With the coming of bad times, the city had reacted like an alarmed snail and withdrawn behind the impenetrable fastness of its walls. But if the houses and gardens that had once stretched deep into Thrace were now largely abandoned, the churches and religious houses were still kept up.
The Church of St Victorinus was one of these places. It was far too small for the thousands who’d come out for the festival, but was an elegant place – built in the shape of a cross, and painted a tasteful red. About fifty yards distant, some hermit had taken up residence at the top of a column that still stood over the building it had once helped to support. With lunatic eyes bulging from his dishevelled face, he stared down at the crowds from the edge of the wooden platform his followers had put up for him. He was uttering benedictions and prophecies for anyone who could take his attention from Saint Victorinus and provide him with morsels of bread and wine.
According to the interminable sermon a young priest delivered to us while we stood in a dense mass outside the church, Victorinus was a fuller from Adrianople who had been clubbed to death here after having delivered to the heretical Emperor Constantius a long oration in the best theological Greek on the equal substance of Father and Son. Afterwards, flowers of unearthly beauty had sprung up on the spot – flowers that sang the Creed of Athanasius to everyone whose life so far had been exceptionally blameless.
Of course, multitudes were soon claiming to hear these singing flowers, and there had been the usual cures of the lame and the blind. So a church had been built there, and the anniversary of the martyrdom was a standing excuse for a good time outside the walls.
Now we were there to say hello to the man, and to see if his flowers could be persuaded back into tune.
‘I must be going deaf in my old age,’ I whispered to Martin as, during a pause in the sermon, we all stood looking up to a raised patch of ground close by the church on which a shrivelled rose bush was shedding its petals.
‘Shut up, dolt!’ someone next to me hissed. ‘I can barely hear the singing of the Creed for your barbarian ribaldry.’
Barbarian, indeed! Anywhere else, he’d have got my fist in his mouth and my knee hard in his groin. But I held my peace. There would be food and drink soon enough. From the preparations I’d seen in hand when we arrived, there would be acrobats and jugglers too. The whores who flitted discreetly round the edges of the crowd were already taking bookings for later.
I looked over the heads of those gathered outside the church, bowed in reverence. There was a bit of shuffling and coughing, and a few groans that I took to be outpourings of rapture. No bird sang in that hot September air. Even the various bugs had been intimidated into silence.
It would be jolly enough later. For the moment, though, boredom and the late-afternoon sun were making the time drag. Was there anyone in that crowd worth looking at? Was there any face there I could bring to mind for a good wank later?
‘How sweetly the flowers sing of the True Faith,’ a voice behind me whispered. ‘Do you not hear the delicacy of phrasing?’
‘But of course I do, Theophanes,’ said I, turning. ‘I hear them as well as you do.’
Did I see the man’s face twitch for just a moment? It was hard to say. He stood a few feet back from me in a small parting of the crowd. For once, Alypius wasn’t in attendance. Instead, Theophanes was accompanied by two black slaves who fanned him gently with ostrich feathers. There was enough paint on his face to cover the prow of a warship, and enough jewellery on his bloated neck and arms to stock one of the finer shops in Middle Street. Certainly, the robe he wore must have kept the silkworms busy for a year.
‘It is so restful to breathe the pure air of the country, do you not think, young Alaric?’ he said in a more conversational tone. ‘I regret that my duties prevent me from leaving the City as often as I might wish.’
He turned to Martin. ‘And you too, my little Martin, how unexpected to see you outside the City.’
Martin gave a rather shifty downward look. Before he could be expected to answer, Theophanes was continuing:
‘But why not join me? I have a private tent beyond the crowd, where food and wine await your attention.’
I suppose the country has its charms. But refreshments have a charm of their own, and lunch was a distant memory.
‘Did you not hear the singing flowers?’ I asked Martin as we pushed our way out of the crowd.
‘No, sir,’ said he in a mournful voice. ‘I don’t think my life has been sufficiently holy.’
‘Never mind,’ I consoled him. ‘You did see that miracle in Lesbos that I said was a trick of the light.’
I decided to leave Authari to stand out the rest of the sermon. He’d not have approved its anti-Arianism if he had been up to following the Greek. We had taken up a position convenient for the wine stalls, because I didn’t fancy risking an evening of fruit juice.
I needn’t have worried. Theophanes’ refreshment tent was about the size of a small house and was all of yellow silk. It was furnished with an opulence I will not try to describe except to say that, gleaming in the suffused yellow light, there was some of the finest silverware I’d ever seen, and piled high on this was a quantity and variety of delicacies an epic poet might have struggled to enumerate.
‘I am ashamed to bring you before so miserable a collage,’ Theophanes began. ‘Had I known I should be blessed by such worthy company as your own-’
He was cut short by a scream outside.
One scream we might have ignored. Perhaps a woman was giving birth. Perhaps someone had trodden on her toes. Women can’t keep their mouths shut at the best of times. But that first scream was taken up by others in the crowd. What had been an enlarged gathering of the reverent was breaking up into a shouting, terrified commotion.
Fast-moving shadows flitted at random across the walls of the tent. Someone now tripped over and broke one of the retaining cords. The corner it had held taut went limp and began gently to sag.
I wrenched open the tent flap and looked out. All was breaking up in chaos. People ran about, some shouting and waving their arms, others with firm determination as they dashed for the road leading back into the city.
I saw a man climb into his chair, which fell abruptly to earth as the slaves dropped the supporting poles and raced off in the same direction. He struggled to his feet waving his arms despairingly at them. Then he was off himself on foot, following the slaves as fast as his tangling robe would allow.
‘The barbarians,’ a man turned to shout at me, ‘the barbarians are upon us!’
And they were!
I saw them about half a mile away coming down a little incline behind the church. Mounted on short ponies, they approached slowly in a wide crescent. There must have been a few dozen of them, spaced apart. I could see their chainmail glittering in the late sun, and the glint of their drawn swords. I could see their squat, beardless faces, and could feel their anticipatory smiles as they looked on the harvest of wealth and human flesh spread out before them.
The road back to Constantinople was already a seething mass of bodies. The ground about was crowded with derelict buildings and bare rocks and bushes.
The Stylite hermit had pulled up his folding ladder and withdrawn to cower unseen in the middle of his platform.
People ran about, crashing into each other, as if they were terrified hens whose coop had been broken into by a fox.
I turned to Theophanes, who looked like death. He leaned heavily on the back of an ebony couch.
‘Where are your guards?’ I asked.
He waved vaguely at the jostling multitude. His blacks had no weapons. Authari was God knows where in the crowd, and was himself unarmed. The soldiers who’d come out with us to keep order were nowhere to be seen. I later heard they’d been the first to mount up and ride for the walls, followed by the priests and then by anyone who had brought or could procure some animal of burden.
We were on our own. Our only available weapon was a jewelled fruit knife. I’d not have trusted the thing for spreading olive paste. I thought of making a dash for it, but Martin and I would have trouble forcing our way to the head of the crowd. No – we’d never get through. We were too far behind.
And what of Theophanes? It didn’t cross my mind to dump him. But how to make our escape with him?
The raiders broke into a gentle gallop as they closed the distance. A great, collective wail of terror went up and rippled forward as they crashed into the back of the fleeing crowd.
