Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

  ‘We’re up Shit Creek, you know,’ said Priscus in conversational tone when his convulsions had moderated. ‘Do believe me that no gates were left open last night. But if the gates do open – correction: when they open – there’ll be two days of bloodshed on the streets.’

  ‘If it does come to that,’ I said, looking round the settled comfort of the room, ‘it might be hard for you.’

  Priscus pulled himself up and went over to look out on to the balcony. He turned back to me.

  ‘It won’t be too good for anyone closely associated with His Majesty,’ he said with an odd laugh. ‘How do you suppose you’ll get out?’

  ‘I believe I have full immunity as the Pope’s representative,’ I said.

  Priscus laughed again. ‘I’d look more to the strength of those gates – or, better still, a fast ship out,’ he said.

  I got up and pulled on a bell cord I’d recently had fitted. This would bring up a slave from the kitchen with the bread and cheese I’d earlier specified for lunch.

  ‘You’ll join me for some food, Priscus?’ I asked. ‘I can’t promise anything special, but you’ll surely find it wholesome.’

  ‘Now when did you last see me do anything wholesome?’ Priscus responded with a nasty grin. ‘I’ve got a vial somewhere of my special black liquid. I think I can chance a few drops of that in some wine – though, mind you, only in white wine. Red with this stuff is bad for my stomach.’

  He asked if I’d found any hidden ways into the Legation from the street. I gave a noncommittal grunt. I wasn’t telling Priscus that Martin was at this moment on an intensive search for some other way out in an emergency.

  ‘I used to come here quite a bit when the Permanent Legate was still receiving guests,’ he said, ‘but I never went beyond the state rooms. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some passageway. As it might save your life at the right moment, I suppose I’d better help you find it.’

  A very good reason, I thought, for not accepting his offer. But I smiled. ‘You are always so good to me, Priscus,’ I said.

  ‘Once a friend, always a friend, is my guiding motto,’ he replied.

  We made our way down to the main garden and headed left towards the back buildings of the Legation. I’d agreed with Martin that the most likely hidden exit would be close by the Permanent Legate’s own quarters. So I wanted Priscus as far away from that as possible. It would never do to let him hear Martin rummaging through the cellars.

  As we crossed the gardens, we were joined by two of the Black Agents. One of them handed Priscus a sealed message. He frowned as he read it.

  ‘It seems that greasy old eunuch has sealed off the Ministry to my people,’ he said, passing the message back. ‘I regard this as an act of open war against me. I’ll tell as much to Phocas when I dine with him this evening. Even at this late stage, there’s always room for one more under the Ministry.’

  I wondered how Martin might be doing.

  We stopped at the pigsties. Priscus was beginning to sweat heavily. It was a warm afternoon, but that and the trembling probably had more to do with his idea of lunch.

  The pigs were happy. A slave was ladling acorns out of a bucket, and they squealed and grunted with pleasure as they nosed through the carpet of liquefied shit to get at them. As we leaned on the gate to watch the pigs feeding I noticed that Priscus was breathing heavily, his face the colour of new papyrus. I began to hope he might have a seizure. That would remove one complication from my life. But he recovered himself with an effort of will and turned to me.

  ‘Wonderful things are pigs, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I added. ‘I’ve always found them more intelligent than dogs.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Priscus. ‘But, certainly, they know what’s up when killing-time comes round. When I was a boy, and out for innocent fun, I used to hide the knife behind my back. Still, I’d see the fear in their eyes as they backed away. And they taste good. Every body part has its own flavour. Do you ever have cups of blood brought to you when one is freshly killed?’

  ‘Not a pleasure I’ve yet sampled,’ I said, ‘though my people do make the most gorgeous blood sausages – much better than I’ve had outside England.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’re from there,’ said Priscus, sounding bored. ‘Phocas once gave me a lecture on the place when he was more than usually pissed. He said it was full of blacks and headless dwarves. Did I hear aright in the Circus that you came here with letters of submission from one of the local kings?’

  I gave a noncommittal sniff and turned back to the pigs, who’d started fighting over some rotten cabbages.

  ‘They’ll eat anything, of course,’ said Priscus, stepping back to avoid getting splashed. ‘When I was carving the Persians up back in the days of Maurice, I once fed some live prisoners to the pigs I had with me. They were Syrian double agents, you see, and I wanted to make an example of them. Like Jews and Egyptians, many of them have a horror of pork.

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t eat pigs. But the pigs ate them. They’ll eat their way through flesh, guts, bone – you name it. They have trouble with teeth and hair, but everything else—’

  Priscus stopped suddenly. We looked at each other and then back at the feasting pigs.

  ‘Do you suppose—?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a possibility – a distinct possibility,’ said Priscus.

  ‘You there,’ I called to the slave, ‘when was all this shit last raked out?’

  Not for a while, came the answer. If it didn’t rain again, it was something for the day after next.

  ‘Get wide-meshed sieves from the kitchen,’ I ordered.

  We watched as the slave, down on his knees, began work in one corner of the sty. Two big handfuls of shit scooped up and pressed through his sieve into a bucket. The remaining straw and other residue carefully picked through. The bucket taken out and emptied. Then back on his knees.

  ‘This will take for ever,’ Priscus said.

  ‘It might take all day,’ I agreed. ‘The problem is, I don’t want the household alerted yet to the possibility. But we do need more hands.’

  The two Black Agents read the look in my eyes and stepped back, horror and disbelief stamped on their faces.

  I pulled out a scented cloth from my robe and held it to my nose. ‘Priscus, I have a request to make of you,’ I said lightly.

  54

  As if I were playing dice, I rattled the box as I emptied it on to the Emperor’s desk. Five indisputably human teeth bounced on to the polished wood. Phocas took up the least decayed of them and held it against the light.

  ‘Without seeing them in the Permanent Legate’s head,’ he began, ‘I wouldn’t like to guess whose these might be. But it’s an interesting possibility.

  ‘So, my two brave champions, you’ve started bringing me answers. Indeed, I think it calls for drinks all round.’

  We drank deeply.

  Priscus had met unexpected resistance when ordering his men into the pigsty. Orders hadn’t worked. Threats hadn’t worked. He’d eventually had to borrow gold from me for a bribe, and then offer more as a bounty. At last, though, they’d joined in the fun.

  ‘Dear me, no,’ I’d said after enough teeth had been recovered, ‘I couldn’t possibly have your men in my bathhouse.’

  So off they’d been sent to sit in the chill waters of a fishpond. Their uniforms would have to be burned. Unless they could find their way into a steam room, their bodies would stink for a month.

  Priscus now sat happily beside me, basking in the sun of Imperial approval.

  ‘Young Alaric is sharp,’ he said. ‘He almost got there before me.’

  ‘The question remains, of course,’ said Phocas with a leer at Priscus, ‘who fed His Excellency to the pigs?’

  ‘I am convinced, sir, that it was the official Demetrius and some other person as yet unknown,’ I answered.

  ‘So you assure me. But have you found this Demetrius?’

  I looke
d at Priscus.

  ‘My dearest Father-in-Law,’ he said, ‘even in its present chaos, I’ve had the City searched and searched. No one fitting the description given has been found. Perhaps if we could do as Alaric suggests, and search the Monastery of St John Chrysostom ...’

  ‘I’ve told you both already,’ Phocas snapped with a sudden turn of ill humour, ‘that the Holy Fathers of St John are not to be troubled with any enquiries. You’ll find no one called Demetrius in their house.’

  Priscus bowed and changed the subject. He spoke now about the treble ring of defence he’d organised for the streets.

  A secretary entered with a pile of documents. A slave carried more behind him.

  Phocas sighed. ‘Alaric, go back to your searches,’ he said.

  He looked over at Priscus. ‘And you have your own work that needs attention. We’ll talk properly about the defences over dinner.’

  ‘We make such a wonderful team, don’t you think, my great blond stunner?’ Priscus asked.

  I looked down from our position on the land walls to the vast army encamped in the old suburbs. A man wearing the purple stripe of a senator caught my eye. He was standing well out of artillery range while, beside him, a slave was flashing a coded message with a mirror against the sun. It might have been for any one of the thousands of men who looked silently back from the safety of the walls.

  ‘What do you think he might be saying?’ I asked, avoiding the question.

  ‘It could be orders to their people inside the walls,’ Priscus said. ‘Or it might just be a bluff to demoralise an already demoralised people.’

  He was right about the changing mood within the City. The excitement of putting on makeshift armour and strutting about with weapons was beginning to wear off. So far as anyone could tell, the whole Empire was now behind Heraclius. And these were fighting soldiers, all taken from the frontiers.

  It no longer sounded so comforting to hear that Heraclius would have to move fast before pestilence and hunger arrived in earnest in his camp – or before the denuded frontiers wholly collapsed. We now expected that there would be an attack very soon, and knew that, whatever might be said of Heraclius himself, he had some good generals around him to lead it.

  The flashing went on and on. If instructions were being sent to the city, they were frighteningly detailed.

  Priscus kissed his hand and waved at a man who sat on horseback behind the Senator. ‘I was at school with him, you know,’ he said cheerfully. ‘He and his friends beat me to pulp when I put the word round that he was fucking a wax image of the Patriarch. How about a little drinkie? Just a small one to guard against the coming chill? There’s a nice establishment by the Church of Saint Anna. And I have a proposal that may interest you.’

  We sat in a cosy upstairs room in the wine shop. The owner fussed silently round us with glass pitchers of white wine and dishes of toasted bread covered in olive paste.

  ‘This can’t be as long as I’d like it to be,’ said Priscus when the man had left. ‘I’m about to engage in urgent business. What I want to ask is if you’d like to share that business.’

  I looked back at him in silence.

  ‘It seems the fucking old eunuch has won for the moment,’ he said, heating his knife over a candle. ‘When I married my charming Domentia and became Heir to the Empire, I thought I’d won the biggest prize in the universe. “Priscus,” I told myself, “you’ve jumped straight over those tossers who held you back in military and civil life. You’ll be Number One in no time at all. In the meantime, you’re just one down from the top.” Then I found that Theophanes stood in my way at every move. He’s the one who made sure I didn’t get made Commander-in-Chief of the field armies. He saw to it that my roving commission through the Eastern Provinces didn’t get me farther than Ancyra. For years now, he’s had the ear of Phocas. He’s been watching me and reporting on me, and dropping poison with each honeyed phrase about my abilities. Fuck him!’

  Priscus squeezed a pinch of another powder on to the hot knife and breathed in the fumes. His gasp of ecstasy over, he looked up again.

  ‘Fuck the old eunuch,’ he repeated. ‘I wish he’d burst from all the food he shovels into his gullet.’

  ‘He is, I’m told, a most remarkable administrator,’ I said, rubbing in the salt.

  ‘Administrator?’ Priscus spat with venomous contempt. ‘If I had my way, he’d still be singing in the travelling brothel that brought him to Constantinople. Yes, that’s a talent I’ll not deny him – “Watchman at the Gates of Love”: a fitting description of someone whose balls were rotting in some Bostra cesspit before I was born!’

  He paused with a little smile as my mind went into motion. Martin and I rarely spoke of what had happened in the Great One’s tent. Neither of us had mentioned it again to Theophanes. He himself would never have breathed a word. That left ...

  ‘Yes, my dearest boy,’ said Priscus with an expansive wave – his cheerful mood was restored – ‘I was there. Sadly, I had business outside the tent that deprived me of your own most remarkable performance. But I had a fine view of the musical cabaret. For the first and probably the only time in my life, I was impressed by the old eunuch’s abilities.’

  Cup in hand, I sat still. I was aghast at the revelation.

  ‘I never once thought it was you behind the curtain in the Great One’s tent,’ I said. ‘I thought it was one of Heraclius’s men.’

  ‘And you may be sure, my dearest Alaric,’ Priscus said with a stretch of his arms, ‘that it was someone from Heraclius. I was there on business relating to the captives and their eventual release. It was quite a surprise when you were all marched into the Monstrous One’s presence. I barely had time to get behind that curtain.’

  ‘So it was you who was negotiating with Theophanes outside the tent,’ I said. ‘In exchange for his life, he agreed to help you kill the Permanent Legate. He was the only one with access. And that would get you in deeper with Heraclius.’

  ‘Brains and beauty.’ Priscus smiled, raising his cup in a mock toast. ‘Of course, I needed you and your freedman dead. I couldn’t risk even the slightest chance that you’d spotted me. The eunuch was very persuasive when it came to getting his own skin spared. You two, however, were decidedly surplus to requirements.’

  ‘I suppose that explains why you’ve been so eager to have me killed since I got back to the City,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that was nothing personal, dear boy,’ Priscus said with a smile. ‘That little scene in church was merely tying up loose ends. I got the old eunuch to kill the Permanent Legate. When you got the job, you had to go the same way. There’s no point in bumping off a Permanent Legate if he’s immediately replaced.

  ‘Getting you murdered in the Great Church, and in the Imperial Presence, would have dropped my Divine Father-in-Law right in the shit with everyone.’

  ‘Are you not forgetting, My Lord,’ I asked mildly, ‘your attempt on me via Agathius in the Legation, your attempt via those Syrians last night, and your efforts with the Emperor?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about last night,’ came the airy reply. ‘As for Agathius, I’d like to know what became of him. My guess is that he’s holed up with Demetrius. If only we’d been able to get hold of either of them, it would have been a sword held right over the old eunuch’s head. With him neutralised, I could have gone through with my plan of surrendering the city once the gates were open. As it is, killing the Permanent Legate will have been my latest service to Heraclius. That alone should keep me in his good books.’

  I looked at him. Was he telling the truth? He appeared to be. Having admitted to a murder attempt in the Great Church, he would hardly deny anything more seemly.

  But Priscus continued: ‘My latest service unless, my dearest, you’ve managed to learn what Theophanes was up to with Justinus of Tyre. I thought for a while he had the means to betray me to Phocas. It seems he had other information – information Heraclius was willing to pay through the nose to get.


  ‘Any ideas about what he did know? Did His Magnificence ever take you into his confidence on that one? Do you fancy a meeting with the next Emperor? I’ll be with him come dusk.’

  I ignored the invitation. ‘What I can’t understand’, I said, ‘is why you’ve changed sides. You might be useful to Heraclius at the moment. Do you really think, though, that he will spare your life once you’ve helped make him Emperor?’

  Priscus looked thoughtfully over to the closed door and then to the shuttered window.

  ‘There are many things you don’t understand,’ he said quietly across the table.

  I had to lean forward to catch his further words. ‘The deal is that I give him the City’, he said, ‘and he gives me an army to use against the Persians. Be assured I’ll soon be turning on him.

  ‘The best I can hope for while Phocas lives is to be a glorified chief of police. The way he carries on, he’ll live for ever. Long before then, he’ll have no Empire left to hand over. All things considered, Heraclius is a much better bet.’

  I scarce knew where to begin. It seemed to me then that he was a walking illustration of what too many mood-altering substances, consumed over too long a period, can do to the understanding.

  I changed the subject. ‘Why do you ask me to defect with you?’ I asked.

  Priscus smiled again. ‘Because, my darling little god,’ he said, ‘now you’re in the know, what else can you do but stick with me?’

  ‘That begs the question, My Lord,’ I said, ‘why you have put me in the know.’

  I thought for a moment of killing Priscus but soon dismissed it. He was also armed, and he might be no fool with a sword.

  He spoke again: ‘Why don’t you join us? I’m sure I could put in a word with Heraclius. He’s not very bright, you should be aware. Once I’m Emperor, I’ll reopen the University and make you its chancellor.’

  Seeing the scorn I couldn’t keep off my face, Priscus continued: ‘And, of course, there are other openings for you at my court. You know that we make a great team. Relieved of the duty to have you killed, I’d find you even more madly attractive than I have so far. I’m not as young as I used to be, but I can still teach a thing or two about mattress acrobatics.’