The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  Priscus yawned and poured himself another cup of wine. ‘So, young Alaric,’ he asked, ‘do I gather right that you’ve been sent to Athens to conquer for Heraclius at the head of a synod?’

  There are few things worse than finding a worm in the piece of bread you’ve been eating. Finding half a worm is one of them. I put the two halves of the bread down and brushed grey crumbs from the stained quilting of my shirt. ‘I’ve no doubt it’s waiting for me somewhere,’ I said cautiously, ‘but I still haven’t seen his letter of further instructions. It’s reasonable to suppose, however, that the Emperor has called a closed council to discuss the progress of heresy.’ I tried to make it all sound very dull. Priscus suppressed another yawn and looked over at the window. The light had almost faded. Another few cups, and there would be an excuse for seeing what vermin might be waiting in our beds.

  But Priscus smiled and reached for his drug box. He dropped into his wine a generous pinch of a blue powder that I knew was a stimulant. ‘You may have thought your dinner of welcome here would be an elegant affair. You may even have looked forward to meeting a few men of your own age and vicious inclinations – dicing and whoring and all that, eh? Instead, we are where we are. Now, you could let me pass an evening with recollections of how I survived the final night battle in the streets of Trampolinea,’ he said. ‘But it would only give little Martin a nightmare.’ He sipped at his wine and pulled a face. He sipped again. ‘I know what, though,’ he said, now brightly. ‘Why don’t we discuss theology? That can’t upset any of us. And, just to make it even more fun, let’s do it in Latin. I’m sure no one is listening outside the door. But let’s do it anyway for the added challenge of discussing profundities in an unphilosophic language.’

  I blinked and settled my features into complete impassivity. Martin gave me a nervous look.

  Priscus laughed and this time sipped delicately from his cup. ‘We’re all friends around this table,’ he said easily in Latin. ‘Do I ever look down on the pair of you if you don’t know the difference between a javelin and an artillery bolt? Of course I don’t! But it does so pain me when you think me nothing but a rough soldier. I know that, when I burn or rape or hang or despoil heretics, you really do assume I have no understanding of the issues involved. Go on, my dear boys, own up – you think I regard the issues as of no more substance than the arguments between the Green and Blue factions in the Circus.’

  I forced a weak smile and shook my head. The rain was beating against both upper and side window panes as if someone were knocking for entry. ‘Don’t you think it rather late for theology?’ I asked, trying to sound bored. ‘It’s been a long day, and the light has gone.’

  ‘Oh, but the night is young!’ Priscus crooned. He finished his cup and giggled. I watched as his face changed from dead white to what the lamps showed as a sort of orange. As it began to change back, and his drug took proper hold of his mind, he let out a long sigh. ‘Besides,’ he went on in a voice that carried no trace of tiredness, ‘we all know that you never go to sleep before midnight. Study, study, study, so deep into the night, isn’t it? How else does a barbarian from the edge of nowhere get such fancy Greek and that formidable learning in the classics? No, my fine, young scholar, you can sit up a while longer, to hear that Uncle Priscus didn’t entirely miss out on education. You just allow me to start this discussion with my own little summary of the issues. I’m sure you’ll have cause to correct one or two misunderstandings of detail. But do hear me out first.’

  Except when all else has failed, and it’s looked as if I were moments from a grisly end, I’ve never been in the habit of praying for help. But, even as Priscus had his mouth open to start his ‘little summary’, there was a sudden rattling on the door handle.

  ‘You finished with that yet, My Lords?’ the old cooking woman rasped as she walked in. She pointed at the iron pot. ‘The Master hasn’t bought no other food in, and, since you ain’t all dead after all, that was to be our dinner. Now, if you’ve had your fill, we wants the leftovers.’

  I’d have said seventy. Just as easily, though, she might have been fifty or ninety – you really can’t tell age with slaves or the lower classes. She stood before us, a tub of shrivelled lard in a dark dress shiny from years of cooking spills.

  ‘Get out of here, or I’ll have you flogged,’ Priscus hissed at her.

  She looked back at him and pulled a face. ‘Please yourself, love,’ she said. ‘But the condemned boy was outside the walls all day yesterday picking up them frogs.’

  Since she at least knew Greek, I wanted to sit her down and ask a few obvious questions about the management of the residency household. I also had a question about these persistent rumours of my death. But Priscus was on his feet and swaying about with a stick in his hand. He lashed out at the old woman, who, with surprising agility, dodged past him. He lunged again, this time tripping over the bottom part of an old dining couch. It splintered on impact, and Priscus vanished for a moment into a cloud of woodwormy dust.

  ‘So it’s just the beer for us poor slaves,’ was the last the old woman said before she got back to the door. She banged it shut behind her.

  I listened for the diminishing scrape of sandals on the unswept tiles of the corridor outside. Within the room, Martin had finally got Priscus free of the heap of broken wood, and His Magnificence the Commander of the East was now breathing like an enraged bull. But he controlled himself.

  ‘I forgive the old witch on account of her cooking,’ he said in a forced lightness of tone. ‘Now, where was I? Oh yes, we were going to discuss the fundamental issues of our day, and in Latin.’ He grinned at me. ‘Even if you have heard them before, I can promise my own take on them will be interesting.’

  Chapter 14

  The rain was getting worse. Now the smoke of the expired lamp had cleared away, I could smell my borrowed clothes. The prayer I’d been considering hadn’t worked. I’d not bother with saying one. I didn’t know how long it would be until I could escape from them and run a wet sponge over my body. Worse – oh, far worse! – I was stuck until then with Priscus for company.

  ‘In the early days of the Faith,’ he opened in a tone that anyone who didn’t know him would have taken for reverential, ‘when professing it was still a crime in the Empire, it was enough for most believers that Jesus Christ was the only Son of God, and that He had been sent among us to call us to the Truth and to redeem us for our sins. Beyond that, it was a matter of trying to follow His ethical precepts. Once the Faith had been established by the Great Constantine, however, attention shifted to investigating the Nature of Christ. What had been a minor and theoretical question now became a dispute concerning the peace of the Empire. Was Christ in His Nature identical with the Father, or merely similar to the Father? You will recall that Bishop Arius held the latter view, and Bishop Athanasius the former – and that every other bishop in the Empire, and eventually every one of the Faithful, was expected to take sides.

  ‘That dispute was settled at the Council of Nicaea nearly three centuries ago – in the year 325 since the birth of Christ. The bishops there decreed that Christ was, in His Substance, identical with the Father, but had also been made flesh for our benefit. Arius was anathematised and his followers were driven from the Church wherever possible. The losers at Nicaea held out for a long time – not least because their position was accepted by most of the barbarian converts. But time and a great deal of persecution did eventually establish the Nicene position as orthodox.’

  He stopped. ‘But, my dear young fellows,’ he said with what I knew was a deliberately annoying brightness of tone, ‘are we not in Athens? Is this not the city of Plato and Socrates? Is this not the place where, of old, in those supremely elegant drinking parties, knowledge was reached not through dry lectures, but by the cut and thrust of debate?’ He got up and smiled. ‘Shall I ask you both what is the nature of the good, and how we can know it is good? Shall I call that dirty and illiterate hag back in, and, by directed questioning, ge
t her to show that knowledge is innate by revealing some truth of mathematics? No!’ He sat down again and smiled at Martin. ‘So can you tell me why the views laid down at Nicaea are orthodox? Dear young Alaric may believe that the whole matter was a trifle got up by priests with too much time on their hands. In Greek, I know, the technical words for each of the positions have only one letter of difference between them – and, without qualifying adjectives, the same Latin word describes both positions. But can you tell me why the Nicene position is orthodox, and all else is damnable heresy?’

  ‘Because,’ I broke in, once it was plain that Martin was too shocked or scared to join the game, ‘if the losing side at Nicaea had been more successful, the Faith itself might have fallen apart. If the Son was accepted in any sense as inferior to the Father, Christ might quickly have been degraded to the same status as the pagan philosophers gave to their many gods. Like Apollo and Hermes, He would have been regarded as one more manifestation of the Originating Principle of All Things. There would have been no establishment of the Faith, only an addition to the Old Faith. The premises being granted, orthodoxy is a logical necessity.’

  Priscus nodded eagerly. ‘That’s right, dear boy,’ he cried. ‘You really have a gift for putting these things so clearly. Such a pity the Great Augustus ignored my advice to give you charge of the university at Istropolis. The world of learning lost a most remarkable scholar.’

  I smiled. ‘Was that before or after the place was burned by the Avars?’ I asked. I looked into the cold and glittering eyes above the bright smile. For a moment, they narrowed.

  But Priscus ignored the attempted diversion and continued: ‘After the Arian dispute was settled, a further question arose. If Christ was indeed God, to what extent was He also made flesh? That was discussed at the Council of Chalcedon a hundred and twenty-six years later. The majority opinion here – rather, the orthodox position – was that the Nature of Christ was both Human and Divine. These Natures were held to be perfectly distinct, but also perfectly fused in a single person.

  ‘Unfortunately, a considerable body of dissidents has continued to claim, if in various ways, that the Nature of Christ is single and Divine – that, as Eutyches once put it, whatever may be Human is at best merged into the Divine as a drop of honey is dissolved in the sea. Now, these Monophysites have been largely Egyptian and Syrian, and they seem to have gained the support of most Egyptians and Syrians. What began as a theological dispute has become a source of political division within the Empire. Every mode of official persuasion, from argument to bloody persecution, has failed to impose the orthodox line, that Christ is both Human and Divine. Instead, during the hundred and fifty years or so since Chalcedon, the Egyptians and Syrians have insensibly thrown off a cultural domination that the Greeks had enjoyed in the East since the time of the Great Alexander. This was covered over at first by a spirit of habitual obedience to the Emperor. But, during our present and, as yet, unfortunate, Persian War, the division has progressed from running sore into a possibly fatal consumption.

  ‘I could say more, but it would bring me to the political difficulties we face in Egypt and Syria, where the heretics await not conquest by the Persians, but deliverance. It would also involve a discussion of military issues that might be too exciting for dear little Martin. So let us turn instead to this closed council in Athens, to be attended by a select few bishops from across the entire Church.’

  I looked at Martin. He looked back. Priscus laughed and paused to swallow another frog. There are occasions when you knock a glass flask over, and it rolls out of reach across the table. You know that, if you could get there in time, you could stop it from rolling straight off to shatter on the floor tiles. But you know that even trying is a waste of time. So it was with Priscus.

  ‘Now,’ he said, a triumphant look coming over his face, ‘what would the most learned Alaric do about the Monophysite dispute? I know: he’d suggest an Edict of Toleration! Stop persecuting them, he’d say, and you eventually turn heretics into loyal taxpayers and defenders of their country. But we know Heraclius would never consent to the toleration of heresy. Worse, even if a more pliable Emperor could be found, you’d never silence those armies of ranting clerics. They’ve been anathematising each other for six generations, and have loved every day of it. Because everyone agrees that it matters, the dispute does matter, and it can’t be ignored.

  ‘So, what else would young Alaric suggest?’ Priscus leaned forward. Unblinking, he stared into my face. ‘Might it be a compromise? Might it be a flattening of two opposed formulations beneath a third on which both sides could agree? Shall we hope that, if the orthodox can be brought to agree that Christ has a Single Directing Will, the heretics will stop objecting to a Double Nature?’

  Priscus got up and tried for a dance about the room. Even with his stimulants, it was too much, and he sat down heavily on the window seat.

  I thought quickly. Martin knew everything, but he was above suspicion. There was Sergius. But the Patriarch never discussed religious policy with me other than on a boat that the two of us had to row into the middle of the Golden Horn. That left the Emperor. The four of us aside, all this was supposed to be a state secret. But there was no doubt it was Heraclius who’d been blabbing to Priscus – most likely when they’d been together outside Caesarea. I tried not to grind my teeth.

  ‘And it is supposed to be a secret, isn’t it?’ Priscus jeered as if he’d read my thoughts. ‘But it is one of my jobs to uncover secrets, you know. A still deeper secret, of course, is that it’s you, and not His Holiness of Constantinople, who is the driving force behind this compromise. You need Sergius because he’s the best man to work on the Great Augustus. And, if he takes full credit in the event of success, he’ll also be the one who falls if the wind ever shifts again.’

  Priscus took his eyes off my face and looked out of the window into darkness. ‘Well, you’ll never get Simeon to go along with any of that,’ he said. ‘He’s stupid and he’s obstinate. You know he fancied himself as Patriarch instead of Sergius – and still does? And do you suppose you’ll get anything at all out of the Latin bishops?’

  I got up and stretched. I could have told Priscus that he’d got things wrong. But he’d got them too right to bother with denials for their own sake. ‘Like every other orthodox churchman within the Empire,’ I said, ‘His Grace of Nicaea will do his duty. I grant the Latin bishops may be a problem. But we shall see how the council goes.’ I sat down again and poured more wine. Though disgusting, it might settle my nerves.

  Priscus got up again. He walked over to the iron pot and looked in. He picked up his spoon and stirred the contents. ‘See, dear boy,’ he took up again, ‘you think that, if you can get a mob of blackbirds to sing as you direct, you’ll go home in glory. I’ll then be the one to pick up the blame for those unfortunate events in Alexandria.’ He grinned and gave full view of his riddled teeth. ‘But I wonder how easily you’ll get that?’ He suddenly bent over the pot and pressed hard on his belly. He gave a long burp. ‘I’ve no doubt you’ll need still more of my support before we get out of this dead or dying city.’ He pressed harder on his belly and gave another burp. Then, after a moment of retching, he opened his mouth wide and, with a dull splash, something had flopped out into the slime. Priscus coughed and stood up. He leaned back and pushed the index finger of his right hand into his throat. Now, he bent quickly forward again and vomited everything he’d eaten into the pot. There was a stink of wine and corrupted stomach juices as whole lumps of clotted frog splashed back from where they’d come.

  It was always hard to predict what Priscus would do next. This time, he’d really got me by surprise. Wine cup frozen an inch from my lips, I watched as he twisted his body, and burped or retched, and vomited again. But he did finally empty his stomach, and stood upright to look into the pot. To be fair, it was hard to see what difference he’d made to its contents.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he gasped at Martin, ‘that the blue ones can be
a little poisonous this time of year. They won’t kill you,’ he went on reassuringly. ‘But you may find yourself pissing rusty water from your arse for a couple of days.’ He stood over Martin and gloried in the terrified look he was getting. ‘Still, I did promise that it wouldn’t make you fatter!’

  He walked unsteadily round the smashed dining couch on his way to the door. As he reached the door, he stopped and turned. ‘I don’t know anything about Herodes Atticus,’ he said. ‘But I can tell you this palace is said to be haunted.’ He grinned at Martin, who’d given up on clutching at his stomach and was now looking around nervously. ‘Yes, there was a witch who lived here many ages ago. I’m told there are nights when you can still hear her, singing spells along every corridor.’ He laughed and went out.

  I listened to the slow scrape of his own sandals as he went off in the direction of his rooms.

  I got up. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said firmly. ‘Today’s been busy. Tomorrow will be busy.’ I reached out to help Martin to his feet. His own hand was damp and trembling. ‘Do see about a bath before waking me,’ I added. ‘And if you bump into him, tell that bastard Count I want a word with him at his earliest opportunity.’

  Chapter 15

  ‘Open it,’ the voice urged in the darkness behind me. ‘You will find that it needs the key with seven hooks.’

  Sure enough, the voice had urged right. Nothing I’d tried earlier with Martin had opened the big door inside the cupboard. A few centuries of damp can do wicked things to iron locks. By much oiling and rocking back and forth, we’d eventually got the cupboard door itself open. This further door, however, might have been a stone relief for all we’d been able to open it. Now, a single push and pull of the key, and I heard the grate of disengaging teeth. The door swung silently inward, and I could smell the damp, chilly air of what was assuredly one of the cellars we’d been seeking but not yet found.