The Ghosts of Athens (16 page)

There was another flash of lightning, and more thunder. I waited for my eyes to adjust from the dazzling flash. Yes, it was a lamp in one of the upper windows. I could keep looking for somewhere dry to sleep, and see who else was in the palace come the morning. But who could have slept now? I reached for my folded sheet and took up my lamp. The carpet could stay where I’d found it. In all those corridors, I’d gone all the way round the main block of the palace. I was now only about half a dozen rooms away from my own quarters. If I remembered correctly, the staircase I wanted was through one of the undivided rooms that lay the other side of a second cluster of deserted offices. I thought of going back for a pair of sandals and some clothes. Even wet clothes might be an improvement on nudity in this chill. But I wasn’t sure how long the lamp would hold up. Shivering in a draught that at least took away the horrid smell of damp, I set out along yet another corridor. In one of the partitions of what had been a very large room – an art gallery, perhaps? – I found myself looking at the cupboard where we’d earlier found the locked door – the locked door, that is, of my dream.

‘I’ll not be going through that!’ I said firmly. My complacent laugh was drowned out by more thunder. The preceding flash of lightning, though, had shown another door that I’d somehow overlooked in our daylight tour. It hung wide open, and led up a staircase of what might once have been fine marble. I paused and looked back at the cupboard. I laughed again and pulled the door open and walked in. The door at its far end was still locked solidly shut. I’d have that open soon enough, I thought. We’d see then what was behind it. I gave the wood a hard tap. No answering echo: it must have been inches thick. I laughed, now gently. With dreams like this, I asked, who needed opium? I turned and walked from the cupboard. I took care to close the door behind me.

I felt a trickle of cold water down my back. I thought for a moment someone had touched me, and fought for much longer than that with a fit of the shivers. I tried to ignore how cold it was all about. I stared into the lamp flame, and tried to forget how, beyond a few yards in all directions, I was in pitch dark.

I told myself I’d made a mistake when I found one of the doors I had to go through to get to that staircase had been locked shut. All the doors in question had been unlocked earlier. I didn’t see why the few residency slaves should have bothered with locking any of them. More likely, I’d taken a wrong turning. But I hadn’t. Everything looks different at night. But I was in the right place. I had to go through this door, and then through another, before I got to the staircase. I was hurrying down another of the corridors – I thought this one might lead into the left side block of the residency – when I saw the faint glimmer from beneath a closed door. I stopped and tried the latch. This door was only shut, not locked. Better still, it opened on to a flight of stairs that led up to a room that seemed moderately well-lit. This wouldn’t be the light I’d seen from the office window. But, since I was investigating one, I might as well investigate another.

I dithered a moment at the foot of the stairs. I thought of calling up. Instead, I listened hard. No sound. I pinched the wick of my own lamp and waited for it to stop smoking. I set a foot on the first of the marble steps – and pulled straight back. Since I was now relying on the dim light from above, I couldn’t see if it was seed corn or little ceramic beads that had been scattered over the stairs. But it was one of those devices I’d used back home when I needed to plot in some language a spy might reasonably be expected to understand. I held my breath and listened for any sound at all from upstairs. It was pointless with that continual drumbeat of the rain. I bent forward and let my fingers play lightly over the coating on the first and second and on every other step I could reach. It was the sort of cheap beads you put on a string and give to children – or that people wear prominently on their fine church-going clothes to show off their humility. Bare feet wouldn’t crunch on this as boots or even sandals would, but would still make some noise. And little beads would most certainly hurt those ever so civilised and well-pumiced feet. I bent forward again and swept a little space where I could step. Keeping as quiet as I could, I went slowly upstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

Still alone, I stood amid the wreckage of what had once been a very fine library. One side of its hundred-foot length was taken up with a series of glazed windows. I’d looked up at these from the courtyard and guessed that they meant a library. The unrendered bricks of the big central dome had the sort of reflected gleam on them that said they were of glass. By day, the whole room must have been as light as the open air. The dome was supported by four columns of many-coloured marble. These had once been sheathed over their middle third in bronze. There was still bronze to cover the capitals where they supported the dome. There were even a few traces of gold leaf on the elegant scrolling of the capitals. The middle sheathing, though, was long since gone. Only a paler colour for the marble, and the dark peg holes, showed what had been there. Much of the panelled ceiling that surrounded the dome had come down. Where the plaster still adhered, there were elaborate painting of stars and of gods of the Old Faith, each head within a bright nimbus.

Back in the days of Herodes – perhaps till quite recently – the library may have contained one of the finest collections in the Empire. Judging from the bookracks that remained, and from where others must once have been, it didn’t seem unreasonable to guess twenty, perhaps thirty, thousand individual rolls.

But I’ve said I was standing amid wreckage. The four-inch by four partitions in the racks were mostly empty. Many of the smaller racks had been overturned. Chairs lay broken on the floor. Tables had collapsed under various weights. As ever, pieces of glass had come loose from their lead framework, and rain had made its own contribution to the damage. The lighting I’d seen was towards the far end of the room. It was enough to be noticed from quite a distance, though not to give a detailed view of anything. But, even in the dimness, I could see the sad desolation of a grand library. Then there were the continuing flashes of lightning. Between the intense whiteness that blanks out everything, and the sudden darkness before eyes can readjust to the normal light, there is the tiniest moment of illumination. In one of those moments, I looked into what might be a good summary of what Athens had finally become.

Close by one of the good windows, there was a table that could still be used. It had a chair set to it. Here the lamps were burning – half a dozen of them in an iron holder. As I walked forward into the room, my feet crunched on an area of mosaic tiles that had come loose on the floor. I stopped and looked down to see if there was broken glass there as well. No, it was just dozens of loose stones that had once been the face of one of the Muses. There was no broken glass to worry about. But some of the stones looked sharp. I stepped back and took a longer route to the table.

There was a taper by the lamps. Cupping this in my hands against the draught that came from every direction, I carried a flame to my own lamp and pressed down the windshield. These lamps had been filled with the cheapest grade of oil, and they let off a nasty, acrid smell along with their rather dim light. But their combined light made a soft and almost welcoming glow. I stood up straight and looked across at the stained murals on the far wall. They showed Athens as it had been at some time in the past; the still unfinished Temple of Jupiter suggested the city in its grandest days. I’d come back for a proper look by day.

I stood behind the chair and turned my attention to the books that lay on the table. One of these was a roll of the ancient kind. The glue had failed, and the individual sheets of papyrus had mostly separated from each other. I picked one of them up and held it close by the lamps. The bright, aromatic smell of the decaying reeds took me straight back to the time I’d spent in what remained of the great library of Alexandria. Once I’d focused on the light and often faded ink strokes of whatever scribe had produced it, so did the text. It was from the fourth book of the life King Ptolemy had written of his friend Alexander, and this sheet carried his account of the council of war held by the Persian King just before his final defeat. I’d read the whole of this in Alexandria, and it was thrilling stuff. More than this, it had a ring of truth. To be sure, you couldn’t trust any of the passages where Ptolemy himself was in action – but the King had been in a position to get at the full truth about all that had happened, and he’d mostly told the truth unless his own interest was concerned. The last few lines of the page had crumbled, and the next I could find took up the story when Alexander was approaching Persepolis.

I looked harder and compared the sheets. I’d been right. The council of war was Ptolemy, sure enough. Persepolis was in a different hand and in a more florid style. It might have been Arrian. It might have been some other late author, who’d rewritten Ptolemy and padded his effort with tales of inherent absurdity. This sheet had Alexander in conversation with an owl who was relaying a message from Athena. Vaguely interested, I pushed the two sheets together. There were of slightly different sizes. By all appearances, the reader had gathered up what he could find of Alexander and was going through it all in no particular order.

The other main work on the table was a huge book of the modern sort. Writing on parchment can be much smaller than on papyrus, and it was hard in this light to see what the book was. Noting how high it was heaped with cushions, I sat on the chair and moved my lamp so close that I had to take care to avoid spilling oil on the pages. I looked up from the wavering text and gave a contemptuous sniff. I found myself staring into a marble bust of Polybius. At some point, this had been knocked from its plinth and then replaced, minus nose and the lower part of its beard. What was left of its features seemed, in the flickering dimness of the lamps, to be twisting into the sneer I could feel spreading over my own face. I looked down again at the text and read with closer attention:

Now these points being conceded to us, the further point is also clear to any one, that, as Moses says darkness was before the creation of light, so also in the case of the Son (if, according to the heretical statement, the Father ‘made Him at that time when He willed’), before He made Him, that Light which the Son is was not; and, light not yet being, it is impossible that its opposite should not be. For we learn also from the other instances that nothing that comes from the Creator is at random, but that which was lacking is added by creation to existing things. Thus it is quite clear that if God did make the Son, He made Him by reason of a deficiency in the nature of things. As, then, while sensible light was still lacking, there was darkness, and darkness would certainly have prevailed had light not come into being, so also, when the Son ‘as yet was not,’ the very and true Light, and all else that the Son is, did not exist. For even according to the evidence of heresy, that which exists has no need of coming into being; if therefore He made Him, He assuredly made that which did not exist . . .

Gregory of Nyassa? I hazarded. The references to light and the nature of time were a strong indication. I turned the page – yes, it was Gregory: I’d gone through this with Martin in Constantinople. Though one of the more ranty of the theologians we’d been pressing for the meaning I needed, he had stood out for his attack on slavery. But who the buggery could be reading this stuff for pleasure? And where was he? Even with this grade of oil, you have to be pretty rich to leave all those lamps burning away like a minor lighthouse. Had he sloped off for a pee somewhere? Had he just vanished like the chancery clerks? I stared again at what was – its inherent absurdity always granted – a most able defence of orthodoxy.

But I wasn’t creeping, stark bollock naked, about the residency for a spot of midnight reading. It was worth noting that, if there was a copy here of Ptolemy’s
Life of Alexander
, the library might not be completely worthless. I ignored the tangle of unrolled books that I could now see beneath one of the overturned racks. I ignored the chaotic heaps of modern books of what might have been more controversial theology or just obsolete law texts. They could all wait till the coming of daylight. The wind shifted again outside, and there was a harsh spatter of rain against every one of the windows. As in my bedroom, water splashed through the gaps in the leadwork and added to the puddles on the floor. I refilled my lamp from a flask of that cheap oil, and moved on.

The library was on the upper floor of the left block of the palace. To the right of where I’d been sitting was another door that led further into the block. At some time in the past, it had been locked from the other side, and then smashed open. Some effort had then been made to reattach it to the frame. Now, getting it open more than about eighteen inches caused it to grate on the broken mosaics that covered the floor. I forced it wide open and looked into the darkness beyond. There was a loud splashing of the water that made its way down from a hole in the roof. Its echo told me I was in a room of at least the same size as the library.

Time, I think, to explain the geography of the place where I was staying. I’ve said it was built by Herodes Atticus. So far as I could tell, he’d tried for a combination of almost Imperial magnificence with something more homely. The result was something of a muddle. The front block of the palace, where it faced on to the Forum of Hadrian, comprised about a dozen very large and high rooms where he could show off his wealth. These were lit by glazed ceiling windows. They were mostly now abandoned or divided into smaller rooms or offices with little regard to the need for natural lighting. Behind these, and facing out into the main courtyard, was a labyrinth of smaller and much lower rooms, lit by side windows or with ceiling windows, or with both. These I supposed were the living rooms for the household. A careful inspection of partition walls and the telltale pattern of the ceiling mouldings might tell what was original to the plan and what had been adapted in the conversion from palace to administrative building. So far, it had just seemed an impenetrable muddle.