The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,36

could see – so I ran away to the big city. Not a very interesting story.”

“Until now!”

“Yes, until now. The best stories are the ones we make up for ourselves. You can’t trust others to make up your story for you. You’re never the hero of someone else’s story.”

She smoothed down her stola and patted her hair. “I’ll be back this evening,” she said. “You can tell me how it goes with Florentius. And then …” When she kissed me before leaving, I wondered whether she was thinking about kissing the emperor on the solidus.

8

I felt distracted. I attempted not to look at the red blot on the floor where the dead rat lay. I avoided the icon’s eyes. From those monstrous windows, was there some theological lesson to be gleaned, into the spirit above and the crushed verminous body below? Would Chrysostom, he of the golden tongue, have penned a Homily on a Dead Rat?

The thought reminded me I had things to do and had better get them done.

For a start, it was time to visit Florentius again.

After going through the archway and climbing the rubble slope up to my entrance to the underworld, I peered through a knothole in the board Arabia had replaced. It was not exactly the great bronze gate to the palace. The space under the iron dog was clear. I crawled out and scanned the square from between scabrous canine forelegs. There wasn’t a living creature in sight except for the stylite high up on his pillar, leaning against its rusted railing like a lifeless icon, and an emaciated cat sniffing the empty donation basket hanging to the ground from a rope attached to the stylite’s railing.

I scuttled away as fast as possible.

I had instructed Arabia to take similar care but could only trust she had taken heed of my warning.

Once out of the square I tried to tidy my clothing. I smoothed wrinkles and shook off dust and cobwebs, but I wasn’t really in any state to present myself to a wealthy patron.

I intended to cut across the Augustaion in front of the Great Church but I began to have the sensation I was being watched.

Possibly I still felt the gaze of those colossal eyes. It wasn’t the painted eyes that bothered me so much. It was what they represented. That ‘being’ up in the sky, seeing everything, all the time. Looking and looking, but never doing anything about what it saw.

A beggar sat slumped at the base of the towering column atop which the Emperor Justinian endlessly rode his chariot.

The beggar who had been sitting in Macedonia’s doorway.

No. Constantinople was filled with beggars and there was nothing to distinguish one pile of rags from another.

Nevertheless, I veered on to a side street just in case.

I went through an abandoned space where a mansion or church or an imperial building had once stood. Statuary – and pieces of statuary – stood and lay amidst brown weeds jutting through the crumbling pavement. My friends and I had come here when boys and played catch with the heads of ancient philosophers. Sometimes we convinced ourselves we saw demons darting in and out among the frozen figures. I had soon learned that there really are demons in the world, but all of them are human beings.

You just have to stay one step ahead.

When I got to my destination I was sure I had lost anyone who might have been following me. Glancing up and down the street, I noticed nothing suspicious. The large, luxurious house where I had delivered more than one icon showed passers-by only a plain brick front without windows at street level. Beyond its roof loomed the vast dome of the Great Church. When the interior of the dome was lit at night, it must illuminate the whole third storey of the house.

My patron agreed to talk to me. A few servants passed through the atrium while I waited, but I didn’t see Arabia.

Florentius was a heavy-set man with thick lips and a red nose. He looked more like a bacchant than a pious Christian. He led me through his office, where we met in the past, and along the peristyle, bordering what had been an ornamental inner garden in more prosperous times. Now the space was filled with pigsties. Several monstrous hogs – mounds of undulating flesh – drank from a basin, overlooked by a marble Aphrodite. Chickens scattered in front of us.

Florentius kicked a plump marble foot out of our path.