Conspiracies of Rome (32 page)

    Lucius asked me to explain again what I’d been doing with him in the markets. It still didn’t seem to go in. He knew enough about the law of property, and had been forced by circumstances to learn about the intricacies of the testacy laws. But financial speculation was beyond him. And I got the impression he thought it all somewhat demeaning. I let my words trail off.

    We turned back to the assault on me the previous evening. While I was going once more over the story in outline, a slave returned from the place of the attack. No bodies, he said, but plenty of blood. He held out the slashed, bloody cloak I’d left there. No one to identify, I groaned to myself. The one I’d injured must have come back with help. Someone at least was showing an unusual interest in keeping the streets uncluttered.

    ‘From now on, my dear Alaric,’ Lucius said, ‘I want you to promise me you won’t go out again at night by yourself. I should have sent back that escort for you. It was wrong of me to go off and leave you like that. Worse,’ he smiled, ‘it was careless. Nevertheless, I think we can now be sure those letters are still about somewhere.’

    I agreed.

    ‘And I think we can say that those men weren’t sent to kill you. I don’t doubt for a moment you can be good with a knife. But one of you against four experienced street scum – they’d have had you before you could realise if murder had been on their agenda. They wanted you alive. Someone wanted you to take him to those letters. The question now is, who wanted you?’

    ‘It was the Column of Phocas,’ I answered. ‘Our column isn’t a thing of stone and gilded bronze. It’s a group of men.’

    As you ought to know, my Dear Reader, the Latin word ‘
columna
’ means ‘column’. But it also can mean general support. ‘
Columna Phocasi
’ can therefore be translated into Greek as ‘Movement for the Protection of Phocas’.

    I was pleased I had uncovered more of the mystery – and had done it without help from Lucius. For the first time, I was taking information to him. I was less pleased that Lucius was so sure I hadn’t been in serious danger from those men.

    I suddenly felt less happy with myself. I hadn’t told him about the stranger who helped me. And I’d decided to hold back on my sighting of Martin. The first made my side of the fight less impressive. Revealing the second might only get Martin into a trouble I didn’t feel inclined to inflict on him.

    We sat awhile in silence. I looked past Lucius, over the terrace, down past the shabby or ruined or still fine buildings, to the Forum, and to the gleaming statue atop its column. I looked back to a polished wine pitcher on a table just a few yards from us. Though distorted, I could see myself in the reflection. I’d got those crude barbarian things off me as soon as I’d got back to Marcella’s. I was now dressed in my one good remaining suit of clothes. This was of heavy linen – white with no colour for the border. I looked decidedly beautiful. I felt better at once. I had to resist the urge to get up and go looking for a better reflection.

    Now I was even richer, I’d have those tailors stitching through the night for an entire new wardrobe. Perhaps I’d go for the heaviest grade of silk.

    ‘It looks,’ said Lucius, breaking the silence, ‘if what you say is correct, as if we’re dealing with some secret imperial security service. I’m surprised, I must say. I never thought our lord and master in Constantinople was up to running anything like that. I thought straight executions with a bit of torture beforehand was his limit.

    ‘Now, Alaric, this means we’re up against something big – really big. Something very fishy was going on at that rendezvous outside Populonium. You and Maximin got in its way. He’s dead because of it, and those letters are still missing. You tell me now those letters won’t lead us straight to the killers.’

    He stopped and pulled at some bread. ‘On the other hand, it doesn’t do to get involved in imperial politics. Few come out alive. Your friend didn’t. My uncle didn’t – assuming he was ever in them. You and I need to be decidedly careful from now on. I heard this morning that one of the sons of the exarch of Africa has just laid siege to Alexandria. The other son is ready to set sail for Asia.’

    This was interesting news. I wondered how it might play on the markets. But I forced my attention back to Lucius.

    ‘The only forces Phocas has to send against them,’ he continued, ‘need to be taken from already losing wars with Persia and the barbarians. He can’t move openly in Rome against anyone. But he does appear to have a reliable gang of cut-throats at his beck and call.

    ‘Yes, let’s go quiet on this for the moment. Don’t suppose I’ve been scared off our enquiry for good. But I am now scared. And so should you be. I need to sit down and think how best to proceed. Do, please, come to me for dinner this evening. For the moment, though, let’s carry on as if things have settled down.’

    As we parted, Lucius came back to the matter of the diplomat. ‘In view of what you’ve now told me,’ he said very quietly, ‘I’d be very careful of that diplomat. If he is working for Heraclius, he might be just as dangerous to us as the Column of Phocas. Do not, I beg you, suppose you can get close to the truth by playing these people off against each other.’

After lunch, I decided on another visit to the library of Anicius. After banking the draft, I collected Martin from the Lateran, where he told me he’d been all morning at work with the secretaries. I let his deception pass. I had no reason for complaint. Some of the books were already copied. I checked these against the originals, and was happy with them. They were mostly perfect copies. Where they deviated was usually for the better – a silent correction here, a marginal comment there. We were dealing, after all, with the semi-educated. They would welcome the occasional help with difficult words or obscure facts.

    As we wandered over to the Quirinal, Martin was less taciturn than I’d previously known him. He’d changed back into the drab clothes of a slave secretary, but something of his earlier happiness lingered about him. He told me about himself.

    ‘It was in Ireland, sir, that I was born,’ he said. He paused, looking deep into his memories of childhood.

    ‘You’ve seen the great seas that lie beyond the Mediterranean,’ he continued with a sudden jerk back to the present. ‘But you have to see the clean, cold waves of the Atlantic to know what an ocean truly is. I was born on the west coast, and my grandmother used to have servants place her chair high on the cliffs so we could look together to the edge of the world.

    ‘No fisherman had ever seen it, but all agreed that the convex dish of the world ended just a hundred miles beyond those waves.’

    ‘You’ll find,’ I said with a superior look, ‘that the world is round. This being so, it has no edge.’

    ‘As you please, sir,’ Martin said with a bow that I thought slightly satirical. I was glad he didn’t ask the obvious question about how people at the antipodes didn’t fall off.

    He went on to explain that he came on his father’s side from a family that had left London when my people turned up. They’d run off to the Celtic enclave in Cornwall, and then, after constant raiding by us, they’d continued across the water to Ireland, far from the dangers we presented.

    ‘I suppose, looked at from your point of view,’ I said, ‘my people must have been rather disruptive. But it was you who invited us. You brought us in to do the shitty fighting jobs you’d forgotten how to do for yourselves. It was only natural we should take over once there were enough of us.’

    I stopped by an open shop and looked at a very nice cosmetic box. From the stiff look I could see coming over his face, I’d started this conversation badly as well. I envied Lucius and his way with slaves. It didn’t matter if they were older than he was or better looking or brighter. They all deferred to him.

    ‘You need to be aware,’ I added with an attempt at starting over, ‘that Fortune is on the side of the strong. It was your land. Then it was ours. Perhaps we shall ourselves one day be dispossessed – if we ever forget that a territory belongs to a people not by prescription, but simply by willingness to fight. But I really don’t think anyone need fear or hope that for a while.’

    What was I saying? I hadn’t meant to say that. I hadn’t even drunk much that day. I put the box down and thought of opening a negotiation for it. Though Lucius seemed to scorn it, many Church dignitaries from the higher classes wore makeup, and I rather fancied playing with different colours for my face.

    ‘If you don’t mind my saying, sir,’ Martin whispered softly, ‘that trimming isn’t ivory, but just bleached ox horn.’

    I stepped back hurriedly from the box and gave the shopkeeper a dirty look. You have to be careful with some of these people.

    We continued on our journey. I made sure to thank Martin for his advice. This let me start over with him yet again. This time, I’d keep a curb on myself. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, offering him one of the dried olives I’d just bought from one of the cleaner hawkers, ‘how you got to Constantinople?’

    I ignored Martin’s sullen comment about what a fine city London had been before we broke into it. There was no point in telling him about my own family’s part in the killing and looting, creditable though it may have been. Instead, I began to prod him for his own story.

    ‘Do have one,’ I prompted him. ‘I seem to have bought far too many for me.’

    Martin had been educated in the local monastic school that his father had endowed, he now explained, with additional lessons from his father. He was intended for a priesthood in the Celtic Church. Then his father had committed some internal dereliction that he never would explain, and had decided to leave Ireland as his penance. Though a small boy, Martin had gone with him. Martin and his father had turned up at last in Constantinople, where they’d opened a school to teach the Latin language and Greek literature.

    ‘He was the best teacher in the city,’ Martin said proudly. ‘He had all the learning of the ancients and all the wisdom of the True Faith. We had more students than we could teach. We turned away all but the best.’

    But it was scholarship that had got his father and Martin himself into trouble. The Greeks didn’t like having their business shown to them by a barbarian from places never conquered by Rome. If that weren’t bad enough, he’d got into an argument about the correct pronunciation of Greek by the ancients.

    Martin went into some detail about this – a mass of technical stuff about voiced fricatives and diphthongs and the like. It meant bugger all to me at the time, though I later realised his father had been absolutely right. The moderns are corrupt in their pronunciation. Worse than that, like the modern Latins, they speak an everyday language that is removed from the ancient language, but not far removed enough to let them learn it properly. Of course, the Greek scholars were at a disadvantage.

    ‘What happened?’ I asked.

    ‘It was when my father began giving public readings of Homer in the recovered pronunciation that the Greeks turned really against us. They accused him of heresy. When the authorities had cleared us of that, they just told all the parents anyway that we were secretly spreading heresy, and we lost students.’

    The bills had mounted. Credit was obtained and overstretched. Eventually, when Emperor Maurice put through his last round of tax increases, the credit lines had snapped. The school went bankrupt. Martin was rather vague about the legal process involved. Interested in these things, I pressed for details.

    ‘It was all documents,’ he said with quiet despair. ‘I don’t know what my father signed. I don’t know what he got me to sign. I was young. We went to court again and again. The judge kept refusing our applications. The lawyers never made anything clear.’

    He explained that enslavement for debt had been long since made illegal. Even so, whatever they’d signed had overridden that law. Martin and his father were sold into slavery. The father had died of a broken heart on the very auction block. Martin was sold into the household of an Egyptian merchant, who’d carried him back to handle his Latin correspondence from Antinoopolis.

    From here, the narrative became broken. I had to press and press to get anything at all. Even then, I had to read between the lines. I gathered that his skin had peeled off in the hot Egyptian sun, and he’d sickened near to death from drinking the Nile water. Then, he’d been sold off cheap to a pimp, who’d prostituted him all the way to Cyrene, where the sun was still unbearable but the air was healthier. He’d almost been sold as a galley slave – though small, he was now growing, and a few months pulling an oar might have thickened his body to be of use until a few years of toil had worn it out. But his learning had saved him. He’d been bought by the Church and taken to Rome to be trained as a papal clerk. He’d been given all the less confidential Greek correspondence to handle. Now that Ambrose was dead, he might be promoted to handling it all.