The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  An encouraging smile on my face, I let the boy go through his lesson. I paid no attention to Nicephorus, who’d finally shut up and was watching the fight with vague interest. There was nothing I didn’t know already – this much about Athens I’d read and reread – but he was a sight more accurate than his Uncle Nicephorus had been. I pretended not to notice the increasing volume of what was on its way to a small riot, and listened to the boy. I’d thought, when I saw him asleep, that he was only about six. But, if he was undersized, Theodore must have been ten, or even twelve. Whatever his age, he was a scholar of some precocity. It was plain he must have been the person who was reading Gregory of Nyassa in the library. Those cushions now made sense. So did the lamps that had been left burning. He must have read until his chest had given up on him, and then staggered off to be put to bed by Euphemia.

  I thought of Euphemia. At some time since he’d gone off to compose my funeral eulogy, Priscus must have made or remade her acquaintance. I felt a stab of jealous anger. I’d find out sooner or later what could have got her to lend him Theodore’s services as a guide.

  I turned my attention back to the building I was having described to me. The western pediment, I knew, had been sculpted by Phidias himself, and showed the contest between Athena and Poseidon for guardianship of the city. The long sides carried an immense and glorious relief of a Panathenaiac Festival. Even in old times, I’d have been too far away to see much of this. As it was, the sculptures had been cleaned of their paint and gilding and then covered over with a uniformity of what may have been plaster, but that I hoped was only white paint. In the next few days, I’d give orders for a wheeled viewing platform to be built. This would let me see everything properly. If it was plaster, I’d see if I could get it taken off. Because he was subject to the Pope, I’d make this approach to the Bishop of Athens through the Dispensator. If that didn’t work, I’d offer him my tongue of Saint George. That would surely be enough to set the workmen in motion.

  A loud and final scream from one of the monks drew me down to the riot under the portico. Things had now turned openly bloody. One of the monks was on his back, and a couple of his rivals were jumping up and down on his chest. I could have taken this as an excuse to get up and intervene. It would have saved me from the trouble of being pleasant to His Magnificence the Commander of the East. But, since Nicephorus himself was taking no active interest, I failed to see any reasonable excuse for noticing the fight.

  I glanced a little to the right. A boy had climbed on to one of the statues and was rocking backwards and forwards on it. Now I was getting used to the local dialect, I could hear his repeated shout that he was taller than all the Prophets. Someone in the shabby crowd called back what might have been an obscenity. The boy rocked hard and shouted something that was too fast to catch. If he didn’t get down soon, he’d have the head off the statue. Again, Nicephorus said nothing.

  I got up and walked towards the nearest edge of the Acropolis. I could hear everyone else follow me over. I looked down to what had been the Temple of Hephaestus, though it was now a shell with a church built within it. I knew that this had once been close by the centre of Athens. Now, there was a huddle of silk weaving factories for about a hundred yards between it and the modern wall. I scanned the rest of the old centre. It made as little sense from above as it had from the ground. Perhaps if I spent a while in the residency library, looking at that mural, I might get some idea of what was down there . . .

  ‘You are welcome to disagree, dear boy – your taste in art is perverse enough, I’m sure,’ Priscus broke in behind me. I only noticed that Theodore had continued his explanations as he halted for another stammer. ‘But I can’t say any of this compares with even the Church of the Apostles back home. Would you like to comment, by the way, on its conversion to a church?’ He turned and pointed back at the astonishing little Temple of Athena.

  I might have taken this as an excuse to leave the edge of the Acropolis and walk right over to the temple. But the scuffle of the monks had passed through riot into a small pitched battle. Instead, I focused on the pediment. ‘I imagine it was damaged at some time in the past – perhaps in the barbarian attack of three hundred years ago?’

  Priscus nodded.

  ‘That may be why the original roof is gone. The new roof is based on the inner wall, into which I can see windows have been cut for the church. That leaves the outer colonnade redundant. But I’m glad the architects had the good taste to leave it in place.’

  ‘You’re a clever boy – I’ll give you that!’ came the reply. ‘But let Uncle Priscus assure you the barbarians never got up here. There’s too little damage to indicate that. I’d blame fire or some other accident of time for the loss of the ancient roof.’ He turned and raised both arms at a couple of boys who’d crept up behind us.

  One of them screamed softly and made a complex sign with his hands. A warning voice from within the crowd called them away.

  Priscus watched complacently as everyone shuffled back another few feet. ‘I still don’t think much of these old buildings,’ he said. ‘Certainly, this one pales to nothing beside the Great Church in Constantinople. Even so, I’ll grant it all has a certain elegance for those who like that sort of thing. Didn’t some Roman general think so in ancient times?’

  ‘You are surely thinking of Sulla,’ I replied with a sly smile. I leaned against the warm stones of the boundary wall and looked at the Temple of Athena. If I ignored the dark figures still darting about under the portico, it had a nobility about its shape that no scowling mosaics of Christ could take away. ‘I’m surprised you could forget the man who set the precedent for every later reign of terror. Those who don’t compare your late father-in-law to Caligula often compare you to Sulla.’

  Cheering by the moment, I smiled into the sneering face. ‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘it was Sulla. The Athenians had, with a regrettable want of common sense, backed Marius in the first of the civil wars that ended the Republic. So before he could get home for his big killing spree in Rome, Sulla rolled up here at the head of an army. Just before the city fell, the whole city assembly went out to beg for mercy. They wasted every trick of Greek eloquence on the old beast. Finally, they fell silent and pointed up here. Sulla followed their pointed fingers and stood silent for what everyone thought an age. Then he turned and, without looking at the scared assemblymen, walked off to his tent. “I spare the living for the sake of the dead,” was all he said before going in.’

  ‘Well said! Well said, my dear young fellow,’ Priscus jeered at me. ‘You’ve a talent for dramatic narration – such a pity you weren’t sent off to Hippopolis. But you have left something out. The real drama in the account is that Sulla’s engineers had already got part of the wall down, and the first wave of soldiers were through the breach and getting stuck into the customary massacre. It was a devil’s job to call them off. No one but Sulla could have done that.’ He stopped and flashed a nasty look at Martin. ‘Do you suppose the barbarians will show such taste and restraint when they push down the heaps of rubble that pass nowadays for the walls of Athens?’

  I saw Martin jerk slightly as if he’d been prodded from behind. Nicephorus unfixed his gaze from the monks, who might now have succeeded in kicking someone to death.

  Priscus leaned closer to me. ‘Shall we go somewhere a little more private?’ he whispered. ‘Even in Latin, what I have to say is not really for an audience.’

  Chapter 25

  There was a time when you could stand anywhere on the high end of the Acropolis and look down to Piraeus and the sea. Then the whole plateau was levelled to make a regular platform for the temples, and was surrounded by walls. After that, you had to go back into the Propylaea and through a side door to climb on to the roof of what had been the Temple of Victory for the sea to be visible. This was where, so legend said, King Aegeus had stood and waited for the return of his son Theseus from Crete; and from where, when Theseus had forgotten to show he’d not been eaten by the Minotaur by
replacing black sails with white, the old man had jumped down and killed himself. That may have been two thousand years earlier. Now, I stood in much the same spot, with the nearest equivalent I’d yet seen to a man-devouring monster a few paces to my right. Groaning from a very gentle climb, Priscus had clutched hold of a sturdy but dead bush that had poked through the roof, and was trying his best not to look worn out.

  ‘I didn’t suppose tourism would be your motive for coming up here after me,’ I said.

  Four miles away, the sea was a sparkling, blue carpet, broken here and there by dark islands. Just below me on the left was the theatre built by Herodes Atticus – a most generous benefactor, second only to Hadrian himself. If I looked right, there was the head and upper torso of yet another statue of Hadrian. This time, he was patting the head of his boy Antinous. An ancient city is a place of many layers. There’s a continuity of building from earliest times into the fairly recent past, and it takes much forgetting and a lot of squinting to see things as they must have appeared at any specific time in the past. Up here, though, I could almost think myself into better times, when Athens still mattered as other than a defensive point in a game that spanned the known world. Certainly, the shining sea, far off, and the deep blue of the sky were as they’d always been in Athens, and always would be.

  I pulled myself back into the present and stared at the Governor’s letter that Priscus held in his free hand. ‘I’ll admit I came out before I’d bothered opening it,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s a cheerful read.’

  ‘Cheerful, dear boy, would be an unfair description,’ came the reply. Priscus tightened his grip on the bush and reached inside his robe for a lead flask. Holding the letter under his arm, he pulled out the flask and handed it to me.

  I unstoppered it and sniffed the contents. Most of it was wine. The rest was unlikely to kill me – Priscus was still expecting others to do his dirty work. I took a swig and passed it back. Whatever of it wasn’t wine hit me as if from behind almost before Priscus could take the flask and pour most of it down his throat. Heart racing, I tried not to fall off the roof, and waited for the pattern of colours behind my eyes to settle into a reasonable blur.

  ‘It’s an infusion of yellow bugs that are gathered from the slopes of a volcano somewhere to the east of China,’ he said. ‘Mix it with sea mandrake, and your balls will explode with lust.’ He fell silent, and joined me in peering into the distance.

  At last, he let out a long and despairing sigh and cleared his throat. ‘We can forget about his numbers,’ he said. ‘They make no sense, even in terms of what the land will normally support. If I weren’t out of area, I’d have the useless toad scooped off his bed of alleged sickness and flogged round the walls of Corinth. But I won’t question the generality of the Governor’s information. There’s sod all to eat anywhere south of the Danube where a grain ship can’t be landed. In the occupied territories, every barbarian without a sword who’s still alive is a walking skeleton. Those who are armed have stopped gambling over what food can be had, and are cutting each other’s throats. It’s only because rainwater has blocked all the passes that they haven’t turned up here already.’

  I looked away from the horizon and waited till I could focus on another part of the city wall. At some time in the distant past – it might have been in the great days of Athens, or after the first real incursion in the chaotic times before Diocletian had steadied the Empire – there had been a much more substantial wall, enclosing a larger space. I could now see where it had been from a few courses of dark stone, or from a gap in the ruins that stretched out beyond the present wall. I’d not have dismissed this as ‘heaps of rubble’. Then again, I had no military experience. The walls about Constantinople were so thick, you could drive two chariots side by side along the battlements. Even the sea walls had never been breached. These walls, for all they seemed high enough, had no thickness at the top; mostly, you looked over them from a wooden platform that needed its own supports. From the other side of the Acropolis, I’d stared down at a wall without even this kind of platform.

  ‘No regular soldiers to guard the walls?’ I asked. I had no doubt that, whatever he said in his reports to the Governor of Corinth, Nicephorus had long since embezzled his military as well as his civil budget. If he was happy to live in a slum and even deny medical care to his nephew, I didn’t suppose he’d spend a clipped penny on guarding the city walls. But I’d see what response I might get out of Priscus.

  He gave a contemptuous sniff and let go of his support. Leaning carefully to avoid slipping, he found a stable place on the tiles where he could stand without risk of falling off the roof. ‘You’ve always been rather keen on citizen militias,’ he said. ‘You may get a chance to see how good they are.’

  I looked at the weathered bronze of the roof tiles on which we were perched. I waited. He gave a weaker sniff. Then he cleared his throat. I looked again at the distant sea. Now Priscus laughed.

  ‘Forget old temples,’ he said. ‘You should go and look at those walls. If they don’t fall inward at some barbarian child’s first push, we’ll see how long they can be held by whatever civilians we can trust not to impale themselves on their own makeshift weapons.’ He pulled out his flask and drained it with a sound halfway between a gasp of pain and a laugh. ‘But never mind that, my dear,’ he said at last. ‘We have a few days until the fun begins. Why don’t you call your priests together and send them all off to Corinth? If they can’t all be housed in proper comfort in what I gather is a somewhat crowded city, you can ship those of lower status across to Aegina. Unless the Avars have discovered how to work a ship, everyone will be safe enough there.’

  So that was why he’d brought me up here! I had expected better of Priscus. Perhaps his health really was collapsing, and this was his best plan for making sure that, when he stood before Heraclius in disgrace, I was hanging my head beside him. ‘We’ll have to take our chance on that,’ I said. ‘So long as the walls don’t actually fall inward, the council must go ahead. And, with so many bishops gathered in one place, I’m sure we can rely on them to pray for an avoidance of another Trampolinea.’

  Priscus made no answer at first. Then: ‘Have you forgotten about our child?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. I stepped halfway down the roof. I held out a hand for Priscus. The tiles were pitted from a thousand years of rain. The soles of my boots gripped them as if they’d been pumice stone. I could help Priscus down to me with one hand, and let him down with the other to where the roof flattened out. ‘Unless the Governor sends more dispatches,’ I said, ‘the Corinth boat comes in on Monday. My plan is to get Sveta there with the children.’

  ‘The bitch Sveta and her spawn can take their chance with the rest of us,’ he spat. ‘But I do feel increasingly paternal about dear little Maximin.’

  Silent again, I helped him down the big final step from the temple roof. We were now on a broad platform below the roof that was probably for maintenance slaves to store materials. Priscus had lost all right to paternal feelings when he cut the mother’s throat and caused the boy to be dumped outside that church in Constantinople. I’d adopted him. I’d given him his name. He was mine by custom and by law. Still, if Priscus too wanted the child out of danger, I’d not object to any belated stab of duty. It would be a cover for my own trip to Corinth.

  He stepped into a patch of shade and rubbed his eyes. ‘If you have any sense, Alaric, you’ll have your clerics out of Athens at the same time. Can’t you go with them?’ he asked with a change of tone. ‘If you took them all off to Aegina, you could still have your council there. At least, the city would have lost a few of its useless mouths.’

  The soldierly reasonableness of his tone was almost convincing – or might have been if I hadn’t known perfectly well that he knew what I knew. Several dozen bishops and other dignitaries, plus any number of secretaries and servants and other hangers-on, made about a hundred and fifty. Getting them out of Athens, and then settled any
where else and ready to do what I wanted, wasn’t a matter of shouting some religious equivalent of ‘About turn: quick march!’ One breath about approaching barbarians, and half of them would bolt for Corinth in search of a safe trip home. Getting the rest moved would be like herding cats. No, I had them all in Athens. Here they’d stay until I’d got from them what I wanted. If the walls did fail us before then, and we all got butchered, that was a risk worth taking. It was certainly better than going back home, tail well and truly between my legs.

  Priscus didn’t even wait for me to put my refusal into words. ‘Oh, do let’s go down,’ he wheezed. ‘It’s time we rejoined everyone else. I suggest we let them think we were nattering over the good old days in Alexandria – the good old days of last month, when at least I had a few hundred armed men to lead against the mob. Yes, let them enjoy their sightseeing. It’ll be the last fun they have before General Pestilence turns back the barbarian horde.’

  We’d got to the roof by climbing a ladder that had been left against the temple wall. As I helped him down its final rungs, and we stood, looking at one of the blank outer walls of the Propylaea, there was a sudden noise of shouts and howling. It was as if a stag had rounded on a hunting pack and was goring everything within reach. The noise echoed about the enclosed space, and it was hard at first to guess from where it was coming. But there was a flight of steps up to a rampart on one of the new defensive walls. We’d avoided this earlier, instead choosing the highest point we could find. I now bounded up the steps and leaned over the wall.

  The noise was coming from the Theatre of Herodes Atticus. When I’d first come up here, it was empty. Now, it was crowded. The upper semicircle of benches was mostly ruined, and covered with what remained of its collapsed roof. But the lowest benches were filled with more of the rabble. They squeezed together on the marble seats and spilled on to the stairways between. Some even stood together in the large orchestra before where the stage had once been. As I shaded my eyes from the glare of the white marble, I gradually saw that the audience had rounded up what may have been every stray dog and cat in Athens. These were now being killed with sharpened sticks and some of the smaller building blocks that had come loose over time. Dogs ran madly about the rubble of the stage. But all escape was closed off, and the whiteness was already covered with little splashes of blood. Men and boys danced and cheered as they set about the work. Though taking no part in it, more of those dark figures hung about on the margins of the slaughter.