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
