Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [90]
Twin wooden bridges linked the muddy banks of the Golden Horn. To the east lay Asia, where could be glimpsed the oldest part of the city, the Bedouin and Mesopotamian quarters at the foot of the Galata hills and amid sundry archeological ruins of earlier settlements that had been swept clean from the face of the land by the desert winds. And the wrath of a vengeful God.
But Byzantium was unique in that it was the only city on the planet to span two continents. On the western shore, at the very tip of Europe, stood the sea walls leading to the Greek and Jewish quarters and the Hellenic-Roman city centre; the Theodosian forum, the temples, the pavilions, the public baths and several curved amphitheatres. In the far west, where the outside city walls met the sea was the Porta Aurea, the golden gate. The walls were so thick and strong that on several occasions before the Romans came, they had withstood invaders like the Gauls and the Seleucid king Antiochus I, who had captured Chalcedon and other towns in the region.
Behind these walls began the seven hills of Byzantium.
The first settlers in this place had been shepherds, Dorian Greeks who had come from these hills during the winter to shelter their flocks. Later came the Spartans, who fortified the peninsular and made it into the stronghold that it was now.
Along with other Greek colonies, Byzantium was a polis, a city-state, its government usually democratic, though there had been occasions when it was controlled by oppressive oligarchies and despotic tyrants. The Romans had come to Thrace 170 years before, organising their empire in Asia and taking new lands. Byzantium, unconquered in a millennia, fell in a bloodless surrender and entered into a formal alliance with Rome, in which it enjoyed the protection of the empire and, though paying an annual tribute, was able to retain its free-city status. The Romans linked the new province to Italy with the Via Egnatia, a chariot road leading from the Adriatic coast to Thrace, with Byzantium lying at its eastern terminus.
The city had maintained excellent relations with Rome until early in the reign of the emperor Augustus who had, for reasons best known to himself, stripped it of its possessions in Bithynia and stationed a garrison within the town itself, instead of at its outskirts as previously. Although it was still, technically, an independent city-state, few of its inhabitants were under any illusions as to who the real rulers of Byzantium were.
Sweeping down the narrow streets that ran at right angles to the northern city walls, the traveller would exit into the circular Amphitheatre Cordelius which led directly into the Vil a Praefectus and the barracks of the Byzantine army. If any such metaphorical traveller had been in Byzantium on this particular day, and possessed wings with which to fly through the window of the Vil a Praefectus and into the atrium chamber; then he or she or it would have seen the praefectus’s wife frothing at the mouth in a furious rage.
‘You had no right,’ the lady Jocelyn told Felicia, her trembling handmaiden, as the contrite girl knelt before her and wept at her feet. ‘To condemn a man of noble birth to the brutal and loathsome attentions of such as Gaius Calaphilus can have no justification of any form.’
Jocelyn slumped like an exhausted mother into her husband’s throne, shaking her head sadly. ‘What is to be done with you?’
‘He forced himself upon me, lady,’ Felicia said between anguished tears.
‘And?’ demanded Jocelyn angrily, gripping the sides of the throne until her knuckles bled white. ‘You are nothing but a ministrant, jade. The only reason for your existence is the unquestioning service of your betters. And Edius Flavia, despite his peculiarities, is most assuredly better than the likes of you.’
Emboldened by a foolishly sincere belief in her own innocence, Felicia prostrated herself before Jocelyn, placing her head on the feet of the wife of the praefectus.