The Curse of Babylon (35 page)

I heard another noise – this time a soft padding of feet coming towards the far side of the monument. I jumped noiselessly up the steps to the base of the inscribed column. Eight feet above ground, and sheltered between statues of Romulus and Augustus, I unsheathed my sword.

The padding of feet stopped. ‘Where have you gone, Alaric?’ Antonia quavered. ‘I did see you, didn’t I?’ She hadn’t lowered her voice. A few yards away, a scared night creature shuffled deeper into one of the flowerbeds.

I jumped down beside her. ‘Run away from home again?’ I jeered in Latin. ‘If I didn’t know him well enough already, I’d have to think ill of your father’s control over his women.’

‘Oh, Daddy’s
easy
to avoid,’ she laughed, going herself into perfectly fluent Latin. ‘He said he’d beat me half to death, once he was done with Akimba. Silly idea! We used to be lovers, and she kept Daddy busy till I’d crept out of the room.’

Looking at her girly face under a hat that, in itself, might have screamed ‘Rape me!’ I wanted to hit her. Instead, I stamped my foot and put a scowl into my voice. ‘You’re mad if you think these streets are safe,’ I said. What point, though, in nagging? From what Leander had told me, she must have known these streets by night as well as I did. The flash of anger gave way to tiredness. ‘Where do you suppose you’re going?’ I asked.

‘Home with you – where else?’ she said.

I climbed the base of the Milestone again and sat on the uppermost step. I waited for her to join me. ‘Listen, Antonia,’ I said, ‘you’re a renegade nun and you may be the daughter of a traitor. There are limits to the sanctuary my house can give you. Other than that, you’re a niece of the reigning Emperor. You may have noticed that, for all my fancy titles, I’m a barbarian immigrant. How long do you think it would take your uncle to remind us both of that?’

‘But I love you, Alaric,’ she said simply. ‘I will never be parted from you.’ She waited a moment. ‘It’s your turn now,’ she prompted.

I sighed and looked at the moon. ‘I knew it when I found you in the poor district,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I knew it, but didn’t notice the fact for a while. It came on slowly and imperceptibly, like the passing of spring into summer. I was fully aware of it before we had sex. I wanted to tell you afterwards but didn’t know how.’ Since I’d already made a total fool of myself, I could see no benefit in holding back. But there was nothing left to hold back. I’d said it all, and with fewer words than I might scribble in the margin of a report. If I added that I loved her more than life itself, I’d only be inviting her to a suicide pact. I put my arm about her. It was a nice feeling.

‘Alaric,’ she said, now urgent, ‘I said I came to see you yesterday on a whim. That’s true but it was also because, after I’d untied myself the night before, I overheard Daddy saying what he planned to do to you when he became Emperor. I thought if he hated you so much, you must be worth seeing. So I cut my hair off when I was with someone who gave me shelter and got ready to bluff my way past your eunuchs. That was the whim.’ She pressed herself close against me. ‘Alaric, do you believe in fate?’

I didn’t. But I was interested to hear more about her father’s confession of treason. I said nothing. ‘After the audience,’ she took up again, ‘I was getting ready to go away when I heard those men from Pontus complaining about Eunapius. They must have been twenty feet away in a dispersing crowd. But I heard them as clearly as you can hear me. Before I could realise what I was doing, I’d pushed my way through to them and taken their case. I didn’t know what to do next. It was Simon who came up behind me and said which way you’d be going. I was sure he didn’t recognise me. Everything after that you know. It was fate that brought us together. No one can ever tell me otherwise.’

I sat awhile in silence. I thought hard. ‘Did your father really say he’d be Emperor?’ I asked. I was probably clutching at air. But, if I could never marry an Emperor’s niece, I might be able to beg for the daughter of a fallen traitor. In part, this would depend on whether her loathing of Nicetas was a settled or a brief embitterment.

‘I told you he’s a traitor,’ she said. ‘And I know exactly what I’m saying. I stood outside a door left ajar and heard Eunapius assure him it was all in the bag and he didn’t need to lift a finger. That was the same Eunapius I met tonight.’ I leaned forward into the moonlight. She caught the look on my face. ‘The reason I told you yesterday I’d go with you to see Heraclius was so I could tell him the truth about Daddy. You don’t know what he did to Mummy,’ she ended.

I thought again. With anyone else but Nicetas, the facts she claimed would have jarred so much with what I’d seen for myself that I’d have to reject her claim. But it was easy to believe that Nicetas was half inclined to go along with a plot someone had brought him, and also willing to fit himself round the established order. One moment he’d be fantasising about tying me to the rack, another begging favours off me for his poet.

‘Didn’t you notice that Theodore is sweet on you?’ I asked, changing the subject. I’d have to think this through. Nicetas wouldn’t think to come knocking on my door for ages, if at all. In the meantime, Samo could outdo himself with keeping
Antony
as my guest.

She ignored the question. ‘That wasn’t a woman who interrupted things, was it?’ she asked.

I stared ahead at the moonlit view I had of lower Constantinople. ‘Does cross-dressing offend you?’ I asked with a smile.

Antonia fell silent. ‘Will you stop being angry with me if I tell you that I saw Simon again this evening?’ she asked. ‘I can prove everything I’ve told you.’

I took my arm away and looked at her. ‘If you’ve wasted any more time than it’s taken to tell me this,’ I said sharply, ‘I shall be very angry indeed. Will you share the details with me?’

She did share them and did it rather better than she had the previous day. Once into the courtyard of her father’s palace, she’d heard men talking and taken shelter behind some roses. She’d heard Eunapius let out a cry of alarm and had looked out to see him with Simon. She’d been too wrapped up in keeping her scared breathing under control to overhear all that was said. But she had heard Simon announce a meeting for the eighth hour of this night.

I stared up at the moon. It was about an hour after midnight. Assuming Antonia had heard right about the eighth hour we had another hour to go – bearing in mind we were now a month beyond the spring equinox, it wouldn’t be a very long hour.

‘Any chance they discussed
where
this meeting was to be?’ I asked.

She smiled uncertainly. ‘They might have,’ she said.

‘Either they did or they didn’t,’ I said evenly. ‘If not, we might as well go home and wait on events.’

She reached out and took my hand. ‘If I tell you where the meeting will be,’ she asked, ‘will you promise to take me there?’

I got up and stepped down to the street. ‘No,’ I said with a firmness I should have used earlier in the day. This was why she’d waited so long before ‘catching up’ with me. I was in the shadow of the Milestone, so put the scowl into my voice. ‘You will tell me what you know. I will then take you home before coming out again with Samo. You should know that this matter isn’t a game. I suggest you should stop treating it as one.’

‘If I tell you, you’ll have to take me with you,’ she said defiantly.

‘I’ll take you home!’ I said. I had an hour at most to get wherever the meeting was to be. She knew Constantinople. Had she already made it impossible to get her to safety and get to the meeting? ‘Look, Antonia, it’s dangerous,’ I said, now trying for a reasonable tone. ‘If you insist on coming with me, you’ll put me in danger as well as yourself. If there’s fighting to be done, or running away, I need to move quickly. Did you learn nothing yesterday?’

She said nothing. Her face was in shadow. I could almost hear the time gurgling away through one of my expensive water clocks. I sighed. Boys want money, or freedom. Quite often, if you have looks or charm, girls want nothing at all. Women
always
make you choose. The choice Antonia was putting to me was outrageous. For all I knew, Eunapius and Simon would soon be making everything as plain as day and within a few hundred paces of where I now stood. All else aside, she might be throwing away her only chance of never setting foot again in that Trebizond nunnery.

I reached out with my right hand. ‘We’ll go home,’ I said calmly. ‘My Jews will be with me late tomorrow morning. They will tell me all I need to know.’

She took my hand and jumped down. She put her arms about me and kissed my cheek. I put my own arms about her and felt suddenly clumsy. ‘Alaric,’ she whispered, ‘Simon said the meeting would be in one of the lecture halls in the Baths of Anthemius. I know a secret way in that the poor use now you’ve put all the prices up.’

Chapter 36

Built in more prosperous and leisured days, the Baths of Anthemius still counted as a world in itself. Except I’d recently ordered it to be closed between sunset and dawn, you could spend your whole time in that vast complex and never see need to go outside. It had shops, restaurants, and a church, and a library and brothels. Once you’d paid your entrance money, there were free lectures on mathematics and history, and poetry recitals and performances of comic plays, and readings of such news as the government thought fit for public consumption. There was also the biggest heated pool in the known world and a gymnasium that, fitted out with the best nude statues taken from Olympia before the earthquake, doubled as an art gallery. Just providing marble for the vast central hall had left every former temple in Ephesus a shell of exposed and crumbling brick.

Now I’d taken the Empire’s finances properly in hand though, the Baths were locked up and in darkness. Before noon the next day, the disused drainage tunnel Antonia had shown me would be bricked off and rendered at both ends. If they wanted a bath, the poor could stick to the cold pool outside. No wonder raising the entry charges hadn’t so far reduced the number of times we had to change the hot water.

As we stepped into the central hall, I put a hand over Antonia’s mouth. ‘If you must speak, do it softly and into your clothing.’ I said, covering my own mouth to avoid an echo. The tunnel had been completely dark and I’d had to trust her assurances that it was safe to pass along. Here, the windows in the dome far above let in enough light from the moon and stars to give bearings. There were four arched doorways, three of them leading to different areas of the sprawling complex. I looked hard at the bronze group of Hercules and Antaeus. If she’d heard right, the exit we needed was the one to which Antaeus was pointing with his right leg. ‘Either lift your feet properly, or take your shoes off,’ I breathed. I took Antonia by the hand and led her away from the worn limestone paths along which visitors were made to keep by day. Within our dark outer clothes, we’d show in this light as black on black against the porphyry cladding of the lower walls. We made our way towards the memorial Heraclius had set up to the unfortunate Emperor Maurice and his five murdered sons.

‘Where are you going?’ she whispered. She slowed and tried to pull me back. ‘I said we had to go this way.’

I put a hand over her mouth again. ‘So you think the plan is for us to go down that corridor,’ I whispered as softly as I could, ‘and knock on every door until Simon or Eunapius calls us in for light refreshments?’ I stepped forward again, quickly passing across the entrance to the corridor. ‘I don’t want to hear from you again until I tell you it’s safe to speak.’ Of course, I’d been stupid to give in to the girl. I should have taken her home and waited for Baruch to report back in the morning. Even if not at first hand, he’d surely have found everything worth knowing. If there was something to be learned here, it couldn’t be worth the risk.

But there was now the faintest sound of voices, and of a big door quietly opened and closed. And there was a flicker of light in the corridor leading in from the main entrance. My heart skipped a beat and everything in the surrounding gloom seemed to become sharper. No longer angry, nor scared, nor beset by guilt for letting her tag along – no longer even dog tired and longing for my bed – I pulled Antonia closer against the wall. ‘Keep still,’ I said, ‘and try not to make any sound at all.’

Approaching along the wide access corridor, the voice of Shahin was unmistakable. ‘Oh, but what splendid buildings you have in this great city of Constantinople,’ he called out in Greek. ‘I had quite forgotten how little we have in Ctesiphon to compare with these glories.’ I pulled the hood closer over my face and looked across the two hundred yards that separated us. Two lamp-bearers were first into the hall. They separated and stood each side of the doorway, bowing as Shahin strode confidently past them. Perhaps half a dozen men filed in behind him – hard to tell exactly how many, given the light available, or the distance. Once inside the ring of columns that supported the arches that held the dome, he stopped and clapped his hands. He listened to the echo and clapped again. He moved towards the central statuary. He put his hand on one of the buttocks and, looking upward, recited: