I took a deep breath. The wreckage of the dawn had mostly been cleared away. Old Simeon might, at this moment, be in the Prefecture, raising hands in prayer over his dead son. These few hundred yards along the Triumphal Way, though, and I could almost tell myself nothing awful had happened.
I reached inside my night cloak. ‘Here is your patent, Leander,’ I said gently. ‘Present it during the day to the Treasury Chief Clerk. After that, you need to go on the first day of every quarter to the Payment Office. There, you’ll collect thirty solidi, or their equivalent in silver if gold is in short supply.’
He cleared his throat to speak. I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I told you I keep promises,’ I said. ‘I only reserve the right to vary them upwards. Now, I’ll not go in with you. Nicetas might be awake in his chair and I don’t fancy another meeting with him.’
I didn’t look left, though I thought I’d seen a shadow flitting about in the darkness. I raised my voice. ‘I don’t think I need remind you of the need to keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life. But I will advise you never to go out again at night.’
‘What have you done with the boy Theodore?’ he asked with a sudden change of subject.
I smiled again. ‘The last time I looked in on him, he was praying in the chapel,’ I said. I thought of our only conversation that day. ‘Beat me — kill me — burn me alive,’ he’d wailed, slapping more salt into the open wounds left by the trampling of the crowd. I’d sent him away with frigid kindness. Perhaps I should have thrashed him with the scourge he’d made for himself. After all, the worst punishments are often those you heap on yourself.
I took a step forward. ‘I’m leaving the City at noon tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I may be gone some time. Please make sure to report everything said and done by Nicetas to John of Ragusa. You’ll find his office in the building that sits above the entrance to the spice market. Don’t be put off when, on your first visit, you’re told he doesn’t exist.’
Chapter 52
Rado leaned forward on his horse. ‘Is your arse hurting again, Master?’ he asked. I pretended not to hear him. Instead, I took advantage of the stop to look again at the dreary expanse of hills and ridges and mountains and valleys that surrounded us on every side. He waited until it was plain I’d not reply. ‘You shouldn’t hold the reins so tight, Master,’ he added.
I put aside the groans of agony now coming from every muscle between my toes and my jaw. ‘You’re a free man, Rado,’ I said. ‘It’s no longer appropriate to call me “Master”. You may call me “My Lord” or use my personal name, as the preference takes you.’ I tried to sound cheerful. ‘You might even call me “Father”.’
Not answering, he gave his horse the slightest flick of his unspurred ankle and moved forward as if the two of them were a single being. He stopped at the edge of the ravine. He looked down several thousand feet into a bank of white mist. If this was the one we’d been skirting most of the afternoon, there was a meandering stream beyond the mist. In the spring, it would be swollen to a surging torrent.
I gave up on the pretence that this was other than a stop for my benefit and climbed stiffly down from the saddle. My horse was probably more relieved than I was. He didn’t collapse into a heap of unconsolable helplessness. Rado looked politely ahead. ‘The pass we want is between those two mountains over there,’ he said. I followed his pointed finger to a blur that may have been twenty miles away or may have been a hundred — if I knew how high we were above sea level, I’d be able to calculate the distance to the horizon. Without numbers to put through the formula, I might as well have been blind. Rado pointed again and drew a path in the air. How he could see two mountains there, or know what sort of pass ran between them, were questions I chose not to ask.
My own silence continued till it bordered on the embarrassing. ‘There really are no mountains in England?’ he asked once more.
‘Just hills,’ I repeated. Could I get away with implying that I’d spent my own barbarian childhood riding up and down them? I still hadn’t said that the hills of Kent were nothing like these wild crags that, except for the peaks looming far above them, I’d have called mountains. For the first time ever, I thought nostalgically of hills covered in bouncy turf, and valleys dense with oak and birch and chestnut. I shifted my sore bottom a few inches to a patch of what counted here for grass. ‘Mine is a rather settled race,’ I said in the best careless tone I could manage — ‘farmers mostly. Before then, we invaded by sea.’
He nodded. It was an answer that recovered me some status. Unlike him, I’d not spent the whole wild dash from the Senatorial Dock to Trebizond rolling about my cabin in a pool of sick. Oh, I’d been His Magnificence the Lord Senator until Rado had chosen these scrawny horses in preference to the much finer beasts on offer. And I’d kept up much of the pretence right till the moment he’d seen a path invisible to me, and taken us off the lovely road that led inland via Pylae. Twelve days later, and a boy who’d never quite learned to dance for me in Constantinople was maturing, almost as I watched him, into something not always likeable but always admirable. Old Glaucus had complained about his narrow focus in the gymnasium. I could see now that this wasn’t a fault: it was Rado. I’d told him we needed to move fast. And fast, therefore, we’d moved. Every time I showed I was getting used to the pace he’d set on horseback, the pace would be increased. We had, in twelve days, covered a distance on my map I’d never have thought possible. The steadily increasing speed Rado had maintained was remarkable — so, too, his granite certainty, from moment to moment, of exactly where we were. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d grown up a thousand miles to the west, and was as new to these mountains as I was. If my backside was hurting more than at any time since I’d taken my first steps in Latin, who was I to complain?
Water flask in hand, Rado slid down beside me. I let him straighten and massage my legs as if I’d been Nicetas in one of his more helpless moods. ‘It’s a bit like where I was a boy,’ he said wistfully. He looked round at the edge of the ravine. ‘My father’s people sweep down from mountains like these to burn or levy tribute on the Greek cities.’ He laughed. ‘I remember how we once took on a whole column of the Emperor’s soldiers, when they marched out from Thebes to force us back to the Danube. We threw big rocks down at them till they were all dead. I don’t think they even saw us!’ He laughed again, now fiercely. Leaving me to drink from the flask, he got up lightly and perched again on the edge of the ravine. If there was room for a bug to crawl between the front of his boot and the edge, I’d have been surprised.
‘Am I a Greek now?’ he asked uncertainly, not looking round.
I took advantage of being unobserved to loosen the collar of my quilted jacket. So high up, the wind was icy. A few moments out of it, and though dipping now towards the western horizon, the sun was hotter than on the coastal plain. I could already feel the sweat running down my chest. Avoiding the sun, I looked up into the astonishing purple of the sky. That alone was enough to set my nose twitching. I looked back at the stony ground. We were thousands of feet above sea level. But the smoothness of the smaller stones put me in mind of the pebbles on Dover beach. That, in turn, put me in mind of Xenophanes and his claim of endless vistas of time preceding the emergence of man. Could it be that thousands — indeed, tens of thousands — of years before, this had been a seabed? How violent must have been whatever earthquakes had brought about the present order of things? And everyone was fighting over a cup that was young by comparison!