The Ghosts of Athens (52 page)

There was a low and bitter laugh about a dozen feet behind me. ‘Did you really think you could evade the gift of sight the Goddess has made me?’ Balthazar asked. He grunted an order, and I heard the rasp of a drawn sword somewhere on my left.

I spun round and saw the movement of a darker blackness against the dark of the night. Almost without thinking, I’d got my own sword out and had lunged with it. There was a gasp of pain, and I felt my victim drop to the ground. I stood back and looked hurriedly about. Whoever else was out there had gone very still, and I could see no movement. But there was a faint sound of someone breathing, and it wasn’t Priscus. Trying not to make any sound of boot leather on stone, I moved slowly in the direction of the breathing. At the very last moment, there was another flash of darkness within the dark, and Balthazar was laughing again.

‘Don’t think there is any escape,’ he said, now conversational. ‘Those who have done evil must themselves suffer evil.’ I heard him breathe in and then cry out in a loud voice, ‘Come, come, good beasts of the frozen north,’ he shrilled in Greek. ‘Come and see what golden prize I bestow upon your thrice-accursed souls.’

‘Fuck you!’ I snarled. Sword raised to strike him down, I rushed at where he must be standing. I crashed straight into Priscus, who was trying for the same. We fell down together in a heap. As we swore at each other and got up, Balthazar skipped out of reach and began more of his shouting. I grabbed at Priscus. There was still no light worth mentioning. But the great darkness of Athens was assuredly before us. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I hissed. But I now felt a hand brush against my face. I dropped Priscus and struck out hard with my right fist into nothingness.

‘O Goddess, Goddess,’ Balthazar cried in the great voice he used for impressing the gullible, ‘now is the time to serve thy servant.’ There was a response from a few yards away in a drowsy Slavic, then an angry grunting from somewhere else. Balthazar was far behind me again, and was setting up an old invocation that might have woken the dead.

O come with rosy fingers, Dawn,

And gods and mortals show the morn.

Yes, hither, hither come: reveal

What evils might the night conceal . . .

It would have been more dramatic if there had been some gradual fading in of light. But it was enough that just about everyone in hearing distance was coming out of his slumbers and beginning to feel about. I took hold of Priscus by his cloak and began pulling him forward. I stepped straight on to a hand. I silenced the shout of pain with a quick downward stab and carried on forward. I saw the big dark shape before it could see me, and rammed my sword into its middle with all my strength. The man went down without any sound. But there was now blood spurting all over me, and my hand slipped as I tried to pull my sword back out. As I tightened my grip and pulled hard, someone who’d been lying down put his arms about my legs, and I went straight down. I was up in a moment, but my sword was gone. I struck out with both fists at another lumbering shape and felt a giving way of jawbone beneath a great beard.

All this time, Balthazar hadn’t let up his maniac invocation of a dawn that still hadn’t come. I think I got someone on the nose with my elbow. Not caring how and where I landed, I jumped away from the arms that were trying again to lock about my legs. I did land on my feet. I bounded forward, but now tripped over a stone and fell into a pair of massive arms that tightened about my chest as if I’d been a child. I tried wildly for a head but I only found myself buried in the lower half of a large and stinking beard. Someone else had now thrown himself on to my back, and I was held fast.

There was a long and blundering shuffle, as the man beneath me got himself free and joined in holding me face down on the rough ground. I heard a shout of triumph and then the hard crack of one stone on another just above my head. I held my breath and went very still.

‘Right, let’s be looking at this fucker,’ someone growled in Slavic. There was a tired laugh beside him.

I waited till there was no one on top of me, then jumped up with all my strength, ready to make a dash for it. But, if I’d been down for what had seemed the tiniest instant, there now
was
enough light for anyone to see round. I’d broken out of the main huddle. I was picking up speed – when a single massive hand took hold of me by the scruff of the neck and held me without any hope of escape. I was thrown down with force. Even now, I might have got up again. But my cloak was caught in more of those brambles, and I struggled just a moment too long. Before I could get clear, someone new had got me from behind, and was holding a knife hard against my throat.

‘One move, you thieving shit, and you’re dead,’ he croaked with ill-natured menace.

‘Please, please, good sir,’ I called feebly in Slavic tinged with a Germanic accent, ‘give food for the starving. You can do what you like with me after.’ I stroked his leg with my one free hand. But the light was coming up fast. The time was already gone when I could try playing along with the most obvious suspicions. There was a great shout of rage from another man, and someone ripped the cloak straight off me. I rolled back in the brambles, showing a tunic of torn but very blue silk.

‘We’ve got ourselves a fucking Greek!’ came a voice from my right. There was a shouted laughter of three or four big men. I saw a hand reach over and press a knife back to my throat.

‘Correction, my dear fellows,’ I heard Priscus laugh from somewhere behind me. ‘You have caught yourselves the top man of King Heraclius himself!’

All hands were suddenly taken off my body, and I was able to sit up and look about me. The three or four men I’d guessed were in fact over a dozen. They sat, grinning uncertainly at me, knives still at the ready. One man holding a spear at him, Priscus was sitting on a large stone. He rubbed his head and smiled. He looked easily round and raised both hands.

‘And I, who have brought him to you, am Priscus – the only general who has ever driven off your Great Chief in open battle.’ He smiled again and nodded encouragement at the man who’d now stood back from him. He got up unsteadily and walked over to where I was still sitting in the brambles. ‘One of us,’ he said to me in Greek, ‘had to shit on the other. The only reason I waited so long was that I was sure it wouldn’t be you.’

He pointed at the man nearest to me and frowned. ‘Get him bound and gagged,’ he said. ‘You really don’t want to take any further chances with the little squirt.’

Though Athens lies on a wide plain, this itself is watered from three lowish sets of mountains. There is Aegaleos to the west, and Brilessus to the east. To the north is the Parnes chain. Decelea guards – rather, it
had
guarded – the easiest southern passes through this chain. I’d thought, the previous day, that the Great Chief had finally arrived outside Athens. No one bothered telling me anything at all as, bound and gagged, I was thrown across a small pony and taken north. But it was fair to assume that it would be somewhere close by the smoking ruins of what had been a town of about a thousand people that I’d be ushered into the presence of Kutbayan himself.

There is, I hope you’ll agree, no such thing as luck. It is a most vulgar concept – much called on to explain facts that would make perfect sense if the long chains of cause and effect by which everything happens could only be made to reveal themselves. At the same time, I’ve never met anyone who failed to act but on the assumption that there is good luck and bad luck. As the sun rose higher in the sky, and I tried to slither into a less uncomfortable position on my pony, I had plenty of time to reflect on the really awful run of luck that had brought me here. I really should have taken one look into that blackness of the open tunnel and set myself to thinking how it could be sealed up again for good. Instead, I’d gone into it with Priscus of all people. Everything since that one choice had followed with an unbreakable run of the most rotten luck.

Once or twice, I heard Priscus raise his voice in a manly laugh as he discussed another of his interminable battles. It had been a surprise to learn that he’d ever won a single battle, let alone against the Avars. No one had spoken of this in Constantinople. Certainly, Priscus himself had never mentioned it. The impression I’d always had was of a Commander of the East promoted because there was no one else to put in the job, and because he did at least know how to retreat while his enemies wore themselves out.

We stopped for a while at noon. It was then that someone ungagged me and squirted water into my mouth. I made myself swallow every drop of the dark and brackish stuff, and tried to ignore the omnipresent smell of death. ‘I want to speak with your head man,’ I managed to croak. I didn’t really believe I could talk my way out of the relative positions Priscus had managed to establish between us. But it was worth trying. It failed. The only answer I got was a light punch in my side and a hurried replacement of the gag. I could suppose it was a mercy that this was a proper slave gag – that is, it was one of those things that resemble a short strap-on dildo, and only keep you from speaking without stopping your breath.

Once we were moving again, and I’d got my tongue into the least awful position against the roll of much-employed leather, I managed to pull my head up long enough for a look round. I’d supposed the dead were human. In fact, it was herd after herd of cattle that had been killed and stripped and left to rot in the sun. I could see shrivelled women and children darting from one heap of bones to another, stuffing their mouths with whatever scraps of stinking offal had been left. I would have looked more. It was a change from looking down at the stones of a very bad road, but hardly pleasant enough to risk choking. I made myself go limp and went back to reflecting on the defects of an enquiring mind.

Before I could be trussed up like a beast to the slaughter, my tunic had been ripped down to my waist. I could feel the opening pains of sunburn on my back as the afternoon grew hotter and more oppressive. I had to fight like mad not to scream, and then start blubbering from the pain and horror of it all, when someone slapped me on the back at our next stop. This time, I drank what was given me and didn’t try looking up.

It was only as I felt the power go out of the sun that the beast carrying me began to slow, and the continuous mumble of laughed conversation from behind me died gradually away. Someone held a knife before my face and giggled. Then he cut the leather straps that had kept me in place, and I slithered off to land on my back in the dust. A grinning red-bearded face looked down at me as I squirmed from the sudden pain and tried once more not to cry out. Still holding his knife, he bent slowly over me. I didn’t suppose that, having been carried all the way here, I was to be done in by someone of such obviously low quality. More likely, he was trying to scare me. I looked steadily up at him as he moved his head to left and right, now blocking and now showing the sun. At last, he pulled a face and put his knife away. He stood up and stretched his arms with a loud cracking of sinews. When he bent forward again, it was to loosen my gag. I still couldn’t speak, but there was no longer that leather stump jammed against my teeth.

‘Get him on his feet, and get him washed,’ I heard Priscus call from somewhere out of sight. ‘You can take a comb while you’re at it to that pretty hair of his. It’s thick with dust.’ He laughed and went into Greek. ‘You’ll surely allow,’ he chuckled at me, ‘that you look a proper sight.’

I don’t know how long I’d been sitting, bent forward with my head on the ground. Because I hadn’t slept in over a day, I might have nodded off for a while. If so, I’d only dreamed that I was sitting all alone in the middle of a wide ring of tents. Every so often, really or in my dream, dirty children came over and stared at me. An old man may have come over for a while and lectured me for a long time in the language of the Avars. What he said seemed full of meaning. But, since I had no Avar, and was in no position to try him in Slavic, his meaning was lost on me.

The light was fading when I was pulled back into full awareness by a gentle slap on my still exposed back. I sat up with a suppressed cry and tried to look round. ‘I’m going to cut your hands free,’ someone young said in passable Latin. ‘If you try anything, I’ll hurt you badly. Do you understand?’

I nodded. A moment later, and I was trying to rub feeling back into my swollen hands. My legs were tied so I could walk only with the limited movements of the very old. It was thus that I finally shuffled within the stinking interior of one of the larger tents.

‘Oh, you still do look a sight, my poor dear boy,’ Priscus cried with what anyone who didn’t know him might have taken for genuine concern. ‘Someone give the lad a drink.’

‘I’ll allow that you have indeed brought us the Lord Senator Alaric,’ someone said from the other side of the tent. He spoke the good Greek of Constantinople, but was sitting on the far side of a ring of lamps, and I couldn’t see him. But it was the voice of a eunuch. It may have been a eunuch of my own age. Or it may not. These creatures can sound young far into middle age. As I tried to look through the glare of the lamps, the eunuch sniggered. ‘If you’re trying to see who I am,’ he said with evident glee, ‘I see no point in disappointing you. It isn’t, after all, that there’s anyone you can grass me to.’ He laughed again and got up.