Demons – yes, demons! And appearing out of a puff of smoke in my office. You know, I dearly loved Martin. Even when we were first brought together in Rome, and I was trying to show who was the master and who the borrowed slave, there had been something about his learned and competent helplessness that appealed to me. He was now the closest thing I had in the world to a friend. And there were still times when I had to resist the urge to give him a good hard punch in the stomach. But I kept my temper and continued looking calmly into his face. As I thought to turn back to Barnabas, the door opened and Priscus walked in.
‘Hard at work, are we, on this day of rest?’ he said with a nod at the basket of stuff for Nicetas.
Barnabas threw himself down for a grovel. Martin bowed and stood away from me.
‘Maximin’s birthday was yesterday,’ I said, with an impatient glance at the heavy blue silk he was wearing. I let my mind’s eye return to those documents, so neatly and so invitingly arranged on the table behind me. All I had to do was get rid of Martin and of Priscus, and then sit down with Barnabas. ‘You’ve missed the celebration,’ I said, still looking at Priscus. I’d make sure not to be the only person in that room who was annoyed. ‘But let me give his thanks for the little whip and branding irons you sent him. He can have them when he’s older.’
Together with all other movements, scowling is something to avoid when your face is a mask of white lead with banks of gold leaf for your eyebrows. Instead, Priscus twitched his nose, which it was clear he’d been using to sniff up whatever passed with him for lunch.
‘I take it, then, you haven’t noticed how no one can get into or out of this place?’ he drawled. He looked at the window. ‘I suppose not. Your office is on the far side of the building. The Egyptians are being held on their side of the Wall. But the Greek trash has turned up in force outside the Palace, and won’t go away. Apparently, some child died of starvation, and everyone’s demanding the grain ships be unloaded.
‘It’s at times like this that a massacre can really calm things. Sadly, Nicetas has agreed instead to meet the leaders of the mob, and he wants the pair of us on hand for moral support. Since he’s got the few slaves on duty running round like blue-arsed flies on other business, he asked me to drop in and summon you.
‘Any chance we could pull you away from what I’m sure is work for the highest benefit of the Empire?’
‘You may leave us,’ I said to Barnabas. As he scurried out, visibly glad to be off the hook, I turned to Martin. ‘Get all this packed away,’ I said, pointing at the Lesser Seal. I took the whole ring of keys from my belt and handed them to him. I might give him a good talking to later in the day. Then again, I might not. He’d only insist he’d been doing me a favour. This being Sunday, he might even call in one of his conversations with God as a defence.
‘If you’ll come back with me,’ I said to Priscus, ‘you might care to fill me in on what’s happening while I get myself changed.’
As we left the room, I looked back. Martin had gathered up the whole two rows of documents and was stuffing them into the cupboard along with the Seal.
Chapter 34
Nicetas and most of his Council were already in place when we arrived at the Great Hall of Audience. I thought the eunuch would have a stroke as he took hold of Priscus and me and led us to our own golden stools in the gathering. This not being one of his days for secular business, Patriarch John was absent, so the pair of us were sitting beside each other just behind Nicetas. I heard the scrape as the golden easel was set up behind us for the icon of the Emperor. The eunuch gave one last pull on the wig of gold and silver threads that Nicetas was wearing. From where I sat, the shaft of sunlight sent down on us from the mirrors in the dome made his head look as if it had caught fire. I wondered if that was how it appeared from the front.
But there was no time for wondering anything – let alone for conversation. Once we were all seated, our faces set into required expressions, the eunuch nodded to the guards at the far end of the Hall. With a loud drawing back of bolts and a whoosh of air and a flood of bright sunshine, the twin gates leading out into the square swung open, and the great unwashed of the poor districts poured in. They flowed through the gates in their hundreds and thousands, and those first through were pushed closer and closer to the front of our platform.
I let my eyes wander over the sea of pinched, desperate faces that stretched from the double row of armed guards just below our platform right down the six hundred feet of the Hall. All that separated these creatures from the natives was a smattering of Greek and a more heterogeneous look when it came to size and colouring. But whatever their size, whatever their colouring, the urban poor are always repulsive. The reason they live in cities and are poor is because they’re trash. They’re too lazy to dig for themselves on the land, and too stupid to take advantage of the city as a market for useful services. All they contribute to city life is crime and rioting. Take that away, and the respectable can step over them as they starve in the street. But the moment they transform themselves from gathered trash into the mob, they become something professional armies might tremble to confront.
Our trouble here was that these weren’t transforming themselves into anything. Even without the revelation I’d had in the Egyptian quarter, this was plainly a directed crowd. I could see the directing agents. They took care not to stand together at the front, but were dispersed among the crowd. Even so, they were dead easy to spot – taller, cleaner, better dressed. Leontius might be dead. His idea of ‘Success in Unity’, brought about by a coalition of both sides of the mob and the possessing classes lived on. And why not? Use the grain fleet to raise the mob: scare Nicetas enough – and I could wait like a poor litigant in court for those warrants.
With three loud blows on a gong behind us, the Hall fell silent. The herald stood forward. He turned and bowed to Nicetas and the whole Council. As the local custom required, we made no acknowledgement of his bow, but sat still and silent as statues. Except we existed in three dimensions, we might as well have merged into the frieze of Augustus that stretched all round us on the walls. The herald turned away from us again to face the main body of the Hall and took in a deep breath.
‘You have been called into the presence of His Imperial Highness Nicetas,’ he began in his measured, impossibly loud voice, ‘Viceroy to His Imperial Majesty Heraclius, Caesar, Augustus, Ever-Victorious Apostle of God, that your grievances may be discussed, and that you cease to disturb the order of our city.’
As the herald finished his greeting, and a single blow on a gong confirmed its ending, there was a general coughing and shuffling at the front as the crowd parted. At the apex of the resulting gap, a big man stood, his bearded head pressed tragically down on to a bundle that he held against his chest. There was a gentle push from behind and what might have been a muttered order. Slowly, he walked forward, stopping just short of the guards. He raised his head and looked round, and then looked straight at Nicetas.
‘O Cousin of Our Lord Augustus,’ he began woodenly in an accent that wasn’t local, but might have been Cretan or even Cypriotic, ‘Most Noble Viceroy, I come before you holding the body of my only child, who has been taken from me by want of bread.’ As he spoke, he held out the bundle, and an arm with about the thickness of a broomstick hung suddenly loose. It was a dramatic effect, and gasps of horror and pity rippled backward through the crowd. Assuming it wasn’t accidental, it showed the man had been well rehearsed.
‘Oh, my dear,’ Priscus had whispered as they were all allowed in to see us, ‘if only they might have one throat!’ I’d not have put it so uncharitably myself. For all I knew, some child had died. The price of bread had risen again, and the free distribution was only enough for a whole family if the parents didn’t scoff it all themselves. Looking at this man, he could have eaten his whole family to death, plus his neighbours. But children were always dying. It didn’t need to be starvation. There was accident. There was pestilence. There was murder. There was r
ape and murder. The death bins hadn’t been emptied for a while, and suitable bodies could be pulled straight off the top. If this little bundle was from a bin, we’d never have noticed. The smell of the living would have masked the rotting of the dead. Priscus had made sure to deaden his nose before coming in. I almost wished I’d accepted a pinch of the blue powder.
But the allegedly grieving father had made his speech, and was now awaiting a reply. You expect a certain pause after someone of his quality has spoken. Immediate replies are demeaning. But this long silence was pushing things. There was a rising chatter towards the back of the Hall. Someone laughed. The herald looked nervously round again. The white paint somehow transferring itself to the lower strands of his wig, Nicetas might have been turned to stone. I could feel the nerves of the slaves behind us, as the ostrich feathers shook in their hands.
There was a sudden commotion far over to my left. I moved my eyes to see what it was. A woman was pushing her way through the crowd.
‘Bread,’ she cried, ‘in the Name of God, give us bread!’ Someone behind her joined in. Over to my right, some utterly disgusting creature with one eye now pushed his way to the front and began howling about the grain fleet. There it still was in the docks, he shrilled, stuffed with food that could keep Alexandria from going without right up to the next harvest. Other voices joined in. The grain fleet! The grain fleet! No one wanted it to leave. No one would settle for less than its immediate unloading.
This was all unscripted, and the directing agents did their best to jolly the proles back into line. But I could see from the confused looks they were darting at the platform that they’d counted on our playing along. The crowd was fast becoming a shouting, rippling thing beyond control. The line of guards that stood between it and us was more for display than use; and the doorway back into the Palace was twenty yards behind us, with stairs down from the platform. And still Nicetas sat, silent and unmoving. If we’d been sitting instead before some vast bonfire, ready to collapse and spill super-heated ashes right over us, it would have been less scary.
‘I hope you will one day find it possible, my love, to forgive me,’ Priscus said softly without moving his lips. He’d taken advantage of a relative lull the directing agents had managed, though I still had to listen hard to follow him. ‘But I seem to have forgotten to say that it wasn’t just to show off your pretty face that you were called down here. Since you’ve made yourself the expert on food supplies, Nicetas thought you might care to speak for him.’
Oh, fuck! I froze with horror. For the first time, I realised that every pair of eyes on the platform was swivelled in my direction. If this was how Priscus wanted his revenge for that birthday sneer, he was excelling himself. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was allowing one of his nostrils to twitch. If he’d been splitting his sides with laughter, it wouldn’t have shown his mood to better effect.
I swallowed and forced all thought of the Leontius documents out of my head. There was no point, though, even trying to loosen the knots in my stomach. I kept my face rigid and thought quickly. In Constantinople, I’d sat any number of times below Heraclius in the Circus, and watched him debate with the people. It could while away much of a dull afternoon to hear his whispered instructions to the herald, and see how close he was sticking to the line agreed in advance. However, if I’d done as much as anyone alive to set these lines, I’d never yet been called on to whisper the instructions myself. I looked again over the expectant mob, trying desperately to pull together the main facts of a report that hadn’t got half my attention as I drowsed by the swimming pool.
‘Tell them,’ I muttered uncertainly to the herald, ‘there is grain aplenty in storage. So long as no one demands extravagance, there is no reason why anyone should starve.’ I don’t know how the man heard me, but he did. I swallowed again and waited for him to finish. At least I didn’t need to get up and speak. The resulting stammer would have brought on disaster straight away.
‘Tell them,’ I added at last, ‘we’ll pay for the child’s funeral as an act of grace.’
And so we were in business. As often as the herald translated my words into the appropriately slow and ceremonious phrases, and the gong sounded to confirm the reply was ended, so another of the two-legged vermin before us would be put up to a reply or further demand. This was the main difference with Constantinople. There, the Circus Factions had their ritual chants to mix and match as their leaders found appropriate. Here, it was individual voices. But there was, I soon discovered, a limiting etiquette. If it was obvious a prole was using his own initiative to call out a protest or question, no one would make a fuss if it was ignored.
‘It is the Will of Caesar,’ the herald explained as we got to the matter uppermost in the thoughts of every mob, Greek or Egyptian, ‘that the grain be transported to the Imperial City that sits on the waves between Europe and Asia. As the Great King Xerxes had those waves scourged for the destruction of his boats, so equally in vain shall we contest the decision of the Lord’s Anointed. The grain ships must go. They will go.’
‘And how, then, shall the finest seed of Alexander be fed?’ someone called out from about twenty feet into the crowd. He stumbled over the unfamiliar words he’d had whispered into his ear. And ‘finest seed of Alexander’! Even now, that shrivelled husk in the Library basement could have fathered better semblances of the human race than this gathering of lice. But I’d finally got my facts and figures straight. By doubling every number in that report, and counting as already present what could be moved in from the smaller cities, I was able to create an impression of plenty in the public granaries. I’d rather have stuck to the more likely bare adequacy – more likely, that was, assuming the black fungus didn’t spread too much further. But with those ships on show to anyone who could get through the cordon into the Harbour, we needed more than claims of adequacy.
Someone came back with a detailed question about grain requisitions in the Eastern Delta. It was the sort of question that required inside knowledge. But what could surprise anyone about that? I had an answer to this that was almost the truth. Certainly, no one had the means to doubt it. We moved to another detailed question, and then to another. They came in almost logical order. My impression was that very little was said in this debate. That’s an impression, though, that every public speaker seems to have. Even taking into account how everything went through the herald, we did cover a lot. Every so often, there was a tremor in the lighting as the sun moved from one mirror to another. And a mood that had started out as at least belligerent had moved through the sceptical to the barely discontented.
‘His Highness the Viceroy will be thirty this coming Wednesday,’ I whispered. I lowered my voice still further in the new silence of the Hall. ‘Be vague about quantities, but announce a free distribution of flour – no, of fresh bread – for that day.’
That got us our first cheer of the afternoon. With every pause in the herald’s ritualised description of the grinding and kneading and baking of the corn, the acclamations rang out. I breathed an involuntary prayer that no one would ask what was on offer once the Christmas distribution had been eaten up.
No one quite did – but the meeting wasn’t yet ended. Someone over by the statue of Alexander asked if the natives were to get the same. A tricky question, this. If I said yes, there’d certainly be nothing left for later distribution. And this might lead to the question I wanted to avoid. If I said no – I thought of what I’d seen earlier in the Egyptian quarter. It felt as if every pair of eyes in the Hall that could see past the herald was focused on me.
‘Tell them the natives get whatever is theirs by custom,’ I breathed so softly, the herald had to sway back a little to catch the words. The exact meaning of what I’d said could depend on circumstances. ‘But announce a three-seventh subsidy on the price of beer to go with the free bread.
‘Oh’ – I thought quickly about another of the reports I’d had read out to me: we needed something to focus attention on
the absolute present – ‘and announce a distribution of one pitcher of oil to every man who presents himself today at dusk before the Church of the Virgin.’ If I worked the warehouse slaves through the night, the natives could have theirs first thing in the morning. For the moment, though, it could be made to seem a Greek privilege.
And that swung them round. As the cheers died away and the gates at the far end of the Hall were pulled open, the herald was crying out in a voice of bright cheerfulness that everyone should go and get ready for the Evening Service, where he could give thanks for the ever-flowing bounty of the Imperial government.
‘Well,’ said Nicetas, stretching his arms as he moved for the first time that afternoon, ‘I think that went rather better than expected.’
The Master of the Works agreed. Another Council member praised my mastery of the relevant facts. Another began some turgid paean to my ‘matchless eloquence’. No one bothered asking what might have happened if the landowners had really wanted a riot. Without turning, I could hear Priscus sniffing up one of his milder powders.
We were alone in the Hall. The herald had jollied nearly everyone out, and the guards had pushed the few lingerers into the street. It had been a fine sound as they locked and barred the gates. I loosened my sweaty clothes and allowed what passed for fresh air to get at my body.
‘Oh, Alaric,’ Nicetas continued with a look away from me, ‘you will be pleased to know that I am minded to seal the orders for the grain fleet to depart. His Holiness the Patriarch has finally decided that the day after tomorrow will be our time of greatest blessing. It will be the day of Saint Lupus. He was very good to Heraclius and me when we set out from Carthage. I still have the relic with me that we used to calm the storm on our second day.’
The Blood of Alexandria Page 25