Antonia was looking at my stained tunic. She looked away and walked back to the exit from the roof. She waited for the noise to go into one of its rhythmical low points. ‘I heard all that talk of fucking and sucking,’ she said. ‘Will you be appalled if I say that my secret places hunger for the meat between your thighs?’ In the clothes she’d put on, she did look decidedly lush. ‘I promise not to scratch your sunburn,’ she added.
‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said thickly. ‘Do keep the sword on as well.’
Together, we went down into the dark interior of the building. The roar of the crowd faded as we reached the bottom of the staircase from the roof. It was replaced by the endless crash and its echoes of the assault on the main gate.
Chapter 43
Not caring if she was naked, Antonia leaned over the balcony and spat at the smashed bodies of the men I’d sent to their deaths. It was hard to recognise the demure being I’d rescued from the poor district in the Jezebel soaking up the groans of the crowd. I bent and finished pulling the grappling hook free of the baluster. I’d not throw it on the heads far below – that would only get it reused. I placed it carefully on a rush mat. Even if not dropped on it, iron can do horrid things to marble. I stood up and, to a gathering roar of disapproval, put my arm about Antonia and tried to lead her away from the edge. ‘I don’t think it’s wise to show yourself in this manner,’ I shouted in her ear.
‘Wave the knife at them,’ I saw her lips describe. ‘Show how you killed a whole stinking rope of them.’ She turned her radiant and almost orgasmic face downwards again. She stretched forward over the balcony. I don’t think she noticed the arrow that missed us but split on contact with the stonework barely a couple of feet to our left. The mob was drifting back to its favourite chant of ‘Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!’ The dozen bodies had already been taken up and were being passed overhead to the far side of the Triumphal Way. Men were reaching up to dip napkins in the blood. Monks danced about with upraised arms. The dead aside, everyone down there was having a decidedly good time. The sudden roar of triumphant hatred was evidence of that. It drowned out the chanting. It even covered the renewed battering of long poles on the gates.
Someone poked me hesitantly in the small of my back. I turned. It was young Eboric. His normal duties were to look pretty and attend on my various wishes. This afternoon the front of his tunic was covered in a splash of fresh blood – not his, though, I could be sure from the pleased look on his face. ‘Pardon for the disturbance, Sir,’ he piped into my ear. ‘But Samo begs to inform you that he’s cut two ropes they managed to get on the office balcony.’ Fascinated, he stood beside Antonia to look over the balustrade. The crowd was still emptying its lungs up at us and jumping about as if someone had poured itching powder down every single back. He remembered himself and turned back to me. ‘He says I can tell you that I cut the throat of a man who managed to climb over,’ his lips described in Lombardic. ‘Samo threw him over the edge. He left red mist in the air even after he’d burst open on the paving stones.’
‘Very good,’ I said, patting the boy on the shoulder. I glanced at him again. It may have been the mood I was in, but Eboric was looking decidedly fanciable. I embraced him and felt a thrill of renewed lust that was checked only by a pursing of Antonia’s lips – and by another arrow: this one still went wide, but embedded itself in one of the wooden beams. I got them both inside and pulled the glazed door partly closed. I looked down at my chest. I was thickly smeared with blood from Eboric’s tunic and this had now imprinted itself over the boy’s lower face. ‘Any casualties on our side?’ I asked in Latin. Eboric shook his head. One of the older slaves had been bruised by a slingshot ball while urinating triumphantly over the balcony. Otherwise, all the dead and injured were on the other side – heavily on the other side, he added to an approving look from Antonia.
I dabbed at the blood with a dry sponge. I had more luck getting the blood off my knife. ‘Have we used any of the molten lead yet?’ Again, Eboric shook his head. More good news – it would need a mountain of scaffolding to get that off the upper walls. ‘Then it’s the balconies we need to watch – oh, and we need to keep them from starting another fire against the portcullis by the lesser gate.’ I slid my knife into its sheath and tossed it on to the bed, and let the boy set to work on me with a piece of the silk sheet that I’d somehow ripped apart in the long climax of my coupling with Antonia.
The archers had finished taking up residence atop one of the victory columns and were now shooting volley after volley of arrows at every opening in the upper front wall. Mostly, they were still firing wide. But one of the arrows smashed through the glazed door and whizzed by so close, I felt its displacement of air against my nose. It buried itself noiselessly in the upper bed hangings. If only it wasn’t madness to close the balcony shutters. I took Antonia to one of the far walls. Unless I was a complete duffer in the military arts, nothing could reach us here. I stood beside her and stared at a large plan of the building. ‘There’s an escape tunnel from the lowest level of the cellars,’ I said in Latin. I pointed at a line of coded text on the plan. ‘If they do break in, I want you to take Theodore and Maximin, and all the female slaves and those under age, and make a run for it. I believe the tunnel comes out into the Great Sewer. Get yourselves to the Kontoskalion Harbour and bribe yourselves on to the first ship towards Cyzicus. The rest of us will hold the ground floor, one room at a time.’
Antonia shook her head. ‘Don’t be silly, Alaric!’ she laughed. ‘Any palace this age that had a flaw in its defences would have been burned long ago.’ She walked back to the middle of the room and let Eboric help pick her clothes up from the floor. ‘I don’t know about you, but that was the fuck of a lifetime with those bearded faces climbing over the ledge.’
That wasn’t quite how I’d have described it – not, at least, after one of the bastards had nearly skewered me from behind. But I joined her and began untangling my leggings from my inner robe. We were just about decent when Theodore staggered in. Eyes screwed shut, hands over his ears, he danced close to the balcony in full sight of the archers. ‘Has God truly abandoned us?’ he sobbed. He opened his eyes. Suddenly thoughtful, he looked at the torn and crumpled bedclothes.
Outside, the crowd was settling into one of its silences. Dinner time? When there’s so little real chance of plunder, the poor don’t riot for free. I hurried over and peeped round the corner of the balcony. I was right about the food. Handcarts were being pulled into a big space made against the colonnade. Also, the seditionaries were back. In their speaking masks again, it was hard to see which was which. I wasn’t kept long in suspense.
‘I think, dear Alexius, I may have been unjust to the barbarian,’ Constans opened after much buzzing and tapping. ‘It must now be plain to the meanest understanding that the girl is no more than a bitch on heat. It may even be worth asking who seduced whom.’ He stopped and waited for an unenthusiastic laugh to ripple through a crowd that was, for the moment, more given over to being fed than stirred to action.
‘Surely the Lord Nicetas is doubly betrayed,’ Alexius replied, unable to keep his voice free of uncertainty. ‘To have his dearest friend shack up with a daughter who’s had enough cock inside her to reach beyond the topmost rung of this ladder is too much for mortal flesh to bear. Overcome by grief, our gallant Commander of the East has retired to the private quarters of his palace. I am told he looks to the Roman People to secure the justice that a corrupt administration of the law has denied him.’
His voice trailed suddenly off into a kind of muffled burp. The crowd was otherwise engaged and Alexius looked to the men standing at the foot of his ladder for guidance. One of them shrugged and called up something that I didn’t catch. I leaned against the wall. ‘Corrupt administration of the law,’ he’d said. Did this mean the conspiracy had fallen apart? That was what the evidence suggested. If Timothy was sitting on his hands in the Prefecture, that gave Nicetas a choice between waiting for Heraclius to come back and gambling everything on the mob. Or, since he’d apparently returned to his usual dithering, Eunapius and Simon were trying one last push to save their necks.
I looked at Eboric. He’d recovered the arrow from the bed hangings and was testing its point against his thumb. ‘Go down and see what Cook is preparing for dinner,’ I said. ‘Tell her we’ll have it in the garden at dusk.’ He bowed and darted out of sight. I looked at Theodore. He’d fallen to his knees and had his arms raised in prayer. ‘I thought I’d given you a Latin exercise to complete,’ I said coldly. ‘Please go back to the library.’ I raised my hand to stop him. I’d specified dinner outside to avoid the reverberant echoes of the pounding on the gates. I didn’t want Theodore wailing like someone on the rack when I finally got myself into the library to oversee the transfer of the most precious volumes to one of the cellars. ‘Correction – go and sit in the garden. The sun is no longer strong enough to burn you.’ I stepped quickly across the killing zone. One of the archers had been waiting, and I saw the blur of his arrow about a foot in front of me. It went straight through the wood of what may have been an original painting from ancient times and buried itself in the plaster of the wall. I tried to look carefree, though the picture had been ruinously expensive. ‘The Lady Antonia and I will spend the time before dinner inspecting the defences.’
I couldn’t fault Samo’s intention. Our spirits had needed raising. If only I hadn’t been the only one at the dinner table who could follow his rendition of tribal war songs recalled from his youth. If only also he hadn’t insisted on dancing boys with swords and a harp accompaniment that had kept us at table till some time after the last fading of the day . . .
Priscus and I were on the roof. He looked down over the sea of torches. ‘It needs more than possession to make siege engines dangerous,’ he said. I pointed in the dim light of the moon at the crack I’d opened on the parapet wall. He grunted and let it take his weight regardless, as he kicked his chair closer against it. ‘If your surmise is right about the defection of everyone who matters, those things are hardly more useful than continued banging on the gates.’
An icy feeling in my stomach, I pointed down at the tallest of the wooden towers. ‘You can get a ladder from that to any of the balconies,’ I said. I looked again at the bright carpet of the torches. A ten-foot gap was opening and closing as some kind of procession I couldn’t see moved slowly though the glare towards a point on the far side of the road.
Priscus followed my pointed finger. He snorted. ‘My poor civiliany Alaric, even scaling a ladder takes more skill than this lot can assemble. What your people need to do is wait for a ladder to be clogged up with shouting fools, then push it out and to the side with a pole. Did I ever tell you about how I beat off the next to biggest night attack at the siege of Hadruma?’ He seemed about to drift off into one of his internal reveries. He stopped himself. ‘There’s a lesson for you in all this,’ he said with a low chuckle. ‘I left you this place with a first-rate armoury for defence. If you hadn’t let the bow strings perish, you could have seen these engines off with a hail of burning arrows. So much money spent on keeping everything clean and in its place – so little on the real fundamentals!’
A barely broken voice drifted upwards from the far side of the Triumphal Way: ‘The diameter in inches of the cord bundle must be equal to eleven-tenths the cube root of one hundred times the weight in pounds of the ball,’ it read haltingly. ‘Please don’t ask me, though, what it means.’ Something was snarled back in a much lower voice. More voices broke out in an argument I couldn’t hear.
Priscus laughed again, and stretched his arms forward to crack his knuckles. ‘So, they’ve found themselves a catapult!’ he sneered. ‘I’d like to see them get it loaded, let alone aimed and fired. It’s a six-month course to be an artillery officer, I’ll have you know. The extraction of cube roots – especially where the number itself isn’t an exact cube . . .’
I’m sure I was meant to find comfort in the outlining of a method that required you to imagine petals dropping off a flower, and must have taken twice as long as doing the calculation properly. But the bare mention of catapults had completed the freezing of my insides. ‘What would you do about the archers out there?’ I asked, changing the subject.
‘Oh, just hang leather curtains on the outside of all the balconies,’ he said easily. ‘The last time I needed them, they were in one of the boiler house lockers. There are special brackets already set into the external ornamentations. Get them rigged up before morning, and the archers can shoot away till their thumbs drop off for all the effect they’ll have.’
He blew his nose between forefinger and thumb. I watched him wipe his hand on what had been a fresh tunic. ‘Now, my boy, where was I with my demonstration?’
Somewhere out in the darkness, there was a sudden sharp clicking. This was followed by a whizz overhead that grew fainter till it ended in a distant impact against something solid.
‘Well I never!’ said Priscus. This time, he sniffed hard and swallowed his snot. ‘Beginner’s luck, of course. You’ll find that angle of approach is sure sign they haven’t unlocked the counterweight lever. If they want to rain death on the Egyptian Quarter, who are we to complain?’