The Ghosts of Athens Read Online Free Page A

at my face. Or it might have been the flapping wing of a bird, or of something larger. This was, I observed with what little rational thought I could manage, a disappointment. If its usual effect at night is a luxurious and more than sexual chorus of pleasure from every atom of the soul, opium can sometimes let you down. So it had tonight. The half pill I’d swallowed before nodding off was still at full blast, and I might now be in for a wild ride through memories best not revisited.
    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,