Once we were moving again, and I’d got my tongue into the least awful position against the roll of much- employed leather, I managed to pull my head up long enough for a look round. I’d supposed the dead were human. In fact, it was herd after herd of cattle that had been killed and stripped and left to rot in the sun. I could see shrivelled women and children darting from one heap of bones to another, stuffing their mouths with whatever scraps of stinking offal had been left. I would have looked more. It was a change from looking down at the stones of a very bad road, but hardly pleasant enough to risk choking. I made myself go limp and went back to reflecting on the defects of an enquiring mind.
Before I could be trussed up like a beast to the slaughter, my tunic had been ripped down to my waist. I could feel the opening pains of sunburn on my back as the afternoon grew hotter and more oppressive. I had to fight like mad not to scream, and then start blubbering from the pain and horror of it all, when someone slapped me on the back at our next stop. This time, I drank what was given me and didn’t try looking up.
It was only as I felt the power go out of the sun that the beast carrying me began to slow, and the continuous mumble of laughed conversation from behind me died gradually away. Someone held a knife before my face and giggled. Then he cut the leather straps that had kept me in place, and I slithered off to land on my back in the dust. A grinning red-bearded face looked down at me as I squirmed from the sudden pain and tried once more not to cry out. Still holding his knife, he bent slowly over me. I didn’t suppose that, having been carried all the way here, I was to be done in by someone of such obviously low quality. More likely, he was trying to scare me. I looked steadily up at him as he moved his head to left and right, now blocking and now showing the sun. At last, he pulled a face and put his knife away. He stood up and stretched his arms with a loud cracking of sinews. When he bent forward again, it was to loosen my gag. I still couldn’t speak, but there was no longer that leather stump jammed against my teeth.
‘Get him on his feet, and get him washed,’ I heard Priscus call from somewhere out of sight. ‘You can take a comb while you’re at it to that pretty hair of his. It’s thick with dust.’ He laughed and went into Greek. ‘You’ll surely allow,’ he chuckled at me, ‘that you look a proper sight.’
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting, bent forward with my head on the ground. Because I hadn’t slept in over a day, I might have nodded off for a while. If so, I’d only dreamed that I was sitting all alone in the middle of a wide ring of tents. Every so often, really or in my dream, dirty children came over and stared at me. An old man may have come over for a while and lectured me for a long time in the language of the Avars. What he said seemed full of meaning. But, since I had no Avar, and was in no position to try him in Slavic, his meaning was lost on me.
The light was fading when I was pulled back into full awareness by a gentle slap on my still exposed back. I sat up with a suppressed cry and tried to look round. ‘I’m going to cut your hands free,’ someone young said in passable Latin. ‘If you try anything, I’ll hurt you badly. Do you understand?’
I nodded. A moment later, and I was trying to rub feeling back into my swollen hands. My legs were tied so I could walk only with the limited movements of the very old. It was thus that I finally shuffled within the stinking interior of one of the larger tents.
‘Oh, you still do look a sight, my poor dear boy,’ Priscus cried with what anyone who didn’t know him might have taken for genuine concern. ‘Someone give the lad a drink.’
‘I’ll allow that you have indeed brought us the Lord Senator Alaric,’ someone said from the other side of the tent. He spoke the good Greek of Constantinople, but was sitting on the far side of a ring of lamps, and I couldn’t see him. But it was the voice of a eunuch. It may have been a eunuch of my own age. Or it may not. These creatures can sound young far into middle age. As I tried to look through the glare of the lamps, the eunuch sniggered. ‘If you’re trying to see who I am,’ he said with evident glee, ‘I see no point in disappointing you. It isn’t, after all, that there’s anyone you can grass me to.’ He laughed again and got up.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ I said with my best effort at contempt as he came over and stood before me. ‘I’d never have guessed you would risk yourself in barbarian hands. But I’ll finally grant that, whatever you are now, you were at least born into the male sex.’ I smiled and repeated with the emphasis of insult, ‘The
‘The lack of respect you show for your betters has once again been noted,’ the voice said.
I looked up from my beer and sniffed. I’d been expecting all day to meet the Great Chief Kutbayan. Despite his alleged lack of humanity, I might have had some chance with him. As he came round and stood beside Seraphius, I looked into the grinning face of a bald and, if possible, a still more obscenely fat Ludinus. I knew then that I was lost.
‘The most I’d expected when I came out here,’ he said, falling into that slow and ceremonious eunuch drawl that was halfway to singing, ‘was that I might be able to identify your body. I now see that I did very well indeed to assume personal supervision for the will of the Great Augustus.’
He stepped forward and slapped my face. He put a soft and slightly damp hand to my throat and leaned forward to see me properly in the light. I spat into his face and laughed as he stepped suddenly back. He put up a slightly stained sleeve to wipe away the gob, and I saw the glitter in the lamplight of his golden ring of office. It wasn’t two years before that he’d been made Grand Chamberlain. But the ring Heraclius, against all urging, had pushed on to that bloated finger would never be slid off again.
‘See, Ludinus,’ Priscus interrupted, ‘I told you it was young Alaric. And young Alaric it assuredly is. Hasn’t our plot worked out just swimmingly?’
Ludinus turned his attention to Priscus, and his face took on the closed look of a eunuch who knows that he’s winning. ‘But, Priscus, my dear,’ he cried with soft menace, ‘I still haven’t admitted that this is, in any sense,
‘Oh really, Ludinus,’ came the answer in a voice just a little too easy to sound natural. Priscus stopped himself and looked thoughtfully in my direction. ‘Do ask yourself what else could have got me out of Athens on the off-chance that I’d stay alive long enough to see you. I could have held even those walls for a month of Sundays, and your friends would have run out of food and patience long after they’d turned on you. Just believe that I’m acting under directions sent out from Constantinople by Heraclius himself. You know as well as I do how often he’ll change his mind before the end of anything he orders. He may have turned against me and back again a dozen times since putting his seal on that letter. But there’s no reasonable doubt that I have his letter safe in my baggage in the residency. You’d be a fool to do other than believe me.’ He sat back and snapped his fingers at one of the armed barbarians behind us. He switched briefly into Slavic to thank the man who pressed a cup of beer into his hand.
Ludinus smiled greasily, while his eyes darted back and forth between us. I could have tried playing Priscus at his own game. But, even as I swallowed to get my voice working, Priscus reached quickly forward and pushed my gag back in. I tried to spit it out, but someone now tied it from behind.
‘Sorry, dear boy,’ he said in a pitying tone. ‘You’ve had your only drinkie for tonight.’
He stood up and yawned. ‘So the deal is that I take off pretty soon for Athens. Without Alaric to keep his beady eyes on me, I’ll open the gate tomorrow night, and the looting and burning will get under way. No one will stop me when I take off on horseback. If you try anything underhand, the coded letter I’ve sent via the Governor of Corinth will be put into the hands of Sergius in Constantinople. What it says about you is quite damning. I do suggest you’ll not wish ever to know its exact contents. But you know the Patriarch won’t stand by when he learns that we’ve let all those bishops — not to mention his good friend Alaric — be put to the sword. You can bet the Great Augustus will treat my written word as the truth, and it won’t look good for you.’ He put his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Oh, it won’t look good for you at all — if it’s ever read out in Council, you’d do better to stay here and look after the Great Chief’s
Ludinus scowled and looked baffled. He bit his lip as he wondered, perhaps for the hundredth time, if Priscus really was telling the truth. When your entire life has been one gigantic plot, you lose sight of all common sense. He might have pulled my gag out again and questioned me alone. Then again, he’d only have assumed that I was lying too. When he did finally turn back to me, it was to slap my face again and then to walk round behind me and pour beer on to my peeled back. He recovered himself by sniggering over my muffled cry of pain.
‘Get the blond animal out of here,’ he trilled when he was back behind the lamps. ‘I have old business with him that I’ll finish when the time is right.’ He waited for Seraphius to put his words into Slavic. As two set of arms reached forward to get me to my feet, he came forward again and gloated into my face. I can’t say I blamed him.
