The Ghosts of Athens

look on his face. Perhaps he had shat the bed!

But I was wrong. ‘The storm sent Maximin into one of his crying fits,’ he explained. ‘Sveta kept him from waking everyone with his screams, but she sent me to find you. She thought it would be necessary for you to comfort him back to sleep.’ He broke off and looked nervously about the room. ‘Don’t you think this room has an evil atmosphere?’ he muttered.

Letting the crumpled sheet drop under the table, I stood up and arched my back. I looked at the wreckage of the library and shrugged. Martin had a talent for reading emotions into arrangements of stone and glass and wood. If he chose to announce this place was evil or friendly or supremely good, that was his affair. I could see that it was a question now of finding something to put on and then going off with him to see if my child was still sobbing disconsolately in Sveta’s arms.

I took up my lamp and made for the door leading to the staircase. Suddenly, I stopped. I listened hard. Far below, in the main block of the residency, I could hear voices. They were argumentative but too low for me to catch any words. I was about to step forward again, when I heard the scrape of sandals on the stairs.

Normally, I’d have stood there and waited to see who else was wandering about this place in the middle of the night. I might even have learned something. But I was stark naked. Worse than that, I had another stiffy that I didn’t think would go down in time. All that, plus Martin for company, might be made a reason for comment by whoever was coming up the stairs. I put the lamp on one of the window seats and pinched hard on the wick. I hurried back to where Martin was frozen to the spot. I put out his own lamp and took him by the arm and forced him silently over the less crunchy areas of mosaic to where a couple of bookracks had fallen together. If we took refuge here, we’d be out of sight until the library was clear again.

‘Oh, get down, you fool!’ I whispered as I pushed hard on the top of Martin’s head. I took a final look across the littered floor of the library to where the moon shone back at me, distorted to twice its normal size by the little panes of window glass. I had an irrelevant thought about what use I might somehow make of glass shaped with better order. Then I heard the renewed sound of much closer voices to my right, and forced myself down into the shadow of those bookracks.

As I’d already gathered from the voices, it was Nicephorus and someone else. ‘How should I have guessed it would be found — and by the young barbarian?’ that someone else insisted in a tone of finality as he paused just outside the door to the library. ‘Just be thankful it was done in time.’ I heard him walk in and stop. He breathed in and gave a long and satisfied sigh. ‘But I tell you again, My Lord Count, this room is a place of the greatest potency. When, at the beginning of time, Athens was appointed as the centre of the world, two lines of the Primal force were set running through your palace. They meet in this very room. Was it not here that Plato was visited by the spirits that revealed their fundamental wisdom?’ He breathed in again, and now mumbled a few words of gibberish.

But he took up again. ‘The power invested in this building is enough to contain every evil,’ he said with a thrilling descent. ‘Properly harnessed, it can protect against every evil. And, after this one, I promise, we have just six more nights till the stars are again in their long-awaited place. Then, once more, shall be the time of greatest strength and greatest weakness.’

I really couldn’t help myself. When a man comes out with this sort of thing in a combination of bad Greek and a fancy accent, how can you not poke your head up for a quick look? I did for just a moment, and then dodged back down to where Martin was twitching and shivering beside me. I’d seen a tallish man — far taller than any of the local people I’d seen that day — probably in late middle age. I think the mop of dark hair beneath his hat was a wig. Under his cloak, he wore a robe of dark linen painted all over with stars and moons and astrological symbols. Beside him, silent and looking angry beyond belief, Nicephorus was slowly hopping from one foot to the other.

‘You promised he’d never get here,’ Nicephorus now said accusingly. ‘You said the storms you’d raised would sink his ship. Yet here he is, safe under this very roof.’

I pricked up my ears at this. Martin’s whispered prayer might not reach all the way over to the door, but was getting on my tits. I silenced him with a quick elbow to one of the fleshier parts of his back and listened harder.

‘The Great Goddess serves those who are pure of heart,’ the other man replied in a tone of still greater superiority. ‘But who can divine her ultimate purpose? If she has allowed him to survive the perils of the sea, and return to the site of his previous outrages, it is assuredly for a good purpose.’

Return? I thought. With a stab of disappointment, I realised it was Priscus they were discussing, not me. But never mind this, I told myself. I still might learn something. Even deliberate spying, I knew already, can be a gamble. You often learn nothing at all — what you overhear makes sense only in terms of what you haven’t heard. Sometimes, though, you do get lucky. This might be one of those latter occasions. Already, I gathered that Nicephorus was an accomplice to murder. I’d see what else I could learn.

I heard the two men walk past me. They continued left until they must have reached the ring of lamps. I looked up again. Yes, they were both by the table. Arms outspread in some gesture of reception as he breathed in the air of this allegedly potent room, the other man had his back to me.

Nicephorus was looking down at the open book. ‘I want you to make him go away,’ he said, for once managing to sound like the civil and military ruler of Athens. ‘If you have any real powers at all, Balthazar, you must get rid of him!’

Immediately, as if on cue, came the quavering voice: ‘Is that you up there, Nicephorus?’

I heard Priscus call from the bottom of the stairs. I heard the uncertain scrape of indoor sandals on the beads as he set one foot on the stairs, and then another.

Chapter 19

Here, in the library, there was a moment of panic. ‘You must hide,’ Nicephorus cried in sudden though soft despair. ‘Look, just go over there.’ Luckily, they were a long way over to my left, and the fallen bookracks where Balthazar now took cover didn’t allow him to see the pair of us.

‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ I whispered happily. Things were turning out better than I’d even dared to hope.

Martin gave a strangled sob beside me and let himself down fully on to the loose mosaic tiles. As they scraped a little under his belly, I thought he’d fallen dead with fright. But he breathed again finally, and, now in Celtic, started another whispered round of prayer.

And it really was wonderful! I’d been rained out of my bed in a filthy mood. Now, if I’d believed anything at all, I’d have been muttering prayers of my own — but, in my case, prayers of thanks.

Priscus came into the library. I heard nothing for a moment but the gasping of a man who’s had trouble with a dozen steps. But he pulled himself together soon enough. ‘Ah, dear Nicephorus!’ he called, now in a tone of nasty enjoyment. ‘I thought I’d find you up here. Even if you aren’t much of a reading man, this always was your favourite place for skulking away by night.’

I didn’t dare look up this time — Priscus had eyes in the back of his head, and at the sides. But he’d paused again, and I could easily imagine how he was looking about. I was right.

‘This building is still more of a dump than the last time I was stuck in it!’ he spat. I heard a scrape, followed by a spattering of mosaic tiles, as he kicked viciously at the floor. ‘That hovel of a room you’ve given me is cold enough for making ice.’ He kicked again at the floor. Then he laughed. I heard him walk quickly past where we were hiding as he made for the table. There was no glow of lamplight on the glass bricks overhead. Trust Priscus to be wandering about in total darkness. He stopped, and I think he now kicked at an unravelled book on the ground. ‘But I can see that, even if you’ve turned from peculation to wholesale embezzlement, you still haven’t been found out by that duffer in Corinth.’ He laughed again, and I heard the faint crunch of cushions as he reached the good chair and sat down in it.

‘I never thought you’d dare return,’ Nicephorus said with a recovery of nerve. ‘What do you want now?’

‘Oh, don’t flatter yourself I’m here by any exercise of free choice,’ came the reply. ‘I just happened to be with bastard Alaric when he got sent here to chair that fucking Church council. Believe me when I say that Athens was the last place I fancied dropping by on my way back to Constantinople.’

‘So who is that blond boy we’re all supposed to grovel to?’ Nicephorus asked. ‘The letters I had gave me to expect someone much older.’