Terror of Constantinople (25 page)

    ‘Oh, yes!’ said Martin, playing along. ‘He told me he’d give the gold to the Church of the Double God to use against what he called the damnable heresy of Arius.’

    ‘And’, I added, ‘he’s still got huge nipple rings with sapphires on them – sapphires the size of grapes. They were making his dugs hang down like an old woman’s.’

    It was the nipple rings that tipped the balance. The gold coins up the arse would simply have led to my being made to do a necrophiliac fisting job on Theophanes. The nipple rings might have worked by themselves. But together, they worked a treat.

    The barbarian was half cut. In any event, experience had given him no reason to be scared of us. With a predatory grunt, he stooped over the motionless body of Theophanes. He pulled at the robe. But it was wound too tightly about the lower parts. He had to get down on his knees.

    ‘Get over there where I can see you together,’ he snarled softly. With a quick look over his shoulder to make sure the others hadn’t heard anything, he set to work. He rammed his sword into the ground on the side of Theophanes farthest from us and knelt to get a better purchase on the robe.

    With both hands, he tried ripping the robe open. But it was cut from the heaviest weave of silk, stitched with a double hem. That sort of tailoring doesn’t rend easily. He tried pulling the robe loose. But three hundred pounds of still flesh don’t move easily either.

    ‘Fat fucking bastard!’ the barbarian grunted in his own language. He reached clumsily for the knife at his belt.

   
Crack!

    Theophanes had got him straight on the head with that stone.

    The creature went down like a stunned ox.

    Straightaway, Theophanes was on top of him, drowning any cries he might still be able to make under a mountain of blubber. I saw his legs jerking wildly, and could hear the muffled gasps. But strong as he was, he was wounded and sprawled in the wrong position to be able to lift even half that immense weight of eunuch off his chest.

    Theophanes raised his elephantine arm for a moment, exposing the barbarian’s head. With another stone, I finished the work.

    I struck hard, and then again and again. On the fourth blow, the skull caved in like ice over a winter’s river, and I felt the slime of blood and brains splashing on my hand. The legs stopped their jerking. It was over.

    ‘Dear me!’ said Theophanes, puffing as he rolled into a sitting position. ‘I thought the beast would never die. For a moment, I thought he might even lift me off him.’

    But the man was dead. Our first efforts had gone to plan.

    ‘Hey, Ratburger,’ came a cry from over by the fire, ‘where in fuck’s name have you got to? Come back over and lose some more.’

    ‘I need a good shit first,’ I replied, mimicking as best I could the voice of the late Ratburger. ‘I’ll be back, and then it’s double or quits.’

    As I’d hoped, they were too dazzled by the fire to see anything outside its pool of light. From where they sat, the entrance to the guardhouse must have been a patch of blackness.

    ‘Ooh, isn’t he a bold one!’ came the cracked voice of an old man.

    Another added: ‘Double or quits? You won’t have double nothing after that!’

    There was a chorus of laughter, and attention returned to the game.

    That gave us a while, but nothing more. Martin wrapped a cloth round the dead man’s head to stop blood getting on to the clothes he was wearing. Then Theophanes and I stripped the body. The man’s clothes stank beyond belief. I hadn’t washed in days, and had been rolling in stale shit and piss, but nothing had prepared me for that awful rankness. My flesh crawled as I pulled the clothes on. For a moment I thought I’d vomit at the greasy touch of the things, but it had to be done.

    Alaric, the golden ‘light from the north’, had become what, but for a stroke of good fortune in Kent, he might always have been – Aelric the filthy, bloodstained desperado.

    When he’d finished turning up the trousers and pulling the upper garments tight by tucking the extra into my waistband, Theophanes stood back to admire me.

    ‘Most fetching,’ he said drily. ‘You’d surely turn the head of every barbarian lass back in those forests.’

    He tugged the sword free and passed it over. He took the knife for himself. We left the body where it lay, covering it with my own clothing and an outer garment of Theophanes so that it would easily pass in darkness for a sleeping captive. So long as the dogs didn’t find it too soon, it would stay hidden as long as we needed.

    We waited until a great shout of laughter and argument showed that all around the fire were more than usually intent on the game they were playing. Then we slipped quickly out of the guardhouse and dodged round the back of the place.

    Keeping the remains of the guardhouse between us and the fire, we moved as fast as we could without making any sound until the ruins became denser and we could vanish into the still silence of the old suburbs.

25

The plan now was to get back to the road leading to the city. The Germanics were all hard at play. The Yellows, if they were still about, probably wouldn’t know one Germanic from another, especially in the darkness. I was sure I could bluff my way past them.

    Well before dawn, we’d be banging on the gates of the City. And these would surely open for someone like Theophanes.

    The problem was, the moon had clouded over, and a light mist had fallen. We weren’t in total blackness – there was a break in the clouds now and then – but it was darker than I had expected. More importantly, with the moon out of sight, we had nothing by which to guide our movements.

    We’d struck out along a narrow street, guessing from our last sighting of the moon it would eventually lead to the main road. But after the first few dozen yards, we found it so choked with rubble that we couldn’t tell road from general ruins. We turned left into another street – then, finding that also blocked, right into another. This soon twisted round to the right, before coming to a dead end.

    What I mean to say is we got lost.

    We stumbled for an age in what we thought was a generally straight line, the mist growing thicker and thicker about us. It was accompanied by a light drizzle.

    We still weren’t in total darkness, but the light we had was of little use for navigating through a sea of broken walls and fallen masonry. The old suburbs had once been half as big as the City itself. Now, spread around us, were occasional streets running between lines of semi-ruined buildings and otherwise vast expanses of quarried rubble. It was like being by night in one of the less frequented districts of Rome.

    We must, I was sure, come eventually to the great clearing that separated the outworks and defensive wall of the city from its old suburbs. But that might easily be long after the sun had burned off both mist and cloud and left us exposed to view like thieves caught in sudden lamplight.

    ‘I think we should be going that way,’ said Martin, pointing left.

    ‘On the contrary,’ said Theophanes, pointing right, ‘
I
think we should be going that way.’

    It didn’t help that I had my own idea of the direction.

    We stopped, uncertain.

    ‘I think’, Theophanes said flatly, ‘we might have passed by this pedestal once already. Those legs, snapped off at the knee, look familiar.’

    Possibly they were But one broken statue, in the darkness, is very like another – and they must, in this stretch of the old suburbs, have been as common as drainage grilles in the road.

    ‘Perhaps’, said Martin, ‘we could go into one of the ruined houses. We can hide there until the barbarians go away.’

    ‘No,’ said Theophanes. ‘Wherever we hid, they’d have us out come dawn like snails from a shell. With their dead friend Ratburger to answer for, I’d not care to be in their charge again.’

    I agreed. The old suburbs were not wholly deserted, but those who lived in them knew exactly how and where to hide when danger threatened. We had no such advantage. We had to keep moving even though we might have been going in a circle. We kept expecting to hear the dreadful clatter of nailed boots on crunchy brick but the only sound was our own soft voices, and the careful picking of our feet through the rubble. So long as we could somehow keep to a straight course, it would be rotten luck if we found our way back to the barbarians. More likely, we’d put a good distance between us and them, and could dodge back to the City when first light showed us where we actually were.

    We didn’t need a gate. We needed only to get within a hundred yards of the City walls to be under at least potential cover of the artillery. No one would follow us within that radius.

    I stepped forward and let the others follow.

    ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ a voice called firmly in Germanic.

    ‘Oh, fuck!’ I said inwardly. What could he be doing this far out? Or were we really so far out?

    ‘I am Aelric, born in Pavia,’ I replied in Lombardic. I knew I couldn’t manage a conversation in his language, but Lombardic would do for basics. ‘I was told to get these prisoners to the Big Man in the Yellow Camp.’

    No such luck.

    ‘I don’t know any Aelric. there ain’t no Lombards detached with us. So who the fuck are you?’

    He went for his sword. In a moment, he’d find enough breath to call out for help.

    I was younger and bigger. I could probably have taken him out – but that wasn’t anything like certain with a sword I’d only handled to put into its scabbard. And what if he managed to call for help?

    I never had to find out.

    How he got round me and behind that man – in perfect silence and in full cover of the mist – I couldn’t at the time imagine. But Theophanes was there. With a single knife-thrust, delivered with tremendous force, straight through a seam in the leather jacket, he had the man in the back.

    As the man went down on all fours, gasping with the pain and shock, the sound of blood frothing on his lips, I saw Theophanes emerge through the mist, a pleased smile on his face. For all the difference in expression, he might have been back in that restaurant, about to hug himself after some particularly apt repartee.

    The man tried to reach back to get at the knife. It hadn’t by itself been an immediately killing blow, but it gave me the chance for a sword-thrust just below the collar bone.

    And that was the end of him.

    Theophanes stood forward to admire his work. He leaned over the body, dabbing playfully at the knife hilt. It bobbed around under his hands like a very stiff erection. As he stood back up, I took his hand and embraced him.

    Whatever happened next, we’d done well together this night.

    When Martin had finished retching the fear out of his guts, we fell to a hurried conference on where we might be. We agreed that the man probably wasn’t part of any search party. He’d been too surprised to come upon me, and then too straightforwardly suspicious of who I was. He must have been on some other mission, and alone.

    We decided not to waste any time on hiding the body. Instead, we just recovered the knife – getting it back out, slippery with blood, took all my effort – and helped ourselves to the one from the dead man’s belt. There was no point taking the sword for Martin. Its weight would only slow him down and he might even cut his leg open by tripping over the thing. But he might be some use with a knife. At least, he could turn it on himself if things grew desperate enough.

    We pressed on. The buildings now were growing larger and less ruinous. Martin felt sure we were coming out of the old suburbs. The clearance between them and the outer defences couldn’t now be far away. It might even be round the next bend in the overgrown street we’d been following.

    Certainly, I had less feeling of confinement. We must be coming out of the old suburbs.

    Then, just as we rounded the bend, came another voice, this one in a high, accented Latin:

    ‘You have taken your time. The Great One doesn’t appreciate delay.’

    ‘Oh, fuck!’ I thought again.

    Looming out of the mist were a good half-dozen of the Yellow Barbarians.

    ‘You’d better come quickly. The Great One will be impatient.’