine together and make for the blessings of the night air. I turned towards Nicetas, ready to bring out a stream of fair words.