The Sheen of the Silk

Forty-six

ANNA RETURNED TO SEE EIRENE AS SOON AS HER venetian patient was sufficiently recovered. She found the ulcers noticeably improved. Eirene was up and dressed in a simple, almost severe tunic. Helena called when Anna was there, but she was not received.

“I am in no mood to receive Helena when I look more like the Gorgon.” Eirene said it wryly, as if it were amusing, but there was pain behind it, and it showed in her eyes and in the tightness of her shoulders as she turned away.

Anna forced herself to smile.

“I wonder what Helen looked like, that they were willing to burn a city and ruin a civilization for her,” Eirene went on, pursuing the conversation as if there were nothing else to remark upon.

“I was taught that their concept of beauty was far deeper than a mere matter of form,” Anna replied. “It needed to be of the mind as well, of the intellect and imagination, and of the heart. If all you want is a beautiful face, a statue will do. And you can own it completely. It doesn’t even need feeding.” She wondered if Eirene’s self-knowledge had created Gregory’s rejection. Was it possible that her belief in her own ugliness had made her seem so to others? Might they have forgotten it, had she allowed them to?

Anna looked at her. The awkwardness of Eirene’s movement was no more than that of many other women her age. Time and intelligence had lent a distinction to her features that they would not have had in youth. Had Eirene not allowed herself to see it?

She both loved and hated Gregory. The look in her eyes, the tension in her hands, gave her away. She believed she could not be loved, not with passion or laughter or tenderness, not with that desperate hunger for her to love in return that made passion a mutual thing.

Later, as Anna stood in the main room receiving payment from Demetrios for the herbs, she was conscious of Helena in a pale tunic trimmed with gold, her hair elaborately dressed. Without intending to, Anna compared her with Zoe, and Helena was still the loser.

“Thank you,” Anna said as Demetrios gave her the coins. “I shall return in a day or two. I believe she will continue to recover, and by then it may be time to change the treatment a little.” She did not add that she was concerned not to dose Eirene too heavily with the intoxicant she had used, in case she became dependent upon its artificial sense of well-being. She intended to use it only as long as it was necessary to face Gregory’s return.

“Don’t change it,” Demetrios said hastily, his face puckered with concern. “It is working well.”

Anna left and walked to her next patient and the one after. It was late and she was tired when she turned aside to climb the steps to her favorite place overlooking the sea.

This place drew her because of its silence. The wind and the gulls were no disturbance to the flight of thought. She was not yet ready to answer Leo’s solicitous questions as to her welfare or see in Simonis’s eyes the slow dying of hope that they would one day prove Justinian’s innocence.

Anna stood on the small, level surface at the top of the path, the wind fluttering the leaves above her. Slowly the color bled away on the horizon and dusk filled the air.

She was annoyed when she heard footsteps on the path below her. Deliberately she turned her back and faced the east and the blurred coast of Nicea, already dark.

She heard her name. It was Giuliano’s voice. It took her a moment to compose herself before she greeted him. “Are you back here for the doge again?” she asked.

He smiled. “He thinks so. Actually I am back for the sunset, and the conversation.” He was flippant, but there was a rueful honesty there for a second. “Home is never quite the same when you go back.” He walked the last few paces and stood beside her.

“Everything is smaller,” she agreed lightly. She must not allow her burning emotions to show. She was glad to have her back to the last of the light.

He looked at her, and something of the tension in his face smoothed away. The smile became wider, easier. “The cafés on the waterfront here haven’t changed. Neither have the arguments. That’s another kind of home.”

“We Greeks are always arguing,” she told him. “We can’t be bothered with subjects about which there is only one valid opinion.”

“I noticed,” he said wryly. There was still enough light reflected up from the water to see the sheen on his skin, the faint pucker around his eyes. “But the emperor has sworn his loyalty to Rome. Doesn’t that end some of your freedom to argue?”

“Not as much as an invasion would,” she said dryly. “There’ll be another crusade, sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” he said, a sudden tightness in his voice.

“Have you come to warn us?”

He looked down at his hands resting on the rough wood that formed a kind of railing. “There’s no point. You know as much of its coming as anyone does.”

“We’ll still argue about God, and what He wants of us.” She changed the subject. “Someone asked me the other day, and I realized I had never seriously considered it.”

He frowned. “I think the Church would say that nothing we could do would be of much value to Him, but He requires obedience, and I suppose praise.”

“Do you like to be praised?” she asked.

“Occasionally. But I’m not God.” The smile flickered across his face.

“Neither am I,” she agreed seriously. “And I like to be praised only if I have done something well, and I know the person speaking is sincere. But once is enough. I would hate it all the time. Just words? Endless ‘you are wonderful,’ ‘you are marvelous’…”

“No, of course not.” He turned around, his back half to the sea, his face toward her. “That would be ridiculous, and… unbelievably shallow.”

“And obedience?” she went on. “Do you like it if people do what you tell them to, never because they have thought of it themselves? Not because they care, and want to do it? Without growth, without learning, wouldn’t eternity be… boring?”

“I never thought of the possibility of heaven being a bore,” he said, half laughing now. “But after a hundred thousand years, yes, terrible. In fact, maybe that’s hell…”

“No,” she said. “Hell is having had heaven and then let it slip from your grasp.”

He put his hands up to his face and pushed the heels of his palms hard against the skin. “Oh God, you are being serious.”

She felt self-conscious. “Should I not be? I’m sorry…”

“No!” He looked at her. “You should be! Now I know what I missed most when I was away from Byzantium.”

For a moment, tears filled her eyes and her vision swam. Then she took one hand in the other and twisted her fingers until the pain reminded her of reality, limits, the things she could have, and those she could not. “Maybe there’s more than one hell,” she suggested. “Maybe one of them is to repeat the same thing over and over again until you finally realize that you are dead, in every sense that matters. You have ceased to grow.”

“I’m tempted to joke that that is pure Byzantine, and probably heretical,” Giuliano answered. “But I have an awful feeling that you are right.”