Terror of Constantinople (56 page)

    But we were untrained and outnumbered. The proper place for my Blues was on the City walls, fetching and carrying for the regular defenders. A leader of genius like Belisarius might have kept the defence going longer and more effectively. Had I known then what I learned many years later, I could have used fire and the safe lines of communication offered by rooftops to inflict catastrophic losses on the enemy. But that day I had only the skills of a bandit and the dispositions made by Priscus.

    And there were now so many threatened points. I knew that we were being pushed steadily back, but we had to hold the line we had. I’d already pulled everyone back to the innermost ring of defences. There was nowhere further to retreat to and regroup.

    We fought with frantic energy. My sword twisted in my grip with blood and sweat and weariness as I hacked and stabbed at the soldiers. So far as I could tell, I was unwounded myself, but I tripped several times over the bodies that now littered the rubble-strewn streets – bodies both in uniform and in makeshift armour.

    At last, that poor Saint Sebastian boy died in my arms. He’d taken an arrow in his throat. His face still shining, he choked with his last breath over the poem Simonides had written so long ago for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae:

 Here dead we lie because we did not choose

   To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

 Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;

   But young men think it is, and we were young.

As I looked down into the dead eyes of his still face, my mind began to clear. Simonides had known how to speak for the Spartans. Their heroes had died for a country that was worth any number of lives. What could I ever hope to say to that boy’s mother? That he’d died to buy time for Phocas?

    So far as I could tell, he hadn’t even died for the Blue Faction. Perhaps he’d died for me.

    I sat down heavily beside him and pushed his eyes closed. An officer in the attack force stood over me. I reached for my sword.

    ‘Fuck off!’ I said wearily.

    The man looked at me and walked smartly off.

    I heard yet another blast of the military trumpets and then a loud voice shouting in the distance: ‘Put your weapons down. Stand against the walls. We give you quarter.’

    I heard another voice from a different direction: ‘Put your weapons down. Your battle is lost. You have full quarter.’

    ‘They’re right,’ Martin spoke urgently behind me. ‘It’s all over. You must get away.’

    I looked round. It was Martin indeed. I’d thought at first I was hearing things. He was nursing a cut to his arm but was otherwise unharmed.

    What the fuck was he doing here? I hadn’t noticed him during the fighting. So far as I’d thought of him at all, it was to assume that he was safe inside the Great Church.

    He sawed at the straps of my breastplate with a broken sword until the thing fell away from my body. It was splashed with blood and dented all over.

    I helped him pull the helmet off my head. This also was dented nearly out of shape. I let him throw a piece of cloth over my hair.

    ‘Where are the others?’ I asked, confused at the sudden silence around me. I coughed as the wind blew smoke into my face.

    ‘Dead or gone home,’ he said.

    He pulled me to my feet.

    ‘We must get out of here,’ he said. ‘There’s no quarter for you. Before the Prefecture building fell, its defenders hailed you as Emperor.’

    ‘Stupid fucking bastards,’ I croaked. All of a sudden, I was thirsty beyond imagining.

    I had by now recovered my senses as much as I needed them. One after the other, I stretched my arms and legs, expecting to feel a stab of white pain at any moment. But I felt nothing. I’d been in the thick of the battle and I hadn’t picked up a scratch. Given time, I’d have started an argument with Martin about the power of his holy relics.

    I looked around me. Except that there was no grass, the street looked like one of the tattier parts of Rome – all smashed wood and other things.

    ‘Which way to the Legation?’ I asked weakly.

60

I don’t know how we got back to the Legation. There were soldiers everywhere. Citizens scurried around, searching for loved ones or loot. A few times, I saw soldiers looking at me. One raised his sword in a strange salute. But no one tried to stop us.

    There were a few bodies in the square outside, and one or two piles of discarded loot. Otherwise all looked much as usual. The Legation was just inside the ring of defences but I didn’t recall any fighting here. Smoke drifted into the square but from some distance away.

    I approached the gate as if in a dream. It was shut. I prayed that it was locked and that all was well inside. As I drew closer, my head was pounding as if I were going into battle again.

    ‘God be praised!’ said Martin in a quivering voice when we reached the gate.

    I touched it gently. No movement. It was surely locked. I pushed harder.

    The gate moved and we both stood looking at the inch of darkness that had opened before us. Neither of us moved. It was like being in a dream. The faint sound of shouting from the streets behind us died away to an oppressive silence. The rest of the world might not have existed as we stood, stupidly, looking at that strip of darkness.

    I pushed harder at the gate and we stepped into the gloom of the main hall. At first, everything seemed as it should be. There were the same patterns of light and shadow, the same dull quietness of the place. Then I saw the empty lodge just inside to my right. Where were the doorkeepers?

    ‘We must go upstairs,’ said Martin in an odd voice, but he seemed as rooted to the spot as I was.

    I made a tremendous effort and stepped forward. ‘Come on,’ I said, taking Martin by the arm. I found my teeth chattering uncontrollably.

    The door to my suite was off its hinges. The bars Authari had worked so hard to procure and fit were smashed with the force of whatever had been brought against the door.

    Upstairs, everyone was dead.

    We found Radogast first. He lay at the top of the stairs. He’d been almost cut to pieces in the desperate struggle. His severed right arm still clutched a military cloak.

    Gutrune lay in the corridor outside my office. Her throat had been slit. She’d died with a bloody knife in her hand. The dent in the lead feeding bottle showed that she must have used it as a club.

    The other dead bodies also showed signs of desperate resistance.

    And Maximin?

    We ran up and down the corridor, looking into each room.

    Nothing.

    There was no sign of looting. This had been a tight military operation. There had been a wild struggle but its outcome could never have been in doubt.

    ‘Aelric,’ Martin cried from my office. ‘Aelric, it’s Antony – he’s still alive.’

    Alive he was, though only just. He was sitting on the floor and he groaned as Martin lifted the cup of water to his lips.

    ‘Men,’ he whispered, ‘armed men. They had the Emperor’s authority. All was in order when I had the gate opened. Priscus’ – he swallowed – ‘he came in with full authority. The doorkeepers let him in. I protested the violation of our immunity. I tried to stop them from taking the dear child.’

    He coughed and blood ran down his chin. I looked at the great spreading stain on his robe.

    ‘The law says the authorities can enter in an emergency to secure the Legation. They have no right to—’

    He coughed again. More blood. His face turned an ashen colour as his lips described the word ‘right’. I took hold of him and held him during his last violent spasm.

    Martin pulled the robe over his face as I drained the water jug.

    ‘I should have been here,’ I said flatly. ‘I could have kept Priscus out.’ I imagined Priscus holding up Maximin to see the work of butchery against the only family he’d known. I could see the look on the man’s face and hear the triumph in his voice as he took possession of his alienated property.

    He hadn’t killed Maximin. That much was certain. If the child’s body wasn’t here, it was repossession that Priscus had in mind. He’d thrown Maximin out before changing sides. Once he had changed sides, he’d needed another son and heir.

    I shook my head to try and get it to focus on the immediate present.

    ‘I could have instructed the officials not to open up,’ I said in elaboration.

    ‘No,’ said Martin. ‘You’d have ended like Radogast. If Priscus hadn’t been let in, he’d only have broken in. Whatever else you may have done or not done today, you couldn’t have prevented this.’

    He stood up. He put his hands on my shoulders and steadied me as I began to shake again. Another moment, and I’d have lost control.

    ‘Aelric, we’ve got to see if anyone is alive in the main Legation, and get the place secured. Come on. We need to find the others.’

We went back into the main hall just as a couple of soldiers Priscus had left behind as guards were returning from the Permanent Legate’s side of the building. One was straining under the weight of the silver crucifix they’d taken from the chapel. Another carried a pile of jewelled icons.

    ‘Fucking good stuff here, mate,’ one of them began with a drunken wave of his booty. Then he remembered who and where he was, and felt for his sword.

    I made short and brutal work of him. Once you’re into a rhythm of killing, it doesn’t greatly matter how tired you are. With the sword-thrust I made into his unprotected throat, he must have been dead before he hit the pavement.

    I turned to deal with his colleague, but Martin had got there already. The soldier lay gurgling at his feet, a bronze pen straight through his windpipe. With the look of an avenging angel on his face, Martin stared grimly down at his work. How he had managed to get the better of an armed soldier was as far beyond me as how he’d managed to stand by me throughout the battle without being recognised or killed.

    We found the Legation officials and slaves locked in one of the storage houses near the pigsties. We had no keys, but the lock was easy enough to smash from the outside. As they emerged blinking into the light, they confirmed what we had already guessed. Priscus had arrived on regular form but once in the Legation he had gone wild. The fact that he’d locked them up rather than killed them showed that he hadn’t forgotten everything about Papal immunity, even under the influence of those shitty drugs.

    Another reason to suppose Maximin was safe.

    Martin took control of the Legation staff. He ordered the gates to be secured and had the bodies taken away to be prepared for a decent burial. He even set some of the slaves about cleaning the blood off the floors of our suite and righting the furniture. I could hear him scolding them as I sat in the lead bath and had warm water splashed over me.

    ‘We’ll get out of here once it’s dark and you’ve had something like a rest,’ he’d snapped before pushing me into the bath. ‘For the moment, I’m assuming Heraclius has more to do than come looking for you here. We both need to get clean and change into different clothes. Stay here until I come for you. I’ll get as much money as I can lay hands on. I don’t suppose your parchment money will be worth anything after today. I can’t say any good has ever come of it,’ he’d added with a glance that managed to express his contempt of the financial world.

    By the time we were dressed in clean but inconspicuous clothes, it was turning dark. Against my will, I’d dozed a long while in the bath which the Legation slaves had kept topped up with warm water. I emerged from the bath less exhausted than when I’d gone in, but was now beginning to ache all over from the strain of of the day’s fighting.

    After we’d eaten with the Legation staff – not a cheerful meal, but a good solid dish of pork sausage and stale bread, all washed down with beer – I was beginning to feel more like my usual self.

    ‘I have to kill Priscus,’ I said to Martin as we went back upstairs to my office. ‘I can’t save Maximin from him in any other way. I need to get close enough to him to get a knife into his throat.’

    I looked round the office. Order had been restored. It was as if nothing had happened. I could almost imagine that I heard Gutrune’s heavy tread on the boards outside as she went to attend to Maximin.