Terror of Constantinople (42 page)

    If you’ve never been out of England, think of the biggest and most lavish church you ever saw and try to imagine it beside the Great Church of Constantinople as a lit taper next to the sun. If you know Rome, you can do better. Think in that case of the Prefect’s Basilica, but make it bigger and taller, and replace the barrel vaults of its roof with a dome that has means of support you only see if you know something of engineering.

    The Great Church had been consecrated over seventy years earlier, with Justinian himself in attendance. This was after a Circus riot that had left much of the city centre in smoking ruins. His intention was to stamp his authority on the Empire once and for all with a building that would outdo the efforts all his predecessors and Solomon himself with its size and magnificence.

    With no shortage of cash in those days, and architects of genius, Justinian had succeeded in spectacular fashion. Every stone quarry in Greece and Asia Minor had been worked double-time to supply the columns and interior furnishings. Every temple in Syria still untouched by centuries of closure had been ransacked for bronze doors and other fittings. The artists had faced problems hitherto unimagined to decorate the interior with mosaics that were in proportion to the whole.

    The result was the largest covered space ever built. From the outside, it is impressive in its mass but looks rather like a giant mushroom. It’s on the inside that it comes alive. The overall shape of the Great Church is a cross with arms of equal length. Its central space is a rectangle of about eighty yards by seventy-five. This is divided from the nave by great columns which take the weight of the galleries and, sixty yards above the floor, of the central dome.

    Our procession had set out from the Legation and crossed the square into the wide atrium of the church. At the main door, we’d been met by the Patriarch. Now, he was leading the way past the Imperial Throne towards the high altar. The interior was brilliantly lit by a constellation of lamps that were suspended from points high above.

    Though conducted in Greek, and with variations of music and incense you’ll see nowhere else, the Eastern ritual for the dead is pretty close in essentials to our own. It has all the same prayers and readings and hymns. There is the usual dwelling on the frailty of life and the vanity of worldly things – the usual directing of hearts and minds to the Incomparable Value and Infinite Blessings of the Life to Come.

    Presiding in a vague sense over all this, Phocas sat on his throne a few dozen yards from the altar. He glowered at the congregation as he made sure that the representative of his good friend the Pope received the send-off he deserved.

    As if to show who was really in charge, the Greek Patriarch’s plans were changed without warning. As he readied himself to turn back from the coffin for another sermon, a deacon plucked at his sleeve. There was a whispered exchange that ended in a look in my direction from the Patriarch that Medusa might have envied. Then I found myself propelled to the front of the church.

    ‘You’re to give the final reading,’ a voice murmured in my right ear. ‘Have you got your text ready?’

    ‘What the fuck? ...’ I gasped, luckily unheard in the shuffling around me. No one had told me I was to do other than watch and look pretty in the robe I’d finally bullied those tailors into working like galley slaves to produce.

    I stood looking down at the immense congregation lining both sides of the central area of the church. The assembled thousands stood looking expectantly back at me. I recognised Philip and some of the other students, all dressed in a most fetching black. There was Baruch, standing beside one of the supporting columns, a golden cross hung prominently round his neck. I noticed the Faction leaders close together. It seemed that Priscus had managed after all to settle their difference.

    I saw the Patriarch, breathing hard and looking down at the floor. Beside him, with a seniority I’d never been able to work out, stood Sergius. He looked at me, his face diplomatically blank.

    Over beside the Emperor, I saw Priscus. He took a surreptitious handful of something I rather fancied for myself at that moment, and washed it down with a swig from his flask. He smiled as he might at a public execution and blew me a kiss.

    Theophanes, standing far behind him, seemed nervous. Next to him, I could see a look of horror on Martin’s face that outdid anything he’d yet managed. It was as if he expected the dome of the church to cave in on us.

    Swathed in purple and gold, Phocas sat in his full hieratic mode. The house might belong to God. But he was its Master. For him, all was as it ought to be.

    I felt the full blast of the expectant hush around me as I pulled open the heavy bound volume of the Gospels before me.

    ‘My reading today’ – my voice caught with sudden nerves. I hadn’t realised how the acoustics in that place would magnify and deepen it. I pulled myself together.

    ‘My reading today’, I began again with forced confidence, ‘is’ – I looked down at the page that had fallen open – ‘from the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians.’

    I swallowed and began: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity  ...’

    Oh Jesus! I thought with a stab of terror, I couldn’t read the words in Greek. The lamp in front of me wasn’t up to showing the tiny script. Besides, it was of the crabbed, ecclesiastical type I’d always left to Martin when I came across it in the Patriarchal Library.

    I squinted as I recited the opening clause. It was useless. I couldn’t read a fucking word. It was as if a spider had crawled out of an inkpot.

    I paused. I swallowed. I resisted the temptation to stage a fainting fit. Instead I improvised, continuing in Latin:

    ‘
Factus sum uelut aes sonans aut cymbalum tinniens.

    ‘
Et si habuero prophetiam et nouerim mysteria omnia et omnem scientiam et habuero omnem fidem ita ut montes transferam caritatem autem non habuero
 ...’

    I got no further.

    ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ a voice screamed behind me. ‘The Great Church is become as Babylon!’

    Fucking cheek! I thought. I wasn’t doing that badly. As for the Latin, I was Acting Permanent Legate to His Holiness in Rome. If I chose to read the lesson in the Empire’s official language, that was my right.

    I turned to see what the commotion was.

    A young deacon had broken free from the throng around the altar and was rushing up the steps to my lectern. Knife in hand, his face carried a look of wild fanaticism. He reminded me of the monks I’d occasionally seen running about the city when they’d heard there was heretical talk in the Baths.

    ‘The Latin dog blasphemes!’

    A few elderly clerics had made an effort to restrain the maniac. Of course, they’d failed. I heard the clatter of armed men over by the Emperor. But they’d have to push their way through a sea of bodies to get to me.

    I was on my own.

    I waited at the top of the bronze steps, ready to overpower the man. He had a knife, but I was much larger.

    It was now that I got a closer look at the knife. It shone dull in the light of the overhead lamps. Some dark gel was dripping from its point. It had been steeped in poison. One nick of that thing, and I’d be a dead man.

    ‘Let the Temple be cleansed!’ the deacon bellowed as he reached the top of the steps.

    ‘God help me!’ I cried in terror. Would there be no limit to the horrors of the past few days? Unless I fancied jumping twenty feet, there was no way off this lectern but past some maniac who was flailing about like the scythe on a war chariot’s wheel.

    ‘Fuck you to hell, Greekling shit!’ I screamed at him with a recovery of nerve. I hurled the Gospels at his head. They missed, but caught him on the shoulder. He wheeled back. For a moment, I thought he’d fall backwards down the steps. But he caught himself on the rail with his free arm.

    The Gospels crashed heavily on to the stone floor, where the binding burst into a cascade of parchment sections.

    ‘Die, Blasphemer!’ the deacon cried with a stab in my direction.

    He missed me, thank God. But he did open a great rent in my lovely new robe. As he came at me again, all wild eyes and slashing knife, I found time to observe that I wasn’t having the best of luck in this City where clothing was concerned. I’d had to hand over a pile of gold for that purple border, and I wasn’t sure it would be chargeable to expenses.

    There was nothing else for it. Through the gash in my robe, I pulled out my sword. In normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have thought to bring it into church. But you tell me, dear reader, when I’d last seen any of those.

    I pulled it out and thrust it at the deacon’s body. It glanced off, the hole I ripped in his robe showing the chainmail underneath. For a moment, he gripped again at the rail to get his balance. Then he was back at me.

    I finally got him down the steps with a knock of the sword handle to his face. Anyone else would have paused to wipe away the blood that gushed from the wound I opened on his forehead. Not this lunatic deacon. His mouth foamed. His eyes glared at me with pupils contracted almost to the size of pinheads.

    He didn’t even cease his cries of ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’ They echoed horribly round the now silent church.

    As he started up the steps again, I took the sword in both hands and swung hard. With a dull thud and a recoil that almost pitched me off the lectern on to the floor far below, I had it half through his neck and deep into his collarbone.

    And it would have gone further but for the mail collar.

    The deacon crashed sideways against the rail. His eyes bulged, the pupils now expanding as they looked fixedly into mine. He opened his mouth for one last cry but in place of any human sound, there was only a gurgling from his severed windpipe.

    Blood gushed from his neck in dying spurts. But, still in command, he stepped backwards in good order on to the lower steps. I thought he might be so far gone in piety and whatever he was on, he’d try another slash with his knife.

    I was taking no further chances. I kicked him hard in the stomach and sent him spinning to the foot of the steps, where he fell in a now silent heap. The knife, though still in his hand, was underneath the body.

    ‘And may God have mercy on your soul,’ I rasped, suddenly recalling where and who I was.

    As I reached up to mop the blood from my face, a most annoying shower of gold leaf dropped down on to my robe.

‘That was a most lucky blow, my darling Alaric,’ said Priscus. ‘Was it not a Sign from Heaven that you never got to say “
nihil sum
”?’

    He stood at the foot of the lectern steps with a couple of armed guards for company and aimed a kick at the motionless body. ‘A shame you had to finish him off, even so,’ he said. ‘It would have been interesting to watch an interrogation according to your own custom. As it is, we’ll never know who put him up to this.’

    ‘I quite agree, my dear Priscus,’ I said, breathing hard. ‘But’ – I quoted – ‘“Not all that men desire do they obtain.”’

    He smiled, nodding acknowledgement of the line from Euripides. It eclipsed his finishing the verse from St Paul.

    I sheathed my sword and walked down to Priscus. Blood had turned the bronze steps as slippery as ice. I had to grip hard on the rail to avoid falling.

    I looked around. The church was absolutely silent. The congregation stood exactly as I’d last seen it. Several hands were still raised in prayer. Some of the people in the front row of worshippers were splashed with blood.

    So was I. More importantly, the slash in my robe was marked all the way down by a dark smear of poison. I’d have to be careful as I took it off.

    Behind me, the Patriarch lay nestled in the arms of one of the younger clerics. He had passed out from the shock. An elderly bishop fanned him gently with one of the leaves from the Gospels.

    There was a sound of quiet weeping.

    Now the Emperor was on his feet. ‘This has been a day of considerable sadness, my Dear Brothers in Christ,’ he said, enunciating slowly.

    All heads turned in his direction.

    ‘However, unless anyone has anything to say to the contrary, I suggest that the service should continue. We can at least commit the body of our Dear Brother the Permanent Legate to God with some attempt at decency.’