Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

I waited for the last footsteps to go out of range. I got up and arranged my clothes again. I turned and looked at the Milestone. It gave the name of and distance to every provincial capital in the Empire that the Great Constantine had ruled. London was near the top. So was York. One of the more recent Emperors had fixed a pompous inscription on its base that combined a Greek translation of Vergil with a quote from Revelation . It was a poor moon but looking at the inscription drew me to a graffito someone had chalked on another side of the monument. I thought at first it was about me. I didn’t know whether to feel pleased or disappointed that it wasn’t.

I heard another noise — this time a soft padding of feet coming towards the far side of the monument. I jumped noiselessly up the steps to the base of the inscribed column. Eight feet above ground, and sheltered between statues of Romulus and Augustus, I unsheathed my sword.

The padding of feet stopped. ‘Where have you gone, Alaric?’ Antonia quavered. ‘I did see you, didn’t I?’ She hadn’t lowered her voice. A few yards away, a scared night creature shuffled deeper into one of the flowerbeds.

I jumped down beside her. ‘Run away from home again?’ I jeered in Latin. ‘If I didn’t know him well enough already, I’d have to think ill of your father’s control over his women.’

‘Oh, Daddy’s easy to avoid,’ she laughed, going herself into perfectly fluent Latin. ‘He said he’d beat me half to death, once he was done with Akimba. Silly idea! We used to be lovers, and she kept Daddy busy till I’d crept out of the room.’

Looking at her girly face under a hat that, in itself, might have screamed ‘Rape me!’ I wanted to hit her. Instead, I stamped my foot and put a scowl into my voice. ‘You’re mad if you think these streets are safe,’ I said. What point, though, in nagging? From what Leander had told me, she must have known these streets by night as well as I did. The flash of anger gave way to tiredness. ‘Where do you suppose you’re going?’ I asked.

‘Home with you — where else?’ she said.

I climbed the base of the Milestone again and sat on the uppermost step. I waited for her to join me. ‘Listen, Antonia,’ I said, ‘you’re a renegade nun and you may be the daughter of a traitor. There are limits to the sanctuary my house can give you. Other than that, you’re a niece of the reigning Emperor. You may have noticed that, for all my fancy titles, I’m a barbarian immigrant. How long do you think it would take your uncle to remind us both of that?’

‘But I love you, Alaric,’ she said simply. ‘I will never be parted from you.’ She waited a moment. ‘It’s your turn now,’ she prompted.

I sighed and looked at the moon. ‘I knew it when I found you in the poor district,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I knew it, but didn’t notice the fact for a while. It came on slowly and imperceptibly, like the passing of spring into summer. I was fully aware of it before we had sex. I wanted to tell you afterwards but didn’t know how.’ Since I’d already made a total fool of myself, I could see no benefit in holding back. But there was nothing left to hold back. I’d said it all, and with fewer words than I might scribble in the margin of a report. If I added that I loved her more than life itself, I’d only be inviting her to a suicide pact. I put my arm about her. It was a nice feeling.

‘Alaric,’ she said, now urgent, ‘I said I came to see you yesterday on a whim. That’s true but it was also because, after I’d untied myself the night before, I overheard Daddy saying what he planned to do to you when he became Emperor. I thought if he hated you so much, you must be worth seeing. So I cut my hair off when I was with someone who gave me shelter and got ready to bluff my way past your eunuchs. That was the whim.’ She pressed herself close against me. ‘Alaric, do you believe in fate?’

I didn’t. But I was interested to hear more about her father’s confession of treason. I said nothing. ‘After the audience,’ she took up again, ‘I was getting ready to go away when I heard those men from Pontus complaining about Eunapius. They must have been twenty feet away in a dispersing crowd. But I heard them as clearly as you can hear me. Before I could realise what I was doing, I’d pushed my way through to them and taken their case. I didn’t know what to do next. It was Simon who came up behind me and said which way you’d be going. I was sure he didn’t recognise me. Everything after that you know. It was fate that brought us together. No one can ever tell me otherwise.’

I sat awhile in silence. I thought hard. ‘Did your father really say he’d be Emperor?’ I asked. I was probably clutching at air. But, if I could never marry an Emperor’s niece, I might be able to beg for the daughter of a fallen traitor. In part, this would depend on whether her loathing of Nicetas was a settled or a brief embitterment.

‘I told you he’s a traitor,’ she said. ‘And I know exactly what I’m saying. I stood outside a door left ajar and heard Eunapius assure him it was all in the bag and he didn’t need to lift a finger. That was the same Eunapius I met tonight.’ I leaned forward into the moonlight. She caught the look on my face. ‘The reason I told you yesterday I’d go with you to see Heraclius was so I could tell him the truth about Daddy. You don’t know what he did to Mummy,’ she ended.

I thought again. With anyone else but Nicetas, the facts she claimed would have jarred so much with what I’d seen for myself that I’d have to reject her claim. But it was easy to believe that Nicetas was half inclined to go along with a plot someone had brought him, and also willing to fit himself round the established order. One moment he’d be fantasising about tying me to the rack, another begging favours off me for his poet.

‘Didn’t you notice that Theodore is sweet on you?’ I asked, changing the subject. I’d have to think this through. Nicetas wouldn’t think to come knocking on my door for ages, if at all. In the meantime, Samo could outdo himself with keeping Antony as my guest.

She ignored the question. ‘That wasn’t a woman who interrupted things, was it?’ she asked.

I stared ahead at the moonlit view I had of lower Constantinople. ‘Does cross-dressing offend you?’ I asked with a smile.

Antonia fell silent. ‘Will you stop being angry with me if I tell you that I saw Simon again this evening?’ she asked. ‘I can prove everything I’ve told you.’

I took my arm away and looked at her. ‘If you’ve wasted any more time than it’s taken to tell me this,’ I said sharply, ‘I shall be very angry indeed. Will you share the details with me?’

She did share them and did it rather better than she had the previous day. Once into the courtyard of her father’s palace, she’d heard men talking and taken shelter behind some roses. She’d heard Eunapius let out a cry of alarm and had looked out to see him with Simon. She’d been too wrapped up in keeping her scared breathing under control to overhear all that was said. But she had heard Simon announce a meeting for the eighth hour of this night.

I stared up at the moon. It was about an hour after midnight. Assuming Antonia had heard right about the eighth hour we had another hour to go — bearing in mind we were now a month beyond the spring equinox, it wouldn’t be a very long hour.

‘Any chance they discussed where this meeting was to be?’ I asked.

She smiled uncertainly. ‘They might have,’ she said.

‘Either they did or they didn’t,’ I said evenly. ‘If not, we might as well go home and wait on events.’

She reached out and took my hand. ‘If I tell you where the meeting will be,’ she asked, ‘will you promise to take me there?’