The Scourge of God

“I suppose.” The translator frowned. “The divinity of the emperor is still under theological debate.” The Hun grunted, and they passed through the darkness of the triple walls to the bright sunlight on the inside. Edeco stopped again. “Where is your city?” Bigilas smiled. Here the immensity of Constantinople first struck the barbarians. “The central city remains behind the original walls of Constantine.” He pointed at a wall nearly a mile ahead. “This new area, walled by Theodosius, is reserved for cisterns, gardens, monasteries, churches, and farmers’ markets. The Lycus River flows under our walls and we have enough water and food to resist an invader forever. Constantinople can never be starved or conquered, Edeco, it can only be befriended.” The Hun said nothing for a while, his gaze rotating. Then,

“I come as a friend. For presents.”

“The chief minister has presents for you, my friend.” At the smaller, older, single-width wall of Constantine there was a marketplace before the Gate of Saturninus where Edeco eyed the goods with a predator’s appetite. Nova Roma had become the world’s new crossroads and every product, every pleasure, every smell, and every taste could be found here. His wives would quiver like excited geese to see booty such as this. Someday he would carry it back to them, spattered with the blood of the merchants who had owned it. The thought pleased him.

The pair went through the gate and entered the urban hub of the Eastern Empire, a raw, bustling capital of gilded churches, ostentatious palaces, crowded tenements, and teeming streets. Edeco suddenly felt shrunken and entirely too anonymous. If the Hun evoked fear outside the walls, he elicited only curious glances inside them. To Constantinople came all the peoples of the world: black Africans, blond Germans, dusky Syrians, shrouded Berbers, migratory Jews, glowering Goths, copper-hued Iberians, industrious Greeks, proud Arabs, clamoring Egyptians, and bumpkin Illyrians and Dacians. They pushed, threaded, and jostled one another, crying out bargains, negotiating prices, shouting for passageway, and promising pleasure. The Hun felt caught in a vast river he did not control. There was a heady stench of spice, perfume, sweat, charcoal smoke, food, and sewage and a cacophony of tongues. It made him want to vomit.

Bigilas was gesturing to it all with pride.

The road they followed was stone, that Roman custom that Edeco believed was hard on feet and harder on hooves.

The middle was open to the sky but on either side was a marble portico that offered shade and shelter and was just as crowded as the lane’s center. The tops of the pillars were carved into fronds and leaves, as if to mimic trees. The Romans used rock instead of wood and then tried to make the rock look like wood! In the shadows beyond the portico was an endless line of shops tunneling into buildings so high that they made the street a canyon. The Hun could not keep himself from scanning the eaves, wary of ambush, and yet these Romans thronged without any apparent feeling of entrap-ment. In fact, they seemed to take comfort in this closeness.

It was an unnatural way to live and it had made the Romans strange: loud, overdressed, the painted women either too veiled or too exposed, the men too rich or too beggared, gamblers and whores beside monks and nuns, all of them clutching and calling and complaining with gusto. It was an ant’s nest, Edeco thought, and when it all finally burned it would be a blessing to the earth.

Bigilas chattered like a girl as they pushed ahead through the confusion, saying this marble was from Troad and their street was called the Mese and that forum was called Arca-dius, as if Edeco cared. The Hun was instead tabulating the wealth on display: the stalls of gold jewelry, the small hillocks of carpets, the linens from Egypt, the woolens from Anatolia, the jars of wine, the fine boots, and the metallic luster of aristocratic weapons. There were cups and bowls, bedding and pots, copper and iron, ebony and ivory, and fine carved chests to put it all away. How did the maggots make such things?

Periodically the Mese opened to wider places that Bigilas called forums. Many had statues of frozen men, for what purpose Edeco didn’t know. Tall columns jutted to the sky but held nothing up. One was topped by a frozen man called Constantine. This was the emperor who had founded the city, Bigilas explained.

The Hun was more intrigued by a monumental four-sided arch at an intersection called the Anemodoulion. At its top was a weathervane, and the Hun watched in amazement as its eagle pointed this way and that. What foolishness! Only Romans needed a toy to tell them which way the wind blew.

Bigilas also pointed out the arches of what he called an aqueduct. Why, Edeco wondered, did the Romans build rivers instead of simply living by one? The Earth Mother gave people everything they really needed, and yet the Romans toiled their whole lives to duplicate what was free.