‘You need a doctor,’ I said. ‘Don’t try telling me again this is seasickness.’
Priscus stood up and leaned against one of the locked doors. ‘If you have any sense in that pretty young head of yours,’ he whispered, ‘you’ll not go round telling people how the Commander of the East is indisposed. I was able to inspect what passes here for a militia this afternoon. With me at their head, those duffers might just hold the walls. Do you want them in a panic?’
I swallowed. In Constantinople, in Alexandria, in Egypt, and on the whole voyage to Athens, I’d done everything short of pray that Priscus — as much my fly in the ointment as I was his, my sworn enemy, my backstabbing opponent in every measure I could urge on poor, stupid Heraclius — might fall down dead of something. Now it was looking as if I’d get what I wanted, I really would make a point of praying in church for his recovery.
We continued along the corridor. After a few paces, Priscus stopped again to clear his throat. He spat into the darkness. He laughed and took my arm to help him forward. ‘When will you officially notice that Nicephorus has abandoned his duties?’ he asked.
‘He seems to have done bugger all when he was about,’ I answered. ‘Unless anyone important makes a fuss, I think we can overlook his absence for another few days.’
We’d now come into a long room that had a side window at the far end into the courtyard. Through this came another hint of distant red. ‘I know that Martin’s been urging you to scarper since before we got here,’ Priscus said with a recovery of strength. ‘We can agree that Nicephorus had no orders to arrest you on the docks. But you really can’t deceive yourself that you’re in the clear. All that guff you spoke to dear Simeon about the Imperial Constitution doesn’t touch the fact that you serve an absolute and arbitrary despot who may still have something nasty in mind for you. So do tell me, dear boy — why hang about when you could be straight out of here?’
‘Because I swore an oath to Heraclius,’ I said. ‘And because I have an overriding duty of service to the Empire so long as I’m in a position to do any good at all.’ I was saved the trouble of continuing by a sudden explosion from Priscus that was part laugh, part sneer.
‘Duty?’ he gasped when he was able to speak again. ‘Duty to that shambling wretch in Constantinople? I have duties to family and class. You have a choice.’ He waved at a mass of damp cobwebs overhead that hadn’t yet been cleaned. ‘This whole Empire is no better than Athens itself. Whatever it may once have been, it’s nothing more than a ghost of what the old poets and philosophers laid down for it. If it’s any better than Persia, or even the less chaotic barbarian kingdoms, I haven’t yet noticed. You tell me what lies between savages like me and those lunatic priests that is worth saving.’
I didn’t break the silence that followed.
‘Oh, well,’ he took up again, ‘it’s so nice that we’re working together again. Even if I am thinking back just one month or so, to when we did so well in Egypt, it will be just like the old days — don’t you think?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Since he was no longer holding on to me, he didn’t feel my shudder.
Chapter 39
‘I said I wanted every door opened,’ was my curt reply. The slave bowed and looked again at the door in the cupboard. ‘If you have to break it open, please do. However, I want every effort made first to pick the lock.’ Martin tagging along behind me, I walked back along the corridor towards one of the courtyard doors.
Out in the courtyard, and once I was used to the dazzling sunshine, my first sight was of Maximin. He was cackling like a mad thing as young Theodore pushed him higher and higher on a swing that had been lashed to a tree branch. I stopped and smiled at the happy scene. Theodore’s clothes were too big for him, and he was sweating in the morning sun from an effort that, even slightly increased, would pitch my son straight out of his enclosure on to the dried mud.
‘This place is a stinking hovel!’ Sveta hissed in my direction. She’d spoken in a Latin that I could be sure none of the slaves could understand. Still, I chose to assume she’d been directing herself at Martin.
‘Please, my dear,’ he quavered back at her. ‘We did agree-’
She silenced him with a blow to the side of his face that still had an ear. ‘Don’t you “please dear” to me!’ she snarled. ‘The whole place stinks. And, now we’re at least unpacked, your lord and master is sending us to Corinth — no doubt to somewhere ever dirtier.’ She drew breath. Then, with the lack of reasoning ability you get in women, went back to complaining about the residency. ‘If he was half the man you think he is, he’d have got us moved right out of this slum. It’s too dirty even for the rats.’
I was pretending not to have heard this — though she’d had a point about rats: why were there none at all? — when I was almost knocked over by a smell that took me back to the mass graves of Alexandria before they’d been covered over. I poured half a bottle of scent on to a napkin and clamped it over my nose and mouth.
‘Ah, the latrines are being cleaned out,’ I said with a muffled attempt at cheer. Their unopened smell at twenty paces had been quite enough for me, and I’d so far avoided a direct visit, making my own offerings into a brass chamber pot. But these were, I had no doubt, civilised latrines. Once in working order, they’d be flushed by as continuous a stream of water as could be arranged from what remained of the aqueduct. Then, we could have oiled and scented sponges, and try to imagine ourselves in a place for persons of quality.
I was thinking of the possibility of getting water into the bathhouse, when Sveta pushed a reddened forearm in my direction. ‘Not a rat to be seen or heard,’ she went on in grim fury, ‘but more bees than you’ll find in a hive.’
‘But Sveta, my dearest love bucket,’ Martin managed to get in while she drew breath, ‘Athens is famed for its honey.’
‘Honey?’ she said with a flat menace I’d heard only once before, when she’d learned that I was proposing to take Martin out of Alexandria into the south of Egypt. ‘Don’t talk to me about honey. Don’t you care if your own child is eaten alive by nasty little bees?’ She dropped her voice and looked in my direction. It was to no effect. I’d have heard her clearly enough from deep inside the residency. ‘And don’t you think you can tell him something about that bloody witch?’
With his own nervous look in my direction, Martin tried to put his arms about her.
But she broke free and raised her voice again: ‘Oh, I should have listened to my mother, God rest her soul. If she could see me now. .’
I heard the warning cry just in time to avoid a shower of sweepings thrown from one of the upper windows. I stepped aside and took the opportunity to get as far out of hearing as I could manage.
‘I trust you are feeling well this morning?’ I said to Theodore, who was still pushing on the swing.
‘Oh, yes, My Lord,’ he cried, bowing just low enough for the now unattended swing not to knock him dead on its recoil.
‘Excellent,’ I said. I paused and put the napkin back to my face as a shift in the wind sent invisible but dizzying fingers of sewer smells in our direction. ‘I trust the Lady Euphemia is happy with the attendants I have assigned to her,’ I said finally.
Seemingly unaware of the smell, Theodore bowed again and smiled. ‘Indeed, My Lord,’ he said. ‘My mother will thank you in person, but regrets that the full daylight is bad for her eyes.’
I smiled. She’d crawled out of bed to splash water over herself shortly before dawn. If she now stirred from her own bed before noon, she’d confirm I hadn’t been sufficiently inventive in the night. Even thoughts of the fallen Decelea hadn’t taken the edge off my lust. Now, the mere recollection of all we’d managed set off an entirely delicious twinge in my loins.
I nodded and left Theodore at play with Maximin. Careful not to trip over the ridges of dried mud, I picked my way across the main part of the courtyard. There had been a sizable lawn here, and flower beds, and a nice marble fountain in the middle of it all. The fountain remained, though silent now, and choked with years — perhaps generations — of rotted-down compost. Still holding the pitcher on his shoulder, the naked boy who was the main part of the fountain stared back at me with the blankness the ancients had generally preferred in their art. I stopped about a dozen yards from what I took to be Euphemia’s window. It had been opened outward a few inches to let in air, and the blind was fully up inside. Impossible, of course, to see anything by day through those thick, greenish pieces of glass. But did I have the impression of being watched? I gave one of my charming smiles and bowed. A shame I had no excuse for going into the building and upstairs to continue what I regarded as unfinished business. Far behind me, I could hear Sveta’s voice rising to one of her cold furies, and Martin’s answering wails of embarrassment. Maximin was laughing again fit to burst.