Terror of Constantinople by Richard Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

to be struck dead for the shame of it all.
        His voice muffled by his hands, Martin was calling out again and again: ‘God forgive me my sins! God have mercy on my soul!’
        Overhead and unregarded, the baby wailed piteously.
        ‘I am not at liberty’, the monk shouted happily above the noise, ‘to take any question regarding your instructions. In any event, I am already forgetting them.’ He took another long swig.
        ‘If you don’t wipe that fucking smirk off your face’, I shouted back, ‘I’ll give you something you won’t forget. Now pass me that jug.’
        I fought to suppress the horror bubbling up within me. For all I sneered at Martin, he seemed right enough this time. Perhaps I had just heard a death sentence. Only a day earlier, I’d been rejoicing at the turn my life had taken. Now, I was caught like a rabbit in a snare.
        I hadn’t just been had by the Dispensator. I’d been really had.
        I looked out through the now-open door to the street where I could already see my covered chair and a couple of armed enforcers standing by.
        ‘Fuck the Church!’ I muttered into the jug. ‘And fuck the fucking Dispensator!’
        And that’s how I came to be standing on the Senatorial Dock a month or so later, with Martin for company, with a fat eunuch to bid me welcome, and with a whole row of stinking corpses swinging to and fro behind him.
        So, let us now unfreeze everyone and thank them for their patience, and get on with the story.

5
    ‘You will, of course, be staying in the residence of His Excellency the Permanent Legate,’ Theophanes said as my chair drew level with his. After a blockage caused by some building works, the road had widened again to allow any amount of traffic side by side.
        ‘You will find the Legation eminently suited to your station in the City. Besides, it is very close by the Patriarchal Library attached to the Great Church, and fairly close to the University. It would be a poor use of your valuable time to have to cross the City unattended every time you wanted to go about your duties.’
        We reached a main junction, and he turned to nodding and smiling at other persons of quality as they were carried by. I saw that few people in Constantinople went about on horseback or in wheeled carriages. Most were in open chairs like our own, each carried by four strong slaves who sweated in the sun. Some rode in closed chairs. I took these to be women of quality.
        While Theophanes exchanged his ritualised greetings, I turned my own attention to the sights of Constantinople.
        When Constantine rebuilt the City, he tried to make it so far as possible a copy of Rome. His Senate House, for example, was a direct copy of the one in Rome. Indeed, his Covered Market exactly copied the jumble of styles that centuries of extension had given the one in Rome.
        Now, Rome was fallen on evil days, but Constantinople had come through unharmed. Whether in shadow or still catching the beams of the afternoon sun, the painted stucco clearly marked one building from its neighbours. From the homes and businesses of the mercantile and professional classes to the garrets of the poor, the buildings rose in careful gradations from ground to topmost floors. Every dozen yards or so, the torch brackets were set up to light the streets when the sun had gone down. Smoothly paved, with drainage points unblocked, the streets were spotlessly clean – swept and washed several times a day. Carried by aqueduct or in underground pipes, water splashed from fountain after fountain, and in bronze pipes running down the walls carried waste from the larger buildings.
        Looking up the hill to the approaching city centre, I could see the vast, glittering domes and arches of an unsacked capital. Around me, the bronze and marble and even gold statues looked down securely from their unbroken plinths. Some of these were of emperors and officials going