The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  There was a soft voice behind me. ‘My Lord is disturbed by the flogging?’ the Captain asked. He’d been going up or coming down the ladder that led to the rowing decks. He now clambered easily up beside me and went through the motions of a bow. He’d taken off his boots, but still wore the fussy uniform he must have put on for his trip ashore. ‘It was the black rower with woollen hair,’ he explained with evident relish. ‘His dream of a supernatural origin for the storms has continued to disturb the other men.’

  I nodded. Just as the biggest of the storms was hitting us, I’d pulled rank on the Captain and ordered all the rowers to be unchained. Since then, rowing had been impossible, and the men had been lounging about on the lower decks with nothing to do but compete at scaring each other.

  I cleared my throat and tried to look haughty. ‘My secretary will need to discuss what slaves will come ashore with us,’ I said.

  The Captain arched his eyebrows and somehow managed not to laugh. ‘I must inform Your Lordship,’ he said very softly indeed, ‘that my orders are to put you ashore without slaves. The local authorities will provide such assistance as may be required.’ I stared back without blinking. I’d finally learned something of the Captain’s own orders. Priscus and I had watched him receive these in a sealed packet. For all the questions he’d put, Priscus would have got better answers out of the Sphinx than from this shifty little Egyptian.

  ‘Very well,’ I said with a forced lightness of tone. ‘Be so good as to inform my secretary of this.’

  The Captain bowed again, and asked if it would please me to see the flogging.

  Without bothering to answer, I turned and continued along the corridor.

  Bearing in mind its natural colour on this voyage, I failed to see why Priscus had taken the trouble to paint his face green. He sat alone in his cabin, looking down at his booted feet. ‘Fucking noise!’ he snarled with a look upwards. Now the flogging was over, the only sound from outside was a third or fourth repeat of the shanty. ‘Can’t these sailors ever keep their mouths shut?’ He pushed a glass cup against his chattering teeth and took a longish sip. He burped and pushed a hand under his ceremonial chain mail for a scratch. ‘So, dear boy, what’s the news?’ he finally asked with the ghost of a smile.

  I stared up at the polished timbers of the ceiling and wondered if there was any suitable answer. Unlike Martin, Priscus had lost weight on the voyage. He’d been padded out when put into his uniform. But there was no hiding the bony wrists or the sagging wrinkles under his chin. This was my first sight of him in five days. Though the great storm had finally ended, his reaction to it hadn’t. His groans and the regular bowls of vomit carried from his cabin had told me he was alive. Now, if he was up and about, he still didn’t look more than the shadow of the grinning fiend who’d taken his farewell of the few persons of quality he’d somehow managed not to impale in Alexandria.

  ‘Shall we go up on the main deck?’ I asked. ‘There may be sod all to look at. But I fancy some last impression of liberty.’

  Beneath an awning that caught most of the rain, I looked into a wall of grey mist. Unless I’d lost all sense of direction, I was looking towards Salamis. It was now more than eleven hundred and twenty years since the Athenians had fought their decisive battle there. While he was still up to any pretence of conversation, Priscus had assured me that the figure of three million given by Herodotus was impossible. But, if you divided all his numbers by ten, they began to make sense. The Spartans had held the pass at Thermopylae longer than anyone could think possible. Even so, the Persians had come on like a charging elephant. Nothing could have kept them from eventually sweeping through the pass. Their single weakness had been the long lines of communication back to Asia. By a stroke of genius, Themistocles had got the Athenians to abandon their city and concentrate all their naval force in the Bay of Salamis. There, the crushing weight of Persian shipping had been taken completely by surprise. Once they’d lost control of the sea, their whole land force was cut off and could be destroyed at leisure.

  ‘The problem with Herodotus,’ Priscus had said to me before the storms sent him scurrying to his cabin like a monk to his cell, ‘is that he just wasn’t a soldier. He was fine at repeating the gossip he’d picked up from the lower class of those who lived long enough to be his sources. But he had no understanding of grand strategy. The Persian attack was a combined operation. Knock away either of its legs, and the whole mass would fall to the ground. Realise this, and the Spartan counter-attack at Plataea becomes little more than a side skirmish. For myself, I’d never have risked a battle. Instead, I’d have kept up the sea blockade, and waited for the Persians to make a dash back towards Byzantium. All the way back, I’d have followed them by sea – wearing them down without ever coming to a full battle.’

  He’d gone from this into a lecture on the need to keep your forces in being, and never risking a battle unless forced, or unless sure of victory. Had he given this lecture to Heraclius outside Caesarea? Priscus had spent the better part of a year obeying his own advice. It had worked so well, the Emperor had come out in person to take the Persian surrender. Of course, the booby had no sooner arrived than he gave orders for a battle – a battle that ended in our own catastrophic defeat.

  We leaned together in silence and looked out into the mist. As members of the Imperial Council, it should have been our duty to suggest mitigations for what Heraclius had brought on us – the loss of Cappadocia and the exposing of Syria to invasion. But Priscus hadn’t been in Constantinople since the defeat, and I’d left before its news could arrive. Did it now matter what we thought? Were we still members of the Council?

  I thought instead of Salamis, over a thousand years before. That still mattered, and always would matter. This one battle had cleared the way for the flowering of Greek civilisation. Then, after another century and a half, Alexander had gone on the offensive and destroyed the Persian Empire, and spread the light of Greece over all the East. Before that could fade, the Romans had taken up the burden of defence. Their legions, half protective, half exploitative, had given the light of Greece another seven hundred years. Now, at last, the Empire established by Rome, and inherited by Constantinople, was falling, one province at a time, to a revived Persia. This time, the decisive battle would be on land, and probably deep within Syria. Athens and the cities of Achaean Greece could have no influence in this battle. So far as their few inhabitants were even aware of it, they would await the outcome of this conflict as passive spectators.

  ‘None of this really matters,’ I said, breaking the long silence. ‘The end of things is often far less important than what went before. A thousand years from now, I really doubt if anyone will be thinking of you or me or Heraclius. But they’ll surely still be thinking of Salamis and what it made possible.’ What I’d said made no sense in itself, and I didn’t feel up to explaining the train of thought that preceded it.

  Leaning beside me on the rail, Priscus continued staring down at the dark, still waters.

  Chapter 9

  Somewhere in front of us, the sun must now be rising fully out of the sea. It might eventually burn off the mist. Or it might not. It hadn’t shown itself to us in days, and might never do so again. But the sense of a new day was taking some hold in both our minds.

  Priscus sighed. He coughed and spat. He sighed again. ‘If only that bastard ship had missed us off Cyprus,’ he said, ‘we’d now be putting into the Senatorial Dock. We could hurry off to the palace and give our side of things to Heraclius. Whatever else happened there, we stopped the Brotherhood from taking over Alexandria. We stopped the Persians from invading Egypt. It’s thanks to us that those seven million bushels of Egyptian corn will put in every year at Constantinople. Perhaps I did get carried away in pacifying Alexandria. You certainly fluffed your introduction of the new land law. But we did save the breadbasket of the whole Empire. No one could take that away . . .’ He trailed off into a mumble about friends in Constantinople.

  Perhaps he
was right. I’d completed the final draft of my report a day after the Alexandrian lighthouse had vanished below the horizon. Before handing it to Martin for copying in his best hand, I’d read it to Priscus. He’d laughed and clapped his hands at its persuasive force. I’d said nothing in it of the overflowing mass graves outside Alexandria, or the plague that had drifted back into the city with the spreading miasma of corruption. I’d said nothing of the burned-out centre, or of the silent, grieving survivors. Without saying anything openly bad about the Emperor’s cousin, I’d managed to throw the whole blame for what I did admit on to Nicetas. And, if the useless bastard of a Viceroy had only done his plain duty and published the new land law at once, none of this could have happened. No doubt, I’d failed miserably in my side of things. No doubt at all, Priscus had gone raving mad once he’d gathered enough force to take on the mob. But who’d let the mob go out of control in the first place? Who’d given the landed interest enough time to choose between handing over a third of their land to the peasants and calling in the Persians? It really was stupid, bloody Nicetas who’d allowed everything to go tits up. Given the slightest regard for truth and justice, Heraclius should have had him dragged off to Constantinople to answer for an incompetence amounting all the way to treason.

  ‘We stand or fall together,’ Priscus had said between reciting some of my choicer sentences in a fair imitation of Our Lord and Master’s flat and whiny voice. ‘Yes, dearest Alaric,’ he’d said, separating the syllables of the name by which I was known in the Empire, ‘we stand or fall together.’

  Then we’d been intercepted off Cyprus and sent west with that sheet of utterly ambiguous parchment. If Priscus had been too overcome by seasickness to sit talking everything over with me, his mind couldn’t but have been moving in the same direction.

  ‘Do you think you were set up from the beginning?’ he asked.

  There was a sudden chorus of shouts behind and above us. There was none of the shifting and pitching that would suggest we were about to dock. But something was going on. I ignored this. We could wait for whatever bad news it surely meant.

  I thought back to the beginning of March. I’d been called to the Imperial Palace. Heraclius had taken me to the great marble balcony that looked over the ship-crowded straits to the Asiatic shore. He’d spoken with such enthusiasm of my land law – what glorious sense it made to give land to the peasants and then arm them as a static defence force. It had worked so well in the Asiatic provinces, where a century of spreading banditry had been checked in just one season, and where, day by day, a rabble of passive starvelings was turning into a race of proud and loyal and productive defenders of their own soil. ‘I can hardly spare you from the Imperial Council here,’ he’d said caressingly. ‘You are my one support, my choicest and most resourceful adviser. But I must spare you for just a few months, so that Egypt can be revived to its ancient wealth and contentedness.’

  So I’d set out for Alexandria, and Nicetas had embraced me and called me ‘brother’. And, then, month had followed month, and the law I’d carried out with every necessary seal and form of words sat, unpublished, on his desk. He’d given me an army of clerks and surveyors, and smiled at every land allocation I’d suggested. He’d fobbed me off with a mass of routine administration. The Lesser Seal he gave me had made me the second man in Alexandria and in Egypt. If he noticed at all, he’d looked the other way when my speculations on the future price of corn had brought me riches beyond counting. And, all this time, the landowning interest had been spinning further and further out of my control. If, by charm and gross bribery, I’d kept the magnates steady, the smaller landowners had formed a solid bloc of opposition. Every difference of race and religion between Greeks and Egyptians had been set aside as news of my intentions spread through the higher society of Alexandria. In the end, if it had appalled me – if I’d even tried to have him arrested for it – was there any real alternative to the massacre Priscus had unleashed on the streets, and the ten thousand or whatever impalings with which he’d finished his work of pacification?

  ‘It might be,’ I said at last. ‘But let’s allow fifteen days for a courier going by relays from Alexandria, and then another day of indecision before sending out that ship. That also fits.’ I stroked my nose and rubbed thin pus between forefinger and thumb. ‘Do you remember how insistent Nicetas was about your accompanying me on the galley? Letting you go back to the capital through Syria would have carried the risk that you’d get wind of the Imperial disfavour, and turn east for the army. There, you could have raised a rebellion like your late and unlamented father-in-law did against Maurice. Who knows? Like him, you could have got yourself made Emperor. Instead, you were shipped out with me.’

  ‘Great minds think alike,’ Priscus said with a bitter laugh. ‘I’m the last survivor from before the revolution. Everyone’s been wondering how long the son-in-law of Phocas the Unmentionable could last in the new order of things. You might say that I’m the Empire’s only half-decent general. But it’s obvious I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since Heraclius rolled up in Constantinople and got himself crowned Emperor.’ He laughed again. ‘You were set up because the old nobility finally got through to Heraclius that your scheme of land reallocation would be the greatest revolution in the Empire since Constantine turned Christian. Once it was known I’d joined you in Alexandria, it was just a matter of two birds with one stone.

  ‘Do you suppose he’ll have us blinded before we’re stuffed into a monastery?’ he asked. ‘Do you suppose we’ll share a monastery? I hope you’ll not take it ill. But I’d rather not have to share a prison with you. Besides, I can tell you from my own experience that there’s no shortage of ghastly places of confinement in this part of the Empire. There’s a particularly nasty monastery halfway up Mount—’

  Martin had made one of his polite coughs behind us. ‘The Captain apologises for his oversight when you spoke with him,’ he said. ‘But he came back from shore with a letter for you.’

  Priscus and I looked at each other. I swallowed and took the unrolled sheet of papyrus in a hand that I willed not to shake.

  ‘Apparently, the Governor is detained in Corinth by ill health,’ I said without glancing up from the letter. ‘We’ll be met by a certain Nicephorus. He describes himself as Count of Athens.’ I looked at Priscus.

  His answer was a long and disgusted clear of his throat. He turned and spat again into the sea. ‘Let’s face it, dear boy,’ he said. ‘You are, when all is said and done, just a barbarian and hardly older than a schoolboy. But I am a descendant of the Great Constantine himself, and not far off three times your age. I’d have thought I was worth being arrested by the Governor.’ He took the letter from me and stared at the scruffy writing. ‘I had dealings with Nicephorus when I was last here,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing he’ll enjoy more than loading me with chains. If blinding really is on the menu, he’ll hold the white-hot metal himself in front of my eyes.’

  I didn’t care if I was seen to grip the rail and steady myself. ‘When exactly were you in Athens?’ I asked weakly.

  He pulled himself gradually back together. ‘It was in the ninth year of Phocas the Tyrant,’ he said just as weakly. He stopped and scowled and repeated the hated words of kinship to the fallen Emperor. He tried to clear his throat again, but failed. He bent forward as far as his armour allowed and tried again. This time, he managed a long and thunderous burp. Then he did clear his throat. Without bothering to turn, he spat on to the deck. ‘It was two years ago – just before everything went really bad for the Tyrant,’ he added when he’d recovered his composure, ‘and the barbarians were pushing closer and closer to the ruined fort at Thermopylae. I was sent out to see what defence could be made of the Greek cities. Unlike everywhere else north of Corinth, Athens did have a wall in nearly decent shape.’ He stopped and cleared his throat again. This time, he swallowed and looked about for his box of drugs.

  ‘I wasn’t aware that Athens had a Count,’ I said. I
might as well go through the motions of interest. ‘I thought it was under direct rule from Corinth.’

  Priscus looked up from fussing with his powders and smiled bleakly. ‘Because, even today, the place has a certain prestige,’ he explained with a hint of the didactic, ‘Athens has its own administration. Since Heraclius didn’t see fit, after the revolution, to recall Timothy the Utterly Idle from Corinth, it would normally be a favour to Athens. But you haven’t met Nicephorus.’ He sniffed in a pinch of something dark. He laughed and leaned back against the rail as tears ran down his green paint.

  ‘You’d better go and get everyone ready,’ I said to Martin. I looked closely at him. His own eyes were heavy with tears. ‘Please remember everything I told you,’ I repeated.

  He bowed and went below.

  Priscus sniffed and coughed. He closed his eyes for a long groan of ecstasy. Then he was back with me. ‘Have you told our obese friend that this galley will dump us in Piraeus before going straight off to Corinth? Does he know there won’t be so much as a slave getting off with us?’ His face now creased into a smile so broad, the lead underlay on his face cracked and a few specks of white and green fell on to his breastplate.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s enough that he’s ready to make a dash once we’re ashore,’ I said. Poor Martin, I thought sadly. Until Cyprus, he’d been counting off the days to when he and his family could settle back into my snug palace in Constantinople. Safe inside the impenetrable walls of the City, he could regard the simultaneous collapse of every frontier with an almost philosophic calm. It was now a question of whether he could avoid being swept up in a double arrest in Piraeus and, without a single slave to carry baggage, get everyone out of the Empire. Poor Martin – I felt almost lucky by comparison. But Sveta would get them all to safety. With her glowering looks and vicious temper, she might be proof of the more acetic denunciations of marriage. But if anyone could ward off a general arrest on the docks, it would be Sveta. The Emperor himself might look away from her Medusa-like stare.