by Albert Noyer
“Peaceful?” Abinnaeus echoed with sarcasm. “The bishop will be pleased to hear that. You’re dismissed, here, Centurio, to follow my orders!” Sickened, he looked back at the basilica’s smoldering ruins and shook his head in dismay. “‘The Roman world is collapsing, and yet we do not bow our heads’.”
“Sir?”
Abinnaeus sighed and looked toward Eusebios. “A half century ago, Jerome wrote that warning. A blessing the saint didn’t live to see the present time. I’ll talk to the bishop a moment, then we’ll return to the pretorium. I’ll order the arrest of both Papnouthios and Shandi. They can languish in confinement until I find a magistrate who isn’t at his winter villa, and charge them with murder.”
* * *
At the pretorium, Nepheros came in late to eat breakfast. Dorothea, still seated at the table, was reading the Life of Catherine, a woman saint martyred at Alexandria almost a century and-a-half earlier.
“Domina, I had a task to complete in my room…” He brushed flies away from a plate of dates and selected one. “My apologies.”
“Secretary, you can drop the pretense,” she said without looking up from the slim volume. “I’ve told the Prefect about us.”
“What?” Nepheros dropped the fruit to stare at her. “Are…are you now touched with insanity?”
Dorothea laid down her book. “We were discussing the Serqet, and our twins’ death came up again. Sergius admitted to being with his new slave that evening and I…I just tired of lying to him.”
“How…how did he react? What did he say?”
“Threatened you with exile to terra incognita, or worse.”
Nepheros sputtered in rage, “You…you bitch! You’ve ruined my career. I can’t stay at Pelusium now.”
“Sergius will resign as prefect and you may remain here. We shall move to Alexandria.”
He tilted up her book so he could read its title. “To Alexandria, where Catherine, the virgin saint, was martyred? You won’t regain your virginity there, you know.”
Dorothea eyes flashed contempt as she reached across the table and slapped him hard.
Nepheros rubbed his stinging cheek with a mocking smile. “ Well deserved, carita. Where is ‘his Excellency’ now?”
“I expect him back soon. He and the two Latins picked up Eusebios and went to inspect Papnouthios’s hospital.”
“A true den of Satan.”
“I’ve always suspected so.”
Nepheros leaned aside to let Karitina fill a cup with mulled wine, then waved her away. “Isn’t Eusebios more concerned about the Kashat papyrus and the report of Nestorios escaping exile with the help of that Nestorian Bishop at Myos Hormos?”
Dorothea eyed him with suspicion. “How do you know Harmonios is Nestorian, or, for that matter, about what happens at the hospital?”
After a slow sip of wine, he replied, “Domina, it is the duty of a secretary to be aware of whatever might endanger his patron. I also know why those three thugs murdered that courier, what they searched for, and who sent them.”
“Who?”
“Ah, carita―”
“Don’t call me that again!” she warned sharply. “The courier?”
Nepheros shrugged his indifference. “Carita, to know who sent them will cost you at least an hour of our passionate love-making.”
“You? An hour?” A throaty laugh rippled from Dorothea. “Even Priapus would be hard put to endure an hour between my thighs.”
“‘Hard put’…a clever pun.” Nepheros began to shell an egg and quietly accuse her. “Carita, you strangled your kitten to put the blame on the Serqet.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Dorothea continued to spread honey on a piece of bread.
“I recognized that silk scarf of yours. You wore it on one of our―”
“Secretary, that’s enough!”
Nepheros finished a mouthful of egg. “You could walk into a room veiled like a Bedouin woman, carita, or naked as Aphrodite, and the Prefect wouldn’t notice you, much less your scarf. Yet back to Nestorios. From what I know of the heretic, he will not flee to Hormos, but go directly to Alexandria and confront Patriarch Cyril about his teaching.” Nepheros took three dates in hand and stood up. “If you’re not feeling ‘coital,’ dulceda, I must go and finish what I was working on.”
CHAPTER XV
To escape any attempted pursuit of Nestorios by the small Kushite garrison at Hebet, Bishop Harmonios had told Sakaon, the caravan master, to trot his six camels at a rapid pace all of the first day and well into the sixth hour of that night. Both beasts and riders rested for the balance of darkness in an oasis surrounded by sand dunes. Now, in a chill first light, the camels were readied to resume their trek to Abydos.
Occupants of a gray, goat-hair Bedouin tent nearby had not yet resumed their journey. Five sleek, black camels tethered outside nibbled at the last blades of seasonal grass. Large-footed, ears erect, the beasts seemed far above in breeding to the light-brown caravan camels that plodded along carrying bundles of trade goods.
Nestorios and the bishop of Myos Hormos, both wearing the desert robes of caravan merchants, sat warming themselves around a palm-wood fire. Their bickering pack camels were watered a final time; the next oasis was fifteen miles northeast along the caravan route. The deposed Patriarch’s red-rimmed eyes burned from a day of squinting against the glare of a November sun that shone brighter than at Constantinople. Nestorios’s throat felt as dry as the sand dunes beyond the palm grove. His teeth ground unconsciously at grit that was impossible to avoid swallowing. Worse than these discomforts was an excruciating ache in his body, a result of being jostled for seventeen hours on his camel’s hard leather saddle, then trying to sleep on bare earth.
Nestorios coughed up gritty phlegm and spat aside. “Bishop, how far northeast from Hebet are we?”
“Sakaon told me about forty miles…”Harmonios paused to extend cold hands nearer the fire. “Holiness, when do you think your absence will be discovered?”
“Deacon Andronicos is clever. Perhaps by this evening’s Vespers my deception will be noted by the monastery’s suspicious abbot.”
A grin creased the bishop’s swarthy complexion. “By then we will be more than halfway to Abydos. What will happen to your deacon?”
“The usual monastic punishment.” Nestorios shifted position to relieve a throbbing pain in his lower back. “The soles of my deacon’s feet will be beaten with wooden rods until he can no longer walk.”
Harmonios crossed his forehead and lips. “May The Crucified One have mercy on him.”
“At the Judgment, a glorified Andronicos will limp into His presence.” Nestorios finished a morsel of flatbread smeared with sand-laced honey, then pointed to his left. “Bishop, just past those palms I noticed a cairn of stones marking what seems to be an indistinct camel trail leading straight north. Ask the caravan master where it goes.”
When Harmonios returned, he told Nestorios it was a seldom-used track that ended at Lycopolis on the Nile. The Roman Sixth Legion had an encampment there.
“And Alexandria is how far beyond that?”
The bishop stroked his moustache as he tried to recall. “Some…three hundred miles, I believe.”
“You know this?”
“Caravans from Hormos follow the Via Hadriana to Antinoupolis, just north of Lycopolis. Cargo is transferred onto downstream barges for shipment north on the river.”
“How many days on the river to Alexandria from there?”
“Perhaps up to four.”
Nestorios traced a crude map in the sand with a forefinger, then looked up at the bishop. “Authorities at Hebet will believe that we are going to Abydos, then on to Hormos. I easily could convince the legion garrison at Lycopolis that their pay is in jeopardy because of the unrest at Constantinople.”
Alarmed at what seemed to be an insane undertaking, Harmonios protested, “Holiness…you…you can’t be serious.”
Nestorios ignored his concern. “What legions gar
rison Alexandria?”
“Only Legion Two Traiana.”
“One? What spiritual creeds do the men at Lycopolis embrace?”
Harmonios said, “There are undoubtedly a few Nestorians among the orthodox. Others might be Arians, even disciples of Mithras, yet, as for all legionaries lucrum…‘Lucre’…is their chief god.”
“Money?” The exiled patriarch thought a moment. “Bishop, what cargo do you bring back to Myos Hormos?”
“Gold, Holiness, from the mines of Kush.”
“Gold for charcoal?” Nestorios half-laughed at the unlikely trade. “The Crucified One taught that we should not value the things of this world, yet could He have understood this absurdity?”
Harmonios scoffed, “Contraband pearls hidden inside charcoal lumps and traded for smuggled gold is the way of this world.”
“Indeed. Patriarch Cyril is at Alexandria,” Nestorios muttered, more to himself than to his companion. “I shall compel him to debate me…” He abruptly stood up and brushed sand from his tunic. “You and I, Bishop, with a single guard, will divert our journey to Lycopolis. I intend to throw the jackals from Hebet off our scent and enlist the Sixth Legion to my cause with a part of your gold.”
“But Holiness―” The bishop began to protest as he stood up.
Nestorios cut him off. “Divine Providence sent you to me at this time,” he said, an intense stare burning in his eyes. “My followers await my arrival from exile…you yourself told me there were many Nestorians at Hormos. Alexandria is a muddle of competing faiths over which I shall triumph.” He grasped Harmonios by the tunic. “Speak to this Sakaon and arrange for what I said. Offer to pay a guard double. Do not mariners at Hormos have a saying about hoisting sail when the wind is fair?”
Intimidated by the patriarch’s fanatical insistence, Harmonios turned away to inform the caravan-master and try to recruit a willing guard.
Neither clergyman had noticed a Bedouin within hearing―ostensibly sleeping on the nearby grass―rise in stealth and creep back toward companions inside the goat-hair tent.
* * *
Although a Nestorian himself, Sakaon thought this idea of his mentor to be that of an imbecile. Only an extra handful of gold nuggets persuaded him to allow a guard to accompany the two men. The man insisted on immediate payment. It was a relatively safe time of year; the caravan season had ended and most Kushite raiding bands had returned south to divide their year’s take of loot.
Within the hour the two churchmen and guard set off on camels purchased from Sakaon. If the trio noticed that the black camels were gone as they passed by the gray tent, no one mentioned it: Nestorios was obsessed with his plan to debate the Patriarch. Harmonios was fearful of the unexpected journey. The guard schemed about how to desert the churchmen at his first opportunity.
A series of stone cairns built at random intervals marked a trail rendered invisible in places by drifting sands. Devoid of other landmarks, the monotonous desert wasteland shimmered in a translucent glare of heat waves: not a single undulating wadi interrupted the three camels’ easy gait; no flat-crowned acacia trees gave distant relief to the bleakness; only the black specks of circling vultures, searching for a desiccated ostrich or jackal carcass, indicated that some forms of life might yet exist in this immense dry place.
Muffled in the cotton fabrics in which the guard had helped swathe their faces, the two clergymen rode uncomfortably on. Bishop Harmonios felt apprehensive. The deposed patriarch’s mind surely had been rendered unbalanced by his humiliating ecclesiastical disgrace and three subsequent exiles. Yet Nestorios saw the surrounding bleakness as a metaphor for mankind’s barren spirituality before The Crucified One had come to offer them the life-giving water of Salvation. In his mind, a spirit-God could no more take on a human body than a man could attain pure Divinity. The orthodoxy of the Church taught otherwise, that The Crucified One had possessed two perfect natures, Human and Divine, in one hypostatic union.
Nestorios’s reverie was interrupted when the guard returned from scouting a short distance ahead and pointed to the north. The patriarch pulled his face-covering lower and shaded his eyes: five bulky shapes on the horizon resolved themselves into riders sitting atop black camels.
“Bedouin?” he asked hopefully. “Traders like us?”
The guard muttered a tribal name, “Blemmyes. Pagan nomads.”
Harmonios heard and directed his camel alongside. “Holiness, those are desert raiders…bandits.”
“I am a Holy Man,” Nestorios boasted. “The savages dare not attack me.”
Clearly worried, Harmonios shook his head. “Even the Romans had difficulty defeating the Blemmyes. Scattered bands survived and still live in remote areas as brigands.”
“You have gold, buy them off…” As the raiders caned their mounts forward at a gallop, Nestorios pulled his hand cross from under his tunic and held it aloft, yet screamed, “Guard, do something!”
Rather than bargain or resist, the man unfastened a saddle bag containing his gold and threw it to the side of the trail, then caned his mount back the way the three had come. The lead Blemmye nomad lost time in deftly dismounting from his camel to pick up the leather container. A second bandit eased an arrow from his quiver as his swifter mount gained ground on the slow gait of the fleeing victim’s trade camel. The Blemmye’s arrow caught the hapless guard in the small of his back and sent him tumbling onto broiling sand.
While a companion chased after the dead man’s camel, the remaining two rode up and swung heavy staffs at the clergymen. Nestorios was caught in the side: his ivory cross arced through the air as he toppled hard to the ground, with one rib fractured and his hand injured. A wild swing by the other Blemmye caught Harmonios in the head. The bishop fell forward onto his camel’s neck, his body jerking in the saddle as his terrified mount charged off the trail and dropped him, dead, into a wasteland of shifting sand dunes.
The Blemmye spy who had overheard the churchmen in the oasis and struck Harmonios grinned in satisfaction. He had unintentionally killed one of the two Christian priests who would be held for ransom, yet, in the minds of his four companions, finding the gold the men had spoken about surely would compensate for that unfortunate accident. The other injured priest had mentioned Alexandria. The Christian chief there would pay a rich ransom. Vultures would feast on the dead guard.
CHAPTER XVI
When Getorius came into the pretorium library with Arcadia, Nepheros had concentrated on taking an inventory of the scroll and book collection, entering titles and their locations in a record ledger. He glanced up from a book he had been reading, stretched, then stood to greet the couple and compliment Arcadia. “Salvete, Domina, you look much better.”
“Thanks to the medication Papnouthios gave me.”
Getorius told Nepheros, “The prefect said you had work to do and couldn’t come to the hospital.”
“Unfortunately, Surgeon, and yet this task excites me. Look around at these ancient scrolls. Homer…Virgil…the Greek philosophers. The former governor had no librarian, thus I’ve taken it upon myself to catalogue what is here.” He closed the codex. “What did you find at the hospital?”
Arcadia shuddered in replying, “Papnouthios had cleaned up the rooms and said that he ‘discharged’ cured patients, yet we saw the results of several gruesome experiments. They were horrible.”
The secretary nodded quick agreement. “I suspected as much, but have not been there. Did the Prefect confront him?”
Getorius said, “Abinnaeus couldn’t. The physician slipped out while we were examining the bodies of several vagrants on which he had experimented.”
“I understood that he had an agreement with Bishop Eusebios about such procedures.”
“Yes, but not vivisections. That’s why the bishop went there to close down his hospital.”
Nepheros stroked his book’s cover in thought before confiding, “Surgeon, we talked about the possibility of the Kashat document being a forgery, so I must tell y
ou that I’m concerned about the physician’s role in finding the papyrus.”
“Papnouthios? Why is that?”
“The discovery seemed authentic, yet you made a fine case for the papyrus being forged. I also believe so, yet I still advised Bishop Eusebios not to act in haste and have the document evaluated before making it public.”
“Nepheros, I have my own doubts about the physician, but how do you think this involves him?”
“Someone had to locate a mummy, then deftly undo the wrappings just far enough to insert the golden case. The physician was born near Lake Moeris and apprenticed himself to an embalmer.”
Arcadia recalled, “He did mention that at the dinner when we arrived.”
“Indeed, Domina, and he’s thick as bitumen with Tanutamun, that satanic priest who struck your husband. The two of them are working together.”
“Because the papyrus’s content will further question Church teachings.”
“Neatly said, Surgeon! Pagans…and be assured that the physician is one of them…pagans realize anything weakening the Patriarch’s authority benefits them. Remember, it was only eighty years ago that the apostate emperor Julian actually succeeded in restoring Roman cults.”
Arcadia said, “I believe that was a human heart in the offering dish to that dreadful god in the room where Pennuta was murdered. She had to have gotten it from Papnouthios.”
“Indeed, ‘Like breeds like.’ I doubt the Kushite woman was baptized.”
“We’re digressing,” Getorius noted. “Our best way of refuting the papyrus might have been in discovering that the mummy is a woman, but then Tanutamun destroyed it.”
“Be assured, Surgeon, that he was instructed by Papnouthios to do so, and attack you as you investigated the gender.”
“It was Arcadia who noticed that the sandals were those of a woman.”
The secretary smiled at her. “Domina, I…I’m quite awkward in the matter of pleasing females, yet your intelligence complements your beauty.”
Getorius saw his wife’s embarrassment and continued the previous discussion. “To pen such a convincing account, our forger had to have complete knowledge of your Egyptian Church’s traditions about the Holy Family.”