The Ghosts of Athens (53 page)

‘Oh, it’s you!’ I said with my best effort at contempt as he came over and stood before me. ‘I’d never have guessed you would risk yourself in barbarian hands. But I’ll finally grant that, whatever you are now, you were at least born into the male sex.’ I smiled and repeated with the emphasis of insult, ‘The
male
sex.’ I tottered past Seraphius, eunuch of the third grade, and sat carefully in the chair beside Priscus. As I took the offered cup of beer, I heard another eunuch voice – this one from behind me.

‘The lack of respect you show for your betters has once again been noted,’ the voice said.

I looked up from my beer and sniffed. I’d been expecting all day to meet the Great Chief Kutbayan. Despite his alleged lack of humanity, I might have had some chance with him. As he came round and stood beside Seraphius, I looked into the grinning face of a bald and, if possible, a still more obscenely fat Ludinus. I knew then that I was lost.

‘The most I’d expected when I came out here,’ he said, falling into that slow and ceremonious eunuch drawl that was halfway to singing, ‘was that I might be able to identify your body. I now see that I did very well indeed to assume personal supervision for the will of the Great Augustus.’

He stepped forward and slapped my face. He put a soft and slightly damp hand to my throat and leaned forward to see me properly in the light. I spat into his face and laughed as he stepped suddenly back. He put up a slightly stained sleeve to wipe away the gob, and I saw the glitter in the lamplight of his golden ring of office. It wasn’t two years before that he’d been made Grand Chamberlain. But the ring Heraclius, against all urging, had pushed on to that bloated finger would never be slid off again.

‘See, Ludinus,’ Priscus interrupted, ‘I told you it was young Alaric. And young Alaric it assuredly is. Hasn’t our plot worked out just swimmingly?’

Ludinus turned his attention to Priscus, and his face took on the closed look of a eunuch who knows that he’s winning. ‘But, Priscus, my dear,’ he cried with soft menace, ‘I still haven’t admitted that this is, in any sense,
our
plot!’

‘Oh really, Ludinus,’ came the answer in a voice just a little too easy to sound natural. Priscus stopped himself and looked thoughtfully in my direction. ‘Do ask yourself what else could have got me out of Athens on the off-chance that I’d stay alive long enough to see you. I could have held even those walls for a month of Sundays, and your friends would have run out of food and patience long after they’d turned on you. Just believe that I’m acting under directions sent out from Constantinople by Heraclius himself. You know as well as I do how often he’ll change his mind before the end of anything he orders. He may have turned against me and back again a dozen times since putting his seal on that letter. But there’s no reasonable doubt that I have his letter safe in my baggage in the residency. You’d be a fool to do other than believe me.’ He sat back and snapped his fingers at one of the armed barbarians behind us. He switched briefly into Slavic to thank the man who pressed a cup of beer into his hand.

Ludinus smiled greasily, while his eyes darted back and forth between us. I could have tried playing Priscus at his own game. But, even as I swallowed to get my voice working, Priscus reached quickly forward and pushed my gag back in. I tried to spit it out, but someone now tied it from behind.

‘Sorry, dear boy,’ he said in a pitying tone. ‘You’ve had your only drinkie for tonight.’

He stood up and yawned. ‘So the deal is that I take off pretty soon for Athens. Without Alaric to keep his beady eyes on me, I’ll open the gate tomorrow night, and the looting and burning will get under way. No one will stop me when I take off on horseback. If you try anything underhand, the coded letter I’ve sent via the Governor of Corinth will be put into the hands of Sergius in Constantinople. What it says about you is quite damning. I do suggest you’ll not wish ever to know its exact contents. But you know the Patriarch won’t stand by when he learns that we’ve let all those bishops – not to mention his good friend Alaric – be put to the sword. You can bet the Great Augustus will treat my written word as the truth, and it won’t look good for you.’ He put his head back and roared with laughter. ‘Oh, it won’t look good for you at all – if it’s ever read out in Council, you’d do better to stay here and look after the Great Chief’s
harem
!’

Ludinus scowled and looked baffled. He bit his lip as he wondered, perhaps for the hundredth time, if Priscus really was telling the truth. When your entire life has been one gigantic plot, you lose sight of all common sense. He might have pulled my gag out again and questioned me alone. Then again, he’d only have assumed that I was lying too. When he did finally turn back to me, it was to slap my face again and then to walk round behind me and pour beer on to my peeled back. He recovered himself by sniggering over my muffled cry of pain.

‘Get the blond animal out of here,’ he trilled when he was back behind the lamps. ‘I have old business with him that I’ll finish when the time is right.’ He waited for Seraphius to put his words into Slavic. As two set of arms reached forward to get me to my feet, he came forward again and gloated into my face. I can’t say I blamed him. More than once in meetings of the Council, I’d given him the rough side of my tongue. No one would ever forget how I’d demolished his proposed scheme of currency debasement to make up for the shortfall in taxes. If anyone did, there were still my written objections to his further scheme of selling monopolies in oil and pork. As he described what he had in mind for me outside the walls of Athens, he hopped from foot to foot, and drool ran down his chin from between his rotten teeth. And he might have continued all night if the two men holding me hadn’t run out of patience and dragged me with trailing feet from the tent into the gathering chill of the evening.

The celebrations might well have been on my account. I don’t suppose any of the drink-sodden barbarians who broke off now and again from their feasting to come over and look at me understood either the concept of an Emperor’s Legate, or of how anyone my age had been appointed. But they did understand that they’d not have to waste their lives in endless assaults on the walls of Athens. That alone would have justified the clatter of drinking horns and the loud and repeated bursts of joy. For all Ludinus had scared the shit out of me, will you credit how the smell of roasted ox had set off hunger pangs in my empty belly? I suppose you might. If so, you can take it further from me that anything you’ve read about the commonality of property among the barbarians is nothing more than worn-out rhetoric against civilisation. Those who had no sword, or no man with a sword, really had been left to hold back death with whatever filth wasn’t actually poisonous. For those who had swords, the deal brought by Ludinus meant better food than ever.

I’d fallen into an exhausted doze in which I didn’t even dream when I felt myself prodded awake. The big campfires were burning low, and there was a sensible diminution in the revelry. Were we coming to the midnight hour? I wondered as I opened my eyes and tried to focus on the dark figure who sat before me on a low stool. There was a dying fire behind him. But I knew, even before I had my eyes properly open, who it was.

‘But why such melancholy in one so young and pretty?’ Priscus cried softly. He chuckled low, and waited for me to focus on him. Then he turned for a look at the guard who’d been set over me. Snoring softly, he lay on the ground, an empty jug cuddled in his arms. Priscus turned back to me and spread his hands out before him.

‘I’ll be making off in a while,’ he continued, now in Latin. ‘Ludinus decided in the end not to accept the pack of lies I offered him. You’d have enjoyed the nasty turn our conversation took once he’d come to that conclusion. Luckily, though he used the guards to arrest me, he gave poor Seraphius the job of watching over me.

‘Oh, poor little Seraphius!’ he said after a long pause. He flexed his hands as if they were still about a throat, and laughed. He paused again, this time going stiff from the returned pain of whatever was consuming his flesh. He began to reach for his bag of drugs, then recalled he’d left it in the residency. He bit his lip as the want of something to shovel up his nose took hold within him. But the spasm didn’t last, and he forced a smile back on his face. ‘I did briefly wonder about taking you with me. But you’re a big lad – you’d slow me down when I really do need a fast getaway.’

He stopped again and smiled sadly. He took out his knife and looked at the leather straps that held me tight. ‘When the dawn comes up again, you’ll be fed and given wine to drink. This will be to recover your strength for the journey back to Athens and to keep you alive through all that is planned for you there. The Avars and the Slavs they rule would get it over and done with in no time at all. But you can trust Ludinus to lay on a good show.

‘Another reason I’m going to leave you here,’ he went on, ‘is because you are a bit of a liability. I will defend Athens as no one ever has in its long history.’ He stopped for a gentle laugh, and counted on his fingers. ‘The place fell to the Persians, and the Spartans, and to King Philip of Macedon, and to Sulla, and any number of times to the barbarians. I’m really not sure it has
ever
fought off a determined siege. Well, it will stand up to this siege with Uncle Priscus in charge of things. My reports are that your speeches to that council have been quite spell-binding. That, plus the horror of watching your slow death in front of the walls, will have all those priests marching back into their hall and voting without a single dissenting voice for the novel and probably heretical view that the Will of Christ is a single aspect of His undivided Nature. So, between now and Christmas, I’ll roll up on Constantinople and present the Great Augustus with a double triumph. You can be sure I’ll fuck that bastard eunuch over before I’m finished. If he drags out the time left to him washing plates in a military brothel, I’ll not have been the man I think I still am.’

He stopped again and put his knife away. He looked closely into my face. ‘But, Alaric, I haven’t come here just to make you feel bad. You must accept that I always have rather liked you. The other night, you heard me tell Nicephorus about the nature of pain. Believe me, it really does exist in two dimensions. There is the pain direct. Then, there’s the real terror of pain which is the knowledge of what it does to the body. That’s why execution by torture is always preceded by a tour of the instruments of pain and an explanation of their use. It’s to break the will of a victim – so he’s ready to start screaming and puking even as you lay hands on him.

‘You have to believe me when I say that the first kind of pain you
can
deal with. It’s simply a matter of giving up on the idea of any continuing existence for the body. Sooner or later, one of your vital organs will fail you – or whoever Ludinus is screeching at will take mercy on you and go just a little too far. Until then, what you have to do is go as deeply inside yourself as you can. When your seared and mangled privy parts are held up before your eyes, you try not to think of them as your own dearest possession. When you feel the hooked glove, glowing white from the brazier, drawn again and again over your body, and your fingers are nipped off at every joint, and your tongue is drawn out to unthinkable length before you feel the serrated shears pushed between your toothless jaws – don’t think of that leaking, convulsing parody of the human form you have become as bearing any relation to the gloriously pretty thing I’ve been lusting over since we first met.

‘Above all, dear boy,’ he ended, ‘do remember that we’ll all be watching you from the safety of the walls and praying for your soul. You really won’t be alone out there!’ He stopped and got wearily to his feet, and went over to the dying fire behind him. He came back with a strip of parchment he’d set alight. He let it burn about a quarter of the way down, then blew it out. He giggled gently as he pushed its smoking end under my nose, and I shrank back from him with a gagged wail of despair.

For the first time ever, he’d managed to break me. Without that gag, I’d have been screeching prayers for mercy. As it was, I lost control of all bodily functions. It was only the sudden roaring in my ears that blotted out most of the soft laughter.

But Priscus had no time for the full enjoyment of his triumph. He got up again and reached for a little bag he’d left at his feet. ‘If you were anyone else,’ he said, ‘I’d kill you here – not, mind you, because it would be a mercy, but because you do know all about that secret way into Athens.’ He smiled and leaned down again and looked at me. ‘But I do know exactly who you are. You’re Alaric the Decent.’ He stood back and his voice took on a bitter edge. ‘You’d never betray those you loved – no, not even for the certainty of a clean death.’ He settled his voice and smiled again. ‘I suppose that will console you through the long ordeal that Ludinus is still elaborating in his filthy mind. I know you don’t believe in God or any kind of Final Judgement. Even so, you can keep your mind from giving way entirely with the knowledge that you’ll die as decently as you’ve lived.’ He stopped. This time, he really had finished. Without looking back, he walked slowly out of sight, and left me alone in the growing silence of the night.