‘Get wide-meshed sieves from the kitchen,’ I ordered.
We watched as the slave, down on his knees, began work in one corner of the sty. Two big handfuls of shit scooped up and pressed through his sieve into a bucket. The remaining straw and other residue carefully picked through. The bucket taken out and emptied. Then back on his knees.
‘This will take for ever,’ Priscus said.
‘It might take all day,’ I agreed. ‘The problem is, I don’t want the household alerted yet to the possibility. But we do need more hands.’
The two Black Agents read the look in my eyes and stepped back, horror and disbelief stamped on their faces.
I pulled out a scented cloth from my robe and held it to my nose. ‘Priscus, I have a request to make of you,’ I said lightly.
54
As if I were playing dice, I rattled the box as I emptied it on to the Emperor’s desk. Five indisputably human teeth bounced on to the polished wood. Phocas took up the least decayed of them and held it against the light.
‘Without seeing them in the Permanent Legate’s head,’ he began, ‘I wouldn’t like to guess whose these might be. But it’s an interesting possibility.
‘So, my two brave champions, you’ve started bringing me answers. Indeed, I think it calls for drinks all round.’
We drank deeply.
Priscus had met unexpected resistance when ordering his men into the pigsty. Orders hadn’t worked. Threats hadn’t worked. He’d eventually had to borrow gold from me for a bribe, and then offer more as a bounty. At last, though, they’d joined in the fun.
‘Dear me, no,’ I’d said after enough teeth had been recovered, ‘I couldn’t possibly have your men in my bathhouse.’
So off they’d been sent to sit in the chill waters of a fishpond. Their uniforms would have to be burned. Unless they could find their way into a steam room, their bodies would stink for a month.
Priscus now sat happily beside me, basking in the sun of Imperial approval.
‘Young Alaric is sharp,’ he said. ‘He almost got there before me.’
‘The question remains, of course,’ said Phocas with a leer at Priscus, ‘ who fed His Excellency to the pigs?’
‘I am convinced, sir, that it was the official Demetrius and some other person as yet unknown,’ I answered.
‘So you assure me. But have you found this Demetrius?’
I looked at Priscus.
‘My dearest Father-in-Law,’ he said, ‘even in its present chaos, I’ve had the City searched and searched. No one fitting the description given has been found. Perhaps if we could do as Alaric suggests, and search the Monastery of St John Chrysostom…’
‘I’ve told you both already,’ Phocas snapped with a sudden turn of ill humour, ‘that the Holy Fathers of St John are not to be troubled with any enquiries. You’ll find no one called Demetrius in their house.’
Priscus bowed and changed the subject. He spoke now about the treble ring of defence he’d organised for the streets.
A secretary entered with a pile of documents. A slave carried more behind him.
Phocas sighed. ‘Alaric, go back to your searches,’ he said.
He looked over at Priscus. ‘And you have your own work that needs attention. We’ll talk properly about the defences over dinner.’
‘We make such a wonderful team, don’t you think, my great blond stunner?’ Priscus asked.
I looked down from our position on the land walls to the vast army encamped in the old suburbs. A man wearing the purple stripe of a senator caught my eye. He was standing well out of artillery range while, beside him, a slave was flashing a coded message with a mirror against the sun. It might have been for any one of the thousands of men who looked silently back from the safety of the walls.
‘What do you think he might be saying?’ I asked, avoiding the question.
‘It could be orders to their people inside the walls,’ Priscus said. ‘Or it might just be a bluff to demoralise an already demoralised people.’
He was right about the changing mood within the City. The excitement of putting on makeshift armour and strutting about with weapons was beginning to wear off. So far as anyone could tell, the whole Empire was now behind Heraclius. And these were fighting soldiers, all taken from the frontiers.
It no longer sounded so comforting to hear that Heraclius would have to move fast before pestilence and hunger arrived in earnest in his camp – or before the denuded frontiers wholly collapsed. We now expected that there would be an attack very soon, and knew that, whatever might be said of Heraclius himself, he had some good generals around him to lead it.
The flashing went on and on. If instructions were being sent to the city, they were frighteningly detailed.
Priscus kissed his hand and waved at a man who sat on horseback behind the Senator. ‘I was at school with him, you know,’ he said cheerfully. ‘He and his friends beat me to pulp when I put the word round that he was fucking a wax image of the Patriarch. How about a little drinkie? Just a small one to guard against the coming chill? There’s a nice establishment by the Church of Saint Anna. And I have a proposal that may interest you.’
We sat in a cosy upstairs room in the wine shop. The owner fussed silently round us with glass pitchers of white wine and dishes of toasted bread covered in olive paste.
‘This can’t be as long as I’d like it to be,’ said Priscus when the man had left. ‘I’m about to engage in urgent business. What I want to ask is if you’d like to share that business.’
I looked back at him in silence.
‘It seems the fucking old eunuch has won for the moment,’ he said, heating his knife over a candle. ‘When I married my charming Domentia and became Heir to the Empire, I thought I’d won the biggest prize in the universe. “Priscus,” I told myself, “you’ve jumped straight over those tossers who held you back in military and civil life. You’ll be Number One in no time at all. In the meantime, you’re just one down from the top.” Then I found that Theophanes stood in my way at every move. He’s the one who made sure I didn’t get made Commander-in-Chief of the field armies. He saw to it that my roving commission through the Eastern Provinces didn’t get me farther than Ancyra. For years now, he’s had the ear of Phocas. He’s been watching me and reporting on me, and dropping poison with each honeyed phrase about my abilities. Fuck him!’
Priscus squeezed a pinch of another powder on to the hot knife and breathed in the fumes. His gasp of ecstasy over, he looked up again.
‘Fuck the old eunuch,’ he repeated. ‘I wish he’d burst from all the food he shovels into his gullet.’
‘He is, I’m told, a most remarkable administrator,’ I said, rubbing in the salt.
‘Administrator?’ Priscus spat with venomous contempt. ‘If I had my way, he’d still be singing in the travelling brothel that brought him to Constantinople. Yes, that’s a talent I’ll not deny him – “Watchman at the Gates of Love”: a fitting description of someone whose balls were rotting in some Bostra cesspit before I was born!’
He paused with a little smile as my mind went into motion. Martin and I rarely spoke of what had happened in the Great One’s tent. Neither of us had mentioned it again to Theophanes. He himself would never have breathed a word. That left…
‘Yes, my dearest boy,’ said Priscus with an expansive wave – his cheerful mood was restored – ‘I was there. Sadly, I had business outside the tent that deprived me of your own most remarkable performance. But I had a fine view of the musical cabaret. For the first and probably the only time in my life, I was impressed by the old eunuch’s abilities.’
Cup in hand, I sat still. I was aghast at the revelation.
‘I never once thought it was you behind the curtain in the Great One’s tent,’ I said. ‘I thought it was one of Heraclius’s men.’
‘And you may be sure, my dearest Alaric,’ Priscus said with a stretch of his arms, ‘that it was someone from Heraclius. I was there on business relating to the captives and their eventual release. It was quite a surprise when you were all marched into the Monstrous One’s presence. I barely had time to get behind that curtain.’