As they ended the sentence, there was wild applause and cheering. I wanted to stand upright and look defiance into every face. But I was only pushed from behind for another grovel. The laughter and the cheering went on and on. It left off any echo, and I felt a chilly breeze on my exposed neck, as if I were now in the Circus, and my sentence were being pronounced before the whole assembled people of Constantinople. .
I woke in my bed to the sound of wolves howling in the distance. I had the impression that Euphemia had been shaking me for some while, but was only aware of this as I came fully back into the present.
‘You were crying in your sleep,’ she said. ‘Were you dreaming?’
The lamp was long since gone out, and there was no sign of dawn. But I sat up and reached to where I knew there would be a cup of water. I drank and wiped my sweaty face on the sheet. ‘It was nothing,’ I said, ‘just a dream.’ I pressed my eyes shut and put it all out of mind. Of course, it had been just a dream. All else aside, when did the real Heraclius ever finish a sentence? If he’d managed that even once since he came to power, there might have been less doubt regarding his actual wishes. I opened my eyes again and listened. ‘But how have wolves got into Athens?’ I asked. Even before she began her soft laugh, I realised the answer. Though awake, I’d still been in the vastness of the Imperial City, where a man could walk for days and never see the same street twice. Here, in Athens, you were never more than a quarter of a mile from the walls. If some shortness of food in the mountains had brought them down early to prowl about the plains of Attica, it stood to reason they’d sound close enough to be just outside the residency.
‘Were you dreaming?’ she asked again.
I made a non-committal reply and drank more water. It was rather brackish. But Euphemia was now sitting up and had her arms about me, as if to protect a frightened child. ‘Do you believe that dreams are a communication with some higher force?’ she asked.
I put the dream itself out of mind and gathered my thoughts. ‘Dreams are nothing more than a distorted continuation of waking thoughts,’ I said. ‘They contain no new sensory impressions. They can suggest new ideas that might otherwise have remained overlooked. But they are generally so connected with waking concerns, that they cannot be regarded as other than unshackled trains of thought. If not that, they are just inexplicable fancies. There is never any outside cause to them.’ Because I was still not fully awake, my self-control hadn’t its usual rigidity, and I found myself wondering about the balance in this dream between fancies and new ideas.
Euphemia smiled and sat a moment in silence. ‘The howling disturbs you?’ she asked with a change of subject.
The short answer was that it did. Even if wall after wall stood between us, the sound those black and vicious creatures made took me back to my earliest childhood in Kent. Perhaps a year after my mother had been dumped with us in Richborough, there had come a winter as cold as anyone could remember. Then, the wolf packs had streamed through every breach in the city wall, and I’d lain awake every night, hearing their snuffling and scratching outside our barricaded door. We were among the lucky ones. We might not have had much of a roof, but we still had four walls. Almost every night, I’d heard the wild screaming of those who were old or manless and whose defences had failed, and who were devoured in their beds. Had this somehow been the cause of that stupid little dream?
I got up from the bed and felt my way to the brazier in the centre of the room. I got hold of the poker and jabbed at the invisible embers. As they came back to life, I put oil into the lamp and got it alight.
Euphemia lay naked on the bed. She sat up and looked back at me. ‘I haven’t seen you properly in the day,’ she said. ‘But your eyes are so light here, they must be a very pale blue.’ She looked harder at me. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.
‘Twenty-two,’ I said. I felt a tremor of renewed lust and sat heavily beside her. ‘Shall we — shall we do it again?’ I asked.
‘Again?’ she cried with mock alarm. She laughed. ‘Have I not yet satisfied My Lord?’ She laughed again and pushed me gently back. ‘Twenty-two,’ she said, now thoughtful. ‘Except for your exalted status, I’d surely have thought you a little younger. There must be an interesting story behind your progress.’ I said nothing and she dropped that line of questioning. ‘But were you not sad to leave Constantinople and come down to this shrivelled husk of a city?’
I nodded, and wondered how she could have come so close to guessing what my dream had been about. But I said a little of the vastness and beauty of the City as it might appear to anyone who couldn’t see the deadness and corruption at its heart. As she prompted, I spoke on about the teeming streets, and the crowded docks and markets, and the museums and galleries, and the mass upon mass of statues and monuments plundered from an empire that embraced every city that had been great and famous long before Constantinople itself had been other than the mediocre town of Byzantium, notable only for its position at the end of a finger of Europe where it almost touched the shores of Asia. If no longer the capital of an empire that reached from north of York almost to Babylon — though pressed on every one of its reduced frontiers, and giving way on all of them — there could be no doubt of its place in the world. I tried, and now succeeded, not to doubt my own place within the City.
‘Oh, to be in such a place,’ she breathed with a desperate longing, ‘a city so large that you can walk about in freedom and never be recognised. It is surely a place of dreams — a place where every dream is able to become real.’
I nodded again and put my own dream finally out of mind.
There was a renewed howling. I froze instinctively and looked about for my sword.
‘Do they really frighten you?’ she asked.
I tried for a smile and reached out for her.
‘But you grow used to them in Athens. They are not even the worst that Athens has to offer.’ She put a hand on my stomach, and drew a sharp nail over the ridges of muscle.
I shivered and drew her into my arms. The smell of her perfume was overpowering. Everything began to fade out of mind but the closeness of our two bodies.
She laughed, now very softly. ‘Like us,’ she said in a dreamy voice, ‘they are the children of the night. Their hunger is as our own. And who shall deny the feeding of that hunger?’
Once more — and I can’t say how many times it had been already — I lay back and arched my body as those unbelievably powerful hands took hold of both my wrists, and I gasped and bit my lips almost to the point of drawing blood in the beginning of another ecstasy that I knew would pass, but that would, throughout its entire duration, seem infinite in both time and nature. Before I passed out of all rational perception, I felt her scented, unbound hair brush against my face. Her lips pressed suddenly against mine, and I felt all her weight upon me. I could hear the wolves still howling, but no longer cared about it, or was properly aware of it.
Chapter 30
Back in ancient times, the streets of Athens were as mean and crooked as of any modern city resettled by barbarians. In the massive improvement works he’d commanded, Hadrian had flattened everything in the centre not hallowed by recollections of the past. But that had been four centuries ago. Since then, we’d had two — perhaps three — devastating raids; and the rebuilding of a now depopulated area had restored much of the original squalor. The sun was peering across from above one of the lower houses when the Dispensator came to a sudden halt.
‘Can this be the house?’ Martin asked uncertainly.