‘Thank you, Father!’ he cried. I told Antony you’d let us go along with you.’
Us? My smile faded like colours left out in the sun. I’d assumed Antonia would still be asleep. What was she doing up and about? ‘Young Antony will be staying with us for a while,’ I said smoothly. ‘Though he will be joining us for meals, he does have duties that will keep him largely to his own quarters, or with me. I’m not sure if he has any time for poetry recitals.’
‘Oh, but he said he’d love to hear the works of a poet attached to someone as important as the Emperor’s cousin,’ Theodore cried with desperate enthusiasm. ‘After I bumped into him in the main garden, we spoke of little else.’ I watched his face brighten and go though as many colours as my map. Anyone else of his age I’d long since have taken to a brothel and given over to slaves who would tease out exactly what it was he fancied. With Theodore, I still hadn’t got round to discussing the mechanics of the fleshly sins his favourite authors denounced so roundly.
I could have said no. I was lord and master of all I surveyed. I should have said no. Every hypothesis I formed about the previous day somehow involved Nicetas. He’d done nothing to contradict that. I’d never yet had a note in his own hand, nor in his native Latin, and there had been more than a hint of the slimy beneath its tone of gushing friendship. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d said anything to please the boy. I remembered the promise I’d made before all my clerks. ‘Very well,’ I said – and I regretted the words at once. ‘We’ll all travel together in the big chair.’ He was beginning to tremble with excitement. Taking Antonia about in public hadn’t been on my list of things to do. She’d probably spend the evening gawping at Eunapius of bloody Pylae – I set aside the ultimate horror that she’d ply for business. But the Lord Senator had spoken and wouldn’t go back on his word. I led the boy to the door. ‘Do ask Samo to step in and see me at his convenience,’ I added, not exactly pushing the boy from the office but making it clear that I had other business that wouldn’t wait.
Alone, I picked up the sheet of map coordinates. They described various landmarks and villages in relation to their distance and direction from Laodicea. After so long living with all this, I had only to scan the neat tables of numerals and fractions, and then shut my eyes to see the map take shape. Instead, I dropped the sheet and closed my eyes to think of Antonia. Theodore had said she was up and about. If I hurried down to the garden, she might still be there. I was getting up from my desk – and finding that my own hands were beginning to tremble – when there was another knock on the door.
Either Theodore had run all the way down to the main hall or Samo had been coming up on business of his own.
Chapter 26
After that promising northern breeze of the morning, the afternoon air was still as inside a church. I emerged from the Treasury archive where Lucas had his office into the baking and mostly empty semicircle that lay at the southern end of the Circus. My next appointment lay within a district of narrow streets that was a survival from the ancient Byzantium. The quickest route was a turn to the right and a walk past a junction of many sewers that was presently unroofed. I shaded my eyes and looked across at a sundial. I’d spent less time with Lucas than expected. I turned left and made my way towards a long covered passageway that would take me under the building that connected the Circus to the Imperial Palace. From here it would be a longer walk, but through streets that nearly always picked up some breath of air from the sea.
Just before the covered passageway, I had another change of mind. The sea walls were a few hundred yards behind me. You couldn’t go very far west along them. There were two harbours where the walls gave way to other defences. But it was a nice walk to the east. You had the sea on your right and could look to your left over the public gardens of the Imperial Palace. There would certainly be a breeze up there. Half a mile along, there was even an eaterie on top of one of the towers that sold passable wine. I had a little time on my hands and I could do worse than spending it in solitary thought.
My meeting with Lucas had been a matter of drawing one blank after another. Though excellent in its own terms, the Treasury team I’d assembled under him was a poor substitute for the Intelligence Bureau. Following an anonymous tip off, he and his people had got to the beach before the blood was set on some of the bodies. Still smelling of urban filth and seawater, all the clothing had been carried into his office for me to poke through with a stick. No sign, though, of the forged note. I did recall having dropped this before Shahin had me tied up. Now, together with the alleged message from Nicetas, it had vanished. I’d given Lucas instructions for every ship to be searched that was passing through the straits without putting in at Constantinople. I could at least disrupt what looked like an excellent communications network for Shahin and whatever other Persian ships were operating in our home waters.
It was also the most I could do. A cup of wine while staring over the sparkling water of the straits might settle my thoughts for what should be a more productive meeting with my Jews. They’d had time enough to make their enquiries. It wouldn’t be too soon to drop in on them for a private talk.
As I turned, I found myself looking at a man I was pretty sure I’d seen by the entrance to the Treasury building. He stared back at me just a little too long, before giving a ceremonious bow and stepping out of my path.
Armed guard set over me by Lucas, or hired assassin? There was a quiet scraping of shoes behind me. I stepped quickly against a wall and went for my sword.
‘Please, My Lord, we are not here to do you any harm.’ My drug compounder spoke with urgent politeness. He looked nervously round and spread his arms in a gesture of peace. ‘You came to me yesterday with a request for help. I am now compelled to grant your request.’ He stepped backwards into the shadow of the covered passageway. ‘It will take up but an instant of your time,’ he added.
I let my right arm relax and stared back at him. I’d assumed he was fussing about Priscus the day before. Perhaps he had been and still was. I stared at the scared look on his face. I’d never thought of him as having any existence outside the drugs market. ‘What help have you in mind?’ I asked softly.
He managed one of his oily smiles and looked about. ‘My Lord Alaric,’ he said with a sudden coming together of his faculties, ‘I understand that you currently possess the Horn of Babylon.’
I reached up to adjust my hat. It kept him from seeing how tense my face had gone. ‘If you are referring to twelve inches of coiled silver that other men have shown willing to kill to get for themselves,’ I said with a forced easiness of tone, ‘the answer may be yes.’ I looked sharply right as some children ran down a flight of steps from the sea wall and began chasing each about the big open space. I relaxed again. ‘Do you want it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. His body trembled with a spasm of fear. ‘I never want even to see it. But if you will come with me, you may learn much about it.’
I looked at his grey and sweating face. What did he know about my silver cup? How had he known about it the previous day? I made up my mind. ‘Where?’ I asked. Not speaking, he pointed into the darkness of the passageway. It was two hundred yards long and the sort of place you advised newcomers to the City not to enter. Here, I had the plain advantage. If I chose, I could arrest him and his assistant and hurry them off for interrogation with Lucas. Or I could walk past him with a curt instruction to call on me the following day. Whatever he was doing away from his usual place, however, it was hard to imagine the compounder had come out to harm one of his best customers. He looked scared and I doubted he was scared of me. I stepped away from the wall. ‘You go first,’ I said.
I hurried blinking into the square dominated by the Great Church. Within the urine-soaked depths of the covered passageway, where men preached heresy above the moans of copulating slaves, the compounder had persuaded me into a hooded cloak that gave me a faintly monkish look. ‘We mustn’t be followed,’ he’d squeaked, pulling my hat of
f. The hood now drawn over my hair, I waited beneath the shadow of a victory monument while he finished climbing the hundred steps that connected two levels of the City. Pushed from behind by his assistant, and wheezing from exertion, he staggered into the light, and leaned against the monument. When he was able, he got out a glass bottle and sniffed a vapour that reminded me of roasting kava beans. It revived him, though it turned his face a deathly shade of grey. ‘I was mad to let you talk me into this,’ he whispered in Syriac to his colleague. ‘It’ll surely get us killed.’ He’d spoken in a dialect mostly used on the Persian side of the Euphrates. I pretended not to understand but was glad of the heavy sword I’d put on to replace the one lost to Shahin.
We walked across the square, the Great Church on our right, towards a brass statue of Saint Peter. Just beyond this stood a line of several dozen carrying chairs. We were deep into siesta and no one was expecting passengers. Ignoring us until our shadows loomed across them, slaves and owners alike were playing dice and drinking.
‘Three men your size?’ asked the owner of a chair that had been picked at random. He laughed. ‘You’ll need more than one chair if you don’t want my slaves to go on strike.’ The compounder silenced him with a quarter solidus that would have been more impressive if it hadn’t stuck to the palm of his trembling hand.
While the owner borrowed more slaves to join in the work, I found myself looking at Saint Peter. This was a statue that would make any Lord Treasurer mindful of his safety. It was about these brass legs that one of my predecessors had flung his arms for sanctuary when the mob caught up with him. Phocas himself had been put to death in a reasonably civilised manner by the new Augustus. His ministers weren’t so fortunate. The Lord Treasurer had been torn apart but kept alive long enough to see various body parts draped upon the statue like barbarian wedding gifts on a tree. It had been necessary, once order was restored, to take the statue down for a long soaking in vinegar.
For all the grim reminder, I was the least visibly scared of the three passengers who eventually set off in the chair. With much bumping and scraping, as even the additional carrying slaves couldn’t keep us more than a few inches above the road, we crept along. At first, the compounder insisted on having the curtains drawn tight about the chair. Soon, however, the heat inside was heading towards the critical and the smell of unwashed bodies and farty breath was beginning to turn my stomach. He didn’t complain when I lifted the flap beside me. This let me see that the owner of the chair was leading us past the old Admiralty building. After this, we stopped and the owner came back for further instructions. The compounder pulled his own curtains open and looked out. Once it was clear we hadn’t been followed, he sat back heavily. Sweating uncontrollably, he got out another gold coin and named a place inside the poor districts – close by the place where I’d taken up with Antonia the day before. He cut off the obvious objection with more gold and pulled his curtain back into place.
‘If I asked where we were going,’ I enquired politely, ‘would you be able to answer?’ The compounder shook his head. My sword in its scabbard was pressing against my thigh. Would it get me out of any trouble I might be heading towards? As the carrying slaves got into their stride and lifted us higher above the pavement, the compounder unstoppered his glass bottle again and sniffed at its fumes until I thought he’d stop breathing. I’d have no trouble from him, I thought.
‘Wait here for us,’ the compounder pleaded. ‘We shan’t be long at all.’ He mopped his forehead and ran a dry tongue over dry lips. ‘I’ll pay you double what I’ve given you so far,’ he added. After a brief hesitation, the owner nodded and pulled out a short sword. The slaves already had their knives out. This ‘moment of my time’ had already extended itself to an hour.
My boots crunched on disintegrated bricks as I skirted heaps of filth too rancid to be scavenged away. We were moving into an area where no outsiders ever went for amusement. If I was right about the geography, we’d soon be in a place where the authorities never went without very good cause and then with a few dozen armed men for protection. As we emerged from one of the bigger courtyards into the semblance of a street, we stopped before a heap of dead and decomposing rats. Now I didn’t need both arms to keep my balance, I took out a bottle of perfume and emptied it into a napkin.
‘It’s in here, My Lord,’ the compounder whispered. He nodded at the narrow entrance to another courtyard and, within that, to a door that hung open in a high wall of surprisingly decent brick. The other buildings were of the usual rickety timber. I thought again of the geography. Before renamed Constantinople and made the Empire’s eastern capital, Byzantium had been given walls adequate for keeping out most barbarian raids. These walls were long gone. But, here and there, deep inside the modern City, traces remained. This could be one of the towers.
The compounder grabbed at my arm as I stepped sideways for a better look at the building. ‘I crave your indulgence if anything you see or hear might contravene the laws of the Empire,’ he said, looking nervously round the empty yard. I said nothing. I’d once heard it seriously argued that the laws didn’t apply in these districts.
Chapter 27
In a fog of smells that, despite the napkin pressed to my face, could have made a muckraker puke, we moved up one flight of irregular stairs. From here, it was an unlit passageway. Behind every door that we passed, I heard a scurrying that put me in mind of rats, but was more likely to be the human residents. We stopped at the far end of the building. This would have been the outer wall of Byzantium and there was no entrance here. We took another flight of stairs back to ground level. Hidden as if by accident behind a pile of building materials covered with the dust of generations, a solid door was set into a solid wall.
The compounder knocked three times. Someone on the other side knocked once and then again and a small hatch was drawn open. The compounder leaned closer so he could be seen. For added security, he said his name. As the door creaked inward, I suppressed a flash of sudden panic and stepped into an interior that seemed to be in total darkness and smelled like an opened grave.
‘Please feel welcome here, My Lord Alaric,’ the compounder’s associate said, speaking for the first time, and in a strongly Syrian accent. ‘Be assured you are among friends and that no danger can come to you.’ By the dim light that came from the corridor, I could see I was in a curtained sliver of what may have been a large room. Whoever had opened the door was out of sight behind the foul and shining curtain.
The compounder pushed himself through the door, leaving me no choice but to stand against the curtain. ‘I assure you, My Lord, you are in no danger,’ he said, drawing the bolt shut. So many assurances of safety. I tried not to listen to the voice inside me that said to pull the bolt open again and make a dash for the light.
I looked past the compounder and willed my throat muscles to work properly. ‘Where’s your friend?’ I asked.
‘Keeping watch outside,’ the compounder answered. I suppressed another flash of panic. If this was a trap, it was unnecessarily elaborate. Avoiding the curtain, I pressed myself against a damp wall and let the compounder run his hands over that horrid cloth in search of an opening.
Through the curtain, I was in a room about the size of a large holding dungeon, though somewhat higher. It was pointless to wonder what had been its original purpose. Whatever that had been, its current purpose was decidedly more exotic.
‘You have brought him to us?’ the most decrepit-looking of the three old men quavered in Syriac. ‘You have brought us the seventh outsider to approach you after the breaking of the sun upon your face in the place of your business?’ He got stiffly up from his place beside his colleagues and peered at me from within the wide circle of candles.
‘As you directed, O Master,’ the compounder answered in a voice that seemed likely to tremble out of control, ‘I have brought the Lord Alaric.’
Oh dear! I thought. I’d assumed he was fussing about Priscus. If he believed I’d been in the drugs ma
rket to see him, his had been the bigger misapprehension. I kept my face steady and waited.
Without rising from his place, another of the old men looked at me. ‘The stars assured us the thief was an older man,’ he quavered, also in Syriac. ‘It was an older man, and a darker, who was seen carrying it from its place of safety,’ He reached out a bony hand to help him see past the candles. ‘Is this not a young barbarian? Has he brought it with him? If not, why has he not brought it with him?’
The compounder went forward another step and bowed. ‘Just as you told me a man would seek me out, Master, so came the Lord Alaric to me yesterday, seeking help. I have done as you directed. I can do no more.’ His voice caught and he began a sentence in Greek that trailed off before it could make sense.
Still on his feet, the first old man pointed at me. ‘Come forward, young man,’ he said in Greek. ‘Do you truly possess the Horn of Babylon?’ He raised both arms in a dramatic gesture, the black folds of his robe stretching out like the wings of a bat.
The stone floor had dipped in places and every depression was a puddle of slime. Avoiding these, I walked forward to the edge of the pentagram that I saw had been chalked just beyond the circuit of the candles. Even after the door was closed, I’d seen how the candles continued to flicker, but hadn’t used up the stinking air. From where I now stood, I could see a small window on my left. The main hole in its shutter was blocked with a sheet of oiled parchment.
‘I do possess the object of which you speak,’ I said, making my own attempt at the dramatic, ‘and would learn whatever can be said about its current significance.’ I stepped forward a few paces and tried to avoid showing my interest in the window.
The Curse of Babylon Page 19
