Lempriere's Dictionary (67 page)

Not half a mile away and oblivious to this invocation, its subject sat cocooned in his thoughts. Through a mild April broken only by his visit to the Stone Eater and a snow squall on the fifth, Lemprière patrolled the kingdoms of his dictionary.

Like a future-ghost, he moved among the Isauri and war-like Lacedaemonians, the Lestrygones who ate sailors washed up on their shores and the Mandurians who ate dogs. In Latium he pushed through thick-leaved laurels over ground where Rome would later rise and teem with painted courtesans stalking through the Suburra, stalls crammed together in the Tabernae Novae and prisoners wailing up from the subterranean levels of the Tullianum. Over the tracts of Mesopotamia, Pannonia and Samartia, he traced lines which were borders, marked points which grew into cities. He saw villages which would later rival Rome and Babylon: Lutetia, Olisipio and Londinium, and stranger places which would sink into the earth leaving only disbelieved stories: Ophiodes, the topaz island, so dazzling it appeared only at night, the labyrinths at Lemnus, Crete and Assinoe where the sacred crocodiles lay embalmed hidden deep within one of three thousand chambers; Samothrace, where mysteries began their lives before sucking in the thoughts of men. He searched through Trapezus on the Euxine coast and out to sea where, on triangular Leuce, in a different version of the tale, Achilles took Iphigenia as his bride. But she was not there. From the enclosed
Palus Mæotis
through the Cimmerian and Thracian Bospori to the Mediterraneum, north to Liburnia, south over the Syrtes sandbanks to Melita and Utica where the Carthaginians fled when the siege was lost and the city burned. Along the rocky shores of Seriphus, Danae’s landfall, over the fertile hills of Naxos where Ariadne cried for Theseus and inland to the Scamander, called Xanthus by the goddesses
who bathed there before the fatal judgment of Paris; Minerva, Juno, Venus. He searched for them all.

But the Xanthus was a muddy stream, Carthage debris, Zama a place where the blood of Scipio’s and Hannibal’s armies had long ago soaked into the soil. He was an intruder kicking through the husks. Liburnia was now the arena for a squalid border-war, he had heard. Quiza was on the coast, Mauritanian something. Little of note happened on Onoeum. Taenarum was the southern-most tip of Europe. Velinus was a stagnant lake and it rained frequently in Umbria. Someone mentioned Xylenopolis. Pliny? Very little grew on the banks of the Zyras.

As the weeks of April passed, he began to believe that something was lost to these cities, kingdoms, islands and seas. With their hold on him loosened, his own idea of them was changed. Their contours remained, but dry and paper-thin. If he chose to push his arm through the tight skin, he would find the flesh stripped away from within, heart and lungs disengaged. It was not a world which would ever be lost, but its earth, rocks, rivers and seas were draining away, its raw substance being lost to the idea as sands are exchanged in an hour glass, the future trickling steadily into the past. Less deceived, Lemprière knew that his scepticism had its price. The fields in which his imagination had once played were drying and cracking. The old heroes were being dispossessed. He asked himself, where now was their kingdom? They wandered in aimless groups, men and women walking through ill-defined streets on private missions. He was there amongst them in a city of exiles, looking into their faces, turning from one group to the next, still in search of her. Iphigenia fled from Taurica with her brother and his companion. Where did she flee? The statue of Diana, their booty, later arrived in Comana, or Sparta or Aricia, the accounts were in dispute. Orestes and Pylades returned to Argos. But Iphigenia joined the bands of the lost who had forgotten their beginnings and lost sight of their ends. Beyond the city there was nothing but flat plains and drab skies. The faces were masks lifted from the features of corpses, husks of memory. Only the city held firm; Troy or Carthage, the first or second Romes, the walls held firm, enclosing the memories. The smell of burning, the first breach. He would find her before the besiegers stormed through the streets, staving in the doors, firing the roofs, searching for the prize of Paris, the jewel which sucked all of them in. Face after face reeled up to him, but they were all wrong, none of them the one he sought. Danae, Iphigenia, Helen…. None of them Juliette.

From a convalescent idleness forced upon him by his doctors, the Emperor Joseph surveyed the conflict through intermittent despatches and dubious communiqués, third or fourth-hand reports of fumbling actions and exaggerated advances. No-one was telling him the whole truth about this war. May brought smart engagements about Choczim and Klevik where the Turkish batteries were raised by Prince Lichtenstein. The Aga of the defending janissaries was taken and shipped to Bohemia with his men. In a rare humanitarian gesture, women and children were marched to the safety of Zwornich. Blows struck at Yassi and Schabatz sent Turkish platoons reeling east, and the Prince de Ligne was made Colonel of the Engineers. But then the Prince of Lichtenstein’s blockade was broken at Dubiza and his men driven back over the Unna. Despatches spoke of raids on his retreating camp in Croatia and heavy losses at Choczim. A rumour picked up by his informants within the Porte suggested his Internuncio was about to be released but nothing more had been heard.

The bleak vistas of Peterwaradian showed him Slavonian plains covered with beech-scrub and wild oaks. The broad Danube flowed past his bunker towards Belgrade where the siege was entering its third or fourth month. His generals were dispirited, summer was coming and, looking up now at the bland sunshine bathing him in the protective aura of its rays, with summer came disease. His messages to his Russian allies had grown curt and heavily ironic. Someone had posted a reward for any “who might find an army quite large and shaggy, lost earlier this year between Petersburg and Belgrade” but Joseph had not smiled. The Empress Catherine and Ewald Friedrich von Hertzberg had vacated his dreams to afflict him in person, the slattern by inaction, her sidling consort with his Plan. The Prussian envoy was in good odour with the Porte. The Hertzberg Plan, an engine of torture fitted especially for him, was gaining ground, gouging deep wounds in his borders, snipping off defenceless extremities, reducing him to a flopping torso booted this way and that by allies and enemies alike. A forage party surprised on the far bank of the Drave had been slaughtered to a man. When their bodies were recovered, their comrades found hideous disfigurements. Joseph heard long sharp knives grind against whetstones. He saw grisly work and wanted to stop it. He wanted to call a halt to this already halted war. Information gathered in Constantinople mentioned a bag. It hung from the arch which marked the entrance to the seraglio. Taller than a man and suspended by a rope which groaned under the weight, the bag was made from a kind of mesh. Emperor Joseph thought a lot about this bag. Certainly, his own men were not blameless. He knew why the camps at Semlin could be full one day, yet able to accept prisoners the next. But the bag was different. At first it was black, but when struck with a pole the reason for this became clear. The
bag was black with flies which swarmed in a cloud before settling once again. They were feeding. The bag was filled with ears, noses, tongues and eyes cut from the faces of his soldiers.

It seemed horrible and pointless. Joseph considered the administrative effort which must have been expended to raise these charnel-house sweepings as a standard over the city. He thought of old Byzantium with its gates broken open, the barbarians staring at the calm clerks, the serried desks, the reams of paper tabulating distant events, the ordered lists. He thought of the slow accommodation between those two orders; the organisation of the intruders’ savagery, new blood in the old machine. Here it was again. Listed by its clerks and marshalled under committees; but still the same. Within its laws, tariffs, bureaucracy, its systems of government and their instruments, at the heart of this empire’s frame a rotting sack of organs was being eaten by flies. On fine days, when the sirocco blew northwards over the town, Joseph would stand on the balcony of his quarters to breathe the dry Saharan air. Showers often followed, and after these the ground would steam in the re-emerging sun. It was at these times that the Emperor Joseph thought most vividly of the city of his enemies.

To focus on the bag is to miss the point. Enfilades of antechambers and corridors devious as their scuttling clerks affirm this as a truth. Within the Porte at Constantinople, junior scribes passing on misdirected memoranda on the first day of their employment have been known to work fifty years, slowly creeping up the strata of clerks, junior officers, translators and administrators towards their destined post where, clearing the sheaf of unfinished paperwork left by their predecessors, they find that first memorandum waiting for them once more. The antechambers lead to more antechambers, the corridors to more corridors. Outgoing directives are a function of the administration’s entropy, mistakes in a word. Its agents and clerks are at the centre of an empire which, extending far beyond the administration’s own eyes and ears, is known to them in the same way the seraglio is known to the colonies of flies which hatch, feed, live and die within the bag suspended from its gates, never once glimpsing the world outside. But the empire needs them all, needs every last delay and deferral, every circumscription and duplicated function, every postponement of the inevitable. Here, at the empire’s heart, to miss the point is itself the point. And, as test of its professional competence, nothing delighted the administration more than the unexpected.

Nascent summer heat beamed its sanction on the domes of the city, drawing steam from the streets, skidding off the choppy seas in the strait as the
Tesrifati
approached the harbour at Constantinople. Under a cloudless sky, her masts jury-rigged, her bulk lolling in the easy sea, the
Tesrifati
docked without incident at the berth she had quit only a month before.
Amongst the water sellers, fish women, tobacco peddlers, hawkers of pots, hucksters and tallymen clustered in the port the word spread quickly. In the Pera district, naturalised Greeks acting as impromptu
sprachtknaben
to the Prussian envoys, passed on the news to unconvincing pilgrims in the pay of the Austrian secret service, who in turn despatched the message post-haste to Vienna where interests friendly to the Porte would return it east to be used, perhaps, in one of several ongoing misinformation campaigns. Picked up by rumour-mongers and sold on to the administration’s informants, it would form a vital link in the event’s second cycle; a damage limitation exercise run for a long-owed favour on behalf of the Appeasement Faction whose sympathisers were, at this moment, conveying to them the bad news of the
Tesrifati
’s rearrival.

At the harbour, barrels of fish were being unloaded from the ship. The crew, manacled once more, sat sullenly on the jetty. Minor officials from the
Beylik
section of the Scribal Office and junior special assistants to the
Reis Effendi
wrote furiously as the inventory was made. The fetid odour of fish hung in the air. The scene might have been identical to that of a month before but for three details. Where before the
Tesrifati
had sat low in the water, now she rode high on the harbour swell. Her antiquated rigging lay cut down in tangled heaps on the deck. Of her captain, there was no sign. In the gloom of the hold, the officials found a cavernous space. The barrels of saltpetre were gone. The crate containing Peter Rathkael-Herbert, the Imperial Internuncio, had disappeared too. At these discoveries, the officials’ thoughts turned to the crew. The administration required explanations. Soon, in the cellars and sub-basements of the Fortress of the Seven Towers, explanations would be forthcoming.

Five days out, five days in which his crew had sat below decks sucking resinous smoke from their pipes or had fished for tunny without luck off the
Tesrifati
’s stern and Hamit knew nothing had changed. They were worse than dogs, stinking and scratching themselves, doing nothing without curses and kicks, laughing at him behind his back. They called him “boy” and he hated them. He thought often of Midilli, his comrades and the sergeants. Then he looked at his vessel, saw a hulk overrun with vermin and his heart sank. In these moments of despondency his refuge was the hold where he dutifully fed and watered the mysterious man in the crate. Each day, he would clamber down the well with a pitcher of water and a satchel of ship’s biscuits. To be incarcerated in a crate in the Mediterranean heat was bad enough. He would not inflict the fish upon his guest. When his duties permitted, they spoke together at length: Hamit grousing about his crew’s deficiencies, his guest replying in a mixture of extraordinarily bad Turkish and a language he did not understand, save for one word. This was “water”. It was always his first word. The boy sat hunched with his
back to the crate, the Internuncio cramped within it, while around them the
Tesrifati
’s timbers creaked, water slopped in the bilges and rats scampered fearlessly over the barrels of saltpetre. They were refugees, bound together by different kinds of misery.