The answer he got was another disapproving look.
I had to admit that, in the labyrinth of streets that lay between the derelict Temple of Apollo and what was now the Monastery of Saint Paul, one box of rendered mud brick appeared the same as any other. In illustrations to the better class of books, Athenian houses are always shown as miniature palaces. If you bother to read the Dialogues of Plato, or any other ancient literature that mentions how even persons of quality lived then, you’ll know that the pictures are not a fair reproduction of ancient ways. Bring him forward a thousand years, and Socrates wouldn’t have felt at all out of place in these surroundings. Of course, he’d have been stoned to death the moment he opened his silly mouth. But he’d have been quite at home otherwise.
‘I have had cause more often than I care to admit,’ the Dispensator said at last, ‘to make my way here. If I have not so far left in any mood of satisfaction, this is most assuredly the house of Felix.’ He sniffed and brought the iron tip of his walking staff down with a gentle thud on the compacted earth of the track between the houses.
I looked pointedly at the step to the door of an abandoned building, and waited for Martin to take the hint and spread his cloak. I waited for the Dispensator to grunt his reluctant thanks and sit down in a shaft of sunlight.
‘You go in,’ I said to Martin. ‘Since the man really does appear to have gone barking mad, it’ll be better if you put him at some ease before we start instructing him in his duties.’ I stood in the shade and stretched lazily. There were some children playing on the other side of a wall. A few late bluebottles were about already to make a nuisance of themselves to a dog who was still trying to sleep. Otherwise, this district of Athens had all the silence you’d expect of a middling slum before everyone is up and about.
I was thinking of the previous night, and of all its endless pleasures, when the Dispensator coughed and looked at me across the narrow street. ‘I was visited yesterday evening by the Lord Priscus,’ he said.
I nodded. Getting Martin out of the residency for our tour of Athens had taken everything short of a slap to the face. Getting him off to the Areopagus had taken a few hard looks. ‘We’re as likely to be murdered in our beds as anywhere else,’ I’d told him. ‘Besides, Nicephorus has no orders, so far as we know, to set hands on you.’ That had given him very little cheer — and could have given him none, bearing in mind the repeated assurances of what Priscus had in mind for him in the event of my fall from the Imperial Grace. Now, if it seemed that Priscus was simply working on the fears of all the delegates, we might be safe enough. After all, what he probably wanted most was me to share in the disgrace back home. Doing away with me might give him an intense if momentary pleasure. But he surely knew that having to explain a dead Legate to Heraclius would only add to his eventual embarrassment.
‘For a Greek nobleman, his Latin is most fluent,’ the Dispensator added.
I nodded again. Unless he made a particular effort, Priscus spoke neither language with much delicacy. I had to grant, though, he had as great a talent for languages as my own. Indeed, I’d now discovered he knew enough Syriac to follow Nicephorus in his more unrestrained moments of terror. Give credit where it’s due — Priscus was a cut above your normal modern Greek.
The Dispensator brushed off a small feather that had settled on his outer robe and cleared his throat. ‘Something I have long wondered, however, is how the son-in-law of the Unmentionable Tyrant could have survived the revolution.’
I smiled. The Dispensator never broke bread without a stratagem. And here it was! The Lateran had its spies everywhere, but still hadn’t fully made sense of the snake pit that lay at the heart of politics in the Imperial capital. I walked over and sat beside the Dispensator. For a moment, our calves met. Then he shifted a little to the right, and there was an inch of space between us.
‘He did switch sides before Heraclius turned up outside Constantinople,’ I said. ‘He betrayed his own defence plans for the City, and made sure that, when the gates swung open, there was a minimum of fighting.’ Since Phocas had bullied me, once Priscus had flown, into making his last stand — and I’d been overwhelmed by the professionals Heraclius had picked up on his journey from Carthage — I’d not go into details here. ‘That earned him a high place in the new order of things. Besides, he is the Empire’s only decent general. Without him to slow their advance, the Persians would already have reached Antioch.’ I paused and spoke carefully. ‘Certainly, but for Priscus, we’d already have lost Egypt.’ No one could deny him that. With or without his arrival in Alexandria, I’d never have got the Viceroy to publish the land law. But Priscus had drawn the Brotherhood into Alexandria, before flattening it. He’d then stopped any invasion of Egypt from across the Red Sea. Without him, I’d have been taking very bad news back to the Emperor. There’d not have been even the pretence of a second chance in Athens.
‘He’s also the head of the old nobility in Constantinople,’ I added. I changed the subject. ‘Did he bring you any alarming news last night?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know the answer.
Now, the Dispensator gave one of those smiles that verge on the friendly without ever quite getting there. ‘He made me aware of the situation north of Thermopylae,’ he said. ‘This did perturb His Grace the Bishop of Messina. My own response, however, was that we were called here for a purpose that no merely secular difficulty could serve to interrupt.’
I looked up at the very blue sky. Trust the Dispensator to send Priscus away with a flea in his ear. If it meant that Nicephorus and Balthazar might now be pushed into arranging a sad accident for me, that was easier to deal with than standing in the way of several dozen clerics, all on the bolt for Corinth.
As I looked down again and waited for the Dispensator to get to the subject of the defective Universal Bishop grant — and this was plainly uppermost in his mind — I heard the door open to the interpreter’s house.
‘You’d better come in, Aelric,’ Martin whispered in Celtic. ‘It isn’t very good.’
I stood in the larger of the two rooms in the house. Though bare, it was neat and clean. There was an icon of Saint Luke on the longest of the walls. Beneath this were a writing table and the pens and many inkpots of one whose living is words and their exact equivalents in another language. Felix himself sat in bed, a threadbare blanket wrapped about his shoulders. It took a while for my eyes to adjust fully to the darkened interior. I could see at once, though, that this was an old man. He might or might not have been as old as he seemed from his unkempt white hair and beard. There was no doubt his wits weren’t all that were needed of someone employed for his job.
‘But where is she?’ he asked as if repeating himself. ‘She went out with letters for the Lord Count. She should have been back long before evening. Where has she gone?’ He looked up into my face.
I caught the haggard despair in his eyes. Much truth is got from strangers by a course of questioning and observation. Sometimes, like a flash of lightning, it will cross from one mind to another. One look at the face is then enough. I swallowed and ordered myself not to let my shoulders sag.
‘Please stay where you are,’ I said gently. I sat down opposite the old man and took his hand in mine. ‘Tell me — when did your daughter go out?’ Getting a meaningful answer did now take questioning. She might have gone out seven days before. It might have been five. If I really needed to know, I could turn and ask the Dispensator exactly when the man had gone from eccentricity to apparent madness. But the description Felix gave me confirmed what Martin had also guessed.
How do you tell an old man that his only child — a daughter he’d loved, and who’d been his one reason for staying alive in this ghastly world — has been murdered in some obscene and utterly worthless ritual, and then dumped like a scraped-out melon husk? I could have taken the easy path and pretended ignorance. I could have made smooth promises of a search and left the news to be broken by someone else. After all, without a positive identification, I could have told myself, I might be mistaken, and that there was no point in giving what might have been an unnecessary shock. But the birthmark he’d mentioned on the right forearm was undeniable identification. I told the man as gently as I could what had happened.