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.