The Gathering of the Storm

9

More than beautiful, though. It takes more than mere beauty not only to capture a man’s heart, but to hold it. And Athenais was much more than merely beautiful.

She first came to the imperial court in the conduct of a lawsuit: ardent, passionately indignant at a miscarriage of justice, brilliantly articulate, magnificently scornful of those she felt trying to cheat her of her due inheritance. And still a girl of eighteen.

She was born the daughter of a prominent and brilliant philosophy professor in Athens, by the name of Leontius. In him, it was said, there burned brightly something of the pure, clear light that had illuminated Athens so many centuries ago, in the days when the Lyceum and the Academy still hummed with life and excitement. On the death of Leontius, a will was discovered which left everything to his two older sons and not a penny to his daughter, whom he loved above all else in this world. At first Athenais tried to reason with her brothers, but they laughed her to scorn. They had always resented the greater love that their father had had for her. And so she came to the highest court in the Eastern Empire: the Court of the Imperial Justice itself, in Constantinople, and presented herself before it, unaccompanied by a single advocate or lawyer.

‘I could not afford one,’ she said with simple dignity, standing before the open-mouthed court lawyers in her simple white stola gathered round the waist by a slim leather belt. ‘So I shall argue my case myself.’

It was true. Her aunt, Leontius’ aged sister, had scraped together a small purseful of silver coins: just enough to buy her passage from the Piraeus to the Golden Horn, and no more.

The will was read out again before the court. After dividing all his estate equally between his two sons, Leontius left only a laconic coda to his daughter: ‘To Athenais, I leave not a penny. She will have good luck enough elsewhere.’

Athenais flinched when she heard her father’s cruel words read out. Then, composing herself, she began to argue her case.

After a short while, someone was sent to fetch Theodosius himself. The scholarly-minded emperor would enjoy a strange spectacle such as this.

To the astonishment of the assembled legates and priests, counsellors and praetors, this young slip of a girl supported her case with the fluency of the most experienced, smooth-tongued old law-hound in the basilica. She understood precisely the venerable four divisions of Roman law: lex, ius, mos and fas. She quoted freely and word-perfectly from the ancient authorities: from the most obscure imperial decretals, from the entire canon of the ius civile, which she appeared to have at her fingertips; from the Orations of Cicero, and the Institutes of Quintilian; from the Digesta of Ulpian, and the Quaestiones of Papinian; from dusty and half-forgotten pandects, from shadowy and unfrequented corners of the responsa iurisprudentium. Even from Demosthenes’ ‘Against Boeotus’, with a learned and scintillating digression on why the arguments of that great Athenian orator still held true, even if Greek law were an utterly separate thing from Roman.

‘For laws, like men, are born to die,’ she said. ‘But justice is immortal.’

Whether it was the spellbinding softness and clarity of her voice or the luminous beauty of her person or her astonishing erudition that silenced the assembled greybeards and venerables, it was impossible to say. Perhaps the implausible combination of all three. But silenced they were. Some of them there on those hard stone benches had already begun to ponder how easy it might be to take this penniless provincial girl for a wife. While others began to curse inwardly that this was a commitment they had already made to another, long ago, and that the commitment still lived.

It was unheard of for a girl to have been taught in the same way as a boy. But Leontius himself had taught her; unorthodox in his views on child-rearing, as in the wording of his will.

The slim Athenian girl quoted even from the Holy Book of the Christians, although she was not baptised into the True Church and her upbringing had been wholly pagan. She cited the example of the daughters of Zelopehad, from the book of Numbers: ‘And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, “The daughters of Zelopehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father’s brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them.”’ A citation from their own Holy Scriptures so learned and so obscure that it had more than one priest amongst that assembly of great minds scrambling from his bench to find a Bible to consult.

Eventually her argument was finished, and she stood silently awaiting judgement.

If the court found against her, she would be turned out onto the streets without a penny. A beautiful girl like that – it was clear how she would have to make her way in the world. Some of the greybeards on their benches even began to delve surreptitiously beneath their robes and into their purses, to see how many solidi they had on them. Why, they could hurry after her and make her a kindly offer even on the steps of the court…

At last, after muffled discussion with his private circle of jurisconsults, Theodosius rose to give his verdict.

He cleared his throat and looked steadily down at the girl. ‘I find the will of Leontius just,’ he said.

Those there commented that, even as he spoke the words, he seemed to grow in stature and gravity. It was as if in those few short minutes in court, in the presence of Athenais, he had suddenly grown up into a man of strength and character. Which was true: he had grown up, because for the first time in his life he had fallen in love.

‘Leontius, your wise and far-sighted father, was correct,’ went on the emperor. ‘You have no need of any legacy. You will prosper quite well on your own.’

Athenais’ eyes flamed with dark anger but she said nothing.

‘You will depart from our court as penniless as you arrived,’ said Theodosius, seeming to add more cruelty to the verdict. His courtiers heard his words and looked to the girl. Her expression was a powerful mix of resolution and despair.

Unspeaking, she turned to go.

‘However,’ Theodosius called after her, and his voice was gentler now, ‘if you will consent to be my wife, you will find your present poverty of less concern.’

She halted, her back turned to the emperor against all etiquette, her head still bowed.

The silence in the court could have been snapped in two.

Then she turned to face him.

Any other girl in her situation would have consented immediately, would have fallen at the emperor’s feet and wept with humble gratitude. But Athenais was not any other girl.

She looked the young emperor in the face, once again breaching all rules of court etiquette. She saw before her, for the first time, not an abstract symbol of power and majesty, more gilded icon than man of flesh and blood, robed in the legendary Tyrian purple and the dazzling gold of a living god. She saw a young, fresh-faced, rather lanky boy, with gentle features and myopic eyes, but eyes nevertheless full of intelligence, humour and longing. Perhaps she also saw in him some of the melancholy and loneliness that always accompany emperors and kings.

She thought in a flash that this was a man she could grow to love.

‘I’ll consider it,’ she said.

And without another word, or a single copper coin in her purse, she turned and swept out of the court.

She wandered the streets of Constantinople as if in a dream.

All this… all this could be hers… Empress of half the Roman World. What power and wealth she would have. What good she could do. But she would have to forswear all pagan philosophy, a thousand years of the finest thought and striving of the Greeks, and submit to being baptised into that Asiatic mystery religion of miracles and blood and human sacrifice which the rulers of the empire now professed.

What would her father say? Her father had been wiser, perhaps, than even he knew.

She stood at the heart of the city, that crowded square of the Augusteion bounded by those four monumental buildings which seemed to represent the soul of humanity in all its nobility and squalor: from the most lofty, spiritual and orderly, to the darkest and most chthonic forces in the hearts of men. Along one side, the great complex of the Mega Palation, the Imperial Palace and its courts, which she had just left. Along another, the grave Senate House. Along the third, the fine old Church of Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom. And along the fourth, the Hippodrome, the arena for the chariot races between those bitter rivals, the Blues and the Greens. Almost daily the poor of the city crowded inside to watch their teams gallop furiously amid the dust and sometimes the carnage of snapped axletrees and flying chariots, broken men and screaming horses; or erupted into scuffles and fights after the contest was won, cornering some poor isolated supporter from the opposite team in a dank, shadowy alley and slicing off an admonitory ear, a nose, a finger…

She looked up at the four great buildings and they seemed to revolve around her. Then she shook herself and left the square and began to wander westwards up the Mese, which runs like a gleaming marble artery through the city, and is one of the wonders of the world. She passed through the marvellous marble-paved oval Forum of Constantine, with its towering hundred-foot column of porphyry in the centre, transported by ship from Egypt, from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. (Oh, I can see it all now before me, as real and sunlit as ever: I, Priscus, knew it well; and never, never, never will I set eyes upon that beloved city again.) The plinth on which the column stood contained the hatchet with which Noah built the Ark, the baskets and the remains of the loaves with which Christ had fed the multitude; and, out of respect for the more ancient ways, the figure of Athene brought from Troy to the Old Rome by Aeneas himself. On the summit of the column, far away in the upper air where only birds and angels flew, gazing out over the rooftops of the city, stood another figure. The body was that of Apollo, carved by Phidias, but the head, surrounded by a halo representing the rays of the sun, was that of Emperor Constantine himself, Ruler of all the Earth under Heaven.

Here half the citizenry of the city was gathered, so it seemed. A vast, milling throng of whores and hucksters, fishwives, fig-sellers, knife-grinders, songbird-vendors, pickpockets, con men and worse. The gangs of child pickpockets were the worst, all bright, gleaming eyes and deft little fingers, like felonious dormice looking to store away a secret hoard against the winter to come.

In one corner a coarse-voiced man was reading aloud to an entranced crowd of illiterate listeners from that scandalous daily news-sheet, The Acts of the Roman People. They cheered raucously when he announced that today was the birthday of one of the minor members of the imperial family, and they listened agog as he read from the list headed ‘Crimes, Punishments, Weddings, Divorces, Deaths, Portents and Abominations’. They were moved to tears at news of the recent death of the Blessed St Thecla, over in Asia, in the wilderness beyond Nicopolis. She had been thrown to savage beasts by a wicked and idolatrous emperor back in the time of the persecutions, but her virginal followers had cast flowers into the arena to calm them. Then she was thrown into a lake of savage seals, but they had all been killed by miraculous lightning. She had baptised herself in a ditch, and later lived for over a hundred and fifty years in a cave, eating nothing but juniper berries. Many sick, lame and blind had come to her there, and she had healed them all. Now she had passed away into a better world. The crowd crossed themselves reverently and prayed that St Thecla would remember them in heaven.

They were captivated by the story of a crow which recently lived in the marketplace beside the Church of St James the Apostle. Apparently the crow had spoken perfect Latin, to general amazement, and attracted sightseers from far and wide. But it had, alas, been bludgeoned to death by an irate shoe-seller for continually defecating on his stall. The other traders in the marketplace had given the shoe-seller a sound drubbing, and paid for the crow to have a lavish funeral.

Such is the arrant nonsense that delights the unlettered multitude. They gasped with horror or cackled with loud gusts of halitotic laughter: the urban masses in all their ghastliness.

In another corner a religious madman stood on an upturned wooden crate, addressing a small but devoted audience. Athenais stopped to listen, and learned that this man had had revealed to him the secret Book of Elchasai the Prophet. He had met the Son of God in the desert, who was ninety-six miles high with footprints four miles long, and was accompanied by his Holy Sister of similar dimensions. He recommended the use of dust and toads’ blood to treat skin diseases, and forty days of consecutive baptism to cure consumption.

Athenais thought back to Athens the Beautiful, Pindar’s violet-clouded citadel, and she saw it being eclipsed and replaced by these great, swarming, fanatical cities of the east; the religion of Athens, the religion of reason and public argument, obscured by strange cults and devotions, hidden mysteries; private ecstasies in small, dark chapels filled with incense and gloom.

She walked on through the neighbouring Forum of Theodosius; by the Amastrium, and the immense Aqueduct of Valens, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. After some time she left the Mese and plunged into the darker alleys of the city, heading north, past a scruffy little colonnade grandly called the Portico of the Lentil Dealers, and then an even scruffier called the Portico of the Scribes and Booksellers. Here they sold salacious tales of the lowest type called novels, that most wretched and plebeian of all literary forms over which no muse presides, and which shall never know respectability. She glanced briefly at their grubby covers, vulgarly bound into pages rather than traditional and elegant scrolls. One grimy, ink-stained and impoverished-looking bookseller tried to sell her The True and Astounding Adventures of the Whore Lubricia, Throughout Every Land and Also in the Underworld, but she looked away and hurried on.

From thence she made her way down Rim of the Jar Lane, then left into Three Birds Alley, quickly along the Street of Doubtful Fortune and past the drunks and wolf-whistlers at the Sign of the Melancholy Elephant. She declined their offer of a cup of wine and stopped instead to refresh herself briefly at the Fountain of the Four Fishes, wondering as she did so what terrible curses all the little gold curse-plates might bear, nailed face-down to the bottom of the fountain so that only the spirits might read them. There was a lot of graffiti round the side of the fountain, much of it of a lewd nature, but she was unable to prevent herself from reading some of it: ‘Amaryllis is a slut… Silvius sucks cock… I had the barmaid at the Melancholy Elephant.’

She went on eastwards until she came to the Golden Horn, and looked out over the great ships riding at anchor there, the salt-faded reds and blues of their furled sails, the gulls wheeling, the smaller lighters bringing grain and textiles and amphorae to the docks along the shore, and the ever-obscene cries of the dockers as they worked. Then she wound back again westwards, and rested a while, leaning against a wall, slipping one tired and dusty foot from her sandal and rubbing it between her fingers.

A man rested his hand on her shoulder, leaned close to her ear, and muttered with vinous breath, ‘I’d give you a plump roast quail for it, love, or even a brace of ’em, so I would.’

She slipped her sandal back on and stood straight, brushing his hand from her shoulder as she would a bluebottle. She looked down and saw a crooked, bleary-eyed, unshaven creature grinning up at her.

‘A quail?’ she repeated in bewilderment.

‘Or a brace, so I would, now I see you from the front up straight and proud and all lovely like that.’ A runnel of spittle appeared over his stubbly chin. ‘You could be like my fresh young wifey for an hour. Just back in my cookshop over the street.’ He jerked his head and the spittle flew into the air. She pressed herself against the wall. ‘Just in the back there,’ he said; ‘the wife’s down the market.’ His legs appeared to be trembling with expectation, and his voice grew strange in timbre. His hands were agitated beneath his tunic ‘Bend you forwards over me breadoven, so I would, hitch your skirts up, run my hands through your lovely raven hair…’

She felt that she was about to be sick.

Abruptly, the man turned and raised his hands against the attack of a skinny old woman with a stick, who was filling the air with the foulest language imaginable. Athenais put her hands over her ears, but still heard both the male and female pudibunda freely adverted to.

The man swore as foully at the old woman in return, but under the thwacks of her stick he began to retreat, and finally broke and ran back to the greasy darkness of his cookshop over the street.

The woman set her stick on the ground and leaned over it, bent almost double, gasping for breath after her exertions.

Athenais stared at her uncertainly.

At last the woman creaked upright again and regarded the girl with her one good eye; the other was milky white.

‘Where’s your guardian, girl?’ she demanded crossly. Her voice was hoarse and her breath wheezy. ‘You can’t just wander around round here on your own, you know. About as safe as a lamb in a wood full of wolves you are here.’

‘I… I’m alone,’ said Athenais.

‘You’re a young fool,’ said the woman. She fumbled in her ancient woollen wraps and pulled out a breadroll. ‘Yours for a copper.’

Athenais shook her head. ‘I haven’t got any money.’

The woman looked at her more closely. ‘What’s your story?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Hm. Nice rich husband you had, till he come home late one night and finds you in bed with one his Armenian slaveboys lying between your open thighs, showing his bottom to the moon.’

‘Certainly not!’ said Athenais indignantly. ‘It’s none of your business, anyway.’

‘Hm,’ said the old woman. She tore the breadroll in two and pushed an entire half into her wrinkled mouth, where she began to chew it as best she could with her one remaining incisor. ‘You look wore out,’ she mumbled through the mouthful.

Athenais looked down. ‘A little.’

The old woman considered, and then thrust the other half of the breadroll into the girls’s hand. ‘Here you are, dearie.’ She cackled. ‘Never thought I’d be the one people’d come to for charity!’

Athenais looked the old woman over, from the filthy woollen cap covering her wispy white hair, down to her cracked and curled-up feet.

‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘You have to eat.’

So Athenais took the breadroll and ate it slowly. It tasted surprisingly good.

‘The baker down there, he gives me a loaf or so every morning, God bless him.’

The girl nodded and swallowed. When she had finished she said, ‘Do you live hereabouts?’

The old woman grinned, showing her single mustard-coloured tooth. She pointed across the street under the arches, where there was a neat little bundle wrapped in a brown woollen blanket. ‘My house,’ she said, beaming.

Athenais smiled. ‘Thank you for the bread.’

‘Not at all, dearie.’

As she walked away the old woman called after her, ‘You want to make for the Metanoia, my girl. The House of Repentance is the only place for you now.’

She walked in the city all afternoon. She was thirsty, but another from among the nameless poor, a blind and legless beggar who sat beside the Fountain of Saint Irenaeus, lent her his old chipped drinking-pot to drink from.

Then she went into the dark cavern of the Church of St Stephanos, and saw amid the flickering candlelight the famous icon of Theotokos Pammakaristos, the All-Joyous Mother of God. She had the distant, serene face of one far removed from the squalor and troubles of the city and the world. The gold, worm-eaten frame from which she looked out was covered in the red lipstick kisses of the city’s whores who came here every day out of love for her. They revered her as their own, talking softly with her as their gentle all-seeing mother in heaven, kneeling for hours in the aromatic dark with their red lips and their bruised eyes, the sweat and odour of their last client still upon them.

She was sitting outside on the steps of the church, considering the fickleness of fortune and longing for some ripe, juicy grapes, when a gilded carriage, drawn by a single white mule caparisoned in crimson, stopped at the bottom of the steps. The door was opened by one of the six statuesque, fashionably Nubian slaves who accompanied the carriage on foot, dressed in immaculate white tunics, and a great lady of the city stepped out. The kind of lady who keeps numberless ‘whisperers’ in her grand townhouse, which is to say those little naked slaveboys kept by rich ladies for amusement, to bring them almonds and candied fruits and whisper compliments and sweet nothings in their pearl-ringed ears.

This lady wore a magnificent cloak of midnight-blue silk, stiffly brocaded with pearls and golden thread, illustrating the miraculous life and martyr’s death of one of her favourite saints, Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. He was shown in three separate embroidered panels, bound to a stake, slain with a sword, and then finally burned. It was a remarkable piece of work. Furthermore this great lady had at home many more such embroidered cloaks, each one carrying illustrations of a different favourite saint and, ideally, martyr. On the whole she preferred her saints to be martyrs as well, because the embroidered illustrations of their deaths in pearls and gold were so much more elaborate and striking. Her favourite of all, perhaps, was her cloak in bright spring green, showing the dramatic martyrdom of dear St Ignatius of Antioch, thrown to the lions in the Colosseum in the reign of Emperor Trajan. She always looked forward to his feast-day, 17 October, when the cloak could correctly be worn without spiritual pride or impropriety. Furthermore, on her fingers she wore an assortment of massive gold rings, set with precious stones or decorated with cloisonne enamel. Within one of them, inside a tiny locket, was curled a single lock of John the Baptist’s flaxen hair.

She was a very great and holy lady indeed.

No sooner had she begun to ascend the steps of the church which she herself had so generously endowed, the hem of her cloak raised up from the dusty ground by two of her slaves, when a street-girl stepped in front of her, as bold as you please.

The great lady arched her delicate pencilled eyebrows.

Athenais held her hand out, and drew breath to speak, but got no further.

The great lady looked her up and down in one swift movement, and then turned haughtily away.

Athenais stepped in front of her again and looked her straight in the eye.

The great lady was outraged. ‘Out of my way, you hussy! And how you dare you look at me so!’

Athenais smiled softly. ‘The day will come soon when you will not dare to look at me.’

The great lady turned to one of her attendants, astonished. ‘Why, the girl’s mad! Or drunk, more probably. Move her out of my way.’

‘Remember me,’ said Athenais, speaking softly still, even as one of the handsome attendants took her firmly by her arm and pulled her aside. ‘Look me in the face, and remember me.’

The great lady, despite herself, looked at the impertinent jade, who was pretty in a sluttish, plebeian sort of way, and found to her intense irritation that, even during the most moving and rapturous moments of the ensuing high mass in the Church of St Stephanos, she was still able to picture the girl’s face quite clearly.

It was growing dark when Athenais came back to the great square of the Imperial Palace, and saw the lamps burning in the tall windows, and felt the air growing cool. She wrapped her arms round herself, sat in the corner of an alley and brooded. She could not go begging at that grandiose door. Not yet. Not yet, though this city was a wood full of wolves.

It was after the great cathedral bells had tolled midnight, and few were left in the streets but whores and thieves and vigiles, the watchmen of the city, who crouched round their braziers, wrapped in their cloaks, with their long, sharpened staves, themselves as wretched and often as drunk as the scoundrels in the streets they were policing. It was not a good place for a solitary girl.

Finally she asked one of the watchmen about a house called the Metanoia. After an obscene invitation to her, to which she did not deign to reply, he grudgingly pointed the way. She walked for a few minutes and came to the door of a low building beside a chapel in a side street. She knocked timidly on the wooden door. After some time a panel was drawn back and a woman’s face appeared.

She didn’t need to say a word.

Almost immediately the door was opened and she stepped inside.

She spent seven days there. Among the prostitutes of the House of Metanoia, which is to say Repentance, cared for wordlessly and with infinite kindness by the nuns of that place, themselves often high-born daughters of noblemen who would not spare the dowry to find their daughters a husband.

She ate and slept and chattered among those prostitutes, young and old, haggard, withdrawn or laughing still, despite the foulness and the outrageous injustice of their short lives hitherto. Pocked with sores, scarred with drunken knife-cuts, some still bruised from the last client they had had before they finally revolted and fled to this place for sanctuary. She told a simple story of herself. The other women also told their stories soon enough, unburdening themselves in stumbling sentences, and her eyes grew round with horror.

She learned a lot in those seven days.

It was in the twilight of the following Sunday when she presented herself at the great doors of the Imperial Palace again. A beautiful, unknown girl in a plain white stola.

How many ranks of household servants, eunuchs and chamberlains she had to pass through, saying to each one, ‘The emperor himself is expecting me’; how much scorn, incredulous laughter, impatience, indifference. It was many hours before she was admitted into a vestibule and told to wait.

Very soon, a man stepped into the room, closed the door behind him and looked across at her. A young man, eager, kindly, with much to learn still.

He was tongue-tied, so she went to him.

‘You knew I would return,’ she said with mock resentfulness. ‘What choice did I have?’

‘I,’ he said, ‘I…’ Hesitantly he took her hand in his. ‘No, but I hoped you would.’

The elderly, arthritic but still zealous Bishop Atticus was instructed to teach the young pagan girl the rudiments of Christianity in time for her baptism and subsequent marriage. The bishop was shocked to find that the girl – clever, articulate, and as pretty as one of those she-demons who so tormented St Anthony in the Theban desert – already knew the rudiments of Christianity, and a lot more besides. He was shocked because it was evident that the girl, having previously heard and understood the Gospel preached with perfect clarity and doctrinal orthodoxy, had nevertheless, on consideration, rejected it as untrue. As if still blissfully unaware of her own wretched sinfulness, and her urgent need to be washed clean in the blood of the Lamb who was slain!

Atticus had been commanded not to pry too closely. So he ran through the essential doctrines of the True Church once more, with brief but ferocious digressions on the ghastly and damnable creeds of the Arians, the Monophysites, the Hieroconodulians and other hell-destined heretics, until he was satisfied that the girl, expressionless and without any obvious spiritual ardour, was able to recount them herself with reasonable fluency.

She was baptised in the private chapel of the palace, where she was given the new name of Eudoxia: rather more Christian a name than the distinctly pagan Athenais. One of the ladies-in-waiting was overheard to say after the baptism that it seemed a shame, as Athenais had been such a pretty name. At which the emperor’s grim-faced sister Pulcheria shot the foolish woman such a look as might wither a cedar of Lebanon.

The woman left the imperial household the following day.

Eudoxia accepted everything with smiling sweetness and serenity. But in private, it was whispered, the emperor still called her Athenais.

They were married on the seventh day of June, in the Year of Grace 421, in the great rectangular basilica of the Church of Hagia Sophia, by Patriarch Epiphanius.

They travelled there in a lavishly carved and gilded coach, drawn by four white horses through the streets of Constantinople. Heralds and trumpeters acclaimed the procession, while the people surged through the streets, strewing herbs and flowers in their path, casting wreaths over every statue and garlanding every doorway they passed with myrtle, rosemary, ivy and box, in the ceremony of ‘crowning the town’.

Theodosius wore a robe of cloth of gold, purple shoes, and an emerald sash. Athenais 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 Athenais’ 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.