‘I am not at liberty’, the monk shouted happily above the noise, ‘to take any question regarding your instructions. In any event, I am already forgetting them.’ He took another long swig.
‘If you don’t wipe that fucking smirk off your face’, I shouted back, ‘I’ll give you something you won’t forget. Now pass me that jug.’
I fought to suppress the horror bubbling up within me. For all I sneered at Martin, he seemed right enough this time. Perhaps I had just heard a death sentence. Only a day earlier, I’d been rejoicing at the turn my life had taken. Now, I was caught like a rabbit in a snare.
I hadn’t just been had by the Dispensator. I’d been really had.
I looked out through the now-open door to the street where I could already see my covered chair and a couple of armed enforcers standing by.
‘Fuck the Church!’ I muttered into the jug. ‘And fuck the fucking Dispensator!’
And that’s how I came to be standing on the Senatorial Dock a month or so later, with Martin for company, with a fat eunuch to bid me welcome, and with a whole row of stinking corpses swinging to and fro behind him.
So, let us now unfreeze everyone and thank them for their patience, and get on with the story.
5
‘You will, of course, be staying in the residence of His Excellency the Permanent Legate,’ Theophanes said as my chair drew level with his. After a blockage caused by some building works, the road had widened again to allow any amount of traffic side by side.
‘You will find the Legation eminently suited to your station in the City. Besides, it is very close by the Patriarchal Library attached to the Great Church, and fairly close to the University. It would be a poor use of your valuable time to have to cross the City unattended every time you wanted to go about your duties.’
We reached a main junction, and he turned to nodding and smiling at other persons of quality as they were carried by. I saw that few people in Constantinople went about on horseback or in wheeled carriages. Most were in open chairs like our own, each carried by four strong slaves who sweated in the sun. Some rode in closed chairs. I took these to be women of quality.
While Theophanes exchanged his ritualised greetings, I turned my own attention to the sights of Constantinople.
When Constantine rebuilt the City, he tried to make it so far as possible a copy of Rome. His Senate House, for example, was a direct copy of the one in Rome. Indeed, his Covered Market exactly copied the jumble of styles that centuries of extension had given the one in Rome.
Now, Rome was fallen on evil days, but Constantinople had come through unharmed. Whether in shadow or still catching the beams of the afternoon sun, the painted stucco clearly marked one building from its neighbours. From the homes and businesses of the mercantile and professional classes to the garrets of the poor, the buildings rose in careful gradations from ground to topmost floors. Every dozen yards or so, the torch brackets were set up to light the streets when the sun had gone down. Smoothly paved, with drainage points unblocked, the streets were spotlessly clean – swept and washed several times a day. Carried by aqueduct or in underground pipes, water splashed from fountain after fountain, and in bronze pipes running down the walls carried waste from the larger buildings.
Looking up the hill to the approaching city centre, I could see the vast, glittering domes and arches of an unsacked capital. Around me, the bronze and marble and even gold statues looked down securely from their unbroken plinths. Some of these were of emperors and officials going back to the time of the Great Constantine. Others, I could see from their perfect beauty, had been carried there from the temples and cities of ancient times.
But I’m describing Constantinople by comparing it with Rome. And if you haven’t been in a settlement larger than Canterbury or perhaps London, these are just vague words. Try then to imagine a city so vast, you can’t see open countryside at the end of any of the streets: the only signs of Nature are cultivated trees and cascades of flowers falling from the window-boxes of the great houses. Try to imagine an endless succession of broad avenues connecting squares, each one as big as the centre of Canterbury and filled with public buildings and palaces every one as big as the new great church in Canterbury.
Try to imagine smaller streets leading off from the greater, all paved with stone or brick, or with regular flights of steps to join different levels, these little streets themselves all lined by houses so tall they often stop the sun from falling on the ground. Try to imagine little alleys leading off these smaller streets, connecting the whole like the strands of a web, so that you can wander for an entire day and not see all of it, let alone conceive its plan.
Try then to imagine all those people – some dressed finer than any bishop, some in rags that a churl would despise. And try to imagine all these in a continual bustle of activity.
Think of just of one incident I recall from that first afternoon. A slave was painting one of the houses in a main street. He hung by one arm from the sill of a high window, a brush in his free hand. Another slave leaned out of the window, paint-pot in hand. Others stood below, arranging a net in case the painter should fall. Around them the pedestrians flowed like water about a rock in a fast stream.
Imagine this, and you have Constantinople, the greatest city in the world.
Theophanes ignored everyone on foot as we passed through the crowds. He made sure, though, to greet anyone who passed in a chair. Sometimes he would introduce me with a flattering reference to my quality that seemed always to magnify his own importance. With a grave nod of his bearded and carefully groomed head, the stranger would acknowledge my presence and utter some exactly worded greeting. More often, I’d be ignored throughout an interminable exchange of courtesies.
In Rome, at this time of year, everyone who could afford to get out would have escaped to the better air of the country – that is, assuming the Lombards weren’t on the prowl. In Constantinople, I soon gathered, everyone who hadn’t actually run off to join Heraclius found it advisable to show loyalty by staying put, regardless of the heat.
On a blank wall by one of the road junctions, someone had written a long graffito in a language I couldn’t then recognise, but that I now know was Coptic – Greek letters are used to express Egyptian sounds. I saw a recognisable version of the name Heraclius and I could make out the sign of the Cross. Some official-looking slaves were hard at work scrubbing it off.
I felt Martin plucking at my sleeve. I looked down at him as he padded along beside us.
‘If you look over to your right in the square coming up, sir,’ he said softly, ‘you’ll see the High Courts.’
Faced with many-coloured marble, topped by two giant symmetrical domes, each itself topped by a golden cross, the court building took up an entire side of the square. The Latin inscription above its central portico recorded its rebuilding by the Emperor Theodosius, the son of Arcadius. Above this, in a sheltered recess, was a giant mosaic of Christ sat in judgement. On each side of him, in Latin and in Greek translation, was the legal maxim: Fiat Iustitia Ruat Coelum – ‘Let Justice be Done, though the Heavens Fall’.
Almost like ants around a cottage door, the litigants and their slaves ran up and down the steps to the great building. The chairs of the great and the carts of the humble crowded the square, awaiting their owners. The dense mass of stalls clustered in the centre around a column topped by a golden statue – I think of Justinian – Martin told me, were selling legal forms and services to those unable to afford proper representation.
‘Is that where the bankruptcy case was decided against your father?’ I thought to ask. It would have been a redundant question. His face already answered. What was it like, I wondered, to be back here after such personal catastrophe?
The Papal Legation was housed in a small but imposing building on the far side of the square containing the Great Church. In its essentials an old palace, arranged around a set of gardens, it must have dated back to the early years of the City. At some point, its central front portico had been graced with an incongruously modern dome of a translucent green and blue, topping an entrance hall as large as a middling church.
It was here, bathed in the eerie light from the dome, that we were greeted by some decidedly secondary officials. One of these stood forward.
