The Sheen of the Silk

Thirty-one

IT WAS ONLY DAYS AFTER THAT WHEN ANNA ATTENDED AN accident in the street. An old man had tripped and bruised himself badly. She was bending over his leg, examining it, when there was a disturbance in the crowd that had gathered, and a young priest, ashen-faced, elbowed his way through, pushing people aside roughly, calling out her name.

“Is it an emergency?” she asked without looking up. “This man has had a bad shock and needs-”

“Yes, you may already be too late.” The priest reached for her arm and pulled her to her feet. “He is bleeding to death. They have torn his tongue out.”

She turned to the crowd and gestured to the old man. “Take him home. Give him hot drinks and keep him wrapped up. I have to go.”

She picked up her bag and allowed the priest to half drag her around the corner and up an alley to a small house where the door was open. She could hear gagging and wails of fear and distress even before she was inside.

The scene that met her was appalling. A monk knelt sprawled on the floor, blood streaming from his mouth, pooling scarlet on the tiles in front of him, covering his hands and forearms and the front of his robe. He gasped, gagged again, and more blood gushed out of him. His face was gray with pain and terror, his eyes staring. Around him three other monks stood helplessly, not knowing what to do. The man was bleeding to death in front of them.

Anna put down her bag and seized a piece of cloth from one of them, glanced at it quickly to make certain it was clean, then went to the man on the floor. Someone said his name was Nicodemus.

“I can help you,” she said firmly, praying that please God she could. “I’m going to stop the bleeding, and you won’t choke. You’ll have to breathe through your nose. It may be difficult, but you can do it. Keep still and let me press this. It’s going to hurt, but it’s necessary.” And before he could pull away, she put her arm around him. One of the monks suddenly grasped what she was going to do and moved forward to help. Together they held the terrified man while Anna forced his mouth open wider and placed the cloth as hard as she could on the bloody remnant of his tongue.

It must have been agony, but after the first convulsive jerk and shudder he kept as still as he could.

In a perfectly level voice she ordered the other monks, and the priest who had come for her, to fetch more clean cloths, to open her case and take out certain herbs and spirits in small vials, also her surgical needles and silk. She directed two of them to fetch water and clean up the blood from the tiles.

All the time she kept the pressure on the stump of tongue, trying desperately to prevent the man from bleeding to death, choking on blood, or suffocating because he could not draw air into his lungs.

She changed one blood-soaked cloth for another, still holding the man with her left arm. She could hear the rhythmic murmur of prayer and wished she could join in.

Finally, more than half an hour after she had begun, she pulled the cloth away slowly and judged that if she was quick, she would be able to stitch the flesh and seal off the vessels enough to remove the cloth permanently.

It was a difficult task in the wavering candlelight, and she was acutely conscious of the pain she must be causing; unlike most other patients, he could not even be given any herbs to drink to deaden the sensation. His mouth and throat were a mass of swollen scarlet flesh, terribly mutilated, but all she had time to consider was saving his life from hemorrhaging away. She worked as quickly as she could, stitching, pulling, tying, cutting, stanching again, always with too much blood and with pain almost palpable in the air.

Finally, she finished and swabbed away the remaining blood. She gently washed his face, meeting his eyes, remembering that although he would never speak again, he could hear everything. She picked up herbs to show to all of them, saying when to use them and how and in what proportions.

“And you must keep his lips and his mouth moist,” she went on. “But don’t touch the wound yet, especially not with water. If he will take it, give him a little honeyed wine to drink, but carefully. Don’t let him choke.”

“Food?” someone asked. “What can he eat?”

“Gruel,” she replied. “Warm, not too hot. And soups. He will learn to chew and to swallow properly, but give him time.” She hoped that was true. She had no prior experience with such a mutilation.

“Thank you,” the priest who had called her said sincerely. “Your name will always be in our prayers.”

She waited with them all night, watching, listening to them trying to reassure one another and find courage for what they knew lay ahead, perhaps for all of them. Nicodemus was the first, but he would not be the last.

“Who did this?” she asked, dreading the answer.

The monks glanced at one another, then at her. “We do not know who they were,” one of them replied. “They had the emperor’s authority, but they were led by a foreigner, a Roman priest with light-colored hair and eyes like a winter sea.” He breathed in and out slowly, and his voice dropped even lower. “He had a list.”

Anna felt the coldness scour through her as if strength drained away. She was wrong to have doubted Constantine, too squeamish, too cowardly of spirit to acknowledge the truth because she wanted to keep her hands clean. She was ashamed of her stupidity.

Faith called for high prices-faith in God, the light, and the hope. Crucifixion was brutal. She was sick at the thought of it, the reality of the gasping for breath, the agony through belly and loins and every sinew, the sheer terror. Why did the images soften it, as if Christ had not been flesh like everyone else, as if His searing horror had been different? The answer was obvious-to escape knowing it, because it made our own betrayal of Him easier.

Then a curious peace filled her. Se had been wrong in her judgment of Constantine, wrong, ignorant, and shallow. She was crushed with penitence. They would all have to fight, to pick up and use weapons that would hurt them as well as the enemy. But the conflict inside her had ceased, and instead there was the wide, sweet balm of assurance.

She was called again to help other monks who had been tortured, but none afflicted her with the same panic as the first one had. She did not save everyone. Sometimes all she could do was ease the agony, stay with them to be there in the last moments. It was never enough.

She hated to be thanked, to accept their gratitude even when she failed. She did not feel brave. She wanted to run away, but the nightmares she would suffer forever, if she left a dying man, would have been worse than any waking horror.

At home she tossed and turned in the night and often woke gasping, her face wet with tears, her lungs aching.

She crept out of bed and knelt in prayer: “Father, help me, teach me. Why do You let this happen? They are good men, peaceable men, trying with all their hearts and bodies, all their time every day, to serve You. Why can’t You help them? Or don’t You care?”

Nothing answered her but the silence, void as the night. If there were real stars, not just dreams and illusion, they were infinitely out of reach.

Once she only just escaped the emperor’s men when they broke into the house, and she ran, half dragged out of the back door by others who were just as passionately against the union. They were willing to forfeit their homes and possessions to rescue the monks who still preached against it and were made martyrs for their faith.

She ran with them through the wind and rain, their feet splashing in the rivulets of water streaming along the gutters, bumping into blind walls and tripping over steps in the darkness. She was pulled along, someone else carrying her bag and her instruments. She had little idea who they were, only gratitude for their courage.

When eventually they burst into a quiet room with an old woman alone beside the fire, she saw in the torchlight that there were three of them, two men and a young woman with long, wet hair.

“You must be more careful,” the woman said, gasping as she struggled to allow the breath into her lungs. “You have answered too many of these calls. They know you now.”

“Why me? Who knows me?” she asked, fighting against the truth.

“Bishop Constantine,” he answered. “People know you are his physician, and you have helped him with the poor.”

No more was said of it. Of course it was Constantine who was behind the rescues, the medicines, the whole resistance of the mass of ordinary people. It had been he who had fought to have Justinian exiled instead of put to death for his involvement in Bessarion’s murder. They were all battling for the same cause, the survival of the faith, the life, the existence of Byzantium, and the freedom to worship as they knew to be right.

She went to Constantine in the quietness of his own house, in the gallery where his favorite icon hung.

“Thank you,” she said simply, standing hungry and bruised, still exhausted in body from the night’s loss and flight, the whole bitter failure of it. “Thank you for all you do, for having the courage to lead us, holding the light high for us to see. I don’t really know how much I care passionately for one faith over another, one creed in the nature of God and the Holy Spirit, but I know absolutely that I care for the love of humanity that Christ taught us. I know with all my heart that it is worth everything we can pay for it. It is worth living and dying for. Without it, in the end the darkness takes everything.”

There was a moment’s prickling silence. She realized what she had said. “If hell were not so deep that it could break your soul, then heaven could not be so high. Would we want God to lower heaven?”

She drew in her breath as he lifted his head from prayer and looked at her.

“Could he ever do that, and still be God?” she asked, although she could have answered it herself.

He said nothing, but he made the sign of the cross in the air.

It did not matter; she did not need his reply.