‘Let His Will be done,’ came the response in cracked unison from the few voices that still could be understood at all.
We stood at last in a room deeper beneath the Prefecture. If low enough for the ceiling to brush my topmost hair, it was otherwise too large for the one lamp set into a recess by the door to do more than throw vague shadows beyond its pool of light. I could hear the gurgling rush of the flood waters through the stone grilles in the floor. With the waters came a chill breeze that made the smell almost bearable by comparison with what had been so far.
‘Do you know why I’ve had you separated from your companions and brought here?’ Priscus opened in conversational tone. He sat himself carefully on a small table that shifted under his weight, and looked at the three tightly bound figures who lay on the floor about a yard from his crossed feet. They could move their heads for looking around. Otherwise, they could do no more than shuffle like serpents on that cold and damp and sick-makingly dirty floor.
They were young men, I could see as my eyes adjusted to the still deeper gloom of this place – very young men. They certainly weren’t my age. If any of them had seen seventeen, I’d have been surprised. Obviously natives, they had the good build and clean look of the higher classes in any nation. Except for the different cut of their clothes, they might have been Greek. One of them looked away as Priscus leaned forward. His mouth moved wordlessly as if revealing some chant or prayer going again and again through his mind.
‘Your companions are low creatures,’ Priscus said again. ‘Their usefulness to me was limited. Before I have my afternoon shit, some of them will be dead. The others will be praying for death. This they might receive today. Or it might be tomorrow, depending on the mood of the assistants who have been set to work on them.’
Priscus stopped and recrossed his legs. He looked at his fingernails. He spoke with the calm authority of a man giving instructions to his secretary. Unblinking, the young men stared back. I wanted to take Martin by the hand and run away as quickly as our legs would carry us. I’d recognised some of the dim shapes outside the pool of light. All that kept me there was the knowledge of what I’d have to pass through before regaining the light of day – and, I suppose, the knowledge that Priscus would never let me forget what, if I remained, I might yet contrive to blot out.
‘You, however, are persons of far greater quality,’ he went on, his voice still bordering on the friendly. ‘You were not intended to fall into my hands. But you have, and you must accept that the Divine Providence has frowned on the plot conceived against the Empire by your elders – a plot of which I am assured you have far better knowledge than your companions.
‘Let me tell you now that you can make this easy for us all. Do you see that fat man over there by the door?’
I heard Martin drop something from his shaking hands.
‘If you give what I think are truthful answers to my questions, he will write them down. You will then be transferred to a more salubrious confinement than this until your evidence has been considered in court. You will then be released unhurt. If you incriminate any persons under whose will you would normally have inherited, your rights will be respected despite any confiscations that are made.
‘You have my word in this. You may not know me, but I am a person with full authority to make this promise. And I am sure you know the Senator Alaric. You will surely know that he is always good for his word.’ He broke off and looked at me.
I looked down at the young men. I was sure I’d seen one of them in a shop somewhere. It was hard to tell in these surroundings. I swallowed and tried to get some moisture into my throat.
‘Do as he says,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. ‘Answer his questions and I promise you your lives. I promise this in the name of the Emperor.’
Silence. One of the young men looked up at me. His dark eyes glittered scared in the lamplight. I stared back and pleaded in silence for him not to be so stupid. Priscus had involved me in his promise. That meant I could enforce it on him, should he feel inclined to break it. The young man looked away. The other two didn’t so much as move their heads in my direction.
Priscus stood up and stretched his arms. He stood over the young man who’d looked at me. His voice echoed oddly in that low but extended room as he spoke slowly and with exaggerated clarity.
‘I will give you one final chance before we start some Greek lessons of my own. I must warn you, though, I am running out of time even before I run out of patience.’ He went to the door and tapped three times on the inside. He stood back as it opened. It was like watching slaves bring in the dining things for a banquet. There were lamps. There was a brazier, well heaped with glowing charcoals. There was even one of those little travelling desks that officials would carry about on their errands. Its inner compartment was stocked with waxed tablets and pens. Priscus pointed to it and looked at Martin.
The light and heat excepted, nothing more was needed. I’d been right about the dim shapes. When you’ve seen one set of torture instruments, you don’t fail to recognise more of the same. There were the spiked cabinets, the tables with their leather restraints and man-shaped depressions, the kettles for heating oil or water, or containing the corrosive fluids. On the walls were the usual racks of knives and pincers and hooked gloves.
I hardly need mention the rack. None of these places would be complete without one. Here, it had what amounted to pride of place. In all, it was about ten feet long, a fixed bar at one end with leather thongs attached, an elaborately geared roller at the other, also with leather thongs attached. I looked away from the instruments. I found myself looking instead at the two craftsmen of pain who’d stayed when the lamp bearers had withdrawn. They might have been brothers. Both were short creatures with heavily muscled arms and shaven heads, both obscenely fat, both with faces that flitted from moment to moment between the ecstatic and the totally blank. But if they had been brothers, I knew well enough they’d have had to be part of a family that had its members in every city of the Empire. Whatever your appearance when you take on that job, that is how in no time at all you end up looking. Naked apart from their stained loincloths, they stood bowed and respectful before Priscus.
‘It is my custom,’ he opened again – still calm, still bordering on the friendly – ‘to give those whom I must question a tour of these places. An explanation of how these various instruments work can have a most loosening effect on the tongue. You will appreciate, however, that time grows ever shorter. I will therefore ask you once more and once only – do as I ask of you.’
‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ From what may have been the oldest of the three, the familiar slogan rang out in Egyptian. ‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ he said again, now louder. The other two joined in, defiant in unity. They varied this with something I hadn’t heard before, but contained the Egyptian word for Greeks.
Priscus stood looking down at them, waiting for them to run out of energy or defiance. He waited in the silence that followed. The silence continued. He shrugged. He turned to the torturers.
‘We’ll start with the rack,’ he said quietly.
The torturers bowed.
‘I want’ – his finger moved uncertainly over the three – ‘that one.’ His finger stopped and pointed firmly at the one who’d been looking up at me.
Chapter 38
‘Priscus,’ I said, breaking the tension in that torture chamber. I took a step forward. He turned his head towards me. I wasn’t sure what I’d wanted to say. Before I could think of anything, he’d raised his arm.
‘Don’t get involved, Alaric,’ he said in Latin. He smiled and pointed at me to stand back against the wall. ‘You know the formalities of lawful authority don’t count in treason cases. Whatever I do now I do with the full weight of the Empire behind me. That one,’ he repeated to the torturers.
They’d already got him to his feet. Now, they didn’t bother untying hi
m, but just cut him out of the ropes. They cut him out of his clothes and even his shoes, dumping the ruined things in a heap.
‘The tears of Alexander,’ he began with a squeak that trailed off with the dawning of genuine fear.
Naked, he looked even younger than I’d thought. He tried turning his head towards the others. But naked and glistening in the now more than adequate light, his body was arched backward over the rack. They were all stupid, spoiled brats. They’d spent what little time they’d lived among fawning slaves and tradesmen. Their fathers’ money had bought their way through every scrape and problem. They’d somehow got themselves mixed up in the firing of the grain fleet without once thinking through what they were doing. Everything so far since their arrest had been just an elaborate game. I was sure they expected their fathers to arrive any moment in that dungeon, purseloads of gold to scatter about and turn Priscus jolly with its magic touch.
But you didn’t play with Priscus – not when he had you in his power; not perhaps ever.
‘Such freshness, such youth, such perfection of form!’ Priscus crooned softly as he leaned over the tethered boy. He ran a finger lightly down the line of the chest, over the stomach, to rest just above the groin. The boy was fastened by his ankles to the fixed bar at one end of the rack, by his wrists to the geared roller at the other end. He’d started babbling and pleading as the roller had gone round to its first click, lifting his taut body off the table.
‘Too late, my beauty, too late,’ Priscus said. ‘Oh, had you only taken my offer – such golden times we might have had. But say farewell now to beauty and freshness. Say farewell to all that might have been. Say farewell to hope itself.’ He turned to one of the torturers. ‘Take it up to number seven,’ he said.
‘But, My Lord,’ the man began.
‘I know the working of your machine as well as you do,’ Priscus replied. ‘When I say number seven, I mean number seven. Now do it – and take it straight there.’
I don’t like the rack. I’ve always hated it. But you don’t normally see it taken far up. For actual punishment, there are the more visual and diverse torments. The idea of racking is to get information. The first few clicks of its geared roller are frightening. The next is painful if prolonged. The next is immediately excruciating as joints, mostly in the arms and legs, are pulled to separating point. After that, it’s the popping of dislocated joints, and the ripping of ligaments, and then the snapping of the weaker bones. Long before the flesh tears and limbs are pulled loose from the body, long before the splashing of blood and the partial recoil of stretched limbs, there’s no recovery from the damage. It’s then a matter of swollen, jellied limbs that never move again, or of paralysis if the weakest point under pressure turns out to be the spine.
But I’d never seen the rack taken beyond the second or third clicks. I say that I watched. In truth, I shut my eyes the moment the poles were inserted into the slotted wheel and those sweaty, chattering creatures leaned forward. What I couldn’t blot out was the transformation of a human scream into something like the squeal of a butchered pig. It gave out when all the air had been forced out of the lungs, and nothing could be taken in.
It was a quieter, more sobbing, but still animalistic cry as the straps were suddenly relaxed, and now, at the beginning of his living death, the boy was thrown back on to the floor. He landed with his arms and legs at impossible angles. I forced myself to shift position without falling over, and turned to Martin. Eyes screwed shut, he’d pushed his head down on to his chest. He was praying under his breath in Celtic. I reached out to bring him back to the present and get his writing materials ready.
‘Not yet,’ Priscus said gently. He stepped away from the rack and looked down at what he’d created. He pointed at the fatter of the torturers. ‘We both know the custom,’ he said. He looked down at the boy. ‘But let’s have none of this modern coyness. Do it here and do it now.’
I’d thought we’d already neared the bottom of the scale of horror. As I stood, watching this gross and monstrously prolonged rape, I realised that Priscus had got us so far only halfway down the scale. I won’t try describing what I had to witness. Even after seventy-four years, it’s enough to freeze the blood. Martin continued praying throughout. I wished I could have joined him. As it was, I made myself think about my price ratios, and how these might correlate in turn with solar eclipses, until I could almost see the numbers dance together.
‘Get that thing out of here,’ Priscus said at last. He kicked hard at the smaller of those obese monsters, who wasn’t happy with first helpings, but was again thrusting into and pulverising the now unconscious boy. He rolled off on to his back, and looked dreamily at the deflating, bloody thing between his legs. Then, like a bow that springs back to its original shape, his face took on its normal, moronic blankness. ‘Take it from cell to cell outside,’ Priscus added, ‘and let the prisoners have their pleasure. If it still breathes after two days, throw it to the dogs.
‘Oh, and do take out the teeth,’ he added as the door was about to close. ‘Don’t bother with it here. But do make sure no one in the cells is inconvenienced.’
The door was closed. The babble from outside of expectant grunts and shrill cries could no longer be heard. Priscus stared down at the two remaining boys. They’d sobbed and screamed at the opening of the horrors. They’d rolled about in a kind of frenzy. I could smell that they’d shat themselves. Since then, they’d lain, shocked and exhausted, on their backs. Now Priscus was giving them his full attention. He pointed at the larger one who’d started the defiant chanting.
‘Get that one on his knees,’ he rapped at the one torturer left in the room. ‘I want his tongue pulled out.’
‘No – please, sir, no!’ the boy screamed. He shuffled desperately forward. He licked at the boot Priscus had planted on the ground nearest his face.
‘But do tell me, what use is there in a tongue that doesn’t speak as directed?’ Priscus asked, pulling his foot sharply back and bending so low his face was almost level with the boy’s. ‘Is it possible that you might now remember a little of the Greek you surely learned at school?’
It was possible their Greek was among the best Alexandria had to offer. Unable to keep their voices below a bubbling screech, they competed at denouncing everyone and everything in their minds. They denounced their parents. They denounced each other. They denounced the wretch who’d just been broken on the rack. They’d have denounced Christ himself if Priscus hadn’t silenced them.
‘I want the truth,’ he said, now friendly again, ‘and I want nothing but the truth. Anything more will only slow me, and I haven’t time to be slowed. Now, my dear young things, I know the truth when I hear it. And I do know how to check what I’m told. Anything less than the truth – anything more than the truth – and I’ll have the pair of you on that rack.’
Martin snapped his pen several times as he scratched at the tablets. Try as he might, Priscus couldn’t impose any order of time on the new denunciations. But I couldn’t doubt they were true. When Martin had finished copying it all into the right form, the conspiracy and its authors would be revealed plain enough even for a fair trial.
Back in the sunlight of the street, I gave way to nature and vomited against one of the Prefecture columns. The single guard who was on duty by the main entrance twisted his face as if to scowl at me. But he saw the purple border on my robe, and went back to his duties, which seemed to involve looking ferocious at everyone walking too close by the building.
Priscus still hadn’t washed off the smoke and dirt of the night. But he was rubbing at his face in the reflection of a glazed window.
‘Do feel free with my blue pills,’ he said, nodding down at the satchel he’d dumped on the pavement. ‘They can work miracles on the promptings of a tender heart.’
I ignored him and leaned forward again. There was another splatter of thin liquid on to the marble. We’d already sent Martin on ahead to the Palace. Prayer, and the certainty that – howe
ver it might have been in my own case – there was nothing in the world he could have done to prevent anything he’d witnessed, had brought back his composure almost at once. I was the one who was slowing things.
‘Do I disgust you that much?’ Priscus asked. From his tone, he could have been asking if the gash on his forehead might frighten passers-by. I stood against the pillar and looked at the crowds. There were fewer persons of quality carried past than was normal for the district and the time of day. The middling people still about were unusually subdued. Most of the shops were open, but with fewer goods stacked up outside them.
‘I don’t expect thanks,’ Priscus said with a change of tone. His voice was now all quiet, if defensive, reason. ‘But you’ll not deny it was a useful morning down there. You’d have spent days – admit it – in genteel questioning. You’d have teased out contradictions and impossibilities in the answers. You’d have tested hypotheses against facts. You’d have been finishing your report just as the main riots were subsiding. I got the truth in less time than it takes to paint my face. And it won’t just be a dozen arrest warrants you’ll get Nicetas to sign when he’s shown Martin’s formal account of those confessions. There will be no one left to oppose your land law.
‘There it is, my darling. I’ll bet you never thought I’d be the one to unblock four months of prevarication. Even without the Great Augustus there to get in your way, you’d have done worse than I could against the Persians. For all I opposed it in Constantinople, I could have got your land law through before I’d found my way about the Palace.’ He took up his satchel and waved it under my nose.
I looked away, still unable to speak.
‘Alaric,’ he said again. I thought for a moment he’d pat me on the back. Luckily, he decided against. ‘Alaric, I know you don’t like my methods. But I gave that boy more chances than the law requires. And I may have got information that will snuff out this planned insurrection before it has time to start. I may have saved countless lives. Bearing in mind the unexpected scale of this conspiracy, even you might agree that I’ve saved the Empire.’
The Blood of Alexandria Page 28