The Silk Conspirators

Constantinople, January 532 AD. The city is burning.The Nika Riots have turned the Hippodrome into a furnace and the streets into battlefields. Thirty thousand people will be dead before it ends. The Emperor Justinian is planning to flee. His empress Theodora is not.In the harbour district of the Neorion, while the city destroys itself, a body surfaces in the mooring ropes of a grain barge. The dead man is Demetrios of Antioch, Imperial Silk Inspector, eleven years at his post, strangled with a length of silk in the one colour that ordinary citizens are not legally permitted to own. Imperial purple. The colour of the emperor himself.Zosimos of Thessaloniki, customs inspector of the third rank and the most expendable official the deputy prefect can find on a very complicated morning, is handed the investigation with one clerk, no resources, and a city too busy burning to pay attention to a dead harbour official.What he finds beneath the murder is a conspiracy that reaches from the loading docks of the Golden Horn to the gilded corridors of the Great Palace. Someone has been smuggling raw silk through the Byzantine customs system for three years, redirecting it to unauthorized workshops producing the forbidden colour in secret, and selling it east across the Persian frontier to the empire's greatest rival. Someone with enough authority to corrupt six customs inspectors simultaneously. Someone with enough protection to have Demetrios strangled and an official's office searched within twenty-four hours of the investigation beginning.And somewhere in the list of fourteen names that Demetrios had assembled before he died, is the name Zosimos cannot reach.Set against the most violent week in Constantinople's history, drawing on the real Amarna Letters of Byzantine commerce, the Corpus Juris Civilis, and the documented world of the Sogdian silk merchants who linked China to Rome, The Silk Conspirators is a novel about who controls the colour of power and what happens to the people who find out the answer.In the Byzantine Empire, the most dangerous thing you can wear is the truth.

Pagina's: 206, Paperback, Abdul Ahad Ansari