The Curse of Babylon by Richard Blake Page A

cracked and then split where it had been folded over. I couldn’t see the message. But the seal was plain. I reached down and snatched at the broken sheet and read its contents:
     
My Lord Alaric,
I beg to inform, further to your standing orders, that we have impounded a ship that foundered last night near the second milestone on the western road out of the City. It is registered in Tanais and stuffed with furs. We have reason to believe that no tolls were paid on its journey through the Straits from the Black Sea to the Propontis.
Again further to your standing orders, we have secured the area, and we await your personal attention.
     
    It was signed by Lucas, Head of Customs Enforcement, and a standard Treasury seal covered the end of his name.
    I forgot about my new cup. Furs from Tanais, and on the far side of the Straits, and untaxed – possible evidence of corruption in the Tolls Office? Even if it showed just negligence, I had more urgent work than sitting here in bored and largely ornamental magnificence.
    ‘Why was this not given to me when it came in?’ I snapped. ‘ When did it come in?’ The Master of the Timings shrugged and gripped harder on his staff.
    ‘It wasn’t delivered into my hands,’ the Listings Clerk added in a voice that accused everyone and no one. I looked again at the message. It could well have been here since before the beginning of the audience. Just in reach, the two eunuchs were hissing at each other in the rapid and deliberately unintelligible chatter their sort used for arguments. I could have handed out two bloody noses – that, or I could have promised immediate transfers to some barbarian-ravaged border province. I did neither. I looked again at the seal, and how negligently it had been rammed into the unmelted beeswax. The whole production screamed urgency. How much time had been lost already?
    I stood up. The crowd stopped its shuffling and coughing. ‘This audience is at an end.’ I said loudly. ‘All unheard petitions are stood over to next Monday.’ I looked round at the uncomprehending faces. As I made for the door into the private quarters of my palace, I made sure to snatch up my birthday present and greetings. Until I could find time for a proper look at these, they could be locked away.
    I barely heard the dejection in the voice of the Master of the Timings as he got everyone ready for a prostration before my now empty chair.

Chapter 7
     
    It was one of those days in late spring when the sun is pitilessly bright. I stepped through the hidden side exit from my palace and hurried blinking into the first shade I could see. Back then, Constantinople still had a population of about half a million – possibly more, depending on how you counted the dwellings. That meant the City air could never be called sweet. But my palace was in one of the best areas, far from the slums and smellier workshops. Why, then, did this empty dead end of a street smell like a broken sewer? It was a change from the incense the Treasury eunuchs had been burning, but in no sense an improvement.
    Oh, there was a body in the street! I hadn’t seen it at first. But someone had got himself beaten to pulp and his belly slit open, and then dumped in a spot where the sun must have been cooking him since an hour after dawn. The bloody vomit he’d splashed over himself didn’t help – nor the wide pool of blood that had already turned brown, and was attracting a solid buzz of flies.
    Oh, but the nuisance of it! I’d got a body in a side street it was my responsibility to keep clean. There would have to be a letter about this to Timothy. For me, he’d squeeze himself into his official carrying chair and be straight over. Questions, endless questions – most of them irrelevant to the case, all of them intrusive – that would be our City Prefect. I clenched my fists and snorted. But I shut my eyes and waited for the flash of anger to fade. Making sure not to tread on anything nasty in my fine