Priscus smiled. ‘A good philosophy for a saint or a villain,’ he said. ‘In Persia, you lied and killed and betrayed. Because you then kept telling yourself how it would keep your beloved farmers digging their fields in peace, I don’t suppose you have any trouble, now you’re back, in thinking yourself an honest man. I’m sure you still think yourself a better man than me.’
‘Fewer bodies,’ I answered, ‘even allowing for age. Less enjoyment, too, in producing them.’
He arched his eyebrows. ‘Dear me, Alaric – so little understanding of your truest friend!’ He stood up and, as if from habit, went over to put his ear close to the door. ‘Listen,’ he went on, ‘if I’ve usually killed with pleasure, I’d like you to tell me when I’ve ever been known to kill from pleasure.’ He stopped and sat down with a sudden loss of energy. ‘What I did outside Simonopolis got me black looks from all and sundry in the Imperial Council. But I lifted the siege with fifty dead on our own side. The Avar horde I sent streaming back towards the Danube left ten thousand of their own dead to be fought over by the crows. Compare that with the irreplaceable armies Nicetas is about to piss away in Syria.’ He poured himself more wine.
‘If you’re wondering what’s put me in the mood for moral philosophy, be aware that today is my sixty-eighth birthday. You may think this a very advanced age. I never believed I’d make it so far. But you’ll pardon me for wondering how I shall be seen a hundred years from now. That I ended up in this place will be less important to the historians than what else I did.’ He got up again and beat his chest. The response was a dry cough that terminated in itself. He laughed. ‘I also can’t help wondering if I haven’t been reserved for some final achievement.’
He laughed again. Visiting time would soon be over. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to get back before the guards I’d bribed at the Military Gate went off duty.
Chapter 22
It was Good Friday in 614. I’d spent all afternoon with Heraclius and everyone else of importance in the Great Church, listening to a mournful sermon from the Patriarch. The sufferings of Christ had been his overt subject. Every mind, though, had been on the news, drifting in with every post, of the catastrophic defeat Nicetas had managed for us in Syria. After that it had been a gambling party, where I’d stripped a couple of young heirs so naked their fathers would have to come begging my indulgence the next morning. Then it was home for a nightcap of triumphant sex with pretty young Eboric and his brother. All was as it should be when, at some time in the deepest part of the night, I was woken by a cold and bony hand clamped over my mouth.
‘Not sleeping with a knife under your pillow,’ Priscus wheezed. ‘is an affectation I beg you to reconsider.’ He took his hand away. I sat up and blinked in the light of the dimmed lamps. I looked about, trying to make sense of things. I was in my own bed. The boys must have gone back to the slave quarters.
I got out of bed and stood facing Priscus. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?’ I demanded.
‘Dearest Alaric, it did used to be my bedroom,’ he said. ‘I see there are ways about this building you still don’t know. You evidently don’t know about the very secret entrance. It’s as dusty as when I last used it.’
I began to feel panicky. Visiting a traitor in his place of confinement was something you promised not to do again if it came to the Emperor’s attention and he chose not to be pleased. Harbouring one at home was treason. Priscus reached for one of the darker bed covers and threw it at me. ‘Come over here and look,’ he said. We went together to the balcony window. Even before he’d got the door open, I could see the glow of fires that blazed from a dozen points beyond the land walls of the City. I leaned over the balcony and looked right. It seemed the abandoned suburbs were a sea of flames.
‘While the cat’s away, the mice will play,’ he jeered. ‘It may be purely opportunistic. It may be that the alliance you broke up between them and the Persians has been revived. Whatever the case, an Avar raiding party has made its way into Thrace, and is killing and burning right up to the land walls.’ I followed his pointed finger to the north-west. The wide splash of bright fire could only have been the Fortified Monastery. He sat down on the floor and went into a coughing fit that owed more to the smoke he must have inhaled than to any return of his sickness. ‘Don’t ask how I got out,’ he said weakly. ‘I came into the City with the last crowd of refugees before the gates were closed again. Where else could I have gone after that but to the home of my beloved friend Alaric.’
As he spoke, there was a sound of shouting deep within the palace. Priscus climbed to his feet again and pulled out a knife already dark with blood. I heard the door fly open in the big antechamber to my bedroom and felt my heart jump into the back of my throat. But it was only Martin. ‘Aelric, wake up!’ he cried in Celtic. ‘The Barbarians are breaking into the City. Everything’s on fire.’ I shoved Priscus behind a curtain just in time. I was no sooner away from the window when Martin burst in, a lamp in his shaking hand.
I took hold of him and led him out on to the balcony. ‘It’s only a raid, Martin,’ I said soothingly. ‘No one can break through the walls. We’re perfectly safe.’ He stared for a long time at the distant fires and his shoulders sagged with the relaxing of tension. ‘It really can’t be more than a few hundred men on horseback,’ I urged. ‘They’ll be gone by morning.’ I took him back inside. ‘Now, go down to the nursery and make sure the maids don’t start a fire as they run about. I have work to do in here and I don’t want to be disturbed.’
I locked the door behind him and walked slowly to my bedroom door. ‘There’s food and drink out here,’ I said. I turned up one of the lamps and sat down. Limping from a sprain I supposed he’d picked up on his dash for the walls, Priscus came forward and took the wine I’d poured. ‘Now you’re officially dead, you are free to go where you will,’ I said. I could have kept up the pretence, with talk of gold and horses. But my heart had sunk back to its normal place and now somewhat lower.
‘You owe me, Alaric,’ he said. ‘Where do you expect me to go in my condition, but home?’
‘Don’t be absurd!’ I snapped. ‘You can’t stay here.’
‘And why not?’ he asked. ‘My grandfather built this palace almost for the purpose of hiding people. There are rooms and suites of rooms you’d need an army of surveyors to find. You can get tubby Martin to look after me. You know he’ll never grass us to Heraclius.’ He slumped down in his chair and looked old. ‘Oh, go on, Alaric,’ he whined. ‘You do owe me – and you know I’ll soon be dead. Let me die in the place where I was born. You’ve taken everything from me. You’ve even taken my child. Give me back at least this much.’ He dropped the pretence of feebleness and looked steadily into my eyes. ‘I claim from you the hospitality that no barbarian can refuse and still think well of himself.’
‘And if our positions were reversed?’ I asked.
Priscus shrugged. ‘You do ask some silly questions, Alaric,’ he said. ‘If our positions were reversed, you’d already have noticed the poison in your wine and I’d be wondering how best to get rid of your body. Now, since that isn’t the case, let’s proceed to business.’ He finished his wine and raised both arms. ‘As God is my witness,’ he went on in Lombardic – the closest language he knew to my own – ‘I swear that, if you give me refuge, I will never shit on you again, but will truly and faithfully serve you as my lord.’ He put his arms down and returned to Greek. ‘Refuse my fealty and I beg you to kill me on the spot. I’d rather be dead than dragged off to another monastery.’
I looked for a while into the darkness of my wine cup. ‘You can stay the night,’ I sighed. ‘That’s the limit of what custom lets you claim. And, since you’ve mentioned young Maximin, do bear in mind the danger your presence brings on his head as well as mine.’
‘Absolutely!’ he said, almost hiding a smile of relief. He looked about the room. ‘Any drugs here you fancy sharing with me?’
The Avars left with the dawn. Once it was cle
ar they wouldn’t be back, Heraclius had the Military Gate unbarred and rode out with the whole Imperial Guard for company. Uncomfortable on horseback, I went with him from one heap of smoking ruins to another, mostly religious houses that had ignored the general retreat of population within the cover of the land walls. I counted four dozen bodies in the ruinous streets, all of them hacked about most horribly.
Heraclius stopped his horse beside one of the few Avar bodies. This one, so far as I could tell, had drunk himself paralytic on stolen wine and not been able to resist when someone had cut his throat. ‘There will, of course, be a full inquiry,’ he cried in a voice that accused everyone about him of some dereliction. I didn’t see how that could include me. If I’d set up the Intelligence Bureau once he was Emperor, he’d long since taken it under his own control. For all he might sack and disgrace a few underlings, there really was only one person to blame for the failure of the usual warning systems. The raiding party had got itself through a hundred miles of increasing Imperial control. Why had no one reported its presence? More likely, why had no one paid attention to the reports? Already whispered voices would be asking what use there was in an Emperor who couldn’t safeguard his subjects even within sight of the capital. Forget the siege the Persians were tightening about Jerusalem – the smoke of burning monasteries that had billowed half the morning over Constantinople would normally have been enough to spark a murder plot or calls to abdicate. Because, by general agreement, Heraclius was the best Emperor we were likely to get, there would be neither. But the whispers would go on nevertheless.
Heraclius looked up from the dead barbarian. ‘Lessons will be learned,’ he cried in a firmer voice. The rest of us nodded and set up the buzz of agreement that might have greeted a plan to rebuild our forts on the Danube.
He dismounted at the smashed-in gate of the Fortified Monastery. ‘Barbarians don’t like to go inside a walled compound unless they know there is another way out,’ he said as if he’d been the first to notice what every inhabitant of the European provinces had known for two centuries. This time, we simply nodded. Undoubtedly, the Fortified Monastery had almost lived up to its name. If the gateposts hadn’t been allowed to rot through, the building could have held out. As it was, the intrusion had been brief enough to let most of the monks and inmates survive.
To the plain relief of his carrying slaves, Timothy the City Prefect got down from his chair. He waddled forward to a spot where he blocked further progress through the gateway. ‘Oh sad day, indeed!’ he cried with a melancholy wave at the remains of a monk who’d been nailed to the gate, then disembowelled. ‘But sad beyond reckoning for our young colleague, Alaric,’ he went on, coming straight to the point. He arranged his flabby face into what anyone who didn’t know him would have thought a pitying smile. ‘Is it not here that the Lord Treasurer was a regular visitor to the cell of the fallen traitor Priscus?’ He waited for a dozen disapproving faces to fix themselves on mine. ‘I am told they had quite resumed their old closeness.’ He broadened his smile. ‘Please, dearest Alaric, accept my sincerest condolences on your loss.’
I could almost feel the Emperor’s blank stare at the back of my neck. ‘We haven’t yet taken a roll call of the survivors,’ I said quickly.
Still looking at me, Timothy nodded. ‘Of course not. And was not Cousin Priscus always the survivor? Did he never tell you how he was the only man alive out of Mantella after it fell to the Slavs?’ He paused. ‘That was where he first established his reputation for selfless heroism.’ I looked briefly at the dead monk. How long had he outlived the ripping open of his belly? I wondered. A shame it hadn’t been Timothy. Not that the barbarians would have got very far with him. His weight would have pulled him off the nails and it would have defeated our own executioners to find his entrails among the fat.
Someone came forward with a list of the survivors. Heraclius blinked short-sightedly at the impression of the names on wax. ‘I want to look inside,’ he said. With odd nimbleness, Timothy bounced on to a heap of fallen brickwork and we all passed through the gate.
The Emperor grunted and waited for me to reach out a hand to help him over the charred body of another barbarian. I could see the head had been knocked in from behind. I avoided making it obvious that I knew my way through the chaotic but largely intact front offices of the monastery. We stood together in the chapel as someone went ahead into the central courtyard to get all the survivors lined up for a prostration. I helped him balance himself on a scorched chair so he could stare out unobserved at the faces of the living.
‘So Priscus is finally answering to God for his crimes,’ he said softly. I said nothing, but looked across the room at what had to be the body of the Abbot. He lay face down before the altar. Anyone who turned him over would probably find his face was an unrecognisable mass of charred meat. But I didn’t need to lift the remnants of his cloak to see the shape of his body. It was enough that I recognised the hilt of the knife that had been rammed into the right killing spot between his shoulder blades. ‘I did think of pardoning him and sending him off to lead the armies in Syria.’ He paused and began to look into my face, before his eyes darted away again. ‘But that would have upset Nicetas and the whole Church. And would it have made any difference? It was surely the Will of God that we have lost Syria.’
‘Blessed be the Name of the Lord,’ I said. It was best never to say anything more to the point when the Emperor was going into one of his sad moods. I thought about the burned-out cloakroom beside the main gate. That contained several bodies that I could hope would never be recognised.
I helped him down from the chair. He did now look at me. ‘Alaric, I give you the job of arranging for the burial of the dead. Please also speak in my name to those poor souls in the courtyard. As an act of clemency, I release all surviving prisoners. As Lord Treasurer, you will make what provision you think proper for their needs. Tell the monks this building will be repaired by Christmas. They can remain here to await such other prisoners as I may condemn in the New Year.’
I bowed and listened as he picked his way back out of the monastery. I only stood upright when I heard the ragged cheer from the sightseers who’d followed us out of the City. It wouldn’t be long before Martin came in to see if I had any instructions for him. Before I went off to break the happy news to the survivors, we had various matters to discuss in Celtic. If he chose to collapse before me in a sobbing heap, I could let it be known he’d been overcome by the horror of a looted House of God. Even among these generally timid Greeks, Martin was noted for the infirmity in his upper lip.
Chapter 23
I think that’s a natural end to my digression. Let’s return, then, to the main narrative. Thirteen months later, Priscus – no, the digression is ended: don’t ask me to explain how one night had stretched to nearly four hundred – stood up from a long inspection of the sleeping Antonia. ‘Not bad looking, if that’s the sort of thing you fancy,’ he conceded. ‘But, if you intend holding on to her, your brains really have migrated to your ball bag.’ He looked again at her closed eyes, and carried his lamp out into the antechamber. I followed him, closing the door as I went.
I suppressed another yawn and looked about for something to put on. Away from the endlessly shifting winds, though, it was a hot night. Besides, it was only Priscus with me. I sat down at the little table where he’d placed his lamp and waited for him to finish making sure that the main door to my sleeping quarters was locked. As silently as a cat, he came back to the table. Still silent, he stared at the wooden box I’d taken from the secret cupboard in my dressing room. At last, he sat down. He pushed the lamp to the edge of the table to get a proper look at me.
I smiled into his cold eyes. ‘Whatever you’re on tonight,’ I said with another and this time unsuppressed yawn, ‘I could fancy a bit for myself.’ He fished about in his tunic, before tutting softly and reaching behind him for a glass bottle. He put a drop of something sticky on my forefinger and watched as I licked it off and took a
sip of wine. Unlike most of his potions, this one had no immediate effect. I didn’t question, though, it would perk me up.
‘Very well, dear boy,’ he said smoothly, ‘I will summarise today’s events. Do stop me if I get something wrong. But you’re the one who’s always insisted on getting the known facts straight before trying to move beyond them.’ He moved the lamp back to the middle of the table. ‘Your face has gone very pale. But I think you’ll be surprised at this latest blend. It shouldn’t even give you a headache tomorrow.’ He smiled brightly and continued in what I could see was a mocking parody of my own manner.
‘You were presented with a silver cup this morning by some person or persons unknown,’ he began. ‘Someone who announced himself as a messenger from the useless bastard Nicetas then appears to have slipped you a message, in correct form, to go off to a quiet spot outside the walls, there to be murdered. He was delayed in getting the message to you and you added to the delay by shambling about the City like a blind pilgrim. By the time you did get there, whatever ambush was arranged for you had been rumbled by Shahin, who is, by the way, one of my second cousins on the Persian side. Once you’d got yourself free, you overheard a conversation that revealed treason in high places. You also learned that Shahin is eager to lay hands on your silver cup. The girl you’d picked up along the way in your usual careless manner may indicate a connection of this plot with Nicetas.
He stopped and scratched his scalp. ‘Oh, but I’m losing track of things. Why don’t you carry on? You do these things so much better.’
I closed my eyes and stretched deliciously. He’d been right about his latest potion. Without ever announcing themselves, its effects had stolen over me as Priscus spoke. I fussed with the lamp until the flame came up brighter and took out the cup. ‘Though in good shape, this is very old,’ I said. I ran a thumbnail down the tiny lettering that covered it inside and out. ‘I saw characters a bit like these on some of the older monuments in Ctesiphon. They’d been pulled from the ruins of Persepolis and Ecbatana, and I was told they dated from the first Persian Empire – the one Alexander conquered, that is. No one can read them any more.’ I stopped and thought. ‘But I think they look more like the inscriptions I saw in the much older ruins of Babylon. No one can read those either.’ I looked harder at the cup. I was surely right. The picture, amid the writing, of a winged lion with a man’s head had a definite look of what I’d seen in the desolate silence that had been Babylon. I looked closer at the tiny face and a faint recollection of horror drifted through the back of my mind. This was my first real inspection of the cup. How could elements of it have featured in my dream? I pushed the question aside. I was drugged, and might be confusing present impressions with memory. Otherwise, hadn’t I just said I’d seen images like these before? I offered the cup to Priscus. ‘Any thoughts?’ I asked.
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