I hardly need mention the rack. None of these places would be complete without one. Here, it had what amounted to pride of place. In all, it was about ten feet long, a fixed bar at one end with leather thongs attached, an elaborately geared roller at the other, also with leather thongs attached. I looked away from the instruments. I found myself looking instead at the two craftsmen of pain who’d stayed when the lamp bearers had withdrawn. They might have been brothers. Both were short creatures with heavily muscled arms and shaven heads, both obscenely fat, both with faces that flitted from moment to moment between the ecstatic and the totally blank. But if they had been brothers, I knew well enough they’d have had to be part of a family that had its members in every city of the Empire. Whatever your appearance when you take on that job, that is how in no time at all you end up looking. Naked apart from their stained loincloths, they stood bowed and respectful before Priscus.
‘It is my custom,’ he opened again – still calm, still bordering on the friendly – ‘to give those whom I must question a tour of these places. An explanation of how these various instruments work can have a most loosening effect on the tongue. You will appreciate, however, that time grows ever shorter. I will therefore ask you once more and once only – do as I ask of you.’
‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ From what may have been the oldest of the three, the familiar slogan rang out in Egyptian. ‘The tears of Alexander shall flow, giving bread and freedom!’ he said again, now louder. The other two joined in, defiant in unity. They varied this with something I hadn’t heard before, but contained the Egyptian word for Greeks.
Priscus stood looking down at them, waiting for them to run out of energy or defiance. He waited in the silence that followed. The silence continued. He shrugged. He turned to the torturers.
‘We’ll start with the rack,’ he said quietly.
The torturers bowed.
‘I want’ – his finger moved uncertainly over the three – ‘that one.’ His finger stopped and pointed firmly at the one who’d been looking up at me.
Chapter 38
‘Priscus,’ I said, breaking the tension in that torture chamber. I took a step forward. He turned his head towards me. I wasn’t sure what I’d wanted to say. Before I could think of anything, he’d raised his arm.
‘Don’t get involved, Alaric,’ he said in Latin. He smiled and pointed at me to stand back against the wall. ‘You know the formalities of lawful authority don’t count in treason cases. Whatever I do now I do with the full weight of the Empire behind me. That one,’ he repeated to the torturers.
They’d already got him to his feet. Now, they didn’t bother untying him, but just cut him out of the ropes. They cut him out of his clothes and even his shoes, dumping the ruined things in a heap.
‘The tears of Alexander,’ he began with a squeak that trailed off with the dawning of genuine fear.
Naked, he looked even younger than I’d thought. He tried turning his head towards the others. But naked and glistening in the now more than adequate light, his body was arched backward over the rack. They were all stupid, spoiled brats. They’d spent what little time they’d lived among fawning slaves and tradesmen. Their fathers’ money had bought their way through every scrape and problem. They’d somehow got themselves mixed up in the firing of the grain fleet without once thinking through what they were doing. Everything so far since their arrest had been just an elaborate game. I was sure they expected their fathers to arrive any moment in that dungeon, purseloads of gold to scatter about and turn Priscus jolly with its magic touch.
But you didn’t play with Priscus – not when he had you in his power; not perhaps ever.
‘Such freshness, such youth, such perfection of form!’ Priscus crooned softly as he leaned over the tethered boy. He ran a finger lightly down the line of the chest, over the stomach, to rest just above the groin. The boy was fastened by his ankles to the fixed bar at one end of the rack, by his wrists to the geared roller at the other end. He’d started babbling and pleading as the roller had gone round to its first click, lifting his taut body off the table.
‘Too late, my beauty, too late,’ Priscus said. ‘Oh, had you only taken my offer – such golden times we might have had. But say farewell now to beauty and freshness. Say farewell to all that might have been. Say farewell to hope itself.’ He turned to one of the torturers. ‘Take it up to number seven,’ he said.
‘But, My Lord,’ the man began.
‘I know the working of your machine as well as you do,’ Priscus replied. ‘When I say number seven, I mean number seven. Now do it – and take it straight there.’
I don’t like the rack. I’ve always hated it. But you don’t normally see it taken far up. For actual punishment, there are the more visual and diverse torments. The idea of racking is to get information. The first few clicks of its geared roller are frightening. The next is painful if prolonged. The next is immediately excruciating as joints, mostly in the arms and legs, are pulled to separating point. After that, it’s the popping of dislocated joints, and the ripping of ligaments, and then the snapping of the weaker bones. Long before the flesh tears and limbs are pulled loose from the body, long before the splashing of blood and the partial recoil of stretched limbs, there’s no recovery from the damage. It’s then a matter of swollen, jellied limbs that never move again, or of paralysis if the weakest point under pressure turns out to be the spine.
But I’d never seen the rack taken beyond the second or third clicks. I say that I watched. In truth, I shut my eyes the moment the poles were inserted into the slotted wheel and those sweaty, chattering creatures leaned forward. What I couldn’t blot out was the transformation of a human scream into something like the squeal of a butchered pig. It gave out when all the air had been forced out of the lungs, and nothing could be taken in.
It was a quieter, more sobbing, but still animalistic cry as the straps were suddenly relaxed, and now, at the beginning of his living death, the boy was thrown back on to the floor. He landed with his arms and legs at impossible angles. I forced myself to shift position without falling over, and turned to Martin. Eyes screwed shut, he’d pushed his head down on to his chest. He was praying under his breath in Celtic. I reached out to bring him back to the present and get his writing materials ready.
‘Not yet,’ Priscus said gently. He stepped away from the rack and looked down at what he’d created. He pointed at the fatter of the torturers. ‘We both know the custom,’ he said. He looked down at the boy. ‘But let’s have none of this modern coyness. Do it here and do it now.’
I’d thought we’d already neared the bottom of the scale of horror. As I stood, watching this gross and monstrously prolonged rape, I realised that Priscus had got us so far only halfway down the scale. I won’t try describing what I had to witness. Even after seventy-four years, it’s enough to freeze the blood. Martin continued praying throughout. I wished I could have joined him. As it was, I made myself think about my price ratios, and how these might correlate in turn with solar eclipses, until I could almost see the numbers dance together.
‘Get that thing out of here,’ Priscus said at last. He kicked hard at the smaller of those obese monsters, who wasn’t happy with first helpings, but was again thrusting into and pulverising the now unconscious boy. He rolled off on to his back, and looked dreamily at the deflating, bloody thing between his legs. Then, like a bow that springs back to its original shape, his face took on its normal, moronic blankness. ‘Take it from cell to cell outside,’ Priscus added, ‘and let the prisoners have their pleasure. If it still breathes after two days, throw it to the dogs.
‘Oh, and do take out the teeth,’ he added as the door was about to close. ‘Don’t bother with it here. But do make sure no one in the cells is inconvenienced.’
The door was closed. The babble from outside of expectant grunts and shrill cries could no longer be heard. Priscus stared down at the two remaining boys. They’d sobbed and scr
eamed at the opening of the horrors. They’d rolled about in a kind of frenzy. I could smell that they’d shat themselves. Since then, they’d lain, shocked and exhausted, on their backs. Now Priscus was giving them his full attention. He pointed at the larger one who’d started the defiant chanting.
‘Get that one on his knees,’ he rapped at the one torturer left in the room. ‘I want his tongue pulled out.’
‘No – please, sir, no!’ the boy screamed. He shuffled desperately forward. He licked at the boot Priscus had planted on the ground nearest his face.
‘But do tell me, what use is there in a tongue that doesn’t speak as directed?’ Priscus asked, pulling his foot sharply back and bending so low his face was almost level with the boy’s. ‘Is it possible that you might now remember a little of the Greek you surely learned at school?’
It was possible their Greek was among the best Alexandria had to offer. Unable to keep their voices below a bubbling screech, they competed at denouncing everyone and everything in their minds. They denounced their parents. They denounced each other. They denounced the wretch who’d just been broken on the rack. They’d have denounced Christ himself if Priscus hadn’t silenced them.
‘I want the truth,’ he said, now friendly again, ‘and I want nothing but the truth. Anything more will only slow me, and I haven’t time to be slowed. Now, my dear young things, I know the truth when I hear it. And I do know how to check what I’m told. Anything less than the truth – anything more than the truth – and I’ll have the pair of you on that rack.’
Martin snapped his pen several times as he scratched at the tablets. Try as he might, Priscus couldn’t impose any order of time on the new denunciations. But I couldn’t doubt they were true. When Martin had finished copying it all into the right form, the conspiracy and its authors would be revealed plain enough even for a fair trial.
Back in the sunlight of the street, I gave way to nature and vomited against one of the Prefecture columns. The single guard who was on duty by the main entrance twisted his face as if to scowl at me. But he saw the purple border on my robe, and went back to his duties, which seemed to involve looking ferocious at everyone walking too close by the building.
Priscus still hadn’t washed off the smoke and dirt of the night. But he was rubbing at his face in the reflection of a glazed window.
‘Do feel free with my blue pills,’ he said, nodding down at the satchel he’d dumped on the pavement. ‘They can work miracles on the promptings of a tender heart.’
I ignored him and leaned forward again. There was another splatter of thin liquid on to the marble. We’d already sent Martin on ahead to the Palace. Prayer, and the certainty that – however it might have been in my own case – there was nothing in the world he could have done to prevent anything he’d witnessed, had brought back his composure almost at once. I was the one who was slowing things.
‘Do I disgust you that much?’ Priscus asked. From his tone, he could have been asking if the gash on his forehead might frighten passers-by. I stood against the pillar and looked at the crowds. There were fewer persons of quality carried past than was normal for the district and the time of day. The middling people still about were unusually subdued. Most of the shops were open, but with fewer goods stacked up outside them.
‘I don’t expect thanks,’ Priscus said with a change of tone. His voice was now all quiet, if defensive, reason. ‘But you’ll not deny it was a useful morning down there. You’d have spent days – admit it – in genteel questioning. You’d have teased out contradictions and impossibilities in the answers. You’d have tested hypotheses against facts. You’d have been finishing your report just as the main riots were subsiding. I got the truth in less time than it takes to paint my face. And it won’t just be a dozen arrest warrants you’ll get Nicetas to sign when he’s shown Martin’s formal account of those confessions. There will be no one left to oppose your land law.
‘There it is, my darling. I’ll bet you never thought I’d be the one to unblock four months of prevarication. Even without the Great Augustus there to get in your way, you’d have done worse than I could against the Persians. For all I opposed it in Constantinople, I could have got your land law through before I’d found my way about the Palace.’ He took up his satchel and waved it under my nose.
I looked away, still unable to speak.
‘Alaric,’ he said again. I thought for a moment he’d pat me on the back. Luckily, he decided against. ‘Alaric, I know you don’t like my methods. But I gave that boy more chances than the law requires. And I may have got information that will snuff out this planned insurrection before it has time to start. I may have saved countless lives. Bearing in mind the unexpected scale of this conspiracy, even you might agree that I’ve saved the Empire.’
Still unable to speak, I stared at him.
‘Do ask yourself how an empire survives without men like me,’ he said with a smile. ‘It needs heroes to found it, and poets and artists and philosophers to make it noble. And it needs someone to direct the rack if it’s to be kept in order.’
‘I think there are certain formalities to be completed before we take ourselves off to Nicetas,’ I said, now I was sure of a steady voice. I stood upright and took a step back towards the Prefecture entrance. ‘However they were got, you have truths that must be used fast if they are to be useful.’
Chapter 39
‘If you won’t let the doctors in, my poor young fellow,’ Priscus drawled as my own so far unpersuasive flow of reasoning came to another halt, ‘that will soon need to come off.’
Nicetas groaned feebly as he shifted position again. Since our last meeting his leg had swelled up to twice its normal size, and there was no end to the pus now oozing from the sores.
‘The head of Saint Mark is being taken specially from its golden case,’ he said in Latin, the pain having taken his Greek away. ‘Prayers are being ordered in every church for the moment when I feel its healing touch.’
‘All the more reason, then, Nicetas dear,’ Priscus added as he went back to the matter in hand, ‘not to interfere with the arrests. I do assure you that, if we don’t have everyone under lock and key by tonight at the latest, Alexandria will go up in flames, and then we lose Egypt. Even if this latter doesn’t worry you, the former might get in the way of your church services.’
‘Let me repeat,’ I added, ‘we have five hundred men under arms to control a city of five hundred thousand. I’ve taken the liberty of sending for reinforcements to every place within a two-day return journey. Even so, I’m not sure it will be enough to put down an insurrection.’ I looked again at the warrants sealed earlier at the Prefecture. They were scattered loosely on a table Nicetas had beside his daybed. Every one of them had been heavily scored through in purple ink.
Nicetas followed my glance and frowned at me. ‘You had no authority,’ he said with an attempt at sternness. ‘All security matters that touch the higher classes of any community are for me and for me alone.’ He beckoned one of his monks over again. He cried out with pain as the man lifted his leg and dropped it down like a slab of butcher’s meat.
‘With all respect, Nicetas,’ I said, ‘my commission gives me full authority to take such actions as I deem necessary for implementation-’
‘Your commission,’ he snarled back at me, ‘gives you no right to take men from their houses when I’ve spent two years buttering them up. It certainly gives you no right to put their sons on the fucking rack. Can the pair of you begin to understand what you’ve done?’
He winced and his whole body shook as the monk poked a finger into one of the larger sores and clapped on what looked like a shrivelled scalp. Priscus and I fell silent during the prayers and application of holy water.
‘I think you need to understand,’ Priscus opened again, ‘that this is a matter of treason. What you call possible rioting Alaric and I know is planned insurrection. We are to lose Alexandria to a coalition of the possessing classes and the joined mob. At the s
ame time, there is to be a Persian attack on Egypt from across the Red Sea. If we lose Egypt, the Empire starves. Before then, Syria will be attacked on two fronts. Do you want to go down in the history books as the man who wrecked the Empire?’ He held up the two sets of confessions that Martin had neatly copied out. ‘We also have the evidence of your own secretary. He confessed without any pressure. He confirmed-’
He stood back as Nicetas picked up a case of waxed writing tablets. He howled something that wasn’t in Greek or even Latin, but might have been Berber, and swung round viciously with them and caught the monk straight in the face. The man took his hands off the leg and stood calmly back to continue his praying.
‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ Nicetas cried accusingly. He called the monk forward for an embrace and apologies. He’d do penance, he swore, for this. In the meantime, he’d bear up under the healing ministrations of the Church.
Ignoring the trickle of blood down his cheek, the monk looked pleased with himself and went back to his probing and kneading of the sores.
‘I’ve already had my secretary released,’ Nicetas gasped with a nasty look at Priscus. ‘Do you know how difficult it is to find trilingual secretaries in Alexandria?’
‘I believe the first one you had was poisoned,’ I said. ‘I think that is a matter that bears reopening.’
‘And I suppose you are the expert,’ Nicetas jeered, ‘when it comes to finding an assistant isn’t all you thought he was.’
I fell silent at the reference to Macarius and looked at the icon of Heraclius hung where everyone coming into the office could see it glowering down. It was one of the lush productions we’d ordered for sending out to the provinces. It showed Heraclius in full regalia, Christ and the Virgin standing behind him. I’d wondered for a while which of the two cousins was worse when it came to getting anything done. Nicetas had won the contest within my first month. This was just the presentation of the olive garland.
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