The Curse of Babylon (50 page)

‘I’ve orders from the Prefect to arrest you, Sir,’ someone said behind me.

Not getting up, I twisted round. Swords at the ready, the two harbour guards were stood well away from me. I closed my eyes in a supreme effort of will not to fall apart. I pointed at the other men streaming through the harbour gate. ‘If you speak with the city guard,’ I said with a composure that startled me, ‘you’ll discover the true state of affairs.’ I closed my eyes again. ‘This being the case, I want the Harbour Master here at his earliest opportunity.’

‘You fucking bastard!’ old Simeon shouted in my face. ‘Was this what you were planning all along?’ He waved at the dense thicket of the dead who covered the Triumphal Way. Sobbing quietly, relatives and friends of the fallen searched and poked among the bodies. They disturbed the usual million flies that had emerged from nowhere and kept back the hungry dogs. But amid the wreckage of so much life, normality was already returning to Constantinople. Not looking about, scented cloths pressed to their faces, men hurried past the dead about their business.

As calm as any man can be who’s bruised all over and covered in dried blood, I stepped away from Simeon. He’d lost a shoe in the panic and was still clutching a placard that said ‘Death to the Pension-Stealing, Yellow-Haired Bastard Alaric!’ Other than that, he’d come rather well through the massacre. Perhaps there were some too old and useless even for the city guard to think it worth killing. Avoiding the main patches of setting blood, I walked over to the catapult. I’d heard it go, but paid no attention to its effects. Tucked away somewhere in my head, there was a formula that would tell me how many thousand pounds of force the torsion springs had given each six-foot arm of the catapult. No need for calculations, however. Swarming with more of those bastard flies, the dead lay about like heaps of smashed and twisted statuary – statuary mixed in with the waste from a butcher’s market.

Simeon tugged at my sleeve. ‘My youngest boy is in there,’ he cried in an old man’s voice that no longer accused anyone of anything. ‘I can’t pull him out.’ He sat down in the mess and wept.

Drained of energy, I sat down beside him and thought what to say. My drug had long since worn off. The weariness now hit me with the force of that dead Treasury clerk. I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen, Simeon,’ I said, ‘go home and wait. I’ll publish an amnesty towards the end of today. Until then, your placard will only get you into trouble. Go home and come out again this evening. The dead will all be laid out in the Prefecture building. You can collect your son from there.’ I noticed we were sitting a couple of feet from one of the ladders the seditionaries had been using. Its pine rungs were splashed with blood. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said quietly.

‘It’s the Master!’ someone shouted behind me. I got slowly to my feet and turned. It was Rado, leading a half dozen of my armed slaves. I could guess they’d gone off to look for me before Leander could get back with the news of where I was. Covered in blood and dust, they steadied themselves and gave the universal barbarian salute of sorrowful triumph.

It was Samo who got to me first. He’d looked out of the palace at the noise. Now, a body under each arm, he lumbered towards me. Eboric danced beside him, a severed head in his hands. ‘Master!’ Samo cried – ‘Master, we can’t find her anywhere!’ I fell into his outstretched arms. At last, I felt some shred of comfort. It broke through the iron grip I’d taken on myself and I found myself crying and crying as if I’d never stop.

Chapter 50

‘Don’t blame me, Alaric,’ Priscus said indignantly. ‘I was out all night –
and
in your service. I disabled the catapult for you. I covered you all the way to your meeting with Nicetas and watched you come out arm in arm with Cousin Timothy. You didn’t notice but I killed five men last night –
five
men, mind you, and every one of them out to get you. When am I supposed to have found time for dressing up and scaring silly Theodore completely out of his wits?’

Anyone else would have had a point. Not Priscus, though. I continued staring at him across my office desk. High on something else from his box of potions, I’d sealed every arrest warrant and given every order needed to retake control of the City. Now, as the sun was losing its power, Priscus was out of bed and ready for the argument I’d so far tried to keep out of mind.

I scraped my chair back and gave him the look of a man invested with absolute power. ‘If Theodore tells me he saw a demon in the chapel, or an angel, or Jesus Christ himself, we can agree he was deluded. However, he’s claiming he saw a figure dressed in black, who told him where the secret cupboard was, and how to get it open, and then to take its contents out of the palace. I’ll grant that everything else that happened was beyond even your control and that you knew nothing about my deal with Timothy. But, unless you can tell me who
did
appear to the boy, you’ll pardon me for blaming you.’

Priscus shook his head sadly. ‘It was meant to be, Alaric,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I tell you about the powers of the cup? It’s no accident it went out of your possession just as the seven days were coming to an end. You really should think yourself lucky. Shame about the girl, though, I’ll freely admit.’

I stood up, disordering a stack of draft proclamations for the next day. ‘You can stop wittering about that fucking cup,’ I snarled. I walked quickly over to another stack of papyrus and reached under it. I never had put the box properly together. The prised off side had remained separate throughout the past few days. Now, I held it up for inspection. ‘I was wondering why a box otherwise so elegant was only painted to look like ebony.’ I pushed it close to Priscus. ‘Look what I found underneath when I scraped the paint off.’

He took it and tried to read the writing in the advancing gloom. It was very small and covered both sides of the slat. ‘It’s letters and numbers and fractions,’ he said defensively. He brightened a little. ‘Astrological incantations,’ he added. ‘They must have been put there when Heraclius ordered a box for the cup. You know what he’s like.’

I raised a hand to silence him. ‘Look again, dear Priscus,’ I said. This latest drug was one of his happier discoveries. It abolished tiredness and had left me with a clear and even moderately serene mind. Priscus could see nothing, so I took the slat away from him and carried it across to the window and squinted at what I’d been able to reveal of the underlying script. You can ask why I hadn’t thought of this earlier. The scraped underside of the box must have shown something, had I only turned my attention away from what it contained. Knowing what really mattered would have simplified everything. Too late for that, however. I thought of the bleak sentence in Thucydides: ‘When error is irreparable, repentance is useless.’

Unmoving in his chair, Priscus looked down at the floor. I stood over him. ‘The names of towns and places are given in a substitution cipher,’ I took up again. ‘I’m sure you can break it in your head. The coordinates are given in plain text, and refer to a map that may be indicated, though not drawn, on another part of the box. The numbers after that ought to be clear to someone of your experience.’ I stopped and pointed at random. ‘So what do you suppose this means: “Hilltop fort”; such and such coordinates; “two hundred and thirty”? Or look at this: “Cordyle” – a city, you may be aware, on the far south-eastern coast of the Black Sea – no coordinates needed or given; “three hundred”. Could the whole box possibly contain a listing of the location and numbers of every military unit engaged in defending the Home Provinces from invasion? Don’t ask me why Heraclius chose to have his cup surrounded by a listing that every officer in the Persian army would give his right hand to see. But he did. And ten sides of that listing are currently on a Persian ship sailing east. I don’t doubt the cup itself means something to our Lord and Master – I might guess it was meant to give protection to the named forces he wanted to enclose it. The cup may have some meaning to Chosroes. But do you really think a man like Shahin would risk himself in our home waters – and inside the City – for a lump of silver?

‘If it was you whispering in Theodore’s ear, how does it feel to be the man who may have done for Shahrbaraz what Ariadne’s ball of string did for Theseus? With that listing in their hands, they can pick off every defensive position in the Home Provinces. Or they can bypass them and, within three months, be looking across the straits at the City walls. You don’t need me to tell you how fast an offensive army can move – or how slowly defence plans can be changed and communicated in an orderly fashion. Would you say, Priscus, we were very fucked, or only fucked? Are you still proud of yourself, O former Commander of the East?’

There was a knock on the door. I stepped away from Priscus so he could hurry behind his usual screen. It was Samo – drunker than usual and more glowering – together with the Deputy Head of the Intelligence Bureau and one of his junior subordinates. The Deputy Head gave me a perfunctory bow, before sliming his way towards the chair that Priscus had just vacated. He was a large man and plainly looking forward to a rest after the long climb to my office. I continued standing.

I picked up a sheet of papyrus and spent long enough reading it for the man to begin fidgeting. The subordinate stared impassively at a painting of Demosthenes. I decided on the tone to adopt and put the sheet face down on my desk. ‘In the past few days,’ I began coldly to the Deputy Head, ‘three facts have come to my attention. The first is a conspiracy, led by the City Prefect and involving several dozen members of the Senate, against Our Lord the Emperor. The second is the unopposed presence within the City of the admiral appointed by the Great King to defend the coastal regions of his Syrian conquests. The third is your own total inaction in the face of these connected threats to the security of the Empire. A fourth, and possibly more serious, fact is your apparent failure to maintain our espionage links in Ctesiphon and the alienated provinces. Have you anything to say in your own defence?’

What he made was a piss-poor defence. Leave aside the misprision of treason charge he deserved – anyone in his office with an ounce of competence would already have known that Nicetas was in the clear. I’d stood over him all through lunch, dictating the terms of our continuing deal. Blaming him was as useless as blaming one of the victory columns. A better defence would have involved full disclosure of what information the Bureau had gathered. It could have at least supplemented my own sources.

I put up a hand for silence. ‘You are convicted out of your own mouth,’ I said with calm menace. ‘I could order your execution on the spot as an accessory to treason. Instead, I find you guilty only of gross negligence. I dismiss you from your position and cancel your pension. I exile you to Ragusa on the Adriatic coast. There, if the barbarians do not take the city and kill or enslave you, I appoint you to the lowest grade in the tax inspectorate. You may rejoice in your continued possession of life and in the employment of your talents in a position to which they may be better suited.’

And that was the end of a man who’d been getting on my tits for two years. I glared him into silence and turned to his subordinate. ‘You, John of Salerno,’ I said in his native Latin, ‘are now Deputy Head of the Intelligence Bureau.’ To add to the drama and the show of absolute power, I picked up his sealed notice of appointment and handed it to him. ‘I have been made aware of your abilities and your zeal, and have no doubt you will justify your unprecedented advancement through five grades.’ His answer was to fall to his knees and kiss my ring. An Italian among Greeks, a closet devotee of the Old Faith, promoted wildly out of turn, and by another outsider whose fall would put an end to his own career – yes, I could reasonably trust John of Salerno to remember who’d put the olive paste on his bread. I’d missed those daily reports from the Bureau. I’d now made sure not to be without them again.

I turned back to the disgraced Deputy Head. ‘Don’t blubber about the Emperor,’ I said with chilly contempt. ‘For all practical purposes, I currently
am
the Emperor. There is no appeal from what I have decided. Be grateful I’ve booked you a place on the dispatch galley to Syracuse that leaves tomorrow morning. If you aren’t on it, your replacement will take such action as he may think appropriate.’

There was nothing else to be said. I waved both men out of my presence and walked over to the window. I looked down to the Triumphal Way. Now the last daylight had faded, it was again a sea of torches – this time, though, the torches of those whose job it was to scrub and sweep for as long as it took to remove all trace of the recent disorders. As promised, the bodies were all laid out for identification and collection in the Prefecture. With named exceptions, my amnesty was in place and no further enquiries would be made of what the dead had been doing outside my palace. I was no Creon by nature. My policy was to avoid any chance of a modern Antigone. Heraclius would come home to a City cleaned up and at peace.

I closed the office door and went back to my desk. ‘If you don’t mind an old man’s judgement,’ Priscus called uncertainly from behind his screen, ‘that was a masterful stroke. You’ve put yourself straight back on top of the pecking order.’ I said nothing. He shuffled over to his chair and poured himself a cup of wine. ‘It wasn’t just the fucking, was it?’ he asked with a sudden firming of tone. ‘Nor was it the chance of getting into the Imperial Family. Does the girl really mean something to you?’