The Curse of Babylon (20 page)

I turned to stare at the Great Church. Fat lot of guidance that gave me. Once more, though now with rising guilt and misery, I went over reasonings that had seemed quite clear so long as I thought I was for the chop. I’d saved myself at the expense of men who had no claim on me – who had no abstract claim whatever to consideration. But what of the Empire and of its toiling millions I was supposed to be defending? Our fates were connected – but at what price?

I heard a shrill cry to my right. It was Martin, running towards me as fast as I’d seen him move in years. Outside the Senate House, several dozen men in togas were milling about, regardless of the rain.

‘Aelric, Aelric,’ he gasped in Celtic, too knocked out to address me in any civilised language. ‘The Emperor was looking for you. He’s granted you everything he confiscated from Priscus.’ I went forward to catch him before he collapsed and helped him beneath the cover of an upturned shield. I perched him on the rim of a water basin and waited for him to finish struggling for breath. I noticed he was crying. ‘Aelric, before he was taken out in chains, Priscus called to me in Slavic. He said that he’d been straight with you and that you’d made a terrible mistake.’ Not speaking, I looked at Martin. Priscus would say that, I told myself. In a race of men who lied with as much compunction as whores or street beggars, he was the greatest liar I’d ever met. Priscus was a shifty, murdering degenerate. But there was now enough doubt in my mind to finish my decline into self-disgust.

I helped Martin to his feet and got him to a passing chair that was for hire. I had no choice but to stay and receive the gesticulating sycophants. They’d all now seen me and were scampering forward with arms outstretched, regardless of how the rain was spoiling their togas. I smiled and pretended not to notice as the best men in Constantinople kicked and punched each other for the right to be first to throw his arms about the knees of the new and undoubted favourite.

Was not of old the Jewish rabble’s cry
–

I quoted softly in Latin –

Hosanna first, and after Crucify?

The following spring, news came back that Chosroes had illuminated Ctesiphon for three days to celebrate the fall of Priscus – and then for another three when he heard that Heraclius had recalled Nicetas from Alexandria to be Commander of the East. With this came a report from one of our spies that General Kartir had been ordered to prepare a direct stab at Constantinople. He was to lead a small and highly mobile force through the mountain passes, before sweeping along the southern shore of the Black Sea. With our main forces already committed in Syria to face Shahrbaraz, we had nothing to put in his way. Heraclius responded by shutting himself away in his palace on the Asiatic shore. I sweated. I dithered. I did everything short of pray for guidance. What are you supposed to do when interest and duty so plainly collide? At last, I put out an announcement in the Emperor’s name that I was being sent off to Rome to negotiate a loan from the Pope. That night, not telling even Martin what I was about, I set out alone.

I didn’t see Constantinople again until the late October of 613.

Chapter 20

Expressionless, the Abbot stared at the seal I’d affixed to my warrant. ‘I don’t recommend seeing him alone,’ he said in the cold voice of a jailor. ‘That he tried to kill a man is beside the point. The sin he has committed against God is not something to be specified in writing.’ He continued looking at the seal. ‘This is not a fit place to contain such evil,’ he muttered.

I shook my head. The man had wasted enough of my afternoon already. ‘You summoned me here on his behalf,’ I said. ‘I see no point in being here unless we can speak alone.’

The Abbot looked closer at the impression I’d made with the Great Seal. If I was here at his request, the warrant I’d thought to bring along gave me unquestionable authority to demand anything I cared. In silence, he made an entry on to a parchment roll, every sheet of which was stitched together and numbered. I wrote my name where he pointed and took in the other entries on the page. I was signing near the bottom. The top entry was dated six months before and recorded a visit sanctioned by the Emperor. The entry immediately above mine went some way to explaining why I’d been called here. I waited while the Abbot went over to a cupboard and took out a single key. ‘He’s been given the room in the tower,’ he said to me as he walked towards the door of his office. ‘I have no authority to search you, My Lord. But you will be aware of the rules governing his confinement.’ I shrugged. We both knew the rules didn’t apply to me. But he was doing his job, and I’d play along.

In silence, he led me past an outer chapel into the main part of the Fortified Monastery. I passed down long and gloomy corridors heavy with the smell of human excrement. Most of the cells appeared to be empty, though here and there I caught faint sounds of praying or of senile or insane giggling. I could have sworn I heard a baby cry somewhere. I could have stopped and listened but didn’t. In a shorter corridor terminated by a bolted iron gate, one of the cells was open. I looked in as I passed. It was a large room and furnished in a manner that, before time and the damp had got seriously to work, had been lavish. One monk sat on a rickety chair, putting books and smaller objects into a crate. Another monk was dabbing the stone floor with a mop. I saw no evidence of a living occupant.

The monk who went before us unbolted the iron gate and bowed as we went by him on to a wide spiral staircase within what I guessed was a much wider tower. We stopped halfway up at a wooden door. The Abbot took out his key and poked it into the lock. He opened it and stood back to let me go in before him. ‘Brother Gondo will remain outside,’ he said. ‘If he hears your voice raised, his orders are to summon the guard. I advise you to remain outside the white line that has been drawn on the floor.’

At first, I saw nothing. The darkness of the corridors and staircase had been moderated by a brace of lamps. Here, the fading light of a winter afternoon was almost wholly shut out by a curtain that hung before the one small window in the cell. I waited for the Abbot to come in behind me and took one of the lamps for myself. I pulled the wick fully up. I waited for the pale and flickering light to show me what I was looking for. After a long silence, I found the malefactor stretched out on a stone ledge that served him for a bed. I thought he was asleep but he was only wrapped in a woollen quilt against the cold. He opened his eyes and looked at me. He sat up and glowered. Behind me, the Abbot cleared his throat. ‘Brother Priscus,’ he said in a curiously soft gloat, ‘your request has been heard and granted. But though it has been suspended, so you may speak collectedly with the Lord Alaric, your daily whipping will resume tomorrow.’ With that, I heard the door swing shut behind me.

I stood just outside the white semicircle drawn on the floor and looked at Priscus. Ever since Martin had opened and read out the Abbot’s letter – and fallen into a heap of sobbing misery after a second re-reading of it – I’d been going through possible openings to this conversation. Priscus had committed people to worse than this and for less. Our first ever meeting had involved my arrest, followed by promises of torture. Now the tables had been irreversibly turned, I could have opened with any number of self-righteous lectures. Instead, I looked at the bald and shrunken scarecrow huddled in his own filth. ‘Hello, Priscus,’ I said softly, ‘I’m given to understand that your head is filled with all manner of insane fancies and that you barely survived a suicide attempt.’ I stepped forward across the line. The look he gave didn’t indicate he’d get up and kiss the hem of my robe. I wondered if he’d spit in my face. ‘I’m surprised to see you alive at all,’ I added – ‘let alone so comparatively well.’

He swung himself stiffly into a seated position. ‘I knew you’d come,’ he sneered in Latin. He kicked the stained quilt on to the floor and stretched his legs. ‘No cups, I’m afraid. But there’s a jug on that table. The horse from which its contents were collected seems to have been drunk at the time.’ He let out a cold laugh. I waited for the coughing fit. Nothing. If he’d put on no new flesh, three seasons of enforced holiness in the damp seemed to have arrested a decline I’d been sure would carry him off in months. He stood up and waved his left arm. The chain that connected his manacled wrist to an iron bracket on the wall rattled. ‘It means stepping well within range of wicked old Priscus,’ he said with one of his nasty grins. ‘But, unless you’ve brought your own refreshments, that’s a risk you’ll have to take.’

I took up the jug and carried it over to where Priscus had sat again. He laughed bitterly and raised the jug to his lips. Then he caught sight of the icon of Saint George on the far wall. He put on a look of patient humility and handed the jug to me. ‘Do sit beside me, My Lord Alaric,’ he said with another of his grins. ‘I do have fleas. But I’m sure you were used to those in Britain, or wherever it was you were born and dragged up.’

I sat down on the ledge and nerved myself for a mouthful of the thin yellow liquid. I felt something behind me, and twisted round to see a familiar wooden box. ‘It may have soothed your conscience to keep me in powders and potions,’ he said. ‘But I’m not inclined to blame you for that.’ He took the jug from me and drank. He smacked his lips and reached for his box. ‘Won’t you join me in a pinch of blue powder? It goes well with the wine. If I take the first pinch, you can be sure the second won’t poison you.’ I knew Priscus well enough to be sure of no such thing – if he wanted, he could poison a man by kissing him. But I didn’t suppose he’d brought me here to kill me.

‘I gave instructions for you to be treated well,’ I opened in a voice that I couldn’t force into the tone I wanted. ‘Why did you try to kill the monk Nicetas sent to see you?’

Priscus wrinkled his nose. ‘Would you believe me if I said I bit his finger off because he spoke disrespectfully of you?’ I’d spoken in Greek. He stayed in Latin and nodded slightly towards the door. I took a small pinch of the stimulant he was offering me. I put it on my tongue and washed it down with another mouthful of wine. I had specified comfort for him. No doubt, that’s what he’d been given till he upset Nicetas.

‘The man offended me,’ he went on. ‘He was here to explain how, in your absence, the new Commander of the East was about to become a second Alexander. I was more interested in where you’d been and for so long that you’d lost the advantage you got from fucking me and the eunuch over. Of course, fathead Heraclius tells everything to his cousin and he’d told enough to his confessor for me to get the drift of things. I’ll be surprised if the story isn’t all over the City.’

He took another drink. He smiled. ‘When I was first brought here, I could hardly believe you’d done what you did. You were Alaric, the silly young barbarian. Then astonishment ripened into hate and I went three times a day into the chapel to implore God for your destruction. But, if I won’t say I’m a reformed character, I’ve had time enough in this place to reflect on things. Whoever it was Ludinus sent to whisper in your ear only told you the truth.’ He laughed nastily. ‘I won’t lie to you – not at this stage in proceedings. I really thought it was all settled for you to be sent here, not me. And I was planning to have you blinded as well as locked away.’ He sighed. ‘But I’ll bet you’ve forgiven me. So long as you come out on top, you’re not the sort who bears grudges. About the only thing that makes you endurable is your lack of belief in God.’

I said nothing. A flea had hopped on to the white silk of my outer tunic. I took it between forefinger and thumb and popped it with my nails. I wiped the blood on a napkin. Priscus sighed again. Beneath his sneery façade, he seemed almost as embarrassed as I was. ‘But, you might tell your dear old friend Priscus the details,’ he took up again with forced jollity. ‘I get bugger all excitement in this place.’

I stood up and lifted a corner of the curtain. The giant walls of Constantinople were about a half mile to the east. Between there and this place lay the ruins of one of the suburbs that, in better days, had spread far beyond the walls. Barely any light had come into the room. But Priscus was squeezed against the wall, hands pressed over his eyes. I let the curtain drop. I went to where I’d put the lamp and moved it closer to the bench. Despite the heavy clothes I had on, I could feel a damp chill soaking through. I was sure I could hear the squeaking of a rat. I sat down again beside Priscus. ‘I’m waiting, Alaric,’ he jeered. ‘I’ve heard something dismissive of what you did in Persia. I’d like to know exactly what happened.’

He sprawled on a pillow black with grease from his scalp and listened as I felt my way into a story that I hadn’t come here to tell, and that still managed in places to bring a scared lump into my throat. A few times, he stopped me to ask a question about persons or places. But he listened mostly in silence as I spoke until the faint glow of light on our side of the curtain had faded and we were in darkness but for the wavering gleam of the lamp.

When I’d finished my account of my last days in Persian territory – speaking a different language and giving a different story to every picket that stopped me – he got up and walked to the farthest length his chain allowed. He turned and made a bow that I thought for a moment was ironic. Then he was back beside me and reaching for his box of drugs. He watched me take a small pinch of his orange powder and waited for its effect to begin. He put his face close to mine. For the first time since we’d met, his breath smelled only of rotting teeth. ‘You know, dear boy, I decided to kill you after your first proposal of a law to dispossess my class of its land. I went out with Heraclius when he needed a piss during the banquet after that Council meeting. I just happened to be carrying the right poison in a flask about my neck. I found myself alone with all the boots and I could tell yours from their size. Five drops in each and you’d have fallen dead some time the following day. Everyone would have agreed it was a heart attack. Instead, I stood looking at those boots till Heraclius had put his catheter away. I never had such an easy chance again.’