Thoughts of the ‘partial exception’ brought on a faint stirring of unease. This wouldn’t ripen into another panic attack. But thoughts of that in itself deepened the unease. The two were obviously connected. If the one wasn’t continually simmering away, the other wouldn’t keep boiling over. I’d have to do something about the causes of the unease. But this was easier said than done. I turned my thoughts back to the safer matter of Nicetas and his nearly certain attempt at a joke. Should I take it as a good-humoured joke? Probably not. There was little humour of any kind about the Emperor’s cousin. None of it was good.
The chairs had now hurried past and I set off again at a quickish stride. I passed the square in front of the law courts. The morning crowd of lawyers and their clients was fast dwindling away. The Monday property auction in the square was nearly ended. I counted five men — probably Jews or Armenians — putting up with the sun for a closing bargain. There was a general smell in the air of charcoal and of roasting meat. Unless you fancied a week of the shits, eating from the public stalls was off limits. But it was a fine smell and it reminded me I’d had nothing since breakfast, and little then.
My quick stride didn’t last beyond the Belisarius Memorial, which blocks the whole centre of the road. Unless there’s a procession or the chariots are racing, you don’t normally see paupers in the better parts of Constantinople. The police have orders to keep out all but a few licensed and almost sanitised beggars. By day, the poor cluster in the dumpier parts of the City. By night, they sleep or swarm in vast and stinking slums even the authorities barely know. You don’t welcome these creatures into your own world. They’re ugly. They’re light-fingered or plain violent. They smell. They carry the seeds of contagion about their unwashed clothes and bodies. Once past the massive statue of Belisarius, though, I found the way was blocked by a loose crowd of the unwashed that must have been a hundred strong.
‘God bless the Lord Nicetas!’ someone shrilled at me. The call was taken up in a ragged chant. ‘My God preserve the Lord Nicetas,’ he called again, ‘who feeds the posterity of Romulus and the heroes of old.’ I stepped out of his way and was almost knocked sideways by a wagon piled high with food. Drawn by white oxen, this had lurched, without warning, from one of the smaller side streets. There were four others behind it.
‘Blessings on the Caesar Nicetas and his bread!’ someone cackled on my left. I glanced round. A woman had left the throng and come over as if to intimidate me into agreement. I looked at her and tried not to shrink back in horror. You couldn’t possibly have said how old she was. Mouth open in a dark and toothless hole, her face said extreme old age. Her uncovered breasts hung down in the most disgusting manner, and one had been honeycombed from within by a cancer. But her matted, lice-ridden hair was still black. She opened her mouth wider for a howl of triumphant laughter. ‘Emperor Nicetas won’t let us starve!’ she screeched. I almost believed she would step closer and try to touch me. I stared at the black and red mottling that ran upward from her wrists and shuddered. Woman or not, I would have gone for my sword. But a man with one eye and weeping sores on the visible part of his chest now appeared beside her and led her back into an army of living refuse that was growing from one moment to the next.
No wonder those chairs had been racing each other away from this lot. The smell and general danger aside, you don’t hang about when a mob starts talking treason.
Chapter 8
However, the poor hadn’t been assembled here to talk treason. I’d no sooner gone round the food wagons when I nearly crashed into the seditionary theatre that was the gathering’s real purpose. Two men in reasonably clean robes had taken their places on very high chairs placed about five yards apart. They were trying to look grand. In the eyes of their audience, they probably succeeded. I think I’d caught them close to the beginning of their act.
‘So good, don’t you think, Alexius,’ the elder of them struck up in an affected voice, ‘that My Lord Nicetas understands the duties of his class?’
‘I couldn’t agree more, my dearest Constans,’ came the reply in a louder and still more affected voice. ‘It’s all so very unlike another person I could mention.’ One look at these two troublemakers and I’d guessed what they were about. I gritted my teeth and waited for the inevitable.
It came from a scabby dwarf who’d been darting in and out of the crowd. ‘So unlike that piece of barbarian shite the Emperor’s allowed to steal our bread,’ he gasped. There was a ragged cheer from everyone who’d heard this, and a louder cheer as the words were carried back and repeated for those who hadn’t heard them.
Yes, I’d caught this at the beginning. Even as I tried to back away and continue about my business, the crowd shrank to a dense mass about the seditionaries. This left plenty of room for me to continue on my way. But Nicetas — more diligent, I might say, than in any of his official duties — was having me slandered to the mob. I’d be silly not to stay awhile and find out his line of attack. Cautiously, I pushed up the brim of my hat and looked over the heads of the stunted, bandy-legged poor to where the seditionaries were settling into their act.
‘It may have been wrong of him to stop the people’s bread,’ Alexius announced in a tone you might almost have taken as a defence of the Lord Senator Alaric. He paused and cleared his throat. ‘But it was surely unpardonable to say there were too many of us in the City, and that not even a hundred of us were the equal of one dirty peasant digging in the fields.’ This got a loud groan, followed by general denunciations of Alaric the Barbarian who’d halved the free distributions of food to the City poor, and who plainly wanted to end them altogether. You can be sure no one bothered complaining about the new entrance fee I’d ordered for the public baths. If one of these animals had so much as washed his face since Easter, I’d have been surprised.
Constans took a sip of wine and looked in my direction. I wasn’t the only person of quality lurking beyond the crowd. But it wouldn’t do for him to recognise the man he’d been hired to preach against. I pulled my hat down a little further.
Still looking at me, Constans laughed nervously, before going back about his business. ‘I tell you, that barbarian is a snake in the bosom of the Empire. He isn’t a Greek like us. He isn’t even a Latin or a Syrian or Egyptian. He’s a barbarian immigrant. He hadn’t been here a quarter of an hour before he’d wormed his way into the Emperor’s confidence. He’s been turning everything upside down ever since. He’s doing to us from the inside what his ancestors did as invaders to the Western Provinces. Unless someone stops him, he won’t stop till he’s pulled us all down to his own level.’
‘Come now, my dearest friend,’ said Alexius, when the chorus of hawking and spitting had died away. ‘I’m sure the boy means well. It’s just that he doesn’t understand our ways. He’s read a few books and thinks he knows everything. When he finally grows up, he’ll surely accept the rightness of ways that were always good enough for our ancestors.’
‘Means well?’ Constans shouted in mock outrage. ‘You’re too trusting, Alexius. How do you think he pays the bills on that palace he was given? I tell you, he’s on the take. Where else is all the money going? What’s he done with all the taxes that come in from the provinces? They don’t go on us, the Roman People, that’s to be sure. What happened to the olive oil ration?’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you even remember that?’ Loud groans. More repeating of the words. More groans.
‘Never mind the oil,’ Alexius broke in, still sounding even-handed. ‘But I’ll grant you have a point. What really matters is the army and there’s been precious little money spent on that. If the Lord Nicetas had been given proper support, we’d never have lost Syria to the Persians. The Empire wouldn’t have been cut in half. We wouldn’t now be facing an invasion of Egypt.’