The Ghosts of Athens (36 page)

‘Do you know what happened in this room?’ the voice asked for a third time. As a few nights before, there was a trace of annoyance behind its calm urgency.

‘The answer you want,’ I answered in an English that sounded as utterly barbarous as I knew that I appeared, ‘requires me to make up a story based on all the facts and rumours and hints of rumours I’ve heard since I came into Athens. For what it’s worth, I’ll say that young woman over there is a witch. She’s fallen asleep over a book of incantations. In a while the low murmuring that I think I can hear will become a roar of anger, as the mob breaks into the palace and makes for this room. The woman will be seized and held while the library is torn apart for other allegedly magical texts. They will be heaped up, and perhaps she will be burned on top of them. Her ghost will then haunt the palace, appearing before those who have the sensitivity of soul to perceive it.’

No reply. I stepped towards the desk and looked at the catalogue. At first, the writing made no sense. It was just the dark squiggles you see in cheaper mosaics that show a book. As I looked harder, though, the squiggles resolved themselves into one of the antique scripts I’d occasionally had to puzzle out in the University Library in Constantinople. The one sheet that showed where the book hadn’t rolled back on itself was a listing of what could only have been works by Gregory of Nyassa.

I snorted and wheeled round. There may have been a slight shadow in the place where the voice had spoken. But it had dissolved before I could say it was there. I laughed again. ‘That was shit opium,’ I sneered, ‘if this is the best library catalogue I can imagine.’

‘And why do you say that?’ the voice asked, annoyance giving way to a reluctant interest.

‘Because, except in Egypt,’ I explained, ‘papyrus rolls had gone out of fashion in libraries of quality some while before Gregory was born. Even otherwise, I might add, his works wouldn’t have been an obvious choice for any educated Athenian.’

‘You really are a fool, Aelric,’ the voice said. ‘I can only speak to you in dreams, and then in riddles determined by your own imagination. But I am trying to warn you of a terrible danger. Can you not reach for once into your deeper self and try to see things as they really are?’

‘Not really,’ I answered. ‘There is much to be said for a keen and lively glance over the surface of things. You pick up a lot of truth on the surface. If you must look below, it should only be to uncover laws that regulate the visible world. Everyone who’s ever tried going deeper has only come up again barking mad, and with ideas of setting the world to rights with a spot of murder.’ I sniffed and thought of Plato. I turned back to the window and tried to step forward.

‘Even if it has to be in riddles,’ I sneered, ‘can you tell me why I’m not able to go close to that woman? Why can’t I look out of the window? Have I worn my imagination out with recreating this library?’

‘You might better ask why you are worth all this trouble,’ the voice answered, now in disgust. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ it spat. ‘Have your look into the garden. See if you like what you see.’

The soft and universal pressure that had kept me back was suddenly lifted, and I nearly tripped forward against the nearest window. I looked out through the glass pieces and tried to focus. It was as if I’d woken in a strange room before the dawn was fully up. I knew that all could make sense with a little effort, but wasn’t up to making that effort. I can say I didn’t like what I saw. I stepped quickly back into the main part of the library.

Covered in sweat, I sat up in my bed.

‘Aelric, it’s me,’ Martin whispered in my ear. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He relaxed his hold on my upper body and pushed a cup of water to my lips.

I drank and opened my eyes. I’d had a leather curtain hung over the window against night draughts and any further rain. But I could see from the red glow coming from behind it that the sun was going down.

In the gloom, I focused on Martin. ‘Was I crying out?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘It was just the opium,’ he said. ‘Everything is really all right.’

I looked at him again. He’d got over our battle on the Piraeus road in better shape than I might have expected. Everything wasn’t all right. But it would have to do. I threw the damp cover back and swung round to sit on the bed. Soon, it would be aired and changed every morning. For the moment, I was aware of the faint smell of beeswax and sex. The drug was fading, and I could feel a slight thrill of lust. But I put this out of mind and sat upright.

‘The Bishop of Nicaea has been here a while already,’ Martin said with an urgent look at the window. ‘I saw him in conversation with Priscus. I’ve had some of the new slaves carry the bath into your dressing room. Can you bear cold water? Irene says the boiler can’t be repaired.’

I stood up and stretched. ‘I’d like to see Maximin before whatever bath you’ve managed.’

Martin looked thoughtfully at the lengthening shadows outside, then nodded.

‘Now do help get this sheet arranged round me. I’m young enough to be a sight worth looking at. But we can’t have naked encounters with Auntie Irene – not, at least, on our first day!’ I stretched again and laughed.

Coming out of the nursery, I bumped into Euphemia. ‘I’ve been with Priscus,’ she said urgently. She had another bowl of bloody water in her hands. That settled my stab of jealousy. ‘He told me everything,’ she whispered. ‘You were a fool to go looking for that body.’

I bent forward and kissed her. I waited for her to put the bowl down, and pressed my body against hers and moaned with a suddenly overwhelming lust. ‘I do – I do assure you,’ I said thickly, ‘that my own encounter was less unfortunate than the Lord Commander’s.’ I stood back from her and forced myself into a semblance of order. ‘But is there anything you can tell me about where Nicephorus might have gone, and what he was doing with the interpreter’s daughter?’

She stepped away from the bowl. ‘What I will tell you,’ she said, looking me straight in the eye, ‘is that the Count Nicephorus is a good man. People may think him strange. But he was the only person in the whole world willing to give a roof to me and his brother’s child. If he was stealing the Emperor’s money, do you think he would keep his own nephew short of medical help? As for murder, you don’t know him at all.’

I could have told her that, if he ever did get a hearing before Caesar, I’d be the main prosecution witness. But hadn’t Balthazar said very clearly that she knew nothing? She might know more than she realised. But there was an appropriate time for everything. Despite the lingering charms of my opium, I felt a sudden need for sex so desperate, I could have taken her there and then. But she twisted out of my embrace.

‘Not here, not now,’ she said with an attempted laugh.

‘Then come back with me,’ I pleaded. ‘I left Martin with his wife. She’ll keep him for ages yet.’ I stretched out imploring arms.

Euphemia stared back at me in the fading light. She pursed her lips and tried to look away.

‘Oh, come on,’ I urged. ‘There’s nothing like a bit of killing to get the amorous propensities going. Just a quickie before dinner – you surely can’t deny me that.’

Nor could she. Nor did she. The question I found myself asking afterwards, as she whimpered softly in my bed and I splashed cold water over my body, was not whether but
how
I’d manage to take her with me back to Constantinople.

Miracles of the Christian Faith usually astonish most when heard at fourth hand. What a little gold can do anyone may see for himself. We’d begun the day with an empty kitchen and a dining hall probably not used since the accession of Phocas the Unmentionable. Well before the coming of darkness, my new and reasonably clean and attentive slaves had begun serving a dinner that would never have passed in Constantinople, but that no one else could have despised. In one respect, it was an improvement. Because this was a partly ecclesiastical function, we could do without dining couches. Instead, I could sit at the head of an open square of tables arranged as Nature and Scripture agreed was most fitting for human convenience.

I waited for the Bishop of Athens to finish a very queer sermon on the text ‘If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’ As he finally came to a close, and sat down with a look about him as queer as his sermon and a tight clutch at a jewelled relic case, I let a couple of slaves lift my chair a foot back from the table and stood up. There was a massive scraping of chairs and grunting as a hundred diners got to their own feet and went into a long and respectful bow. I motioned with my arms for everyone to be seated – this really wasn’t Constantinople, and the niceties could be overlooked – and stared round the table at which I had to sit, and at the two long tables that ran at right angles along the length of what had once been a magnificent room, and that was now respectably clean.

‘Most learned and reverend Fathers of the Universal Church,’ I began, ‘O men of Athens.’ I’d been working on this speech between bouts of frenzied copulation. It can best be described as a kind of warmed-over Demosthenes, with long allusions to Scripture and the Fathers. It rolled out with an appearance of unprepared fluency, and my only need to think was in choosing where to stop for Martin to put it into Latin for the sake of the Western delegates. It allowed me, while on my feet, to have a good look at everyone. The Athenians were easy. Most of them were town assemblymen, and I’d seen them shuffling twice about Nicephorus. The others I had no idea about – Martin had got all the names out of Nicephorus on our second day – but they looked of much the same quality. Their Greek was better than that of the lower classes, though I soon realised that my speech was still somewhat above their understanding. Nodding in what they thought the appropriate places, they stared back at me with the tight, sweating faces of provincial tradesmen whose uppermost thought is to worry that I might take it into my head to notice their fine clothes and sound the fiscal equivalent of the Last Trump. If any of them might wonder, or might know, the whereabouts of their Count, no one had commented on his absence from the seat beside mine, and I’d not trouble myself with commenting.

The clerics were a different matter. Again, Martin had got their names out of Nicephorus. Comparing that list with the one supplied from Constantinople showed a few and sometimes odd alterations. But the world is a big place. People die, or move on. Others come to notice. Overall, though, much as I hated the flabby eunuch, the correspondence of the names on both lists showed a very brisk efficiency in Ludinus – all the more admirable, given how quickly the council had been arranged. What struck me most on looking about, however, was what a strange gathering they were. It’s one thing to look at names on a list, and when you have other things uppermost in your mind. It’s another to look at actual faces. I’d been calling these people the ‘best minds’ of the Church and trying to believe it. Some of them were remarkably fine theologians: when they did speak as one, it might well be for the Church as a whole. What bound the Greeks most together, though, was that they were nearly all prize troublemakers of one kind or another. Simeon – well, Simeon
was
Simeon. But Ajax, deacon in the Metropolitan Church of Aphrodisias; Soterius, thrice enthroned and twice removed Bishop of Nicopolis; Creon, Bishop of Saranta; and so on and so forth: this was as rich a cast of nit-picking fanatics, drunks, fornicators, office-peddlers and general villains as could ever be assembled.

As for the Westerners, I knew very few of them even by name. But the Dispensator was enough trouble in himself for the lot of them. Ludinus was too far away to be pulling any actual strings. But it wasn’t hard to imagine how he’d be sniggering every night into his pillows as he thought of the mob he’d called together for me to try somehow to whip into the right order. Yes, intellectually – and, where not that, socially – this was the Church in miniature. But what I’d thought the previous day about herding cats would apply in force to this lot.

I ended with a fancy peroration cribbed from a speech I’d written for the Emperor at a banquet in honour of the goldsmiths of Constantinople, and sat down to a few desultory acclamations. ‘I want beer,’ I muttered in Slavic to one of my attendants. ‘Bring it in the biggest cup the Lady Irene can find.’

I held up my hands for wiping by the slave who stood behind me, and smiled at the Dispensator. I’d had Simeon placed on my left, with Priscus next to him. It was turning out rather convenient that neither Simeon nor the Dispensator spoke a language the other could understand, and that, with no interpreters present, all conversation had to pass through me. In the intervals of a long and mind-rottingly dull argument with his cousin about a stolen pomegranate when they were at school together, Simeon had tried a few stilted pleasantries with the Dispensator. I’d touched these up in Latin till they could have served as the flattery of someone fishing for a legacy.

The wine was still putrid – better had been located, though not in time for the lees to settle – but, if they had spoiled the grain harvest, the endless rains of summer had given us a fine choice of fruit juices in which to dissolve whatever drugs took most fancy. I waited for the slave to finish with my hands, and reached for my cup of honeyed melon pulp.