submission, wrists chafed from endless struggle with the manacles that had kept them in submission, they’d emerged blinking into the bright sunshine. Credit where due, though, they’d taken the hint even sooner than Edward. Cowed and respectful, they knelt in silence beside him.
‘Their weapons will be returned on your departure,’ the secretary explained in answer to my unvoiced question. ‘As His Excellency said, this is a peaceful place.’ He gave me an openly hostile look, and then bowed ironically. Plainly, he thought the prison traffic he’d been ordered to oversee should have been in the other direction.
I smiled at him and raised my arms. The slaves stood obediently forward and lifted me back into the carrying chair.
‘The Lord Perfect will surely not object if I continue the boy’s education with a tour of your beautiful city,’ I announced. ‘I, for one, shall be grateful of the exercise before dinner.’
The secretary pulled a face that might have curdled milk and muttered something about supervising the gathering of stores. I watched as he went back over to the gaoler and rapped a few quiet instructions. Holding himself steady against the gatepost, eyes bleary from his ‘devotions’, the gaoler bowed at every pause. As the slaves got my chair aloft, and I leaned forward to poke my cane into the back of their leader, I saw the gaoler produce a sheet of what may have been folded parchment – hard to say with my wretched eyes. Without looking at it, the secretary stuffed it into a satchel before disappearing back in the direction of the Prefecture Building.
‘Come, Edward,’ I announced grandly – and sounding grand in any language with most of your teeth missing is quite an achievement. ‘We must inspect the Church of Saint Varicella.’ I leaned forward again and, this time, tapped all the carrying slaves with my cane. The boy and the oarsmen keeping up beside me, we began our slow progress towards the larger of the two semi-ruinous churches.
‘Behold,’ I said after about fifty yards. ‘You see here the most ancient of the monuments of the city.’ We stopped beside a battered arch. ‘Cartenna is a place of measureless antiquity. Its name is derived from the Carthaginian words for “City on the River Tennus”. It is said to have been the birthplace of the mother of the Hannibal who so beset Rome in ancient times. In its present form, however, it is a foundation of the First Augustus, who, after the close of the civil wars, designated it as a colony for soldiers of the Second Legion.’ I pointed up at the pompous inscription. Over time, many of the bronze letters had come away from the stone. But it was still possible to read the words from their context and from the pattern left by the holes.
Edward played along with a question about the roofless temple beside the triumphal arch. While I went into much elaboration about the deification and worship of emperors before the establishment of the Faith, I pushed the blond wig back and mopped at my freshly shaven scalp. Cosmetic paint was beginning to run down my cheeks, but was best left untouched. I looked back at one of the oarsmen, who was picking his nose, and checked to see if we were being followed. Sure enough, there was that bloody secretary. He was lurking behind the pediment of what had been a statue of Septimius Severus. He was stooping forward to get as much as he could of the cover. But if he lacked the colossal obesity of the third sex, it would have taken a larger pediment than this entirely to conceal him.
We continued our slow progress through the silent, abandoned streets of what had once been a substantial grain port. Here had been the public library. Here had been the baths, a gift of the Great Constantine, that could accommodate five thousand. Here was the shrine where Saint Augustine had witnessed the miracle of the stroke suffered by an heretical preacher. My throat was feeling raw from the continual raising of my voice. While Edward passed me up a cup of water drawn from a fountain, I lapsed into quiet English.
‘We’re approaching the harbour from the western side,’ I said. I’d noticed the stepped incline on my way up to the Prefecture. ‘The moment I take off this ridiculous wig and put it back on the wrong way, I want the oarsman with the broken nose to lift me out of this chair and run with me straight to the docks. It will mean jumping down half a dozen steps each with a four- or five-foot drop. The ship’s boat is still moored where you left it, and may still be unguarded. I must rely on the three of you to use your own initiative as required. But the idea is to get us back to the ship before anyone thinks to ignore the Prefect’s orders and tries to arrest us.
‘Do you understand?’ Edward’s mouth had fallen open. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I whispered with another look round. ‘Stop looking so gormless. If you don’t want to end up like Hrothgar, you’ll do exactly as you’re told. Do you understand?’
His face took on his impassive look while he thought. Whatever he was thinking, it took longer than I fancied. Then he nodded. He took the cup from my hands. I heard him muttering to the oarsmen as he replaced it above the bowl of the fountain. I brushed a speck of dust from my tunic and wondered how well I could trust these people. If they decided to run off and leave me in the chair, it would be sod-all punishment for any of them. On the other hand, if gratitude is rather much to expect of barbarians, they were all three of them in considerable awe of the Old One. Even if not a wizard, I was the one who’d had the Greeks anoint him and clothe him in raiments of shining white, and who’d also sprung them from a prison from where they must have thought they’d only be taken out to be hung. I reached up and patted my wig back into place. I’d find out soon enough how I stood with these people. In the meantime, there was a charade that still had to be played. I peered at an inscription above a bricked-up doorway that we were gradually approaching, and cleared my throat.
‘Here is the place where Saint Flatularis suffered the first part of his martyrdom.’ I turned and made a loudish aside to Edward: ‘He was a youth of exquisite beauty, yet was also solid in the Faith. When the tyrant Diocletian ordered all to sacrifice to the demons of the Old Faith, Flatularis refused. In order to break his will, he was chained naked in this house on a bed of roses while three beautiful courtesans assaulted him with their sinful lips and fingers. What did our Most Holy Saint do? Why, he quelled the rising temptation by biting off his tongue!’
I wanted to follow this with an account of how the young man was then rolled – still naked – in live coals mixed with broken potsherds, and end with a homily on what an example this should be for the youth of today. Sadly, the look on Edward’s face was too much, and I found myself having to cover my laughing fit with coughs. By the time I was able to breathe again, we were halfway along the terrace I’d seen from the harbour. Before us, I could see a handful of armed men. It wasn’t worth looking to see behind. On our left was the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the sea, and, against both, the dark blur of our ship where it rode at anchor. It was now or never. I pulled myself back into order. I took a deep breath and lifted my hands up to the wig.
Before I could even turn the thing round, the oarsman had lifted me clean out of the chair. The next few moments are beyond any ordered description. There was a bone-shuddering crunch as the man landed on the first step of the terrace. It was enough to knock all the air out of my lungs, and I fought again for breath. There was another, and then another. I could hear wild shouting above us, but couldn’t even think of trying to look back. Like a frightened child, I clamped my arms tighter about the oarsman’s neck and pressed my face into rancid, prison- soaked clothing.
Our fast, jerking motion came to a sudden end about ten yards from the jetty. With a scream that reminded me of a pig when the knife goes into its belly, the oarsman went down. We hit the granite slabs together with me on top of him. I rolled off and only just saved my face from striking on the stone. I heard the man, still screaming, as he dragged himself to his feet and staggered the remaining distance to the boat. I struggled up and looked back at the crowd that was racing towards me. Suddenly very calm, I relaxed and looked up at the sky. Going like this hadn’t been the end I’d imagined for myself. Then again, it was a sight better than snuffing it in bed, back in the freezing cold of Jarrow.
‘Give me your arms, Master.’ It was Edward! I’d seen him run ahead of us across the docks. Now he’d come back. He took hold of me and heaved me on to his back. He wasn’t yet fully grown, and I was – as I like to keep saying – still a big man, even if decrepit. But, swaying about like a slave under a grain sack, he ran with me across what now seemed the impossibly long distance to the boat. But we got there, and fell together into its deep centre.
‘Stop that boat!’ I heard someone shout. As I gripped the side of the boat and tried to haul myself up, I heard, just overhead, the whizz of an arrow. Another thudded into the planking not six inches from my right leg. I looked up at the blubbering oarsman who’d dropped me. He was nursing a deep gash an earlier arrow had made in his arm. But, as I looked back to the jetty, I could see the Prefect’s secretary frantically pushing the bows down, and shouting madly as he waved everyone towards the boat that had brought me ashore. It was nice to know, I told myself, that, even now, the price on my head was higher alive than dead. I pulled myself up into a sitting position and patted my wig into place. I smiled and blew a kiss at the secretary, who now stood on the extreme edge of the jetty. I couldn’t make out his face. But it wasn’t hard to guess the mixture of disappointment and boiling anger.
