Theodosius wore a robe of cloth of gold, purple shoes, and an emerald sash. Athenaïs wore a stiff dalmatic stitched with precious stones. Indian pearls shone in her dark hair. Descending from the imperial coach, they made their solemn and stately way up the aisle of the church, gleaming with candlelight, the air filled with the sonorous chants of ‘Kyrie eleison’.
Among the congregation were Athenaïs’ humble family: the kindly old aunt who had paid for her journey to Constantinople; and, to the astonishment of many, her two elder brothers, who had so hard-heartedly dealt with her in the matter of their father’s will. Now they sat near the back of the church, disbelieving, watching their sister marry the emperor himself. Shamefaced and bright-eyed in the gloom of that great church, filled with remorse and regret, and acknowledging in their hearts at last that, after all, their sister was a better person and a sweeter soul than they would ever be.
From that day forth, they were devoted to her. And not merely because she was the empress.
Amid the solemn priests and the deacons, the incense and chanting, and throughout the blessed sacrament and symbolic marital ritual of the blood in a silver spoon, the empress’s two brothers were as joyful in their hearts as any there. She had conquered them, as she would conquer so many in the years to come, by goodness rather than strength.
It is a sorrowfully rare stratagem.
The imperial couple stood before the altar and Patriarch Epiphanius with his bejewelled fingers and his long scented hair. The patriarch turned to the purple cloaks and diadems laid out ready on velvet cushions. He blessed the cloaks before they were taken up by the attendant vestitores and fastened about the imperial pair with golden brooches.
The Patriarch placed the diadems on their heads, saying, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’
The congregation chanted, ‘Holy, holy, holy, glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth!’
The emperor and empress turned and walked down the aisle, passing rows of all the noblest and wealthiest citizens of Constantinople. One among their number was a very holy and noble lady who wore a cloak of such elaborate embroidery, illustrating the lurid tortures and deaths of those two blessed brothers, Primus and Felician, saints and martyrs, that other women around her had tutted that she looked as if she was trying to outshine the bride herself. But in truth there was no great danger of that, for the holy and noble lady was by no means so attractive in her features as she liked to believe.
As the newly married couple passed by, the empress seemed to slow a little, and gaze very keenly into the face of the noble lady, and smile. Such was the lady’s rapture at being thus acknowledged by the empress herself, that she gave a little scream, and clasped a hanky to her mouth, and succumbed to a fit of the vapours, and had to be quickly carried out of a side door into the street and splashed with holy water.
After the ceremony they returned to the palace where, flanked by armed guards and eunuchs, they entered the secret passage and ascended the spiral staircase to emerge into the Kathisma, the grandiose imperial box on the north side of the Hippodrome. Theodosius made the sign of the cross over his loyal subjects, and a hundred thousand people roared, ‘Long live the emperor! God bless the empress!’
There followed a great wedding feast in the palace, with the imperial pair seated together on a high dais. Princess Pulcheria had been reduced to a lower seating order. She ate very little, drank nothing, and scowled throughout. When a slavegirl bumped her, she pinched the girl’s arm viciously.
And then came the hymeneal hymn. One of the most admired court poets of Rome had been specially shipped over for the occasion. His name was Claudian Claudianus, an Alexandrian by birth. He was getting on in years, but his inspiration was in no way faltering, and his poems remained as lengthy and ornate as ever. Several guests had to be excused during the recitation of the hymn, which lasted almost an hour, and surprisingly failed to return to the table.
I shall quote only the delicate closing lines of the hymn, after Claudian had delightfully pictured the new empress’s virginal modesty being overcome during the wedding night ahead.
Then when your lips and limbs have found their rest,
Untied soul to soul, ye both shall sleep,
And Morpheus’ train shall still your throbbing breath.
When rosy-fingered dawn shall find you lying
Entangled in the coverlets, arm in arm,
The couch shall still be warm with princely wooing,
New stains ennobling sheets of Tyrian dye.’
When he at last finished and mopped his perspiring brow, the applause was tremendous.
In the days immediately following the marriage of the emperor and his beautiful new empress, a beggarwoman in a side street near the north end of the Mese found that some crazy fool with more money than sense had hidden a bag of solid gold pieces in the brown woollen blanket on the pavement where she slept. She waited a few days in case anyone should come back to collect their money with menaces, but none did. She concluded that God had chosen to wait until her seventh decade before bestowing His blessings upon her, and that His Ways were mysterious and wonderful, and that the money was hers. It would enable her to rent a little apartment above the shop of her friend the baker, and live in comfort for the rest of her days.
Likewise, a blind and legless beggar who sat all day and shivered all night beside the Fountain of Saint Irenaeus, as he sat there one evening, pulling his thin cloak round his skinny shoulders as best he could and praying that the chill wind out of Asia would drop, felt his hand taken by another, a slim, soft hand.
He jerked in blind astonishment. The hand held him gently but firmly.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered hoarsely, his eyes searching the darkness before him as if he might yet see. ‘The Magdalene? The Mother of God?’
He was lifted up into a carriage and driven through the streets, and he knew that the girl or angel or even the Mother of God herself was sitting next to him, but she would say nothing. They passed through some gates into a courtyard, the sound of the carriage-wheels clattering on the cobbles and echoing off the surrounding walls. He was taken and washed, and his sores were bathed in oil and bandaged, and he was laid to sleep in a little narrow chamber, with warm woollen blankets to keep him from the cold.
The following day a fellow who gruffly said he was called Braccus and worked here at this paupers’ hospital carried the beggar out into a sunny garden sheltered by high walls from the wind off the nearby sea. The old man was set down in some sort of arbour, and he sat there all day and on into evening in happy wonder, until the night air was filled with the sweet fragrance of jasmine.
10
THE JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM
I, too, knew her. For at about this time, as well as continuing to serve as chief clerk in the office of the Count of the Sacred Largesse (the title is more impressive than the office, I assure you), I was raised to the rank of clerk-in-Consistory. This meant that I took records of all the proceedings in the Imperial Council Chamber. After some years of diligent service here, it was not unknown for some of the senior senators, or even the emperor himself, to turn to me on a point of order, or to ask if there was a precedent for such and such an imperial decision or decree. In time, in fact, it began to feel as if I was not so much a mere clerk as a valued counsellor. For this reason I was often despatched to the court of the Western Empire in Ravenna or Mediolanum or Rome, and so had intimate acquaintance with all the operations of the time.
And I, too, fell under the spell of the new, girlish empress. What man could not?
Once, I recall, she encountered me scurrying along a marble corridor of the palace in Constantinople, uncharacteristically late for that morning’s session in Consistory, owing to my having had to spend a longer time than usual at stool. Indeed, I was still writing a hurried mental note to myself to eat more lentils in future, when the empress stopped and smiled at me, and all thought of stools and lentils fled. I
slowed my pace, and she asked me in the sweetest, softest voice to come and take a letter for her.
‘Your Sacred Highness,’ I began to babble, ‘I fain would do as you command, but I, I ...’
But one fatal glance into those huge dark eyes, and I was lost for ever. Knowing that I would earn a terrible scolding for my absence from Consistory that morning, I nevertheless followed her meekly back to her private chambers to take a letter, imagining the words flowing honeylike from her sweet lips to my pen. My heart pounded within me. The woman was a witch, a spellbinder, of the most enchanting kind. A dream-weaver, weaving dreams from which you never wanted to awaken.
Of course she knew it. Her mouth twitched with amusement at my stammering, hopeless, infatuated obedience to her every whim. She could have ordered me to stand on the high window ledge of the chamber and throw myself to the ground three floors below, and I would have obeyed. But naturally she would not. Proud she may have been; vain of her beauty, certainly - what woman would not be? But cruel? No. In a cruel world, and a cruel and fickle court, Athenaïs was never cruel. She loved all humanity with a generous, spontaneous outpouring of affection.
She began to speak.
My pen quivered, and I began to write.
When I ran to make my humblest apologies for my absence later that morning to the court chamberlain, a tall, unsmiling eunuch called Nicephorus, he merely waved me away with his long-fingered hand, festooned with signet rings.
‘The empress has already made your pardons for you,’ he said. ‘You were required elsewhere this morning.’
No one else would have troubled thus to save a humble court clerk from a tongue lashing. But that was Athenaïs: loved as much for her kindness of heart as for her beauty.
They are rare companions in a woman.
I doted on her. Sometimes to the sly ridicule of my fellow scribes and clerks, I adored her.
This then was the palace and its inhabitants on the eve of the arrival of Galla, Aëtius and her small retinue, only months after the imperial wedding. It was a moonless night when they arrived at that great fortified compound with its mighty walls of red Egyptian granite, and its interior lavishly decorated with porphyry from Ptolemais in Palestine, Attic marble, rich damask hangings from Damascus, ivory and sandalwood from India, silken brocades and porcelain from China. A dream-palace where even the chamber-pots were made of purest silver.
The fugitives from the West were treated with great kindness upon their arrival - Galla Placidia and Theodosius were, after all, aunt and nephew: she the daughter and he the grandson of Emperor Theodosius the Great. And perhaps the pure Pulcheria admired Galla the more when she found that the reason for her precipitate flight from Italy had been to preserve herself from the unchaste advances of a man.
They were given some of the finest suites in the Imperial Palace, overlooking that bright sunlit sea, so different and so far away from the marshes and the gloom of Ravenna, and they were lavished with gifts of gold, and precious gems, and fine robes. All these things Galla rejoiced in. Aëtius was perhaps less impressed, but he said nothing. He had been to Constantinople before. He knew the city of old.
At dusk the following day a firm knock came on my door.
I was engaged in some tedious but necessary work for the Count of the Sacred Largesse - adding up columns of figures, in other words. I couldn’t help wishing there were a symbol . . . It seems madness to say so, but I couldn’t help wishing there were a symbol for nothing, as well as for all the numerals denoting somethings. A special number signifying no number. Idly I even drew a round ‘O’ in the margin of my paper, to signify emptiness, absence. Surely it would make adding up easier in some ways? But I scribbled it out again. It was a foolish notion, and would only earn me ridicule; and I suffered enough ridicule as it was from my fellow clerks, owing to my great devotion to the Empress.
‘Enter,’ I said, not looking round.
The door opened, and someone stood behind me. Still I did not look, but then the power of his presence was overwhelming, and I glanced back.
It was him. My pupil. My dear, my much-missed, grave-eyed, tall, lean pupil. A general, at twenty-five!
Before I knew what I was doing I had scrambled to my feet and embraced him. It was contrary to all court etiquette, of course, for a mere slave-born pedagogue even to approach a nobleman unbidden, or address words to him first, let alone to embrace him. But Aëtius and I had always been more to each other than mere slave-teacher and master-pupil. He embraced me fondly in return, his blue eyes shining with affection, and perhaps amused remembrance of our long hours of learning together which he had so openly detested.
We stood back and regarded each other.
It was good to have him back in the court, for however short a while. His very presence, so still and strong, was a calmative, in a world which seemed increasingly beset by winds of violent change from without, and unhealthy miasmas of weakness and madness from within. News from Ravenna of Emperor Honorius was not good. Aëtius stood through it all, this lean, hard young man, steady-eyed, unflinching, like a pillar of granite in a hailstorm.
‘So,’ he said, his hands on my shoulders, looking down at me. ‘You work here in Constantinople now?’
I nodded. ‘After my years of pedagogy had finished, and I had seen my most brilliant though idle pupil off into the wide world - you remember faithfully all your lessons in logic, I trust? And the three categories: demonstrative, persuasive, and sophistic?’
‘Only in your late twenties yourself,’ said Aëtius, clapping me on the arm, ‘and talking like an aged pedant already.’
‘Already talking like an aged pedant,’ I corrected him. ‘It is vulgar to end a sentence with an adverb.’
He smiled. ‘What little logic I ever learned is long forgotten. Besides,’ he added, the smile fading, ‘the wide world you saw me off into but rarely conforms to its laws.’
I looked away, out of the window and across the shimmering Golden Horn. Gulls wheeled low in the twilight beyond the bars.
‘After you had gone off to the frontier to learn soldiering, I was despatched from the court of Honorius to come east. It is peaceful here.’ I looked back at him. ‘But what of yourself? I have no other great news, but what of you? What news?’
‘I hear that the emperor has married,’ murmured Aëtius. ‘News enough, I would have thought.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Athenaïs.’
‘You speak of her as a man speaks of his beloved.’
‘Ssshh!’ I hissed, alarmed. ‘Do not even whisper such things!’
He laughed. I glared. Fine for him to fear nothing, but we slave-born pedagogues have a great deal to fear in an imperial court.
‘So,’ he said, ‘this Athenaïs - Eudoxia, we should say, I think - she is very beautiful?’
‘Hmph.’ I still glared. ‘You can decide for yourself when you meet her. She returns from the Summer Palace at Hieron in two days’ time.’
‘What other news?’
I shrugged. ‘No other news. You know better than that. Humble scribes such as myself do not have news. Whereas generals ...’
‘You wish to hear my news?’
I nodded. ‘Of course.’
He considered, then sighed, pulled over a splintery stool from the shadows and sat down. After long rumination he began. ‘During my last season on the Danube station, at Viminacium—’
‘Wait, wait!’ I cried, hurriedly sharpening my goosequill as best I could.
‘You’re writing all this down?’ he said.
‘Every word,’ I said. ‘For the day when . . .’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘The Annals of Priscus of Panium?’
I nodded sheepishly. ‘It won’t be Tacitus, I know. But—’
He laid his powerful hand on my arm, and said, ‘Do not be so sure. We live in interesting times.’
Our eyes met. We both understood the bleak irony in his words.
I rested my hands on the brim of my writing lectern,
dipped my quill, and waited.
‘Well,’ he began. ‘News from the Danube station.’
It was a daily delight to me to see my dear pupil, Aëtius, in his red general’s robes, attending the interminable meetings and sessions of statutes in the imperial Consistory with great forbearance for a man of action such as himself. ‘With attainments beyond his years, and a steadiness of character beyond his attainments’, as St Gregory of Nazianzus said.
He served as dutifully in Consistory as on the battlefield. The frontier was quiet for now; there were no major campaigns to be fought and, besides, the summer campaigning season was almost at an end. So he took his place obediently in the great semicircle of the court, with Theodosius enthroned at the centre, and his senators, counsellors, generals and bishops ranged round the sides. Beyond this heart of the imperial administration, the palace teemed with eunuchs, slaves, ladies’ maids, ridiculous ceremonials, titles, grandiose honours. My own immediate master at this time, the Count of the Sacred Largesse, held one of the simpler offices of state.
Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 11