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of roasting meat. Unless you fancied a week of the shits, eating from the public stalls was off limits. But it was a fine smell and it reminded me I’d had nothing since breakfast, and little then.
     
    My quick stride didn’t last beyond the Belisarius Memorial, which blocks the whole centre of the road. Unless there’s a procession or the chariots are racing, you don’t normally see paupers in the better parts of Constantinople. The police have orders to keep out all but a few licensed and almost sanitised beggars. By day, the poor cluster in the dumpier parts of the City. By night, they sleep or swarm in vast and stinking slums even the authorities barely know. You don’t welcome these creatures into your own world. They’re ugly. They’re light-fingered or plain violent. They smell. They carry the seeds of contagion about their unwashed clothes and bodies. Once past the massive statue of Belisarius, though, I found the way was blocked by a loose crowd of the unwashed that must have been a hundred strong.
    ‘God bless the Lord Nicetas!’ someone shrilled at me. The call was taken up in a ragged chant. ‘My God preserve the Lord Nicetas,’ he called again, ‘who feeds the posterity of Romulus and the heroes of old.’ I stepped out of his way and was almost knocked sideways by a wagon piled high with food. Drawn by white oxen, this had lurched, without warning, from one of the smaller side streets. There were four others behind it.
    ‘Blessings on the Caesar Nicetas and his bread!’ someone cackled on my left. I glanced round. A woman had left the throng and come over as if to intimidate me into agreement. I looked at her and tried not to shrink back in horror. You couldn’t possibly have said how old she was. Mouth open in a dark and toothless hole, her face said extreme old age. Her uncovered breasts hung down in the most disgusting manner, and one had been honeycombed from within by a cancer. But her matted, lice-ridden hair was still black. She opened her mouth wider for a howl of triumphant laughter. ‘ Emperor Nicetas won’t let us starve!’ she screeched. I almost believed she would step closer and try to touch me. I stared at the black and red mottling that ran upward from her wrists and shuddered. Woman or not, I would have gone for my sword. But a man with one eye and weeping sores on the visible part of his chest now appeared beside her and led her back into an army of living refuse that was growing from one moment to the next.
    No wonder those chairs had been racing each other away from this lot. The smell and general danger aside, you don’t hang about when a mob starts talking treason.

Chapter 8
     
    However, the poor hadn’t been assembled here to talk treason. I’d no sooner gone round the food wagons when I nearly crashed into the seditionary theatre that was the gathering’s real purpose. Two men in reasonably clean robes had taken their places on very high chairs placed about five yards apart. They were trying to look grand. In the eyes of their audience, they probably succeeded. I think I’d caught them close to the beginning of their act.
    ‘So good, don’t you think, Alexius,’ the elder of them struck up in an affected voice, ‘that My Lord Nicetas understands the duties of his class?’
    ‘I couldn’t agree more, my dearest Constans,’ came the reply in a louder and still more affected voice. ‘It’s all so very unlike another person I could mention.’ One look at these two troublemakers and I’d guessed what they were about. I gritted my teeth and waited for the inevitable.
    It came from a scabby dwarf who’d been darting in and out of the crowd. ‘So unlike that piece of barbarian shite the Emperor’s allowed to steal our bread,’ he gasped. There was a ragged cheer from everyone who’d heard this, and a louder cheer as the words were carried back and repeated for those who hadn’t heard them.
    Yes, I’d caught this at the beginning. Even as I tried to back