down, and I couldn’t identify their function even by the broken inscriptions.
Once or twice, I turned to ask Maximin. He’d known Rome from any number of visits. Sometimes, he’d answer with a firm confidence that I was willing to trust. Quite often, even he was vague about the former uses of these falling or fallen buildings.
‘It was a temple to some demon,’ he said, pointing up at the great Temple of Jupiter that still loomed above us on the Capitoline Hill. ‘As with all the others, it was closed over two hundred years ago on the orders of Caesar. God willing, it may soon fall down – or be turned to some holy purpose. So many were the demons who resided in this city before men were brought to the True Faith of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Even now, they wander the Earth, tempting the unwary to blasphemy or heresy.’
Knowing Maximin as I did, I mastered the urge to sniff. I resolved instead to get him again when he was feeling less devout. Plainly, Rome was in no need of temples. With the decay of power and population, it also had little need of administrative buildings. But it would be nice to know what all these places had been.
It didn’t help that the Tiber had risen in the past hundred years, and the Forum was now regularly flooded. We mostly walked over compacted mud several feet higher than the old pavements.
Just in front of the Julian Basilica, though, the ground had been cleared, and there was a gleaming new column set up with a golden statue on top. About fifty feet up, the statue was a crude lump of bronze. It looked barely human. It made a shocking change from the smooth perfection of the marble statues we’d just seen in the Basilica or still dotted here and there about the city. The thin leaf covering was coming off. But the column was an elegant, fluted thing. Untouched by the elements, it had obviously been salvaged from some ruined interior – like all other new work in Rome.
This was my first sight of the Column of Phocas. The inscription on its base – placed over another that had been chiselled out – said everything. Part of it read:
We have erected a dazzling golden statue of His Majesty, our Lord Phocas, the Eternal Emperor, the Triumphator crowned of God, in return for countless good deeds, for the establishing of peace in Italy, and for the preservation of freedom.
It had been set up a year or so before by the pope in the presence of Exarch Smaragdus, over from Ravenna, in honour of the emperor. In recent years, pope and emperor had not always been at one. The emperor saw Italy as an outpost. It was a place where taxes should be collected rather than spent. His main concerns were the Persians across the Euphrates and the barbarians beyond the Danube. It took up all the work of diplomacy and strategy to bribe or otherwise to conciliate, or repel these groups by arms from the taxpaying provinces.
The pope, of course, saw things differently. He’d taken effective control over Rome and some other parts of Italy, and was dealing with the Lombards as if he were a sovereign prince. The treaty Pope Gregory had made some years earlier was technically an act of treason. But the days when an emperor could arrest and replace a pope – as Justinian had – were long past.
Then there was the matter of religious primacy. As the successor of Saint Peter, and bishop of Rome, the pope claimed a supreme status above all the other churchmen and an equality with the emperor himself. Pope Gregory had taken up and refurbished the old claim to be regarded as the universal bishop.
So long as they could, the emperors in Constantinople had deprecated or ignored this claim. But then Phocas had taken power by murdering the legitimate emperor, and had run into endless domestic and foreign challenges. Gregory, though old and dying, was still the most effective pope in hundreds of years. It was he who’d sent out the mission to England.
He’d seized his chance with Phocas. In return for some gross but vague flattery – of which this column, set up after his death, was one instance – and a more effective, though less public, series of bribes, the emperor had conceded the title of universal bishop and tacitly accepted the temporal supremacy of the pope in Rome. The gift of one of the larger temples for conversion to a church was a minor thing besides.
We bumped into one of the lawyers we’d seen earlier, pissing against a fallen column outside the Senate House. He gave us a little papyrus slip advertising his name and services, and launched into an overblown declamation on the splendid ceremony that had attended the dedication of the column. There was the exarch himself. There was Pope Boniface, just consecrated after a nine-month interval that had followed the sudden death of the previous Boniface – in those days, popes couldn’t be consecrated without the imperial warrant, and Phocas had held out for a bigger bribe.
‘There was,’ the lawyer said, spreading his arms dramatically, ‘a multitude of the highest dignitaries that came from all four corners of the universe, and all the glory and magnitude of the great Roman People assembled here in the very navel of the universe.’
It took an entire handful of copper to get the spouting wretch off our backs – I thought he’d follow us back to Marcella’s. Instead, he stuffed the coins into his purse and slouched off towards a wine shop set up under the Arch of Septimius Severus.
On the way back, I thought several times we were followed. As ever, the streets were mostly empty, and our shoes rasped loud on the paving stones. But could I hear a soft patter of feet behind us? I knew already Rome was a dangerous place, and cursed myself for leaving my sword behind when we’d set out to see the prefect. My knife would be of limited use against more than one attacker. But every time I stopped and looked round, the street behind was empty and silent. Was it an echo? It might have been. I only heard the noise when we were moving.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ said Maximin. ‘Rome can be frightening when the light has gone. Let’s hurry back.’
We quickened our pace. So did the footsteps behind. But if they were there, they kept a regular distance, and we didn’t look round again.
At the top of the hill, there were some slaves lounging by a little shrine and other people going about their late afternoon errands. There was a sound of hammering from one of the houses as some roofing tiles were replaced. Soon, we were back at Marcella’s. With the inner gate shut behind us, we felt safer.
We’d felt safe too early. Our rooms had been searched. It was a clever job. I’d not have noticed, except the book on drains I’d borrowed earlier was turned over, its spine facing right instead of left. And the little green stone Edwina had once given me was fallen out of the fold in my cloak where I’d stored it.
Had it been my rooms only, I’d have concluded it was the slaves going about their business or looking for things to steal. But Maximin’s papers had been gone through. He was always very neat about these, and had spent an age when he unpacked in arranging these into the right order. He swore they had all been disarranged. Yet when Maximin checked the money he’d left on full display, none was missing. Nor was his silver crucifix. Whoever had been in wasn’t after cash. We called for Marcella. She was distraught.
‘But he was such a well-spoken gentleman,’ she wailed, looking at the papers on Maximin’s table. ‘He swore he was sent by you from the prefect’s office to get some things you’d forgotten. This is a respectable house for respectable people. We’ve never had this sort of thing before.’
‘What did he look like?’ I asked.
He was a tall, dark man, she explained among a mass of irrelevant detail, with a scar and an eye patch. ‘He was ever so polite. He knew your names and where you’d gone, and everything. I had no reason on earth to believe he could be a common thief.’
She fell into a chair, fanning herself with a battered ostrich feather. ‘Gretel! Gretel!’ she screamed. ‘Where are you? Where have you gone, you lazy good-for-nothing bitch?’
The little maid I’d earlier seen scrubbing the step came silently into the room. She was a stunner – and by the sideways look she threw me, I could see she thought the same of me. The moment I heard Maximin snoring across the corridor, I told myself, I’d have her. For a moment, I clean forgot the matter in hand.
‘Gretel, you little Lombard bitch, you hear me well. You don’t never let strangers into the house again. You hear me? You don’t let no one in. I say who comes and goes in this house, and don’t you forget – else I’ll sell you into the brothel God made you to furnish.’ She heaved herself up. ‘O fie, sirs! Just look at the refuse we have to buy nowadays. Even persons of quality – such as I myself – is hard put to find slaves what aren’t uppity. Shall I have her whipped for you?’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ said Maximin. He could have added it wasn’t Gretel in any event who’d let One-Eye into our rooms.
‘Where is the relic?’ I asked quietly.
