The Curse of Babylon (60 page)

The rain had stopped. It was getting on for late afternoon but the sudden brightening of the sky put me in mind of morning. So too the sharpness of the chilly breeze. All about us, the interminable drumming of the rain was replaced by the gurgle of a thousand streams that would probably bring water gushing into the pass for days yet to come.

I stepped over the body of one of the gutted boys and stood at the edge of the tent’s raised wooden platform. I knew Chosroes was behind me. ‘Trying to count the uncountable?’ he asked slimily in Greek. ‘Or are we perhaps looking for an escape?’

I continued looking at the sodden crowd that stretched on and on, as far along the pass as I could see. Even without his coded squeals of hate, it was plain that Theodore must have been brought here by Priscus and had run away. For all I knew, Priscus might be lurking somewhere atop the bleak walls of the pass. He might be watching us. If so, I could be happy I wasn’t alone. For the time being, it was enough to know that whatever sense Theodore had made under torture hadn’t been enough to do for me. I was still in with a chance. I turned and smiled. ‘No to both,’ I said. ‘And if my simple word isn’t enough, why should I come here to spy when I no longer have a master?’

Chosroes stood beside me. We watched in silence as the base of his travelling night palace was unpacked and fitted together. The grovelling engineer had explained in Greek that ten-foot poles should keep it above the water – and should keep it safe from some other threat neither had thought to mention other than obliquely. The poles, I’d heard, shouldn’t give way, so long as the upper floor was omitted from this evening’s build. I’ve said the Persians weren’t that good at the technical aspects of life. Much as in the time of Xerxes, though, they had no shortage of Greek renegades to go some way to supplying their own defects. And the night palace was an impressive thing to watch taking shape. All wooden compartments and leather straps, it was already bearing its planned resemblance – if on a smaller scale – to the Summer Palace in Ctesiphon. Not for Chosroes to slum it in a tent like everyone else.

People were noticing that the Great King had chosen to show himself a second time in one day. Those closest by where we stood began pressing forward, raising their arms in prudent joy. He stretched out his arms in a pose that reminded me of nothing so much as a crucified Christ and held it for what seem a long time. ‘The duties of leadership,’ he sighed at last, dropping his arms. He kicked a piece of stray offal from the edge of the platform. It landed with a splash beside where another of the dead boys was lying face down. ‘Since we don’t have to keep up the pretences of your last stay at my court,’ he began, ‘I’ll ask if you adopted the same democratic manner with Heraclius.’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘Then again, an Emperor’s not usually surrounded by men who have to check after every audience that their heads are still attached. The main problem is sycophants.’ I smiled and looked him in the eye. ‘Would you like me to fall down and slobber kisses on your slippers? Would it make you less inclined to do away with me? I’ll be honest that I didn’t come here out of any positive desire to see you again.’

Chosroes looked back at me. ‘When the mad boy said you were sniffing about,’ he said slowly, ‘I did revive all the plans that went through my mind two years ago. That democratic manner, I can tell you, wouldn’t long have survived the first nibble of my flesh-eating bugs.’ He laughed. ‘However, I had already put those plans aside. I grant you the asylum you still haven’t begged in the manner prescribed by the eunuchs. You have certain verbal and literary skills that make it worth keeping you alive.’ He fell silent. I think he expected me to ask what he meant. Instead, I worked it out for myself and felt my nerves begin to settle – Shahin hadn’t lied: my next tour of Ctesiphon, if there had to be one, shouldn’t involve a visit to the Shaft of Oblivion. I watched the small army of men hard at work on the night palace. I didn’t like the look of those support poles. The palace, though, was turning out decidedly lavish.

Anyone else he’d have had sawn in half for this lack of attention. But Chosroes used the long silence for another go at his itching body. Reminding me of his own presence, my guard jabbed me softly in the back with the point of his sword. Once more, I ignored him.

‘Nearly eleven hundred years after his death,’ Chosroes opened anew, ‘and every educated Greek knows about Xerxes. So many ages later and everyone knows who he was, what he looked like, and what he did and said. For all the incidental lies and exaggerations, Herodotus made him immortal. Do you not think the Great King who finishes the work that Xerxes began deserves his own Herodotus?’

A deathless record of his greatness – in my experience, it crosses the mind of every ruler who’s been moderately successful. In the end, once others had seen to his victory, even Heraclius gave way and commissioned an epic from Leander. If I hadn’t known him, I’d never have believed it could be for this that Chosroes had been so eager to lay hands on me again. But I did know him and had no trouble believing it was for this that the bastard hadn’t got me screaming for death. I nodded wisely. ‘But I thought you were planning to abolish the Greek language,’ I reminded him.

‘Don’t test my patience, Alaric,’ he snarled. He turned away and kept his face out of view while he tried to bring it back to a semblance of the human form. ‘I got you translating Herodotus to see if your Persian was still as good as it always was.’ I nodded again. ‘The last native I commissioned to write up my conquest of Syria did a characteristically piss-poor job. It was all flowery descriptions and no structure. His nearest approach to directness of utterance came after I’d impaled him. I want someone who can write in Persian and think in Greek – someone who can trace the events of the present to causes in a remote past. I want another Herodotus, with a more than a dash of Polybius. If you don’t provoke me into finishing your life, I’m proposing to let you found a new school of Persian historiography.’

Urvaksha looked up from his interminable sorting of knotted strings. ‘You speak the soft and fluting language of the enemy too well,’ he whined. ‘Your mother did you ill to teach it.’

Chosroes pulled hard on the golden chain. ‘If you don’t keep your fucking mouth shut,’ he hissed in Persian, ‘I’ll have you flogged.’ He glanced at me, then back at his cowering general adviser. ‘You go too far in your boldness,’ he said emphatically.

I sniffed at the implied warning. ‘Your Majesty assumes, of course, that his own invasion will be more successful than that of Xerxes,’ I said with a bow that hovered between the perfunctory and the insulting. I turned and looked at the rain-sodden multitudes – most of them up to their knees in water. ‘I’m surprised this army’s got as far as it has into Imperial territory.’

Chosroes lifted his head so that his beard jutted forward. ‘With Shahrbaraz leading, we’ll get to Constantinople in time for the August heat,’ he growled.

I allowed myself a quiet laugh. ‘You might get to Chalcedon,’ I said. ‘You then have six hundred yards of water to cross to the European shore – six hundred yards that Timothy or even Nicetas – will absolutely control. Then there’s the city walls. Also, I don’t think your extermination plan is likely to win hearts and minds inside the walls.’

From far along the pass, a low cheer rolled towards us. There was a patch of blue in the sky and a shaft of sunlight followed the cheering. Before it could reach us, the shaft was cut off. There was a long and universal groan. ‘I’ll confess, I’m not a military man,’ I added. ‘But you’re leading what’s already a dispirited rabble before it’s met a stroke of opposition.’

Chosroes slitted his eyes and looked at me out of their corners. ‘I do have a weapon of great power,’ he suggested. He twisted round and looked fully at me. ‘And, since I can see the thought in your mind, I’ll tell you now I’m not talking about the Horn of Babylon. That might or might not get me inside the walls of the City. But, Alaric, I have something else with me that is the stuff of dreams to all true devotees of the Christian Faith. That will certainly cause the gates to be opened.’

He stopped and tapped his forehead knowingly. The tiny gap in the cloud had closed over. It was turning colder and I felt another spot of rain on my face. Tugging Urvaksha as if he’d been a drunken dog, he led me back inside the tent. The eunuchs and remaining serving boys had done a fast job. The place no longer stank of blood and ruptured entrails. There was a wine jug in a bowl filled with crushed ice. A couple of pale boys stood ready with bags of rose petals to shower on the Great King. He waved them out of sight, and sat on his ivory chair.

I sat beside him and filled the wine cups. I ignored the guard who took his place behind me. Chosroes stood up and pointed. ‘You, boy,’ he called imperiously. ‘Come out of hiding. I need you here to taste my wine. Taste the Lord Alaric’s as well. If it makes you sick, you won’t die soon enough to avoid the Great King’s wrath.’ He looked at the boy’s pale, tear-stained face. He looked briefly at the parts of Babar arranged on the silver dish. It was too much for him. He sat back and roared with happy laughter.

I took up the third sheet of papyrus I’d now covered in my attempt at the Persian script:

Now, the deposition and blinding of his own father had caused great outrage among the Persians. At first, this was suppressed by a general and unrestrained terror, a secondary effect of which was the removal, by death or mutilation, of all who had served his father in senior positions.

In the second year of his reign, however, Chosroes found himself no longer able to keep the opposition from uniting. The first among many failures of the harvests in the southern and most fertile regions of his empire, combined with what appears to be the inevitable return of pestilence, diminished his support among the people. His refusal to command a war against the nomadic Saracens of the desert, who had raided almost to the walls of Seleucia, alienated the loyalty of the army.

On the very day when the price of food is said to have reached its highest level in Ctesiphon, a mob, directed by General Bahram, burst into the summer palace. As was his custom, the young King had given himself up to wine and every manner of debauchery. Even so, he escaped the massacre of his entire household by dressing in the rags of a common leper and making his way towards the Euphrates, where he claimed the protection of the Greek Emperor, Maurice . . .

I looked up from my text. Chosroes was still nodding and smiling. ‘Is this what you
really
want?’ I asked dubiously.

‘Oh yes,’ came the immediate answer. ‘I want a philosophical history. That means telling the truth so far as it can be ascertained. And, since I’m well on the way to conquering the entire known world, I like what will be your dramatic contrast between the early and the mature years of my reign.’ He took the sheet from which I’d been reading and squinted at the smudged mess I’d made of having to compose in a script that ran from right to left. ‘I do particularly like the connection you make between food prices and Bahram’s
coup
. Without spelling it out, you suggest a certain opportunism in his behaviour. Once we move beyond these sample chapters, I’ll explain to you how, after the Greeks put me back on the throne, I had him locked away with his children until he ate them.’

He pushed the sheet back across the writing table at me, and arranged all seven into a neat pile. ‘I’m so glad, Alaric, I haven’t had you killed. You’re the only man alive who can write history this objectively, and in Persian. Please keep it that way. I believe Shahin will be here within the next few days. If he doesn’t corroborate your story at least in its essentials, I won’t kill you – but I will make you watch the death of that Syrian boy you appear to have adopted.’

I pursed my lips and looked thoughtful. I could probably get over the loss of Theodore. But Shahin’s arrival would bring Antonia into the Royal Clutches. The thought of that was enough to set my insides moving in odd rhythms. ‘I wish you hadn’t tortured him,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure his wits will ever entirely come back.’

Chosroes laughed. ‘He had fuck all of those when he was brought in,’ he said. ‘He was talking to himself in a language no one could understand. He only spoke back in Syriac when one of his testicles was almost crushed – and that was to thank his jailor and ask to be roasted over a slow fire. You surround yourself with some very odd people.’

So Theodore hadn’t talked yet. I could be glad of that much. I smiled weakly and reached for a clean sheet of papyrus. ‘I believe you spent eighteen months in Constantinople,’ I said. ‘I’ll need your help to compose the speech you made to the Emperor. There is a couplet by one of your old poets whose name I currently forget. But do you really plan to take the place apart?'

Chosroes looked round and dropped his voice. ‘Of course, I don’t,’ he said in Greek. ‘I said what I did to jolly the army along. You don’t willingly destroy a city of such marvels. Its current population will be gradually eased out. But their lives will be spared. It’s only the farmers I really want to kill – destroying the Greeks at the root, you see; no chance of olive shoots, and so on. For the rest, you will surely agree that the ruler of the world deserves to occupy no less than the capital of the world.’