The Ghosts of Athens (Aelric)

by Richard Blake

  ‘Needless to say, the lazy bastards wouldn’t go in,’ Priscus added in Latin. He grinned and leaned on a broomstick he was using to get himself about. ‘It takes someone of proper nerve to explore those hidden delights.’ He switched into Slavic and called for pitch torches. He turned back to me. ‘Shall I go down first?’ he crooned. ‘It will, after all, be my second visit. Or would the Lord Alaric take his turn to show he wasn’t afraid?’

  How I avoided sliding straight down those crumbled steps isn’t worth narrating. But I stepped at the bottom into a six-inch depth of cobwebs and nearly sprained an ankle on what felt like a brick floor. Priscus barked another order, and two slaves moved reluctantly past me. They stood each side of the little chamber and held up flaring torches.

  ‘Every palace has one, wouldn’t you agree?’ Priscus asked, now back in Latin. ‘Doesn’t even your dear nest in Constantinople have one for those slaves who don’t pay attention to your words of gentle admonition?’

  I ignored the laugh that turned into an attempt to clear his throat. I ignored the splatter of doubtless bloody phlegm on to the cobwebs, and looked about.

  Just because nearly everyone of importance has endorsed it, and just because I’ve never deprived myself of its practical advantages, doesn’t make slavery other than a disgusting institution. Yes, I hadn’t made use of such a place as this. I can say that I’ve never done this to a slave. But there’s no denying that the good behaviour of your own slaves rests ultimately on the knowledge that these places do exist, and are sanctioned by the laws and customs of every civilised race.

  This end of the dungeon was so low that I had to stoop to avoid knocking my head. Its other dimensions were about eight feet by twelve. Still in their manacles, two of the skeletons lay where death had overtaken them. The others had been pulled apart, and it was only from the manacles that I could tell there had been another three. I bit my lip and stared at the closest of them. Half concealed in the mass of filth that lay over the cobwebs, the skull might have been of a child or a small woman. I looked further along the wall, at one of the skeletons that held together. It still nursed what looked like a gnawed wooden pitcher.

  ‘What bastard could just have left them here?’ I breathed as if to myself.

  Priscus heard me and laughed, now with more success. ‘Why ask questions that can’t be answered?’ he said in a firm and mocking voice. ‘How often have you used these very words?’ He suppressed a cough and stepped forward. I heard the dull tread of his velvet shoes as he hurried over to the skeleton in good order.

  I followed him into the overpowering smell of must. All dead matter had long since decayed into its constituent atoms. Even so, I made sure to breathe in through my mouth.

  ‘Just look at this, dear boy,’ he cried. He twisted round to see me and beckoned me eagerly forward. ‘Come and see what refinements the ancients knew and we have forgotten.’

  I took a deep breath and took another step. I tried not to think of my ruined shoes. I did manage to avoid looking at the two slaves, who stood unmoving with bowed heads, torches held out before them.

  Priscus tugged one of the manacles free of the wrist it had enclosed for what may have been centuries. He tossed the bones into the dirt and stood up. ‘This really is lovely, don’t you think?’ he asked.

  The manacle was of a design I hadn’t seen before. What I’d always seen was essentially a broken ring that was screwed or locked together round a limb. This was something much more complex. It can be best described as a hinged bracelet welded to a chain. When fully outstretched, it resembled the antlers of a stag beetle. As you moved them closer, one part passed inside the other. Every inward movement was attended by the click of a ratchet. The two parts went together, but wouldn’t pull apart. The only way to get them back to their original position was to push them fully together, after which they continued freely back on themselves.

  Appalled, I watched as Priscus pushed them together, and then spun them forward to push them together again. ‘Such elegance of design!’ he marvelled. ‘You can adjust them to fit the largest or the tiniest of offending wrists.’

  ‘How do you get them off again?’ I asked. It was a stupid question. I’d already seen the answer. But there might be some hope that Priscus knew something I didn’t.

  No such luck. A gloating look spread over his face, and he turned away from me to show the slaves how the mechanism worked. Barbarians as they were, and ignorant of Latin, they knew the answer without having to ask.

  ‘They don’t come off, my darling,’ he said at length. ‘Not, that is, unless you cut them off. And, really, who would be wasteful enough to ruin workmanship of this quality? No, dear boy, once these things are on, it’s amputation or nothing.

  ‘The moment we’re back in Constantinople, I’ll be straight off to a workman I know. It may be a design that has somehow slipped the memory of man. You can be sure it’s a design too simple and too useful to stay forgotten.’ He giggled and shook the manacle again at the slaves. They shrank back. ‘Do you remember what I said the other evening when you were spying on me about how fear magnifies pain? The moment you feel this bronze contraption clicking shut about your wrist, you know that, even if there is no physical pain, you are lost one way or another.’ He giggled once more and kissed the tarnished bronze. He pulled on the chain. This also was of bronze, as were the clamps that held it to the wall. It was all as secure as on the day when some grinning devil had watched it being put together.

  Priscus was right about the nature of invention. Century can follow century, and some truths can lie forgotten or undiscovered. Once revealed, they can be so simple that only luck can ensure they are forgotten again. Even if whatever was eating him from within took proper hold – even if his drugs failed him – the joy alone of presenting Heraclius with his own copy of this perverted ingenuity would keep him alive till we got home.

  I leaned against the cold, crumbling bricks and took a deep breath. I’d not waste time on asking myself what these wretches might have done to bring this punishment on them. Nor would I think of their screams as the lights had been withdrawn and they’d heard the locking of the door above, or of how long they must have been alive down here before the end. I’d not even look again at the skeletons. As said, two of them were still in good order. Others within reach of these had been pulled about. I wouldn’t speculate on whether some of the bones had tooth marks on them. I tried to think of Theodore and Maximin playing outside in the sunshine.

  ‘Weren’t the ancients just a splendid people?’ Priscus cried in another ecstasy. ‘You can forget those dumpy temples I saw you blubbering over. Their true genius lies fresh and undisturbed in every underground hideaway. If only I’d had this before me when Homer and Demosthenes were flogged into me – why, it might have made me as finicky about language as the most learned young Alaric!’

  ‘If this place exists,’ I said with icy control, ‘we can be reasonably sure that there are other cellars.’ I looked down at the floor. It might be worth asking if other cellars were as damp as this one. But it was a question of underground springs. Other cellars – especially elsewhere in the palace – might be bone dry.

  ‘You must keep looking,’ I said to the slaves. They bowed low. I hurried past them to the crumbling stairs. I’d need new shoes before I went out. The pity was I hadn’t time for another bath.

  Chapter 40

  As I’d expected, word hadn’t got round that I was now the only authority in Athens. That meant no one tried to get past my armed slaves to badger me with petitions for favours or justice. For the moment, persons of quality just bowed and got out of my way. A gathering mob of the local trash had followed me right from the gates of the residency. They might know something about Nicephorus. If so, it would explain their tone and looks of displeasure. But I paid no attention to the low and sinister murmur from behind. The smell of their bodies, whenever the breeze shifted, was a different matter. Was it not partly for these occasions, though, that perfu
me was invented?

  ‘Irene tells me there will be carrying slaves tomorrow,’ Martin wheezed apologetically for the second time.

  I nodded and continued looking down, so I could keep myself from stepping off the raised stones into the drying filth of the streets. I was down to my last pair of fine shoes.

  ‘The Areopagus is nearly half a mile to walk,’ he said, as if revealing we’d have to walk all the way to Corinth. ‘It’s then quite a bit up the hill.’

  ‘You say it’s been rebuilt and given a roof since ancient times?’ I asked. I stopped and waited for him to catch up with me. I still hadn’t got him fixed into any scheme of regular exercise. But, if walking the streets of Athens was better than nothing, it wouldn’t do to have him fall into the mud. More to the point, the unarmed slaves were already overburdened with book rolls, and he was struggling along with all my writing materials. I pointed at what might have been the Colonnade of Nicias. ‘Isn’t that where Diogenes the Cynic lived in his wine vat?’ I asked.

  Martin shook his head. ‘According to one of Aristotle’s letters,’ came the learned response, ‘he lived just above the spring flood line of the river.’

  I nodded and looked about. Apart from the smoke-blackened colonnade, we were now among the monumental buildings Justinian had paid for. They were smaller, of course, than in the centre of Constantinople. But this might have passed for one of the secondary districts of the Capital where it touched on the centre. There was no feeling, among these arched buildings and their many-coloured stones, of the real – or perhaps just the old – Athens. One more junction, though, and we’d be into the Areopagus district. Though not ancient, the buildings here were old enough to give an impression of authenticity.

  From here, worse luck, it would be straight up to where every association – however old the stones might be – would be relentlessly modern.

  I looked sideways at Martin. His face had taken on an abstracted look. ‘Would you mind telling me,’ I asked in Latin, ‘what Sveta meant earlier about a witch?’

  The answer I got was a tightening of his face and a deep blush. But I repeated the question. We still had a hundred yards to go, and there could be no escaping my direct question.

  He swallowed and looked down at the dried mud of the street. ‘Oh, you know what Sveta can be like,’ he said. ‘She’s taken it into her head that the Lady Euphemia is the demon who’s always lived in the residency. She’s frightened for Theodore – and for you.’ He trailed off with a mumbled apology.

  I smiled. Yes, I knew Sveta very well. As for Euphemia, if those wild couplings did eventually kill me, I’d be in no mood to complain. ‘Dearest Martin,’ I said in a condescending voice, ‘we both know that Euphemia came here three years ago with Theodore. You really should keep your wife under better control.’

  Some hope of that, however! We walked on in silence.

  The Bishop of Athens had finished preaching a sermon of the most astonishing perversity. Two of the Asiatic Greek bishops had even dared to walk out. The other Greek delegates had looked at each other and murmured with rising disgust. I could be glad that Martin had made it into something merely banal in Latin. But that was long over, and I was now deep into my opening speech. This was, I could see, going even better than I’d hoped. There had been no time for prior composition. But, if the real ancients – those, that is, for whom Greek wasn’t essentially a foreign language to be got by rule, and never spoken without notes or fear of going wrong – could speak extempore, the learned young Alaric wouldn’t be seen glancing down at a text. Though I had answers to every question that might be raised, it would be for the best if no one thought of these questions until after he was back home. And so I’d begun with lush flattery of all present, and had then moved to a passage that I’d intended to be of terrifying complexity, and that was running fast out of control.

  I found myself straying into a morass of qualifying hypotheses. But, though stretched tighter than I’d ever have dared pen in hand, the thread of the whole sentence still hadn’t snapped. So long as he kept the main subject of the whole period in mind, no one should have lost me in either language. But I was coming close to an embarrassing descent into chaos. Much more elaboration, and I’d lose sight myself of the structure I was raising, or I’d lose much of the audience. Each of the subordinate clauses still open, I made my decision and went straight into my descent. I glanced upward at the windows of the domed ceiling and imagined a blind coming down as I made one closure. Another blind came down in my head as, the sentence rhythm moving ever closer to its final upward lunge, I closed another. As I closed the third, and then the fourth, I could feel the tension in the room. I heard the strain in Martin’s voice as he followed me in Latin and willed me not to fall over myself – not now, when a single slip would ruin the effect of the whole. I looked quickly about the room. The Bishop of Ephesus had given up his expression of sour disapproval, and was sitting with his mouth open. Martin was doing brilliantly in Latin, and had brought the same look to the face of the Bishop of Milan. Would I get there?

  And I did. I closed the last subordination, and passed without drawing breath into the last half-dozen words to round off the whole. As I finished, fifty bishops and assorted clerics got off their wooden benches and cheered themselves black in the face. Between where I stood and the semicircle of delegates, the minute clerk threw down his stylus and waved a waxed tablet the size of a gaming board over his head. I smiled and bowed and took the waves of applause. Men cheered and touched their foreheads. They turned and hugged each other. Martin’s hands shook as he lifted his cup of water. I allowed myself a brief and complacent look at my silver inkstand of office. Thirty pounds of pure silver it weighed. I’d paid for it myself when appointed to the Imperial Council, and specified that, between its three lion feet and its bowl in the shape of an old drinking cup, its long stem should imitate in small scale the serpent column set up in Delphi to commemorate the Persian defeat, and now moved to the Circus in Constantinople. I’d never yet fallen below its promise. I might now have exceeded a promise that perhaps only I could understand.

  But the council was returning to order. I raised my arms for attention, and was straight back to business. ‘It may be legitimate,’ I allowed, ‘to say that denying a Human Will to our Lord and Saviour will imply that He had not a complete Human as well as Divine Nature, so that He was not truly both man and God. Thus, to preserve the integrity of the Human Nature, it is possible that belief in a Double Will is orthodox of necessity. Now, it may be granted that such concern for the true humanity of Christ incarnate cannot be other than praised. The orthodox position is that we must take Christ to be both Human and Divine. At the same time, it can be asked if the possibility of a Single Will be inconsistent with a Human Nature.’

  I looked round again. Everyone was still glowing with the recollection of my long and wonderful sentence – and pleased at his own ability to follow it in either language. Until that passed entirely, I could get away with this mass of gibberish. I smiled and raised my hands in pious supplication. ‘Yet it may also seem to be doubted,’ I took up in a tone of utter reasonableness, ‘if the faculty of will belongs properly to a being’s nature rather than to his person. A failure to conceive this doubt is surely why some of the most learned men of the past age could assert that the lack of any faculty of will to the Human Nature of Christ deprived him of a complete Human Nature. By contrast, however, it may be said that the will is a faculty of person, not of nature. It is persons who have free will and exercise it to choose this or that. If the Human Nature of Christ had its own proper will, so that Our Lord had literally two wills, then there would surely be two Persons, one Human and one Divine. But to assert this is to fall into the most damnable heresy of Nestorius, who divided Our Lord’s Person into two. And can it be understood that the Human Nature of Christ could have its own Will, distinct from the Will of the Second Person of the Trinity, and not be a person?’

  I paused for the ritual denunciat
ions of Nestorius to echo round the hall. This gave me time to pull my thoughts together for the next and rather tricky point. ‘The question, then,’ I went smoothly on, ‘is whether Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ can have one Will and yet two Natures. Or is it that a Single Will might imply the damnable heresy of the Monophysites – that He has but a Single Nature?’ I stopped for Martin to catch up, and for the further cries of ‘Anathema be upon them all!’ Then I brought out what might be seen as a verbal trick, or as an escape from the whole circle in which men had been scurrying for ages past: ‘The orthodox position, settled for once and all at the Council of Chalcedon, is that Christ has two Natures, Human and Divine. There can, of course, be no retreat from that position. Yet, while the doctrine of a Single Will follows necessarily from the heretical doctrine of a Single Nature – for, if there were but a Single Person and a Single Nature, how could men speak of a Second Will? – does the doctrine of a Single Nature itself follow necessarily from the doctrine of a Single Will? This is the question that we have been called here to consider.’

  I stopped again, now for a sip of water and for a look about the hall. This penultimate sentence had been the critical one. I’d established that we could probably get enough of the Monophysites to agree that a Single Will was nothing more than a development from their notion of a Single Nature. But could we, at the same time, persuade the Greeks and Westerners to accept that a Single Will might follow from a Single Person, and not lead straight into the notion of a Single Nature? Get agreement on that, and we could square the circle. Priscus had put the whole thing more crudely over his stewed river frog: ‘a flattening of two opposed formulations beneath a third on which both sides could agree’. But that was essentially what I was about.