Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

What a buggery day this was turning out! I put a hand on the hilt of my sword and peered cautiously from behind the door. I was completely alone. It was a neighbouring courtyard where it seemed a riot was brewing. I took out my sword and tried not to make any noise of my own while stepping from one dry patch of ground to another.

The sounds of masonry were easily explained. The Christmas earthquake that had got me and mine out of bed, and set every church bell ringing by itself, had levelled whole stretches of the poor districts. Nothing had been rebuilt yet. Few owners saw the point of rebuilding. The survivors had squeezed themselves into other accommodation. The courtyard where I’d taken shelter had been knocked about. This one bordered on one of the areas of total collapse. And here was my follower. He must have lost sight of me and taken a wrong turn. Hard to say whether he himself had been followed, or if he’d blundered into a meeting of armed trash. Whatever the truth, he’d made a rotten job of clambering over a heap of mud brick. It had collapsed on itself at first touch. Here, within the slight depression made by the falling of bricks and tangled in his cloak like a corpse in its winding sheet, my follower’s only answer to the two men who were poking at him with bits of wood was much twitching and a few muffled screams.

I waited for a pause in the entertainment and cleared my throat. A dozen dark and rattish faces turned in my direction. All was silent. Someone had already killed one of the dogs, and was holding it as a trophy. The others had scurried out of sight.

‘Oo you?’ one of the younger creatures jabbered. He held up a three-foot length of roofing timber. ‘Oo you?’ One of the others gave my follower a kick, but dropped the block of paving stone he’d carried over to use for a killing blow.

They all stared at me for a long moment. They could have tried rushing me but I knew they wouldn’t. I sheathed my sword. ‘Piss off, the lot of you!’ I said quietly. I inclined my head towards the one exit. I saw the glint of an iron knife. Not going for my sword, I frowned slightly and took a step forward. That was all it needed. Everyone knew the score. I was in my class, they in theirs. No one would lift violent hands against the irresistible and merciless force that plainly stood behind me. No one fancied being torn apart in the Circus by hyenas, or being roasted over a slow fire, or being deprived of sight and manhood and turned loose outside the city walls. I listened to the retreating patter of bare feet, then turned my attention to the struggling figure who remained.

I glanced up at the nearest building. I was aware of the scratching sounds the very poor make when something out of the ordinary has happened close by their homes. But no face showed itself from within the unshuttered squares of darkness. Taking my sword out again, I stood behind one of the many heaps of crumbled brick. I stared at the human bundle before me. Completely lost inside a cloak made light by the brick dust, it had stopped moving.

‘If you’re still alive,’ I said in a conversational tone, ‘you can get yourself out of that stupid cloak and stand up.’ After a long moment, when I began to wonder if someone hadn’t managed a killing blow, a white and trembling hand emerged through a rent in the cloth. It was followed by another. They failed to rip a larger hole and vanished again. Still swathed in the stained blackness, my follower tried to get up. After more struggling, there was a faint ripping sound and the cloak fell apart. Rolling free of it, my follower looked at me and struggled on to his knees, arms raised in supplication.

I stared across three yards of rubble into the face of the young petitioning agent who’d pissed me off that morning. There were fresh tears trembling on the lids of those grey eyes, and the freckles hardly showed on a face pale with fear. As I had back in my hall of audience, I waited until it seemed I’d say nothing at all. This time, however, there was nothing to be said beyond a statement of the obvious.

‘A bloody woman!’ I cried, aghast. Ignoring the possibility of a stain on my outer tunic, I sat heavily on another heap of bricks and dug my sword into the packed earth. Tearful, but not yet crying again, she stared silently back at me. I sighed and arranged my face into a less menacing smile. ‘Well, man or woman,’ I said, ‘you have the most wonderful capacity for slowing me down.’

Still kneeling, she dropped her arms. She smiled nervously. She managed a sort of shrug. I stretched out my legs before me and crossed them at the ankles. I’d chosen those leggings well. They really were most elegant.

‘Of course they were trying to kill you,’ I said impatiently. ‘You may have noticed their attentions were somewhat less than friendly.’ Antonia, only surviving child of Laonicus of Trebizond, looked back at me in scared if slightly defiant silence. ‘However, this brings me to my next question, which is how long have you been in Constantinople? Since you haven’t yet got yourself raped or murdered, I don’t think you can have been here long.’ The tear that I’d seen welling beneath her left eye chose this moment to start its progress down her cheek. Without thinking, I reached into my inner tunic and took out a clean napkin. I passed it to her and looked down at the hilt of my sword. It had a solid, reassuring feel in my right hand. I could have written a short epic had I wanted to give the names and miscellaneous attributes of those whose lives I’d ended with its point or sharp edges. But it had no place here. I stood up, sheathed it and covered it with my outer tunic.

I sat down again and looked at Antonia. She’d controlled her tears. At this distance, and in bright sunshine, she was obviously a woman of about twenty. But it wasn’t hard to see how in male clothing, and with her brown hair cropped short and with surprise on her side, she could have passed for a young man. I cast about for something more to say that didn’t involve reminders of violence or death. ‘It is not the custom for women to lay petitions on behalf of others,’ I said with a haughty sniff.

‘Is it the custom for women to do anything but shuffle between bed and cooking pot?’ she answered, tears suddenly giving way to defiance. ‘I’ve told you who my father was. If you don’t want me to starve or sell my body in the street, what else can I do but take over his practice?’ She stuck out her lower lip and seemed to be expecting an answer. I sniffed again and felt the ghost of my aborted sneeze. I suppressed it and covered the effort with a frown. Rotten luck, no doubt, that plague had taken her family on its last visitation. But that was no reason why an Imperial minister should make a laughing stock of himself by hearing petitions from a woman. I looked into her eyes, and changed the subject.

‘Very well, Antony of Trebizond,’ I said, going back to the matter in hand. ‘You made a quick deal, once I’d hurried off, with those petitioners in their own right and promised you’d get an answer out of me before next Monday. So you followed me, waiting for the right moment to start another of your interminable petitions.’ I stopped and smiled. ‘Most enterprising, I have to say. Did you insist on payment up front? Or did you agree on payment by results?’

She swallowed and looked back at me. ‘If those men had money to spend on agents,’ she said in a voice that tried and failed to sound manly, ‘do you think they’d have walked here all the way from Pontus?’

I lifted my eyebrows at the look of firmness she’d attempted. I also noted the wavering, ever so slight, of her Pontic accent. If she had been born in Trebizond, she’d spent part of her life somewhere else that I couldn’t yet place. ‘So, because you’re from the same province,’ I asked, ‘you took on their case for free? Is that how you plan to make your fortune?’ Antonia said nothing. I thought again. ‘How did you get a petitioning licence? Leaving aside the matter of sex, the Petitioners’ Guild doesn’t allow anyone under forty to approach someone of my eminence.’