The Purple Shroud: A Novel of Empress Theodora (13 page)

After the announcement, people streamed out of the arena, through streets of upturned carts and burnt-out shops, picking their way between ancient statues that had toppled into the Mese. Some of the more stringent of Constantinople’s Christians had used the cover of riot to pull down the old statues to the ancient gods, and while there were plenty still standing, enough had fallen to make a point. Theodora was right: most people were tired and, pleased with Justinian’s announcement, they headed away, either home to wash and sleep, or down to the bars along the harbour where they knew they could eat and drink for many hours yet. No one quite felt it was all over, but a concession had been made, there was time to take a breath; the faction chiefs would go to the Palace
in the morning and begin more formal discussions with Justinian’s councillors. Change was on its way, if not quite fast enough for some. Chiefs from both factions went into another meeting; some possibilities had been mentioned, there were new demands, new names, to be considered. Nothing was settled yet.

Among those jeering the Emperor’s announcement was a group of five youths, a mix of Blues and Greens. Like their leaders, they came from the outlying suburbs of the City, and had enjoyed running free through streets usually patrolled by the Prefect’s men or by police forces of their own factions. Not yet ready to go home, they watched the old men move off to discuss the newly whispered idea that a figurehead should be put up, someone to depose Justinian himself, but the business of bargaining meant nothing to them. They were out for a laugh, and it was too early for bed.

Rufus and Nikolaos led the others out of the Hippodrome, through the Nekra Gate. All five were on edge from three days on the streets, returning to their homes only to take a little food and then run away from scolding fathers and worried mothers. The youths would never have been together in normal circumstances. Rufus, Otto and Lucan were Blues, two brothers and an old friend, Nikolaos and Titus were Green cousins; they had come together when they found themselves part of the mob attacking the Chalke. Shouting and pushing among mostly older men, the boys had stepped back from the main group when hammering against the stone of the building turned to actually setting fire to the doors. The majority of those attacking were current or ex-soldiers: they knew what they were doing and they worked as a band, even though they were strangers. The boys were only there for the
excitement, to be part of something bigger than themselves; they were still scared of the authorities, worried they might be seen and noted from the sentry boxes, their names given up to Palace officials – or worse, in Rufus’ case, his fist-happy fireman father.

It was true that Otto, Rufus’ little brother, had sometimes shown too much enjoyment on their occasional excursions into the City’s grain silos, where they would catch feral cats and then roll them down the Fourth Hill in barrels. And Nikolaos’ cousin Titus certainly seemed to have left a secret behind in Dacia, something shared only between the two boys’ mothers. Rufus was sure there was a girl back home carrying Titus’ bastard, but Nikolaos liked to tease that it was more likely to be a Dacian lad he’d left behind. These were the kind of boys to skip lessons, tease sisters; boys who might, perhaps, have visited a whore or two, though only the eldest would have been brave enough to follow her into a bed. They were not bad boys.

With most of the shops and bars closed in the Forum of Constantine, they went further afield, to a place Lucan knew from his sailor uncle, just off the Forum Bovis, but were quickly sent packing by a trio of whores who’d had enough of youths invading their usually quiet local and wanted a night off, definitely no men. Doubly rejected, they made their way through a narrow alley up towards a dingy little bar near the Church of St Polyeuktos. They failed here too, the Blue owner – and his Blue clientele – had decided not to drop their grudge against the Greens. The owner came out from behind his bar and looked them up and down.

‘Varus’ boys? Blue, yes?’

Rufus nodded, his arm around his brother. Lucan edged closer to Nikolaos and Titus, suddenly aware of the hush in
the dark, low-ceilinged room, and the number of silent men around the tables.

‘But those two,’ the bar owner spat on the floor by the cousins, still staring at Rufus, ‘have the haircut of Green men, am I right?’

Rufus nodded again, slower this time.

The barman shook his head and several of the men at tables stood up. ‘What the fuck’s it coming to? Our old church burned down, and our lads – our own Blue lads – wandering around with these Green cunts like they belong together.’ He came closer to Rufus now, and leaned right into the boy’s face, whispering, ‘You do not belong together. Rome has always run on factions and it wants to stay that way.’ Rufus could smell the rough wine on the man’s breath, saw up close the fat scar down his left cheek, felt a heavy and calloused finger jabbing his collarbone with every word as the man repeated, ‘You – do – not – belong – together. Got it?’

Rufus nodded, pulled Otto closer, took a quick step back and then all five of them were off down the street, terrified boys, not men, scared and shaking and angrier than they’d ever been. Angrier still at the sound of laughter and cheers that followed them, stumbling as they ran over stones and vicious shards of marble, alabaster, stumbling over the broken City.

It was fear that set the boys running, but it was anger that led them to set the fire. Anger at the old men and the middle-aged men, at the rich men running the City and the poor men who, for no reason but age, believed they had the right to tell five boys what to do. There were others who would have approved of them as they ran; visionaries who hoped that all Roman youth might work together for the wider Empire, who believed it possible to overcome the factional desires the
state had both promoted and decried, religious who wished that the divide was between the faithful and the unbelieving, not the Blue and the Green.

The boys came to a halt, panting, eyes streaming with tears from running against the cold night wind and, possibly in Nikolaos’ case and definitely in Titus’, spilling out in very real fear.

‘Fuck them,’ Titus declared now, quickly running a hand over his face so that sweat and tears mingled. ‘Fuck those old men. We can do what we like. The whole City can do what the fuck it likes.’

‘Yes,’ Rufus shouted, an arm around each of the Green cousins. ‘We don’t have to buy any of their lies, we can make a new City, burn this one down and start again.’

‘Mate,’ Lucan interrupted, ‘the burning’s already started.’

‘It has,’ Rufus agreed, ‘but it’s not been started by us, not yet.’

The other four looked at him. He was smiling and it was a smile they had not seen before. It was a smile that was exciting and frightening and very tempting. Then, after a look that passed simultaneously between all five of them, Lucan let out a piercing scream and Rufus joined him. Nikolaos and Titus began to whoop, to jeer, and Otto, silent until now, and perhaps angrier than the others because of his greater fear, opened his mouth and shouted a call to action:

‘Let’s burn the fucking walls down!’

They tried to. Otto had meant the Palace walls and all four of the other boys understood this was his intention. In a city of walls, old, new, Constantine, Theodosian, it was only the Palace enclosure that still seemed a challenge. There were plenty of smouldering beams close enough. There was the cordoned-off mess of Hagia Sophia, dangerously hot, despite
the water poured by the combined force of Green and Blue firemen. There were the soggy, steaming ruins of the Baths of Zeuxippus, the waters of the Baths no challenge to the flaming torches thrown by the rioters. They ran around for over an hour, dodging cordons, skipping under them in Otto’s case, but every cinder they tried was knocked from their hands by their seniors, no fonder of the Palace than the boys, but not keen on further loss either. Riot might breed riot, anger give birth to hot fury, but a razed city would be no good to anyone, whoever stood in the Kathisma. The faction leaders had been very clear in their instructions to their subordinates – no more fire.

At last the boys gave up their attempt on the Palace itself and moved on, tiring, but not sated. And so, when they rounded the corner from the burnt-out hollow that had once been Hagia Sophia, when they saw the Church of St Eirene, still standing, unguarded, open, alone, it took a moment before one of them – Otto again – saw it as a target rather than simply a dark church in a darker night.

The boys were too young to worry about attacking a symbol of the faith, too angry to care that this was the oldest church in the city. They were also too angry to notice how close it was to the old hospital, or that the wind had changed. What had been a cold wind coming directly over the Black Sea from the north, was now a milder sea breeze from the east. A breeze that would turn a fire, set against the church walls, from a quick flare to fast flame, then whip that fire around and throw it at the hospital walls.

Four hours later, the first church of Constantinople had been razed – and the Hospital of Samson was destroyed too: patients burned in their beds, the nuns and monks who worked there horrifically injured as they tried to carry the sick
from the collapsing building, or burned to death alongside patients they would not leave.

‘Fuck,’ Otto said, tears in his voice and then on his cheeks.

‘Yeah,’ the four friends echoed, heads and hands shaking, ‘fuck.’

T
he deaths of the innocent sick, as well as the loss of the City’s first church, pushed even the peacemakers inside the Palace beyond breaking point. At the same moment as the Green and Blue leaders were gathering outside Probus’ empty home to ask him to accept the title of August in Justinian’s place, Belisarius and Mundus were riding out with their own troops against the rioters. Belisarius’ men were Goths, Mundus’ troops were Herules. Neither Goth nor Herule had any great love for the City or its people. Despite the success of their kings in the west, the Goth soldiers were accustomed to arrogance from the Constantinopolitans, and the Herules were considered uncouth savages; fierce warriors yes, but not Romans, not citizens. The two generals led teams of men who had fought for the Empire but had never felt accepted or appreciated by its citizens, and their readiness was as cold as the iron they prepared to wield.

Unfortunately the first opposition they met was neither a group of angry young men, nor a passionate and political mingling of Blues and Greens, but five monks from the ruined Hagia Sophia, processing down a crowded street, carrying the few relics they had scavenged from the burning
church: three saints’ skulls, a holy femur, a scrap of cloth miraculously untouched by flame. The monks swayed as they walked, exhausted and grieving over the desecration of their churches and blessed relics. They did not mean to walk straight into the soldiers, and the soldiers tried to give them a wide berth, but the road was narrower than usual, and as debris left by rioters in the preceding nights cut off access routes there was nowhere for either group to go but forward into each other. Armed soldiers headed straight into a small group of monks, followed not by rioters but by the praying faithful as the monks held the sacred relics aloft. Heads cooled for a moment, hearts stopped, priest looked into soldier’s eye, priest blinked. There was a second when all might have been well. And then that second passed.

Blood in the Mese, screams echoing from the remains of the Chalke Gate, armed troops and rock-wielding youths clashed in the Forum of Constantine. A girl, pushed out of the way into a Mese shopfront, watched as a Goth soldier reached down from his horse and kicked her brother in the head, one, two, three kicks before he was down on the ground and cold. An old man, rammed up against the Palace wall, was searched for weapons, and smacked in the face anyway when his pockets revealed nothing but a thin leather bag of feathers he had collected from the ground on the day his wife died and carried with him for fifteen years. The old man watched now as those feathers were scattered into the cold morning air, and he crumpled down the stone wall, losing his beloved all over again. A child screamed as she was separated from a foolish mother who’d thought perhaps the markets might be trading today, and had ventured out to try to fill a pan that had remained empty for two days. A young boy was trampled. A man stabbed. A soldier battered to death by an angry mob in one dark corner of the City, and in retaliation a girl was pulled
from her home in the next street and raped by four soldiers chanting the name of their dead comrade as they broke her, teaching her to hate them.

By midday, Constantinople was boiling, and by mid-afternoon the women of the City were out on the street, pulled from kitchens and back rooms by the screams of their daughters and the blood of their sons. Fighting off the Goth and Herule mercenaries, they were almost angry enough to spit at Belisarius too. Almost, not quite, and the golden soldier understood that retreat was the better part of that day’s valour – fighting the City’s women could only end in disgrace. Belisarius sent a messenger to Mundus just five narrow streets away, the messenger returned with agreement; the two generals and their men bled back into the Palace.

Theodora slammed into Justinian’s main office, ignoring the advisers with their books and folios open, clamouring that their master consider one plan over another, this solution instead of that.

‘Women are out in the streets now. Fighting. You have to do something, say something.’

Justinian nodded. ‘I know. We’re doing our best.’

He indicated Belisarius and Mundus, both of them still half-armed, covered in the grime and gore of the morning’s battle, Narses taking notes as they caught their breath and threw down the first food and drink they’d had all day. Belisarius broke off from explaining the paths they had taken to look over at the Empress. A grin broke out on his tired face.

‘There’s nothing to smile about, General,’ Theodora said.

‘Of course not, Mistress. It’s just, you’re so worried the women are fighting, when you are yourself…well…’