The Ghosts of Athens (20 page)

But Balthazar was now setting to work with the tones and gestures common to the ministers of every religion when confronted by less than total conviction. ‘Come with me, Nicephorus, Count of Athens,’ he declared thrillingly. ‘Let us consult the Goddess while the heavens are still washed clean.’ He reached out for the door handle. There was a loud scrape as he pulled it back open, and he vanished into the darkness.

I pulled my head down as I heard a soft moan and what may have been a prayer from Nicephorus. I could see the moving reflection on the glass bricks overhead as, lamp in hand, he hurried after Balthazar.

Martin and I huddled together a while longer in the silence that resulted. At last, when it seemed clear that the door wouldn’t open again, I got up carefully. ‘Well, come on,’ I whispered, taking him by the arm. ‘Don’t you want to know what they’re about?’

It was a worthless question. Martin sagged forward over one of the bookracks and farted again. His face was in shadow, but I could hear his terrified whisper about the need to get out of here. He pulled his face out of the shadow and reminded me that Sveta was still waiting with Maximin.

‘Very well,’ I said impatiently – if she couldn’t get a frightened child back to sleep, she wasn’t the woman who could sometimes frighten even me – ‘you stay here and wait.’ I hurried over towards the door. I kept to the side of the room, ready to jump under cover if the door opened again.

As I stepped into the renewed darkness of the corridor, I heard a padding of feet behind me.

‘You’re mad, Aelric,’ Martin groaned. ‘What do you think you’ll say if we’re caught?’

I stopped and spread my arms. I slapped my now dry chest. ‘I
am
the Emperor’s Legate,’ I announced. ‘If any explanations are needed, they won’t be mine.’ I hurried forward.

Trying to control his heavy breathing, Martin tagged along behind me. We had no lamp with us, and it was a matter of relying on the moonlight and on my own recollection of what was about us.

I didn’t suppose they were heading for Euphemia’s room. Hadn’t Balthazar said something about an appeal to the sky? Sure enough, opposite the niche where Demosthenes continued his burst of silent eloquence, a door was now open. I looked up about a dozen steps to another open door that led on to the roof. I crept up and looked quickly out. This part of the building was covered by a double roof. The door opened on to a path of nailed lead sheeting that went, in deep shadow, between the two roofs. To my left, the path terminated in a wall of crumbling brick. I stood and listened. I could hear a gentle sigh of wind on roof tiles, but nothing more. Leaving Martin to follow at his own pace, I darted to the right, making sure not to step in any of the puddles or disturb any of the heaps of shattered tile that covered the path.

It was hard to match the roof to the corridors and rooms that it covered. There should have been a turn right at the end of the path. This would have taken us on to the roof covering the back block of the residency. Instead, after the beginnings of a path, progress in that direction was closed by another wall. I could only go further if I went back and climbed a ladder that went all the way to the top of the left-hand roof. As I set a foot on the lowest rung and tested its strength, Martin clutched at me.

‘Let’s go back,’ he pleaded. ‘Can’t you feel the evil all about us?’

‘Oh, shut up!’ I answered. ‘Stay here and be ready to make a dash if I hurry down.’ I tested the next rung, and then the next. The ladder had been here a long time, and the wood was rotted through in places. Though reinforced with iron bars, these too had rusted, and one of the rungs sagged under my weight. Even as I was ready to pull myself to the top and look over, Martin clamped both arms about my middle and pressed a hot, sweaty face into the small of my back.

But I also had heard the noise. It was a low obscenity, followed by another man’s laugh, and had come from back where we’d come out on to the roof.

‘O Jesus!’ Martin groaned. ‘Sweet and merciful Jesus!’ He’d probably have dithered there till he was caught. But I was straight off the ladder and dragging him into the dead end that may once have led to the far block of the residency.

It was just in time. Even as I got him down to the ground, from where he’d have trouble bolting, the voices grew louder. ‘The Leader said it would stop raining,’ someone insisted in a poor but comprehensible Greek. ‘And it rains no more. The Force burns strong within him tonight!’

The response had a tone of piety about it, but was too peculiar in its intonation for me to make out the actual words. I hadn’t been in Athens a day, and I still couldn’t make much sense at all of the local dialect. But something told me these weren’t Athenians. There was a muffled but anticipatory laugh as the ladder creaked under someone’s weight. Though I’d have been in deep shadow, I didn’t dare look out from where we were hiding. My hair alone would have shone like a beacon in the darkness. I kept my breathing under control and counted perhaps a dozen men up the ladder and on to the roof. It was only when I heard no more sounds from the passage between the roofs that I allowed myself a single quick glance. We were now quite alone again.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Martin whispered pleadingly.

I reached down to push him into silence, but got him on the stump of his missing ear. By the time I’d finished apologising and hugging him, there could have been no one at all dawdling near the top of the ladder. I took hold of it and prepared to step as noiselessly as I could back on to the lowest rung.

‘You aren’t serious . . . ?’ Martin gasped. I laughed softly and stepped on to the ladder. Trying not to make any noise, I climbed to the top and looked cautiously over.

The moon was behind me. Its pale light shone over a large expanse of lead that rose in its centre to a low dome that I guessed was the roof of the courtroom. I couldn’t see Nicephorus or the other men. But I could see Balthazar; rather, I saw his head just beyond the leaded dome. From its angle and the waving arms that shone silver in the moonlight, I could imagine that everyone else was down on his belly for a superstitious grovel.

‘Have you no faith in the Goddess?’ Balthazar cried. Though he must have been twenty yards away, his voice had the unnatural closeness of sounds at night. He bent forward out of sight, and I heard a general groan of terror. Balthazar came back in sight, his arms still raised. ‘O men of little faith,’ he said, ‘behold now the power she gives to her servant!’ He rubbed his hands together. As he pulled them apart, they both caught fire. He clapped them together again, and they went out.

My weight, pressing forward on the ladder, was already causing one of the roof tiles to crumble. Add to that an almost irresistible urge to burst out laughing, and I thought I’d crash sideways. But I shifted position and the ladder stabilised. I could see the shadow of my head on the damp and pitted sheeting. I was suddenly aware of how cold I was, now I was standing still in the breeze of an autumn night.

‘What can you see?’ Martin croaked from below.

I freed my left hand from the ladder and waved at him to shut up. His response was a spluttering fart and a smell that almost knocked me off the ladder. I looked again across the bright expanse of lead. I could see that Balthazar had put his arms down. I knew from my early days in the Church, where I’d assisted in the production of ‘miracles’ to bring over the Kentish heathen, that he’d need to piss on his hands soon if the skin wasn’t to peel off them. But Nicephorus was getting over his earlier fright. From behind the dome, I could hear the firm cries for enlightenment of a man who’s pretty sure of getting his way.

‘I tell you,’ Balthazar cried with another dramatic wave, ‘that the woman knows nothing. The child knows nothing. The intruders know nothing.’

Unless she was fast asleep, Euphemia must have been deaf not to hear all this wailing. We couldn’t have been that far from her rooms, and the sound really was carrying. But Balthazar and his whole congregation were now raving back and forth at each other in some stupid but long-practised litany about the Goddess and her Force, and the wondrous things she would soon assure to her followers pure in heart. I heard the voice of Nicephorus raised above all the others. Leave aside the sorcery charges I was now determined to throw at him for that girl’s murder, anyone who could have been taken in by this shite for at least two years deserved immediate removal from office and transfer to a monastery for the insane.

I could have remained there until they all set out on their return. I could then have cowered with Martin in the shadows, and followed them about whatever other business they might still have. But the breeze was now become an insistent, frigid wind. My teeth chattered. I could feel my nipples tighten to painful dots, and a shrinking in my crotch to the dimensions and probable appearance of a prepubescent boy. Over on the roof, everyone had joined hands and was dancing in and out like girls at a wedding feast. The only words I could catch in this had no meaning. More important was who these people were. There was Nicephorus, of course, and Balthazar. With them, though, I could see perhaps a dozen men in the same dark clothes as the men I’d seen at the back of the crowd in Piraeus. I really wanted to see more. However, I was now shaking uncontrollably. It was as much as I could do to get silently down the ladder and fight to stop myself from curling into a ball.

‘Hold on to me Aelric, hold on,’ Martin cried softly. He put his arms round me and shared some of his blubbery warmth. ‘There is evil all about us,’ he said, pulling away to make the sign of the cross. ‘It ripples from that damnable group in freezing waves. Come quickly, or be drained of the life they must extract for their Hell-bound blasphemies.’

I might have giggled through chattering teeth at his belief that the night breeze was other than a nuisance. But I was badly in need of the heat from his body. I’d noticed how the cold was reaching deep inside me as Balthazar had done his conjuring trick with the powder on his hands. From that, I’d gone in moments to the edge of collapse. Without Martin to keep his body against mine and drag me back along the path, I can’t say how I’d have got back to the comparative warmth of the residency.

We stopped for a moment in the library, where Martin shook out the crumpled-up sheet and got it over me like a cloak. ‘What did you see?’ he asked with a nervous look at the reclosed door. ‘I heard enough. But tell me what you saw.’

‘Not very much,’ I said, fighting off another attack of the shivers. I pulled myself together. ‘Martin,’ I said firmly, ‘I don’t want you to breathe a word of this, not even to Sveta. Do you understand?’

Shivering himself, he looked about. ‘I told you this place had an evil atmosphere,’ he said. ‘Can you really not feel it surrounding you like a fog?’

My answer was a non-committal shrug. Still cold all over, I was coming out of the fit that had almost downed me on the roof. So long as he kept his mouth shut – and I knew he would – he was welcome to his fancies. I looked again at the closed door. It might reopen at any moment, and I was unarmed. I waited for Martin to get both our lamps lit. This time, we were entirely alone. I let him go first down the stairs, noting with tired approval that he managed to step without making any noise. I looked briefly back into the library. Outside the pool of light from the lamps, the moon was back to playing funny tricks with the dust.

‘For a man who says he’s too sick even to leave his bed,’ I said in Latin, ‘His Excellency in Corinth is a wondrously busy correspondent.’ I eased myself down a few inches into the lukewarm water, and looked again at my face in the mirror I was holding. The spot on my nose was now definitely ripe. The bitch was it had been joined by another. I turned my attention back to Martin. He was sitting in the glow of sunlight that was reflected down on us from the high, unglazed windows of the bathhouse. I’d been right about the Governor. His letters had come over unrolled, and formed a heap of papyrus several inches thick. It was a short dash across the water from Piraeus. But he must have worked like a demon to get all this over to us. Martin coughed politely and reached for what he considered the most important of the letters.

Beyond the first intake of breath, however, I heard nothing of whatever he read. With a force that reminded me of a heretical baptism I’d once attended, the slave pushed down hard on my shoulders and sent me so far under water that I felt the sudden chill as my legs rose into the air. I felt the mirror land on my belly and then slide off until I heard it scrape against the leaden bottom of the bathtub. As I came up again spluttering, he set about my hair as if it were potter’s clay. By the time I was able to go back to any kind of conversation, Martin had put the letter down and was back to chewing on his stale crust. He’d farted while I was under the water, and the smell was almost worth a brief comment.

But, ‘I’ll read his military update myself,’ is all I said. I really hadn’t the patience to sit through another attack of the vapours when he read about the barbarian flood gathering north of Thermopylae. ‘Then you can summarise anything else that isn’t a waste of time.’ I sat up and reached for the cup of ginger cordial that Martin had set for me on the little table that was attached to the bath. Heated and with a dash of some local stimulant, it was an improvement on all the wine I’d so far been served. ‘You know, I’m wondering about the value of a trip over to Corinth. If the Governor really is ill, it could be made to look as if I actually cared for the man. And, though you and I have business in Athens, Sveta and the children might be more comfy in the provincial capital.’