The Ghosts of Athens Read Online Free Page B

and, for five golden months, I’d gone out with him from the newly established mission in Canterbury to fish for souls. We’d faked resurrections from the dead. We’d made trees speak and stones spurt fire. I’d once even dressed in a bearskin and let Maximin teach me to pray before a whole village of gawping prospective converts. But we’d never done anything as productive as turn tree sap into beer. Still, if I’d only recently heard that story, it would never do to question it. Deny one miracle, after all, and – why – even young Jeremy might start thinking of himself.
    No chance of that for the moment, however. ‘I’d really like that, Master,’ he said. He leaned forward and raised his hands in the way that I sometimes did in class to get attention for something important. ‘When a man is tired of Canterbury,’ he intoned, ‘he is surely tired of life.’
    He’d said this in Latin. I wished he’d stayed in English. Taedet , you see, is an impersonal verb. His use of it had produced the kind of sentence that, in Jarrow, would have had me tapping my cane on the ground and looking grim. But I only nodded. I leaned back and carefully swung my legs on to the cot. Trying to avoid getting a splinter through my pitiful nightgown, I stretched out and made myself as comfortable as might, in the circumstances, be possible.
    I suddenly realised that the lamp was still turned up. ‘Dearest Jeremy,’ I said, looking up at the dark timbers of the ceiling, ‘it is a sinful waste to burn oil when it isn’t required for reading or prayer. So do be a love and push the wick down.’ In the darkness, I straightened my legs and settled myself to wait for the opium to reclaim me.
    But Jeremy was now in conversational mood. ‘Master, is it true,’ he asked, a hint of shyness in his voice, ‘that you had to leave Canterbury after you’d killed a man?’
    What did those boys talk about in Jarrow when my back was turned? But I didn’t suppose anything could strike them as a tall story where the Old One was concerned. The only thing they might possibly have doubted was the truth. ‘Oh, Jeremy, Jeremy.’ I laughed. ‘I had killed men before I took service with the Church. I killed any number of them afterwards. But I was on my very best behaviour in Canterbury. What did for me here was that I got the wrong girl with child.’
    I laughed again in the frosty silence that resulted. Jeremy had asked me a reasonable question. Whether or not he’d like it, he deserved an answer. ‘She was the daughter,’ I took up again, ‘of one of the chief men around King Ethelbert the Saint.’ I stopped again and smiled unpleasantly. Pushing eighty years before, I’d never have thought my remote cousin Ethelbert could one day be seen as anything but the leering tyrant that he was. He’d done my father over with an enthusiasm King Chosroes himself might have respected. He’d then dumped my mother and all her children in Richborough, so he could come over as and when for a spot of rough sex. The first real notice he’d taken of me was when he’d had me trussed up one night and tried to castrate me. What a bastard he was!
    ‘Doubtless, my young fellow,’ I ended my story, giving a grand wave that I doubted he could see, ‘you may think it all very scandalous. Nevertheless, I do urge you to set aside any unease or embarrassment when others talk of cock or cunt or fucking. Your vows preclude you from knowing of these things. But those who claim to be disgusted by their mention are invariably men without knowledge or honour, or courage or dignity.’ I would have said more, but the gentle buzzing that Jeremy had set up towards the end of my story now deepened into a loud snore. I lay very still in the darkness and willed myself to go back to sleep.
    No peace for the wicked, however! One of the reasons the old generally give up on sex is the annoyance, first of getting so uncertainly to the threshold of rapture, and then of only