Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  And what of Theophanes? It didn’t cross my mind to dump him. But how to make our escape with him?

  The raiders broke into a gentle gallop as they closed the distance. A great, collective wail of terror went up and rippled forward as they crashed into the back of the fleeing crowd.

  Now they were close enough for me to see the evil grins on their faces, the flash of steel as swords were raised. I heard the bubbling screams of the stricken. I saw blood spurt from a man dressed in the formal robes of a senator. His hands went up to the red gash where his face had been, then he went down. I saw a child skewered like game on one of the barbarian lances. Screaming and twisting, it was raised aloft, then shaken loose into the crowd.

  Like an arsonist’s fire among ripe corn, the raiders cut their way into the crowd. If they were looking for prisoners, they hadn’t yet taken any. For the moment, they were giving way to the sheer joy of killing the defenceless citizens of the great City.

  ‘Cover yourself with this,’ I shouted to Theophanes, throwing him a cloth I’d ripped from the table. Dishes of food crashed heavily to the ground. ‘Get this on and come with us.

  ‘Martin – get the fuck from under that table! There’s no safety here.’

  To the blacks, who’d taken to jabbering and clutching at each other: ‘Get hold of your master. Pull him along behind us.’

  Even if we managed to reach the City, the gates might well be shut on us and we’d huddle under the outer wall, hoping the artillery was sufficiently in order to cover us. By now there must have been a thousand bodies between us and those mounted savages but that dense buffer of flesh might be enough to protect us. Sooner or later, the raiders would slow their approach and start taking prisoners and booty. In the meantime, we might find somewhere to hide in one of the ruined buildings.

  Once he was over the initial shock, Theophanes moved with surprising speed over that broken ground. The main difficulty, I found, was to keep Martin with us. Once or twice, I thought of knocking him down and then carrying him.

  We dodged out of main view into a side street. There was no shortage of hiding places. It all depended on how long the barbarians wanted to hang about the city. Even Phocas might send out a brigade to chase them off. At the least, it would soon be dark. That meant we needed to look for a reasonable bolt hole.

  The problem was that others had had the same idea. When you’re trying to vanish, there’s no safety in numbers. Squeezing into an already crowded cellar is just an invitation to trouble. It can be worse than hanging about in the open. You might get paving slabs thrown down on you. Or you might have the building set alight over your head.

  We had to put some distance between us and the others.

  ‘Out of my way, shitbags,’ I snarled, shoving a couple of monks back from the breach in a ruined wall we needed to climb over.

  We darted round the corner into what had once been a narrow shopping street. From here, those mingled wails and shouts came from a comforting distance. I could hear the birds singing and the wind rustling through the dry grass of late summer. It was a matter of finding the right hole to disappear into.

  Then: ‘Oh, Sweet and Merciful Jesus!’ Martin cried in a high falsetto.

  At the far end of the street, a barbarian sat on a tall horse. He was of a different race from the others. Lank, blond hair fell over his shoulders. A yellow moustache covered his lower face. He gave us a predatory smile as he raised his drawn sword.

  23

  When attacked, there is a time to fight and a time to give quietly in. There’s no shame in the latter when you have no means of the former. I did think of picking up a fallen roof spar and using it as a lance. But there was more than one of those Germanics, and Theophanes was urging me to let him do the talking.

  The introduction he made in basic Latin didn’t get us as far as he might have wished. The three of us were tightly bound and roped together for dragging along behind one of the horses. So far, we were unharmed, but, for all they wailed so piteously, the blacks were butchered on the spot – throats cut, hands hacked off to get at their gold bangles.

  We were dumped with about seventy other prisoners inside the walls of a ruined guardhouse. The gate had fallen off and the roof had long since rotted. This was on the extreme edge of the old suburbs and, except for patches of scrub about a yard high, was surrounded by open ground.

  We were a select bunch. The raiders had killed or released everyone who didn’t look fit for a ransom. We were untied, stripped of our cash and jewellery, and then given to feed from bowls of miscellaneous refreshments gathered from the festival preparations.

  I looked around. Everyone just sat quietly eating. I turned to Theophanes, who had taken off his silk slippers to nurse his bruised feet.

  ‘What chance of a rescue?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said flatly, pulling a slipper back on. ‘There are few enough of these creatures, but overcoming them would require a force I don’t think Phocas will want to spare from keeping the City quiet.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, moving on to the next obvious point, ‘we must outnumber these animals five to one. A concerted rush, and—’

  Theophanes stopped me. ‘Please, Alaric,’ he said, ‘this is not Rome. Here in the Imperial capital, there is an order to these things. Even in more settled times than now, I cannot say how often I have seen fires burning outside the City walls. The appropriate response is to chase the raiders away, or to bribe them to go away. If there are too many of them for that, some other nomadic race can be persuaded to attack them in the rear.

  ‘A counterattack being out of the question, the gates will open in due course and the priests will come out to begin ransom discussions. The Yellow Barbarians are from a race we seldom encounter. They drift in now and again from the lands far beyond even Scythia. But the Germanics are reasonably close to the Lombards.’

  ‘And have you seen what the Lombards can do?’ I asked, breaking into the lecture.

  Theophanes waved me to silence. ‘They are doubtless here for the money,’ he said reassuringly. ‘They can be trusted to know the rules. They are probably Christians of a sort. You will notice there has been no more killing without good reason, and no rapes of the better looking. We each have a financial value that will be set by the appearance of our clothing and then by detailed negotiation with our friends and loved ones inside the city.’

  I snorted in disgust. ‘So this is your civilisation,’ I said. ‘You disarm the people. Then, when it proves impossible to defend them, they can be shoved around like farm animals.

  ‘Back in Rome, I can tell you, the priests alone would have been able to fight off this pissy little raid. Given that everyone, ordained or lay, carries arms, we’d have them back inside the walls before dark. Then it would be a matter of exchanging them for anyone who’d fallen into their hands. Failing that, we’d hand them over to the surgeons for live dissection outside the Prefect’s Basilica.

  ‘Get there early enough for a seat at the front,’ I said with strong approval, ‘and you can learn a lot about anatomy as well as the workings of justice.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Theophanes said with slight amusement, ‘we do things differently here.’ He patted my arm with his fat and now unjewelled fingers. ‘Your best chance of getting out of here alive is to wait for the ransom negotiations. I imagine they’ll start tomorrow afternoon.’

  Martin looked suddenly up from his inspection of the robe of blue linen I’d made him put on for the occasion.

  ‘Shut up,’ I rasped at him before he could ask his question. ‘I’m thinking about other matters. It goes without saying I’ll pay any ransom. You came here with me. You’ll get out with me.’

  Handing over an ounce of clipped silver to these swine would stick in my gullet for a year of Sundays. But if it came to that, I’d send the necessary instructions to Baruch.

  Theophanes went placidly back to rubbing the weal on one of his arms where a bracelet had been ripped off with exceptional force
.

  But no priest or Imperial official came to us the following day, or the day after that. We sat in huddled groups, stiff from the night cold and the hard ground where we slept, and sore from the hot sun of the days. Though unbound, we weren’t allowed to go outside the place where we were held captive. The dozen or so guards set over us kept order by the liberal use of beatings. This meant that we shat and pissed where we lived and slept. I did suggest some basic sanitary arrangements but no one listened to me and I soon shut up. I was surprised how many people soon gave up on removing their clothes first.

  For the first time since my arrival in the City, I heard people speaking their minds.

  ‘The drunken fucker won’t allow negotiations,’ one man said bitterly, pulling his soiled robe over his head. ‘They’d puncture his claims to be in control of events.’

  ‘Do you suppose we’ll be killed?’ another asked.

  ‘Well, there aren’t many of these raiders, and they’ll hardly want to be slowed by a train of slaves when they do finally make off. Of course we’ll be killed.’

  ‘But surely Saint Victorinus will keep watch over us?’ an old woman cried, clutching a wooden crucifix to herself.

  ‘As he did all the others?’

  The discussion trailed off.

  Early on the third evening of our captivity, Theophanes opened a new line of conversation with me. So far, he’d kept up his insistence that ransom talks were imminent. But there comes a time when optimism blends into stupidity. And Theophanes was never stupid.

  ‘Aelric,’ he said softly, having checked that Martin was asleep, ‘I must beg of you the favour of a swift death before morning.’

  ‘Those are not words’, I replied, ‘I ever expected of Theophanes the Magnificent.’

  Nor had I expected him to start using my real name.

  ‘They are my words now, dear boy,’ he said. ‘I have saved your life once, to your knowledge. I have saved it on other occasions unknown to you. I ask you now to return the favour by ending mine.’

  I looked him steadily in the face. It was days since his last toilette. Since then, he’d neither scraped off the painted mask nor been able to maintain it. Rain and sweat had washed the dye out of his hair, and dried rivulets of black stained his forehead and cheeks. The effect was like the wall of a ruined building, where courses of brick show through the cracked and discoloured stucco. But there was an ordered resolution about Theophanes that banished any trace of eunuch effeminacy.

  ‘Do you see this?’ He held up a stone about the size of a small melon. ‘I want you to knock my brains out as I sleep. You and Martin must then keep away from my body. These animals are not sober enough to have noticed who is with whom. Nor will they make proper enquiries. If I wake tomorrow morning, I shall have to consider it a grave breach of our friendship.’

  I took the stone into my hand. It was smooth and cool, and it balanced nicely. It was just the thing for bashing heads in.

  The man had a point. If they hadn’t even started yet, there would be no ransom negotiations. It really did seem to be a matter of waiting for these savages to run out of patience and start dispatching us in the manner of their doubtless very brutal choice.

  I’d got that much in the afternoon I overheard two of the Germanics speaking together. ‘I say kill them and fuck off,’ one said, spitting to emphasise his words. ‘We can’t stick around here under the walls of the city itself. There’ll be soldiers come out sooner or later, or brung in from the sea behind us. We’ve got a nice stash of movables from this raid. Let’s be off, I say, while we’ve still got hands to carry it.’

  ‘Not yet,’ the other had said. ‘I heard that slit-eyed yellow fucker – the one what knows Latin. He said the Big Man has something going on. We wait until tomorrow.’

  ‘I dunno,’ had come the reply. ‘I seed him yesterday talking to the King Phocas people. Those priests was back again. He sent them off with a flea in the ear. “No deal,” he said. Whatever happens, there won’t be no ransoming. We’ve got our share of the gold. Let’s take it and be off. Hermann had the right idea – and you know he never sticks round when there’s real danger.

  ‘I’ve got a woman with kids back home. She don’t like these Imperial raids. We’re going in deeper each time. She’d have boiling water all over me feet if she knowed we was outside the City. Let’s kill them.’

  They’d drifted out of earshot. Nothing had happened since, but it could only be a matter of time before the general nerve snapped.

  I hadn’t realised Theophanes could understand any of the Germanic languages. But there seemed no limit to his abilities. It was after listening quietly to the raiders that his mood shifted.

  Martin had also understood. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening praying in five languages. He was for all the world like a man trying different keys in a lock. But none had fitted. No Saint Victorinus had come down with his now armed singing flowers to save us. So Martin had left his stale bread untouched and started on the beer that remained abundant.

  ‘Come now, Martin,’ I’d whispered, ‘we must set an example for these Greeks. These people won’t kill us. We’re all far too valuable. We’ll surely be sold into slavery at worst. Then we can be bought back out. Directly or indirectly, we’ll be ransomed.’

  ‘No, Aelric,’ he’d said flatly, giving me a look somewhere between pity at my own naïvety and offence at my transparent attempt to deceive him. ‘You know we’ll not be sold. In any event,’ he’d added, ‘I’d rather be dead than a slave again.’

  ‘I can’t agree,’ I’d replied, trying to keep the conversation going. ‘Slavery must usually be better than death – especially if we can arrange to be bought back out of it.’

  ‘Bought back, you say?’ he’d replied with a sour laugh. ‘I dare say in Kent, just like in Rome, you can find anyone if you look hard enough for a few days. But do you know just how big the East is? Do you know how long it can take to get messages back even from Ephesus? Can you begin to imagine the distances involved if you get sold into Persia or one of the barbarian realms? And that’s just in settled times. In this world of armed chaos, you’d never get ransomed. Never!’

  For a while, we’d sat in grumpy silence. Then Martin had begun again. ‘Do you realise’, he’d asked, ‘what it means to be a slave? You own slaves. I know you’ve read up on the law governing slavery. But you have no conception of what is really meant by all those legal phrases about abolition of personality and the like.’

  Another pause, and he’d continued: ‘The first thing they do when you become a slave is break you. When I was sold for the first time, it was like a descent into Hell. We were beaten – beaten if we looked at the dealer when he spoke; beaten if we didn’t. We were stripped naked and made to walk around in the open. We were made to draw lots. On that basis, we were assigned to have sex with each other – in front of everyone.

  ‘I was made to have sex with a dying old woman, who barely knew what was happening around her. One of the dealers squatted in front of me, and I had to use his shit as a lubricant. Whenever I showed unwilling, I was flogged back into action.

  ‘One of the others I was with was made to have sex with a dog. When he couldn’t, they beat him to death. It was like with Justinus in that restaurant. I saw someone else have his legs broken for no particular reason. Then he was drowned in a vat of piss.

  ‘They do this’ – Martin was now speaking fast – ‘they do this partly because they enjoy the sight of so much humiliation. But they do it also to break you into your new status of absolute, unquestioning obedience to whatever orders you are given. Nobody wants to buy an uppity slave. You have to learn that, and learn it fast. You have to forget anything you might have been before your civil death.

  ‘Don’t tell me slavery is better than death. Rather than go through that again, I’ll choose death any day. But there isn’t any choice,’ he’d finished. ‘We’re to be killed tomorrow. Because there are so many of us, it will be a qu
ick death. I don’t believe they’ll be wanting to spend much time over us. I suppose I’ll squeal like a pig when the first knife goes into me. You know I’m a coward, and I know you despise me for it. But I’m ready for death tomorrow. It won’t be long. If you have any sense, you won’t try making a fuss. Do that, and you’ll get personal attention.’

  With that, he’d drained his pitcher of beer and settled down for a siesta. Soon, he’d been snoring away with his mouth open.

  24

  But let me return to Theophanes and the notion of having me brain him while he slept.

  ‘Now, Theophanes,’ I said, putting the stone down, ‘if I kill you, who will see to me? You don’t suppose I can trust Martin.’

  He smiled so suddenly and broadly that some flakes of paint dropped from his face on to his breasts and belly.

  ‘I don’t think you have anything to fear, Aelric,’ he said. ‘You and your secretary are safe enough. And the less you know, the safer you will be. If I am right, however – and I am sure that I am right – I have much to fear. I’m surprised I have still not been identified. My end will not be swift or dignified if you refuse this favour that you should know enough to realise you owe me.’

  He fell silent for a while, looking towards the fire that burned outside the doorway. The raiders had lit this for keeping an eye on it by night and for their own comfort.

  ‘Well, Theophanes,’ I said, ‘before I even consider taking that stone to you, I think there are certain things to be discussed. Can you explain, for example, why the ransom negotiators were turned back? Might it be because this is not an ordinary raid? Is there some unseen principal who might not be well-disposed to Your Magnificence once it is known you are among the captives?’