Richard Blake - The Ghosts of Athens

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.

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.