The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  ‘My steward has his orders,’ I said, avoiding the main question. She frowned slightly, before coming forward to let me help her from her under tunic. Naked, she sat down beside me. She put up a hand to arrange hair that she realised too late was no longer there. She frowned again and seemed about to ask another pointed question. Beyond a certain level, the real purpose of luxury is to intimidate. I couldn’t doubt it had failed with Antonia.

  I thought whether I should put my arm about her. I decided against. ‘Until I can puzzle out today’s events,’ I explained, ‘I do think you’ll be safest inside these walls. Your own living and sleeping quarters will be ready by morning. You can send off to your lodgings for anything you want here with you.’

  She lay back on the bed and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. ‘There’s nothing I particularly want,’ she said. ‘I’d like to send some messages. But I’m sure you’ll urge me against that.’ She pulled at the silk covers. ‘Can I take it that the slaves you assign me aren’t the talkative sort?’

  I got into the bed with her and moved a few inches towards her. ‘This is a household of many secrets and of many corresponding layers,’ I said. ‘Until further notice, most of the slaves will know you as Antony. Those who attend on you as Antonia will say nothing.’ I snuggled closer and wondered if sex was out of the question. Even as I reached for her naked body, though, she was asleep. I moved towards her and took her in my arms. Without any sense of change, fierce and joyous lust had given way to an odd happiness. I buried my face in the salty taste of her hair. Before I could fall to wondering about all that had happend, I was myself asleep.

  Bathed in sweat, heart still pounding from the horror of my dream, I woke in a completely dark silence that suggested the dawn couldn’t be far away. I was still holding Antonia. She’d moved in her sleep and her own arms were tight about my chest. I shut my eyes and willed myself to sleep. But, though I’d had one of those nightmares where the details fade like the morning frost in Kent, enough sense remained of its overpowering fear and helplessness to keep me awake.

  I untangled myself from Antonia and went over to wash myself in scented water. I caught a flicker of light from the balcony window. I slipped through the curtains and pulled the glazed door open. I went out into the renewed chill of night and looked down over the Triumphal Way. No longer celebrating, the mob was still far below, still blocking the entire width of the street before my ceremonial entrance. Resembling nothing so much in size and shape as animal droppings, I could see the dark bodies, stretched out and sleeping beside the dying bonfires. In the morning, these parodies of the human form would shamble off to whatever they did by day – or, if they didn’t wake in time, would be flogged about their business by the Prefect’s deputy. Shortly after, I’d have it formally announced that I was alive. What details my announcement would carry I hadn’t yet decided. There was no doubt, however, it would set off a chorus of lamentation in every district where the inhabitants didn’t work for their daily bread.

  I leaned on the pitted marble and looked across the dark city to where it merged into the greater darkness of the sea. The street lighting had long since been left to burn itself out. But, here and there, in high towers or in the windows of palaces as immense as my own, there were the bright points that indicated some late activity. I breathed in and smiled. Somewhere out to sea, Shahin might by now have drunk himself to sleep. No doubt, he’d remit all the floggings and impalings he’d promised his crew in return for their silence over his failed capture of the Great King’s only successful enemy. I thought about Simon. I had told myself to keep it all out of mind till morning. But, as I stood up and walked back inside, I could feel a connecting thread begin to run itself through some of the facts of the past day. I listened to the slow and regular breathing that came from my bed. Thinking about anything at all should be left to the morning.

  I was looking at the dim shape of the bed, when I heard a familiar cough.

  ‘I was in no doubt you’d survive the murder attempt,’ a voice called out from behind a screen. ‘It must have been a close shave, though, if, having brought a woman back, you just fall asleep and babble half the night in what sounded like Syriac but wasn’t.’ I hurried across to the bed. Eyes still closed, Antonia had rolled over to my side.

  ‘Don’t worry, dearest Alaric,’ the voice said again. ‘The girl’s fast asleep. You should be more concerned about the inability of your barbarian sots to notice the man who broke into our palace this evening.’ He laughed and there was the loud click of a box closing. ‘I kept him alive a while for questioning. Among much else that made fuck all sense, he spoke about a cup. Would you believe he was here to steal a cup from you? ‘I regret that the only place I could hide the body was under your bed. But please don’t think ill of poor old Uncle Priscus for that.’ He sniffed up whatever powder he’d chosen and followed this with a long groan of ecstasy.

  ‘Do tell me about this cup,’ he went on at last. ‘I really am all ears.’

  Chapter 18

  It may be age, or opium, or the nature of what I’m trying to explain, that requires this to be a narrative of digressions, and that these often involve abrupt shifts of time. However, Antonia won’t mind if she’s left sleeping, unmolested, in my big and wondrously soft bed. Priscus can nurse his box of drugs. The mob – well, let the mob drowse over dying bonfires, and enjoy the immemorial privilege of making trouble: I’m not revealing much if I say it was a privilege with a longer past than future.

  You, my Dear Reader, I’ll simply assure that this is the last of my deviations. So let us leave the world of 615 – the year when Alaric the Farsighted brought in the new silver coinage – and go back two and a half years. We go back to the December of 612, a week after I had returned with Priscus and various other companions from nine months of adventuring in the outer provinces of the Empire.

  ‘Oh, come on, Martin,’ I said. ‘It’s stopped raining and we’ll be ever so early if we carry on by chair.’ I jumped down and, avoiding the other traffic, hurried across the road into Imperial Square. I looked up at the sky. We’d had heavy rain since dawn and Martin had insisted on a covered chair – ‘You can’t think of turning up on foot!’ he’d said, aghast. But the clouds were now rolling by. We might even have a spot of sunshine to light up proceedings in the Senate House.

  I turned back to Martin. ‘As your former master and as your only friend,’ I said firmly, ‘I command you to climb out of that chair and walk for one mile with me. Our fine outer clothes can stay in the chair. So can your writing things. That’s quite enough weight for the poor slaves to carry uphill. Now, you come over here and take a little health-giving exercise.’

  The oiled curtains twitched and then parted. Slowly, and with a glance at the sky and a hurt look at me, Martin waited for one of the carrying slaves to bring round the little steps that were for the use of invalids and the aged. Avoiding a puddle, he stepped down beside me. As he did, a gust of wind took his hat and carried it a dozen yards into one of the bleak flower beds. With a laugh, I ran after it. As I brought it back, Martin was patting the last of his hair back into the elaborate weave that, in poor light and seen only from the front, gave the momentary impression of a man who wasn’t actually as bald on top as a boiled egg.

  I took him by the arm and led him towards the Imperial statues and a ritual of the aged that had been only delayed by the rain. He came to a sudden stop and looked at the wide steps that led up to the Triumphal Way. I could almost hear the scream inside his head of ‘a hundred and twenty steps!’ He walked over to a stone bench and flopped down. He pulled his hat harder on to his head and, glaring at me from under its brim, looked very like a donkey that has shed its load and is refusing to walk another inch.

  I stood before him. ‘Just look at these men,’ I said, trying to hide my annoyance – ‘every one of them old enough to be your father and fit enough to be your son!’

  Martin stopped trying not to wheeze from the hundred yards we’d just co
vered on the flat. I sat beside him on a dry part of the bench. I put a hand on his shoulder and dropped my voice. ‘Listen, Martin,’ I said urgently, ‘you’ve heard the doctor. If you don’t take action now, your heart really will go pop.’

  That only got me one of his despairing looks. ‘Does it matter?’ he asked. ‘We’re back in the spider’s web. We’ll never get away now.’ He put both hands over his eyes and rocked back and forth till the rolls of fat on his body set up a rippling of his outer tunic that I found distressing to watch.

  I got up again and stood over Martin. ‘You prepared the reading text of the speech I’ve written,’ I said. ‘You know perfectly well that we don’t need to get away. We’re in the clear.’ I might have pointed out that we’d effectively been prisoners since leaving Alexandria. There had been no chance of escape from the Viceroy’s ship, nor – unless, that is, we fancied the certainty of barbarians on land and pirates at sea – anywhere to run to from Athens or from Corinth. I didn’t want to think when was the last time we hadn’t been travelling about in a gilded cage. I was sure this approach would only send Martin into an attack of the vapours that would keep him here for the rest of the day.

  I took him by the hand and pulled him to his feet. ‘Look around you!’ I hissed. ‘Look at this great and wonderful city. Look at its clean pavements and magnificent buildings. Think of its libraries, filled with every book ever written that is worth reading. Think of its comforts, of its delicacies. Think of our own leading part in its defence and improvement. If none of this strikes you as worthwhile, think at least of the oath I swore to Heraclius. Greeks may break their oaths. You know that we don’t. Now, stop this lachrymose bleating about the joys of omnipresent dirt and squalid poverty. We were both happy enough to get away from that. And, if you see Ireland through rosy window glass, that isn’t how I see England. I’m never going back!’

  I let my face relax. I linked arms with Martin. ‘Now come on,’ I said soothingly. ‘I’ll help you and we’ll do the stairs a dozen at a time. We’re not in any hurry. There’s plenty of time to rest between exertions.’

  ‘You’re looking pleased with yourself,’ Priscus said, catching me unawares. ‘Did you stop by a brothel on your way here?’ He’d put on his purple-edged toga over his uniform as Commander of the East. On anyone else, the resulting mix would have looked absurd. Now that illness had stripped away nearly every ounce of flesh from his body, the extreme padding suited Priscus.

  ‘Yes, very pleased with yourself, if you don’t mind my saying,’ someone added from behind in the drawl of a court eunuch. ‘After all, it wasn’t you who got past my guards to the Emperor. It wasn’t you who put his side of the story. For which of us three, I wonder, has that closed carriage been parked behind this place of deliberation?’

  I didn’t turn. ‘Piss off, Ludinus!’ I said. ‘Or do you fancy an accidental cup of wine down your front?’ I stared past Priscus to where Martin was nagging some slaves to get my ivory stool the right way round. As they lined it up again, he looked about the wide space between the semicircle where the Senators would sit and the Imperial Throne. Unable to see that I was watching him, he stuffed another honeyed oatcake into his mouth. ‘A moment of the lips, a lifetime on the hips,’ I’d announced when the first tray was uncovered. A waste of breath that had been. I turned to look the Grand Chamberlain in the face.

  ‘Though he may possess two objects that bring more trouble than joy,’ he went on, ‘the Commander of the East has all the faithless treachery proverbially ascribed to my own species.’ He stepped back and tried for one of his dramatic poses. The movement of his outstretched arms sent off a miasma of rose perfume that blotted out the general stink in the room of stale sweat soaked into wool. ‘According to my report of the audience,’ he sniggered, ‘the Lord Priscus is to be godfather to the Emperor’s son. He got this by feeding the man a pack of lies and even blaming dear young Alaric for the massacre he unleashed in Alexandria.’ His jowls wobbled and his mouth fell open to show a double line of stained and broken teeth.

  Priscus fought to suppress one of his coughing fits. The last one I’d seen, a few days earlier, had involved a gush of foul-smelling blood. Ludinus stared complacently at him. ‘So much ambition in a dying man,’ he said in a bleak and almost uncastrated voice. He looked again at me. ‘If Caesar makes you a junior professor of Greek in Catania, you can thank my intercession,’ he said. ‘If it’s blinding in a monastery, Priscus managed just a little too well to spread the slander you made up about my dealings with the barbarians. I can promise that I will see to that!’

  Someone whose face showed more than a few hundred years of marriage between cousins now took Priscus by the sleeve. His eyes caught mine for just a moment, then glazed over as if I’d been about to ask for a loan. As they went off together into the main crowd of Senators, I heard the beginning of a fawned request for preferment. That left me alone with Ludinus. It was unwelcome company in itself. It also reminded me that I was as much an outsider in this place as he was. Those little cold looks we’d been getting from men who wore their Senatorial robes as easily as if they’d been born in them weren’t only for a eunuch promoted beyond his physical right.

  Without troubling to excuse myself, I turned and walked away from Ludinus. I almost knocked into someone who’d stepped in my way. I nodded an apology and found myself looking into more glazed eyes. Behind me, there was one of those tidal movements you get in gatherings of convivial humanity, and I heard someone let out a barking laugh. ‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Rufus,’ it may have been the laughing man who spoke. ‘The only way to get the common people working at all is to keep them hungry. Take the goad off their backs, give them land – and it’s our land, mind you! – why, isn’t that just a recipe for idleness? As for arming them – well, I ask you why we’re bothering to fight the Persians, when we’re at risk of being murdered in our beds!’ I turned and found myself looking into a mass of suddenly blank faces. I continued looking and a couple of men brought out the shifty, speculative smiles of those who are willing to keep all options open. Everyone else, without openly shunning me, always managed to be looking the other way as I passed by. Someone had been busy with his tongue, I could see.

  Trying to seem genuinely interested, I stood where the sequence of wall paintings began. This was the Senate House and it was decorated without concession to the artificiality of the order it housed. The pictures were all of events in the history of the Roman Senate. Here were the Senators, calmly awaiting massacre by the Gauls. Here was Cato, demanding that Carthage should be destroyed. Here was the formal condemnation of Nero for treason against the State. The captions were in Latin, though most had recently been supplemented by Greek translations. I looked hard at the final painting, in which the Great Constantine was managing to speak at the same time to the Senate Houses in Rome and Constantinople. In each place, the Senators were reaching out to those in the other. They were embraces of shared blood and history, of common loyalty to the Roman State – embraces that ultimately had stood for nothing in Constantinople when it proved convenient to wave goodbye to the Western provinces.

  Priscus put a bony hand on my arm. Then he leaned his remaining weight on me to steady himself. ‘The old eunuch’s a liar,’ he said wearily. ‘I fucked him over with Heraclius beyond hope of repair. I showed the severed finger and everything.’ I said nothing, but moved Priscus towards our own ivory stools. So long as I didn’t let my arm shake, it might look as if he were leading me to my place. ‘You don’t believe that I’ve shat on you, Alaric?’ he asked, still weary, though with a trace of concern. ‘We always knew it had to be me who saw the Great Augustus first. I am head of the old aristocracy. Not even the whole tribe of eunuchs could deny me an audience. I told Heraclius the complete truth – well, I told him the truth as you wrote it up once we’d left Alexandria. You keep your land law. I go off to keep the Persians out of Syria.’

  I pretended to fuss with my toga. It gave him cover from the main c
rowd of Senators as he drank one of his potions from a glass bottle. I had no doubt this would perk him up in time for the audience. How much time he’d have after that was anyone’s guess.

  ‘How many times have I tried to kill you?’ he asked, his spirits already rising. My tally was eight. But I said nothing. Some of these probably counted as misplaced signs of affection. For others, I could doubt where to draw the line between outright murder attempts and conspiracies just to get me out of his way. Priscus smiled. ‘Something I want you always to know, Alaric, is that our personal interests and our beliefs about what is good for the Empire are as one. We stand or fall together.’

  I looked down and smiled at him. ‘My thoughts entirely,’ I said.

  I was wondering what more to say, when, with a sudden whoosh of stale air, the doors flew open and the first of the heralds came in with their silver trumpets. All about us, the babble of laughing conversation died away and every man who wasn’t already there made a dignified scurry for his seat.

  Chapter 19

  At a hidden command, the trumpeters let out an ear-splitting blare of sound. More came in behind them, and then I saw the gold armour of the Emperor’s personal guard. With more trumpet blasts, they marched steadily down the aisle that divided the Senators into equal blocks and stood to attention in the semi-circle we’d vacated.

  He might have been a statue, for all he could move his face under its double layer of gold leaf. But I could hear the smirk in his voice as the eunuch chosen by Ludinus to stand in his place waved his staff of office at us. ‘Long may our Great Augustus reign!’ he shrilled in Latin.

  ‘Long indeed and well may He reign!’ we called back in unison.

  The eunuch was drawing breath to lead a more complex acclamation. It came out as a long squeal of shock. I ignored the elbow the Priscus jabbed in my side and looked steadily at the eunuch. I didn’t need to see that Sergius was out of prison and dressed once more in his patriarchal best. ‘Oh, for one look into that black heart!’ Priscus breathed. ‘Oh, the despair that must be welling up inside it!’ But that was something I could see. Ludinus was a few places from the front on the other side of the aisle. I had an unbroken view of his suddenly strained and sweaty face. Without moving my head, I flicked my eyes about the room. Most faces carried the sort of look you see on men who are watching a slow collision of chariots in the Circus. They’d guessed there would be some change of Imperial favour. They hadn’t expected a revolution.