At once, he was better. The blackness didn’t so much retreat as vanish, and he was looking calmly into his uncle’s face. “How is your arm?” he asked in a voice that, if still dreamy, wouldn’t disgrace him. Simeon shook his head and reached down for a glass bottle of water.
“Drink this very slowly,” he whispered with a look at the driver. “I fear this is the end of our journey. But I’ll get you to bed as soon as we can finish with whatever reception is waiting here.” Michael took the bottle and drank as he was told. He was feeling better by the moment, though relief at having avoided another seizure was evenly balanced by shame. The driver had seen nothing. Simeon would never say anything. But Simeon had passed over any number of possible secretaries for this mission. Nepotism is all very well—but not when it comes to promoting the unfit. He waited till his uncle was looking again out of the window, then reached up and wiped away the tears that trembled on his eyelids.
“On behalf of His Majesty’s Government, I am pleased to welcome you to London,” the bald man said in the smooth and perfect Greek of someone who could only have spent years among the best people in Constantinople. Jessup’s efforts at Greek had been marked by a sounding of vowels and diphthongs that the educated might know but never voiced, and by a placing of accents according to the rules of Latin. What this man spoke might almost have been an imitation of the speech patterns of his two guests. “My name is Tarquin,” he added. “What else might be said about me is not currently important.” He paused and spoke rapidly to the driver, who stood to attention and opened a rear compartment in the vehicle to take out a couple of bags.
They’d stopped outside a building that imitated in its size and style the grand buildings that had survived from the earliest days of Constantinople as an imperial city. Michael looked round. The air of London was foul beyond belief. Breathing was rather like putting your head into the smoke of a bonfire. He could almost taste the coal that Simeon had guessed was the cause of the surrounding fog. He looked back to see how his uncle was coping on his feet, only to find that he was the one offered support. “Take my arm,” Simeon muttered. “Make it look as if you’re helping an old man up these steps.” But, even as he spoke, the driver got hold of him and pulled him the half dozen steps to the entrance of glass and polished wood. Michael looked along the road. Every other building was imposingly high and decorated in lavish style.
Tarquin cleared his throat and drew Michael’s attention from a bronze statue of a man dressed in the clothing of the ancient Romans. “I am aware of your unfortunate experience in Dover. Of course, I do apologise for any offence given to your dignity as ambassadors. I promise that a full enquiry will be made, and that, should it be necessary, lessons will be learned and new procedures put in place to prevent any recurrence of the manner in which you may have been received. Can I take it, then, that you will desist from a formal protest when you meet His Majesty’s chief minister?”
Simeon looked down from the entrance to the building. “We are not to be received by His Majesty himself?” he asked sharply. At home, even poor barbarian envoys could expect one meeting with the Emperor. He came back down the steps and pretended to adjust the collar of Michael’s orange suit. Then he did give his arm, to make it look as though he was receiving the help.
Tarquin shook his head. “It is the custom of our King to speak mainly with his potted plants. Effective government is left in the hands of ministers responsible to the Senate.” He looked closely at Michael, who looked steadily back, hoping his face wasn’t as pale as it felt. They were now joined by obsequious men in tall hats and tight-fitting grey coats from inside the building. These took up the bags the driver had dumped on the pavement and carried them through a door that revolved about a central spindle. His eyes showing nothing at all, Tarquin smiled and led the way through those doors into an entrance hall of many-coloured splendour.
Simeon stood back from their long inspection of a city that spread for miles in every direction they had been able to look. Had they been able to see through the brown haze, it might have spread still further. He and Michael were on one of the higher floors of the building, and they had a better view over London than the Emperor, from his summer palace, had over Constantinople. No matter where they looked, nor how far they looked, they saw evidence of long settlement—buildings of the ancient kind, though of huge size, frighteningly tall buildings of an unknown style, parks and broad squares, wide and crowded streets. They could have looked and looked till the coming of darkness. Still, they’d have seen no limit to the forbidding vastness of a London that every report had assured them was a heap of unpeopled and overgrown ruins. But it would only have confirmed their own insignificance.
The old man picked up a sheaf of papers fastened together at the top left and squinted at the unabbreviated words in block capitals. “Do I not see at least one spelling mistake?” he asked with a smile. He sat down in one of the padded chairs and leafed through the papers. “To call for attention,” he summarised from what he read, “you must pick up that instrument on the table between our beds and press the green button. That, apparently, will bring an attendant, who will wait for us to point on this document to whatever we desire. Shall we try calling for dinner? You can then go to bed.” This had been more a command than a question. But Michael was long since recovered. Going to bed had dropped off his list of things to do. He’d already looked through the sheaf of paper. It was a clever, though a demeaning, production. On the left column of each page was a word or a phrase in Greek. On the right was its equivalent in the British language. When Tarquin had left it with them, the idea had obviously been that they would point in silence, and get what they requested. For Michael, it was a key to the whole language.
Simeon might have read his thoughts. “There is a book in that cupboard,” he said, nodding towards the beds, “the lettering on which suggests it is a Bible. If so, it may belong to a man called Gideon. I’ll not comment on its manner of production. But you will, I know, find it of use.” Holding his left arm at an angle that showed continuing discomfort, he pushed himself out of the chair. Michael waved at this uncle to sit back and hurried to the book. He’d not speculate either on how such small but clear writing had been impressed on page after page of thin paper. But this obviously was a Bible, and in the British language. Trying not to tear the delicate pages, the two men leafed through to what anyone could see was The Acts of the Apostles.
“So, I was right—their language is pretty well uninflected,” Michael said, feeling pleased with himself. “The nouns have one plural form, and the verbs have a different form only for the third person singular. The tenses appear to be compounds, and may take a while to unravel.” He looked again, and brightened still further. If it killed him, he’d never let Uncle Simeon think he’d brought a deadweight invalid with him half way across the world. “And look at this word, and this one, and this one, and this one here—why, these are almost direct transliterations, with little change of meaning, from Latin or Greek. This will be even easier than I thought.” He looked up and smiled happily at Simeon, whose watering eyes suggested he might benefit from a set of those lenses. The old man gave up on trying to read the tiny script and nodded, adding, with his first laugh in many days, that the boy would finally see some benefit in the floggings that had inspired him to get Holy Scripture by heart. Michael said nothing, and raised the book into a shaft of late sunlight, and was about to remark on how the copyist’s pen had left no impression on the paper.