Richard Blake - The Terror of Constantinople

I waited for the recollection of our escape from King Agilulf’s torture garden to come fully back into his mind. For my current purpose, I needed Martin the terror-prone clerk: all this fatalism was no use to me at all. I looked again at the empty cup. Martin filled it to the brim.

I returned to the matter in hand. ‘Look, Martin,’ I said, ‘I’m not asking for much this time. All I need is for you to stand for one meeting without your knees giving way while I talk our way out of this lunatic mission. Can I count on you?’

From the scared look now coming into his eyes, we might just about be in business.

‘We need to make His Excellency aware’, I said, ‘that whatever debts we once variously owed him were discharged in full back in Pavia. I don’t imagine he’s asking for a repeat of Pavia – no snooping around this time, no waiting on moonless nights to pass information about warlike intentions. But I don’t like this stuff about consulting libraries there. It smells like a priest’s armpit.

‘Have another look at these instructions. How much work do you really think they involve? Three days? Five?’

As he unrolled it again and looked down the sheet of tiny writing, I took up a handful of dried onion seeds and began crunching on them.

Martin looked up at length, confusion on his face. ‘I’ll swear most works on his list are here in Rome,’ he said. ‘This one, I know for a fact, is in the Papal Library. This one was condemned a hundred years ago. It may still exist in some private collection, but can’t be anywhere on view in Constantinople. As for this one, Paul of Halicarnassus never wrote on the Council of Nicaea. The work mentioned is mistitled, but is a book of sermons against the Aphthardocetic heresy – that’s the one’, he explained, noting my questioning look, ‘about the incorruptibility of Christ’s physical body after death.’

‘So,’ I asked, ‘in your opinion, everything in these instructions can be done right here in Rome?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here in Rome. At worst, there might be a trip to Ravenna.’

I’d already guessed as much. But Martin was the expert in this. The Dispensator could bully till he was black in the face. He could put whatever gloss took his fancy on why someone employed by the Emperor or by Heraclius or by someone else who didn’t give a toss about heresy in Spain had wanted me dead here in Rome. But I knew he was no expert on the scholarship of heresy.

Yes – I’d have the man by both his tits.

‘Then it’s agreed’, I said, ‘we go to the Dispensator just before dinner-time and tell him to go jump. And when we celebrate in my house afterwards, we shall indeed be what he calls “an harmonious and lucky team”!’

And that did seem to be it. There’d be no trip to the East. The nearest I’d come to the civil war would be betting on whether Heraclius the son or Nicetas the nephew would race each other fairly to Constantinople, or if they’d turn on each other before either could get there.

I rolled the letter back into its case. Feeling peckish again, I was thinking how most delicately to ask if Martin had been able to afford to buy bread – the free-distribution stuff was fit only for pigs.

Just as I was about to speak, the monk who’d accosted me the day before was shown into the kitchen.

‘I bring verbal orders from the Dispensator himself,’ he said in a dramatic whisper that could probably have woken the now-sleeping child upstairs. ‘They supplement or replace your written letter of instruction. Listen carefully, as I am required to give you these orders once only and then to forget them.’

He looked round to make sure no one else was listening, and recited:

‘The citizens Alaric and Martin are hereby requested and required to proceed at once to Constantinople, there to receive such further instructions as may be transmitted from Rome. Each will be collected from his home tonight at the midnight hour and be conveyed thence to the river under armed guard and in a covered chair. The citizen Alaric will be conveyed home now by the same means. Each may take whatever he has time to pack. Anything he cannot pack shall be listed for His Excellency the Dispensator to have sent on by faster intercepting ship.

‘Neither shall tell anyone that he is leaving Rome until he is beyond the city walls, when free communication may be re-established for all purposes. The citizen Alaric is exempted from this requirement so far as concerns his banker, the Jew Solomon ben Baruch, who has already been instructed to attend on the citizen Alaric at his house.

‘The Lady Marcella has received separate instructions regarding the safe-keeping of her slave Gretel. The wife and household of the citizen Martin shall be conveyed at the same time and by the same means from his house to the fortified house of the Sisters of St Eugenia, there to remain as guests until such time as His Excellency the Lord Dispensator shall think appropriate.

‘The citizen Alaric shall bear the whole cost of the stay in Constantinople and such other costs as may attend his stay. He shall, on his return to Rome, render an account of these to His Excellency the Lord Dispensator, who may see fit to order reasonable reimbursement.’

The monk finished his recitation in a blaze of self-congratulation. He sat down and fanned his shining face. He drank deep from the wine jug and wiped his lips after an appreciative smack. He pretended to ignore the chaos of screams and recriminations that had broken out around him.

Sveta had caught enough of the message to send her into a vicious frenzy. She’d lost command of her Latin, and I couldn’t follow the rapid Slavonic of her nagging. But the repeated hissing of my name, and the nasty looks she threw me, told me it was best to sit still. No point trying to explain she’d misapprehended me again.

The slave woman had caught none of the message, but assumed it was a notice of eviction. She was beating her head against the kitchen wall, screaming to be struck dead for the shame of it all.

His voice muffled by his hands, Martin was calling out again and again: ‘God forgive me my sins! God have mercy on my soul!’

Overhead and unregarded, the baby wailed piteously.

‘I am not at liberty’, the monk shouted happily above the noise, ‘to take any question regarding your instructions. In any event, I am already forgetting them.’ He took another long swig.

‘If you don’t wipe that fucking smirk off your face’, I shouted back, ‘I’ll give you something you won’t forget. Now pass me that jug.’

I fought to suppress the horror bubbling up within me. For all I sneered at Martin, he seemed right enough this time. Perhaps I had just heard a death sentence. Only a day earlier, I’d been rejoicing at the turn my life had taken. Now, I was caught like a rabbit in a snare.

I hadn’t just been had by the Dispensator. I’d been really had.

I looked out through the now-open door to the street where I could already see my covered chair and a couple of armed enforcers standing by.

‘Fuck the Church!’ I muttered into the jug. ‘And fuck the fucking Dispensator!’

And that’s how I came to be standing on the Senatorial Dock a month or so later, with Martin for company, with a fat eunuch to bid me welcome, and with a whole row of stinking corpses swinging to and fro behind him.

So, let us now unfreeze everyone and thank them for their patience, and get on with the story.

‘You will, of course, be staying in the residence of His Excellency the Permanent Legate,’ Theophanes said as my chair drew level with his. After a blockage caused by some building works, the road had widened again to allow any amount of traffic side by side.