I took up the third sheet of papyrus I’d now covered in my attempt at the Persian script:
Now, the deposition and blinding of his own father had caused great outrage among the Persians. At first, this was suppressed by a general and unrestrained terror, a secondary effect of which was the removal, by death or mutilation, of all who had served his father in senior positions.
In the second year of his reign, however, Chosroes found himself no longer able to keep the opposition from uniting. The first among many failures of the harvests in the southern and most fertile regions of his empire, combined with what appears to be the inevitable return of pestilence, diminished his support among the people. His refusal to command a war against the nomadic Saracens of the desert, who had raided almost to the walls of Seleucia, alienated the loyalty of the army.
On the very day when the price of food is said to have reached its highest level in Ctesiphon, a mob, directed by General Bahram, burst into the summer palace. As was his custom, the young King had given himself up to wine and every manner of debauchery. Even so, he escaped the massacre of his entire household by dressing in the rags of a common leper and making his way towards the Euphrates, where he claimed the protection of the Greek Emperor, Maurice. .
I looked up from my text. Chosroes was still nodding and smiling. ‘Is this what you really want?’ I asked dubiously.
‘Oh yes,’ came the immediate answer. ‘I want a philosophical history. That means telling the truth so far as it can be ascertained. And, since I’m well on the way to conquering the entire known world, I like what will be your dramatic contrast between the early and the mature years of my reign.’ He took the sheet from which I’d been reading and squinted at the smudged mess I’d made of having to compose in a script that ran from right to left. ‘I do particularly like the connection you make between food prices and Bahram’s coup. Without spelling it out, you suggest a certain opportunism in his behaviour. Once we move beyond these sample chapters, I’ll explain to you how, after the Greeks put me back on the throne, I had him locked away with his children until he ate them.’
He pushed the sheet back across the writing table at me, and arranged all seven into a neat pile. ‘I’m so glad, Alaric, I haven’t had you killed. You’re the only man alive who can write history this objectively, and in Persian. Please keep it that way. I believe Shahin will be here within the next few days. If he doesn’t corroborate your story at least in its essentials, I won’t kill you — but I will make you watch the death of that Syrian boy you appear to have adopted.’
I pursed my lips and looked thoughtful. I could probably get over the loss of Theodore. But Shahin’s arrival would bring Antonia into the Royal Clutches. The thought of that was enough to set my insides moving in odd rhythms. ‘I wish you hadn’t tortured him,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure his wits will ever entirely come back.’
Chosroes laughed. ‘He had fuck all of those when he was brought in,’ he said. ‘He was talking to himself in a language no one could understand. He only spoke back in Syriac when one of his testicles was almost crushed — and that was to thank his jailor and ask to be roasted over a slow fire. You surround yourself with some very odd people.’
So Theodore hadn’t talked yet. I could be glad of that much. I smiled weakly and reached for a clean sheet of papyrus. ‘I believe you spent eighteen months in Constantinople,’ I said. ‘I’ll need your help to compose the speech you made to the Emperor. There is a couplet by one of your old poets whose name I currently forget. But do you really plan to take the place apart?'
Chosroes looked round and dropped his voice. ‘Of course, I don’t,’ he said in Greek. ‘I said what I did to jolly the army along. You don’t willingly destroy a city of such marvels. Its current population will be gradually eased out. But their lives will be spared. It’s only the farmers I really want to kill — destroying the Greeks at the root, you see; no chance of olive shoots, and so on. For the rest, you will surely agree that the ruler of the world deserves to occupy no less than the capital of the world.’
‘It makes sense,’ I agreed.
He stood up and stretched. I’d been scribbling away for him for the remainder of the afternoon and the sky was turning dark outside. ‘I don’t like to be away from my palace at night,’ he muttered. He snapped his fingers at the two guards who’d stood behind me all the time I was writing. ‘Bring the Lord Alaric along. Don’t lose him in the dark.’
Chapter 60
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have had to open my eyes wider in the gloom to check if they weren’t being deceived. In the light of two double lamps, you might easily have thought you weren’t looking at paintings on silk, and that a windowless room twelve foot by eight at best was in fact the vast hall of ceremonies of the summer palace in Ctesiphon.
But I did know better. I was standing in one among several wooden boxes heaped on a large wooden platform that was itself resting on about a hundred support poles. Third behind Chosroes and Urvaksha — and never allowed to forget the smirking armed creature close behind me — I’d crossed, on a causeway above the slowly ebbing waters from the storm, from the big tent to the base of the night palace.
Chosroes patted me on the back. ‘Time, Alaric, to forget the cares of the day,’ he said with slimy cheer. ‘I always so enjoyed our little dinners in Ctesiphon.’ Not answering, I went with him to the entrance and watched as the few serving men our weight limits had allowed pulled up the ladder. Below us, the whole immensity of the night palace was surrounded by a double circle of armed guards. Behind every fifth man in the innermost circle stood a slave with a flaring torch. The whole arrangement struck me as a fire hazard in itself. Otherwise, the palace must have been an obvious target for anyone above the pass able to shoot fire arrows. Any artillery would have knocked it to pieces before the ladder could be let down again.
A more pressing concern, though, was its general stability. Even in the gentle wind that moaned along the pass, the little silver bells above us were tinkling as if an irate master somewhere was calling for his slaves. One look at Shahrbaraz, and I could see that I wasn’t alone in wondering if those ten-foot support poles had been such a good idea.
Either Chosroes didn’t agree or he didn’t care. With his own hands, he pulled the main door shut and drew its bolts. ‘My chief general, of course,’ he tittered, ‘will go back to his military tent after dinner. But you, my dearest Alaric, will be locked into your own room, to sleep on your own silken mattresses. I would have given you a room in the tower — only the engineers became proper wet blankets towards the end of the day. Excepting my own, all the bedrooms are in a small block beyond the dining room.’
He waited for one of his serving boys to open the door to the dining room. Though not approaching his usual accommodation, this was respectably large. Indeed, at about a hundred feet by fifty, I think it amounted to most of the palace. It had no windows, but enough air came in through the gently grinding segments of the structure to keep the lamps flickering and us from choking to death in the smoke from the incense burners.
Chosroes walked briskly into the room. He stopped in the middle and turned round and round on the silk rugs that covered its wooden floor. ‘Behold, Alaric, how civilisation is carried into the furthest wilderness,’ he cried. He sat down on one of the nicer rugs and rocked happily back and forward. ‘I’ll let you watch the engineers dismantle this place in the morning. You can work a full description into your narrative of the invasion. The wall hangings, I must observe, are all cloth of gold.’