The Ghosts of Athens Read Online Free

The Ghosts of Athens
Book: The Ghosts of Athens Read Online Free
Author: Richard Blake
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, Historical, Thrillers
Pages:
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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
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