The Ghosts of Athens (58 page)

He trailed off as the Bishop of Iconium pushed his way between us and screamed something about getting ourselves over to the Acropolis. I reached forward and slapped his face twice. He stopped screaming, and it gave me time to get my own thoughts properly in order. I took the Dispensator by the sleeve and began to shove people out of the way as we made for the door.

‘It may already be too late,’ he shouted. ‘But we can still do our best.’ I waited by the door while he pushed his way back into the wild panic to get the little barbarian’s sword.

As I waited, I saw Martin and Theodore at the far end of the room. The Bishop of Athens was beside them. If I’d known more about the barbarian thrust into Athens, I’d have sent them back to the residency. As it was, I’d have to trust in the judgement of His Grace of Athens.

Priscus opened his eyes and focused dreamily on my face. The doctor had now taken a candle to both his arms, and the room was filled with the smell of scorched flesh as well as vomit and other bodily excretions. I watched as, from both wrists right up to the elbow, the doctor set about scraping away the blistered skin and painting on still more opium juice to quell the pain in that drug-hardened body. It needed a double coat of the dark and oily liquid before Priscus came out of his latest spasm and was able to look up at me. I stared back into the now tiny black dots within his eyes.

‘So, you repelled the attack?’ he was finally able to gasp.

‘Yes,’ I said. I fell silent again.

And we had got through it. Somehow, with me to lead men into the actual fighting, and the Dispensator to direct movement of our catapult from one part of the fray to another, we’d held the city. Without him there to manage it, the plan that Priscus had laid a few days earlier had almost gone wrong. As thousands of men were thrown against the wall, the weakest gate had been opened, and, as expected, the main attack was then diverted. It was now, though, that Priscus had gone down – not wounded by the enemy, mind you, but floored by a fit of internal spasms that not even his iron will had been able to bring under control. It had been almost too late to tighten the noose – thousands more than expected had swarmed through the opened gate, and their assault had reached even to where we debated on the Areopagus. But almost too late wasn’t the same as too late. The Dispensator and I had been just in time to close the gate and seal off the multitude in the streets, and then stamp on the trapped men as if they’d been ants. We’d done it, and the main attack had collapsed into a chaotic retreat from the walls that our own archers were able to make still more utterly humiliating to the enemy.

Priscus was still looking up at me. I suppose he expected a better explanation of what we’d managed than ‘Yes.’ At the least, he was probably expecting me to tell him whether any of the blood that was still splashed all over me was my own. But I said nothing. He drew his tongue over parched lips and tried for a laugh. ‘Don’t try telling me otherwise, dearest Alaric,’ he now said in a distant, vastly weary Latin. ‘But I know that you’ve got her hidden away in this building. And don’t tell me that you still deny the evidence of your senses.’ He looked past me at the lamp that hung over his bed and swallowed a few times.

I looked at the doctor, who shook his head and moved the water jug out of sight.

Priscus managed a weak smile. ‘Oh, but you do deny it, don’t you?’ he went on. ‘If you want to believe that she’s just barking mad from having to share this place with Nicephorus, you really are a fool. Even I gave up on seducing her once I realised what she really was.’ He now did manage a wheezing laugh and fell silent.

‘And I suppose everyone else believes this?’ I asked.

He shut his eyes and his breathing became slow but regular. I thought he’d drifted into unconsciousness. But he opened his eyes again and, though without success, tried to focus.

‘You know she came here just a few years ago with Theodore,’ I said. ‘She’s no more a witch than I am. You’re the fool if you believe other than that.’

With a great effort of will, he raised a hand and waved his forefinger slowly from side to side. ‘My dear boy,’ he whispered, ‘that tunnel we found is only the beginning of what lies under Athens. The whole city throbs with evil, and you must be the only man in the Empire who can’t feel it. Did your clerical friend tell you how many human remains he found stuffed into that tomb?’ I tried not to step back. He noticed and laughed softly. ‘I don’t suppose he did. After all, since you don’t believe anything, there’s no point even telling you about it. But this isn’t what’s important. Wait till she reappears, and then keep hold of her. You really will find her useful in Constantinople. Just make sure to keep her out of the sun till she’s done her work.’

He shifted again on his bed and tried to keep his focus on me. ‘But tell me,’ he croaked, now uneasy through the rising waves of oblivion, ‘what do
you
think happens after death? Do you believe in a Final Judgement? Or do you really believe that death is the end of all things?’

I thought hard. I’d decided at once what he didn’t want to hear. The real question was how bastardly I felt about his own performance in the barbarian camp. The answer was
very
. I settled my face into a look of vague piety. ‘We are assured, both by Scripture and by the teachings of Holy Mother Church,’ I said, ‘that death is but the passage to a new and eternal life. Perhaps not now, but eventually, your eyes will close one last time on the world that you have done so much to make into a nightmare. You may then sleep a few days, or a hundred years, or a hundred thousand years. It will all be nothing to you. Finally, though, when the Seven Angels have sounded their seven trumpets, and the Tribulation is passed, Christ will come back in glory, and every tomb will give up its dead. Then, as naked as the day you were born, you will stand before the Throne of God, and you will be judged for every one of your sins. I know you have no doubt that you will be judged truly, and that your resurrected body will be handed over for everlasting punishments beside which all that you have ever done to others will be as the brush of one of the flies that now crawl on your flesh.’

Yes, it
was
a bastard thing to do, and I’ll make no excuse. I didn’t even feel the joy he would have felt as I looked down into that white and terrified face. But I guessed that I’d got him at just the right moment. In a while, he’d drift away into dreams that would be of the only hellfire he’d ever know. Between then and his slow return to waking, I had little doubt that he’d pass through every semblance of infinity. Yes, I knew the effects of opium – and I knew why, of all the drugs in his wooden box, opium wasn’t among them.

I stood up and nodded to the doctor, who bowed respectfully. ‘Will he recover?’ I asked, now in Greek.

He pulled a face and shrugged. The Lord Commander, he told me with the endless equivocating of his profession, might be on his feet again within a couple of days, and, with increasingly frequent relapses, last another few years. He might, on the other hand, not see out the night. It all depended on the hidden progress of his consumption. He waved vaguely at the icon of Saint Luke that had been placed above the bed.

I looked about the untidy room. I could have sent the doctor out and begun a search for any secret documents. But I really doubted if there was anything at all to find that I didn’t already know. I was still looking at the door of a small cupboard when I remembered there was real work to be done. I tried to brush away a lock of my hair that was covering one of my eyes. The blood that had soaked into it was now set like something a hairdresser would have envied.

‘Tell me if there’s any change,’ I said to the doctor. He bowed low as I walked out of the room. There was still work to be done – and it could start with a bath.

The long day of battle was fading into the west when I caught up with the Dispensator. He was overseeing some hesitant repairs to our one piece of long-range artillery. This was the machine that fired the six-foot bolts. It had broken down long before the attack was over, and didn’t strike me as likely to see action again. We climbed up the ladder and stood together on the wooden rampart, and looked down from the walls over the carpet of still uncleared death that stretched before us.

‘Aren’t those the bodies of rioters killed inside the walls?’ I asked, staring harder into the lengthening shadows. ‘Why are they all naked?’

The Dispensator nodded absent-mindedly. ‘I read of this in one of the ancient histories,’ he finally said. ‘The barbarians thought we were throwing plague victims at them, and this is what eventually broke their attack.’ He stopped and crossed himself, and began a whispered prayer for his endangered soul.

But he stood back from the wall and looked at me. ‘I did watch you leading your men into the charge,’ he said. ‘I hope you will not be offended if I say that a professional would have divided his forces, and might have taken fewer losses. Even so, it was most welcoming to the men to see you laughing and shouting at their head. You did well.’

I must say that I had no recollection of any laughing or shouting. I could remember biting my lip as I ran forward, and raising a very heavy and unfamiliar sword. I could remember a vague satisfaction as I got someone in the neck and went forward into a shower of blood. Beyond that, it was all broken fragments, and these mostly included the moments of relative calm in the slaughter. But, if the Dispensator wanted to think me a hero, I’d not complain.

‘If you can spare a few moments tomorrow morning,’ I said, recalling why I was here, ‘I’ve decided to take the sense of the council. It might come to a vote, but I’m pretty sure I’ll carry the majority of the Greeks.’

The Dispensator looked up at the brighter stars that were coming out, one at a time, in the furthest east. ‘And I suppose you look to me, young man, to save you from the trouble of a vote by directing our own people to shout out as you desire?’ He looked in silence at the sheet of rolled-up parchment that I now held out to him.

Without the barbarian attack, without confirmation of what was happening far off in Constantinople, it had been my intention to strike a ruthless bargain. But we were now where we were. There is a time for haggling and a time for giving way gracefully to the inevitable. I did hope for a certain gracefulness as I handed over the sheet. Such a pity the drugs I’d taken after the battle to keep going had put a visible tremor into my hands.

He looked up from his long and silent inspection of the Latin text. ‘And this is a fully accurate translation of the Greek?’ he asked. He brushed a dirty finger over the text in both languages that Martin had written out in his neatest chancery hand. He stroked the wax seal that I’d myself attached with silken threads.

I nodded and swallowed to try to get some moisture into my mouth. ‘It is an absolutely unambiguous fresh grant,’ I said. ‘You can keep the grant that Phocas made in his last days and I purported to confirm. After all, you never know what force my own grant will have. But, so long as Heraclius hasn’t already sacked me in my absence, His Holiness must, from today, be regarded throughout the Empire as the Universal Bishop.’

‘Then we can take the matter as settled,’ he said, keeping his voice neutral. ‘We make no comment on the orthodoxy of your propositions – and will add this to whatever resolution you put before us. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that the propositions in themselves deserve to be considered by a full and ecumenical council of the Church.’

There was the sudden crack of an arrow that fell short and broke itself on the wall. I stepped behind a wooden screen that had been put up to shelter the defenders.

Without moving from where he was standing, the Dispensator pursed his lips and rolled the parchment shut and replaced it within the ivory ring that Martin had found in one of the abandoned offices in the residency. ‘So, My Lord Alaric, we have a deal,’ he said. ‘I do appreciate the difficulties you may still face with the Emperor. But this has, all considered, been a most smooth and predictable transaction. I will take this with me on the ferry to Corinth next Monday. Once back in Rome, I shall await news of your reception in Constantinople.’

He followed my astonished look over the walls and smiled. ‘I am reliably informed that the Great Chief will make another appearance tomorrow morning. This time, he will call a parley. I will go out and meet him and negotiate his withdrawal. You know that I have negotiated an end to five sieges of Rome by the Lombards.’

Even to Priscus, I might have suggested that a personal meeting with Kutbayan didn’t sound advisable. But this was the Dispensator. I nodded and made a note to myself that everyone would need to be informed of the further adjournment. I’d reconvene the day after next. That would bring us to Saturday – which was about what I’d imagined in the first place. I was hovering between thoughts of my closing speech to the council, and whether I’d wear the green or the yellow, when I heard the thud of another arrow, this time into the other side of the wooden screen. I stepped hurriedly back behind its cover again, and watched as the Dispensator set off on his continued inspection of the city defences.