Well, this had made the trip worth the effort! I’d not be telling Martin about it for fear of imitation, but I watched in fascination.
Indeed, as I watched that frenzied performance, I felt myself coming up in sympathy. For all he was no looker, the man was putting on a fine performance. You’ll pay through the nose to see anything half so good in a brothel.
I unclamped my left hand from the gutter and pushed it under my belly, down towards my crotch. With a horrid fright, I found myself sliding forward. One moment, I was as stable as if back in my bed. Another, and I was in free movement. I tightened my right grip on the gutter, trying to stabilise myself with brute strength. That stopped the sliding. Instead, I began to roll on to my left side. With my head and shoulders already hanging over the ledge, I was barely an inch short of rolling straight into the darkness. If the lead guttering held, I might be able to swing myself into the chapel.
Otherwise, it was the darkness.
Just in time, I got my left hand back on the gutter. My body pitched to the right. I was stable again.
I pulled myself up and lay flat along the ledge. What had looked wide and solid from my balcony now felt like a tightrope. The hundred or so yards back to the balcony stretched into as many miles as I lay shaking and sweating. For the first time, I wondered how I’d get back. Crawling on hands and knees had been easy enough. How to stand up again and turn with nothing but a blank wall to steady myself?
But I forced the thought from my mind. So long as I kept my nerves steady, I’d find my way back. I’d just have to be more careful.
Looking back into the room, I could see that Antony had given up on the scourging. He was now lying on his back, scrubbing the boards with his tattered flesh. A real enthusiast, I can tell you, would have had a dish of salt handy. As it was, those boards must have hurt like dry buggery.
Gasping with passion and at the terrible pain, he smashed hard with the whip handle on his balls and his continuously throbbing erection. It was all to no effect – or it was to none he might have admitted. With a despairing but subdued wail, he went off like an enema syringe. It was an impressive sight. Then, with a convulsive heave, he was over on his front. He buried his head in his clothes and sobbed disconsolately.
‘Oh, filthy, filth of filthiness,’ he mumbled into his clothes. ‘How shall I ever look back from the Jaws of Hell?’
Still erect and throbbing, his cock poked out from beneath his body.
‘Yes,’ I thought to whisper into the room – ‘Get out more often!’ But I resisted the urge. In his present mood, he’d probably think it was the Virgin herself giving him advice, and there was no telling what mischief I’d inflict on the streets.
I could have stayed to watch more of the tears and broken prayers. But I was still getting over my fright, and Antony had turned to slobbering over some relics. It was plain I’d seen the best he had to offer. Time to move on.
I continued along the ledge. The other rooms I passed below me were dark and silent. It was beginning to look as if that singular wank was all I’d see tonight.
But no – from the very last room before the right-angle turn to the left, I could see a flood of light. That was surely what I’d seen from my balcony. I positioned myself above and prepared to look down.
Before I could get my head down to look in, I pulled sharply back.
16
‘My dear Silas, if I can’t bring you to sympathise, you might at least take into account the problems we face.’
It was Theophanes, though it took me a moment to recognise the voice. His Latin had none of the ceremonious courtesy that it usually had with me. Instead, it was rapid and colloquial. He was standing by the window directly beneath me. He was so close, I could have reached down and touched his elaborately styled hair.
Another voice spoke indistinctly from deep inside the room. I couldn’t catch the words, but the voice was one of those affected noble drawls you still occasionally heard in Rome when I was young.
This was His Excellency Silas, the Permanent Legate to the Emperor of His Holiness in Rome. I badly wanted to twist down and get a look at him, but with Theophanes walking about the room, it was best to stay fully on the ledge and listen as well as I could to the conversation.
‘Can you imagine what it’s like to collect taxes when there are no taxpayers? To direct armies and ships that have their only existence on a sheet of papyrus? To govern cities that are for the most part become heaps of stinking ruins?
‘The revolt got up by the Exarch of Africa has brought on a crisis. Even if it can be handled, it has forced us to an awareness that we cannot continue indefinitely to act on the assumption that the plague of seventy years ago was a problem no worse than the barbarian invasions of the West.
‘We now have a solution to the problem. For the first time since we deposed Silverius, it is a solution that involves the Roman Church. You will soon not be tacking in your usual manner between increasingly ludicrous definitions of the Creed that only involve us in endless difficulties.’
There was more mumbling from inside the room. I could catch something like one word in three. But it brought an explosion of rage from Theophanes that left its meaning as plain as if I’d heard it all.
‘In private, Silas, let us be plain. Heresy is whatever your man in Rome declares it to be when the Greek and Eastern Churches disagree. And you support one side or the other exactly as suits your temporal interests. At least when there was an Emperor in the West, he only intervened in our affairs with some regard for the Empire as a whole. I increasingly think you people will only be happy when there is no Empire at all, and you can lay down your law among the successor kingdoms of the East as you are doing in the West.
‘But’ – his voice fell – ‘we now have an agreement that gives you what you want and safeguards every legitimate interest of our own.’
His voice rose suddenly to a strangled shout from deeper in the room: ‘So why are you doing your personal best to ruin everything? Aren’t we giving you enough?’
Delivered in a faint whine, there was more from Silas.
‘There is nothing more to discuss,’ Theophanes snapped. ‘The matter is fully agreed.’
Another reply, then Theophanes spoke again:
‘So far as they can be, the Lombards are squared. The Franks will not intervene. I have done what I can here to ease matters. For the rest, I look to you and yours.’
Outside on that ledge, I fought to control my breathing. There was no doubt I’d stumbled across something important. The question was what?
But that’s the problem with eavesdropping. If you don’t hear the beginning, you probably won’t understand all of it. What I did hear, though, knocked out every theory based on what I’d been told earlier. That was a lie for public consumption. Theophanes wanted people to think there was some difficulty with the Perman ent Legate, and that I was its cause. So far as I could now tell, there was an underlying agreement. The two of them, plus the Dispensator, were all in this together.
But what was this? If I’d been able to catch more than the occasional word in reply, it might all have made more sense. But the Permanent Legate was stationary on the far side of the room, and mumbling away like an adulterer at confession.
Why was he pretending to have withdrawn? Why had he let Theophanes in to lecture him? What was this deal? And where did I come into it? If I wasn’t needed to negotiate anything or to be an excuse for others not to negotiate, why had I been sent here? Why was I in so much danger?
I checked my thoughts. Did I now hear a mention of my name?
‘You will leave him also in my hands,’ Theophanes replied, a very hard tone in his voice.
Something now from Silas in a nasty voice, and an affected laugh.
‘I don’t care if he is!’ Theophanes said. I could almost hear the impatient wave. He moved back to the window. ‘Like most others of his sort, he was brought up a beer drinker, and he still drinks wine as if it were beer.
