Richard Blake: The Ghosts of Athens

No, I was awake. Granted, dreams fed by the poppy can bleed into each other. Sometimes, you’ll even dream that you’re awake between other dreams. But, no — this wasn’t a dream of being awake. Deep within me, some faint grip on reality was telling me that I really was lying on the wooden bunk where Jeremy had placed me after dinner, and that hands were pressed hard on my shoulders. Was someone shouting? Hard to tell for the moment. Beyond doubt, though, I could feel that I was being held down.

Time was when I’d have reached under my pillow for a knife — or, failing that, I’d have swung my legs upwards, and, with all the force that training could give to the heavy muscle of a northerner, I’d have got whoever was attacking me from behind. You can’t do that at ninety-seven. But, as I’d shown well enough on London Bridge, old instincts don’t entirely die. My shoulders were being pressed down on to the wooden boards of my cot. But my arms were still free. I clasped both hands together and rammed upwards as hard as I could. .

‘Oh please, Master, think nothing of it,’ Jeremy sobbed as he sponged more water over a cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding. ‘It was entirely my fault for disturbing you. But you seemed so — so very agitated in your sleep. .’

I’d got the lamp turned up in the room we were sharing, and I could see how close I’d come to smashing the boy’s nose into his face.

I hobbled over and sat beside him on his own wooden cot. ‘Drink this,’ I said gently. He looked at the cup and tasted the stale cider I’d grabbed from the supper table before we were brought over here. It was poor stuff, but would take his mind off the pain. I held the cup while he finished its contents.

I put an arm round his shoulder. ‘Listen, Jeremy,’ I said, ‘I do most humbly apologise.’ I could have elaborated on the life I’d led, and how the habit had long since ripened into instinct of using lethal force whenever in doubt. Instead: ‘It was a dream,’ I said. ‘That’s what made me cry out — though I really am surprised if it wasn’t in Latin.’ I fell silent and let my bony arm rest on his bony shoulder.

I got up and went back to my own cot. I arranged the threadbare blanket about me like a kind of shawl and sat on the rough boards. ‘The Abbot here has told me,’ I said with a firm change of subject, ‘that Theodore wants to see me again directly after morning prayers. If tomorrow is anything like today, I don’t think that will detain me very long. I suggest, then, a proper look round Canterbury. There is a lot here that you still haven’t seen. We can even have food carried outside the walls for a lunch in the open. The forest that stretches between here and Richborough doesn’t compare with what we passed through after London. If you can put up with holding me by the arm and keeping speed with a very old man, I’ll take you to the field of Saint Maximin — it’s where, when I was seventeen, everyone says I helped the most Holy Saint turn tree sap into beer.’

Jeremy looked back at me and smiled brightly. The odd turn of my last sentence had passed him by. Odd syntax, though, was the least the story deserved. So very long ago, I had started out in Canterbury as secretary to Maximin. He’d been a fat, jolly little monk fresh out of Ravenna, and I a barbarian with a pretty face who had nothing honest to sell but the Latin I’d picked up in Richborough. We’d hit it off at once, and, for five golden months, I’d gone out with him from the newly established mission in Canterbury to fish for souls. We’d faked resurrections from the dead. We’d made trees speak and stones spurt fire. I’d once even dressed in a bearskin and let Maximin teach me to pray before a whole village of gawping prospective converts. But we’d never done anything as productive as turn tree sap into beer. Still, if I’d only recently heard that story, it would never do to question it. Deny one miracle, after all, and — why — even young Jeremy might start thinking of himself.

No chance of that for the moment, however. ‘I’d really like that, Master,’ he said. He leaned forward and raised his hands in the way that I sometimes did in class to get attention for something important. ‘When a man is tired of Canterbury,’ he intoned, ‘he is surely tired of life.’

He’d said this in Latin. I wished he’d stayed in English. Taedet , you see, is an impersonal verb. His use of it had produced the kind of sentence that, in Jarrow, would have had me tapping my cane on the ground and looking grim. But I only nodded. I leaned back and carefully swung my legs on to the cot. Trying to avoid getting a splinter through my pitiful nightgown, I stretched out and made myself as comfortable as might, in the circumstances, be possible.

I suddenly realised that the lamp was still turned up. ‘Dearest Jeremy,’ I said, looking up at the dark timbers of the ceiling, ‘it is a sinful waste to burn oil when it isn’t required for reading or prayer. So do be a love and push the wick down.’ In the darkness, I straightened my legs and settled myself to wait for the opium to reclaim me.

But Jeremy was now in conversational mood. ‘Master, is it true,’ he asked, a hint of shyness in his voice, ‘that you had to leave Canterbury after you’d killed a man?’

What did those boys talk about in Jarrow when my back was turned? But I didn’t suppose anything could strike them as a tall story where the Old One was concerned. The only thing they might possibly have doubted was the truth. ‘Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy.’ I laughed. ‘I had killed men before I took service with the Church. I killed any number of them afterwards. But I was on my very best behaviour in Canterbury. What did for me here was that I got the wrong girl with child.’

I laughed again in the frosty silence that resulted. Jeremy had asked me a reasonable question. Whether or not he’d like it, he deserved an answer. ‘She was the daughter,’ I took up again, ‘of one of the chief men around King Ethelbert the Saint.’ I stopped again and smiled unpleasantly. Pushing eighty years before, I’d never have thought my remote cousin Ethelbert could one day be seen as anything but the leering tyrant that he was. He’d done my father over with an enthusiasm King Chosroes himself might have respected. He’d then dumped my mother and all her children in Richborough, so he could come over as and when for a spot of rough sex. The first real notice he’d taken of me was when he’d had me trussed up one night and tried to castrate me. What a bastard he was!

‘Doubtless, my young fellow,’ I ended my story, giving a grand wave that I doubted he could see, ‘you may think it all very scandalous. Nevertheless, I do urge you to set aside any unease or embarrassment when others talk of cock or cunt or fucking. Your vows preclude you from knowing of these things. But those who claim to be disgusted by their mention are invariably men without knowledge or honour, or courage or dignity.’ I would have said more, but the gentle buzzing that Jeremy had set up towards the end of my story now deepened into a loud snore. I lay very still in the darkness and willed myself to go back to sleep.

No peace for the wicked, however! One of the reasons the old generally give up on sex is the annoyance, first of getting so uncertainly to the threshold of rapture, and then of only sometimes being able to pass across. So it now was with sleep. It didn’t help that Jeremy would have kept a stone awake with his snoring.

But, no, I had been sleeping. Without once being other than aware of the snoring boy, I’d been back in the palace at Ctesiphon. The snoring had taken the place of flutes and cymbals to accompany the slow and elaborate gyrations of the dancing girls. With great consideration, Chosroes had told me what wines to avoid. Now, tipsy on something that tasted of wormwood, I’d been sitting with him for about a month — it may have been a year — while his chief general flopped about on the cushions like a landed fish, his face turning black from the poison he’d been fed. A good spy, you see, would have confined himself to harvesting truth from Roxana. The Great Alaric, you can be sure, had planted a few very useful lies in her mind. At last, they’d found their way into the Royal Mind, and I was now switching a complacent gaze between the fluttering, libidinous hands of those naked girls and the swelling tongue of a man who’d spent the past year studying survey reports of the walls of Constantinople.