The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora (10 page)

‘Yet they did,’ said Justinian, ‘so they must be punished.’

‘But hanging? It’ll bring the people out on the streets again, they’ll come to watch and stay to complain.’ Belisarius grinned and Theodora rounded on him. ‘You have something to say, soldier?’

Belisarius smiled his charming smile and stood, bowing to his Empress, speaking in his careful, beautifully modulated tone. ‘Only that I initially assumed you were concerned for the young men’s lives, but of course, Mistress, you’re more worried about how it will play out in the City.’

‘I’d have thought you’d understand that concern only too well, Belisarius.’

‘I hope my master is seen in the best light at all times,’ he answered. ‘It’s one of the reasons I’m careful about my own conduct. I’d never want to bring any hint of shame into the Palace.’

Belisarius spoke lightly, but even so, Theodora heard the accusation in his words.

Narses intervened before she could attack: ‘Augusta, I’ve spoken with Eudaemon. He believes a strong hand now to show he’s in control will stop any further passion on the streets. The Prefect is sure this will work. Green and Blue, both on the scaffold, a clear indication of our impartiality.’

Theodora shook her head. ‘I suspect it will be a clearer indication of his power. And it’s power itself that’s angering the people right now.’

Theodora left the men to get back to the Persian peace treaty, heading for her own rooms, and what comfort she could find there. She wanted to go out to her church, the Hagia Sophia she had always run to as a child, creeping in to find quiet; ease in the century-old building, comfort for her aching bones from cool marble and the caress of warm stone steeped in
decades of prayer. Instead she dismissed Mariam and knelt at her own small altar, doing her best to ignore the noise and undercurrent of tension in the Palace, shutting out the screaming gulls beyond her window, holding the emerald Virgin to her breast, praying for her city long into the night.

The morning dawned cold and damp and Theodora rose early to pray. Across town in his small apartment right out by the Golden Gate, the City hangman was also up early, sharing his breakfast of honey bread and fried fish with his wife and their three-year-old twins. The man enjoyed the complicated craft of his work, combined with the simplicity of its purpose. Not a full-time executioner – even the ever-swelling population of the City did not warrant a full-time position – he had the family business to deal with in the morning.

‘I’ll get the deliveries done first.’

‘Your brother can’t do that?’ his wife asked, wary that her husband was too generous for his own good.

‘His cough’s still bad, a day at home going over the accounts will do him no harm.’

‘Even now?’ she asked, wiping one boy’s face and settling the other more carefully on his stool.

The hangman smiled. ‘The Emperor’s building boom’s been good to us, but that doesn’t mean I’m any keener to add up our profits. If the roads aren’t too busy, I’ll check in at the docks, see if the hemp due in yesterday can’t be offloaded today.’

He didn’t say, in front of the boys, that he would also go across to Sykae with his most trusted carpenter to check the scaffold and make sure all was well, testing the rope for weight and strength. A quick break for prayer in the monastery next to the scaffold, and then down to business. He would not eat again until the prisoners were cut down and pronounced
dead, that was the fast he had instituted for himself, and so he reached now for another piece of bread, an extra fat dollop of mackerel roe for flavour. Even so, he left the bulk of the loaf. He knew his wife would be hungry again soon, she was a little woman with an enormous appetite and their third child was just beginning to show. He kissed her and picked up both of his boys. Holding one under each arm, he squashed them to his chest with a roar and a laugh. Then he pulled on the warmest robe he possessed, inherited from his father who had walked the shore every day, summer and winter. The hangman went out to do a good day’s work.

Theodora knelt at her small altar all morning. She accepted the cup Mariam offered, drank two mouthfuls of water; no wine, no bread. She continued to pray.

Justinian and Narses had worked through the night. They took the breakfast brought to them and ate while looking through their plans. All that was needed now was for this tremor of unrest to be settled. Hopefully, Eudaemon’s hangings would do just that, and then the forward momentum could begin again.

Belisarius came to their meeting a little late. He’d spent much of the night with Mundus, the two generals strategising potential scenarios, discussing lieutenants and troops, each variable dependent on the adversary. Both soldiers well understood that true wisdom, the kind that allowed a man to trust his own split-second judgement even when it was weighted with the fate of thousands of soldiers, came only from experience, but their training encouraged them also to plan for possibilities, and Belisarius knew no man so skilled at making up outlandish, yet not impossible, situations as his friend Mundus. Nor did he know anyone with such skill in imagining solutions to violence closer to home. Antonina hid her
scorn when her young husband came to bed exhausted after a night of war games, and instituted a regime of her own games first thing in the morning. Belisarius was late to his professional duties, but smiling.

At midday Mariam brought Theodora food and drink and the Empress refused both. She prayed on.

By mid-afternoon the hangman’s errands were done, his stomach rumbling as he waited by the scaffold for the prisoners. A crowd of onlookers had already gathered, Greens and Blues, some begging for mercy even now, others there to ensure justice was done – no Green to be condemned if a Blue was let off, no Blue to hang where a Green did not.

Ten years ago the present hangman had crossed the Golden Horn to deliver a new rope to the old hangman and, as it was a hot day, he stayed for a cup of wine. The old man had talked about the skill involved in getting everything just right, double-checking the weight of each condemned man to make sure the neck snapped cleanly, ensuring the prisoner died fast and neat. His art was the precision of death, untainted by opinion. The young rope-maker liked the idea of being untainted by opinion. A few months later, taking receipt of another delivery, the older man mentioned he was looking for an apprentice, and the rope-maker jumped at the chance. Working part-time for the hangman was an opportunity to move away, even a little, from a world where the only smell was hemp in his hair, on his skin, in his clothes. The rope-maker-turned-hangman found his vocation on the scaffold in Sykae. There he could smell fear and death, and the life and love he had at home tasted even sweeter. When the old hangman died, the young rope-maker took his place.

Now he stood in front of the prisoners, ready to weigh them up, measure their necks, get the job done, but his
stomach was rumbling, then griping, then churning. He left the four condemned young men standing in line, two having wet themselves in terror, one in shock and the last still defiant, still screaming true Blue abuse at the Greens. Leaving the Prefect’s guards to keep watch, the hangman ran out to the courtyard and threw up his breakfast, all of last night’s meal, and everything else until all that was left was bile and that still coming in a thin, bitter stream. He vomited until he was giddy and then, cursing his appetite and the mackerel and its roe, he went back to the prisoners’ holding cell.

The crowd outside were louder now. The hangman began again, measuring the men whose last moments were in his care and he did so with shaking hands, eyes unfocused from the sweat dripping down his brow.

One of the Greens looked at his executioner and laughed, ‘Brother, you don’t need to do the job if it’s making you sick. My friends and I will happily give you the day off.’

He turned to his fellow prisoners for confirmation, getting a weak smile from one, a whimper from another, stoic silence from the last.

The hangman shook his head, ‘I do my job, friend. The how and why are not part of it. Sorry.’

‘Fair enough,’ answered the Green. ‘Can’t blame a man for trying.’

The hangman smiled gently, used to both the sullenly frightened and the terrified talkers. ‘I never do,’ he said.

The rope was heavy around the neck, resting on the shoulders. The hangman asked for forgiveness, the prisoner gave it, or not, was crying too much to give it, or spat in his eye in rage, or stood deaf and mute in the silence of shock. The eyes were covered. The rope was tightened, a thick coil of it, forcing the prisoner’s chin up, the better to snap the neck
more cleanly – that part of the process to be quick, painless if possible, if the interminable build-up, endless anticipation could ever be called painless. For each prisoner every second was as long as his life – and as short. The sentence was read aloud again, as it had been by the Prefect, but now in the hangman’s stumbling mutter. Then the prisoner’s name was called, a wail wrenched from his wife in the crowd as she fainted, the scuffle as family picked her up, a yell of bitter fury from the prisoner’s brother, the sentence progressing anyway, as it always did. The rope tightened, the trapdoor dropped, a neck stretched, the prisoner jerked, his eyes bulging, body straining, one final ejaculation of life, and then the neck bones snapped apart. Done.

Once the first Green was cut down, tension began to rise. Back across the water of the Golden Horn the Palace shone in a cold afternoon sun which would soon set. The whispers began before the hangman raised the second length of rope – the Emperor is Blue, as is his wife, she who was once Green, who the Greens famously denied. Is this a trick? Do the powers-that-be mean to hang only Greens and save the Blues from the noose? A chant formed in the throats of those waiting, ready to break into full voice. Then the second prisoner was brought forward and a moan went up from the Blue side of the crowd. He was theirs. The Greens were briefly satisfied, the Blues downcast. The muttering continued: it had come to this, their own Emperor allowing such brutality, merely to make a show of his impartiality, the state’s impartiality. The people were not impartial, they were furious.

The rope was placed around the man’s neck, the spectators became more agitated, more uneasy, their cries were louder, loud enough to be heard over in the Palace. The faction leaders shook their heads, reminding each other that the Emperor was more interested in the Empire than the City, in the
Persian border than the lads fighting for it. Hanged for a street fight. Hanged where, often enough, the same crime might have been punished with blinding or exile or loss of land, loss of citizenship. Hanged to shut them up.

The second neck was broken, second wasted seed given up, second man taken down. It was darker now, the winter sun almost set. The crowd were restless, the hangman was sweating, shaking. The hangman’s assistant, worried his boss would collapse and leave him to deal with the crowd, suggested they could speed matters through, dispatch both men at once. With one Green and one Blue still to hang, whichever man they dealt with first, an extra few moments of life granted to one and not the other would set off a ruckus. This crowd were difficult enough as it was, the Prefect’s men were having a hard time keeping them back from the scaffold. Could they not hang both men at once and be done with it?

The hangman agreed. He preferred to give each man his due, it had been a mark of his career that a condemned man’s crimes were given their allotted time, that the victim’s family would see the full effect of their reparation, an individual life for an individual life. But his guts were churning, his body streaming sweat, he’d had to run off the scaffold once, he couldn’t risk it again; this was the best way, two at once.

Two ropes were raised and the crowd groaned. Two men brought out, made to stand closer than they wanted, than their people wanted: even this near to death the lifelong enmity raged on. The assistant checked the nooses, the hangman made his calculations as to the correct counterweights to use now that there were two waiting to die. The ropes went round the necks, the crowd were screaming, the sun fully set and the square lit by torches. The hangman asked forgiveness, one gave it, the other did not. The men’s faces were covered. The hangman and his assistant stepped back, the lever was
pulled. And nothing happened. The trapdoor did not fall, the men did not drop, no necks were broken, no lives ended. The hangman adjusted the knot, pulled the nooses tighter around both necks, heavy hemp weighing down condemned shoulders. Hangman and assistant stepped back again, the lever was pulled again, with more force this time, and then the trapdoor fell partially but not completely. Now both men were hanging but still standing on the tips of their toes: they were alive, their necks stretched and burned by the rope, but not broken.

The crowd had had enough. They swarmed up on to the scaffold from the ground, Blues and Greens together. The hangman was sensible enough to leap back down into the scuffle, becoming one of the crowd, and watched his assistant beaten aside by the mass of people. Ropes were cut, hoods removed, condemned men whisked away to asylum in the Church of St Lawrence. No chance to rub their bloody and bruised necks, throats hoarse from near-asphyxiation, they were hurried into small boats and ferried over the water. As factions worked together with monks to cover their tracks, hiding from the Prefect’s police, confusing those following them, the rescued men were rushed away. The faction leaders said it was a sign from God, their men had been saved. Natural justice in the form of the hangman’s shaking hands had pardoned the remaining men – one from each side, so it could not be considered anything but fair. They should be freed. They would plead their case at the games in three days’ time, the Emperor would hear their cause, justice would prevail.

Justinian and Narses held emergency meetings, Tribonian and his advisers studied precedent, John the Cappadocian and Eudaemon the Prefect drank late into the night debating the possibilities. Belisarius and Mundus drilled their troops: always better to be prepared. The hangman went home to his wife,
as ashamed as his roiling guts and sweating brow would let him be, stopping every hundred paces to throw up. He crossed the City frightened too – worried that if the men weren’t freed the incensed mob might come after him. Right now they praised his accidental pardoning, in another three days they might condemn him for the two dead. He packed up his wife and children and headed out to her family’s farm, two days’ journey closer to Thrace, just in case.