Tales of Byzantium

by Eileen Stephenson

  Anna’s face took on a pinched expression at the sight of the novice sitting in the reader’s chair. The dreary monotony of daily needlework was dull enough. The princess felt ready to scream at the thought of adding Sister Irene’s barely coherent reading to the day’s tedium. Hegoumena Maria had taken to sitting nearby when Sister Irene read to coach the girl when she stumbled, but her efforts had so far been futile.

  It being the season of Christ’s nativity, the chosen readings were from Isaiah and full of names Sister Irene’s tongue blundered over. Zebulon became Zebon while Naphtali emerged somehow as Phalanti. The hegoumena’s whispered corrections only accentuated the novice’s errors. Anna and several of the less patient nuns rolled their eyes in annoyance at the girl’s attempts.

  Afterward, the women prepared to return for midday prayers in the church. Anna felt uneasy, though, when she noticed the hegoumena looking at her the way her father’s hawks had eyed their prey.

  Later, Anna received a summons from Hegoumena Maria. She arrived in the superior’s office, apprehensive after recalling the look she had noticed from the nun that morning.

  “Lady Anna, I am sure you have noticed Sister Irene’s poor readings during refectory,” the older woman said, looking at Anna through narrowed eyes.

  “Yes, Hegoumena. But the child is young. She may not have had good teachers before coming here,” Anna agreed, wary at this unexpected discussion of a girl who was as humble as a wooden spoon.

  “Yes, well, that is apparent,” the hegoumena said drily. “And it is for that reason I would like you to take on the task of tutoring her at reading and writing. Of course, I will release her from her obligation of silence during those lessons.”

  Anna sat stunned at this indignity. She finally sputtered out a response. “Hegoumena, I am an imperial princess, not a tutor. I think one of the other nuns would be better suited to such a task.” She enunciated each word through clenched teeth to emphasize the outrageous nature of this proposal.

  “Yes, you are an imperial princess,” the hegoumena conceded cheerfully. “But the other nuns live under the rule of silence, as your mother required when she established Kecharitomene, and I would rather not release more than one from her vows—too many opportunities for frivolous gossip. While you live amongst us, however, you have not taken such a vow and may speak as you wish. So I think you would be best.”

  Anna pursed her lips in silent irritation at her mother’s strictures; many monasteries did not have that limitation. Why had her mother insisted on it? She glanced around the room, searching for some escape. A last, a desperate suggestion to avoid such a degrading task occurred to her. “Would it not be possible to hire a tutor from outside to teach Sister Irene?”

  “Lady Anna, again, your mother’s rules permit only limited visits from outsiders, so the peace of our home is not disturbed. I believe Sister Irene will need more than a few lessons.” The older woman’s smile held both encouragement and unbending resolve. “Really, I think you would be best.”

  Anna had played enough chess to recognize checkmate. She swallowed this new humiliation with difficulty before answering the gray-haired nun fingering her prayer beads.

  “When do you want us to begin?”

  The victor’s smile broadened. “In the morning, after third-hour prayer. I think an hour each morning for at least a month. Then we shall see how she progresses.”

  ***

  The next day, shy Sister Irene joined Anna in her rooms for their first lesson. The little nun glanced around in awe of her tutor’s rich accommodations—the four charcoal-filled braziers burning red, thick rugs, cushions, silk curtains, and windows covered in glass that kept out the north wind through the winter but let in the light. Anna and her serving girl had earlier arranged a table so tutor and student could sit next to each other.

  The girl took her seat in the proffered chair. She bent her head and peered down at her hands folded in her lap, too timid to look up. The dark-haired novice had entered the monastery six months earlier and looked about fifteen, younger than most of Anna’s grandchildren. Next to the young nun, Anna drummed her fingers in irritation at the idea she should be teaching this nobody. But the sooner begun, the sooner done. She started with an inquiry into the education the girl had received thus far.

  “Sister, how long did you receive tutoring in grammar?”

  The nun looked up at her, surprised. “I had no tutoring, Lady Anna.”

  “Well, surely you had a tutor. You know how to read a little,” Anna responded with a frown, her voice sharp.

  “No, Lady, I had no tutoring,” she protested. “My father only had the money to educate my brothers; we girls learned what we could from them.”

  Anna’s frown softened, recalling her own pleas to be educated more than other girls. But her parents had been able to pay for her tutors, and they were the best ones available.

  “What of your mother? Did she not try to teach you?” Anna asked. Irene must have received some instruction.

  “I was my mother’s last child. There were seven older than me, so she had little time for it. Mama died when I was six.” Irene stopped speaking for a moment, wiping away a tear.

  “My father did his best for us,” she continued. “My brothers have positions in the army, and my two sisters had dowries to marry. But by then, there was no money left for me. When my father learned that Kecharitomene did not require a gift when a novice entered, he applied for me. And since our family is related to the Kekaumenos family, I was accepted.”

  Anna felt her irritation for the girl’s ignorance melting away. The girl had had few opportunities as the poor relation of a waning noble family. If Sister Irene’s father had died before she entered the monastery, she might have ended up in a brothel, or worse. With more patience, Anna placed her grandmother’s old psalter in front of Irene. It seemed as good a place to start as any. They began to read together King David’s psalms.

  ***

  Sister Irene improved steadily through the winter months. After the first month, when Sister Irene’s turn in refectory came again, her reading needed only a little assistance from the hegoumena. Despite her initial resentment at being assigned such a task, Anna took real pleasure in her student’s progress and promised Hegoumena Maria that Sister Irene would be even better with further tutelage. So the superior allowed their meetings to continue.

  One morning in March, after an especially difficult passage from the Book of the Apocalypse, Sister Irene asked, “When you were tutored as a child, were you also taught from the Bible?” gesturing at the holy book on Anna’s table.

  “I was for some of it. But I asked for other books as well. I read histories, philosophy, poetry, and plays, and I learned mathematics. My parents thought Aristotle would ruin me, but I promised he would not,” Anna said, smiling as she recalled her pleasure at winning their approval for teachers.

  “What were your parents like?” Irene asked.

  Anna smiled in fond reminiscence of her indulged childhood before speaking.

  “My father was not a tall man, not like the big Varangian guards, but no one doubted he commanded and ruled the empire. Even those barbarian Franks could see that when they came through to fight in the Holy Land. My mother was devoted to my father, doing all she could to see to his comfort. They had nine children, but only three of us still live.”

  The little nun’s face melted in sympathy before she spoke again.

  “On your birthday, you told me in the rose garden that your father had been a great general, respected by all. When were his battles?”

  This question made Anna pause, her eyebrows drawn close. Her father had spent the first fifteen years of his reign fighting on all sides of the empire. After he defeated one enemy, others burst out like moles digging from underground. But she had no clear idea about most of the dates—had he fought the Pechenegs before the Bulgarians, and what about Robert Guiscard and his handsome blond son, Bohemond? When had Alexios fought the Turks, or rath
er, when had he not been fighting the Turks? What of the Franks and their Crusade? She had been a child in those years and had no clear recollection of the particulars, except perhaps of the dashing Bohemond, whose attentions had so flattered her.

  Anna leaned back in her chair, trying to recall dates and places, vexed at her inability to remember even the meanest description of them. It was then that she glanced at the box of her husband’s papers, his unfinished history of Alexios’s reign she had brought with her to the monastery after his death. Perhaps they held that information.

  Sister Irene looked quizzically at her, awaiting a response.

  “Sister, it has been so long I cannot recall exactly when my father fought his battles,” she said in apology. “Let me retrieve some notes my husband made. He served in my father’s army and was writing a history of him when he died.”

  Anna walked over to the shelf where her husband’s wooden box had sat since her arrival, sealed tightly with a leather strap buckled around it, a gray film of dust covering it. She blew the dust off, loosened the strap, and removed the lid. She scanned the first sheet of the expensive, stiff parchment. It told of a disastrous battle against the Norman, Robert Guiscard, and his marauding soldiers at Dyrrhachium soon after Alexios took the throne, an unfortunate occasion for her father. Her glance flickered toward Sister Irene, and she put that sheet aside.

  “Umm, I don’t believe my husband quite finished this one,” came Anna’s glib explanation for putting aside that page. She continued searching. No soldier wins all his battles, she thought, but no need to start Alexios’s story with a rout. The next sheet in the box recounted a victory over the Pechenegs, a more pleasing topic for their discussion. Satisfied, Anna brought the parchment to the table, where she and Sister Irene perused it for the rest of that hour.

  Afterward, Anna did not return to refectory with Irene. Instead, she retrieved more of the sheets and spent the rest of the day reading them. The leaves were filled with details she had never known about Alexios’s military campaigns. Anna’s husband had died while on a diplomatic mission for her brother, leaving his history of Alexios’s reign incomplete.

  The stiff parchment had scrapes where he had made changes, lacunae that needed completion. She picked up more of them, reading her husband’s descriptions of Alexios’s many battles and victories when the two had fought together. Her husband’s writings told of the tactics and strategies her father had used in his many battles and wars. But they were somehow incomplete, not the polished prose of a true history. Their dull rendition of military details lacked the lively spark of the man who had so inspired his soldiers’ loyalty and led to his heroic rise to the throne, aided by the plotting of his fearless mother, Anna Dalassena.

  Dusk found her still sitting at the desk by the window in the fading light. She recalled her first conversation with Sister Irene in the garden by the stunted rosebush on her birthday months earlier. She wondered if her father would be forgotten, the memory of him swept away in the storms of time, never to be recalled. Worse, would the memory of her accursed brother’s reign even overshadow that of Alexios’s? She shuddered at that preposterous thought but knew too well the fawning scholars who wrote histories and flocked to court.

  Her fingers drummed on the table next to the bright polished silver oil lamp the serving girl had lit, an idea taking shape in her mind. She ran a slim freckled finger along the edge of the box where her unused quills lay, waiting to be dipped in ink. Her heart began beating faster, roused by new determination.

  ***

  In the morning, a warm wind blew up from the south, a breath of the approaching spring filling the air. The sun still hung low in the sky, a misty nimbus surrounding it, softening its brilliance. Salty sea air blew in its fishy odor from the docks on the Golden Horn.

  A shaft of pale morning sunlight fell on the diminutive rosebush Anna had noticed that winter’s day months earlier. Her mother had been right about it. It needed a sunnier spot where it could grow and flower as it was meant to. She retrieved a spade from the shed where the garden tools lay and returned to the flowerbed. She quickly dug up the small plant that had lived so long in shadows and moved it into the open where the sun could reach it. The languishing rosebush needed to move only a few footsteps within the monastery’s walls to bloom. Gazing on the replanted bush, she knew her life at Kecharitomene must change too.

  Anna returned to her rooms, washed, and sat again at her desk. Her husband’s unfinished notes lay before her alongside empty sheets of parchment awaiting ink. Her life was not over, even if she was confined inside these red brick walls. She lived and breathed and thought—and she would spend her remaining days writing her father’s history. She would earn the respect of Constantinople’s scholars, and finally gain Alexios’s and Irene’s approval, if only in the afterlife. She took up the waiting quill, dipped it in the inkpot, and began, “The stream of time, ever moving . . .”

  Author’s Note:

  Anna Comnena (1083-1153) was the firstborn child of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Comnenus and his wife, the Empress Irene Ducaena. She was betrothed at birth to Constantine Ducas, the son of a previous ruler, the Emperor Michael VII Ducas and his wife, the lovely Empress Maria of Alan. The original intention was for Anna and Constantine to succeed Alexios on the throne, and Anna was at first raised with this expectation. However, Constantine took ill and died, and Alexios and Irene gave birth to many more children, including the son who would become his father’s successor and Anna Comnena’s nemesis, her brother John II Comnenus.

  John was a beloved and well-regarded ruler despite his sister’s envious disdain. Still, it could be argued that Anna Comnena, after spending the last fifteen years of her life writing a still respected history of her father’s reign, The Alexiad, is now the better remembered of the two. Perhaps, in this case, history was told not by the victor, but by the writer.

  Acknowledgements

  John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium planted the seed that blossomed into my obsession with the Byzantines. I will be forever grateful to him for that small book. He has said he considers himself to be ‘just’ a popularizer of history, but that book was magical for me. I can heartily recommend it, or for the more intrepid, his three-volume masterpiece, Byzantium, if you are looking for an enjoyable overview of Byzantine history.

  I must also express my gratitude to the first readers who laid eyes on the stories, the talented writers A.X. Ahmad and Tinney Sue Heath, and my Goodreads friend, Jane Rawoof. Their suggestions helped immeasurably as I toiled away on my computer each evening.

  My editor and creative cover designer, Jennifer Toney Quinlan, provided valuable insights, advice, and encouragement, as well as a striking cover for this collection. I could not have done this without her.

  Finally, to my husband, Kenneth, and daughters Melissa, Suzanne and Kathleen – thank you for your patience as I holed up nights and weekends with my writing for so long.

  About the Author

  Eileen Stephenson was born in Fort Worth, Texas, but has spent most of her life in the Washington, D.C. area, earning a living in the finance industry before discovering the enthralling world of the Byzantines. She has degrees from Georgetown University and George Washington University and is married with three daughters.

  Final Note

  Reviews are critical for all authors, but especially for those like myself who are just starting out. If you enjoyed this collection of stories (and even if you didn’t), please consider leaving a review at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads or other reader websites you might frequent. Learning what readers like or don’t like is the only way to get better.

  Please visit my website,

  eileenstephenson.com

  and sign up to hear about my upcoming release – Imperial Passions.

 

 

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