‘Demet- My Lord, rather,’ he said in evident confusion, ‘there are armed men to see you.’
62
The official stood back. Immediately, three soldiers stepped past him into the room.
‘Ah, do come in, my good men,’ Silas said in halting Greek. Now he was no longer Demetrius, it would never do for him to soil his lips with the common Greek of the streets. Like most of his sort, though, he was too grand and too idle to have paid much attention to learning the pure language.
He turned to me and switched back into Latin. ‘You know I said I’d take you to Rome with me? Well, I lied.’
He sat back in his chair and hugged himself.
One of the soldiers stepped forward. He was a big man with black hair on his hands and wrists and a massive black beard broken only by the occasional battle scar. He looked nothing like the men of the City Guard I’d taken as typical of the Eastern armies. He cleared his throat and held up a slip of papyrus.
‘We are here’, he said in the deep, flattened Greek of the Mesopotamian provinces, ‘to see the so-called Permanent Legate of the Roman Patriarch.’
He looked at Silas. ‘Are you that person?’
‘I am indeed, my good man,’ Silas said, patting his official robe to emphasise his status. ‘To be precise, I am the Permanent Legate of His Holiness the Universal Bishop. I represent His Holiness and, through him, Saint Peter himself.
‘Now, to business. I want to thank His Imperial Majesty Heraclius for the speed of his response to my message. You will find that this loathsome and obscene barbarian child-’
The soldier held up an impatient arm for silence. He looked decidedly sour at Silas’s mention of the hated title.
‘You tell me you are the Acting Permanent Legate?’ he asked. Without bothering for a reply, he turned to his subordinates. ‘You will note’, he said, ‘the malefactor confessed his blasphemy and treason.’
The other two nodded. One fingered his sword.
Silas got to his feet. The easy smile had gone from his face. He looked nervously around the room. The windows were still shuttered after my orders for the room to be sealed. Soldiers blocked the doorway.
I cast my eyes demurely down and tried to look part of the battered furniture.
‘My good man,’ Silas opened, with another, but failed, attempt at jollity, ‘I think we are talking at cross purposes. I said I was the Permanent Legate. If you want the Acting Permanent Legate-’
He got no further. The soldier reached forward and struck him hard in the face with a fist that looked about the size and weight of a lead club.
‘Silence, you piece of Latin shit!’ he said, barely changing either tone or volume.
Silas fell gasping to the floor. He put his hands to his face and drew them away covered in blood. Then he fell silent, looking up with growing horror at the dull, official faces.
The soldier held the slip of papyrus close to his face and began intoning his orders from Priscus.
‘You’ve misunderstood,’ Silas gabbled, now in Latin. ‘The one you want is the yellow-headed barbarian. He’s the one you want.’
‘Silence, pig!’ the soldier rasped in Greek, showing his fist again. He was growing impatient at the sounds Silas was making. It was plain he knew no Latin.
He turned to the other two soldiers. ‘Get him on his feet,’ he said curtly. ‘Each of you – take an arm. Hold him steady.’
He drew his sword.
‘No!’ Silas screamed. ‘Please, in the name of God. You must take me to Heraclius. I have a deal with him. He’ll confirm you’ve made a mistake. Please-’
He got no further. His voice was choked off by a hard sword-thrust into the guts. The soldier pulled it smartly out, wiped the blade on a cloth and sheathed it again. It was one of those smooth strokes you only see from professionals.
Silas was on his knees again. He held up his hands, bloodier than before. He looked up at me, terror and shock stamped equally on his white face.
‘No,’ he croaked, still in Latin. ‘Not like this. I’ve come so far. You must tell them-’
He fell on to his hands and tried to crawl towards me. But every move was suddenly an effort. Then he fell forward on to his face and tried ineffectually to drag himself across the boards. I continued staring down.
The soldier looked at me for the first time. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
‘I am, sir,’ I replied in the smooth, unaccented Greek that I’d long since perfected, ‘Fourth Secretary to His Holiness Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople. I was here on business at the Legation when this impostor tried to extract money from the officials.’
The soldier softened. ‘You know, people like you shouldn’t be out on the streets on a day like this,’ he said. ‘There are some wicked people about.’
He gave me an appreciative look that went straight through my outdoor clothing. But then he remembered what I’d said about the Greek Patriarch. It didn’t do to go about propositioning clerics, even on the Imperial frontiers.
I gave him a charming smile and said something about how the work of Holy Mother Church must go on even during a civil war.
We all crossed ourselves at the mention of the word ‘holy’, then the soldier turned back to Silas, who was still groping his way across the floor in my direction. His bloody robe clung to him as after a heavy downpour and its delicate silk snagged on the floorboards. Strength failing, he gasped with pain at every move. But he somehow wanted to be beside me.
The soldier waved at his subordinates. ‘Let’s get this over and done with,’ he said.
One of them took hold of Silas by what remained of his hair and pulled his head up. There was a hiss of steel through air and a dull thud as the head was parted with a single stroke from its shoulders. Spurting blood which the soldiers moved smartly back to avoid, the body fell to the floor with a heavy thump. For a moment, it lay twitching – then it was still.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, standing forward. ‘May I?’
I took the severed head from the soldier’s hands. He stood back with a bemused respect. I held the head up carefully to avoid getting blood on my clean clothes. I’d often wondered how quickly a beheading killed its victim. Does the mind die at once when the head is severed from its body? Or does some vestige of life remain like the cooling of a stone taken from a fire?
There were other matters, I’ll admit, more deserving of my attention. But this was a chance of knowledge that might not come up so conveniently again. I pushed my face within about six inches of the severed head.
‘Can you still hear me, Silas?’ I cried softly in Latin. I tapped hard on the closed eyes with the fingers of my left hand. There was a fluttering movement.
‘Silas,’ I repeated.
The eyes fell open. I swear they focused for a moment on my face.
‘Silas, you’ve lost,’ I said triumphantly. ‘Now that I know everything, I’m going to make sure that what you schemed to achieve will come to nothing. In a few moments, you’ll wake in Hell. Take this as the beginning of your torments.’
I watched in fascination as the eyes dulled and the twitching of the already slack lips died away.
There – I’d learned something. I’d also done something to get even with that worthless fucker. No one calls me a barbarian without coming seriously to grief, I can tell you.
‘I was placing a curse of the Church on the impostor,’ I explained to the soldier. He nodded, still respectful, and put the head into a black bag.
‘Was any of that stuff his?’ the soldier asked, looking at the pile of things on the floor.
‘The document belongs to the Church,’ I said, avoiding the matter of which Church.
He grunted and took the bronze mirror for himself. It was a very nice object. Martin had gaped at the
