‘Oh, fuck!’ I said inwardly. What could he be doing this far out? Or were we really so far out?
‘I am Aelric, born in Pavia,’ I replied in Lombardic. I knew I couldn’t manage a conversation in his language, but Lombardic would do for basics. ‘I was told to get these prisoners to the Big Man in the Yellow Camp.’
No such luck.
‘I don’t know any Aelric. there ain’t no Lombards detached with us. So who the fuck are you?’
He went for his sword. In a moment, he’d find enough breath to call out for help.
I was younger and bigger. I could probably have taken him out – but that wasn’t anything like certain with a sword I’d only handled to put into its scabbard. And what if he managed to call for help?
I never had to find out.
How he got round me and behind that man – in perfect silence and in full cover of the mist – I couldn’t at the time imagine. But Theophanes was there. With a single knife-thrust, delivered with tremendous force, straight through a seam in the leather jacket, he had the man in the back.
As the man went down on all fours, gasping with the pain and shock, the sound of blood frothing on his lips, I saw Theophanes emerge through the mist, a pleased smile on his face. For all the difference in expression, he might have been back in that restaurant, about to hug himself after some particularly apt repartee.
The man tried to reach back to get at the knife. It hadn’t by itself been an immediately killing blow, but it gave me the chance for a sword-thrust just below the collar bone.
And that was the end of him.
Theophanes stood forward to admire his work. He leaned over the body, dabbing playfully at the knife hilt. It bobbed around under his hands like a very stiff erection. As he stood back up, I took his hand and embraced him.
Whatever happened next, we’d done well together this night.
When Martin had finished retching the fear out of his guts, we fell to a hurried conference on where we might be. We agreed that the man probably wasn’t part of any search party. He’d been too surprised to come upon me, and then too straightforwardly suspicious of who I was. He must have been on some other mission, and alone.
We decided not to waste any time on hiding the body. Instead, we just recovered the knife – getting it back out, slippery with blood, took all my effort – and helped ourselves to the one from the dead man’s belt. There was no point taking the sword for Martin. Its weight would only slow him down and he might even cut his leg open by tripping over the thing. But he might be some use with a knife. At least, he could turn it on himself if things grew desperate enough.
We pressed on. The buildings now were growing larger and less ruinous. Martin felt sure we were coming out of the old suburbs. The clearance between them and the outer defences couldn’t now be far away. It might even be round the next bend in the overgrown street we’d been following.
Certainly, I had less feeling of confinement. We must be coming out of the old suburbs.
Then, just as we rounded the bend, came another voice, this one in a high, accented Latin:
‘You have taken your time. The Great One doesn’t appreciate delay.’
‘Oh, fuck!’ I thought again.
Looming out of the mist were a good half-dozen of the Yellow Barbarians.
‘You’d better come quickly. The Great One will be impatient.’
26
Of course, having found our way into the old suburbs, we’d somehow managed a quarter-turn in our wanderings and had since been moving away from the City. The clearing I could sense ahead was the outskirts.
It was here that the Yellow Barbarians had pitched their own camp. Either they were uncomfortable with even ruined buildings around them, or they just wanted to be able to make the quickest escape if the City gates opened.
All that mattered to me until then was that we’d lost direction and would be horribly exposed when the Germanics turned up to report the loss of three captives.
It was all so bloody unfair! I hadn’t anticipated having to stumble around half the night in those stinking clothes from one shock to another. The idea, let me repeat, had been a straight dash back to the City, with me in disguise to get us past any tipsy inspectors. Now, if anything, we might be in a worse position here than back with the Germanics.
But there was no escaping. There could be no fighting to get away from these Yellows. I had no choice but to go along for the moment with a pretence the nature of which I couldn’t guess.
The Yellow Camp was disgusting in ways you can’t imagine if you’ve only seen barbarians like the less enlightened cousins of my own people. There was a filthiness that by comparison made common dirt appear clean. Even that guardhouse with the other captives was more salubrious.
To be fair, these people were pure nomads. When you aren’t accustomed to spending more than one night in the same spot, you tend not to observe the usual decencies of life. My assumption of a few dozen was based on those I’d seen on horseback, and then on the small number of Germanics. But this was an entire tribe on the move from God knows where.
The leather tents were huddled within a ring of high bonfires that hissed and crackled in the gentle rain, the gaps between them filled with piles of shit and rotting carcasses. Outside each tent, a pony was tethered. These at least looked clean and glossy.
Either these people were late sitters or early risers. No one seemed to be asleep. The men clumped around in quilted jackets, stiff and uncomfortable without their ponies. The women fussed over cooking pots. I could smell their food as soon as we were within the ring of fires. As a tenor voice stands out from a choir in church, it added its own texture to the general stink of the place.
Children ran about everywhere, shouting gibberish and throwing what looked like balls of shit at each other. About a dozen of them stood in a circle poking at a cowering figure with sharp sticks. I tried not to look too closely at what had been done to him as he staggered about to avoid the well-aimed blows.
And I thought the Germanics had been hard on us!
I turned from the horrid sight, restraining an urge to vomit. Even so, my legs were beginning to shake at the thought of what might be in store for us.
‘Wait here,’ the Yellow Linguist said as we reached the largest of the tents. ‘When I call you in, you will kiss the dust of the Great One’s floor.’
After seeing what passed for entertainment in his camp, I’d have licked the man’s feet and painted his toenails. I nodded.
‘I’m going to kill myself here and now,’ Martin whispered in Celtic, with the settled composure of one who has lost too much hope to remain afraid. ‘I will thank you, Aelric, for all your efforts to save us. I wish I had been brave enough to tell you certain things you have a right to know. Instead, I will say goodbye, and hope to see you again in a better world.’
‘You’ll do no such fucking thing,’ I hissed back. ‘We haven’t got this far to lose now. Besides,’ I added, ‘we aren’t here to be murdered. Just follow my lead, and we’ll see Constantinople yet.
‘And keep that knife out of sight,’ I finished, with a faint enjoyment of the irony that almost removed my own terror. ‘Captives aren’t supposed to be armed.’
Theophanes must have guessed something of the exchange. He put a hand on my arm. ‘I wish I could give active help in this dealing,’ he whispered in Greek. ‘But I must now rely wholly on your diplomatic skills. For what it may be worth, I suspect you are here to receive orders rather than give information. But how you explain having the pair of us with you I can’t presently think.’
That made two of us. A drink and a brisk walk round the camp-fires, and I was sure I could think of some half-credible story. As it was, the tent flap opened and the Yellow Linguist beckoned us inside.
The tent was about fifteen feet square and about the same height. There were two heavily armed men standing just within, one each side of the flap. On a raised platform at the far end, with curtains on three sides and
tended by two rather pert young girls, the Great One reclined amid a mass of stained silk cushions.
He was a mountain of flesh. Because he was shorter, he might only have been the same weight as Theophanes, but he looked half as fat again. Slitty eyes sunk deep into his bloated face, a lank moustache breaking through ritual scars and tattoos, he smiled evilly as we stepped into the light from the smoking tapers placed around what passed as his throne.
A runtish servant dressed in yellow struck once on a little brass gong. As its sound faded, the three of us were face down on the floor and licking its beaten, foul-tasting earth. We grovelled there for what seemed an age, until I felt a discreet kick in my side and got back to my feet.
We stood in silence before the Great One, looking respectfully down. At length, he spoke. The language he used sounded vaguely human – if you can imagine something spoken backwards on an indrawn breath. It was all wheezy trills and spat emphases. Just the sound of it chilled the blood.
‘You are here to receive your instructions for tomorrow,’ the Yellow Linguist interpreted in the basic Latin that is common among mixed groups of barbarians. ‘But where is the usual white dog who comes among us for such purposes?’
I was prepared for this one.
‘I am Aelric, his kinsman,’ I replied, trying hard to think in English and speak as if Latin was an unfamiliar tongue. ‘He sends his respects, but has a flux from drinking sour beer. He is not fit to be received in so Glorious a Presence. He sends me in his place.’
There was more of that sinister trilling back and forth. Then: ‘Why do you presume to bring these captives before the Great One? Your instructions were to keep them together.’
‘O Great One,’ I said, ‘these are objects of considerable value. They escaped our first attack. My brother and I found them wandering lost among the houses as we came before you. I sent my brother back with their gold, but thought it best to keep watch over them myself.’
As this was interpreted, I saw a gentle twitching of the curtain directly behind the Great One. I suddenly noticed a little rend in this at about head level. There was someone else in the tent, and he was watching us.
The Yellow Linguist saw this too. He broke off his interpreting and stepped forward, going respectfully round the Great One.
There was a muttered three-way conversation, the Great One listening intently and replying in monosyllables. I was too far away to hear any of it. But as it finished, the Great One smiled broadly. He leaned forward, beckoning me towards him.
I steeled myself and approached. There was a rancid smell of sweaty, unwashed fat and I could see the filed and blackened teeth as his lips were drawn back in a grin.
For the first time, I noticed a neat pile of about a dozen human heads just out of his reach to the left of the pillows. I hadn’t taken them in straight away because they were a uniform dark brown and had been shrunk somehow into balls about the size of a cabbage.
All considered, it was rather like standing before Satan. The Great One took one of my hands between his paws and brushed it against the roughened, greasy flab of his cheeks.
‘Such smooth and elegant hands for a man of the forests,’ the Yellow Linguist interpreted. ‘You are dressed as the Others. You have their colour and their language. Yet in all the time since we were called together, the Great One has been denied the sight of such beauty and daintiness of manner.’
There is a limit to what three days of roughing it can do to a manicure like mine. As I looked wordlessly back into that fat, grinning face, I wished I’d taken Martin’s hint and put an end to myself outside the tent.
I thought of the shambling wretch at the mercy of those children and wondered if, even now, I’d have time to go for my knife. My sword had been taken as we entered the tent.
Instead, though, I repeated my story, adding something about the number and importance of my kinsmen. As I did so, I looked the Great One straight in the eye, trying desperately to ignore the freezing and unfreezing of my guts.
It got me nothing more than a curiously indulgent smile and a gentle squeeze of my hand.
One of those young girls suddenly looked up at me, an expression of cold mockery on her flat, delicately yellow face. I wondered what she might be like, knife in hand, with a bound prisoner. I put the thought from my mind.
‘Did we not hear’, the Yellow Linguist continued interpreting, ‘how the Others shouted in their own camp after cloud had covered the sky? Was not the one summoned before the Great One to be questioned on the shouting?
‘Yet all we have now is silence among the Others, and so much unexpected perfection of beauty set before us.
‘Do the spirits mislead when they inform the Great One that those you bring with you are companions, not captives? Can it be that the one summoned wanders now beyond the protective fires, unseen by those who breathe?’
I’ve seen tax gatherers take longer to get at the essential point of a matter. But I was, you’ll understand, in no mood for considering the relative balance in his mind of direct revelation and intuitive leaps.
He’d rumbled us good and proper, was the best I could think as I stood there, my hand still in his. All that remained was the question of what would happen next.
As usual, it was a surprise.
27
I heard a determined shuffling behind me. The Great One broke eye contact with me and looked over my shoulder. His face took on a look of slightly annoyed bafflement.
I looked round. Theophanes and Martin had moved apart and now stood facing each other at each side of the tent.
‘We are honoured,’ cried Martin in a bright voice, ‘after hearing so many stories of his might and nobility, to be called at last into the presence of the Great One. We wish to perform for him as we have so often performed in the presence of Caesar himself.’
With that, the pair of them launched into song. It was a lyric popular at the time – ‘Watchman at the Gates of Love’, it was called. They sang together while Martin clapped his hands to keep time.
As they moved from one verse of cloying sentimentality to another, Martin sang in a pleasant light baritone. But the obvious star was Theophanes. Powerful, yet clear, the eunuch voice can carry every note from higher bass to soprano.
Theophanes was somewhat past his best for singing, and his voice cracked on some of the higher notes. But he covered this with a superb artistry, moving the more daring trills into a lower register.
During one note that he seemed to hold for ever without wavering, I glanced back to the Great One. He sat entranced. The two girls looked on, their mouths open with astonishment.
As they moved into the final long refrain, Theophanes broke off and began to dance about the tent, stamping his feet rhythmically and waving his arms in time to the music. Keeping his shoulders still, its angle never changing, he moved his head from side to side.
When, at last, the song ended, he took up three of those shrunken heads and, still dancing, started to juggle them. As he did so, Martin began one of those crooning, throbbing songs you hear in the better class of brothel. It’s the sort that begins slowly and builds gradually to a clashing of metres that, handled properly, can imitate the sexual act.
Keeping time with the huge, undulating mass of his body, Theophanes threw the heads higher and higher, so I thought they would hit the roof of the tent and he’d lose them all. Yet, even at the climax of the song, when the dance movements must grow increasingly rapid and abandoned, he dropped not one. He began with three. He ended with three.
It was, all considered, a most remarkable performance. Perhaps, on balance, the world had been the poorer when Theophanes progressed from dancing boy to police state functionary.
As it finished, Theophanes and Martin threw themselves down in a perfectly timed and most elegant prostration.
The Great One squealed with joy, bobbing up and down as he clapped. He hauled himself up and lurched forward to pull Theophanes to his feet. He stretched up to plant a slobbering kiss
on the eunuch’s cheek. Then he reached into his robe and pulled out a red amulet to hang round Theophanes’ neck. After a momentary hesitation, he added one of the shrunken heads. The Yellow Linguist interpreted the stream of appreciation that followed.
Puffing very slightly from the exertion, Theophanes acknowledged all this with a respectful bow. He added something about treasuring the gifts all the days of his life. If this was a discreet enquiry as to how many days this might be allowed to be, he got no definite answer.
But he had gained for the moment at least high praise where it seemed to matter.
Then it was back to business as usual. Rearranging himself on those nasty cushions, the Great One settled into place, and the audience continued.
‘The one without stones in his pouch will go outside to recover himself in the dawn air,’ said the Yellow Linguist. ‘You’ – he pointed at me – ‘will also perform for the Great One.’
I wondered what on earth I could do to match what had just been offered. I thought of some of the more tuneful ballads I’d used to bawl in taverns on the Wessex borders.
But it wasn’t my voice the Great One had in mind. As Theophanes went out of the tent and half a dozen of the other Yellow Barbarians filed in, he kicked at one of the girls who sat at his feet. Toying with one of his shrunken heads, he hissed a stream of orders. When she remained squatting at his feet, with no apparent inclination to obey, he kicked her again. She landed about a yard before me and looked up into my face with a cold fury that made me want to sit down and fan myself.
At last, she got silently to her feet and began tugging at the laces that held the tunic to her body. In an instant, she stood before me stark naked, a closed, sullen look on her yellow face.
The servant who’d sounded the gong pulled out some more of those cushions and began scattering them on the ground.
I didn’t need that poke in the back to tell me what kind of performance was expected of me. Clothes off and folded neatly beside the cushions, I was soon hard at work with the girl, making the beast with two backs while everyone else looked on.
Terror of Constantinople Page 18