‘So,’ I asked, ‘in your opinion, everything in these instructions can be done right here in Rome?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Here in Rome. At worst, there might be a trip to Ravenna.’
I’d already guessed as much. But Martin was the expert in this. The Dispensator could bully till he was black in the face. He could put whatever gloss took his fancy on why someone employed by the Emperor or by Heraclius or by someone else who didn’t give a toss about heresy in Spain had wanted me dead here in Rome. But I knew he was no expert on the scholarship of heresy.
Yes – I’d have the man by both his tits.
‘Then it’s agreed’, I said, ‘we go to the Dispensator just before dinner-time and tell him to go jump. And when we celebrate in my house afterwards, we shall indeed be what he calls “an harmonious and lucky team”!’
And that did seem to be it. There’d be no trip to the East. The nearest I’d come to the civil war would be betting on whether Heraclius the son or Nicetas the nephew would race each other fairly to Constantinople, or if they’d turn on each other before either could get there.
I rolled the letter back into its case. Feeling peckish again, I was thinking how most delicately to ask if Martin had been able to afford to buy bread – the free-distribution stuff was fit only for pigs.
Just as I was about to speak, the monk who’d accosted me the day before was shown into the kitchen.
‘I bring verbal orders from the Dispensator himself,’ he said in a dramatic whisper that could probably have woken the now-sleeping child upstairs. ‘They supplement or replace your written letter of instruction. Listen carefully, as I am required to give you these orders once only and then to forget them.’
He looked round to make sure no one else was listening, and recited:
‘The citizens Alaric and Martin are hereby requested and required to proceed at once to Constantinople, there to receive such further instructions as may be transmitted from Rome. Each will be collected from his home tonight at the midnight hour and be conveyed thence to the river under armed guard and in a covered chair. The citizen Alaric will be conveyed home now by the same means. Each may take whatever he has time to pack. Anything he cannot pack shall be listed for His Excellency the Dispensator to have sent on by faster intercepting ship.
‘Neither shall tell anyone that he is leaving Rome until he is beyond the city walls, when free communication may be re-established for all purposes. The citizen Alaric is exempted from this requirement so far as concerns his banker, the Jew Solomon ben Baruch, who has already been instructed to attend on the citizen Alaric at his house.
‘The Lady Marcella has received separate instructions regarding the safe-keeping of her slave Gretel. The wife and household of the citizen Martin shall be conveyed at the same time and by the same means from his house to the fortified house of the Sisters of St Eugenia, there to remain as guests until such time as His Excellency the Lord Dispensator shall think appropriate.
‘The citizen Alaric shall bear the whole cost of the stay in Constantinople and such other costs as may attend his stay. He shall, on his return to Rome, render an account of these to His Excellency the Lord Dispensator, who may see fit to order reasonable reimbursement.’
The monk finished his recitation in a blaze of self-congratulation. He sat down and fanned his shining face. He drank deep from the wine jug and wiped his lips after an appreciative smack. He pretended to ignore the chaos of screams and recriminations that had broken out around him.
Sveta had caught enough of the message to send her into a vicious frenzy. She’d lost command of her Latin, and I couldn’t follow the rapid Slavonic of her nagging. But the repeated hissing of my name, and the nasty looks she threw me, told me it was best to sit still. No point trying to explain she’d misapprehended me again.
The slave woman had caught none of the message, but assumed it was a notice of eviction. She was beating her head against the kitchen wall, screaming to be struck dead for the shame of it all.
His voice muffled by his hands, Martin was calling out again and again: ‘God forgive me my sins! God have mercy on my soul!’
Overhead and unregarded, the baby wailed piteously.
‘I am not at liberty’, the monk shouted happily above the noise, ‘to take any question regarding your instructions. In any event, I am already forgetting them.’ He took another long swig.
‘If you don’t wipe that fucking smirk off your face’, I shouted back, ‘I’ll give you something you won’t forget. Now pass me that jug.’
I fought to suppress the horror bubbling up within me. For all I sneered at Martin, he seemed right enough this time. Perhaps I had just heard a death sentence. Only a day earlier, I’d been rejoicing at the turn my life had taken. Now, I was caught like a rabbit in a snare.
I hadn’t just been had by the Dispensator. I’d been really had.
I looked out through the now-open door to the street where I could already see my covered chair and a couple of armed enforcers standing by.
‘Fuck the Church!’ I muttered into the jug. ‘And fuck the fucking Dispensator!’
And that’s how I came to be standing on the Senatorial Dock a month or so later, with Martin for company, with a fat eunuch to bid me welcome, and with a whole row of stinking corpses swinging to and fro behind him.
So, let us now unfreeze everyone and thank them for their patience, and get on with the story.
5
‘You will, of course, be staying in the residence of His Excellency the Permanent Legate,’ Theophanes said as my chair drew level with his. After a blockage caused by some building works, the road had widened again to allow any amount of traffic side by side.
‘You will find the Legation eminently suited to your station in the City. Besides, it is very close by the Patriarchal Library attached to the Great Church, and fairly close to the University. It would be a poor use of your valuable time to have to cross the City unattended every time you wanted to go about your duties.’
We reached a main junction, and he turned to nodding and smiling at other persons of quality as they were carried by. I saw that few people in Constantinople went about on horseback or in wheeled carriages. Most were in open chairs like our own, each carried by four strong slaves who sweated in the sun. Some rode in closed chairs. I took these to be women of quality.
While Theophanes exchanged his ritualised greetings, I turned my own attention to the sights of Constantinople.
When Constantine rebuilt the City, he tried to make it so far as possible a copy of Rome. His Senate House, for example, was a direct copy of the one in Rome. Indeed, his Covered Market exactly copied the jumble of styles that centuries of extension had given the one in Rome.
Now, Rome was fallen on evil days, but Constantinople had come through unharmed. Whether in shadow or still catching the beams of the afternoon sun, the painted stucco clearly marked one building from its neighbours. From the homes and businesses of the mercantile and professional classes to the garrets of the poor, the buildings rose in careful gradations from ground to topmost floors. Every dozen yards or so, the torch brackets were set up to light the streets when the sun had gone down. Smoothly paved, with drainage points unblocked, the streets were spotlessly clean – swept and washed several times a day. Carried by aqueduct or in underground pipes, water splashed from fountain after fountain, and in bronze pipes running down the walls carried waste from the larger buildings.