The Curse of Babylon (21 page)

He stopped and gathered his thoughts again. ‘Listen, Alaric,’ he whispered, ‘if Heraclius will never understand the brains and courage required to keep the Home Provinces safe,
I do
. Give Uncle Priscus your hand. He’d like to touch a man who at last has become his equal.’

I could have laughed at him. Perhaps I should have got up and crossed to the other side of the white line. I could have called an order to the monk praying in a scared voice outside the door. I could have walked out. I could have hurried through the ruined suburbs. If the Military Gate was already locked and barred, I could have ordered it reopened. I could have let my eyes glaze over every time I found myself looking at the Fortified Monastery.

Instead, I gave him my hand.

Chapter 21

So was resumed what you might call our friendship. On the first Friday in every month, I’d slip outside the City and walk alone through the ruins to call on Priscus in the Fortified Monastery. After my first visit, I’d given orders for the whip to be put away and for him to be moved into better quarters. There, we’d spend the evening drinking wine and sniffing drugs and talking over the state of the Empire. It was an odd relaxation from the cares of office. Perhaps I should confess it was a support for those cares. Beyond torturing householders in fallen cities into screaming where they’d hidden their savings, Priscus knew nothing of finance. The delicate web of dealings I was beginning to map out in earnest, one touch on any part of which would be felt in all the others, was as great a mystery to him as colours are to a blind man. But show him the correlation of forces in the Imperial Council and he had the feel of a master for how to break up hostile combinations – who should be bribed, who blackmailed, who should be quietly entrapped, without showing by whom, into boys or heresy or financial losses to the Jews. My survival so far in the councils of the Empire – indeed my achievements in the demented snake pit that was Ctesiphon – showed some understanding of the courtly arts. What Priscus now taught me was of a wholly different character. Even when I had no taste for following his advice, it was useful to know what others might be planning against me.

Martin stopped before a statue that showed Polyphemus in the act of eating a man. ‘Aelric, I still don’t like this place,’ he whispered in Celtic. ‘The very walls pulsate with evil. Can’t we just move back to the smaller palace you were given?’

I frowned and looked at the statue. Though not from the very best age of Greek art, it was a fine composition. Its provenance carried it through a line of owners and dealers that led back to the demolition of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome. It might have been commissioned by the Emperor himself. I waited for a couple of slave girls to walk past us in the corridor. One of them looked back at me and smiled. I smiled and nodded. That was tonight sorted, I told myself with a thrill of lust I took care not to show.

I turned to Martin, whose face had taken on a greyish colour in the light from a glazed window. ‘Bricks and marble do not pulsate with anything,’ I said with greater patience than I felt. ‘Now, I’m the Lord Treasurer. I can’t be expected to slum it in a residence stuck between a monastery and an ivory warehouse. I need a big audience hall and room for offices. I need somewhere in which I can show off to all who attend on me.’ I could have gone on to say that I needed somewhere with walls thick enough to let the Emperor’s Lord High Economiser not be torn apart by the mob. But I smiled and reached out to my bedraggled secretary. ‘Oh, come on, Martin,’ I said. ‘We’ve finally got the place spotlessly clean – and you have said how you love the rose garden.’

We continued together along the corridor. The door to my office anteroom was ajar and I heard Samo inside let out one of his moderately drunken burps.

I sat at my desk and stared at the sullen boy. The look in his eyes had already taken Martin’s thoughts off invisible horrors. He was sitting on my left and giving nervous glances at the iron sword on my desk.

I looked up and down the semi-literate scrawl on the wooden board that had been taken from about the boy’s neck. ‘Your name is Rado?’ I asked in Slavic. He stared back at me, his eyes showing their first trace of humanity since he’d been made to stand before me. I let my face break into a smile. ‘I speak several languages,’ I said – ‘most of them rather well. However, the working language of this palace is Latin. Do you know any Latin?’ His eyes darted sideways at Samo, whose chair creaked with every movement. He focused on me again and nodded.

I looked again at the wooden board. ‘You were found trying to run away on a sprained ankle after the failure of your tribe’s raid on Rhodope.’ The boy nodded, but made no other answer. I got up and went to stand over him. He stank like a dead fox. His hair was still plastered with something that made it white and spiky. I guessed its natural colour was light brown but this was only from looking at his eyes. ‘Your people have colonised some high mountains,’ I said. Breathing through my mouth, I walked round him. He had the wiry look you get in mountain races. At the same time, he had the makings of something rather more harmonious. My agent had been in Rhodope at the time of the raid and had been able to get first pick of the human debris left after an unusually firm defence of the city. This boy had been his only selection. I stopped in front of him. He was too young to have suffered the scarification that made adult males of his race useless for anything but working in the mines. In its few moments of relaxation, he had a pretty face.

‘Take off your clothes,’ I said in Latin.

‘You’ll have to kill me first!’ he snarled back in a voice that wasn’t quite broken. He looked at the sword and tensed his muscles as if to make a lunge for it.

I shook my head at Samo to stay seated. I picked up the sword by its blade and handed it to the boy. As I’d expected, it was too heavy for him to do other than let its point bump on the floor. Leaving the sword in his hands, I pulled out a low stool and sat before him. ‘Listen, Rado,’ I said, now back in Slavic, ‘you were held in the slave pens of Rhodope for several days before the road was declared safe enough for travel. I’m sure that let you see how the other captives were made ready for servitude. Did my agent beat you? Did he starve you? Did he cause you to be raped? Did he force you to eat his shit or to assist in killing the injured boys of your people? According to the note that came with you, he bound up your ankle, and packed you off to me.’

I paused and continued looking at the boy. The agent knew my instructions. Despite the unpromising snarl on the boy’s face, he probably hadn’t failed me. ‘You are my slave,’ I said softly. ‘I haven’t had you broken to slavery. But a slave is what you are. You are a two-legged beast as much in my absolute and unaccountable power as a pig bought in from the market to serve at my dinner table.’ I smiled again and waited for my words to register in his head. ‘Here is the deal, Rado. You can be trained as a dancer for my guests and perform such other duties as are assigned to you. You will be taught the rudiments of Greek and be baptised into the Christian Faith. It goes without saying that I expect obedience at all times. I also expect personal cleanliness. In return, you will not be beaten. You will not be chained up at night. You will, moreover, train in the use of that sword and you will keep it sharp and within reach; and you will use it as required in my defence or in defence of this palace. You will receive my absolute trust. Most of the time, you will be holding that sword when my back is turned on you. On the Emperor’s birthday, I free one fourteenth of my slaves, and send them into the world with my blessing and a gift of money.

‘You can accept this deal. Or I can send you to one of the slave markets in Constantinople, where you can hope for – and almost certainly not find – a better master. How do you choose, Rado?’

‘Do you give me any choice?’ he asked bitterly.

I smiled again. ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But I always like to ask.’ I stood up and took the sword from him. ‘So do untie that tunic, Rado. It’s filthy as well as torn. It can help feed the boiler that provides water for your first-ever bath.’

I flashed a happy smile at Martin. He might think this palace accursed and claim there were shadows moving just out of his direct view. There were upwards of a hundred other people here who counted it their lucky day when they were brought through the gates. And every night because of that, I slept soundly in an unlocked room.

‘Alaric, I’d like to ask you a question,’ Priscus announced one late afternoon. Outside, it was raining and the barred window had no glazing to keep out the chill. After a fair beginning, the conversation had languished. All Priscus could bring out was another of those ghastly anecdotes that showed what a good idea it had been in general to lock him into this cage. As for me, I was depressed by news of another campaign mishandled by Nicetas – this one had let a Persian army deep into the Home Provinces and, only after much loss of life and property, had a confederation of my local militias eventually forced a retreat.

I looked away from a stain on the table cloth that reminded me of a map of Britain. ‘By all means,’ I said, trying for an interest I didn’t feel. I was thinking of an excuse to make a dash back inside the City before the rain came down in the volume that, before it darkened, the sky had seemed to be threatening.

‘The philosophers and priests teach that it doesn’t,’ he said after fumbling with his wine cup. ‘But do you think the end
ever
justifies the means?’

I put my own cup down. ‘Yes,’ I said. By tacit agreement, we’d long since given up on trying to deceive each other. If we were lurching into a symposium, we might as well both be honest in ways that would have shocked Plato. ‘The end does justify the means if a number of conditions are satisfied. First, the end must be worth achieving as reasonably understood. Second, the means chosen must be reasonably likely to achieve the end. Third, they must be the most economic means available. Fourth, they mustn’t involve reasonably foreseeable costs that outweigh the expected benefits of the end. Answer yes to all of these, and the means are justified.’

Priscus smiled. ‘A good philosophy for a saint or a villain,’ he said. ‘In Persia, you lied and killed and betrayed. Because you then kept telling yourself how it would keep your beloved farmers digging their fields in peace, I don’t suppose you have any trouble, now you’re back, in thinking yourself an honest man. I’m sure you still think yourself a better man than me.’

‘Fewer bodies,’ I answered, ‘even allowing for age. Less enjoyment, too, in producing them.’

He arched his eyebrows. ‘Dear me, Alaric – so little understanding of your truest friend!’ He stood up and, as if from habit, went over to put his ear close to the door. ‘Listen,’ he went on, ‘if I’ve usually killed
with
pleasure, I’d like you to tell me when I’ve ever been known to kill
from
pleasure.’ He stopped and sat down with a sudden loss of energy. ‘What I did outside Simonopolis got me black looks from all and sundry in the Imperial Council. But I lifted the siege with fifty dead on our own side. The Avar horde I sent streaming back towards the Danube left ten thousand of their own dead to be fought over by the crows. Compare that with the irreplaceable armies Nicetas is about to piss away in Syria.’ He poured himself more wine.

‘If you’re wondering what’s put me in the mood for moral philosophy, be aware that today is my sixty-eighth birthday. You may think this a very advanced age. I never believed I’d make it so far. But you’ll pardon me for wondering how I shall be seen a hundred years from now. That I ended up in this place will be less important to the historians than what else I did.’ He got up again and beat his chest. The response was a dry cough that terminated in itself. He laughed. ‘I also can’t help wondering if I haven’t been reserved for some final achievement.’

He laughed again. Visiting time would soon be over. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to get back before the guards I’d bribed at the Military Gate went off duty.

Chapter 22

It was Good Friday in 614. I’d spent all afternoon with Heraclius and everyone else of importance in the Great Church, listening to a mournful sermon from the Patriarch. The sufferings of Christ had been his overt subject. Every mind, though, had been on the news, drifting in with every post, of the catastrophic defeat Nicetas had managed for us in Syria. After that it had been a gambling party, where I’d stripped a couple of young heirs so naked their fathers would have to come begging my indulgence the next morning. Then it was home for a nightcap of triumphant sex with pretty young Eboric and his brother. All was as it should be when, at some time in the deepest part of the night, I was woken by a cold and bony hand clamped over my mouth.

‘Not sleeping with a knife under your pillow,’ Priscus wheezed. ‘is an affectation I beg you to reconsider.’ He took his hand away. I sat up and blinked in the light of the dimmed lamps. I looked about, trying to make sense of things. I was in my own bed. The boys must have gone back to the slave quarters.