The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  I’d got the lamp turned up in the room we were sharing, and I could see how close I’d come to smashing the boy’s nose into his face.

  I hobbled over and sat beside him on his own wooden cot. ‘Drink this,’ I said gently. He looked at the cup and tasted the stale cider I’d grabbed from the supper table before we were brought over here. It was poor stuff, but would take his mind off the pain. I held the cup while he finished its contents.

  I put an arm round his shoulder. ‘Listen, Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I do most humbly apologise.’ I could have elaborated on the life I’d led, and how the habit had long since ripened into instinct of using lethal force whenever in doubt. Instead: ‘It was a dream,’ I said. ‘That’s what made me cry out – though I really am surprised if it wasn’t in Latin.’ I fell silent and let my bony arm rest on his bony shoulder.

  I got up and went back to my own cot. I arranged the threadbare blanket about me like a kind of shawl and sat on the rough boards. ‘The Abbot here has told me,’ I said with a firm change of subject, ‘that Theodore wants to see me again directly after morning prayers. If tomorrow is anything like today, I don’t think that will detain me very long. I suggest, then, a proper look round Canterbury. There is a lot here that you still haven’t seen. We can even have food carried outside the walls for a lunch in the open. The forest that stretches between here and Richborough doesn’t compare with what we passed through after London. If you can put up with holding me by the arm and keeping speed with a very old man, I’ll take you to the field of Saint Maximin – it’s where, when I was seventeen, everyone says I helped the most Holy Saint turn tree sap into beer.’

  Jeremy looked back at me and smiled brightly. The odd turn of my last sentence had passed him by. Odd syntax, though, was the least the story deserved. So very long ago, I had started out in Canterbury as secretary to Maximin. He’d been a fat, jolly little monk fresh out of Ravenna, and I a barbarian with a pretty face who had nothing honest to sell but the Latin I’d picked up in Richborough. We’d hit it off at once, and, for five golden months, I’d gone out with him from the newly established mission in Canterbury to fish for souls. We’d faked resurrections from the dead. We’d made trees speak and stones spurt fire. I’d once even dressed in a bearskin and let Maximin teach me to pray before a whole village of gawping prospective converts. But we’d never done anything as productive as turn tree sap into beer. Still, if I’d only recently heard that story, it would never do to question it. Deny one miracle, after all, and – why – even young Jeremy might start thinking of himself.

  No chance of that for the moment, however. ‘I’d really like that, Master,’ he said. He leaned forward and raised his hands in the way that I sometimes did in class to get attention for something important. ‘When a man is tired of Canterbury,’ he intoned, ‘he is surely tired of life.’

  He’d said this in Latin. I wished he’d stayed in English. Taedet, you see, is an impersonal verb. His use of it had produced the kind of sentence that, in Jarrow, would have had me tapping my cane on the ground and looking grim. But I only nodded. I leaned back and carefully swung my legs on to the cot. Trying to avoid getting a splinter through my pitiful nightgown, I stretched out and made myself as comfortable as might, in the circumstances, be possible.

  I suddenly realised that the lamp was still turned up. ‘Dearest Jeremy,’ I said, looking up at the dark timbers of the ceiling, ‘it is a sinful waste to burn oil when it isn’t required for reading or prayer. So do be a love and push 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 wh
isper 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 correct Latin. ‘I haven’t come all this way to deal with another drivelling old fool.’

  The Abbot now had his back to me, and I didn’t catch what he said.

  ‘Yes, I could have gone to Jarrow,’ Sophronius answered, filling in the blank in the conversation. ‘But, if His Grace chooses to arrange things in this manner, who am I to disagree?’

  With increasing gaps in my hearing of it, the conversation moved to other business. So far as I could gather, Sophronius wanted an inspection of the Abbot’s school, but was being put off. ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ he said with sudden loudness. His voice dropped to a murmur I couldn’t follow. I think the Abbot was speaking about an outbreak of fever among the boys. Once or twice, I heard Sophronius laugh. There was a double repetition of ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ and a long and anticipatory laugh. But the crunch of leather on gravel was growing more distant, and I was alone again.

  Bugger all was what I’d learned from this act of involuntary snooping. I’d guessed back in Jarrow that Theodore wasn’t inviting me over for an informal natter about the old days. He’d said as much before nodding off in our meeting. Well, I’d find out soon enough what the Church wanted of me – or I might if the old dear managed to stay awake this time. Until then, I didn’t think I’d burst with curiosity.

  I was about to close up the opening in the shutters and feel my way back to bed, when I heard Jeremy groan and shift position till the bed boards creaked beneath him. He followed this with a fair impression of a death rattle and a return to snoring. I pulled a face, then smiled again. I pushed my face out into the fresh air and breathed in the smell of early shrubs.

  Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy! Back in Jarrow, he’d not been my first choice as travelling companion. He’d not have been my first choice for anything. He wasn’t bright. He wasn’t brave. He wasn’t at all good to look at. His lack of personal hygiene might have been notable even in the monasteries of Egypt, where soap and sinfulness were seen in the same disapproving light. I’d sat on the panel that had considered his application to be trained as a monk. My only comment then had been a joke about raising the quality of the Northumbrian breeding stock by removing him from it. I’d only given in to Benedict’s urging when the boy I did have in mind had fallen out of a tree and sprained his ankle. That had left no one else strong enough to pull me all the way to Canterbury. So I’d sneered at him and poked him with my stick the whole way between Jarrow and Canterbury.

  But, if he was lacking in all other qualities, Jeremy did possess a goodness of soul that you mustn’t overlook. As with holiness, that isn’t something I’ve ever myself possessed. But, as with holiness, it is something that must be recognised in others. And, unlike holiness, it is something to be valued. Tomorrow, I’d let him wake me, and dress me, and feed me, and bring me my false teeth, and comb and arrange the blond wig I told everyone I had to wear to keep my scalp warm. And I’d smile at him, and think of something pleasant to say. The moment I was done with Theodore, I’d lead him about Canterbury and show him where tree sap had been turned to beer – and I’d do nothing to persuade him it hadn’t actually happened. Sooner or later, even he’d complete his training. After that, he’d be sent off to risk himself on converting the tattooed savages who dwelt in the forests beyond the wide northern sea. Before then, he might as well be shown some of the love he’d be preaching to others.

  Outside, all was dark. All was silent. I might achieve a little sleep befo
re morning. Or I might lie choking in more of the foetid smells cast off by Jeremy. Whatever the case, it was cold over here by the window. And at last, I realised, I did feel very tired.

  Chapter 5

  I was back with Theodore. The window of his room was now fully unshuttered, and I could see that it looked over a small garden. A warm breeze came through it, and the sound of birdsong. Looking ghastly, but more with it than the previous day, Theodore had got himself propped into a padded armchair that allowed him to see out of the window.

  ‘You will forgive me for not rising to greet you,’ he said with surprising firmness. ‘At our last meeting, I tried to discuss a favour that the Church would have of you. Because of the change in your status attendant on your return to England, this is not a favour that we can demand, and I shall understand if you feel that a conflict of interest prevents you from rendering any assistance.’

  I smiled and took up the undisturbed wine. A bug had crawled into it and, without any consideration, died there. But I fished this out and flicked it on to the floorboards. Wulfric lifted a cup of something hot to Theodore’s lips, and I waited for him to gather more of his ebbing strength.

  ‘While you were away,’ he continued, ‘I had a letter from Rome. The Holy Father is involved in a matter of great delicacy with the Emperor in Constantinople. This involves the damnable heresy of the Monothelites. It is a shame that news of your own presence in the Mediterranean world did not arrive in Rome until after your return to England. It would have been most convenient had we been able to avoid all the delays of a correspondence between Rome and Canterbury.’

  ‘Monothelitism is dead and buried,’ I said, speaking carefully. ‘I sealed the decree against it myself twenty years ago. We blamed everything on poor dead Sergius, and I drafted a grovelling letter of apology from the Emperor to the Pope. Why should the matter still give trouble?’