morning. Inside the palace, it had been ‘Aelric this’ and ‘Aelric that’ from the Dispensator, who’d almost wet himself at his triumph. He’d been waiting with his – unsigned – letter of clarification for Marcella regarding my ‘marriage’ in Kent, and with his undertaking to act in my place regarding Gretel if I should be delayed past her time of delivery.
I didn’t fancy another trip into that office. Not over a matter like this.
‘But you’re bleeding, Master,’ said Authari.
I looked down at my forearm. So I was. That had been a savage little knife. It was the sort of weapon that had Murder written all over it. Luckily, the man had got me below the hem of my sleeve. You couldn’t get new silk that year in Rome for love or money.
Authari pulled me across the square to the side not yet reached by the sun, and sat me on a stone bench. He called for wine and biscuits from one of the hawkers.
‘I would have come sooner, Master,’ he explained in a panicky tone. ‘But those friends of his were all about me, jabbering something about His Holiness.’
He sat down heavily beside me and drank half the wine straight off. While that settled another of the fits of shakes that had made me leave him outside the Lateran, I followed his vague pointing. A hundred yards off, the churchwarden was still fussing over the bloody heap. He’d been joined by a couple of monks. Every so often, he was pointing across at me.
Over to their left, there was another crowd of those petitioners. Even as I looked, they melted into the smaller alleyways that led from the square.
Deep beneath the shock and the after-effects of what might have been a shade too much opium, I felt a faint stirring of alarm, and of what now was a creative anger. This wasn’t a matter of thiefly etiquette. The man hadn’t looked at all like a thief. And he’d been far too swarthy for a native: an African, perhaps, or a Sicilian?
I turned back to Authari, whose babble of explanations was now descending into his native Lombardic.
‘I am entirely satisfied you did your best,’ I said firmly, trying to shut him up. ‘Indeed, you may have done me quite a favour. Had you been with me, they might have gone for me some other time and with more success. As it is, forewarned is forearmed.’
Unconvinced, Authari fell silent, his face still dark with shame and the fear of a slave who has slipped up in his duty. I leaned back against the still cool bricks of the wall behind me and gathered my thoughts.
‘Tell me, Authari,’ I said, sipping what he’d left me of the wine, ‘do you know which side it was that grabbed you? And do put your sword away. The only trouble we might have now is from those monks over there.’
He gave me a look of rather vexing stupidity and replied that the men had been talking about His Holiness.
I sighed, but kept my temper. ‘You do know’, I prompted, ‘there’s a civil war in the Empire?’
He didn’t.
‘It doesn’t normally affect us here,’ I continued. ‘Since your people turned up in Italy, the Emperor’s Exarch doesn’t control much more than Ravenna. Under His Holiness, Rome is effectively an independent city-state.
‘Yes, a city-state,’ I mused. ‘After fifteen hundred years, Rome ends its experience of empire more of less where it began.’
But I pulled myself back to present matters. I didn’t want to lose Authari.
‘It’s a revolt got up by the Exarch of Africa. And he’s winning. Because of that, Emperor Phocas is piling on the pressure in Rome. He needs His Holiness to excommunicate Heraclius the father and Heraclius the son and Nicetas the nephew. That won’t count for much in the East. But Africa is part of the West. A formal denunciation from Rome would cut the rebels off from their base.
‘The problem is’, I went on, summarising what I’d picked up on the Exchange, ‘that the only thing Rome wants of Phocas as the price is something the Eastern Churches wouldn’t allow. The Pope must be made “Universal Bishop”. There must be an irrevocable statement that he stands above the other Four Patriarchs of the Universal Church. Constantinople and Antioch and Alexandria and Jerusalem must all bow down before Rome.
‘That needs a sealed patent for advertising in the East, and shoving under the nose of every bishop and king in the West.
‘There is a further problem. Even if the Eastern Churches could be bullied into assenting to such a patent, neither Pope nor Emperor trusts the other. Neither will make the first move. And it may now be too late. Heraclius, the son, or his cousin will soon show up outside Constantinople. Whoever gets there first will be Emperor himself before Christmas. That means all Rome needs do is wait, while extracting whatever concessions it can from both sides.
‘That brings us to the petitioning mobs. Were the people who stopped you for or against the Emperor? I’d like to know who wants me dead.’
But I had lost him. I might as well have asked him about forward contracts on the price of tin for all the sense I could get out of him.
I dropped the matter. Had I been more with it, I’d have skipped the lecture and stuck to questioning. Even so, I might have all the information that I reasonably needed for what I now had in mind.
Looking back across the square, I could see that the body had now disappeared. It would never do for pilgrims to have that in their first view of the Lateran. In its place stood a huddle of clerical monks. Behind them, on the Lateran steps, stood the Dispensator himself. He had the sun in his eyes, and I wasn’t sure if he could see me. But I could just make out the abstracted look on his face.
‘Heresy in Spain?’ I muttered – ‘my arse!’ Well before the close of business that day, I swore to myself, I’d have this out with His Excellency the sodding Dispensator. This time, I’d be in control of the exchanges.
For the moment, though, I had some urgent preliminary business.
‘Authari,’ I said in my firm, master’s voice, ‘go back home and get some rest. No more to drink this morning. I want you washed and looking respectable for when I send you to fetch the Lady Gretel for her inspection of those Cretan tablecloths.
‘No,’ I said still more firmly, ‘I’ll face no more trouble this morning. And it’s probably for the best if you aren’t with me where I now have to go.’
Sveta took me into the kitchen of the little house and poured me a cup of wine.
‘But you’re bleeding!’ she said with a still more suspicious look at my forearm.
‘Do forgive me,’ I said as she called her woman for hot water, ‘but I didn’t notice.’ I really should have gone home first for a bandage – that, or something with longer sleeves.
It was a surprisingly deep cut, and I winced as the slave woman massaged in the salted pork fat.
‘I believe your husband is teaching?’ I asked.
Ignoring my pleasant smile, Sveta pulled her eyes away from the trickle of blood on to the kitchen table and nodded.
‘Martin will come as soon as he can end the lesson. I went to tell him as soon as I saw you at the door. But it is his best student – he’s the natural son of the Lord Bishop Servilianus, you know.’
I didn’t mind waiting. Servilianus was as influential as his bastard was thick. Martin needed more pupils like that if he was to keep up this go at being independent. I drained the cup with my good arm and held up the other so the slave could do a proper job with her bandage.
‘So, Martin,’ I asked with an attempt at cheerfulness, ‘I take it you don’t fancy Constantinople at the moment?’
He looked up from the letter of instruction. ‘Not now. Not ever,’ he said, his voice most emphatic for a man who’d just nearly shat himself. ‘You know what happened to me when I lived there. Now there’s a civil war about to reach the place, you can’t imagine how it will be.
‘Rather than go back to the City, I’d sooner be taken by the Lombards, and kept this time. I’d sooner go back to Ireland, passing through every village in your own land while speaking in Celtic. Either would be death. But the City would be death as well – death, and before that…’
I waited for him to finish. The baby began crying in an upstairs room. I felt a pang of envy as I heard Sveta go up the external staircase.
I waved at the letter of instruction. ‘Well, I don’t want to go there either,’ I said. ‘So you just save your complaints for the Dispensator. He’s the one who says you know Constantinople. He’s the one who says I need an assistant I can trust absolutely. He’s the one we need to get round if we aren’t to go anywhere at all.’
Martin smiled sadly. ‘After all we’ve been through,’ he asked, ‘you still think you can negotiate with the
