I looked down at my naked body. I was black with filth. Aside from the general rubbing off of lead on me, the bird shit clung like an oily gel. A trickle of sweat that started from my chest was carrying bits of it on to the floorboards.
‘We can’t get a silent bath arranged,’ Martin said. ‘Authari, I’ll help you with cold water and sponges.’
They looked at each other. It was as if they were taking up a conversation I’d interrupted.
‘No,’ I said, suddenly cold with the ebbing of the excitement. ‘There’s plenty of water running through the latrine. I’ll scrub up in there.’
I heard a subdued wailing from some other room in the suite.
‘What in God’s name is that?’ I asked weakly. I was suddenly too exhausted to feel the alarm I felt I ought.
‘Let’s get you clean first,’ Martin replied edgily.
I looked down at the baby boy. He couldn’t have been more than a day old.
With infinite tenderness, Martin wrapped him in the sheet and laid him back on his bed. Authari took up the sponge again and was squeezing milk into the little open mouth.
‘He was lying all alone in the porch of the Mary Magdalene Church,’ Martin explained again. ‘There were some dogs sniffing at him. I couldn’t leave him.’
It was impossible to know who’d dumped him there. The mother would never come forward to say.
‘Well, you can’t keep him here,’ I said firmly. ‘You’ll have to take him back to St Mary’s. Let someone else take him. There’s always someone out there trawling for boys.’
‘Oh please,’ Martin gabbled, ‘please don’t say that.’
‘He was dumped too late already, Master,’ Authari broke in. ‘He’ll have to survive the dogs before he’s any chance of a foundling hospital.’
A foundling hospital? With beggars dying in the streets, the most likely outcome was that some priest would baptise the boy to save him from the fires of Hell, and then clap a hand over his nose and mouth.
‘What is to become of him?’ Martin asked.
What answer was there to that? I looked down at the boy again. I thought of my pregnant Gretel. I thought of Edwina and my living child. I swallowed and looked away.
‘We’ll look after him, Master,’ Authari added. ‘He’ll be no trouble to you. He can stay in the slave quarters below. You won’t know he’s down there.’
‘Then we’ll need a wet nurse,’ I said. ‘He’ll need to be fed.’
Those weren’t the words I’d intended. What I had intended was to order the child to be put back early the next evening and was astonished even as I uttered them. It was like watching a close friend say something unexpected.
Having said these words, though, there was no going back.
‘Martin,’ I added after a pause, ‘go to the slave market tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll pick up someone. You know where the key is to my strongbox. Take what you need from there. Do make sure to buy someone in good health.’
I cut off their excited babble and continued: ‘I take it you will adopt the child as your own. That, or you’ll rear him as a slave.’
Silence.
Martin’s wife would never allow him to adopt – not with their own child. He was plainly thinking of Sveta’s scolding voice. As for enslavement:
‘Such is against the laws of the Empire,’ Martin said with sudden pedantry. ‘If you pick up a foundling, its status is automatically freeborn.’
I gave a cynical laugh. ‘That’s what the lawyers say. Didn’t they also tell you and your father that enslavement for debt had been abolished? You really should ask the brothel keepers where they get their stock.’
If Martin wanted a boy slave, he had one here for the taking. But he still wasn’t interested.
I looked hard at the child. No longer crying, it lay calm before me, eyes still squeezed shut. It was very, very small.
‘Your next act of goodness’, I said slowly, ‘will have rather more thought about the practicalities than this one.’
I paused for silence. Then: ‘I will adopt the child myself. I don’t know if I’m of age yet to do that sort of thing within the law. But the Law of Persons can be flexible if approached in the proper way.’
I bent down and scooped the child into my arms. ‘I accept this child as my own,’ I said, speaking loud. It really was like watching someone else. ‘I name him’ – I thought quickly – ‘I name him Maximin after the dear man who saved my own life as an act of charity.’
Yes – that was right. I thought back two years to that time in Kent, when Maximin had walked all day through the rain to snatch me back from King Ethelbert. But for him, I’d be dead by now. And that was if I were lucky.
It was right that I should rescue someone equally helpless, and that I should call him Maximin.
I brought the child’s head up to my lips. After so much cold scrubbing downstairs, I was more than usually sensitive to the sudden warmth. A strange lump came into my throat as I breathed in the babyish smell. I wanted to add some formal-sounding declaration of paternity. But I found I couldn’t speak.
I put the bundle down again and walked quickly from the room. As I went back down the corridor to my own bedroom, I could hear Martin and Authari fussing over my Maximin. He would need a room on the upper floor now, Authari said. Martin replied in a dreamy voice that was part relief and part something else.
Had I lost face? I asked myself as I undressed for what remained of the night. Had I shown weakness? Perhaps I had. But I didn’t feel that it mattered.
I was woken by the sound of banging outside my window. The sun was still low in the sky, and there were long shadows that kept the gardens overcast.
Standing on the balcony, I looked along the line of windows towards the dome. There was a long ladder going all the way up to where the ledge above the windows joined the dome. Slaves were hard at work, fixing an elaborate contraption of spiked railings.
How the thing had been put together in such a short time was beyond me. But there would be no more night wanderings around the outside of the Legation.
One of the slaves noticed me. Holding the ladder carefully with one hand, he touched the other to his head and bowed as best he could.
I nodded and looked away. In the enclosed garden just below the balcony, those five monks were at work again. They seemed to be under a vow of perpetual silence. When I’d spoken to the one I had seen looking up at me on the first day, he’d drawn his hood closer over his face and turned away from me. Was he watching me now, as I stood observing the slow and rather haphazard tending of the flower-beds?
I stepped back inside. I needed to think all this through. Why had Theophanes killed Justinus of Tyre? What had been in that letter? Above all, what was the nature of this agreement between him and the Church? If it involved suppressing the African revolt, why be so frightened of the Emperor? What was that stuff about bribing the Lombards?
And where did I fit into this scheme of things? Theophanes had confirmed I was useful, and so worth keeping alive. But for what purpose and for how long?
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Maximin crying in the room next but one to mine. With a jumble of recollection, I realised it hadn’t been a dream never mind what had happened in Kent nor what might in Rome: I really was a father.
‘God’s tits!’ I muttered. I looked round for something to drink, but found only lemon water. I threw on a dressing gown and stepped out of the room.
Authari was folding a fresh napkin for the child. There was a bright shitty smell all around. Martin was making a proper mess with the milk and sponge. Every so often, he was getting a drop into the child’s mouth and the cries turned to an odd gurgling.
As I entered the baby’s room, Martin stood. I motioned him to continue. One way or another, my son had to be fed.
I looked at Maximin in the light of day. Babies by nature are never beautiful, and he was gasping and choking
