The Ghosts of Athens (7 page)

He and Theodore will get their account of what is called the Little Council of Athens. And why not? How long have I been promising some account of what I did in Athens? I’ll write it all down, and on the principles I stated to Sophronius. If he ever gets to read it, he’ll surely have kittens.

And that
if
, I do assure you, is a big one. Sophronius may already be ordering new robes for the preferment he thinks he’ll get from using me. But, if I’ll need to let more time pass since that error of judgement on London Bridge, we’ll see who’s the spider and who the fly. Until then, here it goes: what Old Aelric – also known as Alaric – did in Athens, such a very long time ago . . .

If you think of it at all, my dear reader, I suppose you imagine Athens as a place bathed in the intense light of the Mediterranean. You may also think of the sovereign people, assembled in the market place, and of the matchless eloquence by which, for good or ill, they were swayed. Or you may think of the groves and colonnades where every art and every philosophy was carried to perfection. Or, if you suppose the ancients more sinful than illuminating, you may think of that scene on the Areopagus, where Saint Paul preached to a sceptical gathering about the Unknown God.

Well, that was all in ancient times. I first saw the place on Thursday, 19 October 612. By then, it was rather different . . .

Oh, but I’m already running ahead of myself. Let me pull myself to order and begin at the beginning. This was early in the morning of that day. The Imperial galley on which – for what little I suspected it was worth – I was the most important passenger had been riding at anchor off Piraeus since we’d crept in the previous evening. Now, in the first light of dawn that dribbled through the window, I sat alone in my cabin, looking at myself in a little mirror. I was long since used to the continual grinding of timbers. If I listened, I could hear it. Otherwise, it no longer registered. Far above – possibly halfway up one of the masts – a sailor was into the third or fourth stanza of some sea shanty. He sang in one of the Eastern languages, and I hadn’t yet made any study of these. But it had a mournful quality that was feeding my own present mood.

It wasn’t vanity, you see, that had me looking so hard into that mirror. I’ll grant that, at twenty-two, I was at the very summit of health and beauty. I was well worth looking at. Since the weather had turned so horribly against us, I’d almost cheered myself in this cabin by trying on every possible combination of my fine clothes, and I’d been at least satisfied by my appearance in all of them. But my attention was focused now on a spot that covered the whole tip of my nose. If I’d done as the slave suggested, a dab of paint would have covered the thing. Instead, I’d tried popping it before it was ripe, and was now paying the price of acting in haste.

I sighed and put the mirror down. I tried not to listen to that awful and probably endless dirge overhead. So far as it succeeded, the effort only made room in my thoughts for everything else. I looked again at the commission Heraclius had sent me:

You will proceed with all haste to Our most learned and famous town of Athens
, it read.
There, you shall act as may be made necessary. The Lord Priscus, Our Commander of the East, shall accompany you and do likewise.

And that was it. Unrolled and held open with lead weights, the parchment sheet was about thirty inches by eighteen. On its very dark purple background, the three sentences of my commission, written in gold, took up a single line. Because the Emperor had written this himself, and in Latin, it was surely of no importance that he’d omitted all the usual Greek formulae. Did it matter if he’d missed out all my titles and not called me his
right trusty and beloved friend
? Did it matter if he’d left off the epithet
ever victorious
from the mention of Priscus? And – far more important – what did the whole sodding document require of us? I’d never seen anything so vague – not even from Heraclius. After the ship had intercepted us off Cyprus, and turned us west from our homeward voyage to Constantinople, I’d sat looking at the parchment sheet over and over again. I’d told myself until I really believed it, that this was simply the work of someone who was at best semi-literate, even in his own language. Now the voyage was reaching its end, and we’d soon be stepping on to the Piraeus docks, every word of the commission dripped menace.

I let the sheet fall on to my desk and stretched cautiously. My official robe made a bitch of all movement, though was a refuge from the chill. I yawned. If this was the last time I ever wore it, I might as well look good when the Governor had put me in chains and taken off to Corinth. Yes, even if my career was to reach its end in some barbarian-ravaged province in the middle of nowhere, I might as well look good for the occasion. The spot aside, I could be a sight worth seeing.

‘Come!’ I shouted. The door opened. I should have guessed from that hesitant knock that it would be Martin and not the slave with a jug of wine. I glared at him. How he’d managed to gain still more weight on this voyage was a mystery. But he’d managed. The clothes that had fitted him reasonably well in Alexandria were now visibly bulging. In Athens, it was no comfort that he might draw attention from my spot. ‘Have you eaten yet?’ I asked.

Looking as miserable as I felt, he said nothing. But I saw the hungry look he darted at the cheese and stale bread I’d left untouched beside me. I grunted and waved him into the chair opposite my desk.

‘When do you think we can dock?’ I asked.

He shoved a wedge of cheese into his mouth and chewed without visible enjoyment. ‘The Captain is still on shore,’ he said indistinctly. He took a mouthful of brackish water and cleared his throat. ‘I spoke with one of the sailors he sent back for something.’ He swallowed and continued with a faint tremor in his voice. ‘Apparently, the military situation is looking desperate.’

I shrugged again. The provincial authorities, I’d already learned from Priscus, had five hundred troops to cover the entire area south of Thermopylae. If the Spartans had once held up the entire Persian Army there with three hundred hoplites, our own people had long since given up on trying to keep out a rabble of Avars and Slavs. Thirty years of their depredations, and there really was no military situation left to call desperate or otherwise.

‘The harvests have failed in Thrace and beyond,’ Martin explained. I reached cautiously forward and pulled a corner off the dry loaf. I wondered if it was worth trying to eat anything at all. Once arrested, it might be some while before anyone got round to feeding me.

‘Starvation is setting in everywhere south of the Danube, and possibly north of it,’ he added. ‘The word is that twenty million barbarians are on the move, and will sweep through the passes before the month is out.’ He would have said more. But a sudden spasm of fear took hold of him, and his voice fell away.

‘Make that twenty
thousand
,’ I sneered, ‘and then halve it.’ I put the bread into my mouth and chewed with as much enthusiasm as if a priest had put it there. ‘You know perfectly well that the Empire lost Britain to about that many of my own people – and not all at once. Whatever the minstrels told you in Ireland about the unstoppable flood of yellow-headed giants who dispossessed your ancestors, we weren’t enough to have taken London – not, that is, if you’d done other than scuttle out of the place like frightened chickens.’ I sniffed and ignored the face he pulled.

I was right in my history. The Western Provinces really had been lost to not enough armed men to fill the Circus in Constantinople. They’d crossed the Rhine into a desert produced by centuries of misgovernment, and had been quietly welcomed by the survivors. But there was no point taking issue here and now with the accounts agreed by Martin’s people with the Imperial historians about those unstoppable floods of yellow-headed giants. None of it mattered any more. In the resulting silence, I reached down into my leather satchel and pulled out a small cloth bag. Its many coins made a dull chinking sound on the table. I reached down again for a sheet of parchment I’d folded over three times and sealed with my ring. I pushed both towards Martin.

‘The cash is all I bothered bringing with me from Alexandria,’ I said. ‘I thought it would be more than enough for the journey, and it’s still a decent sum.’ Wearily, I lifted a hand to stop the protest. ‘The draft is on the Papal Bank. It will be honoured regardless of any confiscation decree. Your job, once we are separated, is to get yourself and Sveta and your child and my child to Rome, and then wherever may seem appropriate. Go to the Lateran and speak to the Dispensator. He may not give active assistance. But you can rely on him to tell you straight if you will all be safe in Rome – or if you should make a run for where the Lombards rule, or for the lands of the French King. He may even advise you to go back all the way to Ireland. Wouldn’t you like that – to go home at last to Ireland? You could be a man of some consequence there. Whatever the case, you’ll be far outside the Emperor’s reach.’

Martin’s response was to look down at the closed bag and to start crying again. ‘But it’s so unjust, Aelric,’ he sobbed. ‘None of this was your fault. You did everything possible . . .’

I smiled and patted him gently on the hand. ‘You know the rule, Martin,’ I said. ‘When things go this wrong,
someone has to be blamed
. It can’t be the Emperor. It can’t be the Viceroy of Egypt – he is the Emperor’s cousin, after all. That leaves me or Priscus. It’s pretty clear that we’ll both share the blame.’

I smiled again and resisted the urge to reach up and touch my spot. ‘Now, once you’ve gone through the motions of announcing me as I step ashore, and of reading out my commission, I want you to vanish into the crowd. No one will pay attention to a freedman. Get away from me. Don’t look back. Take the first seaworthy vessel out of Piraeus. Go to Corinth. Take whatever ship is going west. Do you understand?’

There was more sobbing and mopping of wet eyes. In the next cabin but one, I heard Maximin start wailing for his father. I told myself not to get up and go to him. It was best not to remind him that I was about. I needed Martin to make a clean getaway on the dockside. I couldn’t have a child in his wife’s arms, screaming and reaching out for me.

There was another knock at the door. This time, it was the wine. I drank two cups straight off, and on an empty stomach. The writing on my commission wavered slightly as I looked at it. But I could feel myself coming into a better mood since the previous night’s opium pill had relinquished its hold on me, and I’d become gradually aware of the clammy bedclothes and of the damp chill beyond them. I was about to give Martin further instructions on the draft; it was too late to explain again how gold could be moved from one place to another without shipping a single piece, but I could remind him of the formalities in the Papal Bank. Just then, though, there was yet another knock on the door. Before I could call out to enter, it opened and the galley’s head slave walked in. He gave what I thought the most perfunctory bow that was decent for a man of my status.

‘The Lord Priscus would have the pleasure of My Lord’s company,’ he said as he finally looked up. Was that the remains of a smirk on his face? I pretended not to notice. I got up and walked over to the little window. This should have looked out towards Piraeus. All I could see was a mass of grey and endlessly shifting fog. There was an unusually loud scraping of timbers as the galley was jolted by a current or some shift in the breeze. Over on the table, my cup moved about an inch, but didn’t tip over. Martin grabbed for safety at the back of an unoccupied chair. I thought for a moment he would start vomiting again. But it was only a single movement of the galley. I couldn’t see it, but I felt a spatter of the rain that was now joining the mist that had slowed our progress through the Saronic Gulf. I pushed the lead shutter into place. Now with just the light of a few lamps, I crossed the room and pulled the door open. Maximin was still crying. It was the settled, disconsolate wail of a child too young to ask questions, but old enough to know that something was terribly wrong.

I looked back at Martin, who was staring at the bag of gold. ‘Go and see if Sveta’s finished packing,’ I said in Latin. ‘Bear in mind that most of the luggage will be impounded on the docks. Make sure that everything important is in the bags that you’ll be carrying.’

I’ve said I was in an Imperial galley. This gives little notion of the size or magnificence of what the Viceroy had forced on me for my departure from Alexandria. It was perhaps the biggest vessel in the whole Imperial service. Over a hundred yards long, and fitted out with a lavish indifference to cost that went some way to offsetting the utter want of taste, it was as fine a prison as anyone could have desired. When told I’d be taking ship for Constantinople, I had insisted on something small and fast. Nicetas had smiled and nodded and given me his own official galley. I’d seen this many times in the private harbour. For a good thousand years, it, or something like it, had been kept permanently ready for those times when the King, or Governor, or Duke, or Viceroy needed to get away from the Alexandrian mob. Now, thanks to Priscus, there was no mob left, we’d all been politely bundled into it and waved off with fair cries and crocodile tears. I had to admit, though, that, once those storms had blown up near Seriphos, anything lighter would have been torn apart. If drowning would have been a mercy compared with what might be waiting for me in Piraeus, there were others to think about. As it was, we’d lost half our oars, and had been creeping forward ever since, propelled by various arrangements of sails that might, in other circumstances, have claimed my entire interest.