with banks of gold leaf for your eyebrows. Instead, Priscus twitched his nose, which it was clear he’d been using to sniff up whatever passed with him for lunch.
‘I take it, then, you haven’t noticed how no one can get into or out of this place?’ he drawled. He looked at the window. ‘I suppose not. Your office is on the far side of the building. The Egyptians are being held on their side of the Wall. But the Greek trash has turned up in force outside the Palace, and won’t go away. Apparently, some child died of starvation, and everyone’s demanding the grain ships be unloaded.
‘It’s at times like this that a massacre can really calm things. Sadly, Nicetas has agreed instead to meet the leaders of the mob, and he wants the pair of us on hand for moral support. Since he’s got the few slaves on duty running round like blue-arsed flies on other business, he asked me to drop in and summon you.
‘Any chance we could pull you away from what I’m sure is work for the highest benefit of the Empire?’
‘You may leave us,’ I said to Barnabas. As he scurried out, visibly glad to be off the hook, I turned to Martin. ‘Get all this packed away,’ I said, pointing at the Lesser Seal. I took the whole ring of keys from my belt and handed them to him. I might give him a good talking to later in the day. Then again, I might not. He’d only insist he’d been doing me a favour. This being Sunday, he might even call in one of his conversations with God as a defence.
‘If you’ll come back with me,’ I said to Priscus, ‘you might care to fill me in on what’s happening while I get myself changed.’
As we left the room, I looked back. Martin had gathered up the whole two rows of documents and was stuffing them into the cupboard along with the Seal.
Chapter 34
Nicetas and most of his Council were already in place when we arrived at the Great Hall of Audience. I thought the eunuch would have a stroke as he took hold of Priscus and me and led us to our own golden stools in the gathering. This not being one of his days for secular business, Patriarch John was absent, so the pair of us were sitting beside each other just behind Nicetas. I heard the scrape as the golden easel was set up behind us for the icon of the Emperor. The eunuch gave one last pull on the wig of gold and silver threads that Nicetas was wearing. From where I sat, the shaft of sunlight sent down on us from the mirrors in the dome made his head look as if it had caught fire. I wondered if that was how it appeared from the front.
But there was no time for wondering anything – let alone for conversation. Once we were all seated, our faces set into required expressions, the eunuch nodded to the guards at the far end of the Hall. With a loud drawing back of bolts and a whoosh of air and a flood of bright sunshine, the twin gates leading out into the square swung open, and the great unwashed of the poor districts poured in. They flowed through the gates in their hundreds and thousands, and those first through were pushed closer and closer to the front of our platform.
I let my eyes wander over the sea of pinched, desperate faces that stretched from the double row of armed guards just below our platform right down the six hundred feet of the Hall. All that separated these creatures from the natives was a smattering of Greek and a more heterogeneous look when it came to size and colouring. But whatever their size, whatever their colouring, the urban poor are always repulsive. The reason they live in cities and are poor is because they’re trash. They’re too lazy to dig for themselves on the land, and too stupid to take advantage of the city as a market for useful services. All they contribute to city life is crime and rioting. Take that away, and the respectable can step over them as they starve in the street. But the moment they transform themselves from gathered trash into the mob, they become something professional armies might tremble to confront.
Our trouble here was that these weren’t transforming themselves into anything. Even without the revelation I’d had in the Egyptian quarter, this was plainly a directed crowd. I could see the directing agents. They took care not to stand together at the front, but were dispersed among the crowd. Even so, they were dead easy to spot – taller, cleaner, better dressed. Leontius might be dead. His idea of ‘Success in Unity’, brought about by a coalition of both sides of the mob and the possessing classes lived on. And why not? Use the grain fleet to raise the mob: scare Nicetas enough – and I could wait like a poor litigant in court for those warrants.
With three loud blows on a gong behind us, the Hall fell silent. The herald stood forward. He turned and bowed to Nicetas and the whole Council. As the local custom required, we made no acknowledgement of his bow, but sat still and silent as statues. Except we existed in three dimensions, we might as well have merged into the frieze of Augustus that stretched all round us on the walls. The herald turned away from us again to face the main body of the Hall and took in a deep breath.
‘You have been called into the presence of His Imperial Highness Nicetas,’ he began in his measured, impossibly loud voice, ‘Viceroy to His Imperial Majesty Heraclius, Caesar, Augustus, Ever-Victorious Apostle of God, that your grievances may be discussed, and that you cease to disturb the order of our city.’
As the herald finished his greeting, and a single blow on a gong confirmed its ending, there was a general coughing and shuffling at the front as the crowd parted. At the apex of the resulting gap, a big man stood, his bearded head pressed tragically down on to a bundle that he held against his chest. There was a gentle push from behind and what might have been a muttered order. Slowly, he walked forward, stopping just short of the guards. He raised his head and looked round, and then looked straight at Nicetas.
‘O Cousin of Our Lord Augustus,’ he began woodenly in an accent that wasn’t local, but might have been Cretan or even Cypriotic, ‘Most Noble Viceroy, I come before you holding the body of my only child, who has been taken from me by want of bread.’ As he spoke, he held out the bundle, and an arm with about the thickness of a broomstick hung suddenly loose. It was a dramatic effect, and gasps of horror and pity rippled backward through the crowd. Assuming it wasn’t accidental, it showed the man had been well rehearsed.
‘Oh, my dear,’ Priscus had whispered as they were all allowed in to see us, ‘if only they might have one throat!’ I’d not have put it so uncharitably myself. For all I knew, some child had died. The price of bread had risen again, and the free distribution was only enough for a whole family if the parents didn’t scoff it all themselves. Looking at this man, he could have eaten his whole family to death, plus his neighbours. But children were always dying. It didn’t need to be starvation. There was accident. There was pestilence. There was murder. There was rape and murder. The death bins hadn’t been emptied for a while, and suitable bodies could be pulled straight off the top. If this little bundle was from a bin, we’d never have noticed. The smell of the living would have masked the rotting of the dead. Priscus had made sure to deaden his nose before coming in. I almost wished I’d accepted a pinch of the blue powder.
But the allegedly grieving father had made his speech, and was now awaiting a reply. You expect a certain pause after someone of his quality has spoken. Immediate replies are demeaning. But this long silence was pushing things. There was a rising chatter towards the back of the Hall. Someone laughed. The herald looked nervously round again. The white paint somehow transferring itself to the lower strands of his wig, Nicetas might have been turned to stone. I could feel the nerves of the slaves behind us, as the ostrich feathers shook in their hands.
There was a sudden commotion far over to my left. I moved my eyes to see what it was. A woman was pushing her way through the crowd.
‘Bread,’ she cried, ‘in the Name of God, give us bread!’ Someone behind her joined in. Over to my right, some utterly disgusting creature with one eye now pushed his way to the front and began howling about the grain fleet. There it still was in the docks, he shrilled, stuffed with food that could keep Alexandria from going without right up to the next harvest. Other voices joined in. The grain fleet! The grain fleet! No one wanted it to leave. No one would settle for less than its immediate unloading.
This was all unscripted, and the directing agents did their best to jolly the proles back into line. But I could see from the confused looks they were darting at the platform that they’d counted on our playing along. The crowd was fast becoming a shouting, rippling thing beyond control. The line of guards that stood between it and us was more for display than use; and the doorway back into the Palace was twenty yards behind us, with stairs down from the platform. And still Nicetas sat, silent and unmoving. If we’d been sitting instead before some vast bonfire, ready to collapse and spill super-heated ashes right over us, it would have been less scary.
‘I hope you will one day find it possible, my love, to forgive me,’ Priscus said softly without moving his lips. He’d taken advantage of a relative lull the directing agents had managed, though I still had to listen hard to follow him. ‘But I seem to have forgotten to say that it wasn’t just to show off your pretty face that you were called down here. Since you’ve made yourself the expert on food supplies, Nicetas thought you might care to speak for
