Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

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?’

Shahrbaraz swallowed too quickly and went into a coughing fit. ‘Not for days!’ he eventually managed to splutter. He drank from his water cup. ‘Everything is soaked. Everyone is out of sorts. Getting the march under way again before we’ve got over the storm may bring on a mutiny — especially since we still haven’t paid the bounties promised when we set out. I won’t mention the state of the food supplies.’ He stopped and narrowed his eyes. He turned a very grim stare on me. ‘If that beast you haven’t yet crucified is up to his usual tricks, I swear we’re marching right into a trap. One sight of a Greek army with the state we’re in, and my advice for the next five days at least will be immediate withdrawal along the pass. Reject that advice and you might as well keep a couple of good horses ready for a dash back to Ctesiphon.’

‘Oh, Shahrbaraz, Shahrbaraz,’ Chosroes laughed, ‘are you really about to break all security in front of Alaric?’ He turned to me. ‘The good General here wants us to invade Egypt. Because we have Syria, it’s easy for us to attack, and hard for the Greeks to defend. It’s also rich enough to let us pay a few bills.’ He turned back to Shahrbaraz. ‘Well, unless you can show me your Greek army of resistance, we march for Constantinople.’ He took a long drink and stared happily at the glittering cloth that hung down from the ceiling.