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away and continue about my business, the crowd shrank to a dense mass about the seditionaries. This left plenty of room for me to continue on my way. But Nicetas – more diligent, I might say, than in any of his official duties – was having me slandered to the mob. I’d be silly not to stay awhile and find out his line of attack. Cautiously, I pushed up the brim of my hat and looked over the heads of the stunted, bandy-legged poor to where the seditionaries were settling into their act.
    ‘It may have been wrong of him to stop the people’s bread,’ Alexius announced in a tone you might almost have taken as a defence of the Lord Senator Alaric. He paused and cleared his throat. ‘But it was surely unpardonable to say there were too many of us in the City, and that not even a hundred of us were the equal of one dirty peasant digging in the fields.’ This got a loud groan, followed by general denunciations of Alaric the Barbarian who’d halved the free distributions of food to the City poor, and who plainly wanted to end them altogether. You can be sure no one bothered complaining about the new entrance fee I’d ordered for the public baths. If one of these animals had so much as washed his face since Easter, I’d have been surprised.
    Constans took a sip of wine and looked in my direction. I wasn’t the only person of quality lurking beyond the crowd. But it wouldn’t do for him to recognise the man he’d been hired to preach against. I pulled my hat down a little further.
    Still looking at me, Constans laughed nervously, before going back about his business. ‘I tell you, that barbarian is a snake in the bosom of the Empire. He isn’t a Greek like us. He isn’t even a Latin or a Syrian or Egyptian. He’s a barbarian immigrant. He hadn’t been here a quarter of an hour before he’d wormed his way into the Emperor’s confidence. He’s been turning everything upside down ever since. He’s doing to us from the inside what his ancestors did as invaders to the Western Provinces. Unless someone stops him, he won’t stop till he’s pulled us all down to his own level.’
    ‘Come now, my dearest friend,’ said Alexius, when the chorus of hawking and spitting had died away. ‘I’m sure the boy means well. It’s just that he doesn’t understand our ways. He’s read a few books and thinks he knows everything. When he finally grows up, he’ll surely accept the rightness of ways that were always good enough for our ancestors.’
    ‘ Means well? ’ Constans shouted in mock outrage. ‘You’re too trusting, Alexius. How do you think he pays the bills on that palace he was given? I tell you, he’s on the take. Where else is all the money going? What’s he done with all the taxes that come in from the provinces? They don’t go on us, the Roman People, that’s to be sure. What happened to the olive oil ration?’ He raised his voice. ‘Do you even remember that?’ Loud groans. More repeating of the words. More groans.
    ‘Never mind the oil,’ Alexius broke in, still sounding even-handed. ‘But I’ll grant you have a point. What really matters is the army and there’s been precious little money spent on that. If the Lord Nicetas had been given proper support, we’d never have lost Syria to the Persians. The Empire wouldn’t have been cut in half. We wouldn’t now be facing an invasion of Egypt.’
    Oh, the fucking injustice of that! I really had to struggle not to kick my way through the crowd, to pull Alexius off his chair and wring his lying seditionary neck. But I did control myself. I also kept my face down when Constans called me a yellow-haired catamite, and someone with a Cypriotic accent accused me of conjuring headless demons in my palace to let loose in the City.
    Yes, the gross fucking injustice! I’d put off the currency reform so money could be found for the defence of Syria. As if from nowhere, I’d squeezed out as much money for that as had been lavished in the old days on the