I let my right arm relax and stared back at him. I’d assumed he was fussing about Priscus the day before. Perhaps he had been and still was. I stared at the scared look on his face. I’d never thought of him as having any existence outside the drugs market. ‘What help have you in mind?’ I asked softly.
He managed one of his oily smiles and looked about. ‘My Lord Alaric,’ he said with a sudden coming together of his faculties, ‘I understand that you currently possess the Horn of Babylon.’
I reached up to adjust my hat. It kept him from seeing how tense my face had gone. ‘If you are referring to twelve inches of coiled silver that other men have shown willing to kill to get for themselves,’ I said with a forced easiness of tone, ‘the answer may be yes.’ I looked sharply right as some children ran down a flight of steps from the sea wall and began chasing each about the big open space. I relaxed again. ‘Do you want it?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. His body trembled with a spasm of fear. ‘I never want even to see it. But if you will come with me, you may learn much about it.’
I looked at his grey and sweating face. What did he know about my silver cup? How had he known about it the previous day? I made up my mind. ‘Where?’ I asked. Not speaking, he pointed into the darkness of the passageway. It was two hundred yards long and the sort of place you advised newcomers to the City not to enter. Here, I had the plain advantage. If I chose, I could arrest him and his assistant and hurry them off for interrogation with Lucas. Or I could walk past him with a curt instruction to call on me the following day. Whatever he was doing away from his usual place, however, it was hard to imagine the compounder had come out to harm one of his best customers. He looked scared and I doubted he was scared of me. I stepped away from the wall. ‘You go first,’ I said.
I hurried blinking into the square dominated by the Great Church. Within the urine-soaked depths of the covered passageway, where men preached heresy above the moans of copulating slaves, the compounder had persuaded me into a hooded cloak that gave me a faintly monkish look. ‘We mustn’t be followed,’ he’d squeaked, pulling my hat off. The hood now drawn over my hair, I waited beneath the shadow of a victory monument while he finished climbing the hundred steps that connected two levels of the City. Pushed from behind by his assistant, and wheezing from exertion, he staggered into the light, and leaned against the monument. When he was able, he got out a glass bottle and sniffed a vapour that reminded me of roasting kava beans. It revived him, though it turned his face a deathly shade of grey. ‘I was mad to let you talk me into this,’ he whispered in Syriac to his colleague. ‘It’ll surely get us killed.’ He’d spoken in a dialect mostly used on the Persian side of the Euphrates. I pretended not to understand but was glad of the heavy sword I’d put on to replace the one lost to Shahin.
We walked across the square, the Great Church on our right, towards a brass statue of Saint Peter. Just beyond this stood a line of several dozen carrying chairs. We were deep into siesta and no one was expecting passengers. Ignoring us until our shadows loomed across them, slaves and owners alike were playing dice and drinking.
‘Three men your size?’ asked the owner of a chair that had been picked at random. He laughed. ‘You’ll need more than one chair if you don’t want my slaves to go on strike.’ The compounder silenced him with a quarter solidus that would have been more impressive if it hadn’t stuck to the palm of his trembling hand.
While the owner borrowed more slaves to join in the work, I found myself looking at Saint Peter. This was a statue that would make any Lord Treasurer mindful of his safety. It was about these brass legs that one of my predecessors had flung his arms for sanctuary when the mob caught up with him. Phocas himself had been put to death in a reasonably civilised manner by the new Augustus. His ministers weren’t so fortunate. The Lord Treasurer had been torn apart but kept alive long enough to see various body parts draped upon the statue like barbarian wedding gifts on a tree. It had been necessary, once order was restored, to take the statue down for a long soaking in vinegar.
For all the grim reminder, I was the least visibly scared of the three passengers who eventually set off in the chair. With much bumping and scraping, as even the additional carrying slaves couldn’t keep us more than a few inches above the road, we crept along. At first, the compounder insisted on having the curtains drawn tight about the chair. Soon, however, the heat inside was heading towards the critical and the smell of unwashed bodies and farty breath was beginning to turn my stomach. He didn’t complain when I lifted the flap beside me. This let me see that the owner of the chair was leading us past the old Admiralty building. After this, we stopped and the owner came back for further instructions. The compounder pulled his own curtains open and looked out. Once it was clear we hadn’t been followed, he sat back heavily. Sweating uncontrollably, he got out another gold coin and named a place inside the poor districts — close by the place where I’d taken up with Antonia the day before. He cut off the obvious objection with more gold and pulled his curtain back into place.
‘If I asked where we were going,’ I enquired politely, ‘would you be able to answer?’ The compounder shook his head. My sword in its scabbard was pressing against my thigh. Would it get me out of any trouble I might be heading towards? As the carrying slaves got into their stride and lifted us higher above the pavement, the compounder unstoppered his glass bottle again and sniffed at its fumes until I thought he’d stop breathing. I’d have no trouble from him, I thought.
‘Wait here for us,’ the compounder pleaded. ‘We shan’t be long at all.’ He mopped his forehead and ran a dry tongue over dry lips. ‘I’ll pay you double what I’ve given you so far,’ he added. After a brief hesitation, the owner nodded and pulled out a short sword. The slaves already had their knives out. This ‘moment of my time’ had already extended itself to an hour.
My boots crunched on disintegrated bricks as I skirted heaps of filth too rancid to be scavenged away. We were moving into an area where no outsiders ever went for amusement. If I was right about the geography, we’d soon be in a place where the authorities never went without very good cause and then with a few dozen armed men for protection. As we emerged from one of the bigger courtyards into the semblance of a street, we stopped before a heap of dead and decomposing rats. Now I didn’t need both arms to keep my balance, I took out a bottle of perfume and emptied it into a napkin.
‘It’s in here, My Lord,’ the compounder whispered. He nodded at the narrow entrance to another courtyard and, within that, to a door that hung open in a high wall of surprisingly decent brick. The other buildings were of the usual rickety timber. I thought again of the geography. Before renamed Constantinople and made the Empire’s eastern capital, Byzantium had been given walls adequate for keeping out most barbarian raids. These walls were long gone. But, here and there, deep inside the modern City, traces remained. This could be one of the towers.
The compounder grabbed at my arm as I stepped sideways for a better look at the building. ‘I crave your indulgence if anything you see or hear might contravene the laws of the Empire,’ he said, looking nervously round the empty yard. I said nothing. I’d once heard it seriously argued that the laws didn’t apply in these districts.
Chapter 27
In a fog of smells that, despite the napkin pressed to my face, could have made a muckraker puke, we moved up one flight of irregular stairs. From here, it was an unlit passageway. Behind every door that we passed, I heard a scurrying that put me in mind of rats, but was more likely to be the human residents. We stopped at the far end of the building. This would have been the outer wall of Byzantium and there was no entrance here. We took another flight of stairs back to ground level. Hidden as if by accident behind a pile of building materials covered with the dust of generations, a solid door was set into a solid wall.