Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

I heard a sneering laugh behind me. ‘Then I will say that your son’s friend has taste as well as elegance of form.’ I turned and made myself smile at Eunapius of Pylae. He licked his lips just as more white lead slid off his cheeks. He washed it down with another mouthful of wine and continued staring at Antonia. ‘Did I hear right that young Antony is from Trebizond?’ he asked with an upward motion of his eyebrows. ‘You will surely be aware that I have estates close by there. How could I possibly not have come across so fine a young man as Antony?’ The faint and satirical emphasis he put on man set me thinking. Either he’d seen straight through her disguise or he knew something.

Eunapius grinned and shuffled closer to Antonia. Looking surly, Theodore managed to get himself between them at the last moment.

‘My dearest friend, Eunapius,’ I said, leading him as if without thought into the crowd of braying Senators, ‘I’ve been thinking hard, ever since our last meeting, about your suggestion of mixing copper into the new silver coins. Do you really think a mixture of two-fifths would not be noticed by the people?’ He looked suspiciously back at me. I was saved from listening to more of the stupid idea he’d been putting to Nicetas by the arrival of a spotty boy, who pushed a message into his hands. We were in a place of comparative darkness and Eunapius had to move the thin sheet of wood close to his face to read what it said. I played with a fold of my toga that had come loose and pretended not to watch a face that had gone suddenly tense.

He scratched the fingernails of his right hand across the waxed surface of the message. ‘I’ll answer this in person,’ he said to the boy. He looked at me and put a crooked smile on his face. ‘My Lord will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if business calls me temporarily from the finest conversation I have yet heard in this most glittering event.’ He twisted round to see where Antonia had gone. Listening to more of his slurred chatter about the Council of Chalcedon, she was quietly steering Theodore away from the wine table.

I watched Eunapius pick his way through the room. It was a long exit. He left no one important unapproached. In every ear he whispered something of about the same length. Nobody, however, seemed to be that friendly in return. He smiled and fawned and ran his fingers over woollen senatorial sleeves. The best he got in return was the distant politeness you show to someone you might know, but whose face you can’t quite recall. At last he was between the two black eunuchs who guarded the door and the room seemed to brighten by his leaving it.

No chance yet of my own exit. I had my sleeve grabbed by someone who rambled on about a set of trusts into which he’d conveyed his property — something to do with stopping his son from giving it away to the Church. Because of that, he’d taken a bad hit from the land law and been compelled to give two-thirds away, rather than the half normally required. I listened with a pretence of sympathy. If I’d been able to understand his account of the trusts involved, I might even have suggested an approach to the Treasury for an ex gratia compensation payment.

‘Don’t talk to me about the Gracchus brothers!’ someone snarled softly behind me. ‘They were men from our own order. They never tried to strip us naked. If you must talk about the olden days, this young fucker’s another Spartacus. It’s now or never — now or never, I tell you.’ He gave a yelp as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The conversation behind me fell silent, before taking up again as a bored discussion of the improved strain of silkworm some missionaries had carried back from the East.

I lifted a cup from a passing tray and, like a man coming up for air, stood back from the bore who’d now taken hold of my sleeve and didn’t seem inclined ever to let me go. I was surrounded by several hundred men who looked to Nicetas to stop me from drying up all the teats on which they and their ancestors had been sucking since time out of mind. They could talk themselves hoarse about the Gracchus brothers. The Senators who’d faced down that threat to their landed position had been men of quality. Grasping, cold-blooded bastards to a man they’d been, but no one could deny they’d made Rome great in the world. These Greeklings in fancy dress hadn’t a day’s military service between them. All two hundred of them, I had no doubt, prayed nightly for Heraclius to grow sick of me. I had no doubt either that every one of them would shit himself if I showed him so much as a clenched fist.

I smiled at the bore. He was almost making sense about his trusts when the Lord Timothy came in sight. ‘Lovely to see you, dear boy — lovely to see you,’ he boomed, holding up two cups of wine as his excuse for not shaking hands. His wig was in place, and his false teeth. ‘So sorry not to recognise you today,’ he lied — ‘fish out of water and all that.’ Cold dislike in his eyes, he pushed out his lower set of teeth. He ran his tongue along the golden ridge, before sucking them back into place. ‘I believe your appearance among them always occasions a certain disorder in the poor.’ He stepped closer. ‘Such a shame, I like to say, that we cannot all get along together.’ He twisted down to blow his nose into the shoulder of his toga. He looked up and smiled. I caught sight of the dried dirt under his fingernails. ‘I really must have you for dinner one evening,’ he said with a snigger. He moved off, cups in hand. ‘Yes — I’d like you for dinner,’ he called over his shoulder.

Still listening to the man with the trusts, I looked over at Nicetas. Surely, he couldn’t fancy himself as Emperor? If he was too stupid to realise how stupid he was, he must know what trouble he’d raise within his family from deposing a cousin who’d showered him with favours. If not that, even he must be aware of the lack of correspondence between the glorious creature of Leander’s poem and the bloated invalid whose only victory in the Syrian campaign had come about when, incoherent from the pain of a septic haemorrhoid, he’d let his hairdresser give the orders.

And where did the Persians come in all this? I could imagine most things of Nicetas. Treason wasn’t among them. Was he an unwitting puppet? Was Shahrbaraz pulling the strings from out of sight? That would make sense of the generally swift and ruthless unfolding of the previous day’s plot. The benefit for the Persians would be the most incompetent fool as Emperor since — I had to stop here and think: in ancient times, Didius Julianus had bought the Purple at auction, but had been done away with too quickly for his full uselessness to be revealed. The only risk for the Persians was that there’d be a vacancy for Commander of the East and this might accidentally be filled by someone who knew what he was doing.

I thought about my own place in things. The previous day Simon had worked a miracle of organisation and put himself personally at risk. Did he suppose I knew about the cup and that I’d call on its awesome powers? Did he think I’d drop everything and take a fast ship to the Emperor in Cyzicus? Bearing in mind what I’d learned in the afternoon — and he might have thought I knew it already — it made sense to want me out of the way as well as getting the cup back. But why had Shahin been so reluctant to go along with killing me? Was it because he wanted to dump me, bound hand and foot, before the Great King’s throne — rather as a cat presents a wounded bird to its master? Or had I some other use? Shahin had never been one to let sex come before his wider interests.

And why was Eunapius suddenly out of fashion? If anything, I was more openly hated than ever. Questions, questions — so many questions.