The Ghosts of Athens (25 page)

I unstoppered it and sniffed the contents. Most of it was wine. The rest was unlikely to kill me – Priscus was still expecting others to do his dirty work. I took a swig and passed it back. Whatever of it wasn’t wine hit me as if from behind almost before Priscus could take the flask and pour most of it down his throat. Heart racing, I tried not to fall off the roof, and waited for the pattern of colours behind my eyes to settle into a reasonable blur.

‘It’s an infusion of yellow bugs that are gathered from the slopes of a volcano somewhere to the east of China,’ he said. ‘Mix it with sea mandrake, and your balls will explode with lust.’ He fell silent, and joined me in peering into the distance.

At last, he let out a long and despairing sigh and cleared his throat. ‘We can forget about his numbers,’ he said. ‘They make no sense, even in terms of what the land will normally support. If I weren’t out of area, I’d have the useless toad scooped off his bed of alleged sickness and flogged round the walls of Corinth. But I won’t question the generality of the Governor’s information. There’s sod all to eat anywhere south of the Danube where a grain ship can’t be landed. In the occupied territories, every barbarian without a sword who’s still alive is a walking skeleton. Those who are armed have stopped gambling over what food can be had, and are cutting each other’s throats. It’s only because rainwater has blocked all the passes that they haven’t turned up here already.’

I looked away from the horizon and waited till I could focus on another part of the city wall. At some time in the distant past – it might have been in the great days of Athens, or after the first real incursion in the chaotic times before Diocletian had steadied the Empire – there had been a much more substantial wall, enclosing a larger space. I could now see where it had been from a few courses of dark stone, or from a gap in the ruins that stretched out beyond the present wall. I’d not have dismissed this as ‘heaps of rubble’. Then again, I had no military experience. The walls about Constantinople were so thick, you could drive two chariots side by side along the battlements. Even the sea walls had never been breached. These walls, for all they seemed high enough, had no thickness at the top; mostly, you looked over them from a wooden platform that needed its own supports. From the other side of the Acropolis, I’d stared down at a wall without even this kind of platform.

‘No regular soldiers to guard the walls?’ I asked. I had no doubt that, whatever he said in his reports to the Governor of Corinth, Nicephorus had long since embezzled his military as well as his civil budget. If he was happy to live in a slum and even deny medical care to his nephew, I didn’t suppose he’d spend a clipped penny on guarding the city walls. But I’d see what response I might get out of Priscus.

He gave a contemptuous sniff and let go of his support. Leaning carefully to avoid slipping, he found a stable place on the tiles where he could stand without risk of falling off the roof. ‘You’ve always been rather keen on citizen militias,’ he said. ‘You may get a chance to see how good they are.’

I looked at the weathered bronze of the roof tiles on which we were perched. I waited. He gave a weaker sniff. Then he cleared his throat. I looked again at the distant sea. Now Priscus laughed.

‘Forget old temples,’ he said. ‘You should go and look at those walls. If they don’t fall inward at some barbarian child’s first push, we’ll see how long they can be held by whatever civilians we can trust not to impale themselves on their own makeshift weapons.’ He pulled out his flask and drained it with a sound halfway between a gasp of pain and a laugh. ‘But never mind that, my dear,’ he said at last. ‘We have a few days until the fun begins. Why don’t you call your priests together and send them all off to Corinth? If they can’t all be housed in proper comfort in what I gather is a somewhat crowded city, you can ship those of lower status across to Aegina. Unless the Avars have discovered how to work a ship, everyone will be safe enough there.’

So that was why he’d brought me up here! I had expected better of Priscus. Perhaps his health really was collapsing, and this was his best plan for making sure that, when he stood before Heraclius in disgrace, I was hanging my head beside him. ‘We’ll have to take our chance on that,’ I said. ‘So long as the walls don’t actually fall inward, the council must go ahead. And, with so many bishops gathered in one place, I’m sure we can rely on them to pray for an avoidance of another Trampolinea.’

Priscus made no answer at first. Then: ‘Have you forgotten about our child?’ he asked.

‘Not at all,’ I said. I stepped halfway down the roof. I held out a hand for Priscus. The tiles were pitted from a thousand years of rain. The soles of my boots gripped them as if they’d been pumice stone. I could help Priscus down to me with one hand, and let him down with the other to where the roof flattened out. ‘Unless the Governor sends more dispatches,’ I said, ‘the Corinth boat comes in on Monday. My plan is to get Sveta there with the children.’

‘The bitch Sveta and her spawn can take their chance with the rest of us,’ he spat. ‘But I do feel increasingly paternal about dear little Maximin.’

Silent again, I helped him down the big final step from the temple roof. We were now on a broad platform below the roof that was probably for maintenance slaves to store materials. Priscus had lost all right to paternal feelings when he cut the mother’s throat and caused the boy to be dumped outside that church in Constantinople. I’d adopted him. I’d given him his name. He was mine by custom and by law. Still, if Priscus too wanted the child out of danger, I’d not object to any belated stab of duty. It would be a cover for my own trip to Corinth.

He stepped into a patch of shade and rubbed his eyes. ‘If you have any sense, Alaric, you’ll have your clerics out of Athens at the same time. Can’t you go with them?’ he asked with a change of tone. ‘If you took them all off to Aegina, you could still have your council there. At least, the city would have lost a few of its useless mouths.’

The soldierly reasonableness of his tone was almost convincing – or might have been if I hadn’t known perfectly well that he knew what I knew. Several dozen bishops and other dignitaries, plus any number of secretaries and servants and other hangers-on, made about a hundred and fifty. Getting them out of Athens, and then settled
anywhere
else and ready to do what I wanted, wasn’t a matter of shouting some religious equivalent of ‘About turn: quick march!’ One breath about approaching barbarians, and half of them would bolt for Corinth in search of a safe trip home. Getting the rest moved would be like herding cats. No, I had them all in Athens. Here they’d stay until I’d got from them what I wanted. If the walls did fail us before then, and we all got butchered, that was a risk worth taking. It was certainly better than going back home, tail well and truly between my legs.

Priscus didn’t even wait for me to put my refusal into words. ‘Oh, do let’s go down,’ he wheezed. ‘It’s time we rejoined everyone else. I suggest we let them think we were nattering over the good old days in Alexandria – the good old days of last month, when at least I had a few hundred armed men to lead against the mob. Yes, let them enjoy their sightseeing. It’ll be the last fun they have before General Pestilence turns back the barbarian horde.’

We’d got to the roof by climbing a ladder that had been left against the temple wall. As I helped him down its final rungs, and we stood, looking at one of the blank outer walls of the Propylaea, there was a sudden noise of shouts and howling. It was as if a stag had rounded on a hunting pack and was goring everything within reach. The noise echoed about the enclosed space, and it was hard at first to guess from where it was coming. But there was a flight of steps up to a rampart on one of the new defensive walls. We’d avoided this earlier, instead choosing the highest point we could find. I now bounded up the steps and leaned over the wall.

The noise was coming from the Theatre of Herodes Atticus. When I’d first come up here, it was empty. Now, it was crowded. The upper semicircle of benches was mostly ruined, and covered with what remained of its collapsed roof. But the lowest benches were filled with more of the rabble. They squeezed together on the marble seats and spilled on to the stairways between. Some even stood together in the large orchestra before where the stage had once been. As I shaded my eyes from the glare of the white marble, I gradually saw that the audience had rounded up what may have been every stray dog and cat in Athens. These were now being killed with sharpened sticks and some of the smaller building blocks that had come loose over time. Dogs ran madly about the rubble of the stage. But all escape was closed off, and the whiteness was already covered with little splashes of blood. Men and boys danced and cheered as they set about the work. Though taking no part in it, more of those dark figures hung about on the margins of the slaughter.

‘Oh, but isn’t that senseless, fucking cruelty?’ Priscus called softly. ‘Such wasted effort when there are people here just calling out to be massacred.’ He sighed and looked into my face. ‘Disgusted, are we, dear boy?’ he asked. He began another sentence, but broke off with a long cough. He turned pale and clutched at his side.

I was wondering if I’d have to carry him off for help. But he steadied himself and looked down again at a new sound of decidedly human screaming. From where we stood, the remaining wall that enclosed the theatre hid part of the action. By craning my neck and squinting, though, I could now see that there was someone tied to the other side of the furthest column on the stage. I could see only both naked arms where they were stretched halfway round the column. But I was sure it was a woman. There were a couple of old men just in view. It looked as if they were jabbing sharpened poles into her body. It was because the slaughter of animals was coming to an end that I heard her own despairing cries.

As I shifted position to try to see more of this, I looked right. Somehow, Nicephorus had got himself up on to the rampart without making any noise. He now stood beside me, smiling indulgently at the proceedings a few hundred feet away. ‘Athens, I am told, was anciently a democracy,’ he said with gloating politeness. ‘If this be the will of the people, who are we to interfere?’

Priscus cleared his throat and spat over the wall. ‘Why don’t you just fuck off, Nicephorus?’ he said without turning.

Nicephorus stared back for a moment, then put his face into an oily smile and touched his forehead. I looked over the wall again. Someone had pulled all his clothes off and was dancing about like a madman before the bound woman.

‘I suppose you find these people loathsome in every respect,’ Priscus went on, now turning his head very slightly in my direction. ‘Not at all like your wonderful ancients, are they?’ He laughed. ‘I, on the other hand, must confess myself rather impressed.’ He shaded his eyes and leaned further over the wall. ‘I’d never realised these people had such white skins.’ He pointed at the naked man and at the arms of the bound woman, and laughed with soft menace.

I looked down into the theatre. He was right about the colour of the local skin – hardly surprising for people who never took their clothes off, possibly not even to wash. Whatever the colour, though, it was less than a pretty sight. I was glad of the several hundred yards of separation. They blurred the worst details, and allowed me to forget about the smell.

I stepped back from the wall and looked down to where Martin was now standing with Theodore. They must have heard the noise, but were deep in conversation about something that took their whole interest. Priscus, though, wasn’t finished.

‘Can you tell our young friend,’ he asked, ‘why these two-legged animals are so ugly?’ He now looked at Nicephorus and waited expectantly.

The Count bit his lip and tried to lick moisture on to his dry lips.

‘Come on, Nicephorus,’ he added with cold and silken charm. ‘You may be Count of Athens. But we both stand far above you in the Imperial pecking order. You’ll do well to answer when you’re spoken to.’

Nicephorus now managed a sickly smile. ‘There is a story,’ he said, ‘that, in ancient times, the common people of Athens and all their posterity were blighted with a curse of ugliness. They are said to have offended a being of great power.’ There was a loud scream from within the theatre. He stopped and looked over the wall. ‘Is My Lord not satisfied with his tour of Athens?’ he asked with desperate politeness. He waved vaguely over the jumble of ruined or converted buildings that spread below us all the way to the new wall and beyond.

‘Your stewardship of Athens is most impressive,’ I said blandly. Indeed, so far as Athens had been left with any machinery of justice, this was probably it. If Nicephorus chose not to pay attention, it wasn’t my business to act in his place. I put those increasingly horrible screams out of mind and smiled easily back at him. Our eyes met. Still smiling, I looked long into his strained, sweaty face. I thought for a moment that he’d stand up to my stare.

Then, just as I was about to be really impressed, his eyes took on a renewed shifty look, and he looked away. But he recovered fast. He laughed and stamped his foot. He looked at Priscus, who was momentarily out of action with more of his Eastern bug juice.