The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  ‘His head’s weight in gold, we was promised,’ a man called from within the crowd.

  ‘God bless the Lord Timothy!’ the same woman replied. ‘He’ll see us right.’

  Both crowds took a step forward. I looked about for escape. Unless I could jump ten feet and grab hold of a smashed balcony, there was no easy way out. There was another collective step forward, and a wizened youth took aim at me with a stone.

  I reached for the purse that still hung from my belt. I held it up for all to see. ‘You want gold?’ I shouted. I undid its laces and emptied the purse into my left hand. I jingled several dozen new-minted solidi, and held one up for inspection. ‘You want gold?’ I turned and made sure everyone could see the value. Timothy could round up a mob and promise what took his fancy. Any one of the coins I had in the palm of my hand would keep all these animals fed for a month. ‘If you want gold, there’s plenty here.’ I threw it as a glittering shower over the crowd that blocked the way from where I’d come. It dissolved at once into a snarling, ravening pack. The other crowd lurched forward, screaming and trampling on the fallen, to get its own share. It was the burrow people all over again, if somewhat more expensive. Not everyone joined the rush, but I’d levelled the odds. I got out my sword and went straight at them.

  This killing had neither elegance nor equality. I stabbed. I slashed. I took the top off one man’s head. I got another in the bladder. Someone who came at me with a knife got his head half-sawn off. I took hold of someone else with my left hand and smashed his brains out against a wall. It was over in barely any time at all. So far as I could tell, I was through without a scratch. I didn’t wait for the shout of baffled rage behind me to begin. I didn’t look back at the bloody carnage I was leaving. I held up my sword as if it were torch carried by night before a rich man’s chair and ran for my life.

  It was dazzling sunshine in Imperial Square. The mob didn’t dare follow me into this place of civilised order and I passed the continuing ritual of the aged at no more than a brisk pace.

  ‘You worthless bastard!’ one of the old men shouted in my direction. ‘I hope your suffering hasn’t even begun.’ It might have been Simeon again. This time, I didn’t stop and try reasoning with anyone. The sun was behind me and I could feel a worrying tightness in the skin of my upper back. Watching my shadow go before me, I walked past some boys who were playing with a ball.

  ‘Is that you, My Lord Alaric?’ a voice called from my right. I made to go for my sword, then realised I was still carrying it. I snorted and put it back into its sheath. Little wonder those boys had kept out of my way.

  ‘Hello, Ezra,’ I said, trying my best to sound as if I were still arrayed in silk and cotton. I’d been eyeing up the young Jew for the better part of a year and he was a welcome, even a cheerful, sight. I raised my hands in the gesture of greeting usual among his people. I saw in time how bloody they were and the black incrustations under every finger nail. I let my hands drop down and shrugged.

  ‘Your chest is looking very red, My Lord,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Should you be walking round with so few clothes?’

  ‘Slight trouble in one of the poor districts,’ I explained with a vague wave. Suddenly struck by the thought of dark, stinking bodies creeping along behind me, I turned round. It was just boys kicking their ball at each other. Beyond them, a dozen of the aged staggered in the sun about their endless circuit. ‘I might ask, my boy,’ I added in my best patronising voice, ‘what brings you so far from the Jewish quarter and alone.’ I stared into his face. I was sure he fancied me but had never tried anything. You can’t tell with Jews – they gave us all our modern ideas of sexual propriety but have many others they haven’t shared.

  He looked away. ‘My uncle sent me with a message to your palace,’ he said. ‘I believe it was about the rent collections near the Saint Andrew Monastery.’

  The Saint Andrew district? Did I own properties there? I wondered. I’d bought up patches of the poor district facing the Golden Horn. I owned five blocks that were rented out to the better sort of artisan, but these were almost in sight of my office windows. Then I remembered. I’d lately won some property from an old fool who believed praying over his dice was better than reasoning from the frequency with which any combination of numbers was likely to come up. This had to be one of them. Since I already must have looked out of my head, I’d not make a total fool of myself by arguing with a Jew about what I owned.

  I smiled at Ezra and led him towards the big flight of steps. ‘Any chance you could pay for a chair to take me along the Triumphal Way?’ I asked. He stopped, his face gone suddenly pale. I thought I’d shocked him by asking for the loan. But I followed his horrified look into the shadowy space between the steps and the embankment. Head smashed in by the impact, the naked boy I’d seen the day before was draped over the rim of the disused fountain. Except there was nothing left of his face, you’d not have thought he was dead. He might have been resting in the sun. Far above, his owner was looking down with arms raised in lamentation.

  It wouldn’t do to sit down and vomit – not here, not looking like this, not in front of a Jew. I swallowed hard and turned back for another look at the Imperial statues. ‘Do be a love, Ezra,’ I whispered. ‘You’re wearing far too many clothes for a day like this. You could lend your uncle’s protector that grey cloak you have on.’

  I watched the boy step back and unfasten his cloak pin. There was nothing athletic or otherwise attractive about his posture. Another year at the most and he’d be trying for a silly beard and probably filling out from the ghastly food Jews think it their duty to eat. But he was a pretty lad for the time being and he had the makings of considerable beauty. If only he’d put himself in my hands . . .

  But he wouldn’t. Just in time, I stopped myself from repeating how little beauty there was in the world.

  There’s nothing like the privacy of a closed carrying chair for getting over a long fit of the terrors. By the time I pulled the curtains aside and set foot on the steps at the main entrance to my palace, I was looking almost carefree.

  The slaves who were hurrying down towards their filthy, bloodstained master wouldn’t have expected any less of His Magnificence.

  Chapter 31

  I looked up at the bathhouse ceiling and counted slowly to twelve. That should give Antonia time to dry the tears she was squeezing out. I looked down again. ‘There is no taxpayer in Zigana called Isidore,’ I repeated, this time with an implacable frown. ‘Your alleged father, Laonicus,’ I went on, ‘left a wife and two sons. The wife is in receipt of a small pension bought from the Treasury by Laonicus before he died. This is still being paid. Both sons continue their father’s practice but concentrate on laying petitions before the Master of the Offices.

  ‘Almost everything you told me yesterday is a lie. I won’t press you for the full truth all at once. But I’d like at least to know your real name.’

  She looked at the waxed tablet where I’d let it fall. Giving up on tears, she smiled shyly. ‘You say almost everything I told you is a lie?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’ I snarled. I stopped and controlled my voice. Eboric couldn’t follow what we were saying but was watching the argument unfold with shy interest. ‘The agent I sent to their lodgings told me your “clients” vacated this morning. Their unpaid rent was settled to the end of the month by someone who didn’t give his name but whose description matches Simon. I should imagine they’re on the road back to Pontus and that you told me the truth about their complaint.

  ‘Now, what is your real name? You might also tell me something of your real business.’

  She sat down on one of the stone benches lining the wall and smiled at me again. Trying not to show exactly how angry I was, I finished towelling off the excess oil from my chest and loins. Pretending to ignore her openly approving look, I dropped the used towel into a basket. On getting back, I’d measured myself just enough opium to settle my nerves from the fright Simon had given me. I should have ta
ken a great deal more.

  ‘My name really is Antonia,’ she said at last in a voice that no longer tried to be other than aristocratic. The faint tinge of something else had also vanished. ‘And I did spend a while in Trebizond. But please don’t ask anything more. It’s all become such a mess and I need to think about it first.’ She leaned against the damp wall. ‘You are a very beautiful man, Alaric,’ she said suddenly. She stopped herself and sat forward. ‘Look, I can imagine what you’re thinking. But I have nothing to do with Shahin or Simon or whatever happened to you today. I got myself past your eunuchs yesterday on a whim. Among other things, I wanted to see how well I could pass as a man. I then got a little carried away with the success.’ She smiled yet again. ‘You could try thanking me, though,’ she said.

  I sat down on a stool opposite her. ‘Thanking you for what?’ I asked with a flattening of my voice. Her answer to this would determine whether I put her into a closed chair and turned my back as she was carried off only she would know where.

  ‘For slowing you down, of course,’ she said. I relaxed but covered this by picking up a small mirror and looking at my face. ‘Without me, you’d have fallen straight into Simon’s hands. I imagine getting away from Shahin was much easier.’ Before I could break in, the smile went from her face. ‘Where is your wife?’ she suddenly asked.

  ‘I don’t have one,’ I said. Confused, I looked harder at my face. I’d never seen it alternate like this between pale and red. ‘Both my sons are adopted,’ I explained. ‘Maximin’s father is – er, was – someone who used to be fairly important. You should have guessed, from his age and appearance, that Theodore wasn’t mine.’ I stood up and walked about the room. I was supposed to be asking the questions. Perhaps I should have taken less opium rather than more. I turned back to Antonia. ‘Why were you walking about the garden?’ I asked in a voice that nearly sounded accusing. ‘I did tell you to keep out of sight.’

  ‘I should keep out of sight?’ she said with what may have been a genuine loss of temper. ‘Have you seen the eyes on one of the disgusting pictures in the rooms you’ve given me? They’re holes that someone can use for looking in. Are you going to tell me I imagined the footsteps I heard behind the wall?’ She dropped her voice. ‘So I shouldn’t go into the garden to get out of this labyrinth of corridors and rooms bigger than a church? The maids you’ve given me don’t know any Greek. Your steward is a drunk who couldn’t take his eyes off me when he found me having a bath. And you tell me I should avoid Theodore. He’s the only normal person I’ve met in this place.’

  She stopped again for breath – or to cover a fit of the giggles: the loss of temper hadn’t been genuine. Time for me to pull the conversation back to the course I’d laid down for it. ‘Why did you encourage him to insist on going out tonight?’ I asked. ‘Theodore never goes out unless it’s to church. He’s never shown the slightest interest in secular poetry. I’ll have to accept that you’ve been using me in some stupid game. I suppose latching on to me was a change from your normal – and no doubt vicious – entertainments. But why rope in poor Theodore? I do think less of you for that.’

  Sure I’d finally got the upper hand, I stood up and scowled at her, hands behind my back. ‘Now, Antonia,’ I said sternly, ‘I don’t choose to wait till you’ve made up another pack of lies. I want to know who you are. You can begin by telling me who your father is.’

  Antonia sat back and laughed softly. She looked at Eboric. ‘What were you doing with that boy when I came in here?’ she asked. Before I could think what to roar at her, Eboric got up from where he’d been sitting against the wall and bowed. It was a graceful, even a charming, gesture. No one could really hold his lack of clothing against him in a bathhouse and Antonia gave him a charming smile in return.

  The smile stayed on her face when she turned back to me. ‘Is there any young slave in this place, Alaric, who is actually ugly?’ she asked. ‘Are there any of them, male or female, with whom you haven’t had sex?’

  Oh, the outrage of it! She hadn’t been here a day and she was already commenting on my household management. No – never mind the outrage of it: there was the irrelevance.

  But, even as I bent down to look her close in the face, I heard a scraping of shoes in the outer room. Antonia stiffened slightly then, keeping her back to the door, was on her feet and looking into a pot of setting depilatory pitch.

  ‘I was told you were down here, Antony,’ Theodore said with a strained laugh. He came fully through the door and caught sight of me. He bowed briefly before looking away from my naked body. His eyes fixed on an image of Pasiphae having sex with the bull. He pulled them away and found himself staring at something even I’d for a while thought outside the normal range of taste. Served the boy right, I told myself, for having lived here over two years and till now avoiding comforts a civilised man enjoyed every day. I was deciding how to speak with him about the inadequacies of cold washing water as a substitute for the real thing. But he’d turned to Antonia and I could see he was going weak at the knees. I couldn’t see his face. Could I complain if it had gone bright red?

  ‘We were discussing what clothes Antony should wear tonight,’ I said in a jolly voice too loud for the room. ‘His luggage was taken yesterday by the bandits.’ Theodore turned back to me, this time ignoring the sin of unashamed nakedness. What he would certainly have called a further and graver sin was presently under control. I hoped he wouldn’t ask for any advance on the vague story I’d given about our meeting while in captivity. But that was easily handled. How was I to explain things when, sooner or later, Antony became Antonia? The staff I’d so carefully assembled wouldn’t so much as blink if I turned into a swan and began propositioning the kitchen maids. If one of my guests changed sex between dinner and breakfast, no one would mention it outside the household. I’d need a bloody good explanation, though, for Theodore. Perhaps I should take him aside now and tell him what I’d had no proper reason for keeping from him the night before.

  It was too late. The boy was smitten. From the look on his face, he loved Antony with total boyish devotion. If I told him anything without careful preparation, he might never get over the shock. I walked past Antonia for a towel and tied it about my waist.

  ‘I came down,’ Theodore said in a voice that seemed on the edge of trailing off, ‘to ask if Antony would like the green silk you gave me for my birthday. Siegmund is sure it will fit him.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll call the tailors in tomorrow,’ I said. ‘For tonight, though, I agree the green silk will go nicely with his eyes.’ I looked into Theodore’s closed and faintly suspicious face. I’d barely started my interrogation of Antonia but Theodore wasn’t moving. I got up. ‘I have important business,’ I said with an involuntary glance at the mirror I was still holding. ‘If anyone needs me, I shall be in my office.’

  I paused for the clerk to soak more ink into his pen. It gave me time to complete the passage I’d been forming in my head. It was a nuisance that his weak chest had kept Sergius in his Nicaea residence far beyond the passing of winter. Until he returned, the usual understandings we could reach together without too many words had to give way to a careful balance in writing between clarity and circumlocution. I took a deep breath and looked for inspiration at an ivory of Cupid making love to Psyche.

  ‘As for the insistence of the Lord Bishop Longinus on a duality of will in Jesus Christ,’ I dictated, ‘this may not as yet be unorthodox, and the chapter in the decrees in the Council of Chalcedon to which he continually refers may not contradict him in their plain sense. Nevertheless, he has been made unofficially aware of the preliminary questions agreed at the closed Council of Athens. Even if he has not spoken out in public against a single will, I find his general attitude unhelpful. We are at one in asserting that such preferments between sees are a matter for the Lord Patriarch, and not for the Emperor or his ministers, to decide. It is, however, my personal opinion that the excellent missionary work overseen by Longinus among the Slavs sh
ould not be interrupted by his translation to a bishopric deep within the Home Provinces.’

  I paused again and leaned back in my chair. ‘Put that between the eleventh and twelfth paragraphs of my letter to the Patriarch,’ I said. The clerk bowed and brought his waxed board over for reading. I scratched one word out and put in another. It made no change to the overall sense but avoided a distasteful clash of consonants. I looked over the whole addition and smiled. If he thought he could poke his nose into matters of church doctrine best left with me, His Grace Longinus could go jump a foot in the air. I’d not have him yapping at me from a place as central or as cushy as Stauropolis. He could stay put in Larissa. Given luck, one of the barbarians he was trying to convert would knock him on the head. Unless he’s made his position clear in writing, a dead martyr is always better than a live troublemaker.

  I got up from my desk and carried a letter over to the window. The daylight was going, and someone in the Food Control Office had been showing off how many words he could cram on to a half sheet of papyrus. I looked at it and sniffed. I went with it to the clerk’s writing table. I dropped it in front of him. ‘Proposal rejected,’ I said. ‘I wrote a memorandum last August on the futility of price controls. Find it and adapt the relevant passages into a reply. Also, I want the man’s head of department in this office on the third hour of light on Friday. Tell him to bring a complete listing of his clerks and their functions.’

  I was pulling a face over some spelling mistakes in another document when the door opened and Theodore and Antonia crept in. I blinked and looked at Theodore in the fading light. Though I’d set half a dozen slaves on forcing him through the faster actions of the bathhouse and on getting him dressed, he still managed to look dirty. Antonia had been unjust about Samo’s abilities. She’d been got up as the most astonishingly lovely young man. I looked at her and my heart beat faster. I looked at Theodore and realised again that he was totally and irreparably lost. I could have fancied Antonia in either sex. This silly boy would never have looked at Antonia. How long before he started feeling guilty about his passion for Antony? I felt a stab of pity, then of guilt. If I explained the whole plot to him when it was over, I might bring him to a reasonable view of things. I knew I wouldn’t. How long before Martin was back? He’d have sorted this in no time.