My stomach turned over. The scared speculations I had pushed out of my mind on that hasty, midnight rush down the Tiber came crawling back. With the shore getting closer and closer, I felt like a man who falls from a high window and sees the ground rushing towards him. Even if I’d dared to ask, would the Captain have turned back?
I wanted to say something reassuring to Martin. All I did was reach out to him under cover of the rail. He took my hand in his. It was cold and sweaty, but firmer than my own. We stood close together as the ship covered the last hundred yards or so.
‘He’ll be expecting our total deference,’ Martin whispered with a slight nod at the official. ‘You address him as “Your Magnificence”.’
I had a speech rehearsed for the Permanent Legate’s agent. I had a variation ready just in case the Lord Silas should deign to meet us in person. I had nothing prepared for this.
It might be a mistake, I told myself again and again. The Permanent Legate’s people might be waiting at one of the general docks. Perhaps an ambassador’s ship was even now being inspected by those customs men, and there’d be red faces all round. But I thought it best to assume that the traffic-control people in the city knew what they were doing, so I put an open smile on to my face and made a gentle bow in the official’s direction. He bowed in response, touching his forehead in the Eastern manner.
As the oars swung suddenly upright and we coasted the last few yards into dock, I glanced up again at the inner wall. I could now see that those dark projections I hadn’t been able to make out were iron gibbets. There must have been dozens of these clustered round the Senatorial Dock. Each held a corpse in various stages of decay.
The corpses looked sightlessly down at me, twisted in their death agonies, blackened by the sun. Some were naked. Others had shreds of clothing that scavengers and the shifting winds hadn’t yet torn away. Here and there, though faded, I could make out the purple border of the senatorial classes.
Martin cleared his throat, directing my attention to the open mouth and outstretched arms of the official.
‘Executed traitors,’ he whispered again with a momentary glance at the gibbets. ‘You should pretend not to notice them.’
As I stepped ashore, the official hurried forward to embrace me.
‘Greetings, Alaric of Britain,’ he called in a voice that might have been a woman’s but for its great power. His flabby, painted jowls shook with the force of his greeting. ‘I bid you welcome after your journey from the Old Rome to the New. Welcome, Alaric, welcome to the City of Caesar!
‘I am Theophanes, and I represent the Master of the Offices himself. In the name of His Glorious Excellency, and in the name of the Great Augustus whose benevolence shines upon us as a second sun, I bid you welcome. Yes, young and most beautiful Alaric, I bid you a fond welcome.’
Theophanes must have seen my furtive look beyond him to the jumble of attendants. He continued:
‘His Excellency the Permanent Legate is sadly indisposed. Rather than send down a subordinate from the Legation, he took up our suggestion of an official greeting. It was no less than we could offer for a scholar of such pre-eminent qualities as yourself.’
He paused and put a slight emphasis on the elaboration of the flattery: ‘A scholar whose qualities are no stranger to the city – though we were unprepared for such personal beauty to be so artlessly combined with youth and learning. Please regard me throughout your stay as entirely at your service.’
His face creased into a smile and he spread his arms as if about to begin a declamation: ‘All that you require for your mission – all that you may desire for your convenience – you will look to me to provide.’
He spoke in good Latin, though with an accent that wasn’t quite Greek. I answered in my best Greek, praising the Emperor for his forethought in all matters and thanking Theophanes for his own eminent goodness of heart.
So there was no mistake. I was indeed the object of this fuss. The Emperor’s most senior Minister had taken an interest. He had sent one of his own most senior officials to greet me.
As we drew back from our second kiss and were about to begin a new round of mutual flattery, the breeze shifted. The perfume that hung like a suffocating fog round Theophanes gave way to a smell of death from the gibbets above our heads. I resisted the urge to gag at the sudden stench and controlled my features. In a moment, the breeze shifted again and the smell of ropes and tarpaulins filled the air.
We moved towards the litters placed for our service, and the armed men lined up into a guard of honour. Behind me, I could hear Martin giving subdued but curt orders for the unloading of our luggage. The customs officials who’d been hovering behind Theophanes and his entourage had given up hope of inspecting this and were dispersing.
That ship had been our home for what seemed an age. I never looked back to it.
2
Oh, but this will never do! The ancient poets may have opened in the middle of things, working backwards and forwards as they felt inspired. You can do that when writing a diary. I seem, however, to have begun a regular chapter in the history of my life. One day soon, when I’m gone to a place condemnation cannot reach, I like to think Bede will take this up and further practise his Greek. I’ll need to do a great deal better than I have to explain myself.
Let us, then, leave things as they were on the Senatorial Dock – no one left frozen there is likely, I think, to complain – and go back to the real beginning of the story.
That was a month earlier in Rome, where I’d now been living for a year, and life was sweet. It was the morning after the Feast of Saint Rubellus, and the bodies of some of those who hadn’t recovered from their stupor had not yet been taken away by their next of kin. Fortunately, the Lombards were on the prowl again, and there were fewer pilgrims than usual. I was making my way down to the financial markets. The fortune I was hoping to make on some Cornish tin had taken an interesting turn, and I needed a meeting with my associates. I was so busy keeping my new shoes from getting blood on them that the monk’s greeting took me by surprise.
‘His Excellency the Dispensator would be glad of the citizen Alaric’s company,’ he said, looking down at me. If he was trying for a grand effect, it didn’t work. As he spoke, the heap of rubble on which he was standing gave way, and his last word ended in a squawk as he landed at my feet.
I could have laughed – especially at the dull sound of the corpse that broke his fall – but didn’t. As you might imagine from his name, the Dispensator’s job was to oversee the Papal charity that bound people materially to the Church. In fact, he had for some time been doing rather more than this. Now he was sinking deeper into his illness, poor old Pope Boniface signed whatever the Dispensator put before him, and did whatever he was advised. The Dispensator ran the Church. The Church ran Rome. If he wanted me now, my time was his.
So, having sent my slave on to the financial district with my excuses, I found myself for the first time since Christmas in the Lateran Palace.
‘I can find my own way in, many thanks,’ I said to the monk. He was plainly glad of the chance to go and get cleaned up before anyone saw him.
I turned left out of the lush beauty of the main hall and made as if for the Papal apartments. Then I took another left turn down an unlit corridor and found myself in the decidedly unlush waiting room outside the Dispensator’s office. I nodded to the clerical monk who kept order and walked past the various supplicants who waited there in silence.
After a while of sitting alone in the office, I heard the door open behind me from an inner room. With a rustle of linen and his usual dry cough, the Dispensator was with me.