Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

Let me say, then, that Constantinople, by universal acclaim the greatest city in the world and sole capital — now Rome itself was a pile of ruins effectively owned by the Pope — of the Roman Empire, sits on a blunted triangle at the far edge of Europe. Its apex looks east, across five hundred yards of water, to the Asiatic shore. Its north-eastern side faces on to the Golden Horn, a big sheltered harbour that makes the City a centre of all trade. Its western and only landed side is guarded by an immense double fortification, four miles long, built when Thrace was almost a garden basking in the Roman peace, but now tested in wave after wave of those barbarians who had overtopped every other city wall in Europe. Its southern side looks over the wide Propontis. Only the land walls can be truly called impregnable. The sea walls, though respectable by the standards of most other cities, are the last line in a set of defences that begin with control of the sea.

This brings me to the long straits that separate Europe from Asia. These begin with the narrow strait, twenty miles long, that runs more or less south from the Black Sea, past Constantinople and into the Propontis, which is an inland sea about a hundred and fifty miles from east to west and about fifty from north to south. From here to the Aegean is another narrowish strait about forty miles long.

Does it now make sense when I say that, having finally made my way into Middle Street, and from there through the most southerly gate in the land wall, I was now hurrying west along the coastal road that joins Constantinople to Adrianople and to Thessalonica and eventually to the port of Dyrrachium, from where the Adriatic may be crossed to the heel of Italy? Tough luck if it doesn’t — because that’s where I was.

Once again, I told myself I was a fool. I should have picked up this bloody girl with both hands and dumped her into the guardhouse. Thanks to Nicetas, my plan of having her escorted back to her lodgings had gone tits up before everyone could finish saluting me. ‘Emergency orders, Sir,’ the officer in charge had answered me. ‘None of us to leave our posts. Can’t go out from the walls. Can’t go back from the walls.’

‘Then stay here till I get back,’ I’d said to the girl with a smile that tried to look both firm and reassuring. ‘You’ll be safe enough here.’ Being the obvious point for any combined land and sea attack, the Golden Gate is almost a fortress in its own right. What I’ve called the guardhouse is a looming mass of stonework perched above a triple arch. It must contain three dozen rooms, some of them rather comfy. But there’d been no getting Antonia into any of them. Without actually refusing, she’d given me a look of combined disappointment and fear that had me speaking again before I could realise I’d caved in.

‘You can wait here till I’m done with my business,’ I’d suggested with a quick glance at the face of the officer in charge. ‘You can tell me what those petitioners want while we go back to the centre. If their petition is reasonable,’ I’d gone on without proper thought, ‘you can break the good news to them in time for dinner.’

‘No time like the present,’ had been the firm and immediate response. One exchange had led to another, and I’d been faced with a choice between compulsion and surrender. It didn’t help that compulsion would have made me later still for Lucas — and he and his men were just one final dash along the road on which I was standing. I’d pretended to ignore the mocking stares of the guards as, with an indifferent shrug, I set off along the road. Then, instead of putting my best foot forward and hurrying through the streams of traffic, I’d slowed to let her keep level with me and not run entirely out of breath, as she explained her clients’ petition.

So far as I could gather, they were victims of a standard injustice. If only my sodding eunuchs had let them put their own case, I could have added those petitioners to my list of things to do the following day, and saved myself the trouble of listening to a panting explanation that broke down as often as Antonia had to save herself from tripping over in a pair of boots that didn’t fit her.

Annoyed, I kicked a stone and watched it skip forward over the worn flagstones. It got the thigh of a carrying slave. It made a slapping noise that I could hear at ten paces. I waited for him to look round, so I could at least bow an apology. But he didn’t seem to notice.

I stopped and put up a hand for silence. This time, I got it. ‘Look, Antonia,’ I said, ‘the mode of address you picked up from the men in your family is purely ceremonial. All I need from you is the tax district where your clients are registered and the name of the local grandee who’s ejected them. Everything else I can get my clerks to assemble for me into a brief report. Now, do please stop this babble of rhetorical devices that haven’t moved anyone to genuine tears in seven hundred years and of legal tags that you plainly don’t understand. All I want are the facts .’

And that’s what she now gave me — and what facts they were! At once, I’d forgotten the injured slave. I think I’d forgotten Lucas himself. I took Antonia by the arm and led her to the side of the road. Not far off two miles we’d been walking. Only now had she got to the point that mattered. Had she only started with it, I’d now be shepherding her back through the City in search of her clients. ‘Please, repeat that name for me,’ I asked, keeping my voice neutral.

‘Which name?’ she asked.

I took my hat off and ran fingers though my hair. ‘The name of the man who ejected your clients from the land they’ve been assigned,’ I said, speaking slowly. ‘He is the man who ensured they got no hearing in the local courts and against whom they’ve come to seek my help.’

I thought she’d said Eunapius of Pylae but needed it confirmed. Eunapius it was. I put my hat on again and fussed to get it back in the right position. It was one way to keep myself from jumping up and down and laughing. I made sure to darken my voice. ‘I wish you’d begun with Eunapius. He complicates everything.’

I’d made my voice too dark and Antonia misread me. ‘So, you won’t help those men?’ she asked, a tone of outrage coming into her own voice. ‘They walked here all the way from Zigana, hundreds of miles away. They believed you were the only honest man in the government and that you’d help them for sure.’ She tried to see under the brim of my hat. ‘You do know that all the country people in Pontus pray every Sunday for your health?’

I began walking again. It was pleasing to know there were some people in this Empire who didn’t hate me. I smiled and turned to Antonia. ‘I will get justice for your clients,’ I said. ‘But you need to understand that I’m in no position to give it by myself.’ I fell silent. That wasn’t the way to explain anything to a woman. That needs simple words and some attention to making their sense clear. I gathered my thoughts.

‘You are right about the land law,’ I said. ‘It has no exceptions in any of the Home Provinces. Every free householder in every country district has the right to enough land to feed himself and those who look to him. There are different provisions that cover the different grades of land and these have already caused much litigation. There are also varying degrees of inalienability and of the obligation to serve in the new militias. But no landowner is exempt. Any landowner who refuses to make such land available as my surveyors have determined he should, may be sued in the courts. If he avoids judgment through bribery or nepotism, he may be charged with perverting the course of justice and tried in Constantinople.’