There was an armed guard outside the Ministry. The few clerks who’d bothered turning up for work had all been kicked out into the street, where some of them now fraternised with the demonstrators. These had now taken to singing hymns and looking hopeful.
‘He’ll be coming out soon, you know,’ said the old woman who’d spoken to Theophanes in the summer. ‘The time of retribution is upon us. My son will come home again.’
I evaded her attempt to catch hold of me and slipped past. A silent crowd had gathered to watch the demonstrators. It was impossible to tell from their faces what they were thinking. Dressed mostly as if for church, they stood and watched, and waited for whatever might happen next.
As I finished threading my way through the crowd, Alypius came forward to meet me. He waved me past the guards and into the darkened hall of the Ministry. Lamp in hand, he led me up to Theophanes.
‘I already know the truth,’ said Theophanes, cutting off my account of Priscus. ‘I climbed on to the walls before darkness and saw the man riding up and down and calling on the City to surrender. He’s had quite an effect. About half the remaining nobility has now slipped out of the City, together with most of the senior Ministers. A few were caught and hanged as they tried to leave. Most bought their way out. I regret we are losing control over the garrison in charge of the land walls.
‘But tell me, Aelric,’ he said, changing the subject, ‘what did you discover from Priscus? You were seen going together into the wine shop. You came out separately – he to open treason, you back to the Legation.’
‘I know that you and he reached an agreement outside the Great One’s tent,’ I began. ‘I know that you conspired to kill the Permanent Legate. And I know that you both agreed on my death.’
Theophanes checked me. ‘You know that Priscus agreed on your death,’ he repented with a laboured formality. ‘That you are still alive and in good health should tell you the extent of my agreement.
‘I have no doubt Priscus told you many things. But there are many other things far beyond his knowledge. For all you see it as your present duty to uncover these things, I must remind you yet again that knowing them would do you no good.’
‘Theophanes, I will have the truth about the Permanent Legate’s murder – and about everything else,’ I said.
‘Then you will have none from me,’ he responded. ‘However, we are meeting here to get one set of truths that you may readily have. Though, since they concern Priscus, they may come too late.’
I thought of those four Syrians down below, now a day into their solitary confinement. I’d been looking forward to showing Theophanes the benefits of an interrogation that didn’t involve the rack and red-hot pincers. It no longer seemed such a fine idea, but it was already arranged and I could think of nothing else to do instead.
‘Because I know this building better than I know the wrinkles on my own face,’ Theophanes said, ‘you will pardon me if I insist on leading the way.’
I followed Theophanes down the stairs from his office to the main hall, and then across to a locked doorway. As he unlocked the door and pulled it open, my stomach turned at the waft of cold, filthy air.
In all the ages during which the Ministry had stood, I wondered as I followed him down that endless spiral of worn-out steps, how many wretches had been dragged through this or the other entrance, and never come out again?
We passed into the entrance chamber I recalled from my first visit. It was a low-vaulted circular room with another set of steps on the far side. Equidistant between these two entrances, a wide passageway led into the endless and regular network of cells.
As before, the lamps flickered dimly in their niches. The reception desk was covered with much the same jumbled mass of papyrus. But ‘Where can they be?’ Theophanes asked, looking round the empty room. ‘The guards knew we had an appointment. I was here myself earlier to see that all was in readiness.’ I strained to see into the network of corridors but heard and saw nothing. The whole place might have been evacuated.
‘Do you know where the prisoners were put?’ I asked Theophanes.
He nodded absently, still looking around the unexpected stillness of his own private Hell.
‘Then we’ll start with the big one,’ I said. ‘I mean the one with the scar on his left cheek that stops his beard from growing right. I think he was their leader.’
Theophanes fussed a while over the heavy ledger on the reception desk, turning the pages. He reached up to a board studded with what looked like hundreds of numbered hooks and lifted off a single set of keys. He tutted impatiently as he saw they were all out of sequence and searched again for the ring that carried the right number. Then he turned back to the ledger and made a series of neat entries.
‘Order in this world begins with small things,’ he said, blotting the parchment.
Then, without so much as a pause to get his bearings, he took up his lamp again and stepped into the passageway. I followed close behind, trying not to retch at the smell of the place. It was far worse than I remembered.
I tried at first to take note of the turns we made and the secondary corridors we passed. But I noticed the complex stretched under the whole Ministry building – even under the surrounding streets and squares. It was immense. But for Theophanes leading the way with the unthinking assurance of a native, I’d soon have been lost.
As we turned into another corridor, I saw two dark figures standing in the gloom of the far end. One was gigantically tall. The other stooped. There was something furtive about their appearance. It was as if they’d been caught in some malevolent act.
We stopped. I fingered my knife. Theophanes smoothed his robe in a gesture of confusion.
‘Fancy meeting you here,’ a voice rasped loudly. ‘As ever, we can dispense with prostrations. With these floors, you’d never get the muck off your clothes.’
56
Phocas inspected himself in the long mirror Theophanes kept in his office.
‘I don’t suppose the blood shows too much against the purple – not in this light, anyway,’ he said.
‘If you please, Your Majesty.’ Theophanes handed him a large cup of wine. Phocas drained it and let out a long sigh of contentment. He handed it back for a refill.
‘Do I need explain myself to you?’ he asked me.
‘No, Caesar,’ I said, trying not to look at the red smear that ran from his trailing robe to the door of the office.
‘Then if you’ll take advice from an older and wiser man,’ he said, ‘let me give you one of the main secrets of effective leadership. As an officer on the Danube, I never believed in giving orders I wasn’t prepared to follow myself.’
‘Clearing my accounts’ is what he’d called it when stopping halfway up the spiral steps for a tipsy giggle. I didn’t see what business it was of mine to ask how many prisoners had been held down there. It was enough to know that he’d gone down and ordered the dungeon guards to kill all of them. He and the huge black slave he’d brought in tow had then turned on the exhausted guards. It was my business that some of the prisoners had been mine. But there’s nothing in the books of etiquette to cover protests to an Emperor for this sort of thing.
I was glad I’d taken care to put on common leather boots before coming out. Anything else would have been ruined by all the blood I hadn’t seen on the floors.
‘I see that fucker Priscus has shat on me,’ said Phocas, still looking at himself in the mirror.
‘Your Majesty will surely agree’, Theophanes said, ‘that Priscus has served his purpose remarkably well since we discovered his intentions. Everything we told him was passed back, and was implicitly believed by Heraclius.’
‘I suppose he’ll be more of a danger to Heraclius outside the City than he was to me inside,’ Phocas said. He sank heavily into a chair covered in white kid leather. I could almost hear the squelching of his robe. I could certainly see the dark stain on the chair-back when he leaned forward.
He looked at me. ‘Now, I find a vacancy has emerged at the head of the City defences. Bearing in mind the defection of almost all the qualified candidates – and the unreliability of those remaining – I am minded to appoint you to the position.’
