Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

‘Spies?’ Chosroes hissed. He jumped out of his chair and pushed his face very close — I could smell his foetid breath, and see the tiny dots his eyes were becoming from a dose of opium I hadn’t seen him take. ‘The Intelligence Bureau has no spies in Ctesiphon. I had the last of them crucified a year ago. I assembled this army without any consultation. I didn’t tell even Shahrbaraz where it was going till the final orders had to be issued. The new Emperor will be told nothing by the Intelligence Bureau.’ Gradually relaxing, he pulled back and laughed. ‘You know, by the way, I flayed Roxana alive with my own hands? Her dying moans may have mimicked the sound of the orgasms you gave the slut.’

It was no more than I’d expected. No one likes an adulteress. But I still felt sorry for Roxana. I nodded and stared at my wine cup. Chosroes scowled something about the need for another purge. I’d done enough. More would be too much. I changed the subject. ‘However, you did say that you were expecting me. Does this mean the Persians have now taken to the ways of espionage?’

A broad and wolfish grin spread slowly over the royal face. ‘I could keep you in the dark, my dear,’ he sniggered. ‘But why should I keep from you one whose only word in the past two days has been your name?’ He clapped his hands and pointed at one of the eunuchs. ‘Go and get him,’ he said coldly.

Two days ? I thought. It couldn’t be any of my people. Had Shahin sent a messenger after all? My innards turned to ice. I had my answer while finishing my wine. One of the flaps opened and a dark and very wet shape was pushed inside the tent. It looked round and saw me. With a howl of maddened rage, it rushed at me, only slipping at the last moment on the bloody silk of the carpet.

‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ Theodore screamed in Syriac. He raked feebly in my direction with bony fingers from which all the nails had been pulled out. ‘I know your secret!’

The rain had stopped. It was getting on for late afternoon but the sudden brightening of the sky put me in mind of morning. So too the sharpness of the chilly breeze. All about us, the interminable drumming of the rain was replaced by the gurgle of a thousand streams that would probably bring water gushing into the pass for days yet to come.

I stepped over the body of one of the gutted boys and stood at the edge of the tent’s raised wooden platform. I knew Chosroes was behind me. ‘Trying to count the uncountable?’ he asked slimily in Greek. ‘Or are we perhaps looking for an escape?’

I continued looking at the sodden crowd that stretched on and on, as far along the pass as I could see. Even without his coded squeals of hate, it was plain that Theodore must have been brought here by Priscus and had run away. For all I knew, Priscus might be lurking somewhere atop the bleak walls of the pass. He might be watching us. If so, I could be happy I wasn’t alone. For the time being, it was enough to know that whatever sense Theodore had made under torture hadn’t been enough to do for me. I was still in with a chance. I turned and smiled. ‘No to both,’ I said. ‘And if my simple word isn’t enough, why should I come here to spy when I no longer have a master?’

Chosroes stood beside me. We watched in silence as the base of his travelling night palace was unpacked and fitted together. The grovelling engineer had explained in Greek that ten-foot poles should keep it above the water — and should keep it safe from some other threat neither had thought to mention other than obliquely. The poles, I’d heard, shouldn’t give way, so long as the upper floor was omitted from this evening’s build. I’ve said the Persians weren’t that good at the technical aspects of life. Much as in the time of Xerxes, though, they had no shortage of Greek renegades to go some way to supplying their own defects. And the night palace was an impressive thing to watch taking shape. All wooden compartments and leather straps, it was already bearing its planned resemblance — if on a smaller scale — to the Summer Palace in Ctesiphon. Not for Chosroes to slum it in a tent like everyone else.

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.’