Conspiracies of Rome a-1

by Richard Blake

  There was no point in asking how he knew my real name Instead, I asked for his advice on transporting books to England. We sat down privately together in the shade of a small portico just by the Exchange and bought some wine and hard biscuits from a passing vendor.

  Ordinarily, he explained, the most secure transport would be by land. It would be slow, but there’d be no chance of saltwater contamination of the leather and parchment. This had to be taken into account when considering the lower costs of sea transport.

  However, he was getting involved in a tin shipment from Cornwall, and there would be a big, heavy ship leaving from Marseilles in July. If I had enough books ready by then, they could travel in the ballast, at a very low rate, and in reasonable safety. I could get them to Marseilles on one of the grain ships from Sicily that was planning a triangular voyage.

  The only drawback was that the ship wouldn’t put in at Richborough, but at one of the Wessex ports, and the books would have to be carried overland. Then again, an armed escort wouldn’t cost much for something like books, which hardly anyone would want to steal. Either that, or Ethelbert could be got at through his wife to stump up an armed party.

  I asked about tin prices.

  ‘Pretty firm at the moment,’ he said. ‘There’s an expectation of all-out war in the East, and for a long time. Whatever happens between Phocas and the exarch of Africa, the Persians mean business. Getting them out of Asia will take hard fighting. I expect tin and all other goods related to the military to go up and stay up.’

  I’d heard this already from the diplomat. ‘How secure are shipments out of Cornwall?’ I asked. ‘I’ve heard there hasn’t been much doing there for a while.’

  ‘You need to dig quite deep nowadays there,’ he said, ‘and that means some danger of flooding, which slows down extraction and raises costs. But prices will soon be high enough to cover that risk. So long as your people don’t decide to raid the mine and steal everything or kill all the slaves, I see good profits there.’

  After some very stiff bargaining, I put myself down for a twentieth share of the cargo. That got me free shipment of the books. It got me a chance of at least a tenfold profit. It also allowed me to probe for the information I really wanted. ‘How long do you think the emperor can last?’ I asked in English. There seemed to be free speech here on all political issues so far as they affected business. But what I wanted to lead into wasn’t for anyone to overhear in Latin. I avoided using the name Phocas, instead using the English word ‘ cyning ’ for emperor.

  ‘Most say he’ll be out by Christmas,’ the old man replied in English. ‘I think it could be longer. He’ll lose to the exarch eventually. But there are differences within the exarch’s own side. His son and his nephew are in a race. One is invading the East through Egypt, the other by sea. Whoever gets first to Constantinople will be the one who deposes the emperor, and therefore takes his place. Because of this deal, each young man is quietly slowing the other down. I think the emperor will last a bit longer yet.’

  I asked if Phocas had much support in Constantinople.

  ‘Not much. The man is feared, which means there won’t be open moves against him as there were against Emperor Maurice. But my information is that the whole administrative machinery has withdrawn its active support.’

  ‘Does that mean the Church as well?’ I asked.

  ‘Have you ever been East?’ he asked in reply. I shook my head.

  ‘I didn’t think you had. Until you’ve been in Constantinople, you won’t believe how controlled the Church is there. It’s almost a department of state. It’s not much different in the other Eastern patriarchates – for all the trouble they have with heresy. The Church won’t lift a finger against the emperor so long as he keeps his palace guard on side.

  ‘Here, it’s very different. Pope Boniface sends long letters of support and not much else. Oh, he pays the costs of defence against the Lombards, but he’d have to do that in any event. No one else will or can pay those. But he makes sure little of the money he sends to Ravenna leaves Italy. In the meantime, he keeps in with the exarch of Africa, and is waiting on events.

  ‘That statue of the emperor in the Forum will be up a while longer – but not that much longer.’

  I ignored the opening for the moment. ‘Does the emperor still have the support of the -’ I paused and cast round for an English phrase for ‘ Agentes in Rebus ’ – ‘of the security services?’

  The old man thought a little about the meaning of the words I’d used. Spies are for the civilised. Barbarians get by on gossip. ‘Not the active support,’ he said at length. ‘It’s the same all over the administration.’

  Even though there was no chance we could be understood by anyone else in the square, he leaned forward and dropped his voice. ‘I heard there was a letter intercepted last January in Syracuse. It’s believed it came from King Chosroes of Persia to King Agilulf of the Lombards. I don’t know what it said. What matters is that it got that far. It was only intercepted by accident. The security people in Constantinople have always been very careful to shut off contacts between Persia and the West. That letter got as far as it did because it was allowed to go through.’

  This was my chance. ‘That’s why the emperor now has his column, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  The old man sat sharply up. ‘What do you know about that?’ he asked. ‘I shouldn’t have told you about it. You’ll get us both killed if you aren’t careful. I saw Fat Silas boasting yesterday about those coins you gave him. Next I knew, he was dead in the gutter. You be careful.’

  ‘But I already know about the column,’ I lied. ‘Because he can’t trust the regular service, the emperor has set up his own personal security service. It’s operating here in Rome.

  ‘What do you know about a man with one eye?’

  The old man got up. His face had closed on me like a town gate at dusk. ‘We’ve spoken quite long enough now about matters that don’t concern the likes of us, young Aelric,’ he said. ‘If you don’t want to end like poor Silas – or your friend, the Saint – you’ll stop asking these questions now.’

  As he walked away, he turned and said, still in English: ‘Within the next year, there will be a new order of things in the East. When that happens, this column will amount to nothing. Until then, regard it as an armed and dangerous conspiracy of the Greeks against the peace. Its spies are everywhere. It won’t rest until the exarch of Africa and his boys are dead, or until they have defeated the emperor.

  ‘I warn you, Aelric, stick to your books. Stick to the price of tin. Make money. Educate your people. Keep your nose out of politics. You may end by losing that and much more besides.’ He walked off back to the Exchange.

  What had I learnt from the conversation? Not much new, I supposed. But much had been confirmed. Phocas was up to something in Rome. The only question remaining was what it could be. Lucius was right: those letters really were the key to our locked door.

  And that gold seemed to be cursed. I aside, everyone who’d owned to touching the stuff was dead – those two bandits on the road, the other ten, Maximin, and now Silas. And I was being watched and had been attacked.

  A superstitious man might have considered giving the gold to the Church. I took a comforting grip on the pommel of that nice sword Lucius had given me.

  38

  I nearly bumped into Martin as I passed one of the Syrian churches in the square. We were in a crowd of dealers and professional men. He didn’t see me at all. He was smiling absently when I saw him.

  ‘Hello, Martin,’ I said patting him on the shoulder. ‘On a mission for the dispensator?’

  Of course, he wasn’t. He’d been with his woman and unborn child. Where could they be staying? This must have been an expensive area for renting.

  He blushed a bright pink. ‘Yes, sir,’ he lied very badly. Then he remembered his place. He set his features into the required expression of cringing respect.

  I smiled and clapped him harder on the should
er. Martin was a rotten liar – most unlike the others of his race. But what was it to me if he had a woman? I hadn’t believed Lucius in his wider claim. Yes, slaves might need a harsh discipline to keep them in line. But that was because, fundamentally, they were human beings, with the same desire for personal freedom and autonomy as the rest of us. Martin wasn’t my slave. He was on loan from the Church. So long as he oversaw that copying, that was the limit of what I wanted from him. I had no complaint about the copying. So what if he ran off now and again to be with his woman?

  I suddenly thought that Edwina would now be heavy with child. I felt a pang of remembrance for what I had lost. And I felt a degree of sympathy for Martin.

  We walked on in the bright sunshine. Dealers and vendors and other men of business hurried around us. There was the occasional litter carrying one of their ladies. We passed through the financial district and across the bridge, back into the semi-ruined main areas of Rome, where the quality of those around us dropped correspondingly. Across the river, we turned right towards the Lateran.

  We began a conversation about the sound of Greek and Latin in their better ages. You need a pretty uncritical nature not to realise that the sound of Latin has changed between ancient times and the present. Nowadays, there are more letters than sounds, and there has been a softening of sounds that once were hard. The question is, what was the ancient pronunciation? And, of course, is it really important to appreciating the writings of the ancients if the sounds have changed? Martin’s father was convinced he had answered the technical part of the question for Greek, and was convinced that the correct pronunciation was necessary to appreciate the ancients.

  I pushed and pushed with Martin to know more of what his father had told him. We spoke. We argued. We gave illustrations of our points as we walked on past the ruined Forum towards the Lateran, where our project of saving these arguments for another generation to settle was going smoothly ahead. But underneath, I was feeling increasingly troubled. I could sense a vague darkness in my mind.

  ‘Martin,’ I asked in as normal a tone as I could command, ‘you said at our big meeting in Marcella’s house that you had been with the dispensator on the day that Maximin vanished. Yet I spoke to the dispensator, and he said he hadn’t seen you since attaching you to the copying mission.’

  I didn’t have my notes with me, and I’m willing to grant I was misunderstanding what both had said to me. Martin hadn’t actually said he was with the dispensator, only that he had not heard from him about the summons that Maximin had received. As for the dispensator, all he had said was that he’d found himself in need of Martin after his attachment.

  If Martin had turned and told me that he had met the dispensator, but was not at liberty to reveal the nature of their conversation, I’d have gone straight back to the question I was forming about the use of the dual cases in Greek. If he’d flushed red again and muttered something nonsensical, I’d have concluded he was with his woman again – though had he ever been gone long enough to get all the way to and back from the financial district? I wasn’t sure at the time about the number and duration of his absences on that day. Instead, he stopped in the street, his face suddenly grey and sweating.

  That vague darkness firmed in shape and colour.

  ‘Martin,’ I asked, now with a harder tone, ‘whoever visited Father Maximin that last afternoon first stopped him from going to the dispensator, and then called him out as night was falling. Yet only four other people knew he had been summoned. There was the dispensator. There was Brother Ambrose. There was me. There was you. One of these leaked that information. Was that person you?’

  This was embarrassing. I liked and respected Martin, and I was questioning him like this with the greatest reluctance. I wanted him to stop me. I wanted him to show impatience and even offence. My line of questioning could have been stopped dead by some kind of reply, however feeble it might have sounded in a regular investigation. How could I be sure no one else had known about the summons? I wanted not so much answers as reassurance.

  Instead, Martin was babbling about his ‘great regard for the reverend father’, and almost having to support himself against a broken pedestal.

  I pressed on, the dark shadow in my mind spreading. I asked where he got the money to buy fine clothes and support a woman and her unborn child in an expensive area. Instead of owning to the standard bribes that all clerical slaves take from petitioners, he nearly puked into the gutter.

  Every response raised another question. Every question arranged more of the facts into an internally consistent pattern. I began myself to feel sick.

  I took firm hold of his arm. ‘What do you know about Maximin’s death?’ I demanded. ‘What was your part in his murder? You knew he was dead when I offered you your freedom. I well recall how white your face went. You knew he was dead when you told me he wasn’t in the convent. You finished cleaning the words off that parchment letter. It still carried recognisable text when the old woman handed it to you. It was you who scraped it and went over it with vinegar.

  ‘I want to know what happened. Did you kill Maximin?’

  ‘No… no, sir,’ he gasped. ‘Surely, I was with you when he was killed. I couldn’t have killed him.’

  A wretched answer. It only confirmed that I had been with him when the body was found. I had no idea where he was before I got late back to Marcella’s. I looked at his feet. Were they the same size as those bloody prints? Lucius had taken the measurements. It would be easy to check.

  ‘I want the truth out of you, Martin,’ I said, tightening my grip on his arm until he winced.

  ‘Please, sir… please,’ he babbled. ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘So tell me where you went on Maximin’s last afternoon.’ I fought to keep my voice from rising too loud.

  ‘Please, sir – I can’t. Please, you’re hurting my arm.’ Martin’s voice was a ragged whisper.

  ‘Hurting your arm, am I?’ said I, grimly. I was angry. More than that, I was horrified. ‘I’ll hurt more than that if I have to. I know you’ve been fucking some girl. I know her belly is full of your trash. Do you think I give a shit about any of that? I want the truth about you and Maximin’s death. Do you understand?’

  Martin twisted ineffectually in my grip. I had him too tight. ‘Please, please,’ he cried, ‘don’t bring Sveta into this. She knows nothing. Please, sir!’

  ‘You’re coming with me,’ I said, now squeezing on his arm until I felt the bones. But where to, I thought? To the prefect? What a joke! To the dispensator? What was his role in the murder? Where to? It was obvious.

  ‘You’re coming with me to Lucius. We’ll have the truth out of you.’

  Martin blenched again. ‘No, sir – not to the lord Basilius. Please, not to him.’

  Indeed not. I could imagine what Martin was thinking. Lucius would have the back off him without putting his wine cup down or raising his voice. If that didn’t work, there were the spiked whips and red-hot pincers, or whatever else he kept in reserve for particularly naughty slaves.

  I turned with him and began marching him away from the Lateran, now towards the house of Lucius. ‘You’ll tell us all you know about the Column of Phocas – who is in it, and how much you were paid. You’ll also tell us about those letters. After all, that’s why you volunteered yourself for the copying mission, isn’t it? Your job was to help get those letters.’

  Thump!

  ‘Urgh!… Fuck you!’

  I’d misjudged Martin. Just because he was weedy and didn’t know how to use a sword didn’t mean he was incapable of violence. He’d suddenly raised his knee and got me in the stomach. I doubled over, gasping for breath.

  And he was off.

  He was lighter than me, and his legs were longer. He was off like a rabbit before I could straighten up. But I gave chase. So long as I kept him in sight, I’d run him down. Then it would be off to Lucius and whatever it took to get the truth out of the man who’d killed or had some part in killing Max
imin.

  ‘Stop that slave!’ I bellowed at some barbarian pilgrim further down the street. ‘Stop him!’

  The barbarian smiled and reached out a heavily muscled arm to scoop Martin as he tried to run past. I could see the gleam of the gold band on his bicep.

  But Martin was deft as well as fast. He dodged the outstretched arm and continued running, his speed hardly broken. We both followed, shouting at others in the street to join the chase.

  Martin ran and ran. We followed. As I’d expected, he had speed but little stamina. He was like my horse on the road from Populonium. He wasn’t built for a long chase. He ran down long, almost empty streets, jumping here and there over the fallen ruins. But we followed close behind. Little by little we gained on him. I could hear his rasping breath as his energy began to fail him. He rounded a corner.

  ‘It’s a dead end,’ the barbarian called exultantly. ‘We’ve got the worthless cunt!’

  He was right. It was a dead end. The street was blocked with a sheer, ten-foot-high pile of fallen rubble. No one could get over that without slowing to a crawl. We’d have him.

  But there was another of those bastard sewers open. Martin stepped straight into a hole in the grating, and was gone. We were there within a few heartbeats. But he was gone.

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ I shouted, looking down. ‘Fuck!’ This one wasn’t blocked. I pushed my head through the hole into a cold, shitty draught. Of all the sewers in all the streets in Rome, Martin had chosen to escape into one that was still in working order.

  Neither I nor the barbarian could follow. At its widest, the hole in the grating was only about fifteen inches wide. Even without the muscling piled on top, we both had those big Germanic shoulders. We pulled at the rest of the grating. But time had set it into the road as if it had been concreted in.

  I looked around. There were others now with us. But they were all too big to fit through.