The Gathering of the Storm

10

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, Athenais 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 Athenais: 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, Aetius 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. Aetius 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 Aetius 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. Aetius 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 Aetius, 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 Aetius. ‘News enough, I would have thought.’

‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Athenais.’

‘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 Athenais – 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, Aetius, 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.

Two days after the arrival of the little group from Ravenna, the empress returned from a week beside the cool fountains in the gardens of the Summer Palace at Hieron, which she loved. It stands on a wind-cooled promontory where the straits meet the Euxine Sea, and is especially grateful at the dry, rank end of the season, when even the voices of the cicadas sound hoarse and choke with dust.

And I was there; I, Priscus. I was there, present as a humble and unremarked court scribe, when their haunted, bewildered eyes first met. In the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches. Aetius and Athenais, both so confident and self-assured beyond their years, though in wholly different ways. There I saw all confidence and self-assurance flee from them.

‘The Princess Galla Placidia, and Master-General Aetius of the Western Legions,’ announced the chamberlain.

They stepped into the room, first Galla, then Aetius. Galla and Theodosius smiled politely at each other, then the emperor stepped forward and they kissed.

Aetius seemed strangely frozen to the spot.

Athenais likewise.

For then she knew what true love was. Her whole being seemed to lurch towards him and she thought with instant desperation: This is the man I love and will always love. Oh, what have I done?

I saw how they avoided each other all that winter. How for them even to see the other was the sweetest, acutest pain imaginable. They barely spoke a word to each other. When a diplomatic mission to the court of the Sassanid kingdom of Persia departed, Aetius went with them, to the surprise of some. He spent the winter out east.

Athenais seemed sometimes strangely distracted for a young bride; and at other times she boasted too loudly and too publicly, to some embarrassment, about the marvellousness of her husband. Women who boast excessively of their husbands are rarely the most faithful. But in her case people put it down to natural warmth and generosity of spirit.

In the spring it was announced that the empress would be going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

‘And,’ Theodosius announced, ‘though the route through our empire is perfectly safe, she will be accompanied by the First Cohort of the Imperial Guard, under the command of General Aetius.’

The emperor had a high regard for the young general, and proudly felt that only the finest military escort would do for his beloved wife.

It was the best and worst thing that could have happened. To spend time together – on the orders of her own husband! It could only add to the pain. And yet perhaps they secretly wanted the pain. Does the human heart want to feel happiness, or does it merely want to feel much, greatly, intensely? No matter what the emotion?

I went with them, and I saw all and wrote nothing. But now in these last days, when only I am left of all that brave and beautiful company… now the truth may be told.

The empress’s party stepped abroad the royal barge, which rode at anchor on a mild sea in the Harbour of Phospherion. They traversed the narrow straits of the Bosphorus, and made landfall upon the Asian shore amid crowds of cheering people waving branches of olive and myrtle. There they dined with the urbane governor of the golden city of Chrysopolis. Some already commented that the empress and the general must despise each other, for they barely looked at each other, let alone exchanged a civil word. When forced to be in close company, at dinner for instance, they kept their eyes and their voices lowered as if in obscure shame.

They processed east and traversed the province of Bithynia to Nicomedia. The empress rode in a fine four-wheeled carriage. Aetius and the guard rode far ahead.

The empress travelled next to Hierapolis, to bathe her lovely limbs in the health-giving hot sulphur springs. From thence she visited the Asian Mount Olympus and its monasteries, and held long and learned talk with the monks there, which left them astonished, humbled, and some of the younger and more hot-blooded, adoring of their new empress to the point of idolatry. She was likewise welcomed and feted in Smyrna, and Sardis, and Ephesus, and all the great cities of the Ionian coast, and south to Pamphylia in the shadow of the Taurus mountains, and so on to Seleucia, and Tarsus, the home of the evangelical tentmaker.

So this ostensible pleasure jaunt fulfilled its secret political purpose of cementing the love of the people, the Church, and the political and senatorial classes across the Levant for the young emperor and his beautiful bride, and making the radiant imperial presence known and respected far beyond the walls of Constantinople.

After several weeks of travelling they came to the teeming city of Antioch, ‘the third city of the empire’, a bewildering hubbub of Cretans, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, Persians, Armenians. It was also called ‘Antioch the Beautiful’; its famed marble streets had been laid down by Herod the Great, and it was the place where the term ‘ christianoi ’, ‘Christians’, was first used. Athenais loved it on sight. She visited the sanctuary of Apollo, where Mark Antony and Cleopatra had been married, now half destroyed by her zealous co-religionists. And she insisted on an afternoon trip out of the heat and dust of the city, and beyond the miles of shanty-towns that stretched over the surrounding hillsides, to see for herself the notorious Grove of Daphne, where hundreds of prostitutes still plied their trade ‘in honour of the goddess’.

At a dinner she gave a magnificent extempore speech upon the glories of Antioch’s magnificent past, and quoted from the Odyssey, ‘??????????????????????????????????????.’

‘I claim proud kinship with your race and blood.’ It always goes down well when a visiting foreign dignitary claims to be of the same descent as his audience.

The next day they rode out of the city southwards, heading for the magnificent temple of Baalbek; but on the empress’s orders they turned east and headed out into the desert, following the crowds who streamed over the hills in their hundreds to visit the product of a religion very different from that which built proud Baalbek: the celebrated ascetic St Simeon Stylites on his pillar, out near Telanessa. There, in the shimmering Syrian desert, Athenais and Aetius and their entourage saw with their own eyes the famous saint, sitting atop his pillar seventy feet into the sky, where he had already sat for ten years, and would sit another twenty yet. The crowds of devotees sat round the foot of the pillar, gazing up in wonder at the saint’s holiness, and collecting the lice that fell from his filthy, emaciated body to the ground. These they tucked away among their own robes as precious relics, calling them ‘the pearls of God’.

Neither Athenais nor Aetius collected any pearls.

In the years to come, many came to imitate Simeon. News spread of his great act of penance, his self-hatred made manifest, his self-abasement raised high, the odour of him spreading out across the valley. As far away as the Ardennes forest in Gaul, a Lombard deacon tried to emulate his example until his rather more pragmatic bishop told him not to be so foolish.

Near Simeon sat another pillar-dweller, Daniel Stylites. Daniel had started on a rather small pillar, but a wealthy benefactor had paid for a magnificent double-column to be erected for him. He had managed to cross to it from his first pillar, by way of a makeshift bridge of planks, so that he never had to sully his feet with the dust of the world. And there he sat, and prayed, and excreted, and praised the Lord.

When they came to the magnificent temple of Baalbek it was evening, and the deserted temple stood proud and pagan in the late rose-light that stretched across the desert. They wondered at the cedar-roofed Portico of Caracalla, the magnificent mosaics in the marble floors, the bas relief of Jupiter Heliopolitan, and above all, at the breathtaking temple of Jupiter, its columns of a size unrivalled anywhere in the world: some eighty feet in height and eighteen feet in girth. They never shall be rivalled, I think, in all the days and works of man. One of the foundation stones of the temple weighed over a thousand tons. Already the knowledge of how to cut and move such titanic blocks is vanishing from the earth. Never shall we see such majesty again.

They saw, too, the temple of Venus, goddess of love and beauty, now a basilica dedicated to St Barbara, virgin and martyr. It was whispered in the neighbouring town that the ancient rites still took place around the temple complex, to the anger of the Christian authorities but with the secret cognisance of more secular powers; and that these silent stones yet witnessed the nature worship of the old gods, ancient even compared to the Olympians who overcame them: Astarte, and Atargatis, and Baal himself, who glared out darkly over his devotees two thousand years before Christ walked on earth.

Eusebius wrote only a century ago that men and women still came here to ‘clasp together’ before the altar in honour of the goddess. Husbands and fathers allowed their wives and daughters to sell themselves publicly to passers-by and worshippers, in honour of their mysterious goddess of love, and some men even took a lewd pleasure in seeing their womenfolk thus made harlots. All night they sang, and drank, and danced, accompanied by the sound of barbarous drums and flutes. Baalbek was never a place with a naturally Christian soul.

It was a place of sacrificial blood as well as sacred love. Can one exist without the other? There was no gentleness in the ancient religion. Blood was riotously shed upon these stones. ‘Anath, the sister of Baal, waded up to her knees, up to her neck in human blood,’ say the ancient texts. ‘Human hands lay at her feet, they flew about her like locusts. She tied human heads around her neck, and hands upon her belt. She washed her hands in the streams of human blood that flowed about her knees…’

At Baalbek, it seems, gods are mortal. They are born, and worshipped; they flourish, and have mighty temples built to them. Later, when men and women cease to believe in them, they wither and die, and a new generation of mortal gods takes their place. In time, too, even Christ will die for ever from the earth.

None of the imperial party spoke their secret thoughts at Baalbek. But they lingered there a long time.

Finally Jerusalem, the Holy City of Zion. This place, too, Athenais greatly loved, and she lingered here for longer that might seem appropriate. For her husband awaited her in Constantinople, and it was high time she was back in his bed. Her highest duty now was to give him sons. An empress had no other reason to live than this.

It was the last night in Jerusalem, before they were due to descend from that holy mountain to the coast, to Caesarea, and take ship for home. The empress was walking on the lonely terrace of the modest palace where they were residing, overlooking the valley of Gehenna, the valley of Sheol, where the ancient Hebrews had tumbled the bodies of their dead into the smoking abyss below and burned them. From beyond the place of Hell came the gentle breezes from the garden of Gethsemane upon the Mount of Olives.

Another figure stepped out from the shadows of the palace onto the terrace to take the night air before retiring. The two of them almost collided. They stepped back and stared with the same wide-eyed astonishment as when they had first set eyes upon each other, three long months before. Their eyes were wide and bright and innocent under the eastern moon. And then like sleepwalkers they moved towards each other again in the soft velvet night. From the olivegroves across the valley came the harsh warning call of a bird, and the moon was golden in the late summer sky over the Valley of Sheol, where the air was hazed with the chaff beaten from the late summer wheat in the surrounding country, and misty with smoke from the chaff heaped up for the burning.

They said nothing. And with consummate awkwardness, like two adolescents-

It is impossible to say who kissed whom. Their lips met. They both fought not to give in to this desire, or rather this need, to touch the other. Both were proud. But both were defeated.

After they had kissed they drew back and looked at each other for a long time. They said nothing. Minutes passed. Neither of them moved. Neither of them could move.

The next day at dawn they left the city for the long journey down to the coast. They rode far apart, heads bowed and silent, like two people recently bereaved.

Galla knew. Galla saw it, with her gimlet eyes, the moment they returned.

Marriage and hardship had perhaps softened Galla’s heart. Motherhood certainly had. She responded to others’ weakness with pity more than with scorn as heretofore. She saw this living agony before her eyes: Athenais and Aetius unwillingly yet so willingly, so longingly, in each other’s company, constrained by the cruelty of circumstance and the stiff rituals and formalities of the court. Her reaction was that of a woman who is herself a little in love with a man who loves another: a sad smile, and silence.

Perhaps also she recognised already that she and Aetius had something in common, that would endure all their lives: they each loved another, and neither of them would ever in this world possess that other.

Between Galla and Athenais, where you might have expected rancour, cattiness, or worse, there was none. Between Pulcheria and Galla, there was as much warmth as that life-sworn virgin, the emperor’s thin-lipped sister could ever muster for a fellow creature of flesh and blood. Pulcheria’s feelings toward Athenais were, inevitably, seething jealousy and resentment, disguised as pious reserve. (Prudes are driven by jealousy, not morality. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach.) But as for cool, green-eyed Galla, perhaps she saw that Athenais’ feelings for Aetius mirrored her own. Perhaps she saw also that the poor girl, married so young and with so much love in her to give, to one whom she was fond of but would never come truly to love, would find only unhappiness in her life. Perhaps. Whatever the reason, she never treated the young empress, so different from herself in temperament, with anything but kindness.

And then on the twenty-sixth day of August 423, a messenger came with shocking news from Rome. Emperor Honorius had died of dropsy, and a usurper, Johannes, had raised legions in Illyria and declared himself the new Emperor of the West.

Aetius seemed relieved to be getting away at last. ‘The enemies of Rome are not growing any fewer,’ he observed dryly. ‘There is fighting to be done.’