Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

‘Though he may possess two objects that bring more trouble than joy,’ he went on, ‘the Commander of the East has all the faithless treachery proverbially ascribed to my own species.’ He stepped back and tried for one of his dramatic poses. The movement of his outstretched arms sent off a miasma of rose perfume that blotted out the general stink in the room of stale sweat soaked into wool. ‘According to my report of the audience,’ he sniggered, ‘the Lord Priscus is to be godfather to the Emperor’s son. He got this by feeding the man a pack of lies and even blaming dear young Alaric for the massacre he unleashed in Alexandria.’ His jowls wobbled and his mouth fell open to show a double line of stained and broken teeth.

Priscus fought to suppress one of his coughing fits. The last one I’d seen, a few days earlier, had involved a gush of foul-smelling blood. Ludinus stared complacently at him. ‘So much ambition in a dying man,’ he said in a bleak and almost uncastrated voice. He looked again at me. ‘If Caesar makes you a junior professor of Greek in Catania, you can thank my intercession,’ he said. ‘If it’s blinding in a monastery, Priscus managed just a little too well to spread the slander you made up about my dealings with the barbarians. I can promise that I will see to that!’

Someone whose face showed more than a few hundred years of marriage between cousins now took Priscus by the sleeve. His eyes caught mine for just a moment, then glazed over as if I’d been about to ask for a loan. As they went off together into the main crowd of Senators, I heard the beginning of a fawned request for preferment. That left me alone with Ludinus. It was unwelcome company in itself. It also reminded me that I was as much an outsider in this place as he was. Those little cold looks we’d been getting from men who wore their Senatorial robes as easily as if they’d been born in them weren’t only for a eunuch promoted beyond his physical right.

Without troubling to excuse myself, I turned and walked away from Ludinus. I almost knocked into someone who’d stepped in my way. I nodded an apology and found myself looking into more glazed eyes. Behind me, there was one of those tidal movements you get in gatherings of convivial humanity, and I heard someone let out a barking laugh. ‘Couldn’t agree with you more, Rufus,’ it may have been the laughing man who spoke. ‘The only way to get the common people working at all is to keep them hungry. Take the goad off their backs, give them land — and it’s our land, mind you! — why, isn’t that just a recipe for idleness? As for arming them — well, I ask you why we’re bothering to fight the Persians, when we’re at risk of being murdered in our beds!’ I turned and found myself looking into a mass of suddenly blank faces. I continued looking and a couple of men brought out the shifty, speculative smiles of those who are willing to keep all options open. Everyone else, without openly shunning me, always managed to be looking the other way as I passed by. Someone had been busy with his tongue, I could see.

Trying to seem genuinely interested, I stood where the sequence of wall paintings began. This was the Senate House and it was decorated without concession to the artificiality of the order it housed. The pictures were all of events in the history of the Roman Senate. Here were the Senators, calmly awaiting massacre by the Gauls. Here was Cato, demanding that Carthage should be destroyed. Here was the formal condemnation of Nero for treason against the State. The captions were in Latin, though most had recently been supplemented by Greek translations. I looked hard at the final painting, in which the Great Constantine was managing to speak at the same time to the Senate Houses in Rome and Constantinople. In each place, the Senators were reaching out to those in the other. They were embraces of shared blood and history, of common loyalty to the Roman State — embraces that ultimately had stood for nothing in Constantinople when it proved convenient to wave goodbye to the Western provinces.

Priscus put a bony hand on my arm. Then he leaned his remaining weight on me to steady himself. ‘The old eunuch’s a liar,’ he said wearily. ‘I fucked him over with Heraclius beyond hope of repair. I showed the severed finger and everything.’ I said nothing, but moved Priscus towards our own ivory stools. So long as I didn’t let my arm shake, it might look as if he were leading me to my place. ‘You don’t believe that I’ve shat on you, Alaric?’ he asked, still weary, though with a trace of concern. ‘We always knew it had to be me who saw the Great Augustus first. I am head of the old aristocracy. Not even the whole tribe of eunuchs could deny me an audience. I told Heraclius the complete truth — well, I told him the truth as you wrote it up once we’d left Alexandria. You keep your land law. I go off to keep the Persians out of Syria.’

I pretended to fuss with my toga. It gave him cover from the main crowd of Senators as he drank one of his potions from a glass bottle. I had no doubt this would perk him up in time for the audience. How much time he’d have after that was anyone’s guess.

‘How many times have I tried to kill you?’ he asked, his spirits already rising. My tally was eight. But I said nothing. Some of these probably counted as misplaced signs of affection. For others, I could doubt where to draw the line between outright murder attempts and conspiracies just to get me out of his way. Priscus smiled. ‘Something I want you always to know, Alaric, is that our personal interests and our beliefs about what is good for the Empire are as one. We stand or fall together .’

I looked down and smiled at him. ‘My thoughts entirely,’ I said.

I was wondering what more to say, when, with a sudden whoosh of stale air, the doors flew open and the first of the heralds came in with their silver trumpets. All about us, the babble of laughing conversation died away and every man who wasn’t already there made a dignified scurry for his seat.

At a hidden command, the trumpeters let out an ear-splitting blare of sound. More came in behind them, and then I saw the gold armour of the Emperor’s personal guard. With more trumpet blasts, they marched steadily down the aisle that divided the Senators into equal blocks and stood to attention in the semi-circle we’d vacated.

He might have been a statue, for all he could move his face under its double layer of gold leaf. But I could hear the smirk in his voice as the eunuch chosen by Ludinus to stand in his place waved his staff of office at us. ‘ Long may our Great Augustus reign! ’ he shrilled in Latin.

‘ Long indeed and well may He reign! ’ we called back in unison.

The eunuch was drawing breath to lead a more complex acclamation. It came out as a long squeal of shock. I ignored the elbow the Priscus jabbed in my side and looked steadily at the eunuch. I didn’t need to see that Sergius was out of prison and dressed once more in his patriarchal best. ‘Oh, for one look into that black heart!’ Priscus breathed. ‘Oh, the despair that must be welling up inside it!’ But that was something I could see. Ludinus was a few places from the front on the other side of the aisle. I had an unbroken view of his suddenly strained and sweaty face. Without moving my head, I flicked my eyes about the room. Most faces carried the sort of look you see on men who are watching a slow collision of chariots in the Circus. They’d guessed there would be some change of Imperial favour. They hadn’t expected a revolution.

Sergius stepped past the eunuch and raised his arms to Heaven. ‘Glory be to God in the Highest,’ he cried in Greek, ‘and to His Servant Heraclius, whom He has sent in goodness and in love to rule over the Roman People.’