Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  ‘Hey, you can’t do that here!’ It was one of the armed churchwardens, come up beside me. He pointed down at the now dead man, outrage in his voice. ‘This is Church property.’

  He was wrong. I was just outside the Lateran precinct. Here, it was a matter for the Prefect – if for anyone at all.

  But I wasn’t up for debate. And Authari had now lumbered up beside me.

  ‘Fuck off, you!’ he snarled. ‘You leave my master alone – or else.’

  ‘That will do, Authari,’ I said weakly, putting a hand on his sword arm. I wanted no more trouble that morning. Inside the palace, it had been ‘Aelric this’ and ‘Aelric that’ from the Dispensator, who’d almost wet himself at his triumph. He’d been waiting with his – unsigned – letter of clarification for Marcella regarding my ‘marriage’ in Kent, and with his undertaking to act in my place regarding Gretel if I should be delayed past her time of delivery.

  I didn’t fancy another trip into that office. Not over a matter like this.

  ‘But you’re bleeding, Master,’ said Authari.

  I looked down at my forearm. So I was. That had been a savage little knife. It was the sort of weapon that had Murder written all over it. Luckily, the man had got me below the hem of my sleeve. You couldn’t get new silk that year in Rome for love or money.

  Authari pulled me across the square to the side not yet reached by the sun, and sat me on a stone bench. He called for wine and biscuits from one of the hawkers.

  ‘I would have come sooner, Master,’ he explained in a panicky tone. ‘But those friends of his were all about me, jabbering something about His Holiness.’

  He sat down heavily beside me and drank half the wine straight off. While that settled another of the fits of shakes that had made me leave him outside the Lateran, I followed his vague pointing. A hundred yards off, the churchwarden was still fussing over the bloody heap. He’d been joined by a couple of monks. Every so often, he was pointing across at me.

  Over to their left, there was another crowd of those petitioners. Even as I looked, they melted into the smaller alleyways that led from the square.

  Deep beneath the shock and the after-effects of what might have been a shade too much opium, I felt a faint stirring of alarm, and of what now was a creative anger. This wasn’t a matter of thiefly etiquette. The man hadn’t looked at all like a thief. And he’d been far too swarthy for a native: an African, perhaps, or a Sicilian?

  I turned back to Authari, whose babble of explanations was now descending into his native Lombardic.

  ‘I am entirely satisfied you did your best,’ I said firmly, trying to shut him up. ‘Indeed, you may have done me quite a favour. Had you been with me, they might have gone for me some other time and with more success. As it is, forewarned is forearmed.’

  Unconvinced, Authari fell silent, his face still dark with shame and the fear of a slave who has slipped up in his duty. I leaned back against the still cool bricks of the wall behind me and gathered my thoughts.

  ‘Tell me, Authari,’ I said, sipping what he’d left me of the wine, ‘do you know which side it was that grabbed you? And do put your sword away. The only trouble we might have now is from those monks over there.’

  He gave me a look of rather vexing stupidity and replied that the men had been talking about His Holiness.

  I sighed, but kept my temper. ‘You do know’, I prompted, ‘there’s a civil war in the Empire?’

  He didn’t.

  ‘It doesn’t normally affect us here,’ I continued. ‘Since your people turned up in Italy, the Emperor’s Exarch doesn’t control much more than Ravenna. Under His Holiness, Rome is effectively an independent city-state.

  ‘Yes, a city-state,’ I mused. ‘After fifteen hundred years, Rome ends its experience of empire more of less where it began.’

  But I pulled myself back to present matters. I didn’t want to lose Authari.

  ‘It’s a revolt got up by the Exarch of Africa. And he’s winning. Because of that, Emperor Phocas is piling on the pressure in Rome. He needs His Holiness to excommunicate Heraclius the father and Heraclius the son and Nicetas the nephew. That won’t count for much in the East. But Africa is part of the West. A formal denunciation from Rome would cut the rebels off from their base.

  ‘The problem is’, I went on, summarising what I’d picked up on the Exchange, ‘that the only thing Rome wants of Phocas as the price is something the Eastern Churches wouldn’t allow. The Pope must be made “Universal Bishop”. There must be an irrevocable statement that he stands above the other Four Patriarchs of the Universal Church. Constantinople and Antioch and Alexandria and Jerusalem must all bow down before Rome.

  ‘That needs a sealed patent for advertising in the East, and shoving under the nose of every bishop and king in the West.

  ‘There is a further problem. Even if the Eastern Churches could be bullied into assenting to such a patent, neither Pope nor Emperor trusts the other. Neither will make the first move. And it may now be too late. Heraclius, the son, or his cousin will soon show up outside Constantinople. Whoever gets there first will be Emperor himself before Christmas. That means all Rome needs do is wait, while extracting whatever concessions it can from both sides.

  ‘That brings us to the petitioning mobs. Were the people who stopped you for or against the Emperor? I’d like to know who wants me dead.’

  But I had lost him. I might as well have asked him about forward contracts on the price of tin for all the sense I could get out of him.

  I dropped the matter. Had I been more with it, I’d have skipped the lecture and stuck to questioning. Even so, I might have all the information that I reasonably needed for what I now had in mind.

  Looking back across the square, I could see that the body had now disappeared. It would never do for pilgrims to have that in their first view of the Lateran. In its place stood a huddle of clerical monks. Behind them, on the Lateran steps, stood the Dispensator himself. He had the sun in his eyes, and I wasn’t sure if he could see me. But I could just make out the abstracted look on his face.

  ‘Heresy in Spain?’ I muttered – ‘my arse!’ Well before the close of business that day, I swore to myself, I’d have this out with His Excellency the sodding Dispensator. This time, I’d be in control of the exchanges.

  For the moment, though, I had some urgent preliminary business.

  ‘Authari,’ I said in my firm, master’s voice, ‘go back home and get some rest. No more to drink this morning. I want you washed and looking respectable for when I send you to fetch the Lady Gretel for her inspection of those Cretan tablecloths.

  ‘No,’ I said still more firmly, ‘I’ll face no more trouble this morning. And it’s probably for the best if you aren’t with me where I now have to go.’

  Sveta took me into the kitchen of the little house and poured me a cup of wine.

  ‘But you’re bleeding!’ she said with a still more suspicious look at my forearm.

  ‘Do forgive me,’ I said as she called her woman for hot water, ‘but I didn’t notice.’ I really should have gone home first for a bandage – that, or something with longer sleeves.

  It was a surprisingly deep cut, and I winced as the slave woman massaged in the salted pork fat.

  ‘I believe your husband is teaching?’ I asked.

  Ignoring my pleasant smile, Sveta pulled her eyes away from the trickle of blood on to the kitchen table and nodded.

  ‘Martin will come as soon as he can end the lesson. I went to tell him as soon as I saw you at the door. But it is his best student – he’s the natural son of the Lord Bishop Servilianus, you know.’

  I didn’t mind waiting. Servilianus was as influential as his bastard was thick. Martin needed more pupils like that if he was to keep up this go at being independent. I drained the cup with my good arm and held up the other so the slave could do a proper job with her bandage.

  ‘So, Martin,’ I asked with an attempt at cheerfulness, ‘I take it you don’t fancy Const
antinople at the moment?’

  He looked up from the letter of instruction. ‘Not now. Not ever,’ he said, his voice most emphatic for a man who’d just nearly shat himself. ‘You know what happened to me when I lived there. Now there’s a civil war about to reach the place, you can’t imagine how it will be.

  ‘Rather than go back to the City, I’d sooner be taken by the Lombards, and kept this time. I’d sooner go back to Ireland, passing through every village in your own land while speaking in Celtic. Either would be death. But the City would be death as well – death, and before that ...’

  I waited for him to finish. The baby began crying in an upstairs room. I felt a pang of envy as I heard Sveta go up the external staircase.

  I waved at the letter of instruction. ‘Well, I don’t want to go there either,’ I said. ‘So you just save your complaints for the Dispensator. He’s the one who says you know Constantinople. He’s the one who says I need an assistant I can trust absolutely. He’s the one we need to get round if we aren’t to go anywhere at all.’

  Martin smiled sadly. ‘After all we’ve been through,’ he asked, ‘you still think you can negotiate with the Dispensator? You can no more talk your way out of these instructions than you can reason with the tides on Dover Beach.’

  ‘There’s every chance we can get out of this,’ I said in a reassuring tone that was as much for me as for him. ‘Either we can get out of it altogether, or we can get it put off till later in the year. At least we can go in better circumstances than seem presently intended.’

  I pushed my cup towards him for a refill. Martin poured to the halfway mark. I took it back before he could reach for the water jug.

  ‘I’m seeing His Excellency again this afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’ll need you with me for support.’

  Martin ignored me. ‘I did pray’, he said, self-pity now replacing alarm, ‘that I might live to see my child grow up. But happiness was never my fate. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”’

  He looked upwards – possibly for God, more likely worried that Sveta might be listening through the floorboards. There were degrees of martyrdom beyond even his present mood.

  But this was getting us nowhere. I changed the subject.

  ‘I bumped into your landlord as I came down the street,’ I said, dropping my voice still further. ‘I took the liberty of settling your rent arrears. Next time you can’t pay the wretch, do come and tell me. I think the two men with him were baliliffs.’

  Martin looked up again. There was a heavy tramp on the upper floor, and the muted sound of a baby being comforted.

  ‘Thank you, Aelric,’ he said, a burden plainly coming off his mind. ‘I’ll tell Sveta when you’ve gone. She does respect you greatly. And she’s as grateful as I am for all you’ve done already to help. Sadly, I can’t persuade her to trust you. She says you only ever get me into trouble. She thinks – she thinks that you might be an atheist ...’

  ‘Think it a token of the great affection I bear you and your family,’ I said quickly. No fool was Sveta. She deserved better than Martin.

  I pushed the cup forward again. Martin looked around.

  ‘You came alone?’ he asked. ‘Does that mean ...?’

  ‘Does it mean’, I answered, quoting his own words back at him, ‘that I’ve got rid of that “drink-sodden oaf” I won at dice? No.’ I laughed. ‘Authari is presently at home opening boxes. He remains my best and most trusted slave. If we must go to Constantinople, he goes too. This time, be assured, he’ll be reminded of your station. Even you’d not deny, though, he can be very handy with a meat cleaver.’

  I waited for the recollection of our escape from King Agilulf’s torture garden to come fully back into his mind. For my current purpose, I needed Martin the terror-prone clerk: all this fatalism was no use to me at all. I looked again at the empty cup. Martin filled it to the brim.

  I returned to the matter in hand. ‘Look, Martin,’ I said, ‘I’m not asking for much this time. All I need is for you to stand for one meeting without your knees giving way while I talk our way out of this lunatic mission. Can I count on you?’

  From the scared look now coming into his eyes, we might just about be in business.

  ‘We need to make His Excellency aware’, I said, ‘that whatever debts we once variously owed him were discharged in full back in Pavia. I don’t imagine he’s asking for a repeat of Pavia – no snooping around this time, no waiting on moonless nights to pass information about warlike intentions. But I don’t like this stuff about consulting libraries there. It smells like a priest’s armpit.

  ‘Have another look at these instructions. How much work do you really think they involve? Three days? Five?’

  As he unrolled it again and looked down the sheet of tiny writing, I took up a handful of dried onion seeds and began crunching on them.

  Martin looked up at length, confusion on his face. ‘I’ll swear most works on his list are here in Rome,’ he said. ‘This one, I know for a fact, is in the Papal Library. This one was condemned a hundred years ago. It may still exist in some private collection, but can’t be anywhere on view in Constantinople. As for this one, Paul of Halicarnassus never wrote on the Council of Nicaea. The work mentioned is mistitled, but is a book of sermons against the Aphthardocetic heresy – that’s the one’, he explained, noting my questioning look, ‘about the incorruptibility of Christ’s physical body after death.’

  ‘So,’ I asked, ‘in your opinion, everything in these instructions can be done right here in Rome?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here in Rome. At worst, there might be a trip to Ravenna.’

  I’d already guessed as much. But Martin was the expert in this. The Dispensator could bully till he was black in the face. He could put whatever gloss took his fancy on why someone employed by the Emperor or by Heraclius or by someone else who didn’t give a toss about heresy in Spain had wanted me dead here in Rome. But I knew he was no expert on the scholarship of heresy.

  Yes – I’d have the man by both his tits.

  ‘Then it’s agreed’, I said, ‘we go to the Dispensator just before dinner-time and tell him to go jump. And when we celebrate in my house afterwards, we shall indeed be what he calls “an harmonious and lucky team”!’

  And that did seem to be it. There’d be no trip to the East. The nearest I’d come to the civil war would be betting on whether Heraclius the son or Nicetas the nephew would race each other fairly to Constantinople, or if they’d turn on each other before either could get there.

  I rolled the letter back into its case. Feeling peckish again, I was thinking how most delicately to ask if Martin had been able to afford to buy bread – the free-distribution stuff was fit only for pigs.

  Just as I was about to speak, the monk who’d accosted me the day before was shown into the kitchen.

  ‘I bring verbal orders from the Dispensator himself,’ he said in a dramatic whisper that could probably have woken the now-sleeping child upstairs. ‘They supplement or replace your written letter of instruction. Listen carefully, as I am required to give you these orders once only and then to forget them.’

  He looked round to make sure no one else was listening, and recited:

  ‘The citizens Alaric and Martin are hereby requested and required to proceed at once to Constantinople, there to receive such further instructions as may be transmitted from Rome. Each will be collected from his home tonight at the midnight hour and be conveyed thence to the river under armed guard and in a covered chair. The citizen Alaric will be conveyed home now by the same means. Each may take whatever he has time to pack. Anything he cannot pack shall be listed for His Excellency the Dispensator to have sent on by faster intercepting ship.

  ‘Neither shall tell anyone that he is leaving Rome until he is beyond the city walls, when free communication may be re-established for all purposes. The citizen Alaric is exempted from this requirement so far as concerns his banker, the Jew Solomon ben Baruch, who
has already been instructed to attend on the citizen Alaric at his house.

  ‘The Lady Marcella has received separate instructions regarding the safe-keeping of her slave Gretel. The wife and household of the citizen Martin shall be conveyed at the same time and by the same means from his house to the fortified house of the Sisters of St Eugenia, there to remain as guests until such time as His Excellency the Lord Dispensator shall think appropriate.

  ‘The citizen Alaric shall bear the whole cost of the stay in Constantinople and such other costs as may attend his stay. He shall, on his return to Rome, render an account of these to His Excellency the Lord Dispensator, who may see fit to order reasonable reimbursement.’

  The monk finished his recitation in a blaze of self-congratulation. He sat down and fanned his shining face. He drank deep from the wine jug and wiped his lips after an appreciative smack. He pretended to ignore the chaos of screams and recriminations that had broken out around him.

  Sveta had caught enough of the message to send her into a vicious frenzy. She’d lost command of her Latin, and I couldn’t follow the rapid Slavonic of her nagging. But the repeated hissing of my name, and the nasty looks she threw me, told me it was best to sit still. No point trying to explain she’d misapprehended me again.

  The slave woman had caught none of the message, but assumed it was a notice of eviction. She was beating her head against the kitchen wall, screaming to be struck dead for the shame of it all.

  His voice muffled by his hands, Martin was calling out again and again: ‘God forgive me my sins! God have mercy on my soul!’

  Overhead and unregarded, the baby wailed piteously.

  ‘I am not at liberty’, the monk shouted happily above the noise, ‘to take any question regarding your instructions. In any event, I am already forgetting them.’ He took another long swig.

  ‘If you don’t wipe that fucking smirk off your face’, I shouted back, ‘I’ll give you something you won’t forget. Now pass me that jug.’