The Curse of Babylon (61 page)

‘It makes sense,’ I agreed.

He stood up and stretched. I’d been scribbling away for him for the remainder of the afternoon and the sky was turning dark outside. ‘I don’t like to be away from my palace at night,’ he muttered. He snapped his fingers at the two guards who’d stood behind me all the time I was writing. ‘Bring the Lord Alaric along. Don’t lose him in the dark.’

Chapter 60

If I hadn’t known better, I’d have had to open my eyes wider in the gloom to check if they weren’t being deceived. In the light of two double lamps, you might easily have thought you weren’t looking at paintings on silk, and that a windowless room twelve foot by eight at best was in fact the vast hall of ceremonies of the summer palace in Ctesiphon.

But I did know better. I was standing in one among several wooden boxes heaped on a large wooden platform that was itself resting on about a hundred support poles. Third behind Chosroes and Urvaksha – and never allowed to forget the smirking armed creature close behind me – I’d crossed, on a causeway above the slowly ebbing waters from the storm, from the big tent to the base of the night palace.

Chosroes patted me on the back. ‘Time, Alaric, to forget the cares of the day,’ he said with slimy cheer. ‘I always
so
enjoyed our little dinners in Ctesiphon.’ Not answering, I went with him to the entrance and watched as the few serving men our weight limits had allowed pulled up the ladder. Below us, the whole immensity of the night palace was surrounded by a double circle of armed guards. Behind every fifth man in the innermost circle stood a slave with a flaring torch. The whole arrangement struck me as a fire hazard in itself. Otherwise, the palace must have been an obvious target for anyone above the pass able to shoot fire arrows. Any artillery would have knocked it to pieces before the ladder could be let down again.

A more pressing concern, though, was its general stability. Even in the gentle wind that moaned along the pass, the little silver bells above us were tinkling as if an irate master somewhere was calling for his slaves. One look at Shahrbaraz, and I could see that I wasn’t alone in wondering if those ten-foot support poles had been such a good idea.

Either Chosroes didn’t agree or he didn’t care. With his own hands, he pulled the main door shut and drew its bolts. ‘My chief general, of course,’ he tittered, ‘will go back to his military tent after dinner. But you, my dearest Alaric, will be locked into your own room, to sleep on your own silken mattresses. I would have given you a room in the tower – only the engineers became proper wet blankets towards the end of the day. Excepting my own, all the bedrooms are in a small block beyond the dining room.’

He waited for one of his serving boys to open the door to the dining room. Though not approaching his usual accommodation, this was respectably large. Indeed, at about a hundred feet by fifty, I think it amounted to most of the palace. It had no windows, but enough air came in through the gently grinding segments of the structure to keep the lamps flickering and us from choking to death in the smoke from the incense burners.

Chosroes walked briskly into the room. He stopped in the middle and turned round and round on the silk rugs that covered its wooden floor. ‘Behold, Alaric, how civilisation is carried into the furthest wilderness,’ he cried. He sat down on one of the nicer rugs and rocked happily back and forward. ‘I’ll let you watch the engineers dismantle this place in the morning. You can work a full description into your narrative of the invasion. The wall hangings, I must observe, are all cloth of gold.’

‘He’s a spy for Caesar!’ Urvaksha spat. ‘Everything you tell him will go straight to Constantinople. You’re a fool to keep him alive.’

‘If I might suggest, Your Majesty,’ Shahrbaraz took up in his deep voice, ‘the blond Westerner has betrayed you once already. Should you be so willing to trust him again? And so soon?’

Chosroes got up and watched the food tasters at work. ‘You can hold your tongues, the pair of you,’ he said in his silky, menacing voice. ‘Each one of you is useful to me in his own way. That’s all you need to consider.’ He pointed one of the tasters at a lead pot of something that still bubbled over an oil burner. ‘Once Shahin’s confirmed his story, I’ll ease his terms of confinement. Until then, he stays beside me and takes notes of all I say and order.’

Shahrbaraz bowed. ‘It is as you command, O Great King,’ he said with a nasty look in my direction. ‘Shahin is, however, very late. None of the scouting parties we’ve sent ahead has seen him or his people. Until then, our only assurance that Heraclius has fallen is Alaric – a man whose lies delayed our conquest of Syria by a year. It is my duty to ask how we can know that he isn’t here to encourage us into a trap?’

Chosroes pursed his lips, reminding me of a scorpion that can’t decide whether or not to sting the frog that’s carrying him across a pond. He smiled and turned his attention back to watching a man pat silently through the cushions on which we were to sit for dinner. He looked up suddenly at a slobbering sound in the corner. I followed his look. Hands tied behind him, Theodore was drifting out of the drugged sleep I’d procured for him, and trying to sit up. So far away, and in poor light, he gave an impression of recovering sanity. I willed him still to be off his head. I couldn’t afford him to be worth torturing into any version of the truth.

‘I know your secret, Alaric the Damned!’ he called out in Syriac – a language neither of the Persians showed any sign of understanding. ‘You have corrupted everything pure in the service of your Dark Lord. I renounce all bonds with you.’ He trailed off into more of the nonsense language he’d spoken for most of his time in captivity. I managed a nervous smile in his direction. It couldn’t be long before the Great King noticed the lack of affection in our relationship. It would have been for the best not to have him around – as ever, bloody Priscus had a lot to answer for: and what was
he
up to, I might ask? But it wasn’t time for that question. I could sweat over it in bed. For the moment, I’d keep up the effort of concern for the idiotic boy’s welfare.

‘I’m not sure my son is hungry,’ I said. ‘But I do suggest another dose of opium to ease the pain. The last time I looked, his ballbag was swollen like a pomegranate. Yes – perhaps a few grains of opium, and on a heated spoon to quicken its effect.’

Chosroes flopped on to a mound of cushions and waved his vague assent. One of the eunuchs went over to a box and began fiddling with bottles. Chosroes reached out for a piece of unleavened bread. ‘Come and join me, dear friends,’ he commanded in a tone that indicated anything but generosity of heart. He watched Shahrbaraz stuff a piece of honeyed mutton into his mouth. He smiled. ‘Tell me, General,’ he asked, ‘when can the army resume its march along the pass?’

Shahrbaraz swallowed too quickly and went into a coughing fit. ‘Not for days!’ he eventually managed to splutter. He drank from his water cup. ‘Everything is soaked. Everyone is out of sorts. Getting the march under way again before we’ve got over the storm may bring on a mutiny – especially since we still haven’t paid the bounties promised when we set out. I won’t mention the state of the food supplies.’ He stopped and narrowed his eyes. He turned a very grim stare on me. ‘If that beast you haven’t yet crucified is up to his usual tricks, I swear we’re marching right into a trap. One sight of a Greek army with the state we’re in, and my advice for the next five days at least will be immediate withdrawal along the pass. Reject that advice and you might as well keep a couple of good horses ready for a dash back to Ctesiphon.’

‘Oh, Shahrbaraz, Shahrbaraz,’ Chosroes laughed, ‘are you really about to break all security in front of Alaric?’ He turned to me. ‘The good General here wants us to invade Egypt. Because we have Syria, it’s easy for us to attack, and hard for the Greeks to defend. It’s also rich enough to let us pay a few bills.’ He turned back to Shahrbaraz. ‘Well, unless you can show me your Greek army of resistance, we march for Constantinople.’ He took a long drink and stared happily at the glittering cloth that hung down from the ceiling.

Shahrbaraz had already gone into another coughing fit. This time, I thought he’d burst a blood vessel on his forehead. I wondered if he was about to speak – as said, he was one of those people even Chosroes didn’t dare murder. But a gust of wind now hit the palace at the wrong angle. With a long and alarming groan, it tilted enough to knock over a pot of earthworms in fish sauce. In silence, we watched it tip over on one of the rugs, and continue an irregular progress towards one of the cloth of gold hangings. Chosroes giggled and lolled back on his cushions. Shahrbaraz said nothing but attacked a dish of something that looked as if it had been squeezed from both ends of an overfed cat. I stuck a piece of bread into a dish of ground chickpeas and olive oil. Chosroes had never complained in the past about my disinclination to share his vile tastes in food. Anything richer than this at the moment and I’d only puke it up again.

In the extended silence of the dinner, I gave way and thought about Priscus. I could take it as read that Theodore wasn’t up to finding his way outside the walls of the City by himself. He’d been brought along as general skivvy for Priscus. Even so, the two of them must have grown wings to get here so quickly. There was no chance Priscus could have known about the invasion. That meant he’d broken all his normal rules of life and come out to make sure I didn’t mess things up. I should have been a little more open with him in Constantinople. Too late for regrets now – that was for sure. I thought of the best Persian for ‘When error is irreparable, repentance is useless.’ If all else failed, I could impress Chosroes with it – I could put it into his father’s mouth when the executioners took out their bowstrings. Or perhaps not – it had too much smell in that context of a rhetorical excess. The Great King could be a harsh critic where historical writing was concerned. I repeated the sentence to myself in Latin and then in English and in every other language in which I was proficient. It kept me from reflecting too obviously on the square painted in red about the Royal eating place. So far as it could be, this room was an imitation of the summer palace.

Before I could figure out the best translation into English, Chosroes got up and clapped his hands. ‘I’ve had enough to eat,’ he announced. ‘The dinner is over. I want everyone out of here except Alaric and one guard.’ I couldn’t say Shahrbaraz had even tried for jollity through the meal. I’d not miss his glowering presence.

You can be sure that, when he’d said alone with me, Chosroes hadn’t meant that Urvaksha could unhook his collar and shimmy down the ladder with Shahrbaraz and the eunuchs and other flunkies – or that Theodore could be carried out like a sack of mildewed grain. It certainly didn’t mean that my guard could go off duty for the night. With those exceptions, though, we were alone. The wind was rising, and the swaying and groaning of several tons of woodwork on its inadequate support was joined by the harsh beating of more rain against the walls.

Chosroes wheeled about again on his favourite rug. ‘Alaric,’ he whispered, ‘I will grant you the boon of letting you ask me any question you please.’ He tripped daintily across the floor and stood over me. I could go through the motions of getting my writing materials ready but I’d already seen that the eunuchs had left me with a heap of waxed tablets. Since I still wasn’t to be trusted with anything that had a point on it, I might as well leave that part of the game aside.

‘Ask, and you shall know,’ he repeated. I got up and went for a chair for him to sit on. Staggering slightly as if from too much wine, I put it down so one of the faint red lines on the floor passed directly beneath it. The guard was watching me with eyes that didn’t seem to blink. Though sitting down, his unsheathed sword rested on his knees. There was one cushion beside the general mass that hadn’t been moved all evening. I could suppose the shock I had in mind would keep the guard in his place long enough for me to go for one of the curtains. Even with a sword, he’d not stand much of a chance against me.

I waited for Chosroes to sit down and made him a reasonably solemn bow. ‘You spoke earlier, Great King,’ I began, ‘of something that is the stuff of dreams to all Christians, and that this would cause the gates of Constantinople to swing open for you. I take it, from the inflexions of your voice, that you were talking about the True Cross. Any chance of letting me see it in the morning?’

He looked back at me. Had I gone too far? No – he put a hand up to his mouth and giggled softly. ‘You don’t miss anything, do you, Alaric?’ he said. ‘I probably should have you crucified as a spy. I might still do that, if Shahin confirms what everyone else believes – that you’re a barefaced liar and are only here to divert me from the approach of a Greek army.’ He looked about for his cup. I got up and carried it to him. I filled it from a jug and sat down close to the unmoved cushion. I had the guard behind me and could hear him settling back after my sudden movement.

Chosroes drank deeply. ‘Getting into Jerusalem last year was hard enough,’ he said. ‘Getting into the Holy Sepulchre Church took three days of fighting. The oldest monks – even the bishops – took up swords and fought like the Spartans at Thermopylae. But Shahrbaraz got there in the end. With his own hands, he ripped the curtain aside and exposed what turned out to be a thirty-pound piece of shrivelled wood – thirty pounds of wood encased in two hundred pounds of gold studded with jewels of inestimable value. I’m glad he didn’t burn it along with the church. My own Christian minority loved me beyond describing when I had it carried through the streets of Ctesiphon. I won’t bore you with the accounts of the miracles worked by it as I rode before it. I don’t imagine you believe it ever formed part of the cross of which the Jewish Carpenter was put to death.’