The Ghosts of Athens (29 page)

I got up and stretched out a hand for Simeon. Silent and thoughtful, he took my hand. I led him from the library and down to the main body of the residency. I put him with my own hands into his carrying chair, and followed him into the street.

Back in my office, I sat down and unlocked the sliding compartment under my desk. I took out twelve of the better coins and transferred them to a leather purse. When it came to shopping, Athens plainly didn’t compare with Constantinople. It didn’t even compare with Rome. But, if none of the silk factories I’d seen from the Acropolis existed for any purpose of tax or regulation, I might see what they could do for me. I smiled and thought how, by doing nothing at all, Nicephorus might unwittingly have done this place quite a favour. If you could only find the right mix of neglect with a dash of civil justice, the whole Empire might be saved yet.

That brought me back to thoughts of my duty here. Unless Nicephorus was far more effective than he’d so far appeared, and Priscus did get to deliver my funeral oration, I could handle things in Athens. As for Constantinople, that was out of my present control. So long as there was no overpowering emergency in Church or state, Heraclius would remain irresolute in all things. If only I could get back home before Christmas, and give him that provisional settlement on a plate, he might well forget all the poison Ludinus had been dripping into his ear. At the least, it would remove any excuse for turning openly nasty. Give me that, and I could give another few months to sorting out the Imperial finances. Give me that, and he might persuade himself that I was irreplaceable. I might even find myself basking again in the sun of Imperial favour.

I stared at the scroll of Dexippus that Martin had carried down from the library and left on my desk. Even if the single lamp he’d set out for me had been enough, this wasn’t a book I now fancied. What it described had been the greatest crisis Athens had faced since the end of its long war with Sparta. The ruin it left had closed one chapter in the city’s history and opened another that wasn’t yet ended. Given the lack of any Imperial assistance, Dexippus had managed the best defence possible in the circumstances. It was a shame he’d written it all up so badly. A month of carefully walking over the ground might illuminate the story as he’d told it. Or it might only deepen the confusion of his text.

Since there was nothing else to read, I decided, I might as well change out of these clothes. I took up the lamp and made for the door. Though it was covered with a thick cloth, there was a smell of unemptied chamber pot in the outer room. If I could have trusted for it to be collected, and not simply kicked over, the next morning, I’d have put it out in the corridor. Instead, I put it on the window seat. Still half pleased with myself, half nervous about what might be happening seven hundred miles away in Constantinople, I opened the door into my bedroom.

There was a sudden smell of beeswax. I heard the creak of leather bed straps. I looked at the dim but smooth shape on the uncovered bed. ‘Your secretary’s wife was most pleased to accept Theodore’s offer of help in the nursery,’ Euphemia said with a slightly nervous giggle. ‘He will sleep there until further notice.’

‘He’s a good boy,’ I said. My fingers shook slightly as I untied the cords that held my outer tunic in place. It couldn’t be seen in this light, but I reached up automatically to tap the much reduced swelling on my nose. ‘You must let Martin direct his reading. He can be a most excellent schoolmaster. His father was the best in Constantinople.’

She giggled again as I pulled my inner tunic over my head. ‘You must think me a most abandoned woman,’ she said.

‘I’ve been hoping no less all day,’ I replied. I turned the lamp full up and stood beside the bed.

I looked up from my prostration into the blackest face imaginable.

‘You failed me in Alexandria,’ Heraclius whined. ‘All I then asked was that you should get Greek and Latin Churches to agree that probably manifest heresy might be orthodox. And you failed me again.’

I tried to speak, but no voice came as the Emperor got up from his throne and stepped over me. Court protocol didn’t allow me to get up yet. Instead, I crouched on all fours, looking at a mass of purple cushions.

The gong struck, and I could finally get up. Heraclius now sat on the far side of the Great Hall of Audience, every bishop he’d called to Athens ranged about him. I felt the blockage clear from my throat and was able to speak. ‘If I was never meant to succeed, how can you blame me for failure?’ I shouted.

My answer was a burst of laughter that went on as if without end.

Acquittal was beyond hoping. Perhaps I could beg for mercy – if not for myself, then at least for mine. I hurried over and fell down for another prostration, and tried to think of the best form of plea. Should I be the manly young Alaric? Or should I just squeal and babble? What was most likely to move these bastards?

I heard the grind of machinery as I raised my face from the carpet. The throne had now been raised about six feet, and all I could see when I finally stood up again was purple flesh bulging over the red leather boots.

‘Who are you to question the workings of power?’ Heraclius asked from aloft. ‘If I command you to do something, I expect it to be done – even if I command others to frustrate you.’

There was more laughter. The bishops had now been joined by the whole of the Imperial Council and what may have been the whole of the Senatorial Order. Already large, the Great Hall of Audience had expanded somehow to the size of the Great Church. The laughter came in massed bursts, and echoed from the impossibly high ceiling.

I put aside all thoughts of protocol. The hall had expanded still further, and contained everyone in Constantinople above the lowest class. It even managed to contain people who’d died years before. Every one of these was dressed in white, and had a nimbus about his head. I stepped forward to approach the distant throne. As I came close, I saw the bishops shrink back as if I’d carried a sword. I looked up at Heraclius.

‘I could have you shut away in a monastery,’ he sobbed. ‘I could have you blinded. I could have your tongue slit in two to make you resemble the serpent that you truly are. Behold, however, the Mercy of Caesar!’ He looked down at two heralds. There was a sheet of parchment held out for them by one of the black eunuchs.

‘It is the judgement of our Great Augustus,’ they read in unison, not trying to keep the laughter from their voices, ‘that you be taken to the topmost roof of your palace, there to look down for the space of one hour at the manifold glories of the Imperial City; and that you be taken thence to the land of endless night and of endless cold that was once the fruitful Province of Britain; and that you there be turned loose among the filthy and unlettered savages who are your rightful people; and that infamy attend your name in the Empire, and that death attend your return to the Empire.’

As they ended the sentence, there was wild applause and cheering. I wanted to stand upright and look defiance into every face. But I was only pushed from behind for another grovel. The laughter and the cheering went on and on. It left off any echo, and I felt a chilly breeze on my exposed neck, as if I were now in the Circus, and my sentence were being pronounced before the whole assembled people of Constantinople . . .

I woke in my bed to the sound of wolves howling in the distance. I had the impression that Euphemia had been shaking me for some while, but was only aware of this as I came fully back into the present.

‘You were crying in your sleep,’ she said. ‘Were you dreaming?’

The lamp was long since gone out, and there was no sign of dawn. But I sat up and reached to where I knew there would be a cup of water. I drank and wiped my sweaty face on the sheet. ‘It was nothing,’ I said, ‘just a dream.’ I pressed my eyes shut and put it all out of mind. Of course, it had been just a dream. All else aside, when did the real Heraclius
ever
finish a sentence? If he’d managed that even once since he came to power, there might have been less doubt regarding his actual wishes. I opened my eyes again and listened. ‘But how have wolves got into Athens?’ I asked. Even before she began her soft laugh, I realised the answer. Though awake, I’d still been in the vastness of the Imperial City, where a man could walk for days and never see the same street twice. Here, in Athens, you were never more than a quarter of a mile from the walls. If some shortness of food in the mountains had brought them down early to prowl about the plains of Attica, it stood to reason they’d sound close enough to be just outside the residency.

‘Were you dreaming?’ she asked again.

I made a non-committal reply and drank more water. It was rather brackish. But Euphemia was now sitting up and had her arms about me, as if to protect a frightened child. ‘Do you believe that dreams are a communication with some higher force?’ she asked.

I put the dream itself out of mind and gathered my thoughts. ‘Dreams are nothing more than a distorted continuation of waking thoughts,’ I said. ‘They contain no new sensory impressions. They can suggest new ideas that might otherwise have remained overlooked. But they are generally so connected with waking concerns, that they cannot be regarded as other than unshackled trains of thought. If not that, they are just inexplicable fancies. There is never any outside cause to them.’ Because I was still not fully awake, my self-control hadn’t its usual rigidity, and I found myself wondering about the balance in this dream between fancies and new ideas.

Euphemia smiled and sat a moment in silence. ‘The howling disturbs you?’ she asked with a change of subject.

The short answer was that it did. Even if wall after wall stood between us, the sound those black and vicious creatures made took me back to my earliest childhood in Kent. Perhaps a year after my mother had been dumped with us in Richborough, there had come a winter as cold as anyone could remember. Then, the wolf packs had streamed through every breach in the city wall, and I’d lain awake every night, hearing their snuffling and scratching outside our barricaded door. We were among the lucky ones. We might not have had much of a roof, but we still had four walls. Almost every night, I’d heard the wild screaming of those who were old or manless and whose defences had failed, and who were devoured in their beds. Had this somehow been the cause of that stupid little dream?

I got up from the bed and felt my way to the brazier in the centre of the room. I got hold of the poker and jabbed at the invisible embers. As they came back to life, I put oil into the lamp and got it alight.

Euphemia lay naked on the bed. She sat up and looked back at me. ‘I haven’t seen you properly in the day,’ she said. ‘But your eyes are so light here, they must be a very pale blue.’ She looked harder at me. ‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-two,’ I said. I felt a tremor of renewed lust and sat heavily beside her. ‘Shall we – shall we do it again?’ I asked.

‘Again?’ she cried with mock alarm. She laughed. ‘Have I not yet satisfied My Lord?’ She laughed again and pushed me gently back. ‘Twenty-two,’ she said, now thoughtful. ‘Except for your exalted status, I’d surely have thought you a little younger. There must be an interesting story behind your progress.’ I said nothing and she dropped that line of questioning. ‘But were you not sad to leave Constantinople and come down to this shrivelled husk of a city?’

I nodded, and wondered how she could have come so close to guessing what my dream had been about. But I said a little of the vastness and beauty of the City as it might appear to anyone who couldn’t see the deadness and corruption at its heart. As she prompted, I spoke on about the teeming streets, and the crowded docks and markets, and the museums and galleries, and the mass upon mass of statues and monuments plundered from an empire that embraced every city that had been great and famous long before Constantinople itself had been other than the mediocre town of Byzantium, notable only for its position at the end of a finger of Europe where it almost touched the shores of Asia. If no longer the capital of an empire that reached from north of York almost to Babylon – though pressed on every one of its reduced frontiers, and giving way on all of them – there could be no doubt of its place in the world. I tried, and now succeeded, not to doubt my own place within the City.

‘Oh, to be in such a place,’ she breathed with a desperate longing, ‘a city so large that you can walk about in freedom and never be recognised. It is surely a place of dreams – a place where every dream is able to become real.’

I nodded again and put my own dream finally out of mind.

There was a renewed howling. I froze instinctively and looked about for my sword.

‘Do they really frighten you?’ she asked.

I tried for a smile and reached out for her.

‘But you grow used to them in Athens. They are not even the worst that Athens has to offer.’ She put a hand on my stomach, and drew a sharp nail over the ridges of muscle.

I shivered and drew her into my arms. The smell of her perfume was overpowering. Everything began to fade out of mind but the closeness of our two bodies.