The Ghosts of Athens (13 page)

We’d reached the end of our first day in Athens. It had been my intention, once we were settled into our accommodation, to go for a look about the city. What I’d seen of it on our way in had been more hopeful than the journey up from Piraeus might have suggested. The streets were amazingly dirty. The small crowds huddling under the colonnades had been, if possible, uglier and more degraded than those who’d met us on the docks. What I’d heard of their chattering still bore little relation to any Greek that I’d ever heard. But the new buildings in the centre had been respectably magnificent. If Justinian had shut down all the universities there eighty years before, he’d been characteristically generous with building grants. As for the ancient buildings, neither Martin nor I was up to identifying anything. But we had no doubt there was much still to be seen. By unspoken agreement, we’d avoided looking up at the great plateau that overshadowed the city. We’d save that experience for better weather.

And better weather hadn’t come. Our planned sightseeing of the early afternoon had been rained off. No one had complained when I cancelled our reception ceremony in front of the Count’s residency. Instead, in the absence of any slaves, I’d helped Martin unpack my clothes. These were all soaked and would need a day in the sun to dry, followed by another day of stretching and pressing. The clothes I was wearing had been damp through. Eventually, a residency slave had come in sight. As luck would have it, he was about my size. So he’d been sent about his duties in a stained silk tunic, and I was now at least warm in the padded shirt and loose trousers of a Slavic prisoner of war. I’d finally got used to the smell and had been looking forward to a dinner where I could put a few pointed questions to Nicephorus.

‘You say the Count’s been taken poorly?’ I asked. I waited for Priscus to suck the flesh off the whole dead thing he’d shovelled into his mouth. It was a noise that almost turned my stomach.

He leaned forward and spat the complete skeleton into a battered silver dish. ‘Oh,’ he said vaguely, ‘the long wait in Piraeus brought back a fever he had in the summer. When I left him, he was sweating all over. He did say he’d attend on you tomorrow morning.’

I rubbed the spot on my nose. It was a fair alternative to grinding my teeth. There was no chance at all of arrest – there’s a limit even to the sort of trick Ludinus might play on his enemies. This being so, I was coming over all official again. I had questions for Nicephorus accumulating like autumn leaves in a gutter, and he’d now taken to his bed.

I turned to Martin, who was coming out of a quiet choking fit from some bones he’d failed to spit out. ‘Where do you suppose the rest of the slaves are hiding?’ I asked.

‘I’ve counted only six slaves in the whole building,’ he said indistinctly. ‘They could be the sweepings of the market on a poor day,’ he added tartly.

I might have observed that, as a freed slave, Martin could have shown a little consideration for those less fortunate than himself. But I couldn’t fault his estimate of their worth.
And six of them!
There must have been fifty rooms in this place – no, many more than that, once you took the three other blocks into account.

‘No wonder it’s all so dirty!’ I sighed instead. ‘And where are the clerks? You don’t expect much administration in a place like Athens. Even so, a few occupied offices might be reasonable.’

Above us, the wind shifted direction. It sent a spattering of rain on to the tiled floor. I stared at the dark puddle that was beginning to make its way in my direction. A sudden draught reached one of the lamps. It went out with a sputter and a smell of rancid oil. I noticed how dark it was getting. As Martin got up to fiddle with the thing, I chewed on the hard crust.

‘Why so much fuss, dear boy?’ Priscus called without bothering to empty his mouth. ‘Weren’t you brought up in a pigsty? This must be luxury itself by comparison. But let’s agree it could do with some attention, and turn to the much more interesting matter of what this place used to be. Did Plato or someone else famous live here in the old days?’ He swallowed. Straight away, he slurped in another of the frogs and smacked his lips.

Plainly, his fellowship in despair act was wearing thin. I had no right to complain: mine had vanished in a puff of smoke a mile outside Piraeus. I grinned and looked down at my crust. Truth was – not that I’d ever admit this to Priscus – that a pigsty would have been one or two steps up from the hovel in Richborough where Ethelbert had dumped my mother. I stroked my throbbing nose. ‘The residency is only about four hundred years old,’ I said. ‘According to the inscription above the main entrance, it was built as a palace by Herodes Atticus.’ I could see from his blank look that I’d outpaced the man’s knowledge of history. ‘He was a close friend of the Emperor Hadrian,’ I explained, ‘and shared his taste for the very ancient. Apparently, he’d been left poor by his father’s extravagance. His fortunes were only restored by the discovery of a treasure hoard under his remaining property. He built this palace on the site of the discovery, which is a shame, bearing in mind its bad position.’ I glanced again at a damaged fresco of the Emperor on the far wall. Surrounded by statues of the famous dead, he was giving a speech to the people of Athens. The young man beside him was probably Antinous. But the head was missing – someone had dug into the plaster long before, possibly to get at one of the hot air ducts underneath.

Not being able to go out, and having nothing better to do with my time, I’d spent the early afternoon looking about the front block of what was now the Count’s residency. You couldn’t fault its original plan. The rooms that hadn’t been subdivided into offices had a size and arrangement that would have pleased the modern rich in Constantinople. But I’ve said the offices were empty. Many were locked shut. Everything was long out of repair. It all desperately needed cleaning. And it was bloody cold. There’s a limit to what you can appreciate of anything when your feet are like ice and there’s a dribble of cold snot on your upper lip. Yes, I’d been glad of that slave’s clothing. Even if they did smell of unwashed barbarian, I was warmer than Priscus or Martin.

Priscus broke my long silence with one of his wet coughs. ‘It could be worse, my dear,’ he said with a good cheer that I guessed was intended to annoy. ‘Did I ever tell you about the winter I spent in Trampolinea? You soon learned to lie still at night. Then the lice would cover you thickly enough to keep you almost warm. Mind you, the days were better. You spent them darting about the city walls, throwing rocks on the barbarians who were trying to climb over to cut your throat.’ He smiled at Martin, who’d now sat down and was staring unhappily into the iron pot.

Priscus yawned and poured himself another cup of wine. ‘So, young Alaric,’ he asked, ‘do I gather right that you’ve been sent to Athens to conquer for Heraclius at the head of a synod?’

There are few things worse than finding a worm in the piece of bread you’ve been eating. Finding half a worm is one of them. I put the two halves of the bread down and brushed grey crumbs from the stained quilting of my shirt. ‘I’ve no doubt it’s waiting for me somewhere,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I still haven’t seen his letter of further instructions. It’s reasonable to suppose, however, that the Emperor has called a closed council to discuss the progress of heresy.’ I tried to make it all sound very dull. Priscus suppressed another yawn and looked over at the window. The light had almost faded. Another few cups, and there would be an excuse for seeing what vermin might be waiting in our beds.

But Priscus smiled and reached for his drug box. He dropped into his wine a generous pinch of a blue powder that I knew was a stimulant. ‘You may have thought your dinner of welcome here would be an elegant affair. You may even have looked forward to meeting a few men of your own age and vicious inclinations – dicing and whoring and all that, eh? Instead, we are where we are. Now, you could let me pass an evening with recollections of how I survived the final night battle in the streets of Trampolinea,’ he said. ‘But it would only give little Martin a nightmare.’ He sipped at his wine and pulled a face. He sipped again. ‘I know what, though,’ he said, now brightly. ‘Why don’t we discuss theology? That can’t upset any of us. And, just to make it even more fun, let’s do it in Latin. I’m sure no one is listening outside the door. But let’s do it anyway for the added challenge of discussing profundities in an unphilosophic language.’

I blinked and settled my features into complete impassivity. Martin gave me a nervous look.

Priscus laughed and this time sipped delicately from his cup. ‘We’re all friends around this table,’ he said easily in Latin. ‘Do I ever look down on the pair of you if you don’t know the difference between a javelin and an artillery bolt? Of course I don’t! But it does so pain me when you think me nothing but a rough soldier. I know that, when I burn or rape or hang or despoil heretics, you really do assume I have no understanding of the issues involved. Go on, my dear boys, own up – you think I regard the issues as of no more substance than the arguments between the Green and Blue factions in the Circus.’

I forced a weak smile and shook my head. The rain was beating against both upper and side window panes as if someone were knocking for entry. ‘Don’t you think it rather late for theology?’ I asked, trying to sound bored. ‘It’s been a long day, and the light has gone.’

‘Oh, but the night is young!’ Priscus crooned. He finished his cup and giggled. I watched as his face changed from dead white to what the lamps showed as a sort of orange. As it began to change back, and his drug took proper hold of his mind, he let out a long sigh. ‘Besides,’ he went on in a voice that carried no trace of tiredness, ‘we all know that you never go to sleep before midnight. Study, study, study, so deep into the night, isn’t it? How else does a barbarian from the edge of nowhere get such fancy Greek and that formidable learning in the classics? No, my fine, young scholar, you can sit up a while longer, to hear that Uncle Priscus didn’t entirely miss out on education. You just allow me to start this discussion with my own little summary of the issues. I’m sure you’ll have cause to correct one or two misunderstandings of detail. But do hear me out first.’

Except when all else has failed, and it’s looked as if I were moments from a grisly end, I’ve never been in the habit of praying for help. But, even as Priscus had his mouth open to start his ‘little summary’, there was a sudden rattling on the door handle.

‘You finished with that yet, My Lords?’ the old cooking woman rasped as she walked in. She pointed at the iron pot. ‘The Master hasn’t bought no other food in, and, since you ain’t all dead after all, that was to be our dinner. Now, if you’ve had your fill, we wants the leftovers.’

I’d have said seventy. Just as easily, though, she might have been fifty or ninety – you really can’t tell age with slaves or the lower classes. She stood before us, a tub of shrivelled lard in a dark dress shiny from years of cooking spills.

‘Get out of here, or I’ll have you flogged,’ Priscus hissed at her.

She looked back at him and pulled a face. ‘Please yourself, love,’ she said. ‘But the condemned boy was outside the walls all day yesterday picking up them frogs.’

Since she at least knew Greek, I wanted to sit her down and ask a few obvious questions about the management of the residency household. I also had a question about these persistent rumours of my death. But Priscus was on his feet and swaying about with a stick in his hand. He lashed out at the old woman, who, with surprising agility, dodged past him. He lunged again, this time tripping over the bottom part of an old dining couch. It splintered on impact, and Priscus vanished for a moment into a cloud of woodwormy dust.

‘So it’s just the beer for us poor slaves,’ was the last the old woman said before she got back to the door. She banged it shut behind her.

I listened for the diminishing scrape of sandals on the unswept tiles of the corridor outside. Within the room, Martin had finally got Priscus free of the heap of broken wood, and His Magnificence the Commander of the East was now breathing like an enraged bull. But he controlled himself.

‘I forgive the old witch on account of her cooking,’ he said in a forced lightness of tone. ‘Now, where was I? Oh yes, we were going to discuss the fundamental issues of our day, and in Latin.’ He grinned at me. ‘Even if you have heard them before, I can promise my own take on them will be interesting.’

The rain was getting worse. Now the smoke of the expired lamp had cleared away, I could smell my borrowed clothes. The prayer I’d been considering hadn’t worked. I’d not bother with saying one. I didn’t know how long it would be until I could escape from them and run a wet sponge over my body. Worse – oh, far worse! – I was stuck until then with Priscus for company.

‘In the early days of the Faith,’ he opened in a tone that anyone who didn’t know him would have taken for reverential, ‘when professing it was still a crime in the Empire, it was enough for most believers that Jesus Christ was the only Son of God, and that He had been sent among us to call us to the Truth and to redeem us for our sins. Beyond that, it was a matter of trying to follow His ethical precepts. Once the Faith had been established by the Great Constantine, however, attention shifted to investigating the Nature of Christ. What had been a minor and theoretical question now became a dispute concerning the peace of the Empire. Was Christ in His Nature identical with the Father, or merely similar to the Father? You will recall that Bishop Arius held the latter view, and Bishop Athanasius the former – and that every other bishop in the Empire, and eventually every one of the Faithful, was expected to take sides.