The Terror of Constantinople a-2

by Richard Blake

  ‘Aelric,’ he said, ‘I must regret to inform you of a change in our circumstances. Do not plague me with questions – now or ever – about my sources of information. But it seems that our positions are reversed. I am safe. It is now you who are in danger.

  ‘Ten paces after I finish talking to you, I will cry out and fall to the ground. I shall give every appearance of having had a stroke. Because my life has become of considerable value to them, these barbarians will turn all their attention on me.

  ‘When that happens, you and Martin will run. The City must be to your left – perhaps only a half-mile away. You will outrun our guards because they are more accustomed to riding. Do not stop, do not look round. Do you understand?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a cheerful wave.

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin, his nerve surprisingly steady.

  Would I ever learn what these ‘sources of information’ had been? I looked down at my heavy, ill-fitting boots that had been made for everything but speed.

  But we’d underestimated the Yellow Linguist. It wasn’t only Latin he understood. He turned and barked an order at which he and the two guards drew their swords with a menacing rasp of steel, glinting in the early sunlight.

  Having passed the church, we were now in a narrow street, one sword in front of us, two behind. All three were too close to be tackled one at a time.

  I pushed Theophanes back against a broken wall and felt for my knife. Martin stood like a man turned to stone.

  I might get one of them if I were lucky.

  ‘Take this, you yellow fuckers,’ a harsh voice cried out from above in Latin.

  I think I shall be forgiven if I say I was long since past any degree of surprise. If it had been Saint Victorinus himself dropping down from that wall, his flowers tumbling behind him, I’d not have raised an eyebrow.

  But it was Authari. Like me, he was dressed in the clothing of one of those Germanics. His sword glinted dull in the morning light.

  So that’s what had become of Hermann, I thought as I lunged at the Yellow Linguist while he was still in shock. But he recovered too fast. It was only the leather tunic that saved me from his raking sword-blow. I danced back, wrapping my cloak around my left arm and lashing out again with the knife.

  No luck with that. Though largely useless for fighting on foot, a sword was still better than a knife.

  I glanced round. My eyes lit on a spar that might be useful as a club. Before going for it, I threw the knife at his face. I was in luck this time. I got him straight in one of his eye-sockets. The knife went in and dropped out again as he fell down squealing and writhing on the broken cobbles like a worm that has just had salt poured over it. Through hands clamped tight over his eye came a stream of black fluid. It was the sort of wound that doesn’t kill at once, but can fester for days in an agony that doesn’t abate.

  Feeling a surge of joy I hadn’t felt in months – not, indeed, since I’d skewered that killer outside the Lateran – I left the knife where it lay and bent down for his sword. Then, hearing a loud clashing behind me, I turned round to join in the action.

  No need. Authari had made short work of the Yellows. He’d had that massive Germanic sword and had taken them too much by surprise. They lay at his feet in two crumpled heaps.

  I saw Theophanes relax his grip on the knife in his hand. No more killing for him at the moment. The work was already done.

  My legs went from under me in a sudden fit of the shakes. I flopped to the ground beside the Yellow Linguist. Everything about me went dark, with little flashes of light at the corners of my eyes.

  ‘Not this one,’ I whispered to Authari as he raised his sword in both hands above the Yellow Linguist. ‘I want to finish him myself – with the knife.’

  The beast had another eye, and much else that he might do before drawing his last breath.

  But Authari ignored me. With a crunch, that heavy sword had smashed through quilted tunic and ribs, and the Yellow Linguist lay as silent as the other two.

  He stood over me, breathing heavily. He put his hand down to me as I struggled to regain control over my little nervous fit.

  ‘Get up, my Golden Aelric,’ said Theophanes. ‘Get up. Just one more effort before we can be safe.’

  ‘Come along, Master,’ Authari added, pulling me up with one arm. ‘I want meat for my breakfast.’

  28

  ‘I think a touch more oil on your back, sir,’ the slave said, flask in hand.

  I could feel the heat baking though my sandals as I stood looking down at the brown sweat that oozed from every pore of my body in that room. Another slave knelt before me on a leather mat, scraping at my legs with his strigil.

  ‘With all respect, sir,’ he said, looking up, ‘we’ll surely cook before we can get all that dirt out of you.’

  On the far side of the hot room, Martin was trying to insist that he could scrape himself. For all the notice his own ministering slaves took of him, he might have been speaking Celtic.

  Theophanes had been right. The City was to our left, but some of the Germanics had been over on our right – four of them. I don’t know if they’d been waiting for us on orders carried from the Great One, or if they’d still been looking for us.

  All that mattered was that they’d almost caught us. We’d run like lunatics over that broken ground towards the defensive clearing. Martin and Theophanes had run hand in hand. Authari and I had followed, turning every so often to throw bricks at the exhausted pursuers. They’d been hardly six feet behind us, swords in hand, as we came within range of the City artillery. Only then had they given up the chase, standing out of probable range and shouting obscenities as we made for the nearest gate.

  The negotiations required of Theophanes had seemed endless before the gate had been swung open by its quaking sentries and we were able to pass back into the City. But once inside, with nine inches of iron-clad gate between us and the rest of the world, I’d realised it was all over. We’d sat quietly drinking the dark, powerful wine the soldiers gave us, listening vaguely to the stream of peremptory orders and explanations Theophanes had snapped at the officer in charge, the creaking of the iron gibbets overhead, and the muffled shouts that drifted underneath the gate.

  Authari explained that he had become separated from us in the attack and by the time he’d caught up with us the Germanics had taken us. He had followed us back to the guardhouse, and hidden out in an old hen coop from where he could see all that passed. He’d waited there for a chance to to rescue us. On the second day, he’d come upon Hermann and broken his neck, taking his clothes and hiding the body. His plan had been to kill another guard early in the morning of the fourth day and take the dead man’s place for an inspection.

  ‘But I missed your escape, sir,’ he said guiltily. ‘I wetted my lips with a little beer I’d found, and then fell asleep for just a few moments. I woke to the sound of shouting. I knew it must have been you who’d got away.’

  He’d wandered through the old suburbs all the remaining night, hoping to find us and lead us back to the city. He’d finally caught up with us as we left the Yellow Camp.

  Now, a piece of advice for you, dear reader – advice you may be in a position one day to take. Always show gratitude to slaves. Thank and reward them for small services. Free them for great services.

  Still in those stinking clothes, I’d hurried Authari straight off to the Church of St Peter and freed him before the priest and the whole congregation.

  As Authari knelt before me for the last time as a slave, I’d bent down and kissed him, and promised him as much gold as he could carry on his journey back to the Lombards.

  ‘With your permission, sir,’ he’d replied, ‘I’ll stay on as your freedman. You were a good master and I do think you have need of my protection.’

  The priest had nodded his approval as he laid his hands on us both. The congregation had shouted the traditional words. Before dusk, the news would be all over the city – to add to the other sto
ries of our daring heroism that were already circulating.

  Now Martin and I were making free with the bathhouse of Theophanes’ palace. In his usual style, he’d called the place his ‘miserable apartment’. But if not on the same scale as the Legation, it was undoubtedly a palace. Close by the Senatorial Dock, in one of the side roads, it was a modest affair of painted brick on the outside. Inside, the array of marbles and elaborate mosaics and frescoes dazzled the senses. No extreme of luxury had been overlooked for comfort or display.

  Filthy as he was, Theophanes couldn’t join us yet in the bath. As we’d come in from the street, he’d been accosted by a messenger bearing letters in a bag of purple leather.

  ‘Do please proceed straight to the bathhouse,’ he’d said, breaking the seal. ‘I will join you when I have dictated the necessary replies.’

  ‘Oh, sir, what have you been about?’ The slave looked up from my crotch, disgust on his face fighting politeness. He called for a pair of tweezers and reached into the short hair above my balls. With a deft tug, he had the creature out and held it up black and twisting for my inspection. In the shimmering light of the hot room, it looked more like a spider than an ordinary pubic louse. Search me where I’d picked the thing up. It might have been from those sluts. It might just as easily have been from those beastly clothes that I hoped were, even now, feeding the bathhouse furnace. You wouldn’t want those things clamped all over you, scattering brown dust into your clothes and raising a continual scabby itch.

  The slave dropped the thing on to a spare linen cloth, then threw off his bathrobe to avoid catching anything himself. He then gave a renewed and closer inspection to the other hairy parts of my body. From the horrified tutting, more of the creatures came to light.

  ‘Malik,’ he called, ‘prepare the depilation room. And bring the freedman as well. We’ll deal with the Master when he’s ready for us.’

  Since I’ll bet you’ve never been depilated, I think I’ll pause here to tell you what it involves.

  First, you go into a hot tub. This isn’t the usual heated pool, which can be large enough for swimming but is never that hot. What I mean is a small bathtub filled with water as hot as you can tolerate. From here, you’re taken out, rubbed all over with oil and roughly shaved. The purpose of this is to reduce the body hairs to no more than an eighth of an inch, while making them softer and looser. Then you lie on a couch while slaves plaster you in strips with a special melted pitch called, in Latin, dropax. When this is set but not fully cooled, the strips are ripped off.

  The operation is repeated as often as required until, from the neck down, your body is as smooth as a new-born baby’s. And that includes toes and fingers.

  The delicate areas of your body need a specially refined wax. Even so, this hurts. But you soon get used to the discomfort. Approached in the right frame of mind, it can be quite arousing. You’ll not believe the inches it can seem to add to even the proudest manhood – nor the continued, sensuous kissing of the flesh it brings out in silk undergarments. So long as you maintain the underlying muscle tone, it can give your body an adolescent look and feel well into your sixties.

  If Martin hadn’t been there, wailing and thrashing about at every stripping of the pitch, I’d have given myself up heart and mind to those gloriously pretty boy slaves who were rubbing their bodies so provocatively against mine as they did their work.

  Such was my first ever bath in the full ancient style. You can rest assured it was not my last.

  Afterwards, I sat naked in a shaft of sunlight that came through the roof of the final room in the bathhouse. Here, in subdued contentment, I gave myself up to the ministrations of the barber and the manicurist. Those awful days outside the city walls were already fading to a distant nightmare.

  ‘What do you think might be for lunch?’ I asked Martin as he glowered into a set of mirrors that revealed the full extent of his bald patch.

  ‘Something special, my dear boy – something very special,’ Theophanes called as he entered the room on a wheeled couch. He lay on his back, a white cloth covering his bulk from neck to knees.

  ‘Can you bear it if I ask to deprive you of your sunbeam?’ he continued. ‘My cosmetician will need all the light God can provide before I am ready to face the world again.’

  Lunch was special, though we were all three now so wilting under the strain of that long, sleepless night that we were barely up to registering the succession of dishes.

  I was happy in the fresh clothes brought over from the Legation. Even Martin was less dour than usual, wearing the best linen robe I’d bought for him and reaching up every so often to reassure himself that the elaborate styling that had brought a lock of hair over his crown still held in place.

  We sat in a peristyle that ran all the way along the inside front wall of the palace. Through the limestone pillars we looked on to the central courtyard, in the middle of which a large fountain was cascading loud jets into a surrounding basin of blue granite.

  For the first time, Alypius joined us at the table. He gave his master endless loving glances as he helped him break up his bread. He even threw me the occasional look that came close to being friendly.

  Throughout the meal Theophanes continued to deal with his backlog of correspondence. The Imperial messages having been dealt with in private, he now turned to the ordinary petitions. He would listen to an abstract of each, then give a simple yes or no. A few times, he specified the fraction of the share of an estate. His comments would be scratched into the margins of each papyrus sheet and then all would be carried off for putting into the correct official form for stamping and delivery.

  During an iced fruit course, the papers that confirmed Authari’s freedom were brought in for me to sign. Having lost my signet ring to the barbarians, I signed my name at the bottom of each copy – one for the Registry, another for each of the parties. Theophanes and Martin signed as witnesses.

  As the dishes were being cleared away, another messenger entered. He whispered awhile to Theophanes, who listened intently.

  ‘Alaric,’ he said in his most official voice, and using my common name to emphasise the return to formality. ‘Alaric, I must bring two connected facts to your attention.

  ‘The usurper Heraclius has intervened with the barbarians to secure the release of the remaining captives. For reasons of state security, these will not be readmitted to the city but will be ferried across to the Asiatic suburbs. At the same time, advance forces from the usurper have arrived outside the city walls. All contact with the Provinces has been cut. We are now under siege.’

  29

  I was alone with Theophanes.

  He’d taken me across the courtyard and right inside the fountain. We’d used little parasols to keep the water off us as we passed through into a small dry space. Under the marble roof were a table and two chairs. A tray of drinks and various nibbles were already set out for us.

  All around us, like a circular window of rippled glass, the water splashed and gurgled loudly into the basin. Through it, we had an unbroken if distorted view of the whole courtyard, which was now empty.

  ‘I find this place so cooling in the hot weather,’ Theophanes explained as we took our seats, ‘and often so private.’

  His voice lingered over the word ‘private’.

  He took up a silver pot with a long spout. ‘Do please let us share this most refreshing drink.’

  He poured two generous helpings of a black, steaming liquid. I’d seen him drink this at the end of some of our dinners in the restaurant. Knowing his abstemious habits, I’d stuck to the wine. Now, I took up my cup and sipped carefully.

  ‘It is a custom I brought from my own country,’ said Theophanes. ‘It is an infusion of berries called kava that both settles the stomach and refreshes the mind. I have never made any converts to it among the Greeks. But it is used widely by those Eastern races that cannot or will not trust themselves with even watered wine. If, after your long ordeal, it does not wholly revive you,
I recommend these other dried berries from Africa. Chewed in moderation, they are still more stimulating.’

  I took up a handful of the things and crunched them. They tasted foul, but I washed them down with more of the kava juice. Even as I doubted its efficacy, the combination set up a warming feeling in my stomach. This spread upwards and around, taking the heavy weariness from my body and giving a renewed sharp edge to my wits.

  ‘Theophanes,’ I said, putting my cup down, ‘you will agree that we have much to discuss in the time available to us.’

  ‘Much indeed, my dearest Aelric,’ he replied. ‘I hope, by the way, you will not object if, when we are truly in private, I use your proper name?’

  ‘I want to know many things,’ I said, ignoring the request. ‘In the first place, I want to know what happened outside that tent while I was entertaining the Great One and his daughter.’

  ‘You will recall,’ said Theophanes through the steam from his cup, ‘that I was sent out to refresh myself after those exertions that Martin had so usefully suggested during your attempts at diplomacy. Doubtless, your own exertions would in some manner have been polluted by the presence of one so sadly incomplete as I.’

  I silenced him with an impatient wave. Those berries were making me testy.

  ‘I’ll have none of that official old toss, if you please,’ I snapped. ‘The day we were taken prisoner, I was approached by the man who tried to kill me last month. He said he was an agent.’

  ‘I was told of the meeting,’ Theophanes said as I finished my account. ‘And no – please be aware that he really is working at the moment for Heraclius. I have used Agathius myself in the past. But I regard him as a person of little intelligence and therefore of limited usefulness. Only think of that crude and self-defeating stratagem of his to keep you inside the city walls. I would never tolerate such incompetence. Had I wanted to keep you away from the barbarian raid – and you are right in assuming it was arranged by, or for, Heraclius – you can be sure it would have been a perfect stratagem.