Free Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake Page B

movement in one of the upper windows of the buildings. I’d catch a brief view of someone pulling back to avoid being seen. Once, I looked up to see a child’s face, showing pale and thin against the blackness behind. It gave me a long and mournful inspection, and then vanished.
        It was around the churches and other religious buildings that the remaining population of common people was now clustered. These people squatted in the former palaces of the great, or had built squalid hovels from reused blocks.
        As we crossed the Tiber and approached the central districts, we began to see people in the street. They shuffled about, mostly in rags, shopping at little stalls that sold spoiled fruit and old clothes and dried fish so stinking it would have turned a dog’s stomach.
        Here and there, I did see people dressed in respectable clothes. I even saw a covered chair carried by four slaves. But persons of quality, I later found, usually stayed indoors until the sun was well and truly up, and the more dangerous human trash had vanished until the return of darkness.
        We even went by a few of the great houses that hadn’t been given over to the poor. Heavily fortified, all remaining ancient elegances bricked up, they glowered blankly over the streets they faced.
        We passed into what had once been a grand square hundreds of feet across, in which the central decorative column was toppled over and lay in broken sections, and the buildings on two sides were burnt out. Here, we were accosted by about a dozen raddled old whores and some scabby rent boys. They dragged themselves behind us, offering their services. Though dwarfed by the surrounding vastness, the noise of their cries was the first we’d heard since passing through the gate.
     
Come, lie with me, O pretty lad!
And give me money and be glad
     
    Some ancient creature of probably female sex struck up, though I thought long after it might have been a eunuch. The song was taken up by a few others, building to a choral detailing of inventive though unlikely pleasures.
        Maximin ignored the various prostitutes. I gave them a momentary glance. I hadn’t had a fuck in months, nor a wank in days. But I could easily resist these charms. I kicked one of the boys over as he came too close, and half drew my sword as one of the whores held up supplicating hands that seemed almost to drip contagion.
        Such was the posterity of the great Populus Romanus that once had set the world to order. Such was the fallen magnificence of a city that had once been adorned with the plunder of the world.

10
    At length, we reached the Lateran, which lay on the far side of the city from where we’d entered. Part of it, indeed, was joined to the southern wall. It stood out from its surroundings in bright, jarring glory. Many centuries ago, it was built as a palace for some noble family. Then it was confiscated by one of the emperors and used as government offices. Then it was given – I think by the Great Constantine – to the pope in his capacity as bishop of Rome. Since then, it had been altered and extended to become the main residence of the pope and the administrative heart of the Roman Church and all those churches that looked to Rome for guidance.
        It loomed before us in a jumbled mass of porticoes and arches. The square in front of it was crowded with beggars and other scum. I could smell their diseased bodies at twenty feet. Fortunately, they saw the glower on my face and kept a reasonable distance.
        First, we presented the letters of introduction that Bishop Lawrence had given Maximin. These were accepted by a priest sitting at a desk in the great reception hall behind the gate. A fat creature of uncertain age and sex, he looked at the battered but still sealed letter with plain contempt. ‘His Holiness is away from Rome. Nothing can be transacted in his absence. Come back next month,’ he drawled, reaching for another dried fig.
        A