The Ghosts of Athens

the wick down.’ In the darkness, I straightened my legs and settled myself to wait for the opium to reclaim me.

But Jeremy was now in conversational mood. ‘Master, is it true,’ he asked, a hint of shyness in his voice, ‘that you had to leave Canterbury after you’d killed a man?’

What did those boys talk about in Jarrow when my back was turned? But I didn’t suppose anything could strike them as a tall story where the Old One was concerned. The only thing they might possibly have doubted was the truth. ‘Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy.’ I laughed. ‘I had killed men before I took service with the Church. I killed any number of them afterwards. But I was on my very best behaviour in Canterbury. What did for me here was that I got the wrong girl with child.’

I laughed again in the frosty silence that resulted. Jeremy had asked me a reasonable question. Whether or not he’d like it, he deserved an answer. ‘She was the daughter,’ I took up again, ‘of one of the chief men around King Ethelbert the Saint.’ I stopped again and smiled unpleasantly. Pushing eighty years before, I’d never have thought my remote cousin Ethelbert could one day be seen as anything but the leering tyrant that he was. He’d done my father over with an enthusiasm King Chosroes himself might have respected. He’d then dumped my mother and all her children in Richborough, so he could come over as and when for a spot of rough sex. The first real notice he’d taken of me was when he’d had me trussed up one night and tried to castrate me. What a bastard he was!

‘Doubtless, my young fellow,’ I ended my story, giving a grand wave that I doubted he could see, ‘you may think it all very scandalous. Nevertheless, I do urge you to set aside any unease or embarrassment when others talk of cock or cunt or fucking. Your vows preclude you from knowing of these things. But those who claim to be disgusted by their mention are invariably men without knowledge or honour, or courage or dignity.’ I would have said more, but the gentle buzzing that Jeremy had set up towards the end of my story now deepened into a loud snore. I lay very still in the darkness and willed myself to go back to sleep.

No peace for the wicked, however! One of the reasons the old generally give up on sex is the annoyance, first of getting so uncertainly to the threshold of rapture, and then of only sometimes being able to pass across. So it now was with sleep. It didn’t help that Jeremy would have kept a stone awake with his snoring.

Chapter 4

But, no, I had been sleeping. Without once being other than aware of the snoring boy, I’d been back in the palace at Ctesiphon. The snoring had taken the place of flutes and cymbals to accompany the slow and elaborate gyrations of the dancing girls. With great consideration, Chosroes had told me what wines to avoid. Now, tipsy on something that tasted of wormwood, I’d been sitting with him for about a month — it may have been a year — while his chief general flopped about on the cushions like a landed fish, his face turning black from the poison he’d been fed. A good spy, you see, would have confined himself to harvesting truth from Roxana. The Great Alaric, you can be sure, had planted a few very useful lies in her mind. At last, they’d found their way into the Royal Mind, and I was now switching a complacent gaze between the fluttering, libidinous hands of those naked girls and the swelling tongue of a man who’d spent the past year studying survey reports of the walls of Constantinople.

Yet, whether I was asleep, or dreaming while awake, I certainly was back in Ctesiphon. Even as I reached out to grab lecherously at one of the firm breasts, I sensed a change in the quality of the artificial light; Chosroes and the girls were continuing as if nothing odd had taken place about us. But I looked up and saw that we were all now in the great, vaulted cellar that only the closest and most trusted companions of the Great King were allowed to see — allowed, that is, to see and be let out again. All about us, each on its own couch, lay the remains of the family members and generals and ministers he’d killed throughout his reign. Women, children, babies still suckling when he’d snatched them away, old and young men: all lay as he himself had arranged them to mummify in the dry air, each with a label pinned to the right ear that he’d written out in his own hand to remind him of names and genealogies. The couches were arranged about us in their hundreds. They reached over to every one of the far walls. In a while, Chosroes would snigger and get up, and call on me to help get this latest victim on to a couch. None would ever dare comment on his absence from the Royal Council. None would dare notice when his name was erased from every public document. His own wives and children would never dare so much as to whisper his name to each other in the dark. Once more, Alaric the Magnificent had bought time for beleaguered Constantinople, and for the drivelling fool of an Emperor who sheltered behind its walls.

And now those massed and flaring torches dimmed, and I was certainly awake in Canterbury. How long I’d lain here aware of myself I couldn’t say. Never speak in the same breath of opium and any clear sense of time. Sweating in the darkness, I lay with no company now but Jeremy and the sound of his snoring. Then he stopped. As I yawned and prepared to turn over, he let out a long sicky burp. Then he farted. Then he was back to snoring.

‘This really won’t do!’ I muttered. I clutched the side of my cot and sat up. Keeping the blanket about my shoulders, I forced myself to stand. I reached for my stick. It must have fallen down when Jeremy tried to wake me. I gave up on patting about for it, and walked unsteadily over to the window. The main shutters were bolted, and I’d have needed a chair to get at the top one — a chair and a lamp, and someone to hold me steady as I reached up to undo it. But, feeling round in the dark, I found a smaller opening about a foot square. I pulled it open. Gripping the back of a chair, I leaned forward and let the chilly night air dry the sweat from my face.

If the rain had finally let up, there was still a mass of clouds overhead, and I really might have been looking out with my eyes shut. But, if chilly, the breeze was a welcome change from the various smells that Jeremy had issued.

I thought of the brief and highly censored story I’d given to the boy. It was nearly eighty years since I’d first arrived in Canterbury. In this time, it had grown from a cluster of mission buildings into what even I, who’d lived so much of that time in the Empire, had to admit was a city of respectable size. Five hundred dwellings, the Abbot had told me over supper. He’d gone so far as to assure me the place compared well with his native Milan. I didn’t suppose he was exaggerating. Plague and the Lombards had long since finished the Empire’s work of devastation in Italy.

But there was no doubt how Canterbury had grown. Eighty years was a long time to be away, and Canterbury had changed and changed again in its growth. If I looked straight ahead into the darkness, the big church was perhaps a little on my right. If so, I couldn’t be that far from where the mission library had been. In a side room of this, Maximin had unpacked the boxes he’d brought with him from Ravenna and begun his dispute with the Bishop’s secretary over possession.

I thought again of Maximin. For most of the previous eighty years, thinking of that name had mostly called up images of the child I’d named after him, not of the man himself. Tonight in Canterbury brought his face clearly to mind. I thought of how he’d saved me from Ethelbert, and how I’d finally avenged his death. I thought of his taste for opium — one of the few creditable things he had taught me. I thought of his wondrous ability to combine superstition and fraud, without once considering that, if his own were faked, all other miracles might somehow be in doubt. I thought of how dearly I’d loved him, and how I’d felt when I looked at his bloody corpse while the sun moved quickly down the Column of Phocas in Rome. I thought of Maximin, and I thought of them all: Ethelred, and that pretty girl and her child who may or may not have been born and who may or may not have lived, and my mother and what little I recalled of my father. And I thought of Martin and the Dispensator, and Priscus and Phocas and Heraclius, and all the others who’d gone into the darkness so long before I ever would. As I leaned there, looking out into the darkness, they and many, many others crowded back into memory as if they’d been petitioners in Constantinople, all racing to be first to touch the wide purple hem of my robe.

I stiffened and gripped harder on the chair. Was that a noise outside? I turned my good ear into the opening and listened hard. I thought at first I’d been mistaken. Behind me, the loud but even rhythm of Jeremy’s snoring broke down into another long burp. As he fell comparatively silent, I listened again. Yes, there were noises outside — it was the scrape of leather sandals on gravel and the faint sound of voices.

‘There was no need for you to come over,’ I heard the Abbot whisper just a few yards away in the darkness. ‘He ate little and drank too much. I put him and his boy to bed in the good room, just as you directed.’ He spoke the clipped, irregular Latin that Italians use when they aren’t putting on any airs and graces to foreigners.

The reply was a soft but disapproving sniff. ‘Even so, I did give orders to be notified of his safe arrival and probable health.’ It was Sophronius. You’d never mistake that rich tone, though subdued, or the exaggeratedly