He was finished. Wiping pissy hands on his robe, he turned to face me. ‘Right, Brother Aelric,’ he called out with fake jollity, ‘where’s me drinkie?’ I smiled again and pointed at the jug. I watched him drain it in a single gulp. He slapped it down on the bedside table and let out a long and appreciative burp. ‘Fucking good stuff!’ he said. ‘Too good for an old sinner like you.’ He thumped his chest and let out another burp. He put both hands on the table and screwed his face up. He now managed a long fart. ‘Lovely tickling of my piles,’ he explained. He noticed a stray sheet of papyrus on the table. ‘Don’t you write in nothing but Greek?’ he snarled with a sudden return to the nasty. ‘Ain’t Latin fancy enough for you?’
Not answering, I smiled into my own cup. It was very good stuff, and it wasn’t the ale I had in mind. Its first effects would be a slight fever before he turned in for the night. Considering his bulk, that might not show till morning. Not long after, the fever would take proper hold, and be joined by griping pains. Another day, and the pains would turn unbearable. Come nightfall at the latest, and there’d be a sudden and catastrophic voiding of blood and failure of every organ. Any Greek physician would know exactly what had been swallowed. In this dump on the edge of civilisation, death would be put down to a visitation of the summer pestilence. There would be much lamentation in public over the body, and much private rejoicing. Until he was replaced, there would be no more starving and beating of prisoners less fortunate than wicked old Aelric — no more compelled sucking off of his rancid member, no more stamping about the monastery by someone whose proper employment in life should have been pushing a dung cart.
I’ll grant he’d kept some curb on his inclinations where I was concerned. I might nowadays be called Brother Aelric: no one dared, even so, to take me as other than the Lord Alaric. But some of his abuse had been most impertinent. More to the point, he was on to me. I couldn’t have that.
Ambrose burped louder. ‘Righty ho!’ he laughed. ‘Time to be off. I’m told there’s a flogging to be done.’ He snorted. ‘That nutter downstairs has been playing with himself again. I ask you — wanking in a monastery!’ He walked heavily to the door. He turned back to me before leaving. ‘It don’t matter shit who your relatives are,’ he said, as if he’d been reading my thoughts. ‘I’ll make the whole world see you for what you are.’
I’d like to see him try, I told myself. But I made no outward answer. He gave me one last glare, before walking out and slamming the door. I waited for the sound of his key in the lock, then took out my teeth and got back into bed. ‘Ho hum! Ho hum!’ I heard him shouting on the stairs, no longer for my benefit. ‘It’s a bad world, I’ll have you know — oh, a bad, bad world!’
I thought of going back to sleep. It would be Ambrose who supervised my packing later in the day. I’d need to be rested for that. I didn’t want anything smashed or stolen. And I’d need to keep him from any search of my belongings. He might find my bronze cloak pin. That would be an embarrassment. But sleep was out of the question until I’d covered my tracks. I threw the blanket aside. Scowling, I looked at the wide-open shutters and climbed back to my feet. I filled the jug from my washing bowl. I swirled the water round and round, before tipping it from the window. I filled it again and let it stand. With the rest of the water I scrubbed my hands. General washing could wait till I was out of here. I might even demand a bath. I’d like a bath.
But, silly old me! I’d dropped my box of poison. Luckily, it didn’t burst open. Instead, it bounced under the writing table. The act of bending down sent all the bones in my upper back into a popping sound that disturbed me. Rather than going back to bed, I sat down at the writing table and looked out through the window. Being locked away on the top floor had its advantages. It freed me from the inevitable smells of a city built without sewers. It gave me a better view than any of my jailers had. I looked east over the low huddle of roofs, some tiled, most thatched, to where the wall marked the city’s boundary with the Kentish forest. The sun was fast rising above the topmost branches of the trees. I put up a hand to shade my eyes and continued looking south-east. Though far less dense and unbroken than it seemed, the forest stretched from here to Dover and the sea. Beyond that lay France and then Italy and Rome. Far beyond that lay the New Rome and its Empire which, for almost two lifetimes, I’d done more than anyone else to hold together.
I thought of my dream. You won’t read about the Battle of Larydia in any of the histories. It had, even so, been the turning of the tide in the first of our two great wars of survival. It didn’t let us clear the Persians out of Syria. It didn’t stop them from taking Egypt. But all the shattering defeats we later inflicted on them had been made possible by what happened at Larydia. Because of that, we finally recovered our losses. Because of that, we made their empire into a protectorate. Because of that, when the second great war came along out of the blue, we, alone of those they attacked, held back the illimitable Saracen flood. Yes, we lost Egypt and Syria again — this time apparently for good. We may soon lose the African provinces. But, again and again since their first attack, the Saracens have smashed against the southern border of the Home Provinces. Each time, they’ve been thrown back, and with horrifying losses. So long as the lesson we learned at Larydia stays in mind, we’ll keep the Saracens out.
I thought yet again of the boy. I had no reason to feel guilty. You can walk about Constantinople, staring at native and borrowed monuments to three thousand years of victories. Mostly, you can look away and ask what all those men fought each other for, and how their fighting and dying had added one grain to the sum of human happiness. The battle we fought at Larydia saved the Empire and its precious cargo of the only civilisation worth respecting. Or, if you want to be less pompous, that boy and all the others were fighting for their God and for their land. I did tell them that at the time. To be sure, they kept the land. No one there — on our side, at least — died in vain.
I thought forward to the end of our Persian War. I thought of how, with the Lord High General Radostes beside me, I was the one who identified the Great King’s dismembered body. At last, his own people had turned on Chosroes, and had starved him and tortured him, and dumped him, still alive, in a field latrine. Over hills and fields, and skirting the edge of a baking desert, the General and I had ridden for days in hope of taking him alive. We got there just too late. His killers bought their lives from me with his crown. That I’d presented to Heraclius, and got a pat on the head for the effort. I’d then been sent off with it, to crown a puppet in the Emperor’s name. I can’t say an age of peace and plenty had followed our triumphal ceremony in Jerusalem. But our victory at Larydia did allow us to make the best of things.
I sat up straight and, as if made stronger by the rising sun, turned to my desk. I pushed aside the pens and inkwell and papyrus. With fingers that moved slightly later than I’d willed them to, I managed to get the cloth bag undone and took hold of what it contained. The first time I held this, it had been in one outstretched hand. Now it needed both hands, and a tensing of aged back muscles, to lift it into the sunlight.