The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  Alone, I sat down again and nerved myself for what was left of the wine. I stared at a wall painting that may have copied the Venus Rising from the Sea by Apelles. Some patches of blue had fallen off with the underlying plaster, and been replaced with rough grey. Otherwise, this may have been the best surviving painting in the residency. The sun was dipping down in the west, and would soon disappear behind one of the towers of the rear block of the residency. For the moment, it shone through the side window and made my uncovered gold glitter as if it had been alive.

  I stood up. I had no idea how long Martin would be. Might it be worth restarting my tour of the building alone?

  Chapter 27

  I bumped into Nicephorus as I emerged from a long gallery that had busts of all the emperors to the time of Arcadius. He was sweating from the weight of a large wooden box he’d been trying to push all by himself along the corridor. He gave me the shifty look of a man who’s been caught in some questionable act. Then he straightened up and grinned back at me. ‘My Lord is satisfied with the glories of Athens?’ he asked as his eyes darted everywhere but into my face.

  ‘They’d have been a sight better without you or your bloody friends!’ I might have said. But this would never have done. I could instead have mentioned the interpreters. Again, that would have led into areas I didn’t yet choose to visit. So I smiled happily as if I still hadn’t noticed the stinking slum he’d made of the residency and asked if he needed a hand with his box.

  He bent straight down again and hugged the box. He looked up at me from the corners of his eyes. ‘Oh no, My Lord,’ he said with a hint of triumph. ‘I’d not dream of spoiling your fine outgoing clothes.’

  I looked harder at the box. From the sound it had made on the dirty tiles of the floor, it was rather heavy – but was too big to be wholly filled with gold. That would have needed more than one man to push along. I wondered briefly if it might be worth waiting till he’d pushed it round the corner, and then sneaking after him. But I put this thought out of mind.

  ‘It is as you wish,’ I said. ‘Please be aware, though, that I’ve arranged a few dozen slaves of my own for my stay here. When you have a moment, I’d be most grateful if we could sit together and work out their accommodation and duties in the residency.’

  He shuffled from side to side in the little corridor like a cornered crab. Much more of this, and I’d really have no choice but to ask something relevant. But he let go of his box again and stood up. He nodded and bowed. He looked up at the sunlight that streamed obliquely through the ceiling window.

  ‘Very good,’ I said in a final tone. ‘Since nothing has come here directly from Constantinople, I’d be most grateful if you could look again through your own correspondence from His Excellency the Governor of Corinth, to see if there is anything forwarded to me. My commission gives me a free hand with the council. But I did expect at least one supplemental letter from the Emperor.’

  As soon as he decently could, he ended the conversation and went back to pushing his box along. He vanished round the corner, and I stood listening to a diminishing sound of long scrapes and grunts of exertion. I found myself looking at the cupboard within which was the door set in the wall. I did remember pulling this shut the night before. It was now ajar. I resisted the urge to open it and walk in. That could wait until the following day, or even the day after. I turned and walked back into the confused layout where the grander rooms at the front of this block gave way to the main living quarters. I’d not bother with exploring. The smell of damp and unswept dust was getting on my nerves. Instead, I’d make my way out into the main courtyard garden. There, I could sit until the sun went altogether. Until dusk came and turned the wild flowers a uniform pale, I could sit by myself and try to put my thoughts in order.

  As I passed by the staircase that led up to the library, I heard the muffled, rhythmical sound of someone reading.

  I’d been right about the palace library. It was, in its basic plan, as fine and elegant by day as I’d imagined. It even had a few dozen books that might be worth reading. The other few hundred were forbiddingly theological. Gregory of Nyassa was light reading by comparison. In my view, they were all fit at best for cutting up and pasting on to the spines of cookery books.

  Young Theodore was plainly of a different opinion. He’d been so absorbed in one of Gregory’s sermons on the infinity of God that he hadn’t noticed the crunch of my feet on those beads, and then across the loose mosaic tiles, until I was standing on the other side of his table. ‘Please don’t get up,’ I’d said as he finally caught sight of me. I’d insisted he should carry on in his bright, childish and faintly Syrian voice while I made my own inspection of the place.

  Now, I was sitting opposite him in an unbroken chair I’d pulled over from one of the corners of the room, a battered scroll of the historian Dexippus open on my lap. Theodore was less shy than I’d seen him in the afternoon. He was larger than I’d seen him in his bed. He was now just a very clever boy, making the best of a dreadful time by reading everything in sight.

  ‘But how can My Lord read without speaking?’ he asked with less of a stammer now we were alone.

  I smiled and let the book roll shut. Even then – yes, back then, at the very opening of my days of glory – I had the makings of a schoolmaster. It wasn’t an inclination I could practise on Martin. Though I’d now exceeded him in whole areas of ancient literature, it was only a year since he’d really left off being my own master. Here was a little boy, though, on whom I could impose to my heart’s content – and on whom I had my own reason for imposing.

  ‘I believe Syria is a place where reading is considered a communal activity,’ I said grandly. ‘It’s the same in Constantinople.’ I paused and waited for his eyes to widen at the mention of the City. ‘Where I come from, though, it is considered rather common to read aloud.’ That was a lie. If I’d got into the habit of reading to myself, it was only because that nature of what I was reading half the time in Canterbury would have got me straight into trouble if I’d recited it for all to hear. But I smiled as if silent reading were the most natural thing in the world. ‘It also allows you to read much faster. You’ll find that, once you’ve got out of the habit of reading aloud, you can go ten or twenty times faster.’

  ‘Then I will endeavour, My Lord, to still my own tongue when reading,’ came the grave and implicitly trusting response.

  I felt a sudden stab of shame and took up Dexippus again. I unrolled him to the place where he described how he’d got everyone on to the Acropolis for his final defence of Athens against the Gothic raiders. That had been under three hundred and fifty years earlier. But his refusal to call any weapon or place or people by its modern name – indeed, his refusal to mention any building that wasn’t already built by the time of Demosthenes – made his account incomprehensible in places. To be sure, it left me no wiser about the fate of the buildings on the Acropolis. I twisted the spine of the book in my right hand, and watched as the glued pages scrolled further and further towards the probable climax of the work. There was a two-inch hole in the antepenultimate page. It wouldn’t stop a determined reading. But I was already going off a man who’d been so universally praised by later historians. I put the book down on the table and watched as the stiff papyrus rolled back on itself.

  ‘How long have you been in Athens?’ I asked in a more normal voice.

  ‘We came here just over three years ago, My Lord,’ came the reply.

  I nodded and waited.

  ‘It was after my father died,’ he went on, now squeezing his eyes shut as if to remember the chronology of events. ‘There had been a poor harvest in our district. There was little food for the authorities to requisition from the country people, and want among the poorer classes brought on a plague in which many died throughout the whole city.’ He stopped and tried not to look confused. ‘My mother – I mean the Lady Euphemia – applied for help to one of her own relatives. But he refused to accept me into his household. So my
Uncle Nicephorus offered us a roof. He was unable to pay for our journey. But my mother sold some of her jewels, and we took ship from Zephyrion.’

  ‘That would have been while Phocas was Emperor,’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes, My Lord,’ he said, more eagerly. ‘I’d been in Athens a whole year, when officials came over from Corinth and threw down the statues of the Tyrant and announced the beginning of a new age of freedom and perfect justice.’ He stopped and looked down at the table.

  I could see he’d covered all his waxed tablets in notes from what Gregory had told him. I had no wish to discuss theology – not with a boy, at any rate. I smiled and leaned carefully back in my chair. Though unbroken, it had the rickety feel about it of old furniture on the turn. Theodore stared up at the sudden creak of old wood. ‘So how do you find the Glorious City Crowned with Violets?’ I asked. ‘I suppose Tarsus was hotter – and less past its best.’

  The boy looked cautiously back. ‘It is a privilege, My Lord, to stay in so famous a city,’ he said. He stopped and looked down again.

  I leaned forward and tried to see what was on one of the loose papyrus sheets he’d had stacked up on his left. It was more about Alexander, but the writing was too stained and faded for me to see from upside down where Theodore had reached in the story. He saw my interest and passed the sheet over. It was Ptolemy again; he was describing how he’d seized possession of Alexander’s body on its journey back to Macedon and brought it to Egypt, which he’d just grabbed in the dissolution of the Empire.

  The boy screwed his face up as if for some great effort. He stammered a little. Then: ‘Is it true, My Lord, that you were in Egypt?’

  I nodded. Egypt wasn’t a subject I’d have wanted to discuss, given any choice. But I was eager for any conversation that went beyond extracting one sentence at a time from him.

  ‘I did see the mummy of Alexander when I was there,’ I said. I thought of that ghastly riot in Alexandria, in which the mob had laid hands on the thing, tearing it in pieces – and even eating parts of it. ‘You don’t often set eyes on a genuine hero,’ I went on with a laugh. Couldn’t the boy have asked about something that brought back more welcome memories? Priscus might see the suppression of the Alexandrian mob as one of the high points in his career. I couldn’t see it as other than part of the disaster that had made my job here essential to succeed. But I’d now managed a look at the sheet that had been underneath the fragment of Ptolemy. This was one of the attacks that Plutarch had made on Epicurus.

  ‘Have you read any of the pagan philosophers?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ he answered. ‘They have nothing to add to the truths given by the Holy Fathers of the Church.’

  I tried to look devout. By much squinting, I now managed to read a few bits of Plutarch:

  And, when the lower classes see their loved ones die, they would rather think them still existing, though in Hell, than utterly erased. And they like to hear it said that those they have lost are in a better place . . . But they are stricken dumb with grief to hear about the dissolution of atoms. They cannot even understand it when told that someone is no more . . . Behold, then, how the philosopher of bodily pleasures really takes away the sweetest and greatest hope of the lower classes . . .

  What could I say about this to make conversation? I wondered. That facts are facts if true? That wishful thinking doesn’t affect whether they are true or not? Best not get involved in that. I looked up at the glass dome directly above where we sat. The sun was now low in the sky. But the glass bricks still shone as if with their own light. ‘Good writer, Plutarch,’ I said, keeping up my schoolmaster act. ‘But Epicurus is also worth a read. Though lacking the same inspiration, he does fit in to some degree with Gregory of Nyassa on the infinity of things. He takes issue with Plato on the nature of the world that we are able to comprehend. His universe has always existed, and always will exist. It is boundless in all directions. His streams of hooked atoms combine and recombine in endless sequence.’

  The boy frowned. ‘But the atoms are surely an impious fraud?’ he asked – or perhaps he asserted. ‘Does not Plutarch say that Epicurus was the meanest of thinkers?’ he went on in similar tone. ‘He was a man of loose morals and had feeble powers of analysis.’

  I smiled and leaned forward on the table. ‘Ah, but were similar claims not made by the philosophers about our own Christian Faith?’ I pushed the scroll to one side and pulled up my sleeves to avoid the dust on the table. ‘I do agree that there are problems with the atomic theory – the “swerve”, for example, to rescue freedom of the will, the infinite divisibility of whatever has extension, the paradox of physical movement. Against all this, however, is the compelling evidence for a world beneath our senses that is comprised of very small particles. Surely, we can rescue the hypothesis of the atoms by allowing that God created them, and that He has determined their motions, and that we can, by patient investigation, use the reason that God has given us to order the atoms to our own convenience?’

  If I’d finally got the boy’s interest, preaching even a bastardised version of the truth hadn’t been my intention. But I had got his interest. Trying not to show how pleased I was beginning to feel, I waited for him to smooth off his previous notes with the wide end of his stylus.

  ‘I think the reason Epicurus is so unpopular with all the other pagan philosophers,’ I continued, ‘is not his openness to refutation by logical paradox, but his claim that government is fundamentally unnecessary. He asserts that a viable human society can exist on the basis of free association of its members – no slavery, no taxes, no lies. Does not our Gregory here also deny the legitimacy of slavery . . . ?’

  And so, as the sun dipped lower and lower, and the glass bricks overhead turned various shades of pink, I settled into my first long dialogue with young Theodore. Looking back, I can regret that it wasn’t our last. But all those shouting matches and pamphlet wars were still so many years in the future. I could have no premonition of them here in the library, as I set out my case, and filled it with just enough weaknesses for a clever boy to best His Magnificence and think well of himself.

  I looked up finally as the last reddish tinge faded from the glass bricks. ‘But you must forgive me, young Theodore,’ I said as if startled by how long we’d sat here together. ‘It will surely soon be your bedtime.’ I paused. I let my face break into a friendly smile. ‘The lady Euphemia tells me that you have been deprived, here in Athens, of the company of other children.’

  ‘But, My Lord,’ he cried, ‘I was playing all day with the children of your secretary. They are delightful creatures.’

  I smiled. He could find out for himself that one of them was mine. ‘Then I must arrange,’ I said, ‘for you to spend one or two nights in the nursery. My secretary’s wife is a most charming woman. She would like nothing better than to let your mother sleep free of cares. And I’m sure she would appreciate your help in getting the youngsters to sleep. Her own singing voice is more determined than pleasing.’

  Theodore nodded. I managed to avoid biting my lip as he explained that Euphemia had come up with exactly the same suggestion.

  ‘Then I must arrange it for this very evening,’ I said. I got up and straightened my clothes. I could already feel a pleasurable tingling in my loins.

  There was an approaching crunch on the stairs. I heard the telltale cough. ‘You were quick about your business, Martin,’ I said without turning. ‘Come in – you will find me less – er – less preoccupied than on your previous visit.’ I looked over at Theodore, who’d now turned back to the Alexander sheets and was trying not to move his lips as he read. ‘You have met young Theodore already. I’ve no doubt you’ll both get on very well indeed. He has a request from his mother to discuss with you.’

  ‘My Lord,’ Martin said in his most formal voice, ‘His Grace the Bishop of Nicaea would have a word with you in private.’

  I barely had time for a scowl, when I heard another crunch of steps outside the library.

/>   Chapter 28

  Simeon walked in and gave a long sniff of disgust. ‘You, boy,’ he snarled at Theodore. ‘If the Emperor’s Legate can stand for a bishop, you have no business sitting in my presence.’ Ignoring that the boy had been making every effort to climb from his chair, Simeon sniffed again. ‘Get out,’ he said, speaking either to Martin or to Theodore – perhaps to both. ‘Come back with something fit for me to drink.’ He looked down and glared at one of the areas of mosaic that still held firmly in place. It was the bare breast of one of the Muses. Avoiding a shattered reading stand that lay in his path, he walked over to where Theodore had been sitting. He picked up one of the cushions and beat the dust out of it. He sat down heavily and looked steadily up at the last glow of light from the dome. It was just enough to bring on a sneeze. By the time he’d finished blowing his nose, Martin and the boy had gone off together, and we were alone.

  I walked over to the mural of Athens in its best age. The Acropolis had been painted both higher and smaller than it really was. There were obvious inconsistencies of perspective that told me the painting was fairly modern. This was less interesting, though, than further evidence of burning in the library. At some time, there had been a series of bonfires in the room. The heat in several areas had been so intense that the mosaic tiles were lifted and the underlying concrete had cracked. Looking up, I could see that some effort had been made to clean smoke from the glass bricks.