Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  This really was too much!

  ‘My dear Priscus,’ I said when I’d recovered use of my voice, ‘you should be aware that the only bodily fluid I might want to discharge near you is vomit.’

  As if I’d spat at him, he shrank back in his chair. A look of rage passed over his face. Then he was all smooth serpent again.

  ‘Be that as it may,’ he said, ‘you’ve lavished enough tenderness these past few months on some of my spawn.’

  I felt as if I’d had a stiletto of ice pushed into my stomach.

  ‘And what in the name of shit,’ I snarled, ‘do you mean by that?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Priscus said slowly and emphatically. ‘Your darling Maximin is one of my bastards. You say he was picked up near dawn outside the Mary Magdalene Church? It’s surely no coincidence that I had a boy child left in the same place at probably the same time – I’m sure we’d agree on the date if we bothered comparing notes. I let the bitch slave-girl carry her belly-load about until she shat it out. When I saw the scrawny thing, I had her throat cut and the baby dumped.

  ‘Yes, my darling boy – I’m the father of the thing you love most in this City. And when I’m Emperor, I may have to take it back from you. It might not do to have a grandson of Phocas as my heir.’

  ‘You’re a fucking liar, you shitbag Greekling!’ I shouted in Latin. Because he spoke it, I suddenly found Greek too dirty a language for my lips.

  ‘But you know I’m telling the truth – don’t you?’ he said, still in Greek. ‘Now you go back to your Legation and look on your beautiful adopted son. If you want to spare yourself a whole mountain of grief – and him too once I’m Emperor – you’ll throw him to those pigs.’

  Priscus got up. ‘I’m sure we still have much to discuss. Perhaps we’ll continue this conversation when we next meet. Perhaps it will be in circumstances similar to those I intended on our first meeting. But for the moment, I have other, more pressing business to attend to.’

  By the time I’d gathered myself sufficiently to follow him from the wine shop, he’d vanished.

  As I staggered through the gate to the Legation, I heard the first word on the streets that the Caesar Priscus had somehow found a way out of the City, and that he’d gone over to Heraclius.

  55

  Martin looked at the child again. ‘There is a certain resemblance,’ he said in a doubtful tone.

  ‘Of course there’s a resemblance, you dickhead,’ I hissed. With his eyes shut, Maximin was a smaller version of Priscus. It was astonishing how I hadn’t noticed this before.

  ‘Where’s your God now? The moment you found that child by the church, you sealed our death warrant.’

  ‘Shut up, or you’ll wake him,’ came the reply. Martin carefully pulled the covers back. He turned to face me. For all the concern he showed, I might have been telling him about a crate of spoiled papers.

  ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘I only picked him up. I recall it was you who insisted on adopting him. And you did adopt him,’ he continued with a sudden intensity. He’d switched into Celtic. ‘Under the laws of every nation, including even yours, the father of a child is the man who takes it as his own. Fatherhood comes from acknowledgement, not from fucking. That child is yours and yours alone.’

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ I said. I’d not let Martin see the tears I was forcing back as I repeated his point again and again to myself. ‘The point is that we’re in the deepest shit you can imagine. This is the natural child of the second biggest traitor in the Empire. In a few days, he may again be the child of the second biggest man in the Empire. Where does that leave him or us? Now, do please shut up about your God. If He had any hand in this, it shows at least an unorthodox sense of humour.’

  ‘Fuck them!’ Martin spat. I looked up in shock at the unexpected obscenity. ‘Do you suppose it was mere chance that I went to that place and at that time? Had I ever been there before? Had I ever taken notice of a foundling before? Was it chance that I brought him home? Was it chance that you adopted him on the spot? Was it chance that you called him Maximin without the shadow of a thought?

  ‘Was any of this chance? It was the Will of God, I tell you!

  ‘It was God who willed me to send the Court Poet early into His Presence. Once He had arranged for me to be in the right time and place, all else followed with the same certainty as a branch struck by lightning crashes from a tree. You can laugh at me with your mind full of the muddy thoughts of the ancients. But you know I’m talking sense.

  ‘I tell you’ – he dropped his voice as the child stirred – ‘I tell you that God is guiding our every move towards some Holy Purpose. You can forget Phocas and Priscus and all the rest of them. If God be for us, who can be against us?’

  If Martin had thrown the wine jug out of the window, and slapped my face and called me names, it wouldn’t have had the same sobering effect as this latest outpouring. But what reply was there to it all?

  We looked silently at each other for a long moment. Then I walked out on to the balcony and sat at the little table, trying to think through the practicalities of the situation.

  ‘Drink this.’ Martin pushed a cup of warmed fruit juice to my lips. ‘You’ll get cold out here otherwise.’

  We sat for a very long time without speaking. The sky turned from purple to black. Dogs barked in the distance. The wind blew softly on my face.

  At last, I got up and went back inside. Maximin was now awake. He smiled as I approached him, lamp in hand. I looked down at him. I put the lamp on the table beside his cot and took him into my arms. I breathed in the slightly shitty smell of the only son I’d ever managed to hold.

  I tried to control the spasms, but wept uncontrollably. The tears burned my eyes and I buried my face in Maximin’s blanket.

  ‘You’re mine, you’re mine,’ I said again and again. ‘You’re mine, and I’ll kill anyone who tries to take you from me.’

  After what seemed another age, I felt Martin beside me. ‘Aelric,’ he said softly in Latin, ‘I’ve sent down for hot water. There’s a messenger from Theophanes. You must wash your face.’

  There was an armed guard outside the Ministry. The few clerks who’d bothered turning up for work had all been kicked out into the street, where some of them now fraternised with the demonstrators. These had now taken to singing hymns and looking hopeful.

  ‘He’ll be coming out soon, you know,’ said the old woman who’d spoken to Theophanes in the summer. ‘The time of retribution is upon us. My son will come home again.’

  I evaded her attempt to catch hold of me and slipped past. A silent crowd had gathered to watch the demonstrators. It was impossible to tell from their faces what they were thinking. Dressed mostly as if for church, they stood and watched, and waited for whatever might happen next.

  As I finished threading my way through the crowd, Alypius came forward to meet me. He waved me past the guards and into the darkened hall of the Ministry. Lamp in hand, he led me up to Theophanes.

  ‘I already know the truth,’ said Theophanes, cutting off my account of Priscus. ‘I climbed on to the walls before darkness and saw the man riding up and down and calling on the City to surrender. He’s had quite an effect. About half the remaining nobility has now slipped out of the City, together with most of the senior Ministers. A few were caught and hanged as they tried to leave. Most bought their way out. I regret we are losing control over the garrison in charge of the land walls.

  ‘But tell me, Aelric,’ he said, changing the subject, ‘what did you discover from Priscus? You were seen going together into the wine shop. You came out separately – he to open treason, you back to the Legation.’

  ‘I know that you and he reached an agreement outside the Great One’s tent,’ I began. ‘I know that you conspired to kill the Permanent Legate. And I know that you both agreed on my death.’

  Theophanes checked me. ‘You know that Priscus agreed on your death,’ he repented with a laboured formality. ‘That you are still
alive and in good health should tell you the extent of my agreement.

  ‘I have no doubt Priscus told you many things. But there are many other things far beyond his knowledge. For all you see it as your present duty to uncover these things, I must remind you yet again that knowing them would do you no good.’

  ‘Theophanes, I will have the truth about the Permanent Legate’s murder – and about everything else,’ I said.

  ‘Then you will have none from me,’ he responded. ‘However, we are meeting here to get one set of truths that you may readily have. Though, since they concern Priscus, they may come too late.’

  I thought of those four Syrians down below, now a day into their solitary confinement. I’d been looking forward to showing Theophanes the benefits of an interrogation that didn’t involve the rack and red-hot pincers. It no longer seemed such a fine idea, but it was already arranged and I could think of nothing else to do instead.

  ‘Because I know this building better than I know the wrinkles on my own face,’ Theophanes said, ‘you will pardon me if I insist on leading the way.’

  I followed Theophanes down the stairs from his office to the main hall, and then across to a locked doorway. As he unlocked the door and pulled it open, my stomach turned at the waft of cold, filthy air.

  In all the ages during which the Ministry had stood, I wondered as I followed him down that endless spiral of worn-out steps, how many wretches had been dragged through this or the other entrance, and never come out again?

  We passed into the entrance chamber I recalled from my first visit. It was a low-vaulted circular room with another set of steps on the far side. Equidistant between these two entrances, a wide passageway led into the endless and regular network of cells.

  As before, the lamps flickered dimly in their niches. The reception desk was covered with much the same jumbled mass of papyrus. But—

  ‘Where can they be?’ Theophanes asked, looking round the empty room. ‘The guards knew we had an appointment. I was here myself earlier to see that all was in readiness.’ I strained to see into the network of corridors but heard and saw nothing. The whole place might have been evacuated.

  ‘Do you know where the prisoners were put?’ I asked Theophanes.

  He nodded absently, still looking around the unexpected stillness of his own private Hell.

  ‘Then we’ll start with the big one,’ I said. ‘I mean the one with the scar on his left cheek that stops his beard from growing right. I think he was their leader.’

  Theophanes fussed a while over the heavy ledger on the reception desk, turning the pages. He reached up to a board studded with what looked like hundreds of numbered hooks and lifted off a single set of keys. He tutted impatiently as he saw they were all out of sequence and searched again for the ring that carried the right number. Then he turned back to the ledger and made a series of neat entries.

  ‘Order in this world begins with small things,’ he said, blotting the parchment.

  Then, without so much as a pause to get his bearings, he took up his lamp again and stepped into the passageway. I followed close behind, trying not to retch at the smell of the place. It was far worse than I remembered.

  I tried at first to take note of the turns we made and the secondary corridors we passed. But I noticed the complex stretched under the whole Ministry building – even under the surrounding streets and squares. It was immense. But for Theophanes leading the way with the unthinking assurance of a native, I’d soon have been lost.

  As we turned into another corridor, I saw two dark figures standing in the gloom of the far end. One was gigantically tall. The other stooped. There was something furtive about their appearance. It was as if they’d been caught in some malevolent act.

  We stopped. I fingered my knife. Theophanes smoothed his robe in a gesture of confusion.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ a voice rasped loudly. ‘As ever, we can dispense with prostrations. With these floors, you’d never get the muck off your clothes.’

  56

  Phocas inspected himself in the long mirror Theophanes kept in his office.

  ‘I don’t suppose the blood shows too much against the purple – not in this light, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘If you please, Your Majesty.’ Theophanes handed him a large cup of wine. Phocas drained it and let out a long sigh of contentment. He handed it back for a refill.

  ‘Do I need explain myself to you?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, Caesar,’ I said, trying not to look at the red smear that ran from his trailing robe to the door of the office.

  ‘Then if you’ll take advice from an older and wiser man,’ he said, ‘let me give you one of the main secrets of effective leadership. As an officer on the Danube, I never believed in giving orders I wasn’t prepared to follow myself.’

  ‘Clearing my accounts’ is what he’d called it when stopping halfway up the spiral steps for a tipsy giggle. I didn’t see what business it was of mine to ask how many prisoners had been held down there. It was enough to know that he’d gone down and ordered the dungeon guards to kill all of them. He and the huge black slave he’d brought in tow had then turned on the exhausted guards. It was my business that some of the prisoners had been mine. But there’s nothing in the books of etiquette to cover protests to an Emperor for this sort of thing.

  I was glad I’d taken care to put on common leather boots before coming out. Anything else would have been ruined by all the blood I hadn’t seen on the floors.

  ‘I see that fucker Priscus has shat on me,’ said Phocas, still looking at himself in the mirror.

  ‘Your Majesty will surely agree’, Theophanes said, ‘that Priscus has served his purpose remarkably well since we discovered his intentions. Everything we told him was passed back, and was implicitly believed by Heraclius.’

  ‘I suppose he’ll be more of a danger to Heraclius outside the City than he was to me inside,’ Phocas said. He sank heavily into a chair covered in white kid leather. I could almost hear the squelching of his robe. I could certainly see the dark stain on the chair-back when he leaned forward.

  He looked at me. ‘Now, I find a vacancy has emerged at the head of the City defences. Bearing in mind the defection of almost all the qualified candidates – and the unreliability of those remaining – I am minded to appoint you to the position.’

  ‘Sir,’ I cried, aghast, ‘I – I....’

  I trailed off. I was too young. I was a barbarian. I was the Pope’s representative. I knew fuck all about the military. I didn’t want to die. All I wanted was to go home.

  ‘If I might be so bold as to suggest—’

  Phocas cut Theophanes off. ‘You suggest nothing,’ he snarled in sudden anger. ‘I’m Emperor yet. I still say what goes in this City. I’m keeping to my side of the bargain. You will therefore keep your mouth shut.’

  A strange look on his face, Theophanes did as he was told. He turned back to me.

  ‘I remove you from the post of Acting Permanent Legate,’ he said. ‘I now appoint you Count of the Palace Guard, which includes the newish post of Duke of the Sacred Defence.’

  As he spoke, he splashed wine from his cup over the black slave who was nodding off on the floor beside him. He too was sodden with blood. Like water from a squeezed sponge, it oozed from his clothing on to the floorboards. The man jerked into life and handed up the leather satchel he’d been cuddling. From this, Phocas produced yet another of his parchment sheets.

  ‘This gives formal effect to my wishes,’ he said. He tried to wipe a spot of blood from the sheet. Instead, his finger only made a broader dark smear over the writing. ‘I brought this along on the off-chance I’d catch you. How lucky we ran into each other downstairs.

  ‘With immediate effect, you are transferred to duties of equal rank to those from which I relieve you. I appoint you Count of the Palace Guard and so forth, with supreme power over all life and property for the purpose of your commission,’ he intoned. ‘You will see there is no mention of appea
ls to me from any decision you make. You have the same rank and powers as dear Priscus.’

  I struggled to find the words to extricate myself from this latest horror.

  Phocas flashed me a thoroughly evil smile. ‘Oh no, my lad,’ he said, ‘you don’t get out of this at all. You get yourself off to the palace where you’ll be kitted out in armour of gold and silver, and then greet your men. If you refuse my order, I’ll have you impaled before morning.

  ‘If you lose the battle on the streets, you either die or make whatever submission you can to Heraclius and Priscus. But let’s be reasonable – that means you die. If you win, you become my champion. Play things right, and I’ll think of chucking in my daughter and the succession. Since there’s no one else left, it might as well be you.

  ‘With hindsight, I can see that Priscus wasn’t the right man for Domentia. He didn’t use her well. You, on the other hand, will make an ideal husband. She might even fancy you. Certainly, you’ll need to give her another son. I can’t have a son of Priscus continuing my line.’

  Unable to think of anything remotely better, I stood in front of the Emperor, bowing my obedience to his will.

  ‘Go, my boy,’ Phocas called, with a return to full good humour. ‘You’ve a busy night ahead of you. I expect to find everything up to scratch on the streets tomorrow when – or if – I decide on my eve-of-battle inspection.’

  As I bowed out of the room, I threw a final glance at Theophanes. He looked ninety if he was a day.

  ‘It suits you better than the clerical robes,’ Martin agreed. ‘It’s a shame they’ve finally arrived.’

  Radogast untied the golden breastplate and I let out my first natural breath since leaving the Imperial Palace. Martin hadn’t missed the scale of this latest disaster. Given any choice in the matter, he’d have had the Legation gates locked, with us on the inside and the keys dropped into a sewer. On the other hand, I could sense some relief that the blasphemy of my position as Acting Permanent Legislator was at an end.