I woke to a smell of frying sausages. It was late in the morning, though the shuttered window gave me no indication of the time. I had the most awful headache, and white flashes attended my every move as I staggered out of bed. The scabs over my wounds had come off in the night, and I’d bled into the bedclothes. Pulling myself free of the sticky silk added to the chorus of pains.
I shambled round in the light that poured through a single chink in the shutters, looking for some clothes. Then I gave up. I unbolted and dragged the door open.
‘Authari,’ I almost called, before remembering all that had happened.
‘Oh fuck!’ I groaned as the horrors of the past day or so came crowding into my mind. I didn’t even try to pretend that they might have been a dream.
I called for Martin. He was already waiting outside the door with Maximin in his arms. Gutrune, he said, was still overcome by the death of Authari. In the past few months, she had lost the father of her child and the child itself. Now she had lost the man who, Martin told me, was planning to ask me to sell her to him so they could be married.
Poor cow! I thought. I’d see her right if Maximin made it to his first birthday.
For the moment, though, there was work to be done. I took up the jug of wine Martin had placed on a table in the corridor and drained it without acknowledgement of the little cup set beside it. Too late, I found it was the sour, greenish stuff favoured by the Greek higher classes and I nearly choked on it. But it was enough to bring me back to a pale semblance of humanity.
‘Martin,’ I said, taking Maximin into my own arms and feeling almost ready to bask in the radiance of his smile – ‘Martin, we need to press on with the investigation. I think we should concentrate on finding out how that bastard Agathius got into my room.’
‘I quite agree, sir,’ said Martin. ‘I suggest first, however, that a bath might be in order. I’ve had one prepared. All else aside, I’m afraid to say that Maximin has had an accident.’
That he had. With Gutrune out of action, no one had changed him, and the tight hug I’d given the boy had squirted a stream of yellow shit all over my belly and legs.
‘Jesus and the Virgin!’ I groaned, now noticing the smell. I handed him straight back to Martin, who held him out at arm’s length.
‘You’ll remember that the main gate was unbarred when we got down there,’ I said in Celtic, ‘but the doorkeepers were drugged. That makes it fair to assume my attacker was let in as part of a conspiracy that involved people trusted by the doorkeepers.’
Martin stood back to let me go first on to the balcony from my bedroom.
‘You may be right,’ he said. ‘But might it not be that some outsider crept in and hid during the day, until he could drug their wine unobserved, and then open the gate?’
‘Possible,’ I replied, ‘but not likely. Remember – except it was drugged, their wine was the same as that served to everyone else in the Legation household that night. That makes it most likely that the wine was drugged by whoever served it, and that he was known to the doorkeepers. Of course, we can settle this when we speak to the men directly. Without Priscus around to interfere, we can ask whatever questions we like.’
With Martin keeping hold of my tunic – I was still a little unsteady – I climbed on to the railing and pulled myself up to look at the ledge that ran along to the dome. It was impossible to tell if anyone else had been up there since my escapade in the summer. But the spikes of the railings at the end were now covered in a film of rust. Any intruder would surely have rubbed off patches of this and left traces of their clothing on them.
I could have walked along to inspect these at close quarters but Martin was holding on to me as a sailor his ropes. I jumped back down beside him.
‘Agathius didn’t come from above,’ I said. ‘That means he must have come up the stairs from the gardens. Now, since we’ve never been able to get out of the garden these stairs lead to, it’s worth asking how he got into it from the main hall.’
That was a mystery easily solved. When we’d last sat there in the summer, the walls of the garden were lined with thick shrubbery. Now, enough of the leaves had blown off to reveal a small door that had been unbarred from the other side. This led into the much larger central garden, where I’d seen those monks go about their clipping and watering and which, in turn, led to various parts of the main building.
It was now that I saw the previously hidden warren of offices and corridors where the main work of the Legation went on and which had once been the state rooms of the palace. The builders had done a good job with the walls and doors, and had even lowered the ceilings to maintain a sense of proportion. It was the mosaic floors that told the story. Where these had been dug up to make way for new walls, the spaces had been crudely filled with concrete.
I was beginning to learn quite a lot about the work of the Legation. This included handling petitions and arranging loans to the Emperor, setting up appointments with him, and promoting the exchange of information that was too confidential to be conducted through the Exarch’s chancery in Ravenna. No wonder the virtual shutting down of the Legation since my arrival had raised so many concerns among those not in the know.
When I had asked for the Permanent Legate’s bedroom to be taken apart by the Black Agents I had rather hoped that the rest of the Legation would be subjected to a less thorough inspection. The broken doors and smashed furniture that the Black Agents had left in their wake proved otherwise. Some of the small band of officials and slaves who were busy cleaning up the mess gave me hard looks as we passed. They were doing their best, but restoring any kind of order would take days.
From here, it was a straight walk through the lower storey of the Permanent Legate’s suite to the now open door that led into the main hall.
‘It was Demetrius,’ the elder and apparently less stupid of the doorkeepers told me when I repeated my question. ‘Slaves got us the meat. He brung the wine.’
He was able to show me the jug and wooden cups in which the wine had been brought since these had still not been collected owing to the chaos of the previous day. The cups were of the sort I had already seen in the slave quarters of the Legation – the sort, that is, that didn’t match the one given to Authari. I handed them to Martin with the request that they be sent to my apothecary for testing.
No point in further questioning. The doorkeepers had settled the one matter on which they were competent to give information. In doing so, they had saved us from a mass of speculation. They claimed not to have seen Demetrius since he had brought the wine and to know nothing more about the Legation than the others since they had both been bought only about a month before my own arrival.
Now, the fact that so much effort had been put into getting at least one intruder through the main gate raised a problem. I’d taken it as fair to assume that there was some alternative way in to the Legation. This would explain how Demetrius and the body of the Permanent Legate had been able to disappear without leaving any trail. What I had now learnt indicated that there was no secret entrance.
‘No one has seen him since we were called to the Emperor,’ Martin reminded me. ‘It may be we were the last to see him.’
As we walked back to the end of the hall, and I prepared to knock on the barred door to my own suite – Radogast would never be able to understand how I was asking to be let back in without having first gone out past him! – the gate of the Legation swung open behind us and Theophanes was carried in. As ever, Alypius walked beside the chair, a purple bag hanging from his shoulders.
‘Ah, there you both are!’ Theophanes cried, prodding at the slaves to carry him over to us. He flashed us an almost natural smile. ‘I have some progress to report.’