Two for Joy (13 page)

They had emerged into the peristyle surrounding the inner garden. Clusters of men strolled along graveled pathways winding around and between flower beds filled with more vases of roses whose heavy perfume sweetened the cooling air. Here and there, deep emerald sprays of ferns soberly emphasized the flaring trumpets of the pale pillars of lilies gleaming in terracotta pots. Shallow bowls of violets glowed purple against the clipped yews forming a somber background for the marble statues and busts set about the garden.

“I will address my guests shortly,” said Aurelius, “but first I must retrieve the notes for my speech. John, after Euterpe and her companions have entertained, if you would be good enough to say a preliminary word of introduction? And then after I announce your august new position, Anatolius, my guests can begin fishing.”

***

Aurelius made his way down the hall, glancing in as he passed by the sitting room where Philo was still entertaining several guests. The senator’s study was deserted but only because, he supposed as he picked up his notes, it offered neither entertainment nor a convenient couch upon which to rest.

The painted cupids on the walls reminded him of happier times when Anatolius was a baby and Penelope was still alive. This room was where their only child had taken his first unaided, tottering steps. Here, he still hoped, one day he would see a grandson take his first steps across the same mosaic floor on which Anatolius had played under Penelope’s fond care. How quickly the years had marched inexorably along, lately seemingly attended as much by sorrows as by joys.

Now, as the sun fell behind the rooftops of the city, the cupids were illuminated by lamplight. Some of the chubby godlings were playing musical instruments, others drove chariots pulled by donkeys. Penelope’s artistic taste had not favored the classical school of painting. Perhaps it was her influence that had made their only child so tender-hearted, so flighty, Aurelius thought. And this being so, she had spent her last years agonizing over how a poet would survive life in the palace.

This room, so full of memories tonight, was the warmest in the house except the kitchen, and since he had become an old man he had grown to detest the cold. But, although he would admit it to no man, that was not the only reason he had made it his study.

Tears began to sting his eyes and he could not read the words on the parchment. It was not a seemly thing to weep, he knew; he was reacting as Penelope would have reacted. The thought brought her closer, as if she had momentarily come back to him from the shadowy land beyond the Styx.

He filled a cup from the jug of wine on the side table. A few days ago he had not been certain he would see this day, given the agony he had been suffering and those damnable Michaelites. Now the pain at least had vanished.

Aurelius raised his cup toward the cupids. He could feel Penelope’s presence as strongly as if she stood behind him. “This is our proudest night, my dearest wife,” he whispered.

Let the Michaelites fulminate outside the city walls, he thought. On this glorious evening, he would banish them from his thoughts.

***

Standing under the portico of the shrine beside the Bosporos, Michael was preaching a sermon. The sun, its rusty red light no longer finding its way to bless the festivities in the garden of Senator Aurelius’ home, was still visible. Unimpeded by Constantinople’s walls and buildings it cast a ruddy glow across the rapt faces of Michael’s audience.

“What do you witness today within the great walls of the city?” Michael was asking. Despite not possessing the booming voice of an orator, his words carried easily out from the steps of the shrine into the attentive crowd gathered at their foot and on the grassy incline leading up to the road.

“Everywhere demons holding their orgies, everywhere citadels of the evil one, everywhere fornication decked with wreaths of honor,” Michael continued. “Even as I speak, the powerful and the godless are gathering to celebrate their own iniquity. But I say to you that these offenses against heaven will draw unto themselves a fiery wrath.”

A woman scanned the faces of the people pressing around the shrine steps. All classes and conditions were represented, a cross section of society—and the dregs of society for that matter.

“We light our lamps and praise the heat and the light cast by the flame. We praise the oil from which the flame draws sustenance. But what of the humble clay vessel which is necessary to hold the oil?”

As the words flowed on, fear nagged at the woman’s vitals. Could her husband have followed her, found her despite all the care she had taken to obscure her path once she had fled their country estate, taking only her jewelry and a few coins? Again she felt a pang of pity for the slaves. They would doubtless have been interrogated mercilessly as to her whereabouts. Although a gentle man in many ways, her husband had always been very conscious of his social position and it would certainly not be enhanced by his wife running away while he was in the city. She glanced at the wound of the sunset, welcoming the approaching darkness that would help her hide her face more securely for another night.

“Those wealthy men in fine robes who measure the Lord’s riches by the weight of gold on their altars declare me to be a heretic,” Michael continued, “and because I say to you who are gathered here by the roadside that we should venerate not only the Father and the Son and the Spirit but also the Vessel of the Spirit, they accuse me of blasphemously worshipping mere flesh.”

The woman looked up into the fast-darkening sky above the crowd of pilgrims milling around the shrine, reminding herself that she must be ceaselessly vigilant. Discovery was possible at any time, one slip, one error, a careless word, and she would be caught.

What, she wondered, had brought the sturdy peasant family clustered nearby to the shrine? They looked healthy enough, brown skinned from laboring in vineyards or fields. A farmer, perhaps even freed slaves? The man was tall, bearded, his face as bony as the hand that rested on his wife’s shoulder. She was short, with child and very near her time. Looking at the high swell of the stomach under a dusty gray tunic and the small chubby-faced boy sucking on a dirty thumb as he peeked at her from between his parents, his eyes mirrors of a blue summer sky, she felt a familiar stab of pain.

The poor, it seemed, bred as easily as brute animals. In the country there was room for all the little ones. But in Constantinople, did they never pause to consider that here was another mouth to feed, another dweller in a city already bursting with humanity, swarming with people crammed into tiny rooms and spilling out into the raucous streets? Children needed light and air and space, not dirty hovels and cramped rooms, scrabbling for food and growing old before their time.

She found herself wondering what the grubby little boy would look like, playing happily in the garden of her husband’s villa. If only she had not lost the child she was carrying just a few short months after her marriage. Her husband had been overjoyed when she returned from the physician with confirmation of their happy suspicions. “Now I have two reasons for joy,” he had said, stroking her still flat stomach fondly. “A wife and a child. I am a rich man indeed!”

Still Michael’s words flowed on as the crowd murmured to each other, some nodding, others looking around them as they listened. Were their thoughts wandering as much as hers?

“Yet how can there be anything, even mere flesh, which does not proceed from God, who created all?” Michael asked. “And how can that which is created by Him not partake of His own being? Now still there are those of you who may not be fully convinced. But consider the woman who brings forth a child. Is it argued that the babe arrived by cart from another place, or that it is somehow different in substance and in nature from its mother although arising from her?”

The words brought a pang to the woman. She was not meant to be a mother. She felt gnawing pain again, a lamentation in the dark space that dwelt in her heart. She had lost their child and they had turned away from each other. Her husband became distant, not acknowledging or apparently even realizing how much she needed his comfort. Oh, he did not begin to drink too much wine to drown his sorrow and he was always icily courteous. But he became a stony-faced stranger who said little and spent less and less time with her, pleading the polite fiction that official business kept him in the city.

And then one night he had arrived home intoxicated and cursed her as barren, screaming his rage, taking pleasure in revealing in obscene detail that he had consorted with women from the gutter and enjoyed it. Yes, and enjoyed it more than anything he had had with her.

In the morning, when he was sober, he had tried to apologize. But it was too late. The drunken words that had flowed like poisoned wine had done their work too well.

“They believe they are safe,” Michael was saying, “like beasts in their dark dens, yet the sacred fire will reach inside their luxurious houses with their beautiful furniture and painted walls.”

Painted walls. Yes, she had taken to spending most of her time sitting in her room, staring at the frescoes. The finest craftsmen had come from Constantinople to decorate her husband’s villa and their handiwork was exquisite. A meticulously painted window deceived the eyes into believing that it opened out into a classical landscape graced by a temple to Venus, whose symbols were seamlessly blended into the tranquil scene.

Here was a serenely flowing river, clear enough to see the rounded stones over which it gurgled and sang, dancing between grassy banks graced by willows and fringed with violets and roses. There, two stately swans swam in the shallows and on the far side of the water, a young couple walked hand in hand up the slight incline of a hill toward a small temple to the goddess. Two doves hovered over its tiled rotunda, pomegranate trees bloomed outside its open door. Beyond, wooded hills rolled into a misty distance.

It was a beautiful scene, or at least she had thought so when she arrived as a new bride. In the mornings they would lie in bed and spin each other stories about the young couple and what had happened to them and all the other supplicants who visited the temple to offer a sacrifice to Venus or perhaps to ask for divine assistance on the field of love.

And they had discussed the names that their first child would be given. But the child had died before he was born and now there would be no more chances.

Was it not strange that here she was, standing beside another shrine? Perhaps someone outside this world was lying on their bed looking in through a window painted upon their wall, seeing her and all the others and spinning romantic stories about their lives.

“I tell you that each human being is a part of God,” Michael went on, “so that the murderer offends not merely flesh but also God. And so too the jurist offends who sentences an innocent to the axe and the husband who beats his wife and those who administer all manner of injustices. Look into the palaces and churches and the houses of the wealthy. They are filled with vessels of gold. But the flame burning in a vessel of clay burns no less brightly. It burns no less hotly.”

The words seemed oddly distant.

The little boy hid his face in the folds of his mother’s rough tunic. The woman became aware that she had been staring at him. She looked away, then glanced back quickly. He was peeking at her, a smile wreathing what could be seen of his face. She felt an answering smile begin to form.

Yet what was Michael saying? “On this very night, God’s holy fire will once again consume those who offend Him.”

Chapter Ten

After Senator Aurelius left the garden to prepare for
the short oration he planned to give to com-
memorate the occasion, John and Anatolius—the latter the subject of the senator’s speech—lingered under the peristyle. John noticed the fountain, like the rest of the house and garden, was lavishly decorated by white roses. They almost, but not quite, succeeded in diverting the eye from the rotund bronze Eros at the fountain’s center.

John commented that he was glad to see Aurelius was pleased with Anatolius’ efforts.

“Or pleased that he is about to dispose of my future according to his own ideas of propriety.” Anatolius’ voice betrayed fatigue quite at odds with his demeanor. “But never mind, who knows what may yet happen? Perhaps these Michaelites will march into the city and promulgate their own laws and have no need of my services!”

“That might save you from joining the office of the quaestor but I doubt there would be much room for your preferred kind of verse in a city ruled by zealots such as them.”

“You’re probably right, unfortunately. By the way, have you had time to read that letter I copied out for you? I left it at your house earlier today.”

John was puzzled. A letter? A chill of understanding came to him, like a sudden draught from an open window. He recalled mentioning to Anatolius that first communication from Michael, the letter Justinian had not permitted him to examine. “Anatolius, you didn’t place yourself in danger, did you?”

But Anatolius was already stepping forward, raising his hands to draw attention.

“My dear friends, thank you for joining us this evening.” His voice had regained its usual ebullience. “I understand my father intends to say a few words shortly, but for now the entertainment will continue with a presentation of the Address of the Muses after the fashion of the ancients.”

A murmur of interest rose from the guests. Several settled down on the peristyle’s marble benches while others lounged against its columns.

When all was quiet except for the hiss and pop of torches fending off growing darkness, Anatolius clapped his hands sharply.

A procession of the nine Muses, modestly dressed in elaborately folded robes, appeared from the shadows. They were led by Isis in the guise of Euterpe. Her chubby fingers coaxed a passably grave melody from the flute disappearing beneath the billowing veil disguising her face. The huge semi-naked figure of Darius, sporting tiny gilded wings on his broad shoulders, followed in their wake. A murmur of admiration rose from the spectators as the little procession stopped beside the fountain overseen by Darius’ bronze colleague.