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sometimes being able to pass across. So it now was with sleep. It didn’t help that Jeremy would have kept a stone awake with his snoring.

Chapter 4
    But, no, I had been sleeping. Without once being other than aware of the snoring boy, I’d been back in the palace at Ctesiphon. The snoring had taken the place of flutes and cymbals to accompany the slow and elaborate gyrations of the dancing girls. With great consideration, Chosroes had told me what wines to avoid. Now, tipsy on something that tasted of wormwood, I’d been sitting with him for about a month – it may have been a year – while his chief general flopped about on the cushions like a landed fish, his face turning black from the poison he’d been fed. A good spy, you see, would have confined himself to harvesting truth from Roxana. The Great Alaric, you can be sure, had planted a few very useful lies in her mind. At last, they’d found their way into the Royal Mind, and I was now switching a complacent gaze between the fluttering, libidinous hands of those naked girls and the swelling tongue of a man who’d spent the past year studying survey reports of the walls of Constantinople.
    Yet, whether I was asleep, or dreaming while awake, I certainly was back in Ctesiphon. Even as I reached out to grab lecherously at one of the firm breasts, I sensed a change in the quality of the artificial light; Chosroes and the girls were continuing as if nothing odd had taken place about us. But I looked up and saw that we were all now in the great, vaulted cellar that only the closest and most trusted companions of the Great King were allowed to see – allowed, that is, to see and be let out again. All about us, each on its own couch, lay the remains of the family members and generals and ministers he’d killed throughout his reign. Women, children, babies still suckling when he’d snatched them away, old and young men: all lay as he himself had arranged them to mummify in the dry air, each with a label pinned to the right ear that he’d written out in his own hand to remind him of names and genealogies. The couches were arranged about us in their hundreds. They reached over to every one of the far walls. In a while, Chosroes would snigger and get up, and call on me to help get this latest victim on to a couch. None would ever dare comment on his absence from the Royal Council. None would dare notice when his name was erased from every public document. His own wives and children would never dare so much as to whisper his name to each other in the dark. Once more, Alaric the Magnificent had bought time for beleaguered Constantinople, and for the drivelling fool of an Emperor who sheltered behind its walls.
    And now those massed and flaring torches dimmed, and I was certainly awake in Canterbury. How long I’d lain here aware of myself I couldn’t say. Never speak in the same breath of opium and any clear sense of time. Sweating in the darkness, I lay with no company now but Jeremy and the sound of his snoring. Then he stopped. As I yawned and prepared to turn over, he let out a long sicky burp. Then he farted. Then he was back to snoring.
    ‘This really won’t do!’ I muttered. I clutched the side of my cot and sat up. Keeping the blanket about my shoulders, I forced myself to stand. I reached for my stick. It must have fallen down when Jeremy tried to wake me. I gave up on patting about for it, and walked unsteadily over to the window. The main shutters were bolted, and I’d have needed a chair to get at the top one – a chair and a lamp, and someone to hold me steady as I reached up to undo it. But, feeling round in the dark, I found a smaller opening about a foot square. I pulled it open. Gripping the back of a chair, I leaned forward and let the chilly night air dry the sweat from my face.
    If the rain had finally let up, there was still a mass of clouds overhead, and I really might have been looking out with my eyes shut. But, if chilly, the breeze was a