The Curse of Babylon (8 page)

Truth was, the Empire was on its uppers. The Persian War I’ve already mentioned had been going on for a decade. With Nicetas now in charge of the defence, we’d just lost Syria. Egypt would surely be next. The magnificence on view was all about the past – sometimes the distant past.

Grim thoughts to keep me company! Still, they kept me from visible impatience. The sun was about to turn beastly overhead and we were in the last rush before siesta time. There was no chance yet of a decent speed. Come the siesta, I’d be able to get a move on. The Triumphal Way would take me past Imperial Square and into Middle Street. From there, it would be another reasonably straight two miles to the Golden Gate, and another two after that to where Lucas would be waiting like a cat that’s caught a bird for its mistress. Until then, it was a matter of threading my way through crowds that seemed to have all the time in the world, and avoiding the carrying chairs that crept or hurtled along in both directions.

I looked into the colonnade on my left. That was packed – you might have thought the shouting, jostling mass there was gathered to pass the time of day, not to get from one point to another without stepping into the sun. I reached up to check if my hat was still in place and stepped round a heap of replacement paving stones that would be set in place once the crowds had melted away. I thought again of Nicetas. It’s only reasonable that an emperor should hand all the really plum jobs about his own family. But why make
Nicetas
Commander of the East – that is, put him in charge of the Persian War? Why then bring him back to Constantinople, while Heraclius was away, and make him Regent as well? The man wasn’t fit for changing the straw in a public toilet. Any one of the statues I was passing would have made a more active Regent. In Syria, he’d run away from the Persians so fast, he hadn’t even stopped by Jerusalem to snatch the True Cross to safety. The Empire was on its uppers, and there was a good case for blaming it on Nicetas.

Far ahead of me, there was a sudden disturbance. It looked like another carrying chair race. I didn’t want to get in the way of that. I gave an involuntary look at the sky and moved towards the right-hand side of the road. I found myself looking at a big statue of Cicero. I could have looked at many other things. If I turned, I’d see the vast mass of the Great Church looming above all else in the City. Though not visible from here, the immensity of the Circus was a half mile beyond. I’d got chariot racing cancelled until further notice, but might be able to hear the faint cheering as one of the cheaper entertainments came to its end. But Cicero suited me better. I looked into the troubled, bronze face. What would
he
have thought of all this?

To be fair, his opinion might not have been the one I currently wanted. However useless Nicetas was, there was a limit to how much blame you could load on one man’s shoulders. It wasn’t just the Persians. Every other frontier was soft or collapsing. We were losing Greece to the Slavs and Avars. We’d mostly lost Italy to the Lombards. Our foothold in Spain was going to the Visigoths. Our control of Africa stopped barely twenty miles inland. You couldn’t blame Nicetas for that. As for the Persians, with one partial exception, we’d found no one else able to stand up to them. If Nicetas was useless, he wasn’t alone in his uselessness.

Thoughts of the ‘partial exception’ brought on a faint stirring of unease. This wouldn’t ripen into another panic attack. But thoughts of that in itself deepened the unease. The two were obviously connected. If the one wasn’t continually simmering away, the other wouldn’t keep boiling over. I’d have to do something about the causes of the unease. But this was easier said than done. I turned my thoughts back to the safer matter of Nicetas and his nearly certain attempt at a joke. Should I take it as a good-humoured joke? Probably not. There was little humour of any kind about the Emperor’s cousin. None of it was good.

The chairs had now hurried past and I set off again at a quickish stride. I passed the square in front of the law courts. The morning crowd of lawyers and their clients was fast dwindling away. The Monday property auction in the square was nearly ended. I counted five men – probably Jews or Armenians – putting up with the sun for a closing bargain. There was a general smell in the air of charcoal and of roasting meat. Unless you fancied a week of the shits, eating from the public stalls was off limits. But it was a fine smell and it reminded me I’d had nothing since breakfast, and little then.

My quick stride didn’t last beyond the Belisarius Memorial, which blocks the whole centre of the road. Unless there’s a procession or the chariots are racing, you don’t normally see paupers in the better parts of Constantinople. The police have orders to keep out all but a few licensed and almost sanitised beggars. By day, the poor cluster in the dumpier parts of the City. By night, they sleep or swarm in vast and stinking slums even the authorities barely know. You don’t welcome these creatures into your own world. They’re ugly. They’re light-fingered or plain violent. They smell. They carry the seeds of contagion about their unwashed clothes and bodies. Once past the massive statue of Belisarius, though, I found the way was blocked by a loose crowd of the unwashed that must have been a hundred strong.

‘God bless the Lord Nicetas!’ someone shrilled at me. The call was taken up in a ragged chant. ‘My God preserve the Lord Nicetas,’ he called again, ‘who feeds the posterity of Romulus and the heroes of old.’ I stepped out of his way and was almost knocked sideways by a wagon piled high with food. Drawn by white oxen, this had lurched, without warning, from one of the smaller side streets. There were four others behind it.

‘Blessings on the Caesar Nicetas and his bread!’ someone cackled on my left. I glanced round. A woman had left the throng and come over as if to intimidate me into agreement. I looked at her and tried not to shrink back in horror. You couldn’t possibly have said how old she was. Mouth open in a dark and toothless hole, her face said extreme old age. Her uncovered breasts hung down in the most disgusting manner, and one had been honeycombed from within by a cancer. But her matted, lice-ridden hair was still black. She opened her mouth wider for a howl of triumphant laughter. ‘
Emperor
Nicetas won’t let us starve!’ she screeched. I almost believed she would step closer and try to touch me. I stared at the black and red mottling that ran upward from her wrists and shuddered. Woman or not, I would have gone for my sword. But a man with one eye and weeping sores on the visible part of his chest now appeared beside her and led her back into an army of living refuse that was growing from one moment to the next.

No wonder those chairs had been racing each other away from this lot. The smell and general danger aside, you don’t hang about when a mob starts talking treason.

Chapter 8

However, the poor hadn’t been assembled here to talk treason. I’d no sooner gone round the food wagons when I nearly crashed into the seditionary theatre that was the gathering’s real purpose. Two men in reasonably clean robes had taken their places on very high chairs placed about five yards apart. They were trying to look grand. In the eyes of their audience, they probably succeeded. I think I’d caught them close to the beginning of their act.

‘So good, don’t you think, Alexius,’ the elder of them struck up in an affected voice, ‘that My Lord Nicetas understands the duties of his class?’

‘I couldn’t agree more, my dearest Constans,’ came the reply in a louder and still more affected voice. ‘It’s all so very unlike
another person
I could mention.’ One look at these two troublemakers and I’d guessed what they were about. I gritted my teeth and waited for the inevitable.

It came from a scabby dwarf who’d been darting in and out of the crowd. ‘So unlike that piece of barbarian shite the Emperor’s allowed to steal our bread,’ he gasped. There was a ragged cheer from everyone who’d heard this, and a louder cheer as the words were carried back and repeated for those who hadn’t heard them.

Yes, I’d caught this at the beginning. Even as I tried to back away and continue about my business, the crowd shrank to a dense mass about the seditionaries. This left plenty of room for me to continue on my way. But Nicetas – more diligent, I might say, than in any of his official duties – was having me slandered to the mob. I’d be silly not to stay awhile and find out his line of attack. Cautiously, I pushed up the brim of my hat and looked over the heads of the stunted, bandy-legged poor to where the seditionaries were settling into their act.

‘It may have been wrong of him to stop the people’s bread,’ Alexius announced in a tone you might almost have taken as a defence of the Lord Senator Alaric. He paused and cleared his throat. ‘But it was surely unpardonable to say there were too many of us in the City, and that not even a hundred of us were the equal of one dirty peasant digging in the fields.’ This got a loud groan, followed by general denunciations of Alaric the Barbarian who’d halved the free distributions of food to the City poor, and who plainly wanted to end them altogether. You can be sure no one bothered complaining about the new entrance fee I’d ordered for the public baths. If one of these animals had so much as washed his face since Easter, I’d have been surprised.

Constans took a sip of wine and looked in my direction. I wasn’t the only person of quality lurking beyond the crowd. But it wouldn’t do for him to recognise the man he’d been hired to preach against. I pulled my hat down a little further.

Still looking at me, Constans laughed nervously, before going back about his business. ‘I tell you, that barbarian is a snake in the bosom of the Empire. He isn’t a Greek like us. He isn’t even a Latin or a Syrian or Egyptian. He’s a barbarian immigrant. He hadn’t been here a quarter of an hour before he’d wormed his way into the Emperor’s confidence. He’s been turning everything upside down ever since. He’s doing to us from the inside what his ancestors did as invaders to the Western Provinces. Unless
someone
stops him, he won’t stop till he’s pulled us all down to his own level.’

‘Come now, my dearest friend,’ said Alexius, when the chorus of hawking and spitting had died away. ‘I’m sure the boy means well. It’s just that he doesn’t understand our ways. He’s read a few books and thinks he knows everything. When he finally grows up, he’ll surely accept the rightness of ways that were always good enough for our ancestors.’

‘
Means well?
’ Constans shouted in mock outrage. ‘You’re too trusting, Alexius. How do you think he pays the bills on that palace he was given? I tell you, he’s on the take. Where else is all the money going? What’s he done with all the taxes that come in from the provinces? They don’t go on us, the Roman People, that’s to be sure. What happened to the olive oil ration?’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you even remember that?’ Loud groans. More repeating of the words. More groans.

‘Never mind the oil,’ Alexius broke in, still sounding even-handed. ‘But I’ll grant you have a point. What really matters is the army and there’s been precious little money spent on that. If the Lord Nicetas had been given proper support, we’d never have lost Syria to the Persians. The Empire wouldn’t have been cut in half. We wouldn’t now be facing an invasion of Egypt.’

Oh, the fucking injustice of that!
I really had to struggle not to kick my way through the crowd, to pull Alexius off his chair and wring his lying seditionary neck. But I did control myself. I also kept my face down when Constans called me a yellow-haired catamite, and someone with a Cypriotic accent accused me of conjuring headless demons in my palace to let loose in the City.

Yes, the
gross
fucking injustice! I’d put off the currency reform so money could be found for the defence of Syria. As if from nowhere, I’d squeezed out as much money for that as had been lavished in the old days on the combined land and sea operation to recover Africa from the Vandals. I’d given Nicetas the best-equipped army we’d sent out in a generation – and to hold a perfectly defensible province. The duffer had fallen into a trap an idiot child might have spotted and, a thousand years after Alexander had brought it under Greek dominion, the Persians were again masters of Syria.

One way or another, I’d have Nicetas for this. If I got any say in the matter, serving in a public toilet would be a soft option for the useless, blame-shifting bastard. For a moment, I thought of pulling my hat off and giving these flecks of stinking gutter scum a lecture on how to save an empire run down by a century of misgovernment. You can imagine this didn’t involve piling still more taxes on those who grew food for the Empire and provided it with soldiers. But I kept my mouth shut. Someone in the crowd now began bleating how I’d used the whole Imperial budget to make solid gold statues of myself in the nude. If true, that would still have been a better use of the taxpayers’ money than spending it on food to shove down his worthless throat.

Constans struck up again, now suggesting a petition to the Emperor when he finally decided to come back from consulting the ‘holy fathers’ in Cyzicus. They could ask for me to be dragged from my ‘demon-haunted’ palace and blinded and stuffed away in a monastery. There was a long groan of agreement from the crowd and a woman began shrieking as if about to give birth. Alexius disagreed, merely suggesting I should be taken back to whatever northern forest was my true home. There, I could be let loose to run about with the other howling savages. That got him a raucous laugh. I didn’t like the repeated talk of demons. I’d speak with Samo, when I got home, about another change of the locks. I watched the two seditionaries smile at each other. You couldn’t deny they were earning their fee for the day.