Richard Blake: The Ghosts of Athens

‘He baptised a dead infant,’ someone else whispered into my good ear. It might have been a churl, or one of the lower tradesmen — hard to tell the difference, really: the broken nose and missing front teeth told me nothing either way. ‘Now Deacon Sophronius is over from Rome,’ he added, ‘there ain’t no more laxity.’ He stopped and giggled, then repeated: ‘No more laxity.’ He looked away to see if there was anything he was missing.

Sophronius was now out of his chair, and was holding up his arms in an exaggerated prayer. Scourges still in hand, the monks had stopped their endless wheeling, and were bent forward in obvious exhaustion.

‘No, you don’t baptise the dead,’ the man beside me went on. ‘If the magic water don’t touch you when you’re alive, it’s the everlasting fire for you.’ He pressed his nasty face into a broader smile. ‘Oh yes, the black fires that ain’t never put out, and the full view, miles above, of the blessed ones in Paradise.’

‘Too right!’ someone joined in from behind me. ‘If a child comes out dead, it was always marked out by God for the fires of Hell. Not the Pope himself can change that. The priest shouldn’t never have let the mother think otherwise.’

There was a hum of agreement all about, though I did see one or two grim faces in the crowd. Sophronius was now beginning a recital of one of Pope Gregory’s more inhuman letters. I could almost hear the smacking of his lips at every pause for the translation into English. I’ll not bother commenting on its inhumanity; besides, you have to accept there’s a certain lawyerly neatness about the doctrine. If you want everyone to believe there is no salvation except through the Church, you can’t go making exceptions for a stillbirth.

Though the penitent himself might well have been dead now, Sophronius was going at a very leisurely pace through what I knew was a letter of immense elaboration. I looked up as the dark and ominous clouds that I’d seen gathering ever since I was wheeled out of Theodore’s residence now blotted out the sun, and I felt the chill of an approaching storm.

‘Let’s get under cover,’ I said to Jeremy, who’d got himself beside me. ‘If you think this spectacle is worth a soaking, I don’t.’

I dreamed that I was young again. I was having dinner with King Chosroes. The Persians hadn’t yet begun their row of shattering defeats that cleared us for what seemed like good out of Syria and Egypt. Unless you had access to the military and tax reports given monthly to the Imperial Council, this could still be seen as a disastrous war. The Persians might be mopping up the Asiatic provinces a battle at a time. They might just have been thrown back with tremendous effort from a stab at Constantinople itself. But most people out of the know expected either a military recovery on our part, or a treaty that would leave us nursing a grudge until the next war. But, as a member of the Council, I’d been fully in the know. When the Persians spoke of reversing the victories of Alexander, a thousand years before, and of recreating the hegemony that had nearly gobbled up the Greek city states, it was more than wishful thinking. The Empire was on the verge of collapse.

I saw Ctesiphon twice. The last time I was there, the Persian capital was much diminished. And the victorious army, of which I was effectively the head, left it a heap of smouldering ruins. But my dream had set me back there for my first visit — when it looked as if the Persians really would be the winners in this great struggle for mastery of the known world. How I’d managed to get there unmolested — let alone worm my way into the Royal Court at Ctesiphon — is too long a story to give as an aside. But I was there, got up as an heretical bishop, and I was having dinner again with His Majesty the Great King.

It was a jolly enough time, if you can find anything good to say about watching gory executions most days, and every single night having to shaft a pretty and inventive, but maniacally demanding, third royal wife. No, it was a jolly time in its own way. The Great King was tired of being nagged by his fire-worshipping priests, and, once he realised I shared his taste for opium, we’d struck up an odd sort of friendship. So, every three evenings, we’d sit in his bedroom, feasting on wild figs and cabbage he’d gathered with his own hands, and then sniffing lumps of resin wrapped in gold foil and dropped into bowls of glowing charcoal.

I’d finished a recitation of some of the lighter anecdotes in Herodotus about the King’s forebears — the disappearance of their own literature always left the Persians dependent on the Greeks for their history — and was waiting for a gong to sound in one of the outer rooms. This would be notice that some eunuchs were coming in to entertain us with their efforts at wanking each other. No gong tonight, though. Instead, it was one of the royal secretaries with another list of family members accused of treason. While Chosroes listened intently to each name and mumbled punishments it needed a diseased mind to conceive let alone pronounce, I made my excuses and went out through the private door.

The Great King had just fathered something that, for the first time in twenty years, had turned out not to have three legs or a cleft palate. So the whole palace was under orders to drink itself blotto. This was my chance for another look through the Secret Archive. There had been a whole delegation of Avars in Ctesiphon. So Roxana the Lustful had whispered in my ear the night before. The generality of what had been discussed was obvious. But it was the details that mattered — and the memorandum of the joint descent on Constantinople would still be drying.

The royal entrance to the archive building was along an unwindowed corridor. There was a lamp burning dimly at the far end, and I made my way along the boarded floor without setting off any of the bells that Chosroes had caused to be placed even here. A little at a time, I got the door catch up so it didn’t make any noise, and let myself in.

Oh bugger! The Pope himself was sitting in there. How he’d got here all the way from Rome — and in his most formal reception outfit — isn’t something you bother asking in a dream. It was enough that he had got himself there, and was now grinning at me from the only chair in the room.

‘You shifty, atheistical bastard!’ he spat in Persian. ‘You’ve a right nerve abusing the King’s hospitality. I’ll see you buried alive for this, an eighteen-inch stake rammed up your arse.’

I hurried across the room and tried to shush him into silence. No hope.

He now switched into Latin and began a shouted recital of my official name and titles. His voice rose and rose, until it echoed from every wall in that large room.

I suppose that, even in dreams, the Universal Bishop — Servant of the Servants of Christ, the first among equals of all the Patriarchs, and so on and so forth — deserves a certain respect. But I hope you’ll not think it scandalous if I snatched up the cushion from under his feet and shoved it hard over his face. I shoved it there and held it there, while his arms flailed helplessly about, and I tried to stop up the little squeals of outrage that came through the stuffed silk. .

All now went dark about me and I drifted, as if for many centuries, through a medium less buoyant than water, though more dense than air. I might have been very high above the earth. Or perhaps I was drifting upside down. When I did look up, I was aware of a solid blackness that might be the land. Now and again, I heard the piteous wail that might have been a child. Perhaps there was a hand dabbing at my face. Or it might have been the flapping wing of a bird, or of something larger. This was, I observed with what little rational thought I could manage, a disappointment. If its usual effect at night is a luxurious and more than sexual chorus of pleasure from every atom of the soul, opium can sometimes let you down. So it had tonight. The half pill I’d swallowed before nodding off was still at full blast, and I might now be in for a wild ride through memories best not revisited.