The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  It was shortly before noon when I caught up with Priscus on the southern wall. He’d been dictating in Latin to Gundovald’s secretary. Head uncovered, the boy’s hair shone very blond in the sunlight. I looked at him just a moment longer than I’d intended.

  Priscus broke in with a cynical laugh. ‘If you’ve come about the dawn attack,’ he said, ‘you can rest easy that it didn’t get very far.’

  ‘A dawn attack?’ I asked, joining Priscus in Latin.

  ‘Oh, don’t look so scared, my pretty young man,’ he replied in an easy drawl. ‘Your face has gone a red that entirely obscures the leftovers of your wanking spot.’ He laughed and made a crude gesture that provoked one of my darker scowls.

  It didn’t help that the blond boy behind me now let out an idiotic snigger.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it an attack, though,’ Priscus explained. ‘It was probably no more than an uninstructed attempt by a few dozen boys with more courage than sense.’ He waved the blond boy out of hearing and leaned carefully against the topmost stones of the wall. The wooden platform shook under our combined weight. He shut his eyes, and, as if by effort of will alone, stood up. He put a hand on my shoulder and directed me to a small huddle of barbarians who stood behind the ruined wall of what had been a house.

  ‘What is that?’ I asked, nodding at the crude assembly of timbers. ‘You did assure me,’ I said when I knew I could keep my voice steady, ‘that these people knew nothing of siege warfare.’

  ‘My dear Alaric,’ came the sneered reply, ‘if barbarians are generally ignorant, most of them aren’t stupid. Look at yourself.’ He laughed unpleasantly as I couldn’t keep a second blush from spreading over my face. ‘Look at that gorgeous little thing over there,’ he added with a nod at the boy. ‘Never assume these people aren’t capable of learning from their betters. If they really were dumb animals, we’d still have a governor in York, and the pair of you’d be running about some northern forest with your arses painted blue!’

  He laughed again and went back to looking hard at what was undoubtedly a wheeled battering ram. It lacked only the covering of hides needed to protect it from fire and arrows. ‘They were lining it up against just the right stretch of wall,’ he said with an approving nod. ‘If you’d come here earlier, you’d have seen those duffers now sheltering against our bowmen picking up their dead. We’ll chase them properly off in a while. Then I’ll send a few men down to set fire to that thing. They can also recover the arrows. We aren’t exactly flush in that department.’ He coughed and spat over the wall. ‘It would help if the external ditch hadn’t been allowed to fill up with rubbish,’ he added with mild disgust.

  He pointed at one of the bodies. ‘You’d have imagined, with all the talk of famine,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that these people would have looked a little more starved. I’ll grant these were the young of the higher class. But, if the others look wasted, you can’t set these numbers in motion when there’s nothing at all to put in their bellies. A bit odd, don’t you think, my dear?’

  ‘You thought there would be a parley,’ I said. ‘Any indication of one yet?’

  As I spoke, there was the sudden blast of a trumpet from the other side of a wall. As we’d been speaking, a small gaggle of men had come in sight. The trumpet went silent, and the smallest of the men stood forward.

  ‘You will open the gates for the men of the Great Chief,’ he squealed in Latin. ‘You will let us take the food and precious things that may lie within your city. If not, we will break down your walls with overpowering force, and give your city over to burning and killing till not one stone stands upon another, and not one of you remains alive. We will do to you as we have done to the other cities. None shall help you.’ He went off into a long enunciation of the horrors of a sack. Fortunately, there were only three of us in hearing able to follow its chilling promises of blood and fire.

  The herald stopped and arranged his features into a smile. ‘But the Great Kutbayan does not desire your lives,’ he shrilled. ‘He is ever merciful, ever forbearing to those who do his bidding. Open your gates and give what you have within them, and your lives will surely be spared.’

  To my left, I heard the sudden whizz of a couple of arrows. One of these flew straight past the herald. Another brushed the neck of the trumpeter. I saw him fall to his knees, blood spraying from where the arrow had barely touched him. There was a burst of cheering from the archers as he clapped a hand over his severed blood vessel, and then fell straight forward on to an area of broken mosaic flooring.

  Priscus darted along the rickety platform and slapped someone on the back. ‘Good show!’ he cried happily. He disappeared into a crowd of young tradesmen, and the choking sounds beyond the wall were smothered in cries of pleased enthusiasm. Another of the archers pulled his bow back to the chest and let fly. This time, the arrow missed by a foot. But the herald was already hurrying out of range.

  ‘Did I hear the name Kutbayan?’ I asked when Priscus was back beside me.

  ‘Such sharp ears you have!’ he said with a happy grin. ‘Though I really did assume you’d guessed that much already. I don’t think the Great Chief has caught up yet with his subjects. But I have no doubt he’ll put in at least a brief appearance later today.’ He caught the look on my face and gave a really nasty smile. ‘Yes, it will be Kutbayan himself if I’m not mistaken – Kutbayan who fed every officer in that army we sent against him feet first into the cogs of a water mill; Kutbayan who placed thin boards over all the children of Pentapolis and made the parents dance until they were pulverised like grapes in a press.

  ‘Do tell me, Alaric dearest, if you think suicide a really terrible sin,’ he asked with another of his cheerful grins. ‘Believe me that the fires of Hell might not compare with what the Great Chief has in mind for us. How you dispatch Martin and his family is for you to decide. But do leave little Maximin to me. I know so much about the infliction of pain, that I can make death gentler than a kiss good night.’

  I gripped the rough stones of the wall and waited for the tremor in my knees to pass away. Pile horror high enough on horror, and anyone will buckle. ‘I hear you had an argument with Irene,’ I said, changing the subject.

  ‘The old witch tried to change my defence orders for the residency,’ he said, spitting over the wall again. ‘She’s useful to make sure that food and hot water come at the right time. But I’ll take a cane to her if she tries acting the man in every respect.’

  So much for her night defence! I thought.

  Priscus let go of the wall and leaned closer. He contorted his features into a leer. ‘By the way,’ he said, now back in Greek, ‘you’ll never guess whose rooms I saw her leaving just before I came out for the dawn attack?’

  I’d been wondering why Euphemia had been so eager to crawl out of my bed the night before.

  But there was a scream from the other side of the wall. I turned and looked down. One of the barbarians had crept forward and tried to recover weapons from the dead. He was now flopping about not far from the dead trumpeter with an arrow in his belly. Priscus was immediately back with his young men. A few of them stared over at me with happy, triumphant faces. It was only for a moment; then they were dancing eagerly about Priscus as he barked more of his soldierly praise. Where I was concerned, he might be a slimy, shifty Greekling – the Imperial Councillor fighting for his position in the sun even as the sky clouded over. To his men, he showed only his other face. For them, he was the greatest military commander in the Empire – the Heaven-sent one whose leadership would save Athens from falling as Decelea had.

  Now at a safe distance, the herald had started calling out at us again. In response, two of the youngest defenders heaved a grotesque thing of pumpkins and cucumbers on to the top of the wall, and began shouting back in Greek that they’d taken the Great Chief prisoner. Shouting the name Kutbayan, they made the thing bob up and down, and, with shouts of laughter, sliced off half the cucumber that was doing service as a phallus. The herald fell silent
, and there was a ripple of outrage that spread back through the crowd of barbarians who stood behind him.

  ‘Pretty sick-making, wouldn’t you agree?’ Priscus jeered as he came back to me.

  I didn’t understand at first.

  But he poked his tongue out and made a rapid licking motion. He’d have laughed, but for a sudden spasm that had him clutching with white knuckles at the stones of the wall.

  ‘What women do with each other is nothing to us,’ I said stiffly. And, if that was true, it still didn’t settle the twitching in my lower chest. ‘However,’ I said, coming to the reason that had brought me to the walls, ‘I have a favour I must ask of you.’

  Chapter 46

  ‘Unless Simeon was deceived or lying,’ I said, ‘the man can’t have been sighted inside the walls.’ I finished my cup of the Dispensator’s beer and looked morosely at the whitewashed wall of his office. He’d been right about its dirt and lack of amenity. By comparison, the residency when I’d first arrived there was almost salubrious.

  ‘I’d put nothing past a man with so little presence of mind,’ the Dispensator said with a sniff of contempt. ‘But I do assure you that I saw the Count – rather, I saw the former Count – very clearly indeed. He was standing in the shade of an old building. There were two men with him dressed like the ones who attacked us the day before last.’

  I’d believe the Dispensator in place of Simeon, or any other of the terrified Greeks who’d sat trembling through the morning session of the council. At the same time, it wasn’t just Simeon who’d seen Nicephorus walk out of Athens. Had he come back in before the gates were closed and barred? Or was there some hidden breach in the walls? I’d raise this with Priscus when we reported back to each other at dinner.

  I went back to the previous subject. ‘The difficulty with any murder,’ I explained, ‘is finding connections. Find those, and it’s only a matter of time before you find your man. I’m flattered that everyone is still talking about it. But the killing of the Duke’s secretary in Rome was actually very easy to solve. The angle of the blow indicated the height of the killer. That being so, all I had to do was sort out chronologies and motives among a limited number of suspects. The confession helped, but I’d already got all the evidence we needed for the hanging.’

  ‘Ah, but it was a stroke of genius to guess that all those nails found about the body had been set into a bar of river ice,’ the Dispensator cried, now as happy as he’d ever let show. ‘But for that, we’d still be looking for the weapon.’

  I smiled complacently and waited for the Dispensator to refill my cup. I thought back to what now seemed golden days in Rome, when I was just an elegant ruffian with few other duties beyond self-enrichment in the markets. In that glow of nostalgia, even the Dispensator could have passed for an old friend.

  ‘You will need to force the Greeks to attend the next session,’ he said, coming back to a still earlier subject. ‘We are most provoked by their lack of moral fibre.’

  I nodded. I’d already torn strips off the Bishop of Ephesus. He’d pass my threats to the other Greeks, and they would surely all put on some show of interest in the afternoon session. This would be mostly taken up with the Dispensator’s own explanation of the Papal will. Deciding I’d now got him in the right mood, and keeping a very straight face, I explained again the difficulties involved in his demand for two interpreters to call out his words in unison to the Greeks. Bearing in mind the quality of our interpreters, I repeated, we’d have no choice but to reduce the whole speech to a theatrical performance – one clause of his own elaborate Latin read out from a prepared text, followed by another joint reading in Greek.

  ‘Spontaneity is possible,’ I insisted, ‘but only with a single interpreter . . .’

  ‘Such was done for the Great Constantine when he opened the Council of Nicaea,’ he said firmly. ‘No less can be demanded when I speak in the name of the Universal Bishop. There must be two interpreters.’

  I was saved the trouble of a reply by a loud scraping of many feet in the monastery courtyard.

  The Dispensator suddenly smiled and lifted his cup. ‘I have already spoken with the Lord Priscus,’ he went on in a different tone. ‘Further to his fittingly humble request, I have given orders for every monk in the city to work under his directions for the building of a second wall behind the weak point in the fortifications.’

  I decided not to try looking surprised. He smiled again. With luck, I really might have got him. Or was there something just a little too warm and knowing about that smile?

  ‘The Commander of the East does not fall below his reputation,’ he continued. ‘His idea of creating a killing field within the walls is most ingenious. Like the drawing of blood from a diseased body, it will be used repeatedly to relax the pressure elsewhere.’

  There was a knock on the door. Without bothering to wait, Irene walked in. ‘You’ve got to come back with me to the residency, love,’ she said in Greek. She looked at the Dispensator and bowed about half an inch.

  ‘Go away!’ I snapped. She was the last person I wanted to see. The Dispensator was already on his feet and looking outraged. ‘You should know women can’t just walk into a monastery.’

  ‘Well, suit yourself, dearie,’ she said with a shrug. She reached into her satchel. ‘The slave who was clearing out the Count’s office found these underneath the charcoals in one of the braziers.’ She took out and untied two waxed tablets. Safe between them were a few scraps of charred papyrus. ‘They might be important.’

  I sighed. Whatever importance they had, I’d never get from here to the residency and then back to the Areopagus in time for the afternoon session. I’d see what she had. Unless they told me something of the utmost urgency, they’d have to wait till evening. I took the scraps and spread them carefully on the table.

  ‘The very walls resound with evil,’ I read with much squinting. ‘I sit alone . . . The rats depart . . . The Dark One lays siege . . .’ I looked up. ‘These other words appear to be in Syriac writing,’ I said. ‘Are you able to tell me what they mean?’

  ‘The Lady Euphemia don’t read no Syriac,’ she said with a loving smile. ‘But that dear little boy of hers tells me it’s some devotional hymn. It’s about the ending of all space and time, though not the return of Jesus Christ.’ She crossed herself and squinted at the Dispensator, who glowered back at her.

  I looked again at the scraps. There were other words and phrases in both Greek and Syriac. But they were too fragmentary to make sense without a long inspection. It was all in the hand of a man unused to writing for himself. Even making this allowance, there was something unhinged about the shape and direction of the Greek letters. If Nicephorus had been writing with his left hand, they might have been formed with less appearance of some overpowering emotion.

  ‘Is there more of this?’ I asked.

  Euphemia nodded. She added that the other scraps made no sense at all, but she’d had them set on a limestone table and covered over with large pieces of window glass.

  I nodded my approval. I nodded again as she explained that she’d put the office off limits to further cleaning and had locked the door. I’d overlook that she was ploughing as hard as any woman could in my own furrow – there was no doubt she was a woman of sense in more than just business.

  ‘My Lord will forgive me if I wear my plain robe for the speech,’ the Dispensator broke in. ‘His Holiness is Servant of the Servants of God. It would never do for his representative to address a council in a spirit of less than the meekest humility.’

  Meek humility! I fixed my gaze on the icon of Saint Peter that was the one splash of colour on the otherwise bare walls, and tried desperately not to laugh. If he’d got himself up from head to toe in purple silk, but omitted that astonishing text I’d finally wheedled out of him, meekness and humility might have been a more appropriate description of what the Dispensator had in mind.

  He looked carefully into my face. He smiled again – and, once again, it was
suspiciously warm. ‘The Lord Priscus may have his reasons,’ he said lightly. ‘But I fail to see why the Lord Bishop of Athens cannot attend this afternoon’s session.’

  ‘I understand that Priscus has need of him for dealing with the monks,’ I said with what I hoped was a casual shrug. ‘Several of the abbots have objected to the wholesale commandeering of so many of their men. But, since the common people of Athens won’t lift a finger for the defence, the Lord Bishop is needed to explain the plenary nature of your instructions.’

  ‘It is a shame,’ he said with the mildest possible frown, ‘that, apart from you and Martin, the Lord Bishop is the only one of us fluent in both Imperial languages. Without his presence, it seems the Greeks will have to rely wholly on the interpreters.’

  I gave a regretful smile. I’d not have described the Bishop of Athens as ‘fluent’ in Latin – the best I could say was that it was slightly less eccentric than his Greek.

  ‘Still,’ the Dispensator said, ‘the needs of defence must be respected.’

  I stood up and watched as Irene finished putting the scraps away. Anything regarding Nicephorus was important. But this really would have to wait. ‘It will be only fitting, My Lord,’ I said, ‘if I lead you with my own hands to the speaking lectern.’