Conspiracies of Rome Page 23

  As we wandered over to the Quirinal, Martin was less taciturn than I’d previously known him. He’d changed back into the drab clothes of a slave secretary, but something of his earlier happiness lingered about him. He told me about himself.

  ‘It was in Ireland, sir, that I was born,’ he said. He paused, looking deep into his memories of childhood.

  ‘You’ve seen the great seas that lie beyond the Mediterranean,’ he continued with a sudden jerk back to the present. ‘But you have to see the clean, cold waves of the Atlantic to know what an ocean truly is. I was born on the west coast, and my grandmother used to have servants place her chair high on the cliffs so we could look together to the edge of the world.

  ‘No fisherman had ever seen it, but all agreed that the convex dish of the world ended just a hundred miles beyond those waves.’

  ‘You’ll find,’ I said with a superior look, ‘that the world is round. This being so, it has no edge.’

  ‘As you please, sir,’ Martin said with a bow that I thought slightly satirical. I was glad he didn’t ask the obvious question about how people at the antipodes didn’t fall off.

  He went on to explain that he came on his father’s side from a family that had left London when my people turned up. They’d run off to the Celtic enclave in Cornwall, and then, after constant raiding by us, they’d continued across the water to Ireland, far from the dangers we presented.

  ‘I suppose, looked at from your point of view,’ I said, ‘my people must have been rather disruptive. But it was you who invited us. You brought us in to do the shitty fighting jobs you’d forgotten how to do for yourselves. It was only natural we should take over once there were enough of us.’

  I stopped by an open shop and looked at a very nice cosmetic box. From the stiff look I could see coming over his face, I’d started this conversation badly as well. I envied Lucius and his way with slaves. It didn’t matter if they were older than he was or better looking or brighter. They all deferred to him.

  ‘You need to be aware,’ I added with an attempt at starting over, ‘that Fortune is on the side of the strong. It was your land. Then it was ours. Perhaps we shall ourselves one day be dispossessed – if we ever forget that a territory belongs to a people not by prescription, but simply by willingness to fight. But I really don’t think anyone need fear or hope that for a while.’

  What was I saying? I hadn’t meant to say that. I hadn’t even drunk much that day. I put the box down and thought of opening a negotiation for it. Though Lucius seemed to scorn it, many Church dignitaries from the higher classes wore makeup, and I rather fancied playing with different colours for my face.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying, sir,’ Martin whispered softly, ‘that trimming isn’t ivory, but just bleached ox horn.’

  I stepped back hurriedly from the box and gave the shopkeeper a dirty look. You have to be careful with some of these people.

  We continued on our journey. I made sure to thank Martin for his advice. This let me start over with him yet again. This time, I’d keep a curb on myself. ‘Tell me,’ I asked, offering him one of the dried olives I’d just bought from one of the cleaner hawkers, ‘how you got to Constantinople?’

  I ignored Martin’s sullen comment about what a fine city London had been before we broke into it. There was no point in telling him about my own family’s part in the killing and looting, creditable though it may have been. Instead, I began to prod him for his own story.

  ‘Do have one,’ I prompted him. ‘I seem to have bought far too many for me.’

  Martin had been educated in the local monastic school that his father had endowed, he now explained, with additional lessons from his father. He was intended for a priesthood in the Celtic Church. Then his father had committed some internal dereliction that he never would explain, and had decided to leave Ireland as his penance. Though a small boy, Martin had gone with him. Martin and his father had turned up at last in Constantinople, where they’d opened a school to teach the Latin language and Greek literature.

  ‘He was the best teacher in the city,’ Martin said proudly. ‘He had all the learning of the ancients and all the wisdom of the True Faith. We had more students than we could teach. We turned away all but the best.’

  But it was scholarship that had got his father and Martin himself into trouble. The Greeks didn’t like having their business shown to them by a barbarian from places never conquered by Rome. If that weren’t bad enough, he’d got into an argument about the correct pronunciation of Greek by the ancients.

  Martin went into some detail about this – a mass of technical stuff about voiced fricatives and diphthongs and the like. It meant bugger all to me at the time, though I later realised his father had been absolutely right. The moderns are corrupt in their pronunciation. Worse than that, like the modern Latins, they speak an everyday language that is removed from the ancient language, but not far removed enough to let them learn it properly. Of course, the Greek scholars were at a disadvantage.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘It was when my father began giving public readings of Homer in the recovered pronunciation that the Greeks turned really against us. They accused him of heresy. When the authorities had cleared us of that, they just told all the parents anyway that we were secretly spreading heresy, and we lost students.’

  The bills had mounted. Credit was obtained and overstretched. Eventually, when Emperor Maurice put through his last round of tax increases, the credit lines had snapped. The school went bankrupt. Martin was rather vague about the legal process involved. Interested in these things, I pressed for details.

  ‘It was all documents,’ he said with quiet despair. ‘I don’t know what my father signed. I don’t know what he got me to sign. I was young. We went to court again and again. The judge kept refusing our applications. The lawyers never made anything clear.’

  He explained that enslavement for debt had been long since made illegal. Even so, whatever they’d signed had overridden that law. Martin and his father were sold into slavery. The father had died of a broken heart on the very auction block. Martin was sold into the household of an Egyptian merchant, who’d carried him back to handle his Latin correspondence from Antinoopolis.

  From here, the narrative became broken. I had to press and press to get anything at all. Even then, I had to read between the lines. I gathered that his skin had peeled off in the hot Egyptian sun, and he’d sickened near to death from drinking the Nile water. Then, he’d been sold off cheap to a pimp, who’d prostituted him all the way to Cyrene, where the sun was still unbearable but the air was healthier. He’d almost been sold as a galley slave – though small, he was now growing, and a few months pulling an oar might have thickened his body to be of use until a few years of toil had worn it out. But his learning had saved him. He’d been bought by the Church and taken to Rome to be trained as a papal clerk. He’d been given all the less confidential Greek correspondence to handle. Now that Ambrose was dead, he might be promoted to handling it all.

  ‘Do you never want to see Ireland again?’ I asked. A look of wild despair crossed over his face. He turned away. I felt stupid for asking the question. We walked on in silence.

  ‘I do dream of home,’ he said at length. ‘I dream of the faces I haven’t seen in years. I dream of the clean, fresh waves. I dream of the little monastery bell, and the songs of old men around the fire at night.

  ‘But it was all so long ago. I have . . . I have friends in Rome. Even if I were to find the money to buy my freedom, what would I be in Ireland? I’d always be a foreigner. I’d always long for the patterns of gold and shadow that play across the broken squares of this still great city.

  ‘Can you go back to England, sir?’ he asked me. ‘Would you go back? Is there anything for you? Are the people there still your own?’

  ‘No,’ I said softly. ‘We are both refugees from our own land. We can never go back.’

  I wanted to add that we could only look forward.
But that would have been crass. I had come into riches great enough to buy Ethelbert and all his kingdom and hardly notice the expense. He was a slave, living for the moments he could steal from the Church to be with his lover and a child who’d be born the bastard of a slave. If the woman were free – unlikely from the look of her – the child would enjoy a purely formal status he didn’t possess. If the woman were indeed a slave, it also would be a slave – the absolute property of a stranger.

  The Church did sell freedom to its slaves. But Martin was right: where would he find the sum of money needed to buy an educated clerk out of slavery?’

  ‘Listen, Martin,’ I said suddenly. ‘I offered you your freedom the other night. That didn’t come off, but I want to reopen the offer. Let’s get these books out of the way. I’ll then beg you from the dispensator. I’m not his favourite Englishman, as you probably know. But he’ll owe me for those books. I’ll have to pay for a new building in Canterbury to house them all by the time we’ve finished. And I will pay for it. The dispensator will owe me, and I’ll collect on that. With all these wars, there must be educated slaves aplenty I can buy from the East to replace you.’

  I don’t know what I expected. I’d not have been surprised by polite thanks, or enthusiastic gratitude – or even a kiss. Instead, he broke down in tears. He leaned against a wall, his body shaking with uncontrollable sobs.

  I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Martin,’ I said, ‘I promise you’ll be free – free to go and do as you like. If you can think of the approach, I’ll see the dispensator tomorrow. He prays in the Church of Apostles, I think. I’ll catch him after the service.’

  Martin pulled himself together. ‘No, sir,’ he said, controlling his voice, ‘it’s best to wait until you can show the first cartload of books. I’ll have them bound just as soon as they’ve been pressed fully into blocks.’

  We walked on to the house of Anicius.

  32

  The library was much as I’d left it – was that just three days before? It seemed like three months. Martin had arranged for collection of the pile of books I’d left on the floor. I’d now start pulling down more of those precious things.

  What I really had in mind was a regular institute of higher learning in England. The Church wanted an army of educated clerics. I’d give that to the Church. Those young men could spend all morning copying manuscripts. In the afternoon, they could discuss the meaning of what they’d read. I’d make England the intellectual heart of the entire West – far away from savage barbarians, and stupid, decayed nobles, and imperial officials too weak and lazy to protect the civilisation that had spawned them as meat in the sun generates maggots, but too active and strong to leave it in peace. Our own youth would learn all I could send them of literature and history and philosophy and mathematics and science, and they would bring it back to the world that had lost it.

  Looking round, I noticed an open scroll on the reading table. I didn’t recall leaving anything there. I looked closer. It was another old book. Only this one showed greater signs of use and much evidence of care for its condition. It had been mended in all the cracked places. Some of the fainter ink had recently been gone over in a wavering hand. There was no title on it. I carefully pulled it back to the first column and began reading:

  e tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen

  qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda uitae

  te sequor o Graiae gentis decus inque tuis nunc

  ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis . . .

  It was a rapturous hymn of praise to Epicurus, I discovered with a shock. It went on to explain how he had freed us from the fear of death, and thereby enabled us to live more happily.

  It was an odd sort of poetry – none of the smooth perfection I’d been used to in Vergil and the other old writers. I later discovered it was by someone called Lucretius, who’d lived around the same time as Cicero. And he hadn’t lived to complete his poem.

  But what this poetry lacked in smooth refinement, it more than compensated for in overwhelming force. It swept over me like an oncoming tide, in wave after wave of didactic passion. We had no reason to fear death, it proclaimed. After death there was nothing, as Anicius had said, and death itself was nothing.

  ‘As we felt no woe in times long gone when from all the earth to battle the Carthaginians came, so when we are no more and the mind and body are sundered, we shall feel nothing of what may happen then – not even if the earth is confounded with the sea and the sea with the sky.’

  No voice like this can ever have proclaimed the nothingness of the soul after death. Not even Epicurus himself can have thundered this Gospel of Death so loudly. Not even the Church Fathers could have encountered this blast of impassioned eloquence without bending before it. Death is annihilation. Why therefore fear it?

  I read the piece through. I rolled back and read it again. It’s at times like this that spacing between the words might be helpful. I read it again, committing it all to memory. Seventy-five years later, I can still remember it. Perhaps I will write it down before I die. It would be a shame if the young students at Jarrow miss out on something so astonishing.

  I looked up. Anicius must have been standing over me a long time. He’d put on a robe that was almost clean and, except for his breath, didn’t smell today.

  ‘Please accept my regrets for your own troubled mind,’ he said. ‘Your friend is at peace, however. On the eccentric principles of yourself and your master, his atoms will be reused, for they at least are immortal. They will form the parts of other living bodies. He is now nothing. We all come to nothing. But different lives will make use of our atoms. And, like runners in a torch race, these atoms will hand on the lamps of life.

  ‘Post mortem nihil ipsaque mors nihil.’

  I thanked him for the immense comfort he had brought me. In truth, all the bounce I’d got from surviving that knife attack without a scratch and reaping that nice harvest on the Exchange had been knocked out of me by his words. But I wanted to be polite. I also wanted the rest of the poem. From the last sheet inside the book, I’d found that this was Book Three of a longer poem. Where was the rest?

  ‘There is more, and –’ he waved at the racks – ‘it may be in that lot somewhere. I’ll not dig it out for you. Far better, I think, if you can find it for yourself. You may find other books there that will bring you to a better appreciation of the truth. Yes, my young scholar,’ he sat down and glanced with a curiously soft look at the racks, ‘there is an educational value all its own in browsing. I used to do that when I was your age. It brought me friends who have lasted nearly the rest of my life.’

  He looked back at me. ‘Tell me, my dear boy, what for you is the value of all this knowledge that you seek?’

  ‘Knowledge,’ I said, trying to choose words that wouldn’t give him an excuse for his logic chopping, ‘allows us to live happily. Knowledge of the world gives us power over the world, and enables us to arrange the world for our own convenience.’

  Anicius sat looking at me for a while. ‘And you found that in your Epicurus?’ he asked at length.

  As said, I’d found very little yet in Epicurus. I’d had to guess most of it for myself. I didn’t answer, but waited for him to go on.

  ‘Your Epicurus,’ he said, ‘believed that the sole value of knowledge was to dispel superstitious fear. He encouraged his followers to learn astronomy simply to let us know that heavenly phenomena are natural and predictable effects, not acts of Divine Intervention. Equally his defective theory of the atoms.

  ‘But all other pure knowledge he despised. He taught against geometry and virtually all mathematics. They do nothing to remove fear, and so have no value.

  ‘Your positive theory of knowledge has no echo in any of the great philosophers of ancient times. There is a story of the great Euclid. While he was lecturing one day in the Alexandrian Library, a student interrupted him to ask what use the particular geometrical proposition might have.

  ‘ “Give the man
some money,” Euclid said to an assistant, “and throw him into the street”.’

  Anicius smiled at the recollection of the story. He went on to make some sniffy comments about where Archimedes had gone wrong in using his mathematical skills to build ‘mere machines’. He made a brief defence of knowledge for the sake of moral improvement.

  He saw my look of polite disagreement. He leaned forward and looked closely into my face. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  I steadied my features against the blast of his stinking breath and told him about England. I used its old name, Britain.

  ‘A strange people, if there are more like you,’ he said with an uncomfortable laugh. ‘You will come again, though, will you not?’ he asked, suddenly earnest. ‘There are so many books here that you will find of value. I will personally dig out some translations of Plato that my uncle made into Latin.’

  He paused and looked at me. ‘If you can tell me each time when you’ll be back, I’ll personally find the books you want. I’ll take you through them – that is, if you can bear an old man’s company. . . . Do take whatever you want. I’ll mark the ones I want back after copying. The rest you can keep. I’ll gladly—’

  He broke off with a gasp of pain. He lurched backwards, and I only just caught him in time before he hit the tiled floor. Teeth chattering, his face white, he clutched at his lower belly. I later discovered he had kidney stones. By the time he’d recovered from the spasm, he was lapsing out of rational mode.

  ‘But it’s all worthless,’ he said, back in the whining tone of our first meeting. ‘I envy you your barbarism. Devoid of philosophy, devoid of religion, you are all so pure of heart and mind.’