The Ghosts of Athens

I swallowed and tightened my grip on the lamp as I stepped though the door and this time walked all the way down to where the shaft veered left.

‘It’s doors within doors within more bastard doors in this place,’ Priscus sighed wearily. If it hadn’t been for the big lamp I carried, we might never have spotted it. My dream had been accurate so far as this was an underground chamber. It was certainly big enough for hiding everyone should the need arise. But it had seemed at first just to be a storage cellar. Of course, it had no boxes of treasure. The little door at the far end had been hidden by a heap of rotten furniture. Its iron bolts had long since rusted where they’d been drawn back, and the door hung slightly ajar.

‘We’d better see where it leads,’ I said firmly. ‘We’d better see as well if anyone is still in there.’

Priscus put a hand on his sword and nodded.

I went back to the crumbled steps and looked up at the lights. ‘There’s another tunnel down here,’ I shouted up. ‘Remember my orders if we’re gone a while — no one follows till morning.’ I heard Martin’s stammered objection. ‘Those are my orders,’ I snapped. I looked about the room again and smiled. It was much smaller than in my dream, and a different shape entirely. I thought for a moment of giving up for the night. Come the morning, and we could return with a few armed slaves for company. Then again, could I really bring myself to wait? This was an exciting find, and my blood was up. We’d survived a daring assault on the residency. You don’t just turn in placidly for the night when something like this was found. Who could tell where this might lead? I ignored the whole babble of objections that had followed my last orders, and walked back over to where Priscus was still waiting.

‘It looks very narrow in places,’ he said with an excitement that matched my own. ‘If I suggest that you go first, it really is because I’d not like to get stuck with you behind me.’ He giggled and stepped out of my way.

I’d come to another of those narrow points where I thought I’d never get through. But I squeezed my shoulders together and felt my cloak scrape hard against both sides of the twisting passage through the rocks. What had started out as a reasonable tunnel cut into the rock was now a minimally smoothed-out fissure.

‘It’s rather like being buried alive, don’t you think?’ Priscus asked cheerfully from close behind me.

I grunted and bent down even lower to avoid knocking my head on a projection of rock no one had thought to hack away. We might have gone a hundred yards. Or it might have been a hundred feet. I’d already lost all sense of direction in these underground twists and turns.

‘How do you suppose Euphemia would be useful to us in Constantinople?’ I asked. I’d spoken more for the sake of hearing my own voice than in hope of any meaningful answer. But my voice came so loud and so flat in this enclosed place that I fell silent at once. I made myself go forward another couple of feet. I could now stand fully upright. I only felt the sides of the tunnel if I bothered to raise my elbows.

Priscus stopped behind me and slowly breathed in to savour the oppressively damp air. If I was fighting not to turn and push my way back to the residency, he was showing increasing signs of enjoyment. It was some while since he’d even coughed. ‘I meant what I said, dear boy,’ he said happily. ‘It’s obvious you get on extremely well. I’ve always thought the little sexpot was wasted here in Athens, but never liked her enough to think of unloosing her in the night lighting of Constantinople. Are you really thinking you can bear to fuck her into a quivering heap and then dump her like Ariadne on Naxos? You really are her one chance of getting out of the residency to anywhere at all. That’s surely worth something to her.’ He began one of his sniggering laughs and failed to avoid walking straight into another piece of low rock.

That shut him up and left me alone again with my own thoughts. He had a point. Three nights of passion hadn’t dulled her charms. Unless I was stuck in Athens long enough to grow bored with her, it really was a matter of finding the right excuse to give Heraclius when I finally rolled up with a concubine. For all his other faults, old Phocas wouldn’t have turned a hair if I’d taken her about in public. Heraclius took a sterner view of anything beyond the most private fornication. Regardless of my own affection for the dear thing, though, she might be useful in a city where everyone beautiful was either locked securely away or a common possession of the rich and lustful. I might have felt some degree of shame that I was thinking how most effectively to turn pimp. But, when you’ve spent as long as I had, trying to think of any escape from an impenetrable maze, where every apparent exit had been blocked up or shown itself to be a trap, you may understand that I was getting ready to abandon most sense of decency.

I had a further thought. ‘You did meet her when you were last here?’ I prompted. ‘That was back in the days of Phocas, didn’t you say?’ But now I knocked my head, and all my thoughts were scrambled in a white blaze of pain and a string of obscenities.

‘One might have hoped for a gallery hollowed out in the rock,’ Priscus said when he’d finished laughing at me and shoving me forward. ‘Much more of this, and we may have to regard where we are as more a means of escape than a place of refuge. Would you care to speculate on where it comes out?’

‘Perhaps in one of the overgrown pits at the foot of the Acropolis,’ I hazarded. ‘I do think we’re going into the centre of Athens.’

If Priscus had his own thoughts of distance and direction, he didn’t share them with me. We pushed on, now in silence.

About a year back, an outbreak of influenza in Constantinople had required me to sit in judgement on a case of parricide. The young man I was trying almost certainly hadn’t been a party to his brother’s crime, but was proven by his conduct to be a knowing beneficiary. The abolition of the death penalty for his lesser offence wasn’t to take effect until the Emperor’s birthday, and I thought I was doing the boy a favour when I stretched the point and condemned him to the lead mines. I could now see why he’d broken down and begged for the ancient punishment of scourging to death. I hadn’t been down here long at all, and it was hellish already. Only the knowledge that there must be at least two exits kept me from a panic attack that would have impressed Martin.

I was about to stop again to clench fingernails into the palms of my hands, when I felt a slight but joyous breeze. If it smelled faintly of death, that was nothing beside the movement and cold of the air.

‘Well, come on, my brave young savage,’ Priscus urged, giving me a hard shove. ‘Some of us are getting desperate for a piss.’

I stumbled forward, now seeing how, in spite of its horn shield, the lamp flame was beginning to twist and flicker in the breeze.

But there was no exit. Instead, I pushed myself through what seemed an impassable narrowing of the rock, and fell into a reasonably wide and tall passageway. Its walls were of dressed stone that went all the way up to the vaulted ceiling. I could tell that it hadn’t been a sewer, though what else it might have been — and how old — I certainly couldn’t guess. All I could say was that someone, a few centuries before, had caused a tunnel to be hacked from underneath the residency to get access to wherever it might lead. I looked both ways along the passage. It ended a few yards to our left in a wall of smooth rock. To our right, it seemed to stretch far beyond the outermost pool of lamplight.

‘What can you think of this, Alaric dear?’ Priscus asked in a sibilant whisper.

I looked again and stiffened slightly. I turned and pushed my lamp back into the tunnel from which we’d just come and waited for my eyes to adjust. To my right, perhaps a dozen yards along, there was the faintest glimmering of another lamp.

‘What is it?’ Priscus asked, now very softly.

I saw him rub his eyes and try to see what I had. But either I’d been mistaken about that glow or his own eyes weren’t up to seeing it. No, I hadn’t made a mistake. I put a finger to my lips and quietly drew my sword.

‘We can’t wait here any longer!’ I heard Nicephorus groan as if not for the first time.

I’d pushed our lamp still further into our own tunnel, and we’d crept slowly along in the darkness. The side opening through which the glimmer had come wasn’t a direct entrance, but was another, narrower passage with a doorway into some kind of chamber about six feet along it. We now stood outside, trying to make sense of a conversation that had been going on for a while before we’d caught a single word.

‘The Goddess never fails those pure in heart,’ came the reassuring answer from Balthazar. ‘We have three more nights till the day of utmost radiance dawns. No one shall stand in our way when the time comes of our utmost power.’

I relaxed my grip on my sword and flattened myself against the cold and slightly damp stones of the wall. I’d