The Curse of Babylon

by Richard Blake

  People were noticing that the Great King had chosen to show himself a second time in one day. Those closest by where we stood began pressing forward, raising their arms in prudent joy. He stretched out his arms in a pose that reminded me of nothing so much as a crucified Christ and held it for what seem a long time. ‘The duties of leadership,’ he sighed at last, dropping his arms. He kicked a piece of stray offal from the edge of the platform. It landed with a splash beside where another of the dead boys was lying face down. ‘Since we don’t have to keep up the pretences of your last stay at my court,’ he began, ‘I’ll ask if you adopted the same democratic manner with Heraclius.’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘Then again, an Emperor’s not usually surrounded by men who have to check after every audience that their heads are still attached. The main problem is sycophants.’ I smiled and looked him in the eye. ‘Would you like me to fall down and slobber kisses on your slippers? Would it make you less inclined to do away with me? I’ll be honest that I didn’t come here out of any positive desire to see you again.’

  Chosroes looked back at me. ‘When the mad boy said you were sniffing about,’ he said slowly, ‘I did revive all the plans that went through my mind two years ago. That democratic manner, I can tell you, wouldn’t long have survived the first nibble of my flesh-eating bugs.’ He laughed. ‘However, I had already put those plans aside. I grant you the asylum you still haven’t begged in the manner prescribed by the eunuchs. You have certain verbal and literary skills that make it worth keeping you alive.’ He fell silent. I think he expected me to ask what he meant. Instead, I worked it out for myself and felt my nerves begin to settle – Shahin hadn’t lied: my next tour of Ctesiphon, if there had to be one, shouldn’t involve a visit to the Shaft of Oblivion. I watched the small army of men hard at work on the night palace. I didn’t like the look of those support poles. The palace, though, was turning out decidedly lavish.

  Anyone else he’d have had sawn in half for this lack of attention. But Chosroes used the long silence for another go at his itching body. Reminding me of his own presence, my guard jabbed me softly in the back with the point of his sword. Once more, I ignored him.

  ‘Nearly eleven hundred years after his death,’ Chosroes opened anew, ‘and every educated Greek knows about Xerxes. So many ages later and everyone knows who he was, what he looked like, and what he did and said. For all the incidental lies and exaggerations, Herodotus made him immortal. Do you not think the Great King who finishes the work that Xerxes began deserves his own Herodotus?’

  A deathless record of his greatness – in my experience, it crosses the mind of every ruler who’s been moderately successful. In the end, once others had seen to his victory, even Heraclius gave way and commissioned an epic from Leander. If I hadn’t known him, I’d never have believed it could be for this that Chosroes had been so eager to lay hands on me again. But I did know him and had no trouble believing it was for this that the bastard hadn’t got me screaming for death. I nodded wisely. ‘But I thought you were planning to abolish the Greek language,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Don’t test my patience, Alaric,’ he snarled. He turned away and kept his face out of view while he tried to bring it back to a semblance of the human form. ‘I got you translating Herodotus to see if your Persian was still as good as it always was.’ I nodded again. ‘The last native I commissioned to write up my conquest of Syria did a characteristically piss-poor job. It was all flowery descriptions and no structure. His nearest approach to directness of utterance came after I’d impaled him. I want someone who can write in Persian and think in Greek – someone who can trace the events of the present to causes in a remote past. I want another Herodotus, with a more than a dash of Polybius. If you don’t provoke me into finishing your life, I’m proposing to let you found a new school of Persian historiography.’

  Urvaksha looked up from his interminable sorting of knotted strings. ‘You speak the soft and fluting language of the enemy too well,’ he whined. ‘Your mother did you ill to teach it.’

  Chosroes pulled hard on the golden chain. ‘If you don’t keep your fucking mouth shut,’ he hissed in Persian, ‘I’ll have you flogged.’ He glanced at me, then back at his cowering general adviser. ‘You go too far in your boldness,’ he said emphatically.

  I sniffed at the implied warning. ‘Your Majesty assumes, of course, that his own invasion will be more successful than that of Xerxes,’ I said with a bow that hovered between the perfunctory and the insulting. I turned and looked at the rain-sodden multitudes – most of them up to their knees in water. ‘I’m surprised this army’s got as far as it has into Imperial territory.’

  Chosroes lifted his head so that his beard jutted forward. ‘With Shahrbaraz leading, we’ll get to Constantinople in time for the August heat,’ he growled.

  I allowed myself a quiet laugh. ‘You might get to Chalcedon,’ I said. ‘You then have six hundred yards of water to cross to the European shore – six hundred yards that Timothy or even Nicetas – will absolutely control. Then there’s the city walls. Also, I don’t think your extermination plan is likely to win hearts and minds inside the walls.’

  From far along the pass, a low cheer rolled towards us. There was a patch of blue in the sky and a shaft of sunlight followed the cheering. Before it could reach us, the shaft was cut off. There was a long and universal groan. ‘I’ll confess, I’m not a military man,’ I added. ‘But you’re leading what’s already a dispirited rabble before it’s met a stroke of opposition.’

  Chosroes slitted his eyes and looked at me out of their corners. ‘I do have a weapon of great power,’ he suggested. He twisted round and looked fully at me. ‘And, since I can see the thought in your mind, I’ll tell you now I’m not talking about the Horn of Babylon. That might or might not get me inside the walls of the City. But, Alaric, I have something else with me that is the stuff of dreams to all true devotees of the Christian Faith. That will certainly cause the gates to be opened.’

  He stopped and tapped his forehead knowingly. The tiny gap in the cloud had closed over. It was turning colder and I felt another spot of rain on my face. Tugging Urvaksha as if he’d been a drunken dog, he led me back inside the tent. The eunuchs and remaining serving boys had done a fast job. The place no longer stank of blood and ruptured entrails. There was a wine jug in a bowl filled with crushed ice. A couple of pale boys stood ready with bags of rose petals to shower on the Great King. He waved them out of sight, and sat on his ivory chair.

  I sat beside him and filled the wine cups. I ignored the guard who took his place behind me. Chosroes stood up and pointed. ‘You, boy,’ he called imperiously. ‘Come out of hiding. I need you here to taste my wine. Taste the Lord Alaric’s as well. If it makes you sick, you won’t die soon enough to avoid the Great King’s wrath.’ He looked at the boy’s pale, tear-stained face. He looked briefly at the parts of Babar arranged on the silver dish. It was too much for him. He sat back and roared with happy laughter.

  I took up the third sheet of papyrus I’d now covered in my attempt at the Persian script:

  Now, the deposition and blinding of his own father had caused great outrage among the Persians. At first, this was suppressed by a general and unrestrained terror, a secondary effect of which was the removal, by death or mutilation, of all who had served his father in senior positions.

  In the second year of his reign, however, Chosroes found himself no longer able to keep the opposition from uniting. The first among many failures of the harvests in the southern and most fertile regions of his empire, combined with what appears to be the inevitable return of pestilence, diminished his support among the people. His refusal to command a war against the nomadic Saracens of the desert, who had raided almost to the walls of Seleucia, alienated the loyalty of the army.

  On the very day when the price of food is said to have reached its highest level in Ctesiphon, a mob, directed by General Bahram, burst into the summer palace. As was his custom, the young King had giv
en himself up to wine and every manner of debauchery. Even so, he escaped the massacre of his entire household by dressing in the rags of a common leper and making his way towards the Euphrates, where he claimed the protection of the Greek Emperor, Maurice . . .

  I looked up from my text. Chosroes was still nodding and smiling. ‘Is this what you really want?’ I asked dubiously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ came the immediate answer. ‘I want a philosophical history. That means telling the truth so far as it can be ascertained. And, since I’m well on the way to conquering the entire known world, I like what will be your dramatic contrast between the early and the mature years of my reign.’ He took the sheet from which I’d been reading and squinted at the smudged mess I’d made of having to compose in a script that ran from right to left. ‘I do particularly like the connection you make between food prices and Bahram’s coup. Without spelling it out, you suggest a certain opportunism in his behaviour. Once we move beyond these sample chapters, I’ll explain to you how, after the Greeks put me back on the throne, I had him locked away with his children until he ate them.’

  He pushed the sheet back across the writing table at me, and arranged all seven into a neat pile. ‘I’m so glad, Alaric, I haven’t had you killed. You’re the only man alive who can write history this objectively, and in Persian. Please keep it that way. I believe Shahin will be here within the next few days. If he doesn’t corroborate your story at least in its essentials, I won’t kill you – but I will make you watch the death of that Syrian boy you appear to have adopted.’

  I pursed my lips and looked thoughtful. I could probably get over the loss of Theodore. But Shahin’s arrival would bring Antonia into the Royal Clutches. The thought of that was enough to set my insides moving in odd rhythms. ‘I wish you hadn’t tortured him,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure his wits will ever entirely come back.’

  Chosroes laughed. ‘He had fuck all of those when he was brought in,’ he said. ‘He was talking to himself in a language no one could understand. He only spoke back in Syriac when one of his testicles was almost crushed – and that was to thank his jailor and ask to be roasted over a slow fire. You surround yourself with some very odd people.’

  So Theodore hadn’t talked yet. I could be glad of that much. I smiled weakly and reached for a clean sheet of papyrus. ‘I believe you spent eighteen months in Constantinople,’ I said. ‘I’ll need your help to compose the speech you made to the Emperor. There is a couplet by one of your old poets whose name I currently forget. But do you really plan to take the place apart?'

  Chosroes looked round and dropped his voice. ‘Of course, I don’t,’ he said in Greek. ‘I said what I did to jolly the army along. You don’t willingly destroy a city of such marvels. Its current population will be gradually eased out. But their lives will be spared. It’s only the farmers I really want to kill – destroying the Greeks at the root, you see; no chance of olive shoots, and so on. For the rest, you will surely agree that the ruler of the world deserves to occupy no less than the capital of the world.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ I agreed.

  He stood up and stretched. I’d been scribbling away for him for the remainder of the afternoon and the sky was turning dark outside. ‘I don’t like to be away from my palace at night,’ he muttered. He snapped his fingers at the two guards who’d stood behind me all the time I was writing. ‘Bring the Lord Alaric along. Don’t lose him in the dark.’

  Chapter 60

  If I hadn’t known better, I’d have had to open my eyes wider in the gloom to check if they weren’t being deceived. In the light of two double lamps, you might easily have thought you weren’t looking at paintings on silk, and that a windowless room twelve foot by eight at best was in fact the vast hall of ceremonies of the summer palace in Ctesiphon.

  But I did know better. I was standing in one among several wooden boxes heaped on a large wooden platform that was itself resting on about a hundred support poles. Third behind Chosroes and Urvaksha – and never allowed to forget the smirking armed creature close behind me – I’d crossed, on a causeway above the slowly ebbing waters from the storm, from the big tent to the base of the night palace.

  Chosroes patted me on the back. ‘Time, Alaric, to forget the cares of the day,’ he said with slimy cheer. ‘I always so enjoyed our little dinners in Ctesiphon.’ Not answering, I went with him to the entrance and watched as the few serving men our weight limits had allowed pulled up the ladder. Below us, the whole immensity of the night palace was surrounded by a double circle of armed guards. Behind every fifth man in the innermost circle stood a slave with a flaring torch. The whole arrangement struck me as a fire hazard in itself. Otherwise, the palace must have been an obvious target for anyone above the pass able to shoot fire arrows. Any artillery would have knocked it to pieces before the ladder could be let down again.

  A more pressing concern, though, was its general stability. Even in the gentle wind that moaned along the pass, the little silver bells above us were tinkling as if an irate master somewhere was calling for his slaves. One look at Shahrbaraz, and I could see that I wasn’t alone in wondering if those ten-foot support poles had been such a good idea.

  Either Chosroes didn’t agree or he didn’t care. With his own hands, he pulled the main door shut and drew its bolts. ‘My chief general, of course,’ he tittered, ‘will go back to his military tent after dinner. But you, my dearest Alaric, will be locked into your own room, to sleep on your own silken mattresses. I would have given you a room in the tower – only the engineers became proper wet blankets towards the end of the day. Excepting my own, all the bedrooms are in a small block beyond the dining room.’

  He waited for one of his serving boys to open the door to the dining room. Though not approaching his usual accommodation, this was respectably large. Indeed, at about a hundred feet by fifty, I think it amounted to most of the palace. It had no windows, but enough air came in through the gently grinding segments of the structure to keep the lamps flickering and us from choking to death in the smoke from the incense burners.

  Chosroes walked briskly into the room. He stopped in the middle and turned round and round on the silk rugs that covered its wooden floor. ‘Behold, Alaric, how civilisation is carried into the furthest wilderness,’ he cried. He sat down on one of the nicer rugs and rocked happily back and forward. ‘I’ll let you watch the engineers dismantle this place in the morning. You can work a full description into your narrative of the invasion. The wall hangings, I must observe, are all cloth of gold.’

  ‘He’s a spy for Caesar!’ Urvaksha spat. ‘Everything you tell him will go straight to Constantinople. You’re a fool to keep him alive.’

  ‘If I might suggest, Your Majesty,’ Shahrbaraz took up in his deep voice, ‘the blond Westerner has betrayed you once already. Should you be so willing to trust him again? And so soon?’

  Chosroes got up and watched the food tasters at work. ‘You can hold your tongues, the pair of you,’ he said in his silky, menacing voice. ‘Each one of you is useful to me in his own way. That’s all you need to consider.’ He pointed one of the tasters at a lead pot of something that still bubbled over an oil burner. ‘Once Shahin’s confirmed his story, I’ll ease his terms of confinement. Until then, he stays beside me and takes notes of all I say and order.’

  Shahrbaraz bowed. ‘It is as you command, O Great King,’ he said with a nasty look in my direction. ‘Shahin is, however, very late. None of the scouting parties we’ve sent ahead has seen him or his people. Until then, our only assurance that Heraclius has fallen is Alaric – a man whose lies delayed our conquest of Syria by a year. It is my duty to ask how we can know that he isn’t here to encourage us into a trap?’

  Chosroes pursed his lips, reminding me of a scorpion that can’t decide whether or not to sting the frog that’s carrying him across a pond. He smiled and turned his attention back to watching a man pat silently through the cushions on which we were to sit for dinner. He looked up suddenly at a slobbering
sound in the corner. I followed his look. Hands tied behind him, Theodore was drifting out of the drugged sleep I’d procured for him, and trying to sit up. So far away, and in poor light, he gave an impression of recovering sanity. I willed him still to be off his head. I couldn’t afford him to be worth torturing into any version of the truth.

  ‘I know your secret, Alaric the Damned!’ he called out in Syriac – a language neither of the Persians showed any sign of understanding. ‘You have corrupted everything pure in the service of your Dark Lord. I renounce all bonds with you.’ He trailed off into more of the nonsense language he’d spoken for most of his time in captivity. I managed a nervous smile in his direction. It couldn’t be long before the Great King noticed the lack of affection in our relationship. It would have been for the best not to have him around – as ever, bloody Priscus had a lot to answer for: and what was he up to, I might ask? But it wasn’t time for that question. I could sweat over it in bed. For the moment, I’d keep up the effort of concern for the idiotic boy’s welfare.

  ‘I’m not sure my son is hungry,’ I said. ‘But I do suggest another dose of opium to ease the pain. The last time I looked, his ballbag was swollen like a pomegranate. Yes – perhaps a few grains of opium, and on a heated spoon to quicken its effect.’

  Chosroes flopped on to a mound of cushions and waved his vague assent. One of the eunuchs went over to a box and began fiddling with bottles. Chosroes reached out for a piece of unleavened bread. ‘Come and join me, dear friends,’ he commanded in a tone that indicated anything but generosity of heart. He watched Shahrbaraz stuff a piece of honeyed mutton into his mouth. He smiled. ‘Tell me, General,’ he asked, ‘when can the army resume its march along the pass?’