The Ghosts of Athens

More than once in meetings of the Council, I’d given him the rough side of my tongue. No one would ever forget how I’d demolished his proposed scheme of currency debasement to make up for the shortfall in taxes. If anyone did, there were still my written objections to his further scheme of selling monopolies in oil and pork. As he described what he had in mind for me outside the walls of Athens, he hopped from foot to foot, and drool ran down his chin from between his rotten teeth. And he might have continued all night if the two men holding me hadn’t run out of patience and dragged me with trailing feet from the tent into the gathering chill of the evening.

Chapter 53

The celebrations might well have been on my account. I don’t suppose any of the drink-sodden barbarians who broke off now and again from their feasting to come over and look at me understood either the concept of an Emperor’s Legate, or of how anyone my age had been appointed. But they did understand that they’d not have to waste their lives in endless assaults on the walls of Athens. That alone would have justified the clatter of drinking horns and the loud and repeated bursts of joy. For all Ludinus had scared the shit out of me, will you credit how the smell of roasted ox had set off hunger pangs in my empty belly? I suppose you might. If so, you can take it further from me that anything you’ve read about the commonality of property among the barbarians is nothing more than worn-out rhetoric against civilisation. Those who had no sword, or no man with a sword, really had been left to hold back death with whatever filth wasn’t actually poisonous. For those who had swords, the deal brought by Ludinus meant better food than ever.

I’d fallen into an exhausted doze in which I didn’t even dream when I felt myself prodded awake. The big campfires were burning low, and there was a sensible diminution in the revelry. Were we coming to the midnight hour? I wondered as I opened my eyes and tried to focus on the dark figure who sat before me on a low stool. There was a dying fire behind him. But I knew, even before I had my eyes properly open, who it was.

‘But why such melancholy in one so young and pretty?’ Priscus cried softly. He chuckled low, and waited for me to focus on him. Then he turned for a look at the guard who’d been set over me. Snoring softly, he lay on the ground, an empty jug cuddled in his arms. Priscus turned back to me and spread his hands out before him.

‘I’ll be making off in a while,’ he continued, now in Latin. ‘Ludinus decided in the end not to accept the pack of lies I offered him. You’d have enjoyed the nasty turn our conversation took once he’d come to that conclusion. Luckily, though he used the guards to arrest me, he gave poor Seraphius the job of watching over me.

‘Oh, poor little Seraphius!’ he said after a long pause. He flexed his hands as if they were still about a throat, and laughed. He paused again, this time going stiff from the returned pain of whatever was consuming his flesh. He began to reach for his bag of drugs, then recalled he’d left it in the residency. He bit his lip as the want of something to shovel up his nose took hold within him. But the spasm didn’t last, and he forced a smile back on his face. ‘I did briefly wonder about taking you with me. But you’re a big lad — you’d slow me down when I really do need a fast getaway.’

He stopped again and smiled sadly. He took out his knife and looked at the leather straps that held me tight. ‘When the dawn comes up again, you’ll be fed and given wine to drink. This will be to recover your strength for the journey back to Athens and to keep you alive through all that is planned for you there. The Avars and the Slavs they rule would get it over and done with in no time at all. But you can trust Ludinus to lay on a good show.

‘Another reason I’m going to leave you here,’ he went on, ‘is because you are a bit of a liability. I will defend Athens as no one ever has in its long history.’ He stopped for a gentle laugh, and counted on his fingers. ‘The place fell to the Persians, and the Spartans, and to King Philip of Macedon, and to Sulla, and any number of times to the barbarians. I’m really not sure it has ever fought off a determined siege. Well, it will stand up to this siege with Uncle Priscus in charge of things. My reports are that your speeches to that council have been quite spell-binding. That, plus the horror of watching your slow death in front of the walls, will have all those priests marching back into their hall and voting without a single dissenting voice for the novel and probably heretical view that the Will of Christ is a single aspect of His undivided Nature. So, between now and Christmas, I’ll roll up on Constantinople and present the Great Augustus with a double triumph. You can be sure I’ll fuck that bastard eunuch over before I’m finished. If he drags out the time left to him washing plates in a military brothel, I’ll not have been the man I think I still am.’

He stopped again and put his knife away. He looked closely into my face. ‘But, Alaric, I haven’t come here just to make you feel bad. You must accept that I always have rather liked you. The other night, you heard me tell Nicephorus about the nature of pain. Believe me, it really does exist in two dimensions. There is the pain direct. Then, there’s the real terror of pain which is the knowledge of what it does to the body. That’s why execution by torture is always preceded by a tour of the instruments of pain and an explanation of their use. It’s to break the will of a victim — so he’s ready to start screaming and puking even as you lay hands on him.

‘You have to believe me when I say that the first kind of pain you can deal with. It’s simply a matter of giving up on the idea of any continuing existence for the body. Sooner or later, one of your vital organs will fail you — or whoever Ludinus is screeching at will take mercy on you and go just a little too far. Until then, what you have to do is go as deeply inside yourself as you can. When your seared and mangled privy parts are held up before your eyes, you try not to think of them as your own dearest possession. When you feel the hooked glove, glowing white from the brazier, drawn again and again over your body, and your fingers are nipped off at every joint, and your tongue is drawn out to unthinkable length before you feel the serrated shears pushed between your toothless jaws — don’t think of that leaking, convulsing parody of the human form you have become as bearing any relation to the gloriously pretty thing I’ve been lusting over since we first met.

‘Above all, dear boy,’ he ended, ‘do remember that we’ll all be watching you from the safety of the walls and praying for your soul. You really won’t be alone out there!’ He stopped and got wearily to his feet, and went over to the dying fire behind him. He came back with a strip of parchment he’d set alight. He let it burn about a quarter of the way down, then blew it out. He giggled gently as he pushed its smoking end under my nose, and I shrank back from him with a gagged wail of despair.

For the first time ever, he’d managed to break me. Without that gag, I’d have been screeching prayers for mercy. As it was, I lost control of all bodily functions. It was only the sudden roaring in my ears that blotted out most of the soft laughter.

But Priscus had no time for the full enjoyment of his triumph. He got up again and reached for a little bag he’d left at his feet. ‘If you were anyone else,’ he said, ‘I’d kill you here — not, mind you, because it would be a mercy, but because you do know all about that secret way into Athens.’ He smiled and leaned down again and looked at me. ‘But I do know exactly who you are. You’re Alaric the Decent.’ He stood back and his voice took on a bitter edge. ‘You’d never betray those you loved — no, not even for the certainty of a clean death.’ He settled his voice and smiled again. ‘I suppose that will console you through the long ordeal that Ludinus is still elaborating in his filthy mind. I know you don’t believe in God or any kind of Final Judgement. Even so, you can keep your mind from giving way entirely with the knowledge that you’ll die as decently as you’ve lived.’ He stopped. This time, he really had finished. Without looking back, he walked slowly out of sight, and left me alone in the growing silence of the night.

I do believe the convention, at this point in my story, is for me to explain how I gave way to despair — how I finally called on God for help, and how, when nothing happened, I wept the tears of the young and bright and beautiful who knows exactly what will be done to him. Perhaps I should also describe how I tried and failed to bite off part of my gag and choke myself on it. But, since you know that I’m sitting here in Canterbury, seventy-odd years after the event, in a good light and with a cup of strong French red beside me, would you really have me slow down what is already a somewhat protracted narrative? I think not. So, let’s hurry over those sleepless and embarrassing hours that I passed between about midnight and shortly before the first light of another dawn, and move straight to the matter of my escape.

I thought at first the gentle sawing on the ropes that held my hands behind me was part of the torment. Ludinus was no match for Priscus when it came to breaking a man. But he’d certainly enjoy strutting about in front of me, promising to reconsider my end if I only sucked off my guards or whatever. But it was a child’s hand that pushed my wrist out of the way as the knife cut deeper into the restraining knots.

The girl I’d fed beside the tomb of Hierocles now knelt before me to cut at the leather band that held in the