The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  ‘Very well, Antony of Trebizond,’ I said, going back to the matter in hand. ‘You made a quick deal, once I’d hurried off, with those petitioners in their own right and promised you’d get an answer out of me before next Monday. So you followed me, waiting for the right moment to start another of your interminable petitions.’ I stopped and smiled. ‘Most enterprising, I have to say. Did you insist on payment up front? Or did you agree on payment by results?’

  She swallowed and looked back at me. ‘If those men had money to spend on agents,’ she said in a voice that tried and failed to sound manly, ‘do you think they’d have walked here all the way from Pontus?’

  I lifted my eyebrows at the look of firmness she’d attempted. I also noted the wavering, ever so slight, of her Pontic accent. If she had been born in Trebizond, she’d spent part of her life somewhere else that I couldn’t yet place. ‘So, because you’re from the same province,’ I asked, ‘you took on their case for free? Is that how you plan to make your fortune?’ Antonia said nothing. I thought again. ‘How did you get a petitioning licence? Leaving aside the matter of sex, the Petitioners’ Guild doesn’t allow anyone under forty to approach someone of my eminence.’

  ‘You don’t look very old yourself,’ she said with another stab at the defiant. It was no more than I deserved. I smiled and leaned back. I looked up at the bright, cloudless sky, and then hurriedly back at Antonia. She was on her feet and brushing dirt from her outer tunic. I looked at her trembling hands. They had the right proportions for a woman, but also the slight roughness of someone who’s done manual work.

  ‘Taking your leave of the Lord Alaric?’ I asked.

  She pushed her lip out again. ‘Since you haven’t arrested me,’ she said, ‘I don’t see how that’s any of your business. I see I’ve been wasting my time on you. I’m going back to my lodgings.’

  This was my chance to be rid of her. Instead, I pretended to yawn. ‘Your cloak is ruined. The clothes you have on aren’t for wearing in the street. You have no hat. You seem confident, even so, that you’ll find your way back alone and in safety.’ I shook my head and put a sad note into my voice. ‘You need to have grown up in a nunnery to believe any of these things. If you’ve been in this city longer than a week, I’ll be impressed by your luck.’

  I watched her stiffen slightly. It was only for a moment. ‘But you won’t stop me from going if that’s what I want?’ she asked, looking carefully into my face. ‘You won’t make me stay?’

  ‘Not at all!’ I said with a reassuring smile. ‘You are a free individual. It’s your undoubted right to come and go as you please. I’d never dream of forcing my protection on someone who didn’t want it.’ I made my smile broader and waved her about her business. I looked once more at my gorgeous leggings and wondered what I ought to say next.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Antonia put a hand to her belt. There was nothing where her purse might have been. She looked down and patted all round her waist. Not looking at me, she stumbled past me to where she’d been rolled about by the locals. Helplessly, she looked at the mass of shattered or crumbled bricks that lay about.

  I got up. ‘What is it?’ I asked. Ignoring me, she bent down and poked at random under the heaps of masonry. ‘Where did you last definitely have it?’ I asked, trying to sound helpful. ‘You could try looking underneath the remains of your cloak.’

  She sat on a low heap of rubble. ‘It won’t be there,’ she said in a voice of quiet despair. ‘I can’t go home without it. It was my rent money.’ She looked about to dissolve into proper tears.

  There was a sudden clatter of disturbed masonry to my right. The reply I’d been looking for died on my lips. Looking straight ahead, Antonia put both hands to her mouth. ‘They’re back!’ she cried softly.

  She was wrong. Every city has its human trash. In a city the size of Constantinople, there are many gradations of the human trash. The poor who’d followed Nicetas weren’t the absolute lowest in the City. Nor were the rattish creatures I’d lately chased off. Once I could jolly them outside the walls to grow their own food, some even of these latter had a fair chance of returning to humanity. Or their children had. Not so the small, shrivelled creatures in dark rags who, with a soft scraping of hands and knees through rubble, had been creeping towards us – these were the lowest. Alone, I’d have given them one look, before running away. I’d seen a man die from a scratch he got off one of these. Maybe their touch – and, for all I knew, their very breath – carried contagion. It may well have been the puke-inducing smell of their bodies that curdled, when there was no wind to moderate the sun, into the miasma by which the summer pestilence was caused.

  I waited a few moments after letting them see they’d been noticed. Slowly, I got up and, without going for it, let my sword show. That put an end to their present attack. One of them dropped his length of sharpened stick. Another stretched supplicating arms in my direction. One after the other, they took on the high and pitiful whining of those who’ve decided they’re more likely to get what they want by showing weakness.

  I looked slowly about me. I raised my arms in a gesture of peace. ‘You beg the charity of His Magnificence the Lord Senator Alaric,’ I intoned in my most hieratic voice. I reached inside my robe and took out a leather purse. ‘Let it be received.’ I poured its contents into the palm of my left hand. With a flick of my wrist, I sent twenty or so misshapen coppers towards the far end of the courtyard.

  Not looking at the effect this created, I turned back to Antonia. ‘Take my hand,’ I said. ‘There’s no present danger. But the mood of the burrow people is changeable. Try not to look at them.’ She got up and put her hand into mine. With one backward glance at where her fallen purse might be lying, she allowed me to lead her across the wide carpet of rubble. Together, we picked our way across the courtyard. Never once did the beggars look up from their frantic scavenging and their squeals of exultation whenever a coin came to light amid the filth.

  At last, I was in Middle Street. From the poor district, it was a matter of climbing over another collapsed building, then of finding the one flight of steps that led upward to a street that, long since abandoned, still had the names of shops written in Latin. From here, it was a short cut through an alley. Middle Street itself was largely empty at this time of day. But it was a relief to stand on paving stones again and to breathe uncorrupted air.

  I stood in the shade of a triumphal arch begun and never finished by the Great Justinian towards the end of his reign, and looked west at the looming mass of the land walls. ‘I have business outside the City,’ I said, breaking a long silence. ‘I’ll give orders in the guardhouse for you to be escorted back to your lodgings.’ I stopped and tried once more to think through what else I had in mind. ‘You can come and see me tomorrow morning and explain your clients’ petition. They took you on in good faith. Whatever the irregularities, it’s only fair that I should hear what brought them all the way to Constantinople.’ I kept my voice neutral. ‘Since they have no money, I will pay the customary fee. We can settle that in the guardhouse.’

  I thought Antonia would reject an offer of outright charity. I bent down and, taking care not to rub it in, brushed a patch of brick dust from my left boot. I stood up again and stared in silence along the quarter mile of street that separated us from the walls. Much of it was waste nowadays. Here and there, though, you could see little fields laid out and planted with crops. They were a cheerful sight. They showed how at least some people in the City were standing on their own feet.

  I stood up straight again and looked at Antonia. Her face wasn’t a mask of happiness. But she was bright as well as proud. My offer could be seen as a professional courtesy. It had no obvious strings attached. She’d be a fool not to take it. ‘Come and see me at the third hour of light,’ I said. ‘Give your name to the doorman. He’ll know that you’re expected.’ She still said nothing. I stepped out of the shadow and didn’t look round to see if I was followed. After so long in shade or compara
tive shade, the sunlight was dazzling. I wondered if I should give her my hat. No need. When I did look back, she’d been rather inventive with my napkin. It did suit her, I had to admit.

  Chapter 11

  You will have noticed, Dear Reader, that this is a story of digressions. Some of these might usefully be pruned. This one, I think, is needed. When I speak of places and events inside Constantinople, it doesn’t much matter whether you know the City. It is a very, very big city. Even after five years of exploration, driven by my own eccentric tastes and by professional duty, there were still courtyards here and there, and whole streets and short cuts between streets, that I didn’t yet know. Don’t worry if you cannot exactly place all that I describe inside the walls. Unless you know its general situation, though, all that I say regarding the outside of the City might as well be in the language of one of the peoples who live beyond the furthest limits of the East.

  Let me say, then, that Constantinople, by universal acclaim the greatest city in the world and sole capital – now Rome itself was a pile of ruins effectively owned by the Pope – of the Roman Empire, sits on a blunted triangle at the far edge of Europe. Its apex looks east, across five hundred yards of water, to the Asiatic shore. Its north-eastern side faces on to the Golden Horn, a big sheltered harbour that makes the City a centre of all trade. Its western and only landed side is guarded by an immense double fortification, four miles long, built when Thrace was almost a garden basking in the Roman peace, but now tested in wave after wave of those barbarians who had overtopped every other city wall in Europe. Its southern side looks over the wide Propontis. Only the land walls can be truly called impregnable. The sea walls, though respectable by the standards of most other cities, are the last line in a set of defences that begin with control of the sea.

  This brings me to the long straits that separate Europe from Asia. These begin with the narrow strait, twenty miles long, that runs more or less south from the Black Sea, past Constantinople and into the Propontis, which is an inland sea about a hundred and fifty miles from east to west and about fifty from north to south. From here to the Aegean is another narrowish strait about forty miles long.

  Does it now make sense when I say that, having finally made my way into Middle Street, and from there through the most southerly gate in the land wall, I was now hurrying west along the coastal road that joins Constantinople to Adrianople and to Thessalonica and eventually to the port of Dyrrachium, from where the Adriatic may be crossed to the heel of Italy? Tough luck if it doesn’t – because that’s where I was.

  Once again, I told myself I was a fool. I should have picked up this bloody girl with both hands and dumped her into the guardhouse. Thanks to Nicetas, my plan of having her escorted back to her lodgings had gone tits up before everyone could finish saluting me. ‘Emergency orders, Sir,’ the officer in charge had answered me. ‘None of us to leave our posts. Can’t go out from the walls. Can’t go back from the walls.’

  ‘Then stay here till I get back,’ I’d said to the girl with a smile that tried to look both firm and reassuring. ‘You’ll be safe enough here.’ Being the obvious point for any combined land and sea attack, the Golden Gate is almost a fortress in its own right. What I’ve called the guardhouse is a looming mass of stonework perched above a triple arch. It must contain three dozen rooms, some of them rather comfy. But there’d been no getting Antonia into any of them. Without actually refusing, she’d given me a look of combined disappointment and fear that had me speaking again before I could realise I’d caved in.

  ‘You can wait here till I’m done with my business,’ I’d suggested with a quick glance at the face of the officer in charge. ‘You can tell me what those petitioners want while we go back to the centre. If their petition is reasonable,’ I’d gone on without proper thought, ‘you can break the good news to them in time for dinner.’

  ‘No time like the present,’ had been the firm and immediate response. One exchange had led to another, and I’d been faced with a choice between compulsion and surrender. It didn’t help that compulsion would have made me later still for Lucas – and he and his men were just one final dash along the road on which I was standing. I’d pretended to ignore the mocking stares of the guards as, with an indifferent shrug, I set off along the road. Then, instead of putting my best foot forward and hurrying through the streams of traffic, I’d slowed to let her keep level with me and not run entirely out of breath, as she explained her clients’ petition.

  So far as I could gather, they were victims of a standard injustice. If only my sodding eunuchs had let them put their own case, I could have added those petitioners to my list of things to do the following day, and saved myself the trouble of listening to a panting explanation that broke down as often as Antonia had to save herself from tripping over in a pair of boots that didn’t fit her.

  Annoyed, I kicked a stone and watched it skip forward over the worn flagstones. It got the thigh of a carrying slave. It made a slapping noise that I could hear at ten paces. I waited for him to look round, so I could at least bow an apology. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  I stopped and put up a hand for silence. This time, I got it. ‘Look, Antonia,’ I said, ‘the mode of address you picked up from the men in your family is purely ceremonial. All I need from you is the tax district where your clients are registered and the name of the local grandee who’s ejected them. Everything else I can get my clerks to assemble for me into a brief report. Now, do please stop this babble of rhetorical devices that haven’t moved anyone to genuine tears in seven hundred years and of legal tags that you plainly don’t understand. All I want are the facts.’

  And that’s what she now gave me – and what facts they were! At once, I’d forgotten the injured slave. I think I’d forgotten Lucas himself. I took Antonia by the arm and led her to the side of the road. Not far off two miles we’d been walking. Only now had she got to the point that mattered. Had she only started with it, I’d now be shepherding her back through the City in search of her clients. ‘Please, repeat that name for me,’ I asked, keeping my voice neutral.

  ‘Which name?’ she asked.

  I took my hat off and ran fingers though my hair. ‘The name of the man who ejected your clients from the land they’ve been assigned,’ I said, speaking slowly. ‘He is the man who ensured they got no hearing in the local courts and against whom they’ve come to seek my help.’

  I thought she’d said Eunapius of Pylae but needed it confirmed. Eunapius it was. I put my hat on again and fussed to get it back in the right position. It was one way to keep myself from jumping up and down and laughing. I made sure to darken my voice. ‘I wish you’d begun with Eunapius. He complicates everything.’

  I’d made my voice too dark and Antonia misread me. ‘So, you won’t help those men?’ she asked, a tone of outrage coming into her own voice. ‘They walked here all the way from Zigana, hundreds of miles away. They believed you were the only honest man in the government and that you’d help them for sure.’ She tried to see under the brim of my hat. ‘You do know that all the country people in Pontus pray every Sunday for your health?’

  I began walking again. It was pleasing to know there were some people in this Empire who didn’t hate me. I smiled and turned to Antonia. ‘I will get justice for your clients,’ I said. ‘But you need to understand that I’m in no position to give it by myself.’ I fell silent. That wasn’t the way to explain anything to a woman. That needs simple words and some attention to making their sense clear. I gathered my thoughts.

  ‘You are right about the land law,’ I said. ‘It has no exceptions in any of the Home Provinces. Every free householder in every country district has the right to enough land to feed himself and those who look to him. There are different provisions that cover the different grades of land and these have already caused much litigation. There are also varying degrees of inalienability and of the obligation to serve in the new militias. But no landowner is exempt. Any landowner who refuses to make such la
nd available as my surveyors have determined he should, may be sued in the courts. If he avoids judgment through bribery or nepotism, he may be charged with perverting the course of justice and tried in Constantinople.’

  ‘Then what’s the problem?’ she asked.

  ‘The problem,’ I explained, ‘is that your clients have come up against Eunapius of Pylae. He’s in thick with Nicetas, who is the Emperor’s cousin. Anyone else and I could write one letter ‘asking’ for the law to be obeyed. Writing to Eunapius would be a waste of papyrus. He wouldn’t be scared by the implied threat of a tax audit. And you can forget about formal proceedings. He’d go straight to Nicetas, who’d run to the Emperor with a cloud of accusations against me and your clients. No, it’s worse than that. While the Emperor’s away, Nicetas might try his luck and directly order me to desist. He’d also go public. Set up that manner of dispute and there’s no chance Heraclius would side against his own blood.’

  ‘So, what will you do?’ she asked. ‘The men who walked here aren’t the only victims. There are dozens of other families who have had their land taken back. There are also accusations of rape and murder against some of his men.’

  Now I had the relevant facts, this was getting better and better. And I’d been under the impression that Antonia was an assassin hired by Nicetas to supplement his seditionaries! I’d said I’d have him for the trick he’d pulled on the Triumphal Way – and I would!