Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

‘While the cat’s away, the mice will play,’ he jeered. ‘It may be purely opportunistic. It may be that the alliance you broke up between them and the Persians has been revived. Whatever the case, an Avar raiding party has made its way into Thrace, and is killing and burning right up to the land walls.’ I followed his pointed finger to the north-west. The wide splash of bright fire could only have been the Fortified Monastery. He sat down on the floor and went into a coughing fit that owed more to the smoke he must have inhaled than to any return of his sickness. ‘Don’t ask how I got out,’ he said weakly. ‘I came into the City with the last crowd of refugees before the gates were closed again. Where else could I have gone after that but to the home of my beloved friend Alaric.’

As he spoke, there was a sound of shouting deep within the palace. Priscus climbed to his feet again and pulled out a knife already dark with blood. I heard the door fly open in the big antechamber to my bedroom and felt my heart jump into the back of my throat. But it was only Martin. ‘Aelric, wake up!’ he cried in Celtic. ‘The Barbarians are breaking into the City. Everything’s on fire.’ I shoved Priscus behind a curtain just in time. I was no sooner away from the window when Martin burst in, a lamp in his shaking hand.

I took hold of him and led him out on to the balcony. ‘It’s only a raid, Martin,’ I said soothingly. ‘No one can break through the walls. We’re perfectly safe.’ He stared for a long time at the distant fires and his shoulders sagged with the relaxing of tension. ‘It really can’t be more than a few hundred men on horseback,’ I urged. ‘They’ll be gone by morning.’ I took him back inside. ‘Now, go down to the nursery and make sure the maids don’t start a fire as they run about. I have work to do in here and I don’t want to be disturbed.’

I locked the door behind him and walked slowly to my bedroom door. ‘There’s food and drink out here,’ I said. I turned up one of the lamps and sat down. Limping from a sprain I supposed he’d picked up on his dash for the walls, Priscus came forward and took the wine I’d poured. ‘Now you’re officially dead, you are free to go where you will,’ I said. I could have kept up the pretence, with talk of gold and horses. But my heart had sunk back to its normal place and now somewhat lower.

‘You owe me, Alaric,’ he said. ‘Where do you expect me to go in my condition, but home?’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ I snapped. ‘You can’t stay here.’

‘And why not?’ he asked. ‘My grandfather built this palace almost for the purpose of hiding people. There are rooms and suites of rooms you’d need an army of surveyors to find. You can get tubby Martin to look after me. You know he’ll never grass us to Heraclius.’ He slumped down in his chair and looked old. ‘Oh, go on, Alaric,’ he whined. ‘You do owe me — and you know I’ll soon be dead. Let me die in the place where I was born. You’ve taken everything from me. You’ve even taken my child. Give me back at least this much.’ He dropped the pretence of feebleness and looked steadily into my eyes. ‘I claim from you the hospitality that no barbarian can refuse and still think well of himself.’

‘And if our positions were reversed?’ I asked.

Priscus shrugged. ‘You do ask some silly questions, Alaric,’ he said. ‘If our positions were reversed, you’d already have noticed the poison in your wine and I’d be wondering how best to get rid of your body. Now, since that isn’t the case, let’s proceed to business.’ He finished his wine and raised both arms. ‘As God is my witness,’ he went on in Lombardic — the closest language he knew to my own — ‘I swear that, if you give me refuge, I will never shit on you again, but will truly and faithfully serve you as my lord.’ He put his arms down and returned to Greek. ‘Refuse my fealty and I beg you to kill me on the spot. I’d rather be dead than dragged off to another monastery.’

I looked for a while into the darkness of my wine cup. ‘You can stay the night,’ I sighed. ‘That’s the limit of what custom lets you claim. And, since you’ve mentioned young Maximin, do bear in mind the danger your presence brings on his head as well as mine.’

‘Absolutely!’ he said, almost hiding a smile of relief. He looked about the room. ‘Any drugs here you fancy sharing with me?’

The Avars left with the dawn. Once it was clear they wouldn’t be back, Heraclius had the Military Gate unbarred and rode out with the whole Imperial Guard for company. Uncomfortable on horseback, I went with him from one heap of smoking ruins to another, mostly religious houses that had ignored the general retreat of population within the cover of the land walls. I counted four dozen bodies in the ruinous streets, all of them hacked about most horribly.

Heraclius stopped his horse beside one of the few Avar bodies. This one, so far as I could tell, had drunk himself paralytic on stolen wine and not been able to resist when someone had cut his throat. ‘There will, of course, be a full inquiry,’ he cried in a voice that accused everyone about him of some dereliction. I didn’t see how that could include me. If I’d set up the Intelligence Bureau once he was Emperor, he’d long since taken it under his own control. For all he might sack and disgrace a few underlings, there really was only one person to blame for the failure of the usual warning systems. The raiding party had got itself through a hundred miles of increasing Imperial control. Why had no one reported its presence? More likely, why had no one paid attention to the reports? Already whispered voices would be asking what use there was in an Emperor who couldn’t safeguard his subjects even within sight of the capital. Forget the siege the Persians were tightening about Jerusalem — the smoke of burning monasteries that had billowed half the morning over Constantinople would normally have been enough to spark a murder plot or calls to abdicate. Because, by general agreement, Heraclius was the best Emperor we were likely to get, there would be neither. But the whispers would go on nevertheless.

Heraclius looked up from the dead barbarian. ‘Lessons will be learned,’ he cried in a firmer voice. The rest of us nodded and set up the buzz of agreement that might have greeted a plan to rebuild our forts on the Danube.

He dismounted at the smashed-in gate of the Fortified Monastery. ‘Barbarians don’t like to go inside a walled compound unless they know there is another way out,’ he said as if he’d been the first to notice what every inhabitant of the European provinces had known for two centuries. This time, we simply nodded. Undoubtedly, the Fortified Monastery had almost lived up to its name. If the gateposts hadn’t been allowed to rot through, the building could have held out. As it was, the intrusion had been brief enough to let most of the monks and inmates survive.

To the plain relief of his carrying slaves, Timothy the City Prefect got down from his chair. He waddled forward to a spot where he blocked further progress through the gateway. ‘Oh sad day, indeed!’ he cried with a melancholy wave at the remains of a monk who’d been nailed to the gate, then disembowelled. ‘But sad beyond reckoning for our young colleague, Alaric,’ he went on, coming straight to the point. He arranged his flabby face into what anyone who didn’t know him would have thought a pitying smile. ‘Is it not here that the Lord Treasurer was a regular visitor to the cell of the fallen traitor Priscus?’ He waited for a dozen disapproving faces to fix themselves on mine. ‘I am told they had quite resumed their old closeness.’ He broadened his smile. ‘Please, dearest Alaric, accept my sincerest condolences on your loss.’