Oh, there was a body in the street! I hadn’t seen it at first. But someone had got himself beaten to pulp and his belly slit open, and then dumped in a spot where the sun must have been cooking him since an hour after dawn. The bloody vomit he’d splashed over himself didn’t help — nor the wide pool of blood that had already turned brown, and was attracting a solid buzz of flies.
Oh, but the nuisance of it! I’d got a body in a side street it was my responsibility to keep clean. There would have to be a letter about this to Timothy. For me, he’d squeeze himself into his official carrying chair and be straight over. Questions, endless questions — most of them irrelevant to the case, all of them intrusive — that would be our City Prefect. I clenched my fists and snorted. But I shut my eyes and waited for the flash of anger to fade. Making sure not to tread on anything nasty in my fine new boots, I went over for a look at the body. All I could see of the face was that it had been bearded. The rest was smashed in. The clothing suggested a vagrant. So, unless it had been taken, did the lack of any weapon. I bent forward and sniffed at the vomit. No smell of wine. I’d gone off to sleep the previous night to a distant sound of brawling. The most likely explanation was that some young men of quality had got fighting drunk and found a sleeping beggar to kill. It was coincidence they’d finished him off outside my palace. I hoped the bastards had got themselves covered in gore — that, after all, would be their only punishment.
I stood back from the body. Samo would be out here later for his daily check on how clean the palace and its surrounds were being kept. He could deal with this. I looked down at my boots. They were still unspotted. I lifted the front of my outer tunic. My leggings were as white as my boots and showed my calves to nice effect. Once that brocade had been lifted off me, I’d put on some lovely clothes. I couldn’t see it but my cloak pin alone would get me the envy of anyone I passed. I looked up at the dark blue of the sky. Not long to go and the sun would be fully overhead. For the moment, I stood in the shade of my own palace wall and, after so much gloom and smoke, the sky was of the deepest and most astonishing blue. It was the colour I’d demanded — with moderate success — for my cloak.
I looked at the body again. If this was an impulse killing, why had someone broken all the fingers on the right hand? My spirits sank back to where they’d started. But I tried to lift them again. In even a well-policed city this size, you could expect a few dozen bodies most nights. These had to be left somewhere. Why not here now and again? I could have rolled the body over and had a proper sight at the clothing. But that would have spoiled my own. I’d seen enough. I stood upright and smoothed the front of my outer tunic. I had official duties, and was already late for them. I stood forward and crushed an engorged fly that had crawled a little too close by my left boot.
I turned and walked towards the archway that led into the Triumphal Way. I stopped in the shade and pulled the wide brim of my hat down another inch. Just a well-dressed man about his business, I slipped though the archway and turned right into the road that cut through the vast ceremonial district of Constantinople.
When barbarian kings or ambassadors are honoured with a tour of the City, they always start with the view along the Triumphal Way. This isn’t the main street on Constantinople, or the longest. It is simply what its name suggests — a street that, deviating neither to right nor left, and cutting through two hills, and crossing one valley on brick arches, runs for a mile through the centre. That mile really is the most astonishing vista of glittering porticos and colonnades, triumphal arches and colossal statues and gilded inscriptions. Whether you look at magnificence that goes on seemingly without end, or at the swarming, chattering multitudes of the well-dressed as they go about their business, you’ll think you’re in the capital of an empire at the height of its glory. But that’s always been the intention. You don’t call a street the Triumphal Way and line it with monasteries and sewers. It was laid out so the Emperor himself could ride along it in his chariot of state.
Truth was, the Empire was on its uppers. The Persian War I’ve already mentioned had been going on for a decade. With Nicetas now in charge of the defence, we’d just lost Syria. Egypt would surely be next. The magnificence on view was all about the past — sometimes the distant past.
Grim thoughts to keep me company! Still, they kept me from visible impatience. The sun was about to turn beastly overhead and we were in the last rush before siesta time. There was no chance yet of a decent speed. Come the siesta, I’d be able to get a move on. The Triumphal Way would take me past Imperial Square and into Middle Street. From there, it would be another reasonably straight two miles to the Golden Gate, and another two after that to where Lucas would be waiting like a cat that’s caught a bird for its mistress. Until then, it was a matter of threading my way through crowds that seemed to have all the time in the world, and avoiding the carrying chairs that crept or hurtled along in both directions.
I looked into the colonnade on my left. That was packed — you might have thought the shouting, jostling mass there was gathered to pass the time of day, not to get from one point to another without stepping into the sun. I reached up to check if my hat was still in place and stepped round a heap of replacement paving stones that would be set in place once the crowds had melted away. I thought again of Nicetas. It’s only reasonable that an emperor should hand all the really plum jobs about his own family. But why make Nicetas Commander of the East — that is, put him in charge of the Persian War? Why then bring him back to Constantinople, while Heraclius was away, and make him Regent as well? The man wasn’t fit for changing the straw in a public toilet. Any one of the statues I was passing would have made a more active Regent. In Syria, he’d run away from the Persians so fast, he hadn’t even stopped by Jerusalem to snatch the True Cross to safety. The Empire was on its uppers, and there was a good case for blaming it on Nicetas.
Far ahead of me, there was a sudden disturbance. It looked like another carrying chair race. I didn’t want to get in the way of that. I gave an involuntary look at the sky and moved towards the right-hand side of the road. I found myself looking at a big statue of Cicero. I could have looked at many other things. If I turned, I’d see the vast mass of the Great Church looming above all else in the City. Though not visible from here, the immensity of the Circus was a half mile beyond. I’d got chariot racing cancelled until further notice, but might be able to hear the faint cheering as one of the cheaper entertainments came to its end. But Cicero suited me better. I looked into the troubled, bronze face. What would he have thought of all this?
To be fair, his opinion might not have been the one I currently wanted. However useless Nicetas was, there was a limit to how much blame you could load on one man’s shoulders. It wasn’t just the Persians. Every other frontier was soft or collapsing. We were losing Greece to the Slavs and Avars. We’d mostly lost Italy to the Lombards. Our foothold in Spain was going to the Visigoths. Our control of Africa stopped barely twenty miles inland. You couldn’t blame Nicetas for that. As for the Persians, with one partial exception, we’d found no one else able to stand up to them. If Nicetas was useless, he wasn’t alone in his uselessness.