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able to get a move on. The Triumphal Way would take me past Imperial Square and into Middle Street. From there, it would be another reasonably straight two miles to the Golden Gate, and another two after that to where Lucas would be waiting like a cat that’s caught a bird for its mistress. Until then, it was a matter of threading my way through crowds that seemed to have all the time in the world, and avoiding the carrying chairs that crept or hurtled along in both directions.
    I looked into the colonnade on my left. That was packed – you might have thought the shouting, jostling mass there was gathered to pass the time of day, not to get from one point to another without stepping into the sun. I reached up to check if my hat was still in place and stepped round a heap of replacement paving stones that would be set in place once the crowds had melted away. I thought again of Nicetas. It’s only reasonable that an emperor should hand all the really plum jobs about his own family. But why make Nicetas Commander of the East – that is, put him in charge of the Persian War? Why then bring him back to Constantinople, while Heraclius was away, and make him Regent as well? The man wasn’t fit for changing the straw in a public toilet. Any one of the statues I was passing would have made a more active Regent. In Syria, he’d run away from the Persians so fast, he hadn’t even stopped by Jerusalem to snatch the True Cross to safety. The Empire was on its uppers, and there was a good case for blaming it on Nicetas.
    Far ahead of me, there was a sudden disturbance. It looked like another carrying chair race. I didn’t want to get in the way of that. I gave an involuntary look at the sky and moved towards the right-hand side of the road. I found myself looking at a big statue of Cicero. I could have looked at many other things. If I turned, I’d see the vast mass of the Great Church looming above all else in the City. Though not visible from here, the immensity of the Circus was a half mile beyond. I’d got chariot racing cancelled until further notice, but might be able to hear the faint cheering as one of the cheaper entertainments came to its end. But Cicero suited me better. I looked into the troubled, bronze face. What would he have thought of all this?
    To be fair, his opinion might not have been the one I currently wanted. However useless Nicetas was, there was a limit to how much blame you could load on one man’s shoulders. It wasn’t just the Persians. Every other frontier was soft or collapsing. We were losing Greece to the Slavs and Avars. We’d mostly lost Italy to the Lombards. Our foothold in Spain was going to the Visigoths. Our control of Africa stopped barely twenty miles inland. You couldn’t blame Nicetas for that. As for the Persians, with one partial exception, we’d found no one else able to stand up to them. If Nicetas was useless, he wasn’t alone in his uselessness.
    Thoughts of the ‘partial exception’ brought on a faint stirring of unease. This wouldn’t ripen into another panic attack. But thoughts of that in itself deepened the unease. The two were obviously connected. If the one wasn’t continually simmering away, the other wouldn’t keep boiling over. I’d have to do something about the causes of the unease. But this was easier said than done. I turned my thoughts back to the safer matter of Nicetas and his nearly certain attempt at a joke. Should I take it as a good-humoured joke? Probably not. There was little humour of any kind about the Emperor’s cousin. None of it was good.
    The chairs had now hurried past and I set off again at a quickish stride. I passed the square in front of the law courts. The morning crowd of lawyers and their clients was fast dwindling away. The Monday property auction in the square was nearly ended. I counted five men – probably Jews or Armenians – putting up with the sun for a closing bargain. There was a general smell in the air of charcoal and