The Ghosts of Athens

victorious army, of which I was effectively the head, left it a heap of smouldering ruins. But my dream had set me back there for my first visit — when it looked as if the Persians really would be the winners in this great struggle for mastery of the known world. How I’d managed to get there unmolested — let alone worm my way into the Royal Court at Ctesiphon — is too long a story to give as an aside. But I was there, got up as an heretical bishop, and I was having dinner again with His Majesty the Great King.

It was a jolly enough time, if you can find anything good to say about watching gory executions most days, and every single night having to shaft a pretty and inventive, but maniacally demanding, third royal wife. No, it was a jolly time in its own way. The Great King was tired of being nagged by his fire- worshipping priests, and, once he realised I shared his taste for opium, we’d struck up an odd sort of friendship. So, every three evenings, we’d sit in his bedroom, feasting on wild figs and cabbage he’d gathered with his own hands, and then sniffing lumps of resin wrapped in gold foil and dropped into bowls of glowing charcoal.

I’d finished a recitation of some of the lighter anecdotes in Herodotus about the King’s forebears — the disappearance of their own literature always left the Persians dependent on the Greeks for their history — and was waiting for a gong to sound in one of the outer rooms. This would be notice that some eunuchs were coming in to entertain us with their efforts at wanking each other. No gong tonight, though. Instead, it was one of the royal secretaries with another list of family members accused of treason. While Chosroes listened intently to each name and mumbled punishments it needed a diseased mind to conceive let alone pronounce, I made my excuses and went out through the private door.

The Great King had just fathered something that, for the first time in twenty years, had turned out not to have three legs or a cleft palate. So the whole palace was under orders to drink itself blotto. This was my chance for another look through the Secret Archive. There had been a whole delegation of Avars in Ctesiphon. So Roxana the Lustful had whispered in my ear the night before. The generality of what had been discussed was obvious. But it was the details that mattered — and the memorandum of the joint descent on Constantinople would still be drying.

The royal entrance to the archive building was along an unwindowed corridor. There was a lamp burning dimly at the far end, and I made my way along the boarded floor without setting off any of the bells that Chosroes had caused to be placed even here. A little at a time, I got the door catch up so it didn’t make any noise, and let myself in.

Oh bugger! The Pope himself was sitting in there. How he’d got here all the way from Rome — and in his most formal reception outfit — isn’t something you bother asking in a dream. It was enough that he had got himself there, and was now grinning at me from the only chair in the room.

‘You shifty, atheistical bastard!’ he spat in Persian. ‘You’ve a right nerve abusing the King’s hospitality. I’ll see you buried alive for this, an eighteen-inch stake rammed up your arse.’

I hurried across the room and tried to shush him into silence. No hope.

He now switched into Latin and began a shouted recital of my official name and titles. His voice rose and rose, until it echoed from every wall in that large room.

I suppose that, even in dreams, the Universal Bishop — Servant of the Servants of Christ, the first among equals of all the Patriarchs, and so on and so forth — deserves a certain respect. But I hope you’ll not think it scandalous if I snatched up the cushion from under his feet and shoved it hard over his face. I shoved it there and held it there, while his arms flailed helplessly about, and I tried to stop up the little squeals of outrage that came through the stuffed silk. .

All now went dark about me and I drifted, as if for many centuries, through a medium less buoyant than water, though more dense than air. I might have been very high above the earth. Or perhaps I was drifting upside down. When I did look up, I was aware of a solid blackness that might be the land. Now and again, I heard the piteous wail that might have been a child. Perhaps there was a hand dabbing at my face. Or it might have been the flapping wing of a bird, or of something larger. This was, I observed with what little rational thought I could manage, a disappointment. If its usual effect at night is a luxurious and more than sexual chorus of pleasure from every atom of the soul, opium can sometimes let you down. So it had tonight. The half pill I’d swallowed before nodding off was still at full blast, and I might now be in for a wild ride through memories best not revisited.

No, I was awake. Granted, dreams fed by the poppy can bleed into each other. Sometimes, you’ll even dream that you’re awake between other dreams. But, no — this wasn’t a dream of being awake. Deep within me, some faint grip on reality was telling me that I really was lying on the wooden bunk where Jeremy had placed me after dinner, and that hands were pressed hard on my shoulders. Was someone shouting? Hard to tell for the moment. Beyond doubt, though, I could feel that I was being held down.

Time was when I’d have reached under my pillow for a knife — or, failing that, I’d have swung my legs upwards, and, with all the force that training could give to the heavy muscle of a northerner, I’d have got whoever was attacking me from behind. You can’t do that at ninety-seven. But, as I’d shown well enough on London Bridge, old instincts don’t entirely die. My shoulders were being pressed down on to the wooden boards of my cot. But my arms were still free. I clasped both hands together and rammed upwards as hard as I could. .

‘Oh please, Master, think nothing of it,’ Jeremy sobbed as he sponged more water over a cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding. ‘It was entirely my fault for disturbing you. But you seemed so — so very agitated in your sleep. .’

I’d got the lamp turned up in the room we were sharing, and I could see how close I’d come to smashing the boy’s nose into his face.

I hobbled over and sat beside him on his own wooden cot. ‘Drink this,’ I said gently. He looked at the cup and tasted the stale cider I’d grabbed from the supper table before we were brought over here. It was poor stuff, but would take his mind off the pain. I held the cup while he finished its contents.

I put an arm round his shoulder. ‘Listen, Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I do most humbly apologise.’ I could have elaborated on the life I’d led, and how the habit had long since ripened into instinct of using lethal force whenever in doubt. Instead: ‘It was a dream,’ I said. ‘That’s what made me cry out — though I really am surprised if it wasn’t in Latin.’ I fell silent and let my bony arm rest on his bony shoulder.

I got up and went back to my own cot. I arranged the threadbare blanket about me like a kind of shawl and sat on the rough boards. ‘The Abbot here has told me,’ I said with a firm change of subject, ‘that Theodore wants to see me again directly after morning prayers. If tomorrow is anything like today, I don’t think that will detain me very long. I suggest, then, a proper look round Canterbury. There is a lot here that you still haven’t seen. We can even have food carried outside the walls for a lunch in the open. The forest that stretches between here and Richborough doesn’t compare with what we passed through after London. If you can put up with holding me by the arm and keeping speed with a very old man, I’ll take you to the field of Saint Maximin — it’s where, when I was seventeen, everyone says I helped the most Holy Saint turn tree sap into beer.’

Jeremy looked back at me and smiled brightly. The odd turn of my last sentence had passed him by. Odd syntax, though, was the least the story deserved. So very long ago, I had started out in Canterbury as secretary to Maximin. He’d been a fat, jolly little monk fresh out of Ravenna, and I a barbarian with a pretty face who had nothing honest to sell but the Latin I’d picked up in Richborough. We’d hit it off at once, and, for five golden months, I’d gone out with him from the newly established mission in Canterbury to fish for souls. We’d faked resurrections from the dead. We’d made trees speak and stones spurt fire. I’d once even dressed in a bearskin and let Maximin teach me to pray before a whole village of gawping prospective converts. But we’d never done anything as productive as turn tree sap into beer. Still, if I’d only recently heard that story, it would never do to question it. Deny one miracle, after all, and — why — even young Jeremy might start thinking of himself.

No chance of that for the moment, however. ‘I’d really like that, Master,’ he said. He leaned forward and raised his hands in the way that I sometimes did in class to get attention for something important. ‘When a man is tired of Canterbury,’ he intoned, ‘he is surely tired of life.’

He’d said this in Latin. I wished he’d stayed in English. Taedet, you see, is an impersonal verb. His use of it had produced the kind of sentence that, in Jarrow, would have had me tapping my cane on the ground and looking grim. But I only nodded. I leaned back and carefully swung my legs on to the cot. Trying to avoid getting a splinter through my pitiful nightgown, I stretched out and made myself as comfortable as might, in the circumstances, be possible.

I suddenly realised that the lamp was still turned up. ‘Dearest Jeremy,’ I said, looking up at the dark timbers of the ceiling, ‘it is a sinful waste to burn oil when it isn’t required for reading or prayer. So do be a love and push