The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  Sergius stepped past the eunuch and raised his arms to Heaven. ‘Glory be to God in the Highest,’ he cried in Greek, ‘and to His Servant Heraclius, whom He has sent in goodness and in love to rule over the Roman People.’

  As if this were a ceremony established since time out of mind, Priscus and I raised our arms. ‘Glory, glory, glory be to God in the Highest,’ we responded, also in Greek, ‘and may victory and all good fortune attend Our Lord Emperor Heraclius, and His Heirs and Successors by Law appointed.’ We waited for every other Senator to turn astonished heads in our direction. As we raised our arms again, the chant was taken up by two hundred voices. There was the crash of a cymbal just outside the door, followed by more trumpeting.

  ‘He hasn’t washed since the fall of Caesarea,’ Priscus said without moving his lips. ‘Be warned he smells like the bedding in a doss-house.’

  In another break with protocol, Heraclius came in on foot, Sergius walking backwards before him. He’d also set aside the normal olive wreath for these events, and with it the last scrap of pretence that the Emperor was one temporarily important Senator addressing his colleagues, and was wearing his biggest golden crown. As he passed by us into the semicircle, the pair of us drew breath and cried in Greek: ‘Praise be to the Lord Heraclius Faithful in Christ!’ We paused and, with another loud drawing in of breath, led the whole Senate in the new acclamation. We continued with it until the Emperor had gone up the steps to his throne and the long train of his purple robe had been tucked out of the way. Now Sergius fell to his knees before the throne. ‘We salute the Lord’s Anointed,’ he intoned, still in Greek. This, at least, was the signal everyone knew. We fell forward into our long prostration.

  Afterwards, perched on my ivory seat, I looked across the room at Heraclius. Never mind his abstinence from soap and water – he was looking old in the light of day. He was bald. He was fat. His beard was more grey than golden. Above the beard, his face carried the look of a gambler who knows he’s on a losing streak and doesn’t know how to change it.

  He kicked impatiently with both feet until he’d got his long silken train loose. I’d told Martin to prepare the reading copy in big letters so Heraclius could see his speech without having to lean forward. But he leaned forward anyway. ‘Conscript Fathers,’ he began in Latin. So he carried on for a few sentences. After this, to general relief, his text switched into Greek. Martin had written out the accents for all the longer or less colloquial words. Here and there, he’d added a marginal gloss in Latin. I’d given the text to Heraclius the afternoon before and I knew that, if he’d not been able to memorise it, he’d read it through several times. And he had. At his age, there was nothing he could do about his strong Western accent but I could make sure he sounded competent in Greek.

  It was a long speech. The year since he’d last called the Senate together had been crowded with events. If none was cause for celebration, custom required many of them to be noticed. I listened, at every pause wondering if he’d carry on along the path I’d laid out for him or if he’d go off on some possibly fatal deviation. After every pause, I heard my own words read back at me. There was the earthquake and tidal wave in the Black Sea, the raising of the dead in Petronella, the loss to the Persians of our last outpost in Cappadocia, the defection to the Persians of a mountain race whose name I’d left out because the Emperor couldn’t pronounce it. No mention of the bloodbath Priscus had unleashed in Alexandria, or of my own unwitting contribution to making it inevitable. Nothing of how we’d saved Egypt from the Persians. Nothing of our saving Athens from the barbarians, or of the triumphant though closed religious council I’d run there. I’d left them out of the speech and no one had thought to put them in. It went on as predictably for me as a lesson read out in church.

  We were at the key passage. ‘Come forward, Priscus, my beloved Commander of the East,’ he called. Once or twice during the unfashionably direct and uncluttered prose Heraclius was reading, Priscus had given me a funny look. Now, without looking at me, he got up and walked towards the Throne. ‘Priscus, I resolved when my son was born that there was one man alone in the Empire who was fit to be his godfather. That man was our greatest general – our shield against the Persian menace – and last posterity of a family that, in every generation since the most ancient days of our Empire, had distinguished itself alike in the council chamber and on the field of battle.’

  All about, I could hear the collective wiping of sweaty hands on togas. I swallowed and tried not to look at Priscus. He was kneeling with both arms stretched forward and I knew he was struggling not to cough. ‘A few words of advice, however, I ask from my Commander of the East. When a man insults his Emperor, whom does he offend?’ At once, the soft, collective rustle ceased and the room was quiet.

  Priscus waited until his fit was past and he had full control of his voice. ‘Who insults his Emperor surely offends God who has appointed the Emperor,’ he managed to answer in a voice that I could barely hear. I darted my eyes to the right. A look of panic on his face, Ludinus was clearly wondering how far he’d get with his monstrous bulk before he was caught in a noose of silver chains.

  Heraclius continued: ‘And if a man, through cowardice and negligence, loses one of our choicest provinces to the enemy, and rages like a ravening animal through the second city of our Empire, should he receive a lenient sentence?’ There was a long pause, then Priscus answered in a cowed stammer that I couldn’t hear. By now, Heraclius was on his feet. Still reading from his text, he raised his voice. ‘In every evil the Empire has suffered, you were involved as author or accomplice. You betrayed your lawful Emperor, Maurice of lamented memory, and helped bring to power Phocas the unmentionable tyrant. The Tyrant gave you his daughter in marriage, in spite of which you betrayed him to me. You have failed to defend the Empire. You have butchered its citizens. You were a bad son-in-law to one Emperor. You are a bad friend to another.’

  In a movement I hadn’t scripted, he snatched up all the pages of his text and threw them straight ahead. Priscus raised his hands up to protect his face and toppled forward. Heraclius stepped over his fallen body and looked about the hushed Senate. ‘I declare Priscus guilty of high treason,’ he shouted. ‘I dismiss him from all his offices. I degrade him from the nobility of the Empire. I confiscate all his goods. I sentence him to be immured for the rest of his life in the Fortified Monastery outside the walls of Constantinople.’

  As Heraclius stepped backward until he was just a yard or so in front of me, cries of horror broke out from every corner of the room. A few dozen men rushed forward and stood in a ring about Priscus. ‘Accursed be the traitor!’ they shouted in Latin. Let his name be forgotten. Let his final days be short and filled with bitterness.’ One or two of the men shuffled close to the Emperor and held up their ivory nametags for him to note and remember. Above the increasingly shrill and demented chorus of hate, I heard Priscus break out in a coughing fit. Then I heard someone clear his throat and spit. I heard more hawking and a long groan, as if someone had kicked the fallen man.

  ‘You certainly know how to keep everyone guessing,’ Ludinus said beside me. ‘For just a moment there, I thought you were going back on our deal.’ His face creased into a smile of relief. Trying not to ruin its double layer of paint, he dabbed at his face.

  I looked over his shoulder at the two Imperial Guards who’d appeared and were awaiting my command. ‘The Emperor has found you also guilty of high treason,’ I said, looking at my fingernails. The smile froze on his lip. ‘We decided you weren’t worth a public denunciation. But the particulars will be shown to you in writing. Their burden is your conspiracy with the barbarians to destroy the cities of Attica.’ Without moving my head, I looked up at him. ‘If you make any fuss in here, Ludinus, I’ll have your legs broken where no one can hear you scream. Your sentence is that you are to be taken to Athens, where the survivors from Decelea have been settled, there to serve in the military canteen. If you breathe a word of your real identity, or try claimin
g that you acted on orders from the Emperor, I have no doubt the unfortunate Deceleans will visit on you the punishment that you deserve.’ I nodded at the guards. ‘Take him away,’ I said softly.

  I remained on my stool. I stretched my legs and stared at the silk leggings below the lifted hem of my toga. I didn’t watch as Ludinus was bundled out of the debating chamber – though some of the more reflective Senators had, and were now turning their hard, calculating faces in my direction. The eunuch had deserved his fate. Murder is murder and his hands were red with the blood of thousands. That besides, he’d been a fool – a fool for letting me charm my way past him to Heraclius, and for not having a competent spy in hiding whom I couldn’t then corrupt. I felt more pity for squashed bugs than for this broken eunuch.

  A couple of monks had joined Sergius, bowls of steaming water in their hands. Razor in his own hands, the Patriarch was pushing through the ring of Senators. Once he’d tonsured Priscus, the denunciations would cease. Priscus would then be a monk and entitled to some formality of consideration. The man would also have been ruled, by law and by public opinion, incapable of any return to favour. I could have pushed in behind Sergius and watched the infliction of this final punishment. It was richly deserved. From the day he’d got up and walked, Priscus had led a life of the utmost beastliness. Compared with him, Ludinus was clean.

  But I didn’t watch the humiliation. Paying no attention to Heraclius, I got up and walked from the room. I hurried though the main hall, crowded with carrying chairs and gossiping slaves, outside into the cold air. I walked a hundred yards along the Triumphal Way and stopped by the terrace overlooking Imperial Square. It was coming on to rain again and I squeezed myself under cover of a bronze Achilles that had been snatched from a derelict temple on Seriphos.

  Through a mist of rain that blurred its outlines, I looked over the City. Justice aside, I’d landed an astonishing double blow. A Greek might spend his entire adult life plotting to achieve less than Alaric the underaged barbarian just had. At the next meeting of the Imperial Council, there would be no more Ludinus to spray out policies almost designed to bankrupt the State and impoverish the people. There would be no more Priscus to lead resistance to my creeping demolition of the land-owning nobility. There’d be me and there’d be Sergius. So long as we continued to agree on what was needed, Heraclius would poke his tongue between his teeth and write the lawful form of words on whatever sheet of parchment we chose to set before him.

  I was thinking, though, of Priscus, Commander of the East. As well as snake and general obstructer, he was also the Empire’s only competent general. He hadn’t lost Cappadocia. If Heraclius hadn’t turned up and demanded a battle, the blockade of the Persians in Caesarea would have finished the war on our terms. If I still couldn’t understand the details of a campaign that involved endless marches from nowhere to nowhere, and that took in half the East, I’d believed Priscus when he said he could have defeated the Persians with never more than a skirmish. I’d now ruined him. The Empire he’d wanted to save would have been an oversized desert, squabbled over by tax gatherers and parasitic landlords. But what use would my alternative be, if it was swallowed up by the Persians one battle at a time?

  I turned to stare at the Great Church. Fat lot of guidance that gave me. Once more, though now with rising guilt and misery, I went over reasonings that had seemed quite clear so long as I thought I was for the chop. I’d saved myself at the expense of men who had no claim on me – who had no abstract claim whatever to consideration. But what of the Empire and of its toiling millions I was supposed to be defending? Our fates were connected – but at what price?

  I heard a shrill cry to my right. It was Martin, running towards me as fast as I’d seen him move in years. Outside the Senate House, several dozen men in togas were milling about, regardless of the rain.

  ‘Aelric, Aelric,’ he gasped in Celtic, too knocked out to address me in any civilised language. ‘The Emperor was looking for you. He’s granted you everything he confiscated from Priscus.’ I went forward to catch him before he collapsed and helped him beneath the cover of an upturned shield. I perched him on the rim of a water basin and waited for him to finish struggling for breath. I noticed he was crying. ‘Aelric, before he was taken out in chains, Priscus called to me in Slavic. He said that he’d been straight with you and that you’d made a terrible mistake.’ Not speaking, I looked at Martin. Priscus would say that, I told myself. In a race of men who lied with as much compunction as whores or street beggars, he was the greatest liar I’d ever met. Priscus was a shifty, murdering degenerate. But there was now enough doubt in my mind to finish my decline into self-disgust.

  I helped Martin to his feet and got him to a passing chair that was for hire. I had no choice but to stay and receive the gesticulating sycophants. They’d all now seen me and were scampering forward with arms outstretched, regardless of how the rain was spoiling their togas. I smiled and pretended not to notice as the best men in Constantinople kicked and punched each other for the right to be first to throw his arms about the knees of the new and undoubted favourite.

  Was not of old the Jewish rabble’s cry –

  I quoted softly in Latin –

  Hosanna first, and after Crucify?

  The following spring, news came back that Chosroes had illuminated Ctesiphon for three days to celebrate the fall of Priscus – and then for another three when he heard that Heraclius had recalled Nicetas from Alexandria to be Commander of the East. With this came a report from one of our spies that General Kartir had been ordered to prepare a direct stab at Constantinople. He was to lead a small and highly mobile force through the mountain passes, before sweeping along the southern shore of the Black Sea. With our main forces already committed in Syria to face Shahrbaraz, we had nothing to put in his way. Heraclius responded by shutting himself away in his palace on the Asiatic shore. I sweated. I dithered. I did everything short of pray for guidance. What are you supposed to do when interest and duty so plainly collide? At last, I put out an announcement in the Emperor’s name that I was being sent off to Rome to negotiate a loan from the Pope. That night, not telling even Martin what I was about, I set out alone.

  I didn’t see Constantinople again until the late October of 613.

  Chapter 20

  Expressionless, the Abbot stared at the seal I’d affixed to my warrant. ‘I don’t recommend seeing him alone,’ he said in the cold voice of a jailor. ‘That he tried to kill a man is beside the point. The sin he has committed against God is not something to be specified in writing.’ He continued looking at the seal. ‘This is not a fit place to contain such evil,’ he muttered.

  I shook my head. The man had wasted enough of my afternoon already. ‘You summoned me here on his behalf,’ I said. ‘I see no point in being here unless we can speak alone.’

  The Abbot looked closer at the impression I’d made with the Great Seal. If I was here at his request, the warrant I’d thought to bring along gave me unquestionable authority to demand anything I cared. In silence, he made an entry on to a parchment roll, every sheet of which was stitched together and numbered. I wrote my name where he pointed and took in the other entries on the page. I was signing near the bottom. The top entry was dated six months before and recorded a visit sanctioned by the Emperor. The entry immediately above mine went some way to explaining why I’d been called here. I waited while the Abbot went over to a cupboard and took out a single key. ‘He’s been given the room in the tower,’ he said to me as he walked towards the door of his office. ‘I have no authority to search you, My Lord. But you will be aware of the rules governing his confinement.’ I shrugged. We both knew the rules didn’t apply to me. But he was doing his job, and I’d play along.

  In silence, he led me past an outer chapel into the main part of the Fortified Monastery. I passed down long and gloomy corridors heavy with the smell of human excrement. Most of the cells appeared to be empty, though here and there I caught faint sounds of praying or of seni
le or insane giggling. I could have sworn I heard a baby cry somewhere. I could have stopped and listened but didn’t. In a shorter corridor terminated by a bolted iron gate, one of the cells was open. I looked in as I passed. It was a large room and furnished in a manner that, before time and the damp had got seriously to work, had been lavish. One monk sat on a rickety chair, putting books and smaller objects into a crate. Another monk was dabbing the stone floor with a mop. I saw no evidence of a living occupant.

  The monk who went before us unbolted the iron gate and bowed as we went by him on to a wide spiral staircase within what I guessed was a much wider tower. We stopped halfway up at a wooden door. The Abbot took out his key and poked it into the lock. He opened it and stood back to let me go in before him. ‘Brother Gondo will remain outside,’ he said. ‘If he hears your voice raised, his orders are to summon the guard. I advise you to remain outside the white line that has been drawn on the floor.’

  At first, I saw nothing. The darkness of the corridors and staircase had been moderated by a brace of lamps. Here, the fading light of a winter afternoon was almost wholly shut out by a curtain that hung before the one small window in the cell. I waited for the Abbot to come in behind me and took one of the lamps for myself. I pulled the wick fully up. I waited for the pale and flickering light to show me what I was looking for. After a long silence, I found the malefactor stretched out on a stone ledge that served him for a bed. I thought he was asleep but he was only wrapped in a woollen quilt against the cold. He opened his eyes and looked at me. He sat up and glowered. Behind me, the Abbot cleared his throat. ‘Brother Priscus,’ he said in a curiously soft gloat, ‘your request has been heard and granted. But though it has been suspended, so you may speak collectedly with the Lord Alaric, your daily whipping will resume tomorrow.’ With that, I heard the door swing shut behind me.