Conspiracies of Rome a-1

by Richard Blake

  Maximin looked round for me and slowed his own horse. ‘Ride on,’ I called to him. ‘We can outrun them. Ride on!’

  I knew I was lying. But I wanted him at least to get away. This was all my fault. If anyone had to suffer for it, that duty was mine. ‘Ride on!’ I called again.

  ‘Stop right there, you fuckers!’ came the words in English so close behind I could hear they came from Big Moustache. For all that sounds travel oddly by night, I knew they were just a few hundred yards behind. And they were closing on us.

  I could hear the panting of their own horses. I could hear the grunted obscenities in at least two languages.

  ‘Don’t let the fat one get away,’ I heard one call, nearly frantic with the strain of pursuit. ‘Get either side of him.’

  They were so close, we were almost a single group. I pushed my head into the mane, and dug in my spurs for a final, desperate effort of speed. But I was falling behind. Only his continual looking back and waving me on kept Maximin from flying ahead. I could almost feel the approach. I imagined a hand reaching for the reins, and at last the swing of the heavy sword…

  As we came to a slight incline in the road, and my horse eased to a diminishing canter, the clatter behind ceased abruptly with a babble of obscenities. At first, I paid no attention.

  ‘Faster, faster, fuck you!’ I snarled at the horse. I dug my spurs viciously into its flanks. I plied the whip to every point I could reach without falling off. But, as the poor thing continued slowing, I realised we were indeed without pursuers.

  I didn’t look round. But I did lift my head and look forward. At the top of the incline, as if come from nowhere, sat a band of mounted soldiers. It took a few moments for me to realise what was happening. How long had my head been down? Until then, the road ahead had been empty. Was I imagining the soldiers? Was this some mirage, brought by my own imagination to lessen the horror of the killing blow from behind? But the soldiers were real enough. Like fish scales, their armour glittered in the moonlight. They sat in perfect formation, parting on either side as my horse staggered through.

  I saw Maximin already dismounted, talking to one of the men and pointing wearily back at our pursuers. As my horse came to a spontaneous halt, I fell to the ground. Every muscle suddenly ached. My clothes were wringing with sweat. Until I felt the smooth, stable warmth of the slab under my cheek, I hadn’t realised how cold I’d become in the night air. I shivered. I was too exhausted otherwise even to pant.

  There was a shout of orders in a language I didn’t know, and the men were off in pursuit of the now fleeing pursuers. The renewed clatter of hooves faded into the distance. Maximin knelt by me, pouring water between my parched lips and uttering soothing words.

  ‘Whatever were you doing so late on the road?’ a new voice came in Greek.

  I opened my eyes. An officer with a great dark beard stood looking down at me, his steel helmet a cone of light.

  ‘They were chasing us,’ I whispered feebly in Latin. Not much of an answer – but it was the truth.

  ‘We are on business for the universal bishop,’ Maximin added in Greek. He seemed almost his usual self. ‘We have a relic of the highest value to give back into his holy keeping.’

  The officer grunted an order to a couple of men who hadn’t joined in the pursuit. They poured water for my poor shattered horse and began sponging the gore from its flanks. One of them gave a disapproving look at my bloody whip and at the smear of blood that led from it to near my right hand. ‘Your arse will hurt like buggery tomorrow,’ he said in jocular but accented Latin.

  I nodded feebly. I was hurting badly enough already. The pain would soon be ready to blot out the relief of not having been caught by those English bastards.

  ‘Welcome to the Empire of the Greeks,’ said Maximin, fully himself again and without any hint now of exhaustion. He nodded to the soldier, who went back to his work of sponging. He continued in English: ‘I don’t think we shall go beyond mentioning the relic.’

  9

  I was lucky in my first view of Rome. It was on a Monday and, according to the modern style, was the twenty-first day of April in the year 609. The spell of drizzle that had been with us for the last few days of our journey on the road was now lifted. Before riding on ahead into the city, one of the soldiers who’d accompanied us told me that spring was now here with no chance of a relapse.

  We entered through the Pancratian Gate and, the great wall of Aurelian behind, we rested our horses atop the Janiculum Hill. We dismounted and ate a little breakfast of bread and cheese. From here, in the morning sun, we could see the Seven Hills and appreciate the city as a whole.

  I had never seen anything so gigantic or magnificent. Within the immense circuit of its walls, Rome spread out for miles across in all directions. There was still a mist in the lower parts, and this prevented a full view. But I could clearly trace the circuit of those walls, and I knew that everything inside was Rome. It was so vast, you could have dropped in the whole area of Canterbury and Richborough together, and had room to do it dozens of times over.

  As long as I could remember, I’d been hearing about Rome. I’d heard about it from Auxilius, who’d never been here. I’d read about it in the mission library. I’d heard about it from the missionaries. I’d heard much from Maximin, who’d been here so often he nearly counted as a native. But nothing had prepared me for anything so terrifyingly wonderful.

  One of the ancient emperors – one from long before the seat of Empire was transferred to Constantinople – could find no better way to apprehend the size of his capital than to have all the cobwebs gathered from every building and heaped before him. It is often only in the accumulation of the individually small that you can make sense of the inconceivably vast.

  No one did any such for me. Instead, I just stood there, gawping at the unimagined size of it all, and trying not to let Maximin see how overwhelmed I was.

  ‘Big, isn’t it?’ he said with a half-suppressed pride, shaking out his napkin for the little birds that twittered round and reaching for his bridle.

  ‘It is big,’ I agreed, trying to sound nonchalant. I wanted to put something into my voice that would say I too had seen big cities – Genoa, for example, and Pisa – and that Rome was just a larger version of these. But my voice trailed off as I looked again over the whole. In and around the central district, I saw clusters of buildings so huge I could barely conceive how they had been designed and constructed. Standing out most clearly in the general vastness were the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill and the baths built by Diocletian far over to the left. These dominated the city, dwarfing everything around them in height and sheer mass. Largely obscured by the palace was another mountainous building that I later found out was the great Colosseum – a stone amphitheatre so large that eighty thousand people at a time could watch the games that used to be held there.

  But even as we rode in, and I strained to look up at the buildings on either side of the road, I could see that Rome, like everywhere else in my world, had seen better days.

  This had, indeed, been apparent even before we reached the gate. There was a time when Rome was served by eleven aqueducts – long arched structures carrying in three hundred million gallons of water every day. These fed the baths, the fountains, and many private houses. They poured into fishponds and even great artificial lakes. But in the sieges of Rome that had attended the War of Reconquest, the aqueducts had all been cut. Some had been patched up afterwards. But most remained cut. The baths and the fountains were now all dry. The ponds that remained had become stinking, pestilential sewers.

  I had seen how the aqueducts were cut on the last stretch of the Aurelian Way. For several miles, this is joined by the route of an aqueduct built by Trajan. About a mile from the city, the top level of arches had been smashed away, and the continual gush of water that still came down from the hills had made the surrounding land into a marsh. Projecting from the rippled mud were the usual ruins – only there were so many of
these, it was apparent that the city had once extended far beyond the walls.

  Inside the walls, the city was falling into or was already in ruins. The great public buildings mostly remained. These were built of stone or massive brick arches. They had been stripped of their ornaments. The very marble facing had been pulled off the lower walls, leaving exposed courses of brickwork, with regular notches where the marble had once been attached. Here and there, too high easily to reach, massive bronze decorations showed something of what the old effect must have been. Below that, all was mean and bare. Every dozen yards or so, I saw plinths half-buried in the rubbish. The bronze statues advertised by the lush flattery of the inscriptions were all gone.

  But, so long as the roofs were sound, the main structures survived. They were still surviving when I was last there, hobbling out of the emperor’s reach with a price on my head. Probably they will always be there. The less solid structures were already collapsing, though. We rode down streets of apparently magnificent buildings that towered seven or eight storeys above the ground. But I could see daylight through the bare upper windows, where roofs and floors had fallen in. Sometimes, only the facade stood up, the rest having collapsed upon itself. Sometimes, the facades themselves had collapsed forward into the street.

  Most of the side streets were choked with rubble. In the main streets down which we passed, rubble had usually been piled back against the walls, where it lay covered in grass and rubbish. Mostly, the middle parts of the streets were clear, and we directed our horses over radically worn but still serviceable paving stones. Occasionally, though, what had originally been a wide avenue was now so constricted that we had to dismount and lead the horses over little hills of broken masonry. We did this by what had once been a junction of five wide streets. A colossal statue of some god or emperor had collapsed on itself, and the body parts had been left where they fell, to be gradually buried under the accumulating rubbish of half a century.

  Everywhere was the smell of damp brickdust and rotting filth. I could have shut my eyes and sworn I was back in Richborough. Here, as back home, pigs snuffed around for sustenance. Little clouds of steam swirled on the ground as the sun gained in power. Those streets reminded me of nothing so much as rows of blackened, broken teeth, the occasional soundness only emphasised the neighbouring decay.

  We passed through whole districts of silent, built-up desolation. In ancient times, I am told, there had been over a million inhabitants. Now, the decline of power and trade and the ravages of war and plague had reduced the population to around thirty thousand.

  Of course, this was a larger population than I had ever seen. I doubt if Canterbury – when I first arrived there – had more than five hundred people. But it’s all a matter of proportion. Canterbury was small enough to bustle even with five hundred people – the main street was often so crowded, you had to take your turn to get down it. Thirty thousand people in a city built to house a million produced an effect of almost total desertion.

  Every now and again, my gaze was drawn upwards by a movement in one of the upper windows of the buildings. I’d catch a brief view of someone pulling back to avoid being seen. Once, I looked up to see a child’s face, showing pale and thin against the blackness behind. It gave me a long and mournful inspection, and then vanished.

  It was around the churches and other religious buildings that the remaining population of common people was now clustered. These people squatted in the former palaces of the great, or had built squalid hovels from reused blocks.

  As we crossed the Tiber and approached the central districts, we began to see people in the street. They shuffled about, mostly in rags, shopping at little stalls that sold spoiled fruit and old clothes and dried fish so stinking it would have turned a dog’s stomach.

  Here and there, I did see people dressed in respectable clothes. I even saw a covered chair carried by four slaves. But persons of quality, I later found, usually stayed indoors until the sun was well and truly up, and the more dangerous human trash had vanished until the return of darkness.

  We even went by a few of the great houses that hadn’t been given over to the poor. Heavily fortified, all remaining ancient elegances bricked up, they glowered blankly over the streets they faced.

  We passed into what had once been a grand square hundreds of feet across, in which the central decorative column was toppled over and lay in broken sections, and the buildings on two sides were burnt out. Here, we were accosted by about a dozen raddled old whores and some scabby rent boys. They dragged themselves behind us, offering their services. Though dwarfed by the surrounding vastness, the noise of their cries was the first we’d heard since passing through the gate.

  Come, lie with me, O pretty lad!

  And give me money and be glad

  Some ancient creature of probably female sex struck up, though I thought long after it might have been a eunuch. The song was taken up by a few others, building to a choral detailing of inventive though unlikely pleasures.

  Maximin ignored the various prostitutes. I gave them a momentary glance. I hadn’t had a fuck in months, nor a wank in days. But I could easily resist these charms. I kicked one of the boys over as he came too close, and half drew my sword as one of the whores held up supplicating hands that seemed almost to drip contagion.

  Such was the posterity of the great Populus Romanus that once had set the world to order. Such was the fallen magnificence of a city that had once been adorned with the plunder of the world.

  10

  At length, we reached the Lateran, which lay on the far side of the city from where we’d entered. Part of it, indeed, was joined to the southern wall. It stood out from its surroundings in bright, jarring glory. Many centuries ago, it was built as a palace for some noble family. Then it was confiscated by one of the emperors and used as government offices. Then it was given – I think by the Great Constantine – to the pope in his capacity as bishop of Rome. Since then, it had been altered and extended to become the main residence of the pope and the administrative heart of the Roman Church and all those churches that looked to Rome for guidance.

  It loomed before us in a jumbled mass of porticoes and arches. The square in front of it was crowded with beggars and other scum. I could smell their diseased bodies at twenty feet. Fortunately, they saw the glower on my face and kept a reasonable distance.

  First, we presented the letters of introduction that Bishop Lawrence had given Maximin. These were accepted by a priest sitting at a desk in the great reception hall behind the gate. A fat creature of uncertain age and sex, he looked at the battered but still sealed letter with plain contempt. ‘His Holiness is away from Rome. Nothing can be transacted in his absence. Come back next month,’ he drawled, reaching for another dried fig.

  A few silver coins bought better manners. He told us he would do what he could, and we should return the following afternoon.

  Next stop was the Church Bank, housed in one of the cellars. Armed guards stood outside a monumental brick arch that led down into what I cannot imagine once had been. Now, it was brightly lit and filled with dark, sharp Syrians, who darted here and there among parchment ledgers and sheaves of papyrus. Every movement threw up clouds of dust into the dank, unventilated air of the bank.

  This was my introduction to banking. I hadn’t at all liked Maximin’s idea when we’d unloaded the horses and dragged those bags into the Lateran. I was appalled when he said we should hand it all over to these shifty Orientals. I said it would be safer with the whores outside. It still took some explaining to me what a good idea banks were.

  Of course, it all depends on where you bank your cash. I lost a small fortune when the Saracens took Antioch. Every bank in the city closed its doors as the cash boxes were plundered. I did in the end get some of it back from Omar – but only after shedding my foreskin in a pretence conversion, and then he paid in silver that took forever to carry away.

  Not that I did too badly from the deal. When that pig of an Emperor Consta
ntine – the present one, that is – caught me out and confiscated my house and fortune and tried to have me blinded, I still had something beyond his reach in Antioch. It paid for my escape and the bribes along the way. It still pays for little delicacies that I have sent to me in Jarrow, along with the occasional new book and quire of papyrus. I have a great-grandson who looks after this. I have never seen him, but I understand he is a perfect little Saracen.

  But the Church Bank was an excellent choice. Handling and backed by the vast revenues of the Church, it has never closed its doors. Not even when, about thirty years after opening my account there, Exarch Isaac marched over from Ravenna to plunder the Lateran, did the bank suspend its activities. It is the greatest if least observed power of the West. In those days, it was still flexing its muscles as the imperial hold on Italy slackened. Even so, it transacted an immense business. Money came in from the papal estates all over the West and in the Empire. Money went out.

  Recently, the pope had taken over the costs of Roman defence. After the last big siege, about ten years previously, Pope Gregory had made a separate peace with the Lombards under which he paid them five hundred pounds of gold every year. There was the cost of a food dole for the dirty parasites in Rome. There were bribes to state and Church officials in Constantinople. There was the occasional sub to the emperor himself when his finances became desperate – that is, every few months.

  Entering Rome with twenty-eight pounds of gold in the saddlebags and two around my waist, I’d thought we were unimaginably rich. The Syrian clerks didn’t turn a hair as I dumped bag after bag onto the table. They opened a few bags at random, tested the coin, and just weighed the rest. Most of it went unopened into another vault even deeper underground. They gave us a little parchment book with our names and addresses and the weight of the amount deposited. Being still a distrustful barbarian, I kept hold of the two pounds I’d killed for. All the while, big boxes of coin came back and forth, each one accompanied by a sheet of papyrus covered in writing by many hands.