Once again Athanaric interrupted. “Whatever he might know of any fugitives he would hold under the Hippocratic oath,” he said. “For him, that’s better than an imperial edict. I don’t think he’d tell you a thing, unless you broke him utterly. And, most excellent and charitable Palladios, I beg you not to do that. As a favor to me.”
“Why are you defending this . . . this gelded heretic?” Lucius demanded furiously.
“Because he saved my life,” Athanaric returned flatly. “I would have died of a fever if it hadn’t been for him. And where I come from, we think that creates a debt.”
“Blood debt!” said Lucius, getting to his feet and sneering at Athanaric. “A pagan notion; a barbarian notion; a foolish and worthless Gothic sentiment!”
Athanaric flushed. “Perhaps. But I prefer it to your Roman savagery, most Christian archbishop.” He turned back to the prefect. “Moreover, Your Excellency, this Chariton could be of great service to the state, if you let him live. If you kill him on the rack, he might give you a few worthless names of people who would be gone already by the time you went to seek them. But if he lives, he could be a means of strengthening the armies of Their Sacred Majesties, and also a means for you to do a favor to your colleagues in Thrace.”
“Eh?” asked Palladios, almost visibly pricking his ears up. “What’s that?”
“Send him to work in a military hospital,” said Athanaric. “Have you been to the ones on the Danube frontier? There are also some in Your Excellency’s home province of Noricum. The doctors in places like that are incompetent quacks. I didn’t know how bad they were until I met a real Hippocratic like your prisoner here. They kill more men than they cure. But real Hippocratic doctors don’t want to work in military hospitals at the ends of the earth; they’d rather spend their time soothing ladies’ nerves or even treating the Alexandrian rabble, leaving our soldiers to butchers and witches. Well, I know the army duke who commands in Scythia; he’d be delighted to have a real Alexandrian physician, a graduate of the Museum, to run his hospital. If Your Grace would have a contract drawn up and Chariton would consent to sign it, you would have the pleasure of rendering Duke Sebastianus your debtor, serving the interests of the state, and ridding your city of an adherent of the Athanasian faction, all in one.”
Palladios let out his breath in a little puffing sigh and looked at me speculatively.
“Why should you let him go?” demanded Lucius, seeing that he was losing and growing still more vehement. “He must know something about our enemies. Have him racked and see if he talks.”
“Have him racked, have him flogged, have him killed!” Palladios snapped, turning on the archbishop. “That’s all you ever say. I swear by all the gods, you bishops are more bloodthirsty than barbarian anthropophagi! What’s the use of killing a doctor? The most noble Athanaric is right: the eunuch would be more use to everyone stitching up soldiers in Thrace. Well, Chariton of Ephesus.” He turned back to me and left Lucius biting his nails with anger and glaring. “Would you consent to sign such a contract?”
I felt very weak at the knees and had to swallow several times before I could answer. I hadn’t felt the depth of my fear until I began to believe I would escape. “Gladly,” I said at last.
It was not entirely clear who should draw up a contract for me to become an army doctor. In the end the notary was sent to the office of the duke of Egypt, who would arrange things with the assessor. I was to wait until the contract arrived; Athanaric stayed with me, as though he didn’t trust Lucius not to have me racked in the interval.
The waiting room was a little box in the back of the prefecture. It had a bench down each side and a window overlooking the prefectural gardens. The guards escorted me there, this time without roughness, but Athanaric dismissed them when we arrived. Astonishingly, they didn’t question his right to do this; they just went. I sat down hard, shaking a bit. I had to lean forward because my hands were still tied. Athanaric noticed and grinned; he took out his knife and sawed through the leather.
“Thank you,” I said, and examined my wrists, which were rubbed raw. My hands were trembling. “Thank you very much.”
He shrugged; I just caught the gesture as I looked up again. “The debt’s canceled now?” he asked.
“There wasn’t any debt,” I told him. “A doctor doesn’t refuse to treat a sick man. And you might have recovered from that fever without me.”
“Might I? Shall I go back and tell them that?” He laughed at my alarm. “There was a debt. Besides, I like people who refuse bribes. It’s unprofessional, seeing how much I depend on their acceptance, but I can’t help it. And I don’t like to see honest men tortured for keeping faith with their friends, particularly not by bloodthirsty bishops. You thought I’d come to help them, didn’t you?”
“I knew you’d helped them in the past.”
“My job is to take information to the court and edicts out of it. I don’t make policy, and I don’t lie to His Illustriousness the master of the offices of His Sacred Majesty. I don’t have to like every act every servant of His Sacred Majesty may take it into his head to commit.”
I thought of him riding off with the news of Athanasios’ death. If he hadn’t ridden so fast, Lucius might not have been here yet, and Peter would never have been captured. But still I could believe that he disliked cruelty. And he had saved my life, or at least my life as a doctor. That counted for something. “What are military hospitals like?” I asked. “Do I have to sign on for twenty years?”
“Oh no!” he said, answering the second question first. “Doctors aren’t enlisted, or commissioned either; the contracts of employment vary. We’ll probably sign you on for ten years or so, to keep you out of Lucius’ way. The hospitals are fairly standard things of their kind, a bit more regulated than your ecclesiastical hospitals here. I imagine you’ll be sent to Novidunum. It’s a big fortress on the Danube, and the hospital there is particularly bad. The troops always say that it’s better to cut your throat and have done with it than go to Novidunum. It’ll keep you busy.” He paused, then added, “I’ll probably see you there from time to time. My appointment here is finished, and I have a lot of contacts in Thrace; some family too. I’m usually posted there. So you see, I’m interested in improving the health care of the region.”
I smiled at that. “I’ll improve it if I can.”
We sat in silence for a minute, and then Athanaric asked, “Since you’ve finished here, and I have too, perhaps you could tell me: What was that divine revelation that Archbishop Athanasios had about you?”
“Something personal,” I said.
“Which you don’t mean to tell me. Very well, I’ll just have to suspect the worst. Your conscience was burdened with some appalling crime and the archbishop made you treat monks as a penance. All I have to do now is to imagine the crime. Did you attribute a work of Herophilos to Hippocrates?”
He looked so cheerful at this prospect that despite everything I had to smile. “Imagine away,” I told him. “Thank you again.”
I left Alexandria a week later, sailing on an army supply ship from the Great Harbor. I had not seen Theophilos, nor any other of the church leaders. I did manage to get my three nuns out of prison, but I didn’t stay in their house. Philon had heard of my arrest. When I had signed the contract and was allowed to walk out of the prefecture, I found him waiting in the atrium: he had been applying, unsuccessfully, for permission to see me. When I appeared, still stinking and filthy from the prison, he came running over and caught my shoulders. “I thank God!” he exclaimed, and hugged me.
He took me straight back to his house, and we arrived to find Theogenes and Theophila both over from their home in the Broucheion, waiting anxiously for news of me. Everyone was so glad to see me free and untortured that I had great difficulty in getting enough time to bathe.
I spent my last week in the city at Philon’s house. It was perhaps a mistake, as it made me wish that I didn’t have to go. Everything I loved in Alexandria
was there: Philon and his family; medicine and books; freedom. Alexandria’s freedom is like Christ’s peace: “not as the world’s.” Alexandria’s freedom is a liberty to search for truth and to define your own law. The city has a hundred different laws, all in conflict, trying to impose on each other, violent and alive. In that last week in Philon’s house, I knew that if I stayed in Alexandria I would one day be able to fulfill my dream, to say plainly, “I am a woman, but I will still practice medicine,” and have it accepted, a law of my own, not really any stranger than the Torah or the hierarchies of Plotinus. But I could never survive under Lucius. And Alexandria had become a sad place for me. Too many people were dead or imprisoned. Too much had died with Athanasios.
I was not terribly frightened of going to work in a hospital in Thrace. As Philon had said, my greatest teacher now would be experience anyway. And the great Dioskourides had been an army doctor. I didn’t mind the idea of the work. I knew that I would miss the stimulation of lectures at the Temple, and the many bookshops around its annexes; I would miss consulting with Philon, and the “stimulating company” of the other doctors from the Museum. I gathered I might have difficulty in finding various common drugs up on the frontier. I could certainly expect the army doctors and most of the men to despise me, at least at first, as an effeminate Asian eunuch. But all this was considerably better than the rack — or, for that matter, being sent back to Ephesus and forced to behave as a disgraced gentlewoman. I would be paid, once in rations and again in the value of those rations in money, and I would be free to take private patients on the side. I’d see something of the world, particularly if I managed to attach myself to a mobile unit during a campaign.
I’d arrived in Alexandria almost penniless, with a chest containing my jewels, three books, two spare tunics, and a pair of boots. I left in somewhat better state, with most of the jewels, sixty-three books, three tunics, two spare cloaks, a complete set of medical supplies, and nearly fifty solidi. I also had a medical qualification from the Museum, and the dubious distinction of having been private physician to the archbishop. All in all, I had not done badly. And, I told myself, a few years’ experience on the Danube frontier wouldn’t hurt me. From what Athanaric had said, good doctors were in short supply up there: I might make a career for myself yet. I managed to put a brave face on it when I said farewell to Philon and his family.
But when the ship glided past the Pharos and lifted its sails to the land breeze, I looked back at the city, shining around its harbor, and I wept. Alexandria, the most turbulent city in the empire, dirty, dangerous, violent — I wept at parting from it as I had not wept when I left my own home. It is not confined by the limits of its nation or its people. Like the Pharos, it rises from stubborn rock and casts its light a long way through the wastes of darkness.
I ARRIVED IN THRACE in early October of the year that Athanasios died. We had a smooth journey from Alexandria. Because it was unseasonably fair weather, and because it was late in the season, the shipmaster did not sail up the Syrian coast but took his vessel directly across the deep sea to Crete. There we took on fresh water, and then, hurrying to catch the last of the good weather, proceeded through the islands and up into the Bosphorus. We arrived in Constantinople early on the twenty-fifth of September. The harbor shimmered in the soft morning, and the city seemed to rise out of the water like a vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, its domes and palaces turned to gold by the early light. By the docks vendors were crying their wares: fresh figs, new melon, hot sesame cakes! Seagulls flapped white wings over the bright water, scavenging amid the rubbish tipped into the harbor.
The ship was due to unload part of its cargo of grain into a smaller vessel, which would take it, and me, on up into the Euxine Sea; the cargo would be unloaded at Histria and from there shipped up the river. This smaller ship was already waiting in the dock when the Alexandrian one put in, and immediately its master came on board. “I want to leave tomorrow!” he announced to the entire crew. “Who knows how long this wind will hold? I want to get the voyage done before the winter. You don’t make any money sitting in Constantinople docks!”
So the hatches were opened, and the dock workers began dragging the bales of grain up, loading them onto handcarts, and wheeling them over to the other ship. When I managed to catch the master in a free moment, I asked him whether I had time to go into the city to see someone.
“You’re going to Scythia?” he asked, looking at me dubiously. The master obviously thought Scythia an unlikely destination for an Asian eunuch.
I explained who I was, and he looked still more dubious. “I have a friend in the city,” I said. “Do I have time to see him?”
“If you’re back on the ship before dawn tomorrow,” he answered. “That’s when I’m leaving. The wind won’t wait and neither will I.” I agreed to this, and set off.
Constantinople is a new city. Very little is left of the old town of Byzantium which the Most Glorious Emperor remade into his capital and named after himself. But some of the shine had come off his work in the fifty years since it had been built. Many of the buildings had been put up hastily and carelessly and were now coming down again; I found that the carpenters and plasterers of the city were well employed, and the streets were littered with chunks of plaster and broken roof tiles. But the city was still beautiful, with wide streets, and full of public gardens. In one square I found a statue of the great Alexander, taken from his mausoleum in Alexandria and now standing among the plane trees of Constantine’s city. A public fountain flowed from the pedestal beneath his feet, and his glass eyes, under the hair of gilded marble, seemed to stare sadly at the world he had conquered and lost. Constantinople is full of art treasures pillaged from all the greatest cities of the empire. The Most Pious Emperor had wanted the city that bore his name to be of unrivaled magnificence.
I made my way to the city prefecture, then stopped. It was nearly noon, and I had to be back on the ship that night. Was it worthwhile, troubling Thorion for that short a time?
I went back to the public square of Alexander and sat down on a wall. I wanted to see Thorion. It had been three years and more, and I missed him. And I wanted to see Maia too. I ached with wanting to see them. But I was afraid. I knew that Thorion wanted me to give up my pretense. He now had a job as an assessor, legal adviser to the provincial governor. He had a good salary and earned as much again in bribes and perquisites, and he was no longer dependent on our father and no longer so worried about Festinus. So much he had told me in his letters. He hadn’t trusted more than that to paper, but I could guess the rest of his plans. He meant to bring me — his sister, whom he had “rescued” from Festinus and “concealed” for three years — back into respectable society, and he meant me to marry one of his friends and lead a normal life. And I didn’t know how to begin to tell him that I would do no such thing. The gap between us had grown too wide — and Thorion was scarcely even aware yet that it existed. I would cause my family nothing but misery if I appeared in Constantinople now. And there wasn’t any time to talk to them properly, not with the ship leaving next day before dawn.
I sighed. Some women from the quarter were drawing water from the fountain, and they stared at me suspiciously. I smiled at them in apology, got off the wall, and walked back to the docks. The shipmaster gave me a strange look, but no one asked any questions.
From Constantinople we sailed northwest along the Euxine coast. The weather held, and the Euxine produced none of its treacherous storms; the master began to relax, and put in at several small ports along the way to take on water and fresh fruit. At one of these, Odessus, we learned that Sebastianus, who was duke of the Thracian province of Scythia, was consulting with the count of Thrace in Marcianopolis. Since I would be under Sebastianus’ command, it made no sense to go on to his headquarters in Tomis and wait there for him, so I disembarked at Odessus and set off for Marcianopolis, which is twenty miles upriver from the seaport.
There were plenty of boats going up the river from
Odessus to Marcianopolis, carrying fish and imported goods from the port as well as passengers, and I paid a few coppers to install myself and my traveling chest on one of these. Two other passengers climbed in, a woman with a package of imported woolen cloth and a man with some fish and two large amphorae of wine. They both looked at me sidelong, but said nothing. The boatmen cast off from the quayside, raised the sail, and sat to their oars; I sat on my chest in the stern and watched the countryside go past. I hadn’t had much chance to see it from the ship — just beaches and rocky shores backed by mountains; many forests of dark pine and oak; a few towns huddling at the mouths of muddy rivers, surrounded by open fields; one or two cities. Going up the river, I found Thrace even wilder and more desolate than I thought it would be. Odessus was a very much smaller city than the ones I was used to, and Marcianopolis, when we reached it, was not much bigger. Between the two the river wound through a narrow strip of cultivated land toward the Haemus mountains. Cows grazed in the rich pastureland; a few peasants were taking in the last of the harvest, stooping and rhythmically slashing the rich gold of the grain. For the first mile or so the landscape looked indefinably strange to me, and then I realized what was missing: olive trees. They won’t grow in Thrace; it’s too cold for them. The inhabitants follow the barbarian Gothic custom and make a paste from milk, which they call butter, and this they use in cooking and on bread in place of olive oil. The vine too has difficulty growing in Thrace, and the local wine is thin and sour.
I gave an uncomfortable shiver and looked up, away from the cultivated lands. Beyond it were the dark, shadowy shapes of the mountains and miles of empty plain and forest, alien and savage. There was a lot of land lying waste. Thrace is a sparsely populated region. It was so even in ancient times, except around the coast, and it suffered greatly in the wars before the accession of the most illustrious emperor Diocletian. It is quite a large diocese, too, comprised of six provinces. It is bounded on the south by the Aegean, on the east by the Euxine, and on the north by the river called Hister or Danube, beyond which are the tribes of the barbarian Goths. On the west it borders the imperial diocese of Dacia, which is Latin-speaking and under the control of the western emperor. The southern four provinces of Thrace speak a kind of Greek, but the two northern ones, Moesia and Scythia, are bilingual, Greek and Latin — that’s not counting the Gothic spoken by many of the soldiers and the Thracian of the peasants.
The Beacon at Alexandria Page 24