Conspiracies of Rome (12 page)

    Had it been my rooms only, I’d have concluded it was the slaves going about their business or looking for things to steal. But Maximin’s papers had been gone through. He was always very neat about these, and had spent an age when he unpacked in arranging these into the right order. He swore they had all been disarranged. Yet when Maximin checked the money he’d left on full display, none was missing. Nor was his silver crucifix. Whoever had been in wasn’t after cash. We called for Marcella. She was distraught.

    ‘But he was such a well-spoken gentleman,’ she wailed, looking at the papers on Maximin’s table. ‘He swore he was sent by you from the prefect’s office to get some things you’d forgotten. This is a respectable house for respectable people. We’ve never had this sort of thing before.’

    ‘What did he look like?’ I asked.

    He was a tall, dark man, she explained among a mass of irrelevant detail, with a scar and an eye patch. ‘He was ever so polite. He knew your names and where you’d gone, and everything. I had no reason on earth to believe he could be a common thief.’

    She fell into a chair, fanning herself with a battered ostrich feather. ‘Gretel! Gretel!’ she screamed. ‘Where are you? Where have you gone, you lazy good-for-nothing bitch?’

    The little maid I’d earlier seen scrubbing the step came silently into the room. She was a stunner – and by the sideways look she threw me, I could see she thought the same of me. The moment I heard Maximin snoring across the corridor, I told myself, I’d have her. For a moment, I clean forgot the matter in hand.

    ‘Gretel, you little Lombard bitch, you hear me well. You don’t never let strangers into the house again. You hear me? You don’t let no one in. I say who comes and goes in this house, and don’t you forget – else I’ll sell you into the brothel God made you to furnish.’ She heaved herself up. ‘O fie, sirs! Just look at the refuse we have to buy nowadays. Even persons of quality – such as I myself – is hard put to find slaves what aren’t uppity. Shall I have her whipped for you?’

    ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ said Maximin. He could have added it wasn’t Gretel in any event who’d let One-Eye into our rooms.

    ‘Where is the relic?’ I asked quietly.

    With a look of concern, Maximin took me down to the stable beside the toilets. Except for the gold, he’d left his share of the loot in his saddlebag. There it still was. The groom told us One-Eye had been in, but had only time to check my bags before an Ethiopian diplomat had come in and started demanding who he was. He’d gone off pretty directly.

    ‘There was something furtive about him,’ the diplomat said to me. ‘I hadn’t seen him in the house before, and I didn’t think he was a new guest. If I’d thought he was trying to steal one of my horses, of course I’d have killed him on the spot. As it was, I challenged him, and he sloped off without saying anything.’

    I’d met the diplomat earlier in the day. We’d bumped into each other as I was going in to try out the toilets. He’d smiled at me and bowed most politely as I’d passed him. Of medium height, very thin and black all over, he was the first person of his sort I’d ever seen. Assuming you, my Dear Reader, are English, I imagine you’ve never seen people like him. But I assure you, there are people who are black all over. They come from parts of the world where perpetual exposure to the sun causes the skin to blacken with permanent effect. And for some reason I can’t explain, their skin burns not only in the exposed areas.

    For all his physical oddities, though, he spoke excellent Latin. I later found he also knew Greek and several Eastern languages beside his own. Now we lounged together just inside the stables, quietly comparing notes on the delights of Rome. He’d been here about a month longer, and had found his way round pretty well. We agreed I should let him take me soon on one of his ‘missions of pleasure’. From the way he grinned and rolled his eyes, these missions were rather less than spiritual.

    Just as we were turning back to a discussion of what One-Eye might have been after, Maximin was calling me over.

    ‘God be praised,’ he said. ‘This Ethiopian has saved the Church from a second violation. But for him, the relic would surely have been stolen again.’

    He showed us the leather bag into which the English mercenaries had stuffed things. It was undisturbed. Maximin explained to the diplomat about the relic and its significance. There followed an interminable flourish of crossings and mutual flattery.

    ‘So he followed us all the way back to Rome,’ I broke in, ‘to steal Saint Vexilla’s nose?’

    I wanted to speculate on the value of the jewelled casket containing the relic. None of the cash in our rooms had been touched; and that together was worth much more than the casket. But Maximin gave me a dark look that said, ‘Shut up: this man is a stranger.’ The diplomat wandered off to look at his own horses.

    Maximin took the leather bag containing the casket straight up to his room. ‘Who else has a key to our rooms?’ he asked Marcella.

    ‘Only me, Reverend Father,’ she answered.

    ‘Good. Pray see to it that only you and I go into these rooms in future.’

    With that it was over. Not very hungry, I skipped dinner. Normally, I’d have had a Greek lesson from Maximin. We were past the scraps of literature he could remember and were well into conversational practice. I said I felt tired after the long day. From the loud snores I soon heard, so was he. I put down the mathematical text I’d been reading and went to the door.

    I feasted that night on bread and cheese. Oh, glory was it to be young. If only I could be again  . . .

13

‘The English mission,’ the dispensator said with an attempt at the declamatory style, ‘is more than the work of bringing over a race of barbarians on the edge of the world. It is a new and vital project of the Church.’

    He’d been addressing us for what seemed half the day, standing within the arc of a semicircle of seats; other, lesser dignitaries seated beside him, all in their best white and purple robes. Maximin and I sat before him, ourselves in the best clothes we’d been able to find on the last lap of our journey to Rome.

    No one dared look bored. No one dared plead other business. The dispensator was in fact, though not in theory, the main Church official in Rome, and therefore the most important man in Rome. He handled the accounts, authorised payments, and supervised the whole administration of the Church and its ancillary functions.

    Maximin had been exceeding glad to crawl out of bed and have the summons pressed into his hand. Splashing water over his face, he explained this was another sign of our step up in the world. Back in Canterbury, Bishop Lawrence had told him to report to someone of far less importance. Now we were barely short of honoured guests.

    The great hall of the Lateran is a wonderful place for a meeting – cool, though not too cool, good light, good acoustics, a fine coffered vault high above, glittering mosaics of Christ and Saint Peter covering the walls.

    Probably enjoying their faint echo, the dispensator repeated his phrase about a ‘new and vital project of the Church’. He sucked in his withered cheeks, and looked round to bask in the consent of all around him. Then, with a lurch from bombast into a diplomatic jargon I could only understand much later, he continued.

    For all the intriguing that had bought it, the title of universal bishop meant nothing in the East, where the Churches hated or feared or despised all things Roman. It meant little in much of the West, where the Churches claimed an autonomy of discipline based on their own long foundation, and mostly dealt with Rome though their local kings. But the English Church was a new Church, subject directly to Rome. Bishops were appointed by Rome. Local rulers were to be honoured, but obeyed only so far as was consistent with a primary loyalty to Rome. So far as England was concerned, the Lateran was ‘
omnium orbis ecclesiarum Mater et Caput
’ – the Mother and Head of all the Churches of the world.

    There was, the dispensator granted, a Celtic Church in the country that had survived my people’s invasion. This Church denied the primacy of Rome, and held heretical views about the date of Easter – as if this latter would have counted but for the former dereliction. Our duty was to bring the Celts over. If they refused our hand of loving friendship, we should use all secular means available to smash them.

    On the model established for England, a new order was to be established in the West, and then elsewhere – of a unified, centralised Church, subject in all matters to Rome. The dispensator quoted the relevant text of Scripture: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’

    He gave it in Latin – ‘
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram
 . . .’

    The pun, you see, is the same in Greek and Latin – though I hope you will also notice that it isn’t a very good pun. ‘Peter’ and ‘
petra
’ are not substantives of the same gender. Now, would God really sanction a universal Church based on such slipshod grammar? I don’t think so. Indeed, I assume Christ addressed Peter in Aramaic, which I know pretty well, and the pun doesn’t work. Nor does it in Coptic or Syriac or Hebrew or Slavic or Germanic or English.

    I looked at that semicircle of the great sitting still in their formal robes. Some of the faces were ravaged by fanatic penances, others softened by lives of sybaritic luxury. Some were educated men. Others could truly boast that they had never opened a single book of pagan learning. But they had an absolutely common purpose. This was the aggrandisement of their Church. They had taken this from those who went before them. They would hand it on to those who followed. You can achieve much in your own lifetime. But this is nothing compared to what can be done in the lifetime of a corporate entity. This never tires and never sleeps and never grows old and feeble. It recovers from mistakes and reverses. Like the waves on Richborough beach, individual follows individual, sometimes pressing forward, sometimes falling back. But the tide comes in with unbroken force. It can, by sheer perseverance, change the manners of whole nations, and can by unending repetition make statements that, considered rationally, are nonsense, gain acceptance even by the wise as self-evident truths.

    Such I gathered from my first real encounter with the Imperial Church of Rome.

    That was what made our book-gathering mission so important. I had thought the books were brought over to entertain the likes of me. Not so – or not entirely so. Through the English Church, Rome would conquer not only by example. Our nation was to be reshaped as a race of Christians and Christian missionaries. Our priests would then be sent forth – to France, to Germany, to Spain, even back to Italy – with purified Latin and no tinge of heresy and no loyalty but to Rome, to reshape all other nations in the image established for us. The books were not incidental. They were central to the plan.

    ‘So, Maximin of Ravenna,’ the dispensator concluded at length, ‘you have our fullest confidence. You have unlimited funding. State what you have achieved for us in England, and state what more you want of us.’

    Maximin stood and began a monstrously long speech of his own. He’d been working on this ever since we took ship from Richborough. We were told of the conversion of Ethelbert and his many works of piety. I barely recognised the drunken, demented savage I’d last seen with mutton fat dripping off his chin and a gelding knife in his hand.

    From this, we proceeded to the multitudes of converts – true enough, if you allow for the fact that their sacred trees had all been cut down and their witch doctors killed or chased out of Kent. I was produced as evidence of the miracles of learning that my people could achieve. One of the clerics gave me a long and appreciative inspection, abstractedly wetting his lips. The others marvelled at my command of the language as I uttered a few sentences in Latin.

    Then there were the official miracles. Oh, I had trouble keeping a straight face during that recitation of lies. Did Maximin believe it? I rather think he did. I’m sure he believed all his own lies. I am myself an accomplished liar. But I’ve always felt constrained by a clear distinction in my mind between the truth of a matter and what I was saying at any one moment. Maximin was a natural liar. He really should have tried a career in diplomacy or intelligence or finance. He’d have prospered.

    Needless to say, everyone else believed him. His description of how, on Bishop Lawrence’s approach, the sacred grove outside Dover had spontaneously uprooted itself and run into the sea drew murmurs of pious approbation. When I was with Theodore last Christmas, I made a point of struggling to Dover. The rotted stumps were still in place – untouched since I had myself supervised the churls with their axes. The timbers still roofed the little church we’d started in the same place.