Chapter 45
With a final smash of the crowbar, the lock disintegrated. I waited for the slaves to get out of the way and stepped into the cupboard. In my dream, the door had opened inward. I’d already guessed that it really opened outward. Now it was no longer secured, it had swung slightly out. I controlled myself and took hold of the door handle.
There was a murmur of disappointment behind me as I found myself looking at a sheet of smoothed rock. ‘What a waste of fucking time!’ one of the slaves muttered in Slavic. I pretended not to have understood him and rapped hard on the rock. It was real enough and solid. I turned and nodded at the slave who was holding a polished mirror in readiness. He moved it gently in his hands, and sent a shaft of reflected sunlight from the opened window overhead on to the rock. Keeping myself out of the light’s path, I looked carefully round. Leave aside the question of why — there was nothing to suggest that a door had not been placed against solid rock and then locked shut.
‘We continue looking for deep cellars,’ I announced. There had to be something deeper than the ordinary storerooms and the dungeon Priscus had found. I’d never seen a palace yet without somewhere deep for storage of treasures or for the refuge of its owners. If this wasn’t the entrance, Irene could carry on searching. Even a day and half a night of frantic activity had left much of the residency unexplored in detail.
‘You do realise, dearie, all these men I sold you are Slavs?’ Irene tittered beside me. ‘Even if they don’t turn against us when the city gates open, can you trust them not to winkle us all out of hiding?’
I led her over to a niche that had once contained a statue. The plinth remained. The statue itself must have been of bronze or even silver. This had been stripped out long before. So too the metallic letters of the inscription. ‘Irene,’ I said quietly, ‘I don’t expect you to know the politics of the northern tribes. But weren’t these men sold to you by the Avars?’
She smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh no, dearie.’ She laughed. ‘These ones sold themselves to me last month. They turned up asking for bread. Since no one else wouldn’t do business with them, I had to take pity. I bought them all with a promise of food.’ She patted the leather breastplate she’d put on in honour of the siege and gave a thoughtful look at one of the bigger Slavs.
This did put things in a different light. I’d have to see what steadying effect my own promise and their kiss of fealty might have. However it might be with the barbarians, there was no doubt any more of their loyalty against the Athenian lower classes.
I stepped out into the garden for a breath of fresh air. Blinking in the full light of morning, I was met by someone with a stack of letters. Two of these were from the Dispensator. In one of them, he was complaining about a slight from another of the Greek bishops. In the other, he’d posed a set of questions about the Will of Christ that would take me a whole day of sophistry to answer. These he’d coupled with a reminder of how my confirmation of the Pope’s title was still outstanding. It was worth asking which of these he’d written first. The other letters were from locals — word had finally gone round that I ran Athens. I waved the messenger inside and continued across the hard mud to where Theodore was playing again with Maximin and with Martin’s child. The nice thing about being a child, I thought to myself, is that you don’t usually know until the last moment that someone is about to slit your belly open and pull out all your guts.
‘Come to Daddy!’ I cried with a passable smile. I picked the boy up and kissed him. Back in Alexandria, I’d noticed how he was growing with every day that passed to look like Priscus. This hadn’t been lost on Priscus, who’d now managed to claim some avuncular status. He’d even muttered about changes to his will. I put this out of mind and buried my face in the heavy clothing that Sveta had insisted he needed against the chill of an Athenian autumn. There was a faint smell of unchanged underclothes and of rather questionable dirt from the heaps left by all the cleaning.
‘If My Lord pleases,’ Theodore said beside me, ‘my mother has allowed me to beg permission to sit in the council hall. Your secretary has assured me it is the greatest religious gathering of our age, and that it will remain famous in all future ages.’
I looked down at the boy. For all the sun was burning through my own tunic, Euphemia seemed to have the same idea of clothing as Sveta. If he’d been dressed like that ever since leaving Syria, no wonder he was sickly. Athens might have had a wretched summer. Even so, it was hardly some frigid desert of the north.
‘You are welcome to come along to the council sessions,’ I said grandly. I’d already established that he had no Latin. He’d be no danger to what I now had in mind. If he really believed this prolonged cloud of hot air would be so much as noticed by future historians, he had less faith than I in any recovery of the human understanding from its present low point.
I gave Maximin into Sveta’s arms. Knowledge that we were under siege appeared to have settled her temper — or whatever time of month directed her moods may have altered in my favour. I thanked her and turned back to Theodore. ‘I feel I should continue with making your acquaintance,’ I said. That might take my own mind off the gathering horror beyond the walls.
He bowed gravely, and the sleeves of his tunic brushed the ground.
‘Please do ask your mother if you can be allowed to join us for dinner. Afterwards, we can go up and sit in our much improved library until darkness calls you away to bed.’
He bowed again.
I nodded.
There were a few white puffs of cloud in the sky. I didn’t suppose they would turn to rain. If they managed to cover the sun, however, it would make walking through Athens less sticky than it might otherwise be.
We took a wrong turn after I’d taken a sharp left to avoid some petitioners. If dilapidated and mostly unoccupied, the buildings that lay between the residency and the old Areopagus courthouse did give the impression of a reasonably large city. But it was an impression only maintained by keeping to the main street. I thought we’d be going across the little bridge over the Ilissus. Instead, we took another turn, and found ourselves looking at the confused jumble of masonry that had once been the Baths of Marcus Aurelius. Beyond them was a fifty-yard clearing terminated by the city wall. This was now filled with tents and the beginnings of stone shacks put up by the refugees from outside Athens. I swore at myself for getting lost, and wished I’d just told my guards to shove the petitioners aside. I motioned at a side street that would take us into a huddle of small houses, and probably to the foot of the Areopagus hill.
We’d barely set out along the street, though, when we came face to face with another gathering. This wasn’t more petitioners. Nor, I could be grateful, was it anyone looking for trouble. It was just a funeral procession of the lower classes. The two women in front were making a feeble show of crying out and tearing at their clothes. The dozen old men who shuffled along behind had their heads covered and were looking grim. I stared at the swathed bundle they were carrying, and I took off my hat and prepared to bow. Instead of passing by, though, on their way to whatever church had been appointed for the burial, they stopped directly in my path. One of the old men came forward and stepped through my armed slaves. He jabbered something I didn’t catch. He stamped his feet and pointed at me. Someone else pulled at the shroud covering the body. As it came off, the body itself was dumped without any respect on the ground, and everyone stood away from it.