Priscus now sat happily beside me, basking in the sun of Imperial approval.
‘Young Alaric is sharp,’ he said. ‘He almost got there before me.’
‘The question remains, of course,’ said Phocas with a leer at Priscus, ‘ who fed His Excellency to the pigs?’
‘I am convinced, sir, that it was the official Demetrius and some other person as yet unknown,’ I answered.
‘So you assure me. But have you found this Demetrius?’
I looked at Priscus.
‘My dearest Father-in-Law,’ he said, ‘even in its present chaos, I’ve had the City searched and searched. No one fitting the description given has been found. Perhaps if we could do as Alaric suggests, and search the Monastery of St John Chrysostom…’
‘I’ve told you both already,’ Phocas snapped with a sudden turn of ill humour, ‘that the Holy Fathers of St John are not to be troubled with any enquiries. You’ll find no one called Demetrius in their house.’
Priscus bowed and changed the subject. He spoke now about the treble ring of defence he’d organised for the streets.
A secretary entered with a pile of documents. A slave carried more behind him.
Phocas sighed. ‘Alaric, go back to your searches,’ he said.
He looked over at Priscus. ‘And you have your own work that needs attention. We’ll talk properly about the defences over dinner.’
‘We make such a wonderful team, don’t you think, my great blond stunner?’ Priscus asked.
I looked down from our position on the land walls to the vast army encamped in the old suburbs. A man wearing the purple stripe of a senator caught my eye. He was standing well out of artillery range while, beside him, a slave was flashing a coded message with a mirror against the sun. It might have been for any one of the thousands of men who looked silently back from the safety of the walls.
‘What do you think he might be saying?’ I asked, avoiding the question.
‘It could be orders to their people inside the walls,’ Priscus said. ‘Or it might just be a bluff to demoralise an already demoralised people.’
He was right about the changing mood within the City. The excitement of putting on makeshift armour and strutting about with weapons was beginning to wear off. So far as anyone could tell, the whole Empire was now behind Heraclius. And these were fighting soldiers, all taken from the frontiers.
It no longer sounded so comforting to hear that Heraclius would have to move fast before pestilence and hunger arrived in earnest in his camp – or before the denuded frontiers wholly collapsed. We now expected that there would be an attack very soon, and knew that, whatever might be said of Heraclius himself, he had some good generals around him to lead it.
The flashing went on and on. If instructions were being sent to the city, they were frighteningly detailed.
Priscus kissed his hand and waved at a man who sat on horseback behind the Senator. ‘I was at school with him, you know,’ he said cheerfully. ‘He and his friends beat me to pulp when I put the word round that he was fucking a wax image of the Patriarch. How about a little drinkie? Just a small one to guard against the coming chill? There’s a nice establishment by the Church of Saint Anna. And I have a proposal that may interest you.’
We sat in a cosy upstairs room in the wine shop. The owner fussed silently round us with glass pitchers of white wine and dishes of toasted bread covered in olive paste.
‘This can’t be as long as I’d like it to be,’ said Priscus when the man had left. ‘I’m about to engage in urgent business. What I want to ask is if you’d like to share that business.’
I looked back at him in silence.
‘It seems the fucking old eunuch has won for the moment,’ he said, heating his knife over a candle. ‘When I married my charming Domentia and became Heir to the Empire, I thought I’d won the biggest prize in the universe. “Priscus,” I told myself, “you’ve jumped straight over those tossers who held you back in military and civil life. You’ll be Number One in no time at all. In the meantime, you’re just one down from the top.” Then I found that Theophanes stood in my way at every move. He’s the one who made sure I didn’t get made Commander-in-Chief of the field armies. He saw to it that my roving commission through the Eastern Provinces didn’t get me farther than Ancyra. For years now, he’s had the ear of Phocas. He’s been watching me and reporting on me, and dropping poison with each honeyed phrase about my abilities. Fuck him!’
Priscus squeezed a pinch of another powder on to the hot knife and breathed in the fumes. His gasp of ecstasy over, he looked up again.
‘Fuck the old eunuch,’ he repeated. ‘I wish he’d burst from all the food he shovels into his gullet.’
‘He is, I’m told, a most remarkable administrator,’ I said, rubbing in the salt.
‘Administrator?’ Priscus spat with venomous contempt. ‘If I had my way, he’d still be singing in the travelling brothel that brought him to Constantinople. Yes, that’s a talent I’ll not deny him – “Watchman at the Gates of Love”: a fitting description of someone whose balls were rotting in some Bostra cesspit before I was born!’
He paused with a little smile as my mind went into motion. Martin and I rarely spoke of what had happened in the Great One’s tent. Neither of us had mentioned it again to Theophanes. He himself would never have breathed a word. That left…
‘Yes, my dearest boy,’ said Priscus with an expansive wave – his cheerful mood was restored – ‘I was there. Sadly, I had business outside the tent that deprived me of your own most remarkable performance. But I had a fine view of the musical cabaret. For the first and probably the only time in my life, I was impressed by the old eunuch’s abilities.’
Cup in hand, I sat still. I was aghast at the revelation.
‘I never once thought it was you behind the curtain in the Great One’s tent,’ I said. ‘I thought it was one of Heraclius’s men.’
‘And you may be sure, my dearest Alaric,’ Priscus said with a stretch of his arms, ‘that it was someone from Heraclius. I was there on business relating to the captives and their eventual release. It was quite a surprise when you were all marched into the Monstrous One’s presence. I barely had time to get behind that curtain.’
‘So it was you who was negotiating with Theophanes outside the tent,’ I said. ‘In exchange for his life, he agreed to help you kill the Permanent Legate. He was the only one with access. And that would get you in deeper with Heraclius.’
‘Brains and beauty.’ Priscus smiled, raising his cup in a mock toast. ‘Of course, I needed you and your freedman dead. I couldn’t risk even the slightest chance that you’d spotted me. The eunuch was very persuasive when it came to getting his own skin spared. You two, however, were decidedly surplus to requirements.’
‘I suppose that explains why you’ve been so eager to have me killed since I got back to the City,’ I said.
‘Oh, that was nothing personal, dear boy,’ Priscus said with a smile. ‘That little scene in church was merely tying up loose ends. I got the old eunuch to kill the Permanent Legate. When you got the job, you had to go the same way. There’s no point in bumping off a Permanent Legate if he’s immediately replaced.
‘Getting you murdered in the Great Church, and in the Imperial Presence, would have dropped my Divine Father-in-Law right in the shit with everyone.’
‘Are you not forgetting, My Lord,’ I asked mildly, ‘your attempt on me via Agathius in the Legation, your attempt via those Syrians last night, and your efforts with the Emperor?’
‘I don’t know anything about last night,’ came the airy reply. ‘As for Agathius, I’d like to know what became of him. My guess is that he’s holed up with Demetrius. If only we’d been able to get hold of either of them, it would have been a sword held right over the old eunuch’s head. With him neutralised, I could have gone through with my plan of surrendering the city once the gates were open. As it is, killing the Permanent Legate will have been my latest service to Heraclius. That alone should keep me in his good books.’
I looked at him. Was he telling the truth? He appeared to be. Having admitted to a murder attempt in the Great Church, he would hardly deny anything more seemly.
But Priscus continued: ‘My latest service unless, my dearest, you’ve managed to learn what Theophanes was up to with Justinus of Tyre. I thought for a while he had the means to betray me to Phocas. It seems he had other information – information Heraclius was willing to pay through the nose to get.
‘Any ideas about what he did know? Did His Magnificence ever take you into his confidence on that one? Do you fancy a meeting with the next Emperor? I’ll be with him come dusk.’
