I couldn’t fault Samo’s intention. Our spirits had needed raising. If only I hadn’t been the only one at the dinner table who could follow his rendition of tribal war songs recalled from his youth. If only also he hadn’t insisted on dancing boys with swords and a harp accompaniment that had kept us at table till some time after the last fading of the day . . .
Priscus and I were on the roof. He looked down over the sea of torches. ‘It needs more than possession to make siege engines dangerous,’ he said. I pointed in the dim light of the moon at the crack I’d opened on the parapet wall. He grunted and let it take his weight regardless, as he kicked his chair closer against it. ‘If your surmise is right about the defection of everyone who matters, those things are hardly more useful than continued banging on the gates.’
An icy feeling in my stomach, I pointed down at the tallest of the wooden towers. ‘You can get a ladder from that to any of the balconies,’ I said. I looked again at the bright carpet of the torches. A ten-foot gap was opening and closing as some kind of procession I couldn’t see moved slowly though the glare towards a point on the far side of the road.
Priscus followed my pointed finger. He snorted. ‘My poor civiliany Alaric, even scaling a ladder takes more skill than this lot can assemble. What your people need to do is wait for a ladder to be clogged up with shouting fools, then push it out and to the side with a pole. Did I ever tell you about how I beat off the next to biggest night attack at the siege of Hadruma?’ He seemed about to drift off into one of his internal reveries. He stopped himself. ‘There’s a lesson for you in all this,’ he said with a low chuckle. ‘I left you this place with a first-rate armoury for defence. If you hadn’t let the bow strings perish, you could have seen these engines off with a hail of burning arrows. So much money spent on keeping everything clean and in its place – so little on the real fundamentals!’
A barely broken voice drifted upwards from the far side of the Triumphal Way: ‘The diameter in inches of the cord bundle must be equal to eleven-tenths the cube root of one hundred times the weight in pounds of the ball,’ it read haltingly. ‘Please don’t ask me, though, what it means.’ Something was snarled back in a much lower voice. More voices broke out in an argument I couldn’t hear.
Priscus laughed again, and stretched his arms forward to crack his knuckles. ‘So, they’ve found themselves a catapult!’ he sneered. ‘I’d like to see them get it loaded, let alone aimed and fired. It’s a six-month course to be an artillery officer, I’ll have you know. The extraction of cube roots – especially where the number itself isn’t an exact cube . . .’
I’m sure I was meant to find comfort in the outlining of a method that required you to imagine petals dropping off a flower, and must have taken twice as long as doing the calculation properly. But the bare mention of catapults had completed the freezing of my insides. ‘What would you do about the archers out there?’ I asked, changing the subject.
‘Oh, just hang leather curtains on the outside of all the balconies,’ he said easily. ‘The last time I needed them, they were in one of the boiler house lockers. There are special brackets already set into the external ornamentations. Get them rigged up before morning, and the archers can shoot away till their thumbs drop off for all the effect they’ll have.’
He blew his nose between forefinger and thumb. I watched him wipe his hand on what had been a fresh tunic. ‘Now, my boy, where was I with my demonstration?’
Somewhere out in the darkness, there was a sudden sharp clicking. This was followed by a whizz overhead that grew fainter till it ended in a distant impact against something solid.
‘Well I never!’ said Priscus. This time, he sniffed hard and swallowed his snot. ‘Beginner’s luck, of course. You’ll find that angle of approach is sure sign they haven’t unlocked the counterweight lever. If they want to rain death on the Egyptian Quarter, who are we to complain?’
He’d barely finished to draw breath, when the whizz of a second stone ball through the air ended in a crash that knocked the pair of us against the roof tiles. I lay for a moment, wondering if I’d been seriously injured. Absorbed in myself, hardly noticing how I slid down on to the lead, I didn’t hear the landing of the ball once it had splintered and bounced back from its place of impact. But I opened my eyes to a noise of desperate and terrified shrieking and another of those rising groans of horror from the crowd.
Priscus was already on his feet and was pushing at the wall. ‘Come on, my lovely!’ he crooned, going into a rhythm of pushing and relaxing, pushing and relaxing. ‘Come on, my fucking lovely!’ I was still sitting up and rubbing the back of my head when, with a dull scraping of brick against brick, the wall gave and he jumped backwards. The stone ball must have hit us just below the parapet. I guessed its parts had landed somewhere in the middle of the Triumphal Way. The brick mass of the wall would have landed almost directly below. The new and louder screaming must be those who’d pressed themselves close to the palace wall for safety and had more or less survived the arrival on their heads of a half ton of brickwork.
I paid no attention to Priscus, who was jumping up and down in silence, his arms raised to heaven. I got on my hands and knees and looked over the jagged edge of the roof. I was in time to hear a slither of detached facing blocks from the wall. There were fewer torches on the ground. Those remaining darted about like alarmed ants. I was aware of a low and general moaning, and of calls for help from those of the injured who could speak.
‘I don’t think they’ll be trying that again,’ Priscus crowed beside me – ‘at least, not in the dark.’ He went back to his victory dance, only stopping when he trod on his cloak and had to sit down abruptly to avoid pitching himself into the darkness. I looked over the edge again. The torchbearers had congregated directly below. By much squinting and telling myself to set aside the glare, I could just see the frenzied work of recovering the dead and living.
Priscus cleared his throat. ‘You did secure all the hidden ways in and out?’ he asked, sounding nervous for the first time.
I continued looking down. ‘Unless there’s another approach you haven’t told me about,’ I answered, ‘the only way still open is into the Great Sewer – and I’ve placed a couple of boys there to listen for movement.’ I scrambled back from the edge and stood carefully up. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m more worried about that bloody catapult. Has the former Commander of the East any suggestions?’
There was now a flare of torches a dozen yards along the roof. ‘Are you safe, Master?’ Rado cried urgently. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’ I looked round. Priscus had vanished into the darkness. I looked down at my tunic. In the approaching light, I could see a dark patch that had to be dirt. I brushed the worst of it away and stepped forward.
‘There will be no other attack tonight,’ I said firmly. ‘We remain on full alert, nevertheless.’ I hurried forward. I didn’t like standing so close to a sheer drop. Equally, the faintest shuffling of bare feet over tiles had told me that Priscus was lurking only a few feet above me, and most of the men and boys clambering towards me weren’t in the know.
Heart sinking into the pit of a stomach that was itself twitching, I thought of what had to be done. ‘Rado,’ I said in what wasn’t quite a commanding voice, ‘I need to speak with you in private.’
Chapter 44
‘Can I do you a favour, dearie?’ I paid no attention to the elderly whore. ‘I do special rates, you know, for men of the cloth.’ She reached forward to touch my hood.
I stopped myself from flinching back. ‘Piss off, you foul creature of the night!’ I grated in a Syrian accent. When that didn’t work, I shoved her hard in the chest and stepped over her drink-sodden body.
Stuck inside my palace, I’d been dithering between two views of what was happening. Either the whole lower-class population of the City was laying siege to me, or there had been a general collapse of order. The truth, I’d found, was somewhere in the middle. We’d emerged half-smothered f
rom the Great Sewer into the usual dark and silence of the night. All the brothels around Salvation Square were closed and in darkness. The only sound as we passed by the Leiriope Park was of the watchman, snoring in his box. Throughout the whole south-eastern quadrant of the City, everything seemed entirely in order.
Here, outside the Circus, though, you could see the evidence of a more than local disturbance. It was here that the owners of the wine shops mostly didn’t live above their premises and these had been looted. No one in sight to stop them, men were reeling from fired buildings with jars of drink or other property in their hands. The narrowest part of the street was blocked by what may have been a crowd of hundreds, brought together for the sale or purchase of stolen property. The voice of the auctioneer was almost lost in the clamour of shouting and threats. But it was brisk bidding for a load of spices and silk that must have come from one of the less solid warehouses beside the docks.
I looked about for Rado. He was five yards behind me and still kicking the old whore. I hurried back for him. ‘Leave her alone,’ I hissed in Slavic. ‘You’ll draw attention to us if you kill her. And do stop swaggering. You’re supposed to be a bloody monk!’ He stopped at once and stood to attention. Glaucus was right – his days were over as a dancing boy. He’d seen to that with his efforts in the gymnasium. But, now he was swathed in black, I no longer saw him as he’d been brought to me the year before. He was getting tall as well as broad.
Ahead of us, the street was blocked by two drunks, going at each other with sharpened roof tiles. The cheering crowd they’d gathered completed the blockage. I took Rado by the arm and led him to a recessed doorway. ‘Listen, boy,’ I asked, ‘why do you suppose I brought you with me tonight?’
‘To be your bodyguard, Master,’ he replied, standing straighter.
‘And how do you think I want you to behave?’ I asked again. ‘As a man of your tribe? Or as a city tough? If I wanted the latter, I could hire the winner of those two fools over there.’ I could almost feel my rebuke sinking into the boy’s spirit. I waited a moment, then – ‘What is your heart’s desire?’ I asked.
‘To earn my freedom,’ he said, fighting a sudden tremor in his voice. ‘I’m not clever with writing and things like that. Perhaps all I can do is become a soldier.’ He stopped again and controlled himself. ‘I want to be like you, Master.’
It was a more focused answer than I’d expected. But I squeezed his hand. ‘Then be what you are,’ I said, ‘not what you think I’d like you to be.’ Not answering, he turned away from me.
The fight was ended almost as quickly as it had begun and I took the opportunity to step forward into the wavering light of the torches. Staying in character, I made sure to walk round the still body of the loser. I found myself looking at a table on which someone had spread a few dozen singed papyrus books. ‘Come on, Alaric, move on,’ I told myself as if I’d been giving another order to Rado. You can be sure it was a worthless order. I picked up the tattiest and perhaps the oldest of the books, and carried it over to where a fresh torch had been lit. It can never hurt, where books are concerned, just to have a look. With a skip of my heart, I found that I was holding the Twelve Letters of Carneades on the Pragmatic Acceptance of Knowledge. I’d thought his works were long since lost. The only full outline I had of scepticism was a plodding work by an Athenian doctor. I unlaced the book and unrolled it to the first page of text.
‘Lovely stuff, don’t you think, Father?’ I pretended not to hear the owner of the stall, and continued squinting at the faint script. This would be hard to make out in any light. As it was, only the central column of text was legible. I read this a second time, now committing it, clause by clause, to memory: If, then, it cannot be proven, in the sense required by the philosophers, that there is an external world, it does not seem necessarily to follow that we must reject the existence of this world. So far as we believe that there are external objects, and that these influence our mental state, it strikes me as reasonable, O Cleomenes, to say that, while always suspending final judgement, we may pragmatically, on applying certain common sense tests . . .
The stallholder raised his voice and put his face closer. ‘I’m told they’re all strictly orthodox, Father. They came from a good home, and would grace any sacred library.’ I nodded and rolled the book to the protocol sheet. It was too stained to read in the light available. The script and general appearance, though, said it might be five hundred years old. Mobs never go for public libraries unless there’s a monk to urge them on. Most likely, one of the houses of the great had been sacked. What might have begun with a nod and a wink from Nicetas had turned into an uprising against everyone with decent clothes on his back. It took immediate pressure off my own walls. At the same time, had it left Nicetas with any choice but revolution against his cousin? Heraclius wouldn’t be pleased to come home to a burned and looted capital.
‘How much for all of them?’ I whispered, forgetting my Syrian accent. It was an unwise question. The answer would have tested the morals of anyone but an illiterate saint. Mine failed before the stallholder could finish naming his price. You should never not buy a book. I fished deep inside my robe and pulled out a handful of clipped silver. ‘Take everything first thing in the morning to the shop of Baruch, the Jewish banker,’ I said, speaking low. I paid no attention to the man’s funny look. ‘Tell him to give you this much again. Talk to anyone about our business,’ I added, ‘and you’ll be garrotted in the central garden of the University.’ While the stallholder turned away to count the silver in the torchlight, I grabbed Rado by the sleeve and pulled him deep into the jostling crowd.
Even for a pair of monks – monks, at that, with some vicious metalware concealed about their persons, the covered passageway was an unwise choice of route on an evening like this. It would have to be a few more of those packed streets and then a walk along the ascending street where the City Prefect had his offices.
The Prefecture buildings were locked up and in darkness. This much I’d been ready to expect. If he was still up and going about his duties, Timothy would be in his own palace, five blocks away from mine. Keeping in the shadows, we hurried upwards in the direction of the Central Milestone. We passed side streets where at least one attack had been made, but where the occupants were looking to their common defence. The bodies lying in the gutters or swinging from the brackets where torches should normally have been, were warning enough against more predatory attacks in this district. Once or twice, someone stepped out in front of us. But why stop anyone like us? ‘God bless you, Fathers – have a care on a night like this,’ was the most we got.
The general call of bed, and the known risk of injury, had thinned the numbers outside my palace. As on the night I’d got back from my first brush with Shahin, the siege was little more than dark bodies stretched out beside dying bonfires. I looked out from the darkness of the colonnade. In the faint glimmer of moonlight, it wasn’t possible to see the extent of structural damage caused by the catapult ball. But I knew the price of marble facing slabs. Three patches of these had come away. I could be sure every one of these had broken where it landed.
‘There are three guards, Master,’ Rado whispered in my ear. ‘Do you want me to lead them away? Or shall we kill them?’ ‘Guards’ was rather a grand word for the scruffy thugs who were taking their ease about five yards away. But there may have been more of them – the catapult itself was blocked from view unless we stepped out into the moonlight. Even three wouldn’t be so easy to take out at once and without noise. I moved deeper into shadow and waited for the boy to follow.
‘Stay here, but keep an eye on me,’ I said with slow emphasis. ‘Only come if I call you.’ I patted him on the shoulder before he could protest. ‘When did your people ever waste their lives on a frontal assault?’ I asked. ‘Now, wait for me to call you or wait until your own sense tells you otherwise.’
I walked thirty paces back the way we’d come and broke cover a long way from the catapult. Looking neither r
ight not left, and skirting several pools of congealing blood and any place on the pavement where the assembled dregs hadn’t yet fallen asleep, I made myself walk slowly across the wide expanse of the Triumphal Way. I stopped before my main gate and stared at the effects of the bonfires that had been lit there. The iron portcullis was bent in slightly, but should still go smoothly up into its housing. The gate itself was scratched and dented, but could be put right in half a morning. The cracked and smoke-stained marble would need specialised care. So too the chipped stairs. Sixty feet above me, two men were speaking in the rough Latin that barbarians of different races use when speaking together. If they leaned over the office balcony and saw me, they might choose to forget the orders I’d given for reactive force only. But I’d done enough to set up my excuse. I turned and made my way back towards the colonnade.
I slowed to a shuffle as I passed by one of the siege towers and the catapult came in sight. I’d believe Priscus that the siege towers were useless. And, unless it could be got repeatedly up and down the front steps, the battering ram was more likely to injure its users than open any gates. It was the catapult that mattered. I blinked a few times and tried to focus harder in the gloom. For once, I could see, I’d been right and Priscus wrong about something military. This was one of the iron machines we’d lately set up on the land walls. Given the right setting of the angle bars and the right degree of torsion, it could throw a fifty-pound ball to hit a point somewhat lower than any of the balconies. A few dozen of these hitting on one point would bring down at least part of the front wall. Properly handled, a smaller catapult than this could knock through stone like a mason’s hammer. It could turn brick to clouds of choking dust. It could shoot a chain of iron balls at ground level and slice advancing men in half. Even after his army had run away, five of these had almost won the Battle of Antioch for Nicetas. Sad for us they’d fallen into Persian hands. I could laugh and poke my tongue out at anything else. This darkly glittering monster couldn’t be left in place.
The Curse of Babylon Page 32
