The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  ‘You look very fine, father,’ Theodore said stiffly. I glanced down at my senatorial toga. After six hundred years of changes in manners and faith and language, you might call it an affectation still to be dressing up like Cicero. But I was undeniably a noble sight. The purple stripe suited me no end. I felt almost happy to look at it. I was too young for the Senate, and I might be expected to cheer and clap tonight at an epigram on the fact by that worthless arse-licker Leander. I’d bear up in the knowledge that I looked absolutely lush.

  ‘The chair is waiting downstairs in the hall,’ Theodore added. ‘Do you think it would be an easier balance for the carrying slaves if Antony and I sat together opposite you?’

  I nodded gravely. I hadn’t expected him to notice how heavily armed the slaves were. In his present state, he might not have noticed an earthquake. It had its uses. One of his many points of resemblance to Martin was a dislike of violence. ‘Your consideration for others does you credit in this life,’ I answered, ‘and will surely be rewarded in the next.’ I glanced at Antonia. She was looking troubled. Well she might. But for her, Theodore would be settling down for his evening prayers.

  Chapter 32

  After a supper that might have been put together from the leftovers of his feast for the rabble, I was stuck in the place of honour beside Nicetas. His legs, swaddled in more bandages than I’d seen on Egyptian mummies, were propped on two ebony footstools, and I had the best smell in the room of flesh that any competent doctor would have uncovered in half a wink and left to dry out. Though it had been dark for hours, the night was sweltering. No hint of a breeze came through the open windows and the forest of candles that burned overhead completed the resemblance to a steam room. It could have been worse, I’d thought, as a semi-nude black girl came over to stand beside us with a fan. She was a better sight than the hard, scowling faces the rest of the audience had turned in my direction. It then did get worse. One politely lecherous look from me and she’d shuffled behind Nicetas. I was left with nothing else to do but try for a look of awed enthusiasm and pay attention to the latest masterpiece by Leander Memphites. Oh, for another quarter pill of opium to replace the one that had so completely, and so long ago, worn off.

  It still could have been worse, I kept assuring myself. Leander might have composed five books in praise of Nicetas rather than just four. And we were approaching the climax of Book Four – that is, I hoped we were. Leander had dropped his usual simper and was steadily raising his voice till his Egyptian accent showed through like the sweat on the underarms of his tunic. Yes, we were getting there. After a worrying descent of his voice to describe and praise the main churches in Carthage, he ripped his tunic open from the neck downward to show an unshaven and distastefully flabby chest and, his face taking on the look of a man who’s trying to defecate and knows that he won’t, moved into an exultant squawk:

  As in some stadium ancient, behold a beautiful athlete.

  See the Lord Nicetas! Splendidly onward he rushes,

  Kicking the dust to clouds, as his feet, so fleetingly sighted,

  Spring on the ground and are gone. See, following after,

  Barely giving contest, how his opponents falter,

  All their long strides failing, as, claw-like, agony catches

  Hold of their chests. See him alone in the heat of the morning

  Make for the finish. Lord Nicetas – Swift as Achilles . . .

  So he carried on through another hundred lines or so to the end, before lapsing into a simper for the burst of applause that Nicetas led.

  ‘Blessings on Leander,’ a fat eunuch shrilled, ‘wondrous servant of the Muses.’

  ‘And blessings on Nicetas,’ came the chanted response from the rest of us, ‘great and victorious hero – the New Belisarius!’ The great and victorious hero raised his walking stick for another round of applause. This given, there was a determined rush for the wine tables, and I found myself alone with Nicetas and his poet.

  ‘Don’t you think Leander is magnificent?’ Nicetas grated. It was hard to know if this was a question or an accusation. Coming from Nicetas, it was probably both.

  ‘I’ve never heard the rhythm of hexameters made so obvious,’ I answered cautiously.

  ‘Exactly!’ he cried with an emphatic snort that ended in a cry of pain as he moved and one of his legs dropped off its stool. ‘If you ask me,’ he went on in an ill-natured mutter, ‘I’m sick to death of those rules about long and short syllables. I can’t hear them in Latin or in Greek, though I was flogged every day for years. You’ll agree that Leander has much improved on the ancients. I’ve always wondered how they could sit through the poetry of their own age. I certainly can’t abide it.’ He raised his voice again. ‘What this Empire needs is a renewal of the arts. How can I inspire men to win battles when they have no poetry ringing in their ears?’

  ‘Absolutely! Well said!’ Someone behind me cried through a full mouth. There was another cry of agreement on my left. I nodded politely. The true answer, of course, was that our armies were more likely to win if he wasn’t leading them. But he’d put on an almost convincing show of concern when I was made to explain the previous day’s murder attempt on me. Who was I to cast the first hard look of the evening?

  ‘My Lord’s patronage of the arts is an example to us all,’ I said. Nicetas glowered at me, before prodding Leander with his walking stick. This got a quiet repeat of the running track passage. In a break for Leander to sip delicately at his wine cup, I clapped very softly, and smiled and nodded. ‘Would My Lord excuse me a moment?’ I asked. ‘I must see how my son and his friend are getting on.’

  Theodore was enjoying himself. I’d heard that much from a dozen yards away and in spite of the mass of sweaty bodies that separated us. ‘You see, it’s absolutely necessary,’ I heard him call at the top of a still-unbroken voice, ‘to regard Our Lord Jesus Christ as both Man and God and joined together in a Perfect Union. To see it otherwise is not merely heresy but also an inability to recognise the promptings of reason.’ I embraced Paul, first deputy of the City Prefect, and, avoiding being dragged into conversation with his increasingly doddery father, came upon Theodore beside one of the wine tables. He’d got Antonia wedged against a column. He also had her by one of her sleeves. His tendency to spray saliva when excited was on full display.

  ‘I trust you’re enjoying the recital,’ I said. Theodore nodded eagerly without taking the cup from his lips. The front of his robe was already stained and sopping wet. He looked into his cup. Before he could open his mouth to speak, a serving slave had noticed and was giving him yet another refill. ‘Should you not be mixing that with three parts water?’ I asked with vague concern. The wine I’d seen poured was a very dark red. Even I didn’t knock it back like this – not in public, anyway.

  ‘But it has the most refreshing taste,’ came the silly answer. ‘The Lord Eunapius assures me the taste is ruined by water,’ he added in a voice that ended in a slur. He let go of Antonia and moved to take a step forward but clutched at the table for support. Time, I decided, to take him by the arm and get him out of the room. I’d left our chair in the main courtyard. I could sit him in it and rely on the carrying slaves to keep him there till he passed out. But I was looking at Antonia. Her own cup in hand, she seemed to be glowing from within. I tried to think of a careless remark and found that my chest was beginning its funny trick with light. Taking both arms from the table, Theodore tottered closer to me. ‘Antony says the poetry was the finest thing he’d ever heard,’ he said thickly. He burped, opening a pathway between my nose and the contents of his stomach.

  I heard a sneering laugh behind me. ‘Then I will say that your son’s friend has taste as well as elegance of form.’ I turned and made myself smile at Eunapius of Pylae. He licked his lips just as more white lead slid off his cheeks. He washed it down with another mouthful of wine and continued staring at Antonia. ‘Did I hear right that young Antony is from Trebizond?’ he asked with an upward motion of his eyebr
ows. ‘You will surely be aware that I have estates close by there. How could I possibly not have come across so fine a young man as Antony?’ The faint and satirical emphasis he put on man set me thinking. Either he’d seen straight through her disguise or he knew something.

  Eunapius grinned and shuffled closer to Antonia. Looking surly, Theodore managed to get himself between them at the last moment.

  ‘My dearest friend, Eunapius,’ I said, leading him as if without thought into the crowd of braying Senators, ‘I’ve been thinking hard, ever since our last meeting, about your suggestion of mixing copper into the new silver coins. Do you really think a mixture of two-fifths would not be noticed by the people?’ He looked suspiciously back at me. I was saved from listening to more of the stupid idea he’d been putting to Nicetas by the arrival of a spotty boy, who pushed a message into his hands. We were in a place of comparative darkness and Eunapius had to move the thin sheet of wood close to his face to read what it said. I played with a fold of my toga that had come loose and pretended not to watch a face that had gone suddenly tense.

  He scratched the fingernails of his right hand across the waxed surface of the message. ‘I’ll answer this in person,’ he said to the boy. He looked at me and put a crooked smile on his face. ‘My Lord will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if business calls me temporarily from the finest conversation I have yet heard in this most glittering event.’ He twisted round to see where Antonia had gone. Listening to more of his slurred chatter about the Council of Chalcedon, she was quietly steering Theodore away from the wine table.

  I watched Eunapius pick his way through the room. It was a long exit. He left no one important unapproached. In every ear he whispered something of about the same length. Nobody, however, seemed to be that friendly in return. He smiled and fawned and ran his fingers over woollen senatorial sleeves. The best he got in return was the distant politeness you show to someone you might know, but whose face you can’t quite recall. At last he was between the two black eunuchs who guarded the door and the room seemed to brighten by his leaving it.

  No chance yet of my own exit. I had my sleeve grabbed by someone who rambled on about a set of trusts into which he’d conveyed his property – something to do with stopping his son from giving it away to the Church. Because of that, he’d taken a bad hit from the land law and been compelled to give two-thirds away, rather than the half normally required. I listened with a pretence of sympathy. If I’d been able to understand his account of the trusts involved, I might even have suggested an approach to the Treasury for an ex gratia compensation payment.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about the Gracchus brothers!’ someone snarled softly behind me. ‘They were men from our own order. They never tried to strip us naked. If you must talk about the olden days, this young fucker’s another Spartacus. It’s now or never – now or never, I tell you.’ He gave a yelp as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The conversation behind me fell silent, before taking up again as a bored discussion of the improved strain of silkworm some missionaries had carried back from the East.

  I lifted a cup from a passing tray and, like a man coming up for air, stood back from the bore who’d now taken hold of my sleeve and didn’t seem inclined ever to let me go. I was surrounded by several hundred men who looked to Nicetas to stop me from drying up all the teats on which they and their ancestors had been sucking since time out of mind. They could talk themselves hoarse about the Gracchus brothers. The Senators who’d faced down that threat to their landed position had been men of quality. Grasping, cold-blooded bastards to a man they’d been, but no one could deny they’d made Rome great in the world. These Greeklings in fancy dress hadn’t a day’s military service between them. All two hundred of them, I had no doubt, prayed nightly for Heraclius to grow sick of me. I had no doubt either that every one of them would shit himself if I showed him so much as a clenched fist.

  I smiled at the bore. He was almost making sense about his trusts when the Lord Timothy came in sight. ‘Lovely to see you, dear boy – lovely to see you,’ he boomed, holding up two cups of wine as his excuse for not shaking hands. His wig was in place, and his false teeth. ‘So sorry not to recognise you today,’ he lied – ‘fish out of water and all that.’ Cold dislike in his eyes, he pushed out his lower set of teeth. He ran his tongue along the golden ridge, before sucking them back into place. ‘I believe your appearance among them always occasions a certain disorder in the poor.’ He stepped closer. ‘Such a shame, I like to say, that we cannot all get along together.’ He twisted down to blow his nose into the shoulder of his toga. He looked up and smiled. I caught sight of the dried dirt under his fingernails. ‘I really must have you for dinner one evening,’ he said with a snigger. He moved off, cups in hand. ‘Yes – I’d like you for dinner,’ he called over his shoulder.

  Still listening to the man with the trusts, I looked over at Nicetas. Surely, he couldn’t fancy himself as Emperor? If he was too stupid to realise how stupid he was, he must know what trouble he’d raise within his family from deposing a cousin who’d showered him with favours. If not that, even he must be aware of the lack of correspondence between the glorious creature of Leander’s poem and the bloated invalid whose only victory in the Syrian campaign had come about when, incoherent from the pain of a septic haemorrhoid, he’d let his hairdresser give the orders.

  And where did the Persians come in all this? I could imagine most things of Nicetas. Treason wasn’t among them. Was he an unwitting puppet? Was Shahrbaraz pulling the strings from out of sight? That would make sense of the generally swift and ruthless unfolding of the previous day’s plot. The benefit for the Persians would be the most incompetent fool as Emperor since – I had to stop here and think: in ancient times, Didius Julianus had bought the Purple at auction, but had been done away with too quickly for his full uselessness to be revealed. The only risk for the Persians was that there’d be a vacancy for Commander of the East and this might accidentally be filled by someone who knew what he was doing.

  I thought about my own place in things. The previous day Simon had worked a miracle of organisation and put himself personally at risk. Did he suppose I knew about the cup and that I’d call on its awesome powers? Did he think I’d drop everything and take a fast ship to the Emperor in Cyzicus? Bearing in mind what I’d learned in the afternoon – and he might have thought I knew it already – it made sense to want me out of the way as well as getting the cup back. But why had Shahin been so reluctant to go along with killing me? Was it because he wanted to dump me, bound hand and foot, before the Great King’s throne – rather as a cat presents a wounded bird to its master? Or had I some other use? Shahin had never been one to let sex come before his wider interests.

  And why was Eunapius suddenly out of fashion? If anything, I was more openly hated than ever. Questions, questions – so many questions.

  Chapter 33

  ‘I will not seek the violent crown of martyrdom,’ Theodore said mournfully. Antonia had got him into a chair between two columns and was looking about for help. ‘Such things must never be sought. But if God, in His Infinite Mercy, calls me to stand witness to my faith, I shall be ready – yea, even though my belly be slit open and my intestines wound slowly out, I will never cry out but in joy.’

  ‘How much has he drunk?’ I whispered. I looked about the room. If I didn’t shut the boy up soon, I’d be a laughing stock as well as hated.

  ‘I could carry him out myself,’ Antonia said. ‘The problem is he keeps trying to kiss me every time I take hold of him.’ She lowered her voice still further. ‘Was that man with the painted face Eunapius of Pylae?’ I nodded. She looked back, disgusted and oddly alarmed. ‘When can we get out of here?’

  ‘Spot of bother, dear boy?’ Timothy asked, coming from behind one of the columns. He looked at Theodore, who now put his face into his hands and began rocking back and forth. ‘Dried oysters in honey,’ Timothy said with a laugh – ‘that’s what your boy needs. They’ll bring him round in no t
ime.’ Losing interest in me, he put his flabby face close to Antonia. ‘I really don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of you yet, young man.’ She fell back before the blast of his putrid breath. She looked at me and swallowed. I scowled back at her. This wasn’t all her fault. But I’d tell her it was the moment we were alone.

  ‘Stay here beside him,’ I said coldly. ‘I’ll go and get some of the carrying slaves.’ Timothy could be trusted not to rape her – not here, at least.

  I turned, and found myself staring at Leander. He cleared his throat. Shining with sweat, his face was twisted into an obsequious leer. ‘The Lord Alaric will surely agree with the most just observations of the Caesar Nicetas,’ he opened with slimy respect. ‘An empire that has no place for the Muses cannot be surprised when the Persians overrun its fairest provinces.’

  I resisted the urge to kick him on both shins. Eunapius was beside him. While out of the room, he’d acquired another coat of paint for his face. I stopped and made myself smile at Leander. I could see that he’d shaved closely for his recital. But black stubble beneath his skin darkened the lower half of an already dark face. I spread my arms in a gesture of piety. ‘We mustn’t forget, my dear Leander, that now Heraclius is our ruler the Empire is under the special protection of Christ and the Virgin.’