I said a little of the vastness and beauty of the City as it might appear to anyone who couldn’t see the deadness and corruption at its heart. As she prompted, I spoke on about the teeming streets, and the crowded docks and markets, and the museums and galleries, and the mass upon mass of statues and monuments plundered from an empire that embraced every city that had been great and famous long before Constantinople itself had been other than the mediocre town of Byzantium, notable only for its position at the end of a finger of Europe where it almost touched the shores of Asia. If no longer the capital of an empire that reached from north of York almost to Babylon — though pressed on every one of its reduced frontiers, and giving way on all of them — there could be no doubt of its place in the world. I tried, and now succeeded, not to doubt my own place within the City.
‘Oh, to be in such a place,’ she breathed with a desperate longing, ‘a city so large that you can walk about in freedom and never be recognised. It is surely a place of dreams — a place where every dream is able to become real.’
I nodded again and put my own dream finally out of mind.
There was a renewed howling. I froze instinctively and looked about for my sword.
‘Do they really frighten you?’ she asked.
I tried for a smile and reached out for her.
‘But you grow used to them in Athens. They are not even the worst that Athens has to offer.’ She put a hand on my stomach, and drew a sharp nail over the ridges of muscle.
I shivered and drew her into my arms. The smell of her perfume was overpowering. Everything began to fade out of mind but the closeness of our two bodies.
She laughed, now very softly. ‘Like us,’ she said in a dreamy voice, ‘they are the children of the night. Their hunger is as our own. And who shall deny the feeding of that hunger?’
Once more — and I can’t say how many times it had been already — I lay back and arched my body as those unbelievably powerful hands took hold of both my wrists, and I gasped and bit my lips almost to the point of drawing blood in the beginning of another ecstasy that I knew would pass, but that would, throughout its entire duration, seem infinite in both time and nature. Before I passed out of all rational perception, I felt her scented, unbound hair brush against my face. Her lips pressed suddenly against mine, and I felt all her weight upon me. I could hear the wolves still howling, but no longer cared about it, or was properly aware of it.
Chapter 30
Back in ancient times, the streets of Athens were as mean and crooked as of any modern city resettled by barbarians. In the massive improvement works he’d commanded, Hadrian had flattened everything in the centre not hallowed by recollections of the past. But that had been four centuries ago. Since then, we’d had two — perhaps three — devastating raids; and the rebuilding of a now depopulated area had restored much of the original squalor. The sun was peering across from above one of the lower houses when the Dispensator came to a sudden halt.
‘Can this be the house?’ Martin asked uncertainly.
The answer he got was another disapproving look.
I had to admit that, in the labyrinth of streets that lay between the derelict Temple of Apollo and what was now the Monastery of Saint Paul, one box of rendered mud brick appeared the same as any other. In illustrations to the better class of books, Athenian houses are always shown as miniature palaces. If you bother to read the
‘I have had cause more often than I care to admit,’ the Dispensator said at last, ‘to make my way here. If I have not so far left in any mood of satisfaction, this is most assuredly the house of Felix.’ He sniffed and brought the iron tip of his walking staff down with a gentle thud on the compacted earth of the track between the houses.
I looked pointedly at the step to the door of an abandoned building, and waited for Martin to take the hint and spread his cloak. I waited for the Dispensator to grunt his reluctant thanks and sit down in a shaft of sunlight.
‘You go in,’ I said to Martin. ‘Since the man really does appear to have gone barking mad, it’ll be better if you put him at some ease before we start instructing him in his duties.’ I stood in the shade and stretched lazily. There were some children playing on the other side of a wall. A few late bluebottles were about already to make a nuisance of themselves to a dog who was still trying to sleep. Otherwise, this district of Athens had all the silence you’d expect of a middling slum before everyone is up and about.
I was thinking of the previous night, and of all its endless pleasures, when the Dispensator coughed and looked at me across the narrow street. ‘I was visited yesterday evening by the Lord Priscus,’ he said.
I nodded. Getting Martin out of the residency for our tour of Athens had taken everything short of a slap to the face. Getting him off to the Areopagus had taken a few hard looks. ‘We’re as likely to be murdered in our beds as anywhere else,’ I’d told him. ‘Besides, Nicephorus has no orders, so far as we know, to set hands on you.’ That had given him very little cheer — and could have given him none, bearing in mind the repeated assurances of what Priscus had in mind for him in the event of my fall from the Imperial Grace. Now, if it seemed that Priscus was simply working on the fears of all the delegates, we might be safe enough. After all, what he probably wanted most was me to share in the disgrace back home. Doing away with me might give him an intense if momentary pleasure. But he surely knew that having to explain a dead Legate to Heraclius would only add to his eventual embarrassment.
‘For a Greek nobleman, his Latin is most fluent,’ the Dispensator added.
I nodded again. Unless he made a particular effort, Priscus spoke neither language with much delicacy. I had to grant, though, he had as great a talent for languages as my own. Indeed, I’d now discovered he knew enough Syriac to follow Nicephorus in his more unrestrained moments of terror. Give credit where it’s due — Priscus was a cut above your normal modern Greek.
The Dispensator brushed off a small feather that had settled on his outer robe and cleared his throat. ‘Something I have long wondered, however, is how the son-in-law of the Unmentionable Tyrant could have survived the revolution.’
I smiled. The Dispensator never broke bread without a stratagem. And here it was! The Lateran had its spies everywhere, but still hadn’t fully made sense of the snake pit that lay at the heart of politics in the Imperial capital. I walked over and sat beside the Dispensator. For a moment, our calves met. Then he shifted a little to the right, and there was an inch of space between us.
‘He did switch sides before Heraclius turned up outside Constantinople,’ I said. ‘He betrayed his own defence plans for the City, and made sure that, when the gates swung open, there was a minimum of fighting.’ Since Phocas had bullied me, once Priscus had flown, into making his last stand — and I’d been overwhelmed by the professionals Heraclius had picked up on his journey from Carthage — I’d not go into details here. ‘That earned him a high place in the new order of things. Besides, he is the Empire’s only decent general. Without him to slow their advance, the Persians would already have reached Antioch.’ I paused and spoke carefully. ‘Certainly, but for Priscus, we’d already have lost Egypt.’ No one could deny him that. With or without his arrival in Alexandria, I’d never have got the Viceroy to publish the land law. But Priscus had drawn the Brotherhood into Alexandria, before flattening it. He’d then stopped any invasion of Egypt from across the Red Sea. Without him, I’d have been taking very bad news back to the Emperor. There’d not have been even the pretence of a second chance in Athens.
‘He’s also the head of the old nobility in Constantinople,’ I added. I changed the subject. ‘Did he bring you any alarming news last night?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer.
Now, the Dispensator gave one of those smiles that verge on the friendly without ever quite getting there. ‘He made me aware of the situation north of Thermopylae,’ he said. ‘This did perturb His Grace the Bishop of Messina. My own response, however, was that we were called here for a purpose that no merely secular difficulty could serve to interrupt.’
I looked up at the very blue sky. Trust the Dispensator to send Priscus away with a flea in his ear. If it meant that Nicephorus and Balthazar might now be pushed into arranging a sad accident for me, that was easier to deal with than standing in the way of several dozen clerics, all on the bolt for Corinth.
As I looked down again and waited for the Dispensator to get to the subject of the defective Universal Bishop
