The Ghosts of Athens (51 page)

That shut him up and left me alone again with my own thoughts. He had a point. Three nights of passion hadn’t dulled her charms. Unless I was stuck in Athens long enough to grow bored with her, it really was a matter of finding the right excuse to give Heraclius when I finally rolled up with a concubine. For all his other faults, old Phocas wouldn’t have turned a hair if I’d taken her about in public. Heraclius took a sterner view of anything beyond the most private fornication. Regardless of my own affection for the dear thing, though, she might be useful in a city where everyone beautiful was either locked securely away or a common possession of the rich and lustful. I might have felt some degree of shame that I was thinking how most effectively to turn pimp. But, when you’ve spent as long as I had, trying to think of any escape from an impenetrable maze, where every apparent exit had been blocked up or shown itself to be a trap, you may understand that I was getting ready to abandon most sense of decency.

I had a further thought. ‘You did meet her when you were last here?’ I prompted. ‘That was back in the days of Phocas, didn’t you say?’ But now I knocked my head, and all my thoughts were scrambled in a white blaze of pain and a string of obscenities.

‘One might have hoped for a gallery hollowed out in the rock,’ Priscus said when he’d finished laughing at me and shoving me forward. ‘Much more of this, and we may have to regard where we are as more a means of escape than a place of refuge. Would you care to speculate on where it comes out?’

‘Perhaps in one of the overgrown pits at the foot of the Acropolis,’ I hazarded. ‘I do think we’re going into the centre of Athens.’

If Priscus had his own thoughts of distance and direction, he didn’t share them with me. We pushed on, now in silence.

About a year back, an outbreak of influenza in Constantinople had required me to sit in judgement on a case of parricide. The young man I was trying almost certainly hadn’t been a party to his brother’s crime, but was proven by his conduct to be a knowing beneficiary. The abolition of the death penalty for his lesser offence wasn’t to take effect until the Emperor’s birthday, and I thought I was doing the boy a favour when I stretched the point and condemned him to the lead mines. I could now see why he’d broken down and begged for the ancient punishment of scourging to death. I hadn’t been down here long at all, and it was hellish already. Only the knowledge that there must be at least two exits kept me from a panic attack that would have impressed Martin.

I was about to stop again to clench fingernails into the palms of my hands, when I felt a slight but joyous breeze. If it smelled faintly of death, that was nothing beside the movement and cold of the air.

‘Well, come on, my brave young savage,’ Priscus urged, giving me a hard shove. ‘Some of us are getting desperate for a piss.’

I stumbled forward, now seeing how, in spite of its horn shield, the lamp flame was beginning to twist and flicker in the breeze.

But there was no exit. Instead, I pushed myself through what seemed an impassable narrowing of the rock, and fell into a reasonably wide and tall passageway. Its walls were of dressed stone that went all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. I could tell that it hadn’t been a sewer, though what else it might have been – and how old – I certainly couldn’t guess. All I could say was that someone, a few centuries before, had caused a tunnel to be hacked from underneath the residency to get access to wherever it might lead. I looked both ways along the passage. It ended a few yards to our left in a wall of smooth rock. To our right, it seemed to stretch far beyond the outermost pool of lamplight.

‘What can you think of
this
, Alaric dear?’ Priscus asked in a sibilant whisper.

I looked again and stiffened slightly. I turned and pushed my lamp back into the tunnel from which we’d just come and waited for my eyes to adjust. To my right, perhaps a dozen yards along, there was the faintest glimmering of another lamp.

‘What is it?’ Priscus asked, now very softly.

I saw him rub his eyes and try to see what I had. But either I’d been mistaken about that glow or his own eyes weren’t up to seeing it. No, I hadn’t made a mistake. I put a finger to my lips and quietly drew my sword.

‘We can’t wait here any longer!’ I heard Nicephorus groan as if not for the first time.

I’d pushed our lamp still further into our own tunnel, and we’d crept slowly along in the darkness. The side opening through which the glimmer had come wasn’t a direct entrance, but was another, narrower passage with a doorway into some kind of chamber about six feet along it. We now stood outside, trying to make sense of a conversation that had been going on for a while before we’d caught a single word.

‘The Goddess never fails those pure in heart,’ came the reassuring answer from Balthazar. ‘We have three more nights till the day of utmost radiance dawns. No one shall stand in our way when the time comes of our utmost power.’

I relaxed my grip on my sword and flattened myself against the cold and slightly damp stones of the wall. I’d moved a few inches to the right, when Priscus took hold of my sleeve and pulled me back.

‘Not with
your
colouring, fathead!’ he whispered. He pushed me further along the wall and put his own head round the corner. He held it there for the tiniest moment before darting back. ‘I don’t think we’ll be going to arrest them,’ he whispered again. ‘They’ve eight of those shitty acolytes about them.’

I breathed slowly out. I didn’t fancy a battle in the dark against superior numbers. We could make our way back to the residency, though, and return with enough men to try for an arrest. It was beyond reasonable belief to think either Nicephorus or Balthazar would top themselves rather than be taken. I’d just have to hope the fight wouldn’t be too chaotic when it came.

No luck! Even as I stretched over to Priscus to breathe in his ear, bloody Balthazar took it into his head to restart the conversation. ‘I feel a disruption in the Force,’ he cried. ‘The instruments of evil are among us.’

Even before I could hear the scrape of shoes, Priscus was pushing me back into the main tunnel. ‘Not that way!’ he muttered, keeping hold of me as I tried to dash for the way we’d come. He was right – long before we could get to it, our lamp would be seen, and we’d never squeeze fast enough through the narrow points. We hurried onward into the total and unexplored blackness of the other direction. We’d covered about fifteen paces when Priscus began one of his spasms. He buried his face in his cloak, and I carried him, thrown over my shoulder, further into the dark.

‘I see him as clearly as if by day,’ I heard Balthazar say in his most thrilling voice. ‘They go towards the house of death.’

I’m sure Nicephorus was impressed. I was too busy trying to creep along at speed to think anything at all. Of course, bearing in mind he’d said there was someone, and that he couldn’t be seen going towards the glow of our own lamp, there was only one direction in which to look. And, if he really had been able to see in the dark, Balthazar would have seen two people, not one.

But none of this got round the fact that those dark and utterly ruthless assassins were padding after us, and I had no idea where we were heading. I hurried along in the darkness, Priscus thrown over one shoulder, my free arm held out in case we came to another dead end. After some unguessable time of hurrying forward, I nearly sprained my wrist on a wall. I felt about and made off along another tunnel. The air was now increasingly fresh and cold, and, more and more, the smell of death was overpowering.

Without realising its approach, I found myself running in only near-total darkness. Somewhere ahead, there was a reflected glow of moonlight. It wasn’t enough to see anything clearly. But it was a welcome sign of some possible escape from those approaching footfalls one or two dozen yards behind us.

Yes, there
was
an exit. I came to it almost before I could see it. Rather like the tunnel that had brought us from the residency, someone had cut another opening in the smooth stones lining the underground passageway. For all I could tell, the passageway itself continued for ever and ever. But this opening had a flight of more crumbled steps, leading up to a patch of light from a moon that shone directly in. I threw Priscus forward on to the steps and forced him to the top. I nearly vomited at the sudden blast of corruption as he fell forward on to a cold and slimy corpse. I clutched hold of it to avoid falling back down the steps and sent it slithering down to the bottom. I thought at first that the jagged hole through which the moonlight came was too small for me to get through. But it had been narrowed with loose bricks, and these just fell outwards as I shoved at them with both hands. For one horrifying instant, I found myself tangled in my own sword belt. Then, pulling Priscus heavily behind me, I fell out into the full soft glow of the moonlight.

I lifted Priscus bodily out of the way and dumped him in some brambles. Even as I tried to pull out my sword and take advantage of my position against anyone who tried following us out, I realised without any shock at all that we’d come out beside the tomb of Hierocles.

‘I don’t think they’ll follow us here,’ Priscus said with a long gasp. ‘Even they aren’t that suicidal.’ He got up slowly and uncertainly and moved towards the road. Just before he got there, he sat down heavily. I thought he’d finally collapsed. But: ‘Don’t go on to the paving stones,’ he said weakly. ‘You’ll show like a louse on white skin.’ He was right.

Trying not to snag my clothing on the brambles, I sat down beside him. I listened carefully. There was a faint scraping from within the tomb, and a quiet noise of argument. I kept very quiet, sweaty hand clutching spasmodically on my sword grip. But there was no louder scraping – no reason to suppose we were to be followed out into the open.

We sat there for what may have been a long time. Gradually, Priscus came back to something close to normality. . ‘Did I ever tell you how I got out of Trampolinea alive?’ he wheezed.

‘I think you’ve already given me two versions,’ I said. ‘Have you a third that involves an underground chase?’

His answer was a low wheezing laugh. He took hold of a relief on the front wall of the tomb and used it to help himself to his feet. He stood, still clutching the tomb for support and breathing with forced slowness. ‘Do pull that hood over your head,’ he groaned. ‘We didn’t come out dressed in black for no reason.’

Twenty yards beyond the far side of the road, there were the remains of a campfire.

‘Not fifty men about that,’ he giggled softly, ‘not fifty men awake, at any rate.’ He looked harder. ‘But somewhat more than a thousand fires, we can be perfectly sure.’

From inside Athens, our wall had seemed ridiculously flimsy. Seen from out here, it seemed quite otherwise. We were, I knew, about a quarter of a mile outside. The moon had gone behind some clouds, and there was nothing to be seen of Athens except a break in the vast mass of dying fires.

Priscus took me by the shoulder and turned me to the left. ‘Over there,’ he said, ‘we’ll find one of the corner towers. It should have a dozen guards on the night shift. If everyone there can be woken, we’ll get ourselves pulled up on ropes.’

I didn’t consider trying to go back directly the way we’d come. But there was the possibility of sitting here and waiting for the slaves to come after us. It would soon be morning, and my orders to stay put would lapse. They could cut their way through the men Balthazar had with him. Then, we’d be able to get back into the residency. Come the morning, I’d personally supervise the blocking off of that tomb from within. We really couldn’t afford anyone to find so easy a way into Athens – not straight into the residency.

But Priscus had already thought ahead. ‘The longer we’re out here,’ he said in a most reasonable tone, ‘the greater the chance we’ll be caught out by the dawn.’

I nodded and stood up. There was a loud crack as I stepped on a dead branch of something. Priscus muttered something contemptuous and pulled me further away from the road. His own eyes had been useless underground. Now, he seemed able to see everything about us. We set off across the sea of bushes and jagged stones that stretched far away on each side of the road.

Perhaps I’d trusted too much in Priscus and his night vision. Perhaps the path he’d charted through the wilderness was more circuitous than I’d thought it was. But long after we should, in my view, have stood calling softly up at the sleeping guards, we were still picking our way over broken ground. We hadn’t even come to the ruined bathhouse that had been taken over by the barbarians as a covered position close by the tower Priscus had mentioned. I looked up at the clouded sky. Far over in the east, there was the slightest glow of the light before dawn. Not long now, and we’d be able to see where we were going. If anyone out here was up early, he’d be too busy shaking life back into his stiff and chilly limbs to bother looking at a couple of dark figures flitting about. We’d get ourselves back into Athens, and shock everyone in the residency by our loud banging on its gate . . .