Free Terror of Constantinople by Richard Blake

bitterness. ‘Getting back from Pavia to Papal territory was nothing compared with this. You can’t get across the city without the right stamp on your permit – let alone get out of it. And you can bet that, long after there’s no bread in the shops, the old eunuch and his police will be grinding away like a watermill.
        ‘I don’t like this place,’ he whispered, now in Latin. ‘I never asked to be sent back here. I know my duties, but I shan’t rest easy until we see Naples again – if we see Naples again. Let us praise God that our families are safe.’

8
    The chair that collected me put us down inside the main hall of the Ministry building. This was a squat, overblown cavern of a place, faced inside and out with carved granite and white limestone. Hundreds of offices on floor after floor faced inwards to that main hall. Except on the higher floors – and then above eye-level – I don’t think there were any windows that faced outwards. Business was transacted there in a constant glow of lamps. The offices were places of unending gloom.
        Light streamed down into the hall from a circle of windows set into the base of the dome. The floor was covered in a giant mosaic showing the sufferings of the damned in a Hell that seemed to owe more to the Old Faith than to anything in the teachings of Holy Mother Church.
        Clerks hurried about bearing thick files. Some of them stood in corners in whispered consultations with men dressed in black. These were big, powerful men, with obvious body armour under the cloaks that covered them from head to foot. They moved with confident swaggers as they tapped at the sheets of papyrus offered them by the clerks.
        A couple of the big men who stood together looked over at me and opened a conversation with one of the clerks that I was sure must relate to me.
        Once he’d finished helping me from the chair, Martin stood quiet and very still beside me. His body almost radiated fear and depression.
        There had been a change of plan. We were now invited to lunch with Theophanes. He himself had been waiting for us with only one clerical assistant for company. This was the man I’d seen yesterday, though I’d given him no attention. A little man with dark eyes and the hooked nose of the East, he looked like a younger, slimmer, unmutilated version of Theophanes. He spoke only in reply to his master, and then in a rapid and very correct Greek.
        After another elaborate display of courtesy, and theatrical flourishes that nearly floored me with the wafts of rose and sandalwood perfume they sent in my direction, Theophanes led the way on foot to a restaurant in the square outside the Ministry.
        On the way in, I hadn’t noticed the little crowd gathered outside. All women and the elderly, they stood silently in the scorching glare of the sun. Some held up placards with names written on them. We attracted a few odd looks from these people, but most turned their faces away, refusing to acknowledge the grave but slightly mocking greeting Theophanes went out of his way to give them. They in turn were ignored by those who passed around them.
        ‘They are the relatives of certain persons the Great Augustus has been compelled to regard as traitors,’ Theophanes said, answering my unasked question. ‘Their own evident age and poverty remove them from suspicion of wrongdoing. And the presence among them of several monks dissuades us from enforcing the laws against riotous assembly.’
        I looked away from the gathering. Just across the road from the Ministry, on a patch of watered and neatly tended grass, was a small statue of the official who, back in the days when the Emperor Julian had tried to restore the Old Faith, had shut down the Ministry. He’d turned the clerks into the street and started burning their files.
        Then Julian had been killed on his Persian campaign, and the next Emperor, Jovian, had re-established the Ministry. The