Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

‘Why didn’t you leave me here?’ she whispered. ‘You could be back in Constantinople, directing the capture of that man.’

‘Because I didn’t,’ I said. That was all I might have said. But I felt some obligation not to go back to my own thoughts. I sat up. ‘I had no idea the day would end like this,’ I managed to say with an approach to lightness of tone. ‘But I do most humbly apologise for having brought you into this nightmare.’ Yes, I should have had her taken into custody at the Golden Gate. Better still, I should have had a look at that dodgy seal before it was absolutely too late. I’d brought this on the pair of us. ‘I got you into this and I’ll get you out. I’m sorry,’ I ended before trailing off.

There was a long silence. Then, after a funny whimper, ‘What will happen to us?’ Antonia asked. I blew warm breath over my nose and put my thoughts together.

‘If we don’t get away, it will be bad,’ I answered. We’d reached the point where false assurances would have been worse than the truth. ‘But let’s try putting what has happened into some kind of order,’ I went on in a voice that was unlikely to travel though the locked door. ‘I got a message very early this morning to come outside the walls. The obvious intent was to murder me. My eunuchs and you unwittingly conspired to slow me down. By the time, I arrived at the appointed place, my killers had themselves been killed.

‘Questions: Who was trying to kill me this morning? Who was able to forge a more than reasonably convincing message? Why did Shahin turn up and stop the murder? How did he know I’d be there? Generally speaking, what is a Persian ship doing unobserved in our home waters?’

I thought again. ‘I kept mentioning Beirut to our friend. That’s where the Persians have their Aegean naval base. However, he mentioned Shahrbaraz. He’s their best general. We tried to bribe him last year into revolting again Chosroes. The last I heard of him, he was hovering somewhere east of Armenia — we were expecting an attack on your own province. It’s possible he could have got from there to supervise a naval assault on us. But I don’t think he has. It’s question enough how Shahin got into the Propontis from the Aegean. It staggers the mind how he got here from the Black Sea and is now proposing to go back there. How on earth could he have got past Constantinople?’ How indeed? Forget smugglers and a bit of corruption — this implied treason close to the top.

Antonia broke the silence. ‘I ran — I mean, I left Trebizond at the beginning of the month,’ she said. ‘There was no talk of a Persian fleet in the Black Sea. And where could it be based?’

Good question. Most likely, though, we were headed for the Black Sea. I began shivering again. Ever since I’d heard the name Shahrbaraz, I’d been in a state of horrified despair. So long as I thought he was operating out of Beirut, I’d told myself I had ages to find and use the right opportunity to get away. A dash through the Black Sea to one of its most eastern ports was something else. A man far thicker than Shahin could be trusted to keep me trussed up and helpless. I went back to thinking about suicide. The messiest lurch into the blackness of death beat the reception I could expect in Ctesiphon.

‘When they found I was a woman,’ Antonia said, ‘they stopped searching me. But I’ve got a knife.’

I swallowed and counted downward from five. ‘And can you get to it?’ I asked, no longer caring if my voice shook.

‘They tied my hands behind my back,’ she said. I gritted my teeth. As if I hadn’t known that already. The best way to magnify despair is to season it with hope. Far overhead, there was a shouted command in Syriac. It was too distant for me to catch any words. But it suggested the sun was finally down and we we’d be putting in for the night. Where? I wondered again. And, unless at least three ministries were riddled with treason that couldn’t be kept secret, what story was being told to cover the ship’s presence here?

Yes, I was thinking again as if I were in no danger and was gathering information for later use. It took my thoughts off what might be planned for me. And this general turn of events did have its interesting side. I thought again about the timings of my progress that day through Constantinople. No delay at all and I’d be dead by now — well, dead unless those killers had been complete duffers. If only Antonia had slowed me down more than she did, Shahin would have been gone by the time I got to the little bay. It was bastard luck, I thought, to have got there almost but not quite too late enough to find a pile of dead bodies. If I ever got out of this, I could work up a nice speech about the role of contingency in human affairs. Yes — if only . .

I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts, I didn’t at first notice the gentle but persistent scraping on the far side of the cabin or the squeaks of suppressed pain. ‘What are you doing?’ I finally asked. The answer was more scraping and what sounded like a piece of furniture tumbling over. I waited for what seemed a very long time. As I was about to ask again, I heard a quiet sob.

‘I’ve got my hands from behind my back,’ she said. ‘But I can’t lean forward to get to the knife.’ For the first time, Antonia broke down and cried. It was now, I could hear, that the full disgusting horror of everything had reached the core of her mind. We’d reached the same point of despair. The only race from here involved whose bowels would give way first.

The muscles all about my ribcage were twitching and I knew my voice would shake no matter what control over it I attempted. But I took a deep breath and stopped worrying what my voice might say about me. ‘Antonia, where is your knife?’ I asked. I waited for another long shudder to pass. ‘If you’ve managed to twist your hands from behind you, can you also push yourself across the floor to me?’ I struggled for a tone that was calm but authoritative. ‘Where is your knife?’

She began a stuttering answer that went nowhere. I waited. ‘In a belt about my right thigh,’ she finally managed to say. Her tone indicated she’d say more. Either she’d spoken oddly or she changed her mind. I heard a renewed scraping as she set about getting as much as she could of her lower body into the middle of the cabin. My own hands were tied behind me in a complex arrangement that didn’t compress the flesh, and there was a rope that held them to my bound feet and was looped through a metal ring fixed into the wall. I found, if I twisted on to my stomach and bent my knees, that I could push my head and upper body towards Antonia. It took much scraping and a progressive tightening of the bonds about my wrists and ankles but I finally made contact with her clothing. I then realised, with a jump of the spirits, that we’d both been squeezing ourselves along paths that didn’t cross. One moment, I was bumping my nose against a piece of cloth that might have been a discarded rag. Another, and my face was resting on the warmth of her lower belly and hands, close together, were dabbing about in my hair.

‘I can’t get my clothes loose,’ she said. ‘Where are your hands?’

‘I left them against the wall!’ I answered with a nervous laugh. And, much more of this strain, and there they’d drop off. But I arched myself back and began a shuffling move down Antonia’s body to where, just below her knees, I’d find the hem of her petitioning robe. From here, it was a return upward into still greater warmth. I’d expected the knife would be on the outside of her leggings. What use, after all, of a weapon that could only be got at by stripping off? Of course, it was underneath the clinging wool and linen mix. It would have been no more useless in a street fight if she’d left it under her bed. But this wasn’t a street fight and, pushing myself towards the cord that secured her leggings about her waist, I felt more positive than at any time that day since jumping out of my cold pool. She’d tied the leather in a neat bow that I was able to pull straight apart. I took the leggings between my teeth and began pulling them down. It was harder than it sounds. At last, though, my face was resting against her undepilated nether parts.