Richard Blake - The Curse of Babylon

The light here was just good enough for me to see Leander run his fingers again through his hair. ‘But you’re mad,’ he said, now in soft panic. He’d tried that argument already, without effect. He cast round for another. ‘How do you know I won’t betray you the moment we’re in the palace?’

Good point — though also easily answered. ‘The young man with the hood still over his face knows who you are and what you look like. All you know about him is that he’s rather big and has a talent for holding a knife to your throat. Aside from him, my household is filled with slaves and freedmen I’ve always treated well and who have more than a certain regard for me. This, I hope you’ll agree, makes for an imbalance of power you should keep continually in mind. If anything happens to me, you’ll be dead meat the moment you show yourself in public.’

I put a smile into my voice. ‘Now, let me go over again what I’ve told you. This time, if you don’t keep begging for mercy, you might understand it.’ I waited for him to finish slobbering more wine from his flask. Scaring him was easy — and there would be more of that to come. But I really needed him at least minimally on side.

‘The City mob doesn’t count,’ I said, starting over. ‘Your boss can’t be Emperor. The Army wouldn’t hear of it. He won’t carry the respectable classes after a night like this. Unless someone brings him round before it’s too late, he’ll be nursing two blinded eyes in the Fortified Monastery, and his poet will get all the blame for sending him as mad as everyone thinks he must be. That means you , Leander. Even if Heraclius is tender to his cousin, he’ll think nothing of having you racked to death, or torn apart by hyenas in the Circus. We are talking about high treason, after all.’

I waited for him to stop farting. I’d applied the stick. Time, now he was on the verge of moral collapse, to show the carrot. ‘Leander, there is, in one of my filing boxes, a sealed patent granting you a position in the bureaucracy. It’s worth forty seven solidi a year. You can rent a small house on that and keep two slaves. I’ve added a variation that gives you this by right, not at will. Once published, only an emperor will be able to cancel the appointment.’ I waited for this to sink in. ‘Is it your highest ambition to spend the rest of his life spraying flattery at Nicetas? He’s not exactly an ideal patron.’

Leander put both hands on his belly and leaned forward. I thought he was about to vomit. Instead, he was crying. ‘How do I know you’ll keep your word?’ he sobbed.

Another easy one to answer. ‘I have a reputation for honesty and fair dealing,’ I said. I stood up and moved away from Leander. He was deep in shadow but had the best sight of me a waxing moon allowed. ‘This is a reputation that brings many advantages. Why should I risk it on doing you over? Oh, I may, now and again, wriggle out of big promises. But I can always find a convincing excuse for that. And it’s against a deep background of promises to people like you that I never break.’ I waited for the logic of my case to seep into his mind. ‘So, I put it to you, Leander: I’m your best chance of staying alive and of making it to a security that few poets achieve. Will you get me in front of Nicetas? ’

He kept his head almost between his knees. But I could tell from the way he breathed that Alaric the Golden-Tongued — Alaric, who could make the worse appear the better reason: Alaric, who was presently telling the truth — had made the necessary conquest. Search me what I was to tell Nicetas when, like Cleopatra from her carpet, I appeared before him. But neither of the main alternatives to talking sense into the fool was greatly to my convenience. Now he was my prospective father-in-law, watching him dragged off to the Fortified Monastery had lost all its old charm. And, if one of them had just been put out of action, there were over a hundred other catapults that could be unbolted from the city walls.

I reached out to Leander. ‘Put your hand in mine,’ I said softly. ‘Get me to Nicetas. I’ll do the rest. Do this for yourself — and for Antonia.’

Something metallic scraped against the street side of the statue. This was followed by a light patter of feet. I pushed Rado back. ‘No, stay here with the little Greek,’ I murmured. Sword in hand, I darted out of cover.

The street was empty — rather, it had been almost empty. In the moment before it disappeared, though, I’d seen enough of the flutter of dark cloth against the darker shadow of the far colonnade.

I took a deep breath. I shut off the approach of a rage darker than the shadow of the colonnade. ‘I won’t ask you to explain yourself,’ I said in Latin. ‘But you can come out of hiding.’ How she’d made it this far in life might be used as a minor proof of God’s existence.

Though it was well past the midnight hour, the square in which Nicetas had his palace was brightly lit. Two huge torches burned above the main entrance. Armed men stood beneath, stopping and mostly turning back the flow of visitors. Right in the middle of the square, a gang of drunken proles was raucously hailing Nicetas as the new Emperor. As yet, no one took notice of them. Leander hurried us past the line of well-dressed supplicants and seemed about to avoid the guards altogether.

Not quite. ‘Here, mate, where do you think you’re going?’ The guard stepped backwards through the gateway and leaned his right arm against the wall. He drummed the fingers of his left hand on his breastplate.

It was Leander’s turn to step backwards. He pressed shaking hands against his thighs and tried for an easy smile. ‘I am Court Poet to His Magnificence the Commander of the East,’ he squeaked. ‘If you send for your superior officer, he will readily confirm that I am not to be delayed as I go about my Master’s business.’

The guard’s answer was to hawk and spit, his gob just missing Leander’s feet. He turned his attention to me. ‘Big for a monk, aren’t we?’ he asked. He stood on tiptoe and peered suspiciously into what I hoped was the darkness within my hood. One hand raised to pull at the hood and he’d have been dead before he hit the ground. I’d have been halfway to the Central Milestone, with Antonia pulled along behind me, before the other guards could check that he was dead.

I kept my arms folded inside the long sleeves of my robe. ‘I am Father Gregory,’ I said in my Syrian accent. ‘The Lordship’s poet has brought us through all the danger of the streets on a mission of great importance.’ I bowed respectfully, shuffling forward an inch to finish the work of concealing Antonia.

Still looking closely at me, the guard took his arm from against the wall. It might have been a friendly action. Just as likely, it allowed him all the quicker to go for his sword. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked in Syriac. ‘The Lord Nicetas has his own spiritual advisers in residence. Why does anyone need more than that?’

He was lighter than most Syrians and his Greek was completely idiomatic. He’d taken me by surprise. But I bowed again. ‘From Edessa, my son,’ I answered in his own language. I’d been there more than once. I could describe its sights well enough for anyone who wasn’t a native. It was where I’d learned my Syriac. I tightened my grip on the short sword I was pressing with my right hand against my left forearm. ‘We were asked to send holy oil from the lamp that burns before the relics of Saint Aerumenus the Merciful.’

The guard looked at the satchel I had about my neck. Someone behind me coughed loudly. Someone else began a jingling of coins in his hand that could have only one meaning. He looked at me again. ‘You can go in,’ he said, now back in Greek. ‘Captain Silenus is at the top of the main staircase. Make your way straight to him. Don’t go near the private quarters. We’ve had orders to kill on sight.’