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day, I swore to myself, I’d have this out with His Excellency the sodding Dispensator. This time, I’d be in control of the exchanges.
        For the moment, though, I had some urgent preliminary business.
        ‘Authari,’ I said in my firm, master’s voice, ‘go back home and get some rest. No more to drink this morning. I want you washed and looking respectable for when I send you to fetch the Lady Gretel for her inspection of those Cretan tablecloths.
        ‘No,’ I said still more firmly, ‘I’ll face no more trouble this morning. And it’s probably for the best if you aren’t with me where I now have to go.’
     
    Sveta took me into the kitchen of the little house and poured me a cup of wine.
        ‘But you’re bleeding!’ she said with a still more suspicious look at my forearm.
        ‘Do forgive me,’ I said as she called her woman for hot water, ‘but I didn’t notice.’ I really should have gone home first for a bandage – that, or something with longer sleeves.
        It was a surprisingly deep cut, and I winced as the slave woman massaged in the salted pork fat.
        ‘I believe your husband is teaching?’ I asked.
        Ignoring my pleasant smile, Sveta pulled her eyes away from the trickle of blood on to the kitchen table and nodded.
        ‘Martin will come as soon as he can end the lesson. I went to tell him as soon as I saw you at the door. But it is his best student – he’s the natural son of the Lord Bishop Servilianus, you know.’
        I didn’t mind waiting. Servilianus was as influential as his bastard was thick. Martin needed more pupils like that if he was to keep up this go at being independent. I drained the cup with my good arm and held up the other so the slave could do a proper job with her bandage.
     
    ‘So, Martin,’ I asked with an attempt at cheerfulness, ‘I take it you don’t fancy Constantinople at the moment?’
        He looked up from the letter of instruction. ‘Not now. Not ever,’ he said, his voice most emphatic for a man who’d just nearly shat himself. ‘You know what happened to me when I lived there. Now there’s a civil war about to reach the place, you can’t imagine how it will be.
        ‘Rather than go back to the City, I’d sooner be taken by the Lombards, and kept this time. I’d sooner go back to Ireland, passing through every village in your own land while speaking in Celtic. Either would be death. But the City would be death as well – death, and before that  ...’
        I waited for him to finish. The baby began crying in an upstairs room. I felt a pang of envy as I heard Sveta go up the external staircase.
        I waved at the letter of instruction. ‘Well, I don’t want to go there either,’ I said. ‘So you just save your complaints for the Dispensator. He’s the one who says you know Constantinople. He’s the one who says I need an assistant I can trust absolutely. He’s the one we need to get round if we aren’t to go anywhere at all.’
        Martin smiled sadly. ‘After all we’ve been through,’ he asked, ‘you still think you can negotiate with the Dispensator? You can no more talk your way out of these instructions than you can reason with the tides on Dover Beach.’
        ‘There’s every chance we can get out of this,’ I said in a reassuring tone that was as much for me as for him. ‘Either we can get out of it altogether, or we can get it put off till later in the year. At least we can go in better circumstances than seem presently intended.’
        I pushed my cup towards him for a refill. Martin poured to the halfway mark. I took it back before he could reach for the water jug.
        ‘I’m seeing His Excellency again this afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’ll need you with me for support.’
        Martin ignored me. ‘I did pray’, he said, self-pity now replacing alarm, ‘that I might live to see my child grow up. But happiness was never my fate. “The Lord giveth