Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

His voice trailed suddenly off into a kind of muffled burp. The crowd was otherwise engaged and Alexius looked to the men standing at the foot of his ladder for guidance. One of them shrugged and called up something that I didn’t catch. I leaned against the wall. ‘Corrupt administration of the law,’ he’d said. Did this mean the conspiracy had fallen apart? That was what the evidence suggested. If Timothy was sitting on his hands in the Prefecture, that gave Nicetas a choice between waiting for Heraclius to come back and gambling everything on the mob. Or, since he’d apparently returned to his usual dithering, Eunapius and Simon were trying one last push to save their necks.

I looked at Eboric. He’d recovered the arrow from the bed hangings and was testing its point against his thumb. ‘Go down and see what Cook is preparing for dinner,’ I said. ‘Tell her we’ll have it in the garden at dusk.’ He bowed and darted out of sight. I looked at Theodore. He’d fallen to his knees and had his arms raised in prayer. ‘I thought I’d given you a Latin exercise to complete,’ I said coldly. ‘Please go back to the library.’ I raised my hand to stop him. I’d specified dinner outside to avoid the reverberant echoes of the pounding on the gates. I didn’t want Theodore wailing like someone on the rack when I finally got myself into the library to oversee the transfer of the most precious volumes to one of the cellars. ‘Correction — go and sit in the garden. The sun is no longer strong enough to burn you.’ I stepped quickly across the killing zone. One of the archers had been waiting, and I saw the blur of his arrow about a foot in front of me. It went straight through the wood of what may have been an original painting from ancient times and buried itself in the plaster of the wall. I tried to look carefree, though the picture had been ruinously expensive. ‘The Lady Antonia and I will spend the time before dinner inspecting the defences.’

I couldn’t fault Samo’s intention. Our spirits had needed raising. If only I hadn’t been the only one at the dinner table who could follow his rendition of tribal war songs recalled from his youth. If only also he hadn’t insisted on dancing boys with swords and a harp accompaniment that had kept us at table till some time after the last fading of the day. .

Priscus and I were on the roof. He looked down over the sea of torches. ‘It needs more than possession to make siege engines dangerous,’ he said. I pointed in the dim light of the moon at the crack I’d opened on the parapet wall. He grunted and let it take his weight regardless, as he kicked his chair closer against it. ‘If your surmise is right about the defection of everyone who matters, those things are hardly more useful than continued banging on the gates.’

An icy feeling in my stomach, I pointed down at the tallest of the wooden towers. ‘You can get a ladder from that to any of the balconies,’ I said. I looked again at the bright carpet of the torches. A ten-foot gap was opening and closing as some kind of procession I couldn’t see moved slowly though the glare towards a point on the far side of the road.

Priscus followed my pointed finger. He snorted. ‘My poor civiliany Alaric, even scaling a ladder takes more skill than this lot can assemble. What your people need to do is wait for a ladder to be clogged up with shouting fools, then push it out and to the side with a pole. Did I ever tell you about how I beat off the next to biggest night attack at the siege of Hadruma?’ He seemed about to drift off into one of his internal reveries. He stopped himself. ‘There’s a lesson for you in all this,’ he said with a low chuckle. ‘I left you this place with a first-rate armoury for defence. If you hadn’t let the bow strings perish, you could have seen these engines off with a hail of burning arrows. So much money spent on keeping everything clean and in its place — so little on the real fundamentals!’

A barely broken voice drifted upwards from the far side of the Triumphal Way: ‘The diameter in inches of the cord bundle must be equal to eleven-tenths the cube root of one hundred times the weight in pounds of the ball,’ it read haltingly. ‘Please don’t ask me, though, what it means.’ Something was snarled back in a much lower voice. More voices broke out in an argument I couldn’t hear.

Priscus laughed again, and stretched his arms forward to crack his knuckles. ‘So, they’ve found themselves a catapult!’ he sneered. ‘I’d like to see them get it loaded, let alone aimed and fired. It’s a six-month course to be an artillery officer, I’ll have you know. The extraction of cube roots — especially where the number itself isn’t an exact cube. .’

I’m sure I was meant to find comfort in the outlining of a method that required you to imagine petals dropping off a flower, and must have taken twice as long as doing the calculation properly. But the bare mention of catapults had completed the freezing of my insides. ‘What would you do about the archers out there?’ I asked, changing the subject.

‘Oh, just hang leather curtains on the outside of all the balconies,’ he said easily. ‘The last time I needed them, they were in one of the boiler house lockers. There are special brackets already set into the external ornamentations. Get them rigged up before morning, and the archers can shoot away till their thumbs drop off for all the effect they’ll have.’

He blew his nose between forefinger and thumb. I watched him wipe his hand on what had been a fresh tunic. ‘Now, my boy, where was I with my demonstration?’

Somewhere out in the darkness, there was a sudden sharp clicking. This was followed by a whizz overhead that grew fainter till it ended in a distant impact against something solid.

‘Well I never!’ said Priscus. This time, he sniffed hard and swallowed his snot. ‘Beginner’s luck, of course. You’ll find that angle of approach is sure sign they haven’t unlocked the counterweight lever. If they want to rain death on the Egyptian Quarter, who are we to complain?’

He’d barely finished to draw breath, when the whizz of a second stone ball through the air ended in a crash that knocked the pair of us against the roof tiles. I lay for a moment, wondering if I’d been seriously injured. Absorbed in myself, hardly noticing how I slid down on to the lead, I didn’t hear the landing of the ball once it had splintered and bounced back from its place of impact. But I opened my eyes to a noise of desperate and terrified shrieking and another of those rising groans of horror from the crowd.

Priscus was already on his feet and was pushing at the wall. ‘Come on, my lovely!’ he crooned, going into a rhythm of pushing and relaxing, pushing and relaxing. ‘Come on, my fucking lovely!’ I was still sitting up and rubbing the back of my head when, with a dull scraping of brick against brick, the wall gave and he jumped backwards. The stone ball must have hit us just below the parapet. I guessed its parts had landed somewhere in the middle of the Triumphal Way. The brick mass of the wall would have landed almost directly below. The new and louder screaming must be those who’d pressed themselves close to the palace wall for safety and had more or less survived the arrival on their heads of a half ton of brickwork.

I paid no attention to Priscus, who was jumping up and down in silence, his arms raised to heaven. I got on my hands and knees and looked over the jagged edge of the roof. I was in time to hear a slither of detached facing blocks from the wall. There were fewer torches on the ground. Those remaining darted about like alarmed ants. I was aware of a low and general moaning, and of calls for help from those of the injured who could speak.

‘I don’t think they’ll be trying that again,’ Priscus crowed beside me — ‘at least, not in the dark.’ He went back to his victory dance, only stopping when he trod on his cloak and had to sit down abruptly to avoid pitching himself into the darkness. I looked over the edge again. The torchbearers had congregated directly below. By much squinting and telling myself to set aside the glare, I could just see the frenzied work of recovering the dead and living.