Conspiracies of Rome Read online

  He prosed on about that learned ancestor of his. So educated, he’d been, yet still he’d met his end by having a cord put around his forehead and tightened till the eyes popped out. ‘Let there be an end to learning, and then we can all be at peace,’ he concluded, hobbling off for what I took at the time, from his quickened movements, to be a piss.

  By the door, he turned back and added, now more rational again – almost, indeed, humorous: ‘Never grow old, my little Briton. It really isn’t worth the effort.’

  Martin was sitting at a table in one of the other rooms. He had several books open before him.

  ‘What are those?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve found the Greek section, sir,’ he said, pointing down at a scroll written in black with headings in faded gold.

  I looked hungrily at the text. ‘What is that one you’re reading?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the fifth book of Thucydides – his description of the Sicilian Expedition.’

  ‘May I see?’ I looked closer over his shoulder.

  He stood up and gave me his place. I sat, making sure not to get dust on my fine clothes, and looked at the glued sheets. I could read some of the words, though they were written in a slightly different alphabet from the one Maximin had taught me by scratching in the mud on those French roads. I could understand words here and there. But the whole was in a Greek far more complex than I had learnt. It might for the most important part have been in a foreign language.

  I looked up in despair. ‘I can’t read it,’ I said. ‘Can you teach me?’

  ‘When would you start?’

  ‘Now?’ I suggested.

  Martin went to the racks and brought back another book. ‘This is by Xenophon,’ he explained. ‘The Greek is pure, but simple enough to understand if you can read the Gospels.’

  He pulled up another chair, and began the lesson.

  So I put myself back into school. Martin was a good teacher. If his father had been even better, no wonder the Greeks had hated them. He read each sentence, giving me his father’s reconstructed sound of the words. I followed him with my own reading. He told me it was important for appreciating the pure language to forget the modern pronunciation I’d got from Maximin. The two languages were often so far apart, it was best to regard them as separate. I could easily switch back into the modern pronunciation for speaking with educated moderns. Then he turned to explaining those difficulties of grammar and syntax that would puzzle a student who knew only the spoken language of the moderns.

  It was like swimming in the sea at Richborough – the water was cold, so that wading in was difficult and movement was stiff and awkward at first, but then gradually your strokes became more and more confident. I won’t pretend that I ended that lesson with anything like a perfect grasp of those endlessly complex variations of tense and mood. But I could understand the rising excitement of those brave and resourceful Greek mercenaries who, after so many months of passing through the landlocked realms of the barbarian, at last reached the sea and knew that they would see home again.

  As Martin rolled up the book, I asked: ‘How long before I can read your Thucydides?’

  ‘It can take years of patient study by the modern Greeks to write like him,’ he said. ‘The only modern my father said had perfectly succeeded was a Syrian called Procopius – and he’d studied Greek as a foreign language. But just to read him – I think, at your speed of progress, we can move to him long before the books are all ready for shipping to Canterbury. But you will need to work every day.’

  ‘Every day and all day, if I must,’ I said firmly.

  It was dark outside when we left. This time, we were accompanied back by two of Marcella’s big slaves. And still we were followed. No one else seemed to notice, and I decided to ignore the footsteps behind us.

  As we arrived, it began to rain, and I could feel a storm coming on. I hadn’t gone off as agreed to dine with Lucius. Should I set out in the dark and rain? No. I sent him a note of apology, and promised to come to him for breakfast.

  33

  I’d decided on dinner in the common room that Marcella provided for her guests. I would get Martin out of dining with the other slaves. In return for a decent meal, he could continue explaining some of the difficulties that had come up during our inspection of Xenophon.

  As I was locking the door to my rooms, though, I was caught by the diplomat. He’d been dawdling in the long corridor that led to all the upper quarters, and I knew he’d been waiting for me. But he smiled as if surprised at a sudden meeting, and invited me to dinner in his own rooms.

  I thought to go back and change. I was, after all, only expecting to eat with persons of little consequence – and not even that if Martin had gone off to be with his woman. But the diplomat was dressed with less than his usual magnificence, and was rather pressing with his invite.

  I agreed and followed him directly to his rooms.

  The dishes were all of gold, made in a style I’d never before seen. The food almost knocked my head off – all pepper and other spices I’d not yet encountered. As we munched our way through the various courses of burning and brightly coloured meats, I found myself downing pint after pint of that fizzy water.

  ‘You will surely forgive my lack of wine,’ the diplomat had explained as I sat down with him. ‘Except for the Holy Sacraments – in which we are far more assiduous than either Latins or Greeks – it is something not permitted in my country to persons of quality.’

  I made a polite comment. My spirits sank. Even Martin, down in the slave quarters, would have beer with the warmed-up leftovers from the common room.

  But I couldn’t fault the conversation. The diplomat now gave me a regular lecture on the science of making money on the financial markets. Forget what I’d picked up earlier from him and on the Exchange, this was my real introduction to the ways of the market. After five years in Alexandria, he knew everything worth knowing.

  Of course, what he told me now merely scratched the surface of a discipline that only a study of many years would fully reveal. And he was deliberately vague about the nature of what he had really been up to at the Exchange.

  I asked him about the Great Library of Alexandria – was it still there?

  ‘There are libraries there,’ he said. ‘But you will find them filled with the vain learning of those who did not accept the Truth revealed by Jesus Christ. In my view, that it was not long ago committed to the flames shows how little the Greeks have really accepted of the Truth.’

  From this, he went on to an account of the True Orthodoxy of his own national Church. Outside the Empire, the Ethiopians had fallen into just about every heresy dreamt up in the East. Monophysitism was the least of their derelictions. I wondered again what on earth he could be doing at large in Rome. But without any visible seam in his discourse, he drifted from the single, not fused, nature of Christ to the charms of the women in my own part of the world.

  ‘If bathed long enough,’ he said with an appreciative smack of his lips, ‘and if correctly perfumed, your women can be quite comely.’

  As the meal ended, one of the slaves brought us glass goblets filled with a hot blue liquid. The diplomat’s eyes lit up at the sight. He drained half of his goblet with a hungry gulp.

  I sniffed doubtfully at mine. Get through the generous helping of spices with which it was dosed, and it smelt like dogshit.

  ‘But do drink, my young Aelric,’ the diplomat said with a now measured sip. ‘It does all that your wine offers and much more beside. Drink up and enjoy.’

  My palate was now so seared by the dinner that I barely noticed the taste. All I noticed was an extreme sweetness over something bitter that left my mouth dry. After the first preparatory sip, I drained the goblet and set it down on the table. Having managed a whole dinner in the Ethiopian style, I wasn’t inclined to show myself up with any barbarian delicacy in matters of drink.

  The diplomat gave me an alarmed stare and muttered something about the need to savour his –
I think he called it – kaphkium.

  ‘I’ll drink the next one more slowly,’ I said, leaning back in my chair. I could feel an oddly serene energy spreading through my body. Whatever was in this stuff beat what both Marcella and Lucius had given me the other day.

  ‘Now,’ I said, sitting forward again with a bump of the chair, ‘there are other things that need to be discussed—’

  ‘Such as the division of our spoils,’ the diplomat broke in.

  ‘All in good time,’ I replied. ‘First, we do need to discuss how you came to know my real name. Everyone here calls me Alaric. Do say how you learnt otherwise.’

  The diplomat smiled. ‘It is my business, Aelric, to know everything that may be relevant to my purposes,’ he said.

  ‘That still leaves us,’ I continued, ‘with the matter of what relevance I may have to your purposes. For all it concerns our fraud on the markets, my name might as well be Henghist or Cholodowicus. So why have you made it your business to learn that much about me? And how did you learn it? You could only have got it from the dispensator or the prefect. The first originated the mistake that got me my name in this city. The second was probably too lazy to inspect any of the documents Father Maximin showed him.’

  A feeble opening, perhaps. But it was the best one I could devise at the time. I was hoping I might get some correction out of the diplomat that would give a little more information about what was known about me and how.

  ‘Yes,’ the diplomat said, wrenching the conversation away, ‘the Blessed Martyr Maximin, who will soon be the Most Holy Saint Maximin. His murder was a truly shocking business. Such things would never happen in my own country. There, we know the respect due even to heretical priests of the True Faith. At the very least, we question them before proceeding further than arrest.

  ‘I do feel a certain degree of guilt that I was the last person who had a civilised discussion with the Holy Martyr. I saw that he was troubled in mind, yet passed up the opportunity to lighten his burden. In particular, I do very much regret that I only discovered after his murder that he was possessed of certain objects that might be of concern to a person of great and increasing importance in the Empire.’

  The diplomat looked steadily into my face. I tried to look back. But whatever had been in that drink had set my mind on a course of wandering that it took all my efforts to control.

  ‘You told me the other day,’ I said thickly, ‘that you had information that was of relevance to the matter of Father Maximin’s death. Can you tell me now what that might be?’

  The diplomat smiled and beckoned his slave to pour me another cup of water. ‘You will find,’ he said, ‘that all I might have been able to tell you came out in yesterday’s meeting with your friend the lord Basilius. I have nothing further to say beyond a repeat of my most earnest condolences.

  ‘I am, however, very interested in the matter of those letters. I believe there were four of them. I knew soon after you arrived at this most charming residence of your good fortune to the north of Rome. I was not aware until too late of the attendant circumstances.’

  ‘There were three letters only,’ I said, hoping the needless correction would give me time to think of something that would be an answer, but would give nothing important away.

  The diplomat ignored my correction. ‘Have you any idea what they might have contained?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. The diplomat changed his approach.

  ‘Can you tell me what you discovered at the House of the Sisters of the Blessed Theodora?’ he asked. ‘Did anyone there see the letters?’

  ‘Maximin never got there,’ I said. ‘He was killed shortly after he’d set out to go there.’

  ‘So the letters have disappeared,’ the diplomat said, his tone half statement half question.

  ‘They are sought by the Church and by other persons,’ he added with a noticeable emphasis. ‘But no one so far has been able to set eyes on them.

  ‘As well as the Church and these other persons, I also am now seeking the letters.’

  ‘You and your master the exarch of Africa,’ I said. I wanted to show the man I knew something. ‘I wonder how much they might be worth if you could take them to him?’

  The diplomat smiled broadly again. His teeth shone white in the lamplight, the gap between as dark as a prison cell.

  ‘Why don’t you help me find out?’ he asked. ‘You were pleased enough with the trifle of money we picked up this morning. Can you imagine how much more could be yours in return for the right information? Have you any notion of what money can buy? Think of your highest price and double it.’

  He leaned forward to me, his eyes shining. ‘I don’t know what those letters contain. But I feel they are worth much – to the Church, perhaps to the Lombards, and perhaps to all those who have or who want this Empire of the Romans for themselves.’

  He controlled himself and sat back.

  ‘So you are working for the exarch of Africa?’ I asked.

  Above his continued smile, the diplomat’s face turned impassive. ‘I work for no one beside the king whose maternal grandmother is mine also,’ he said. ‘It is my business in the Empire to know many things, and to trade information with those who can offer me and mine benefits in return.’

  ‘Do you know what happened to me last night?’ I asked, with another laboured effort to take control of the conversation.

  The diplomat shed his impassive look and gave me another of his open smiles. ‘You fucked a barbarian slave,’ he said. ‘I sampled her delights for myself when I arrived, but found her strong bodily odour a bar to true felicity of flesh.’

  ‘Some toughs tried to murder me in the street,’ I said, thinking it might do to slap the little whore about the next time we were alone.

  ‘So many the dangers of this great but fallen city,’ the diplomat replied. ‘However, you did tell me this morning of your adventures. Was there anything else about them that you might wish now to share with me?’

  He fell silent. He sat looking at me for what seemed a long time. At last, my will snapped, and I asked: ‘You may not know, but what do you think was in the letters?’

  ‘If I thought anything clearly, my golden boy from the North,’ he smiled back at me, ‘would I be so eager to learn it from you?’

  ‘This conversation,’ he said at length, ‘is private. If you care for your new friend Basilius, you will keep all this to yourself. As for the letter you had me sign, bear in mind it is a sword with two edges.’

  He called one of his slaves over with more fizzy water. By the time I staggered out of his suite, I was bursting.

  34

  I fell sweating into my bed. My mind was racing, and I thought for a moment I’d not get to sleep. But I no sooner had the covers pulled up than I was out like an extinguished lamp.

  I had the strangest dream. I was back outside that wine shop on the Caelian Hill. It was night, and there was no moon overhead. I was with Lucius and Martin beside the broken sewer. Martin was holding a torch that burned without any noticeable flame. All around was still and silent.

  The sewer was different. Rather than terminating about six foot down in a thick layer of earth and rotting filth, it was too deep to see the bottom. A cold draught blew steadily up at us, carrying the faint smell of something very old and frightening. A flight of worn steps led down into the mobile blackness. They went down and down, seemingly far beyond the range of the light from our single torch.

  ‘Go on, Martin,’ I urged. ‘Go down there and have a look. We’ll be up here for you, and you can assuredly trust us to come down if you get lost.’

  Martin looked at me with doubt showing plain on his face.

  ‘Go on,’ Lucius joined me in urging. ‘There might be something valuable down there, and we’ll let you share it with us.’ He spoke in the cold, peremptory tone he always adopted with slaves.

  At last, after a brief shove from Lucius, Martin went down into the shadows. Before setting foot on the steps, he handed
me the torch, and I saw his pale, scared face as he walked down into the endless blackness of the sewer.

  We could hear his footsteps crunching lightly on the various mortar crumbs and other débris that lay on the steps.

  ‘It’s very dark down here,’ he cried up plaintively. ‘Can I come back up and borrow the torch? I can’t see anything.’

  ‘You’ve started now,’ Lucius replied firmly. ‘You’ve got to see it out.’

  Down and down he went, until we could hear nothing more of him. There followed an interminable wait in which Lucius and I speculated on what might have happened below.

  ‘Are you all right, Martin?’ I called softly down. ‘Have you found anything down there?’

  No answer.

  The darkness within the shadow of the sewer grew more intense, and I noticed that the torch was beginning to fade without burning out.

  Suddenly, at what sounded an incredible distance, we heard footsteps ascending. These were not the light, hesitant steps we had heard going down, but a slow, regular tread crunching heavily on the steps.

  ‘Is that you, Martin?’ I called down nervously.

  No answer – only the same tread coming steadily closer up the steps.

  ‘It is him,’ Lucius said with trembling voice. ‘He’s just trying to frighten us.

  ‘I’ll have him flogged when he comes out.’

  At this point, the torch went out, and we stood in utter darkness.

  The footsteps were now just a few yards below, and I could hear something brushing on the steps as if dragged behind. Without seeing or hearing or smelling anything new, I had the impression of something unspeakably old and unspeakably evil.

  Lucius and I bolted. We ran back down the street, looking for the security of Marcella’s house. There was a wall across the street where there had been nothing before. In the centre of the wall was a small gate. Lucius dragged it open, and we ran through into the clear street beyond.