ladder stabilised. I could see the shadow of my head on the damp and pitted sheeting. I was suddenly aware of how cold I was, now I was standing still in the breeze of an autumn night.
‘What can you see?’ Martin croaked from below.
I freed my left hand from the ladder and waved at him to shut up. His response was a spluttering fart and a smell that almost knocked me off the ladder. I looked again across the bright expanse of lead. I could see that Balthazar had put his arms down. I knew from my early days in the Church, where I’d assisted in the production of ‘miracles’ to bring over the Kentish heathen, that he’d need to piss on his hands soon if the skin wasn’t to peel off them. But Nicephorus was getting over his earlier fright. From behind the dome, I could hear the firm cries for enlightenment of a man who’s pretty sure of getting his way.
‘I tell you,’ Balthazar cried with another dramatic wave, ‘that the woman knows nothing. The child knows nothing. The intruders know nothing.’
Unless she was fast asleep, Euphemia must have been deaf not to hear all this wailing. We couldn’t have been that far from her rooms, and the sound really was carrying. But Balthazar and his whole congregation were now raving back and forth at each other in some stupid but long-practised litany about the Goddess and her Force, and the wondrous things she would soon assure to her followers pure in heart. I heard the voice of Nicephorus raised above all the others. Leave aside the sorcery charges I was now determined to throw at him for that girl’s murder, anyone who could have been taken in by this shite for at least two years deserved immediate removal from office and transfer to a monastery for the insane.
I could have remained there until they all set out on their return. I could then have cowered with Martin in the shadows, and followed them about whatever other business they might still have. But the breeze was now become an insistent, frigid wind. My teeth chattered. I could feel my nipples tighten to painful dots, and a shrinking in my crotch to the dimensions and probable appearance of a prepubescent boy. Over on the roof, everyone had joined hands and was dancing in and out like girls at a wedding feast. The only words I could catch in this had no meaning. More important was who these people were. There was Nicephorus, of course, and Balthazar. With them, though, I could see perhaps a dozen men in the same dark clothes as the men I’d seen at the back of the crowd in Piraeus. I really wanted to see more. However, I was now shaking uncontrollably. It was as much as I could do to get silently down the ladder and fight to stop myself from curling into a ball.
‘Hold on to me Aelric, hold on,’ Martin cried softly. He put his arms round me and shared some of his blubbery warmth. ‘There is evil all about us,’ he said, pulling away to make the sign of the cross. ‘It ripples from that damnable group in freezing waves. Come quickly, or be drained of the life they must extract for their Hell-bound blasphemies.’
I might have giggled through chattering teeth at his belief that the night breeze was other than a nuisance. But I was badly in need of the heat from his body. I’d noticed how the cold was reaching deep inside me as Balthazar had done his conjuring trick with the powder on his hands. From that, I’d gone in moments to the edge of collapse. Without Martin to keep his body against mine and drag me back along the path, I can’t say how I’d have got back to the comparative warmth of the residency.
We stopped for a moment in the library, where Martin shook out the crumpled-up sheet and got it over me like a cloak. ‘What did you see?’ he asked with a nervous look at the reclosed door. ‘I heard enough. But tell me what you saw.’
‘Not very much,’ I said, fighting off another attack of the shivers. I pulled myself together. ‘Martin,’ I said firmly, ‘I don’t want you to breathe a word of this, not even to Sveta. Do you understand?’
Shivering himself, he looked about. ‘I told you this place had an evil atmosphere,’ he said. ‘Can you really not feel it surrounding you like a fog?’
My answer was a non-committal shrug. Still cold all over, I was coming out of the fit that had almost downed me on the roof. So long as he kept his mouth shut — and I knew he would — he was welcome to his fancies. I looked again at the closed door. It might reopen at any moment, and I was unarmed. I waited for Martin to get both our lamps lit. This time, we were entirely alone. I let him go first down the stairs, noting with tired approval that he managed to step without making any noise. I looked briefly back into the library. Outside the pool of light from the lamps, the moon was back to playing funny tricks with the dust.
Chapter 21
‘For a man who says he’s too sick even to leave his bed,’ I said in Latin, ‘His Excellency in Corinth is a wondrously busy correspondent.’ I eased myself down a few inches into the lukewarm water, and looked again at my face in the mirror I was holding. The spot on my nose was now definitely ripe. The bitch was it had been joined by another. I turned my attention back to Martin. He was sitting in the glow of sunlight that was reflected down on us from the high, unglazed windows of the bathhouse. I’d been right about the Governor. His letters had come over unrolled, and formed a heap of papyrus several inches thick. It was a short dash across the water from Piraeus. But he must have worked like a demon to get all this over to us. Martin coughed politely and reached for what he considered the most important of the letters.
Beyond the first intake of breath, however, I heard nothing of whatever he read. With a force that reminded me of a heretical baptism I’d once attended, the slave pushed down hard on my shoulders and sent me so far under water that I felt the sudden chill as my legs rose into the air. I felt the mirror land on my belly and then slide off until I heard it scrape against the leaden bottom of the bathtub. As I came up again spluttering, he set about my hair as if it were potter’s clay. By the time I was able to go back to any kind of conversation, Martin had put the letter down and was back to chewing on his stale crust. He’d farted while I was under the water, and the smell was almost worth a brief comment.
But, ‘I’ll read his military update myself,’ is all I said. I really hadn’t the patience to sit through another attack of the vapours when he read about the barbarian flood gathering north of Thermopylae. ‘Then you can summarise anything else that isn’t a waste of time.’ I sat up and reached for the cup of ginger cordial that Martin had set for me on the little table that was attached to the bath. Heated and with a dash of some local stimulant, it was an improvement on all the wine I’d so far been served. ‘You know, I’m wondering about the value of a trip over to Corinth. If the Governor really is ill, it could be made to look as if I actually cared for the man. And, though you and I have business in Athens, Sveta and the children might be more comfy in the provincial capital.’
I was expecting some reaction from Martin to this very diplomatic admission that Athens might not be completely safe. But it was now that the slave spoke. Rather, he giggled and let out a sentence of what sounded like Egyptian while poking at my nose. I frowned and gripped the sides of the bath. He repeated himself and gave me another poke. Would it be unreasonable, I wondered, if I stood up and boxed his ears? Or might it show a certain want of dignity?
‘I think he’s asking if you’d like him to suck out the pus,’ Martin explained, seemingly unaware of my admission.
He was right. The slave had spoken in the local dialect. Now I bothered listening, it did have a Greek base, but was so corrupted, and so mixed in Slavic words and grammatical forms, that it might have been a different language. Sad, I thought, that Athens had come to this. I nodded and tried to ignore the blast of stinking breath and the scrape of teeth against my nose.
‘Have you seen our host yet?’ I asked as the slave pulled momentarily back and spat a mouthful of goo into the water. Even if he was rather an unlikely spy, I might as well avoid any mention of names or titles that had meaning in Greek as well as Latin.
Martin nodded. ‘He was up before me,’ he said. ‘He got the big slave to heat your bathwater. He said he’d not be able to join you for breakfast, but would arrange a tour for you of Athens. He had a black eye,’ he added.
I waited for the slave to suck again on my nose. ‘I choose to assume he’s off on some official business,’ I said. ‘For sure, with no one employed to copy letters, or even deliver them, he must be running about Athens like a blue-arsed fly.’ I closed my eyes as the slave attached himself still harder to my nose, and thought about possible departure times for Corinth. I had no great wish to see the Governor. But I did want Sveta and the children safe behind the walls of the provincial capital. Also, I was short of cash. What Martin had handed back to me might have got him and my other people to Rome. But, now I’d be in Athens for some while — and now I’d heard it plain the whole official budget was embezzled — I needed some Jewish or Syrian banker to cash a draft for me. If I wanted
