The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  Thoughts of the ‘partial exception’ brought on a faint stirring of unease. This wouldn’t ripen into another panic attack. But thoughts of that in itself deepened the unease. The two were obviously connected. If the one wasn’t continually simmering away, the other wouldn’t keep boiling over. I’d have to do something about the causes of the unease. But this was easier said than done. I turned my thoughts back to the safer matter of Nicetas and his nearly certain attempt at a joke. Should I take it as a good-humoured joke? Probably not. There was little humour of any kind about the Emperor’s cousin. None of it was good.

  The chairs had now hurried past and I set off again at a quickish stride. I passed the square in front of the law courts. The morning crowd of lawyers and their clients was fast dwindling away. The Monday property auction in the square was nearly ended. I counted five men – probably Jews or Armenians – putting up with the sun for a closing bargain. There was a general smell in the air of charcoal and of roasting meat. Unless you fancied a week of the shits, eating from the public stalls was off limits. But it was a fine smell and it reminded me I’d had nothing since breakfast, and little then.

  My quick stride didn’t last beyond the Belisarius Memorial, which blocks the whole centre of the road. Unless there’s a procession or the chariots are racing, you don’t normally see paupers in the better parts of Constantinople. The police have orders to keep out all but a few licensed and almost sanitised beggars. By day, the poor cluster in the dumpier parts of the City. By night, they sleep or swarm in vast and stinking slums even the authorities barely know. You don’t welcome these creatures into your own world. They’re ugly. They’re light-fingered or plain violent. They smell. They carry the seeds of contagion about their unwashed clothes and bodies. Once past the massive statue of Belisarius, though, I found the way was blocked by a loose crowd of the unwashed that must have been a hundred strong.

  ‘God bless the Lord Nicetas!’ someone shrilled at me. The call was taken up in a ragged chant. ‘My God preserve the Lord Nicetas,’ he called again, ‘who feeds the posterity of Romulus and the heroes of old.’ I stepped out of his way and was almost knocked sideways by a wagon piled high with food. Drawn by white oxen, this had lurched, without warning, from one of the smaller side streets. There were four others behind it.

  ‘Blessings on the Caesar Nicetas and his bread!’ someone cackled on my left. I glanced round. A woman had left the throng and come over as if to intimidate me into agreement. I looked at her and tried not to shrink back in horror. You couldn’t possibly have said how old she was. Mouth open in a dark and toothless hole, her face said extreme old age. Her uncovered breasts hung down in the most disgusting manner, and one had been honeycombed from within by a cancer. But her matted, lice-ridden hair was still black. She opened her mouth wider for a howl of triumphant laughter. ‘Emperor Nicetas won’t let us starve!’ she screeched. I almost believed she would step closer and try to touch me. I stared at the black and red mottling that ran upward from her wrists and shuddered. Woman or not, I would have gone for my sword. But a man with one eye and weeping sores on the visible part of his chest now appeared beside her and led her back into an army of living refuse that was growing from one moment to the next.

  No wonder those chairs had been racing each other away from this lot. The smell and general danger aside, you don’t hang about when a mob starts talking treason.

  Chapter 8

  However, the poor hadn’t been assembled here to talk treason. I’d no sooner gone round the food wagons when I nearly crashed into the seditionary theatre that was the gathering’s real purpose. Two men in reasonably clean robes had taken their places on very high chairs placed about five yards apart. They were trying to look grand. In the eyes of their audience, they probably succeeded. I think I’d caught them close to the beginning of their act.

  ‘So good, don’t you think, Alexius,’ the elder of them struck up in an affected voice, ‘that My Lord Nicetas understands the duties of his class?’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more, my dearest Constans,’ came the reply in a louder and still more affected voice. ‘It’s all so very unlike another person I could mention.’ One look at these two troublemakers and I’d guessed what they were about. I gritted my teeth and waited for the inevitable.

  It came from a scabby dwarf who’d been darting in and out of the crowd. ‘So unlike that piece of barbarian shite the Emperor’s allowed to steal our bread,’ he gasped. There was a ragged cheer from everyone who’d heard this, and a louder cheer as the words were carried back and repeated for those who hadn’t heard them.

  Yes, I’d caught this at the beginning. Even as I tried to back away and continue about my business, the crowd shrank to a dense mass about the seditionaries. This left plenty of room for me to continue on my way. But Nicetas – more diligent, I might say, than in any of his official duties – was having me slandered to the mob. I’d be silly not to stay awhile and find out his line of attack. Cautiously, I pushed up the brim of my hat and looked over the heads of the stunted, bandy-legged poor to where the seditionaries were settling into their act.

  ‘It may have been wrong of him to stop the people’s bread,’ Alexius announced in a tone you might almost have taken as a defence of the Lord Senator Alaric. He paused and cleared his throat. ‘But it was surely unpardonable to say there were too many of us in the City, and that not even a hundred of us were the equal of one dirty peasant digging in the fields.’ This got a loud groan, followed by general denunciations of Alaric the Barbarian who’d halved the free distributions of food to the City poor, and who plainly wanted to end them altogether. You can be sure no one bothered complaining about the new entrance fee I’d ordered for the public baths. If one of these animals had so much as washed his face since Easter, I’d have been surprised.

  Constans took a sip of wine and looked in my direction. I wasn’t the only person of quality lurking beyond the crowd. But it wouldn’t do for him to recognise the man he’d been hired to preach against. I pulled my hat down a little further.

  Still looking at me, Constans laughed nervously, before going back about his business. ‘I tell you, that barbarian is a snake in the bosom of the Empire. He isn’t a Greek like us. He isn’t even a Latin or a Syrian or Egyptian. He’s a barbarian immigrant. He hadn’t been here a quarter of an hour before he’d wormed his way into the Emperor’s confidence. He’s been turning everything upside down ever since. He’s doing to us from the inside what his ancestors did as invaders to the Western Provinces. Unless someone stops him, he won’t stop till he’s pulled us all down to his own level.’

  ‘Come now, my dearest friend,’ said Alexius, when the chorus of hawking and spitting had died away. ‘I’m sure the boy means well. It’s just that he doesn’t understand our ways. He’s read a few books and thinks he knows everything. When he finally grows up, he’ll surely accept the rightness of ways that were always good enough for our ancestors.’

  ‘Means well?’ Constans shouted in mock outrage. ‘You’re too trusting, Alexius. How do you think he pays the bills on that palace he was given? I tell you, he’s on the take. Where else is all the money going? What’s he done with all the taxes that come in from the provinces? They don’t go on us, the Roman People, that’s to be sure. What happened to the olive oil ration?’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you even remember that?’ Loud groans. More repeating of the words. More groans.

  ‘Never mind the oil,’ Alexius broke in, still sounding even-handed. ‘But I’ll grant you have a point. What really matters is the army and there’s been precious little money spent on that. If the Lord Nicetas had been given proper support, we’d never have lost Syria to the Persians. The Empire wouldn’t have been cut in half. We wouldn’t now be facing an invasion of Egypt.’

  Oh, the fucking injustice of that! I really had to struggle not to kick my way through the crowd, to pull Alexius off his chair and wring his lying seditionary neck. But I did control myself. I also kept my face down when Consta
ns called me a yellow-haired catamite, and someone with a Cypriotic accent accused me of conjuring headless demons in my palace to let loose in the City.

  Yes, the gross fucking injustice! I’d put off the currency reform so money could be found for the defence of Syria. As if from nowhere, I’d squeezed out as much money for that as had been lavished in the old days on the combined land and sea operation to recover Africa from the Vandals. I’d given Nicetas the best-equipped army we’d sent out in a generation – and to hold a perfectly defensible province. The duffer had fallen into a trap an idiot child might have spotted and, a thousand years after Alexander had brought it under Greek dominion, the Persians were again masters of Syria.

  One way or another, I’d have Nicetas for this. If I got any say in the matter, serving in a public toilet would be a soft option for the useless, blame-shifting bastard. For a moment, I thought of pulling my hat off and giving these flecks of stinking gutter scum a lecture on how to save an empire run down by a century of misgovernment. You can imagine this didn’t involve piling still more taxes on those who grew food for the Empire and provided it with soldiers. But I kept my mouth shut. Someone in the crowd now began bleating how I’d used the whole Imperial budget to make solid gold statues of myself in the nude. If true, that would still have been a better use of the taxpayers’ money than spending it on food to shove down his worthless throat.

  Constans struck up again, now suggesting a petition to the Emperor when he finally decided to come back from consulting the ‘holy fathers’ in Cyzicus. They could ask for me to be dragged from my ‘demon-haunted’ palace and blinded and stuffed away in a monastery. There was a long groan of agreement from the crowd and a woman began shrieking as if about to give birth. Alexius disagreed, merely suggesting I should be taken back to whatever northern forest was my true home. There, I could be let loose to run about with the other howling savages. That got him a raucous laugh. I didn’t like the repeated talk of demons. I’d speak with Samo, when I got home, about another change of the locks. I watched the two seditionaries smile at each other. You couldn’t deny they were earning their fee for the day.

  They now decided they’d finished earning it. As the crowd drifted in the direction of the food wagons, I walked slowly across to the wide steps that led down to Imperial Square. This journey was already taking longer than it should. I needed a short cut to the city walls.

  Dignity almost recovered, I stood on the topmost step and took my hat off. I fanned myself and put it back on. The breeze was settling into a regular wind and the afternoon might not be quite so sweltering as I’d thought it would be. I looked at my boots. They could do with a light brushing but I’d avoided stepping in any of the filth that drops from the bodies of the poor. I’ll not say my spirits were rising but it was a fine day for being out of doors. Nicetas was trying to do me over. Good seditionaries don’t come cheap. He’d spent a fortune on a cup that would be an excuse for one of Leander’s leaden epigrams. But I’d more than match that. I’d send the cup off to the mint and put notice of this into The Gazette. That would put a sour look on his face.

  But all that could wait. Lucas was waiting outside the walls, and with evidence that might let me save still more of the taxpayers’ money on salaries and pensions. I prepared to hurry down into Imperial Square.

  ‘Might Your Honour be a gambling man?’ someone asked in the wheedling tone of the poor. I paid no attention and looked up at the sky – not a cloud in sight, but the gathering shift to a northern wind would soon justify my blue woollen cloak. ‘Go on, Sir – I can see it’s your lucky day!’ I looked round at someone with the thin and wiry build of the working lower classes. He looked under the brim of my hat and laughed. ‘For you, Sir, I’ll lay special odds,’ he said. ‘You drop any coin you like in that bowl down there.’ I didn’t follow his pointed finger. I’d already seen the disused fountain thirty feet below in Imperial Square. He put his face into a snarling grin. ‘Even a gold coin you can drop, Sir. The ten foot of green slime don’t count for nothing with my boy. He’ll jump right off this wall beside you, and get it out for you.’

  I was about to tell him to bugger off and die, when I looked at the naked boy who’d come out from behind a column. I felt a sudden stirring of lust. Like all the City’s lower class, he was a touch undersized and there was a slight lack of harmony in the proportion of his legs to his body. For all this, his tanned skin was rather fetching. Give him a bath and . . .

  Oh dear! He’d no sooner got me thinking of how much to offer, when he swept the hair from his eyes and parted very full lips to show two rows of rotten teeth. The front ones were entirely gone. The others were blackened stumps. Such a shame! Such a waste! So little beauty there was already in this world – and why did so much of that have to be spoiled? I could have thrashed the boy’s owner for not making him clean every day with a chewing stick. I stood up.

  His owner hadn’t noticed. ‘Oh, Sir, Sir!’ he cried, getting directly in my way and waving his arms to stop me. ‘Sir, the deal is this. You throw in a coin. If the boy gets it out, you pay me five times your coin. If he can’t find it, I pay you five times. If he breaks his neck or drowns, I pay you ten times.’ He laughed and pointed at the boy again. I didn’t look, but wondered if I might make an exception. Bad teeth are bad teeth – but the rest of him was pushing towards excellent.

  But I shook my head. I could fuck anything I wanted later in the day. Until then, duty was calling me again. Trying not to show I was running away, I hurried down the steps.

  ‘You’ve a nerve, showing your face in public!’ the old man croaked accusingly. I’d been aware of him – of him and all the others – as I hurried across the square. My main attention, though, had been given to an epigram about me scrawled on a statue plinth. It was in better Greek than your standard graffito and involved a play on words that joined the name Alaric with the use of powdered lark wing as an emetic. ‘Not content with stealing half my pension, you’re also putting both my boys out of work.’ He stopped in front of me and stamped his foot angrily.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Simeon,’ I said, taking my hat off in deference to his years.

  ‘And if you had seen me,’ he snapped, ‘you’d have been back up those steps before I could say “knife”.’ There was a murmur of agreement from all the other old wrecks in the square. I sighed. Would I ever get outside the city walls?

  But let me explain. Imperial Square takes its name from the ministry buildings that surround it on three sides – either that, or from the group of statues at its western end. This is a complete set of emperors, beginning with Julius Caesar and culminating with Anastasius, whose reign, a century before, had seen the last big wave of city beautification. The statues were ordered in a tight spiral, with Anastasius at the outermost point. The series could easily have continued – Justin, Justinian, Justin, Tiberius, Maurice, Phocas – who, like the other tyrants, would simply have had an unmarked plinth – and then Heraclius. But the money or will had run out and the series stopped with Anastasius.

  From the depression it had worn in the paving stones, the ritual of the aged could easily date from the time of Anastasius. The idea was to begin with Anastasius and, touching every plinth in turn, get round the outside of the spiral to Julius Caesar in the smallest number of breaths. The lap was then to be repeated on the inside on the spiral back to Anastasius. When there was no chariot racing or executions to watch, you could lay bets on who would get round the fastest. Sometimes, the square would be filled to bursting with the idlest sort of rich. Mostly, though, it was just a few dozen old men, some walking briskly, others staggering. No doubt those staggering had once been brisk and, assuming they got that far, the brisk would eventually stagger. So it had been going on since time out of mind despite the sun or rain or snow. So, if not quite to the end of time, it would continue.

  And I’d brought it to a pause. Simeon took a step forward. The rest of the aged formed into a decrepit mob behind him. ‘Is it him? Is
it him?’ one of them was crying insistently. ‘Is it the one the Devil has sent to destroy us?’ I could have taken to my heels. But I’d pulled my hat off. The least I could do was be polite.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said earnestly, ‘you have been repeatedly assured that the halving of salaries and pensions will be balanced by payment in the new and purer coinage. With the late fall in prices, I really don’t believe anyone will be worse off than before.’ That wasn’t true – unless renegotiated, most rents would effectively double – and it got me a low jeer, followed by a moaning, varied chorus of disapproval that was more genteel only in its expression than the roasting I’d had from the vermin who clustered round Nicetas. From more than one mouth, I caught the word ‘barbarian.’ I pretended not to hear this and waved my hat for silence. ‘Look, my dear friends, we’re at war,’ I went on in my reasonable tone. ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’ I caught Simeon’s eye, and put a faint edge into my voice. ‘Besides, your two sons are among the lucky third,’ I said to him directly. ‘They still have their positions.’ I smiled and waited for the threat to sink in. And it was more than a threat. Now I’d been allowed to make a proper start, even Heraclius was asking how much of the administration he’d inherited from the past was needed. I’d been looking at the Food Control Office for two years – you could double manpower in the home fleet if you shut down that gigantic waste of space.