Two for Joy

Chapter Twelve

Unlike Justinian, Anatolius finally agreed to speak to John. He would not, however, emerge from the study in which his father had died.

As John entered the room, Anatolius raised his head. His drawn face and red-rimmed eyes formed a sad contrast to the uncaring riot of cheerful godlings going about their merry business on the painted walls.

John sat down and the two friends looked at each other in silence for a long time.

Finally Anatolius spoke. “Well, then, is it not ironic that Fortuna would grant my father’s wish in such a strange fashion?”

His voice sounded lifeless, the result, thought John, of that freezing numbness that the kindly gods send to the bereaved for the first few days after a death, lest the too heavy burden of grief snap mind and spirit under its inescapable oppression.

There was nothing he felt he could say to help Anatolius cope with his loss. He could only listen to him and in that way permit his friend to give rein to his feelings. Public displays of these were not considered manly, it was true, but Anatolius, newly orphaned, had not yet learnt the emotional control which circumstances and years at court had thrust upon John.

“Just a day or so ago,” Anatolius went on, tears pooling in his bloodshot eyes, “I sat in that very chair you’re in, John, listening to my father talk about respectability and how he wished I would become more responsible, before I brought danger upon him and others.” He buried his wan face in his hands. “And I brought his death here,” he said, his voice muffled. “Now he is gone and I have gained all the respectability and responsibility he could have wished, because now I am the head of the household. If only I wasn’t! If only he were still alive!”

John felt moisture seeping into his own eyes in sympathy with the grief-stricken man before him, who was now valiantly trying to swipe tears discreetly away with his knuckles.

“Yes, Anatolius,” he replied quietly. “It is a fact that, by virtue of his being your father, he was always part of your world. And now he is gone, and that world is changed forever. It can never be the same. I think that now you are bitterly regretting all your hasty words to him, your disrespect. Wishing, too, that you had told him you loved him more often than you did.”

Anatolius looked at his friend in a wondering fashion.

John nodded. “That is exactly how I felt when my father died,” he said, “although I would never speak of it outside this room. Although it’s hard to believe now, time will smooth out the jagged edges of the pain in your heart, just as it has since your mother died.”

“There is not a day passes that I do not think of her, John,” Anatolius admitted, “although I rarely talk about her.”

“That is the way of it,” John nodded. “We speak little of the departed, even though our memories of them are our only comfort once they are gone. And as to your father, he was a good man and I know you will conduct yourself well when the time comes for the funeral rites. I’d be happy to assist you with those, if you wish.”

“Thank you,” Anatolius said listlessly, leaning his chin on his hand and staring down at the inlaid skull peering up at him from the desk top.

“But,” John went on, “one thing, Anatolius. You must not blame yourself for his death. A senator, indeed any man, always has enemies of whom he is not aware. It is part of life. Nothing that you did could possibly have caused his death.”

Anatolius looked up, a flash of anger in his tired eyes. “But I did, John. He gave me free hand with the banquet. I sent out the invitations. Therefore I must take the blame.”

John sighed, realizing it was too soon for him to attempt to persuade his friend that his reasoning was faulty.

“And the odd thing is,” Anatolius continued, hunching his shoulders and wrapping his arms around himself as if he was cold, despite the warmth of the room, “I was very careful not to invite persons whose presence might embarrass or distress my father. Senator Balbinus, for example. There’d been bad blood between them for some time. And there were one or two others, but you see, there must have been one that I somehow overlooked, the bastard who ate and drank and laughed with us and then murdered…” His voice trailed away and he looked down in dumb misery.

“Your father has been ferried over the Styx earlier than any of us could have foreseen,” John said, “but can you not try to think how happy he was about your appointment to the quaestor’s office? Many men must live beyond their time of happiness and die looking back on their lives with regret and bitterness. He was proud of you and although perhaps he rarely said so, he loved you. He has left you an honorable name and an excellent example of civic duty.”

“And surely Lord Mithra smiles on him for that alone,” Anatolius murmured.

John nodded. It seemed that their conversation was helping Anatolius somewhat, so he cast about for further topics. Inspiration struck him. “Anatolius, here is an odd coincidence. From what Philo has been telling me, if I had attended the Academy a few years later than I did, your father might well have been one of my tutors.”

Anatolius looked surprised. “That’s an odd thought indeed. He used to talk occasionally about his days at the Academy, but after a while, you know how it is, the stories all become over familiar and you don’t listen too closely. Of course, he left the Academy years before Justinian ordered it closed. Yet despite what Justinian claims, I never formed the impression that theology was much discussed there, pagan or otherwise. I know my father lectured on the nature of justice, for one thing, and he did once attempt to explain the mathematical proof for the existence of the aether, or some such theory. I was not much interested, I am sorry to say.”

“I wasn’t either,” John admitted. “I was hasty of nature, I fear, wishing to learn but not wanting to take the time necessary to acquire knowledge. That was why I left. Had Clotho spun my life differently, no doubt I would have trodden an entirely different path to the one that brought me eventually to Constantinople.”

“You would have been happier, John. Yet I can’t imagine you being an inattentive student.”

Anatolius got up and began pacing from the desk to the door and back again. John thought it was an encouraging sign that the younger man was restless. Upon arrival, John had questioned Simon and learnt that Anatolius, having ordered his father’s body prepared for burial, had locked himself into the study on the night of the banquet and remained there ever since, drinking only water and refusing food.

Anatolius stopped his pacing and looked at John. There was a strange expression in his eyes. “I believe,” he announced, “that the dead can speak to us from Hades.”

John wondered if the other had become light-headed from lack of nourishment.

“And,” Anatolius continued serenely, “that the method by which they communicate with the living is through dreams. So I have slept here, in the last place my father saw before he left this world, hoping that he would appear in my dreams and tell me who murdered him.”

John asked if he had received any such visitation.

“No, my father did not come back,” Anatolius frowned. “But my mother did. Yet I cannot remember exactly what she said, however hard I try.” He looked stricken at his admission. “It seems to me that she bade me to open my eyes, to be ever vigilant and guard my back against the blade, just as my father said to me in this very room not so long ago. I asked her if she could name his murderer and suddenly she was gone.”

“Then it was but a dream,” John said gently. “And we must labor in this world to find the culprit.” He stood and laid his thin hand on Anatolius’ arm. For an instant he recalled his recent audience with Theodora and her order that he devote himself solely to investigating the deaths of the stylites. He pushed the unpleasant recollection aside.

“I give you my solemn oath, Anatolius, as a Runner of the Sun, as a fellow initiate of Lord Mithra, that I will help you find the man responsible for your father’s death and ensure that he pays the price for it.”

Following his discussion with Anatolius, John made his way home through unusually congested streets, his thoughts restlessly circling the mystery of Senator Aurelius’ death. He was so preoccupied that he had pounded at his own front door long enough to attract a curious stare from the guard lounging outside the excubitors’ barracks across the square before he realized that Peter was not attending to his duties. When he tested the nail-studded door he found it secured from within.

Faced with the unexpected problem of how to get into his own home, he stepped back and surveyed its brick front. The first floor was a blank wall in the usual fashion and the windows ranged along the second floor were well beyond his reach. A single rap on the door usually brought Peter, if not on the run, as near to it as he could manage. But Peter had not been himself recently and John now found himself imagining the elderly servant lying helpless inside, unable to move or be heard calling for assistance. Perhaps he had fallen down the narrow stairs and now lay unconscious only a step or two away on the other side of the door on which his master had lately been pounding.

Suddenly the bolt was drawn back and the door swung open, revealing Peter’s leathery, lined face peering out. He apologized for the time it had taken for him to answer his master’s summons.

“I laid down to rest for a while and fell asleep,” he explained as he rebolted the door. Hardly were the words spoken when his legs gave way. John barely caught his arm in time to prevent him from pitching forward and breaking his gray head open on the tiled floor.

It was all John could do to assist Peter up the two flights of stairs to the servant’s room. Although Peter was too feeble to walk unaided he nevertheless protested and resisted John’s assistance, as drowning men will sometimes struggle against their rescuers.

“I can’t lie about all day, master, I have work in the kitchen,” Peter fretted when John insisted he rest.

“Bread and cheese will feed me well enough for now, and those I can get for myself.” John glanced at the large wooden cross on the wall behind Peter’s narrow cot. It struck him anew how ironic it was that a servant could display the symbols of his beliefs openly, whereas his powerful and high placed master could not afford the risk of having any symbol of Mithra in his home.

“You see,” said Peter, catching the direction of John’s glance, “you need not fear. I do not believe my time has come yet, but if it has, then surely He will send another to look after you in my place.”

“That may be, but for now you need rest and that is what you must have. I shall ask Gaius to visit you and perhaps he can prescribe something to help you recuperate more quickly.”

“That physician will have no stronger medicine than the one I am taking already.”

Peter nodded at the plate on a small table in the corner. It held what remained of Matthew the Pure’s pilgrim token, the sight of which reminded John of the dangerous speed at which another holy man’s reputation was growing.

He took bread from the basket on the kitchen table. Peter had not been well enough to go to market that morning, it seemed, for no cheese was to be found. Instead, John contented himself with a plain chunk of bread and a cup of water in what had been his study but with the arrival of Philo had been transformed into a shatranj room.

After its outing to Aurelius’ banquet, the exotic game sat once again on its borrowed table, its heavily carved playing pieces arrayed against each other in orderly ranks.

He picked up a finely wrought ship. It reminded him of his long ago journey to the chilly, misty land of Bretania at the very edge of the civilized world. The memory of crossing the choppy seas in the teeth of a gale was not a pleasant one and he set the piece back down quickly.

Thankful for solitude, he sat quietly and allowed his gaze to wander across the mosaic wall of his study. At this hour, the girl Zoe slumbered quietly behind her tesseraed eyes, waiting for the flickering light of a lamp to awaken and animate her. Yet the world in which she lived still spoke to John.

Beneath the heavenly riot of pagan gods, who like Zoe were nightly given life by lamplight although life of a much coarser nature, was the familiar bucolic scene. Staring at the bent-backed farmer plodding along behind a patient ox as he plowed his field, John’s thoughts strayed to the palace gardener, Hypatia.

Suddenly, he saw a solution to the problem of what to do concerning Peter. He would enlist Hypatia to assist with the household duties, temporarily at least. Doubtless he would still have to order Peter to accept her help, particularly since he did not like anyone in his kitchen when he was cooking, but on the other hand, he suspected that his proud servant would not resist too strongly since Hypatia was a friend who had once served with him in the same household.

The sound of Philo clattering upstairs intruded upon this happy thought.

“John! I am glad to see you’ve returned!” Philo said, breezily barging into the study. “Because although as you know I am not one to complain, I visited the kitchen earlier and it’s not quite what I would expect to find in a Lord Chamberlain’s household. No roast venison, no lark’s tongues or stuffed peacocks, none of those exotic fruits and spices which we all know courtiers dine upon every night! What is that servant of yours up to, anyway? It took him long enough to answer the door, I noticed.”

“You were here when I arrived?”

“I was in the garden, contemplating philosophical theories. Anyway, I was wondering if perhaps we could dine upon duck again tonight, although Peter needs to make a richer sauce as I was telling him just the other day. I don’t think he appreciated the suggestion, to be honest.”

“He will not be cooking anything tonight. He is unwell,” John said.

“I see.” Philo was peeved. “Perhaps you should consider engaging another servant. After all, we replace our boots when they are no longer serviceable, do we not?”

Philo’s hand went unerringly to the ship John had moved. “I see you have been examining my game. My demonstration at Aurelius’ banquet certainly attracted a good deal of interest, but I doubt if anyone will remember it now, considering all the excitement over the senator’s unfortunate death, not to mention that disreputable girl’s.”

Philo continued to prattle on about his prospects of tutoring would-be shatranj players, but had lost John’s sympathetic ear after his outrageous suggestion that Peter be tossed aside like worn-out footwear.

“Philo,” John finally cut in sharply, “Peter is my trusted servant and I will deal with his difficulties in the manner of a just master. But as for yourself, I must deal with you as master of this house. I must insist that from now on, while you are enjoying my hospitality, you will not venture outside alone. It would be foolish, since the streets are becoming extremely dangerous even for those who are familiar with the city.”

Philo glared at his former student. “You have no right to speak to me in that manner, John.”

“There is no one except for the emperor to whom I may not speak in any manner I wish,” John replied coldly. “And I am ordering you to remain inside this house for your own safety.”

The harsh words stuck in his throat, or perhaps it was the last crumbs of bread. He reminded himself it had been many years since Philo had been his tutor and further that he had no right to speak of Peter in the manner that he had used.

“Very well, John. After all, I am in no position to argue with my benefactor.” Philo replaced the shatranj ship on the board with enough force to send several smaller pieces to the floor.

The mention of Aurelius’ banquet reminded John of another matter and his anger at Philo was now directed at himself. How could he have forgotten something so important? He, the Lord Chamberlain who owed his position and his continued life largely to his unerring attention to every detail, no matter how minor it seemed in the richly woven carpet of court life.

“To change the subject, Philo,” he began, “Anatolius said he left a document here on the day of the banquet.”

“He would have left it with your servant. Why are you asking me about it?”

“Peter was not here then, being at work directing the slaves in Aurelius’ kitchen.”

Philo looked at the ceiling. “I know nothing of any such document. You have intimated that I am foolish. Would you now call me a liar as well?”

John had spoken plainly on many occasions to satraps and senators and the highest officials of the empire. But those powerful men had not taught him to decipher the magic of the written word nor walked with him along the shaded paths of the Academy, opening his mind to the wonders of history and philosophy. He could not bring himself to do it.

“No, Philo,” he finally admitted with a sigh. “I cannot call you a liar. But I must now go out, so please remain here and see that Peter does not try to over-exert himself. I have inquiries to make.”