Trying to seem genuinely interested, I stood where the sequence of wall paintings began. This was the Senate House and it was decorated without concession to the artificiality of the order it housed. The pictures were all of events in the history of the Roman Senate. Here were the Senators, calmly awaiting massacre by the Gauls. Here was Cato, demanding that Carthage should be destroyed. Here was the formal condemnation of Nero for treason against the State. The captions were in Latin, though most had recently been supplemented by Greek translations. I looked hard at the final painting, in which the Great Constantine was managing to speak at the same time to the Senate Houses in Rome and Constantinople. In each place, the Senators were reaching out to those in the other. They were embraces of shared blood and history, of common loyalty to the Roman State — embraces that ultimately had stood for nothing in Constantinople when it proved convenient to wave goodbye to the Western provinces.
Priscus put a bony hand on my arm. Then he leaned his remaining weight on me to steady himself. ‘The old eunuch’s a liar,’ he said wearily. ‘I fucked him over with Heraclius beyond hope of repair. I showed the severed finger and everything.’ I said nothing, but moved Priscus towards our own ivory stools. So long as I didn’t let my arm shake, it might look as if he were leading me to my place. ‘You don’t believe that I’ve shat on you, Alaric?’ he asked, still weary, though with a trace of concern. ‘We always knew it had to be me who saw the Great Augustus first. I am head of the old aristocracy. Not even the whole tribe of eunuchs could deny me an audience. I told Heraclius the complete truth — well, I told him the truth as you wrote it up once we’d left Alexandria. You keep your land law. I go off to keep the Persians out of Syria.’
I pretended to fuss with my toga. It gave him cover from the main crowd of Senators as he drank one of his potions from a glass bottle. I had no doubt this would perk him up in time for the audience. How much time he’d have after that was anyone’s guess.
‘How many times have I tried to kill you?’ he asked, his spirits already rising. My tally was eight. But I said nothing. Some of these probably counted as misplaced signs of affection. For others, I could doubt where to draw the line between outright murder attempts and conspiracies just to get me out of his way. Priscus smiled. ‘Something I want you always to know, Alaric, is that our personal interests and our beliefs about what is good for the Empire are as one. We stand or fall together.’
I looked down and smiled at him. ‘My thoughts entirely,’ I said.
I was wondering what more to say, when, with a sudden whoosh of stale air, the doors flew open and the first of the heralds came in with their silver trumpets. All about us, the babble of laughing conversation died away and every man who wasn’t already there made a dignified scurry for his seat.
Chapter 19
At a hidden command, the trumpeters let out an ear-splitting blare of sound. More came in behind them, and then I saw the gold armour of the Emperor’s personal guard. With more trumpet blasts, they marched steadily down the aisle that divided the Senators into equal blocks and stood to attention in the semi-circle we’d vacated.
He might have been a statue, for all he could move his face under its double layer of gold leaf. But I could hear the smirk in his voice as the eunuch chosen by Ludinus to stand in his place waved his staff of office at us. ‘Long may our Great Augustus reign!’ he shrilled in Latin.
‘Long indeed and well may He reign!’ we called back in unison.
The eunuch was drawing breath to lead a more complex acclamation. It came out as a long squeal of shock. I ignored the elbow the Priscus jabbed in my side and looked steadily at the eunuch. I didn’t need to see that Sergius was out of prison and dressed once more in his patriarchal best. ‘Oh, for one look into that black heart!’ Priscus breathed. ‘Oh, the despair that must be welling up inside it!’ But that was something I could see. Ludinus was a few places from the front on the other side of the aisle. I had an unbroken view of his suddenly strained and sweaty face. Without moving my head, I flicked my eyes about the room. Most faces carried the sort of look you see on men who are watching a slow collision of chariots in the Circus. They’d guessed there would be some change of Imperial favour. They hadn’t expected a revolution.
Sergius stepped past the eunuch and raised his arms to Heaven. ‘Glory be to God in the Highest,’ he cried in Greek, ‘and to His Servant Heraclius, whom He has sent in goodness and in love to rule over the Roman People.’
As if this were a ceremony established since time out of mind, Priscus and I raised our arms. ‘Glory, glory, glory be to God in the Highest,’ we responded, also in Greek, ‘and may victory and all good fortune attend Our Lord Emperor Heraclius, and His Heirs and Successors by Law appointed.’ We waited for every other Senator to turn astonished heads in our direction. As we raised our arms again, the chant was taken up by two hundred voices. There was the crash of a cymbal just outside the door, followed by more trumpeting.
‘He hasn’t washed since the fall of Caesarea,’ Priscus said without moving his lips. ‘Be warned he smells like the bedding in a doss-house.’
In another break with protocol, Heraclius came in on foot, Sergius walking backwards before him. He’d also set aside the normal olive wreath for these events, and with it the last scrap of pretence that the Emperor was one temporarily important Senator addressing his colleagues, and was wearing his biggest golden crown. As he passed by us into the semicircle, the pair of us drew breath and cried in Greek: ‘Praise be to the Lord Heraclius Faithful in Christ!’ We paused and, with another loud drawing in of breath, led the whole Senate in the new acclamation. We continued with it until the Emperor had gone up the steps to his throne and the long train of his purple robe had been tucked out of the way. Now Sergius fell to his knees before the throne. ‘We salute the Lord’s Anointed,’ he intoned, still in Greek. This, at least, was the signal everyone knew. We fell forward into our long prostration.
Afterwards, perched on my ivory seat, I looked across the room at Heraclius. Never mind his abstinence from soap and water — he was looking old in the light of day. He was bald. He was fat. His beard was more grey than golden. Above the beard, his face carried the look of a gambler who knows he’s on a losing streak and doesn’t know how to change it.
He kicked impatiently with both feet until he’d got his long silken train loose. I’d told Martin to prepare the reading copy in big letters so Heraclius could see his speech without having to lean forward. But he leaned forward anyway. ‘Conscript Fathers,’ he began in Latin. So he carried on for a few sentences. After this, to general relief, his text switched into Greek. Martin had written out the accents for all the longer or less colloquial words. Here and there, he’d added a marginal gloss in Latin. I’d given the text to Heraclius the afternoon before and I knew that, if he’d not been able to memorise it, he’d read it through several times. And he had. At his age, there was nothing he could do about his strong Western accent but I could make sure he sounded competent in Greek.