Two for Joy

Chapter Two

By the next morning there were almost as many explanations for the stylite’s fiery death as there were inhabitants of the city. Anatolius, secretary to Justinian, ached to be out in the forums soaking up the latest rumors. Only a hour before he’d learned from one of the house slaves, back from a market visit, that two other stylites had died in the same mystifying and terrifying manner.

Unfortunately, the young man had to answer a summons to his father’s study. Senator Flavius Aurelius, it seemed, was displeased with his son. Again.

“Anatolius,” Aurelius began in a weary tone, “as you will doubtless recall, we have had this conversation on numerous occasions. When are you going to desist from being so hasty in your speech?”

The silver-haired senator distractedly pushed a pile of scrolls and codices to one side of his desk, revealing the grinning skull depicted in its tiled top. It was a not so subtle reminder that when work was to be done there was no time to be wasted on fripperies or foolishness. The desk made an odd contrast to the cavorting cupids which the senator’s wife had had painted on the walls of what had been her sitting room. The decorations had not been favored by Aurelius during his wife’s lifetime, but now that she was dead, they served as a comforting reminder of her. Or so Anatolius supposed. Such sentiments were not the sort that his father would share with anyone.

The young man shifted his feet nervously and bowed his head, knowing better than to reply but wishing that his father would finish his latest speech about responsibility and respectability and not wearing his hair too long in the back. “You’ll be mistaken for a Blue,” was how his father usually expressed his disapproval.

“Take this latest nonsense, this ‘Ode to An Empress,’” the senator was saying.

Anatolius looked up sharply.

A wry smile creased Aurelius’ face. “Ah, I see I have finally managed to surprise my son. Yes, I heard about it.”

Anatolius looked down again, studying the mosaic floor. Unlike the desk top, its purely decorative geometrical patterns had no comment to make on mortality.

“The emperor might well dismiss your patronizing the fleshpot where it was overheard as a worldly sin. But as to the verse itself…No doubt you will wish to know the identity of the person who informed me.” Aurelius continued, “Let us just say that it was someone at court. The gods smiled on you, for the person who told me about it is a friend and can be relied upon to be discreet.”

“Father, I only recited it to a few acquaintances. It was a jest.” Anatolius looked hurt, because he was. Paternal lectures always had the effect of making him feel at least ten years younger, or perhaps even twenty. “I do have some care for what I say in public. And in private.”

The senator shook his head, pointing out that however private the room, in a house of that sort little went unnoticed and even less went unremarked.

“Yes, I suppose that’s so,” Anatolius admitted. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

“It would be best if you were careful all the time, for all our sakes. Everyone at court has enemies. Timothy, the vineyard owner who supplies the imperial table with much of its wine, has openly declared his designs on my country estate, for example. He, for one, would not be averse to seeing me fall from favor through your disgrace. Then, too, I have lately been hearing much gossip concerning Senator Balbinus distressing his wife by frequenting that very establishment where you recited your scurrilous verses. If that is indeed true, you are fortunate that he was not there to hear your sorry performance.”

Anatolius frowned and began to speak but his father cut his words short.

“That particular young woman ceased to be your concern when she married Balbinus,” he said. “What I want you to consider in this matter is that if he had overheard you, he would have been only too ready to use your ill-considered words to his own advantage. He and I have been much at odds lately. And need I say Balbinus and Timothy are but two opponents of many?” He nodded toward the documents on which he had been working when Anatolius arrived. “Some day you will have to deal with all this.”

He sighed and gestured to the chair beside his desk. “Now sit down, Anatolius, and let us talk.”

Anatolius, familiar with the course of his father’s lectures, breathed a sigh of relief. Now, most likely, they would discuss chariot racing. After that he would be dismissed and be free to go to the Forum Constantine to hear what new embellishments had been added to the tale of the burning stylites. Better yet, his father had not yet inquired when he intended to visit the tonsor or wear more sober garments as befitted his official position, nor when he might be thinking of getting betrothed. He was not getting any younger, despite how his father could make him feel, and neither was his father.

“All the same,” Anatolius said unrepentantly as he sat down, “it really was a marvelous epigram, rather than a poem. It began ‘Theodora’s father kept bears, now Theodora bare…’”

“Stop!” The senator rarely used that tone.

Anatolius regarded the floor again. He regretted his haste in speaking so lightly. Perhaps his father had a point.

“Now I must tell you that I have made a decision about your future, Anatolius. I believe you would do well in a legal career, and thus I have arranged for you to take up an appointment in the quaestor’s office.”

Anatolius looked at him in stupefied amazement. Surely his ears had deceived him. “The quaestor’s office?”

His father, horribly, nodded confirmation.

“But it’s practically worth my head to squeeze an occasional fine turn of phrase into the emperor’s official correspondence,” Anatolius blurted out. “How will I survive organizing dry old laws and drafting proclamations?”

Aurelius raised his hand slightly but imperiously, quelling his son’s protests. Although the senatorial class lacked the political power it once possessed, its members still passed down to each generation the commanding presence of their ancient rank, not to mention their extensive land holdings.

“It’s true that legal matters have more need of prosaic wherefore’s and whereas’s than of poetic seas that are wine dark,” he admitted. “But it’s time for you to fully enter the adult world, to become a respectable and responsible citizen.” The senator glanced down at the tiled skull. “Not only that, I am getting older and I would like to see a grandson before I make my journey with the dark ferryman. But at least at this point I am not looking to arrange a good marriage for you.”

“Thank Mithra for that,” Anatolius muttered.

“No, Anatolius, for that you can thank your dear mother, who was always the romantic and opposed arranged marriages. And furthermore, you had best guard your speech when uttering an oath. One day your tongue will behead you, if it does not do worse. I will not always be here to smooth things over.”

The older man frowned and Anatolius saw his lips tighten. Perhaps he was thinking of his deceased wife. Aurelius quickly resumed his composure, however, and continued brusquely. “But on to a more pleasant topic. I have decided to hold a banquet in honor of your appointment. The guests will be colleagues of mine, men of good reputation and prominent in their fields. It’s of great assistance to a young man such as you, Anatolius, to have friends in high places, especially when trying to climb up to their level. They can offer you a helping hand.”

“Or they can knock you down and plant their boot in your face,” Anatolius retorted, “depending on which prominent person you mean and from which quarter the political wind happens to be blowing that particular day.”

His father nodded gravely. “I see that you have at least begun to learn some caution, if you do not always exercise it. Remember, at the palace, although it’s always necessary to look ahead and consider all possibilities, it is equally important to guard your back against the blade.” He grimaced as he stood. Anatolius jumped up to offer assistance, resentment at the paternal lecture dissipating as he asked if his father were in pain.

The answer came with a shake of the head. “Just a stone which I hope to pass in due course. I would prefer to avoid having to submit to the surgeon’s knife. Now, since I have urgent business to attend to, I’ve decided to place you in charge of making arrangements for this festive gathering I mentioned. I’m certain that it will be a credit to the household. Nothing too extravagant, of course.”

The prospect of arranging a banquet was more to Anatolius’ liking than that of joining the legal profession. “I’ll consult with the Lord Chamberlain and ask for his advice, then,” he said with a smile. Surely this ghastly whim of his father’s would pass, most likely with the stone. He would enjoy the banquet at any rate. “Perhaps I could engage some of Isis’ girls to entertain? In an appropriately genteel manner, of course.”

Aurelius laughed. “You are incorrigible, Anatolius! But take care that whatever you arrange does not lead you-or any of us-into danger. There will be absolutely no recitation of scurrilous epigrams, for example.”

Anatolius assured him that he would be very careful.

“Then I must be away,” his father replied. “We shall discuss the banquet further tonight. You can tell me then, having consulted your friend John, how your arrangements are proceeding.”

Aurelius departed, leaving his son sitting by the desk. Before leaving, Anatolius quickly pushed a codex over the skull that grinned up at him from the desk top with over much familiarity.

The face of death atop the stylite’s column was less easy to ignore.

As John approached the platform where the stylite’s charred remains lay, a flock of crows rose with raucous protests, forming a roiling black cloud in the bright morning sunlight. With the birds gone, he could hear the buzzing drone of flies, their smaller but no less busy companions.

Unfortunately even the brisk breeze blowing in from the sea could not quite dissipate the odor of burnt flesh emanating from the body in the middle of the confined space atop the column.

Suppressing a gag, John reached over the iron railing and, grasping Gaius’ hand, helped the heavyset physician clamber up off the ladder. With both of them now on the narrow platform, it was difficult to avoid treading on the remains of Matthew the Pure. John looked away, out over tiled rooftops, but the white-capped swells of the sea visible beyond them did nothing to subdue his sudden nausea.

“In my time, I’ve buried the dead on battlefields, sometimes after they’ve been lying in the sun for a day or more,” he remarked to the physician, “but this is far worse. At least a soldierly death is clean. This was not.”

“I have yet to witness a clean death,” replied Gaius bluntly. He vigorously shook the railing fencing in Matthew’s own battlefield, dislodging chunks of rust. “But I have to say that if Matthew slept leaning against this, his deity must surely have had a hand on him.”

Remembering how the burning stylite had flung himself vainly against the railing, John realized the rusty iron was stronger than it appeared, but said nothing. He glanced down. From this height, Felix, the excubitor captain standing guard below, resembled a small, poorly detailed mosaic figure. A curious crowd had already gathered in the forum. Justinian, John knew, would have the remains of Matthew and the other dead stylites spirited away during the coming night to avoid any further public commotion. But first the emperor had ordered John and Gaius to inspect the bodies where they lay in the hope of finding some pointer to the reason for their mysterious deaths.

It was all very well for Justinian to give orders, Gaius had grumbled on their way to the forum, but he didn’t have to personally carry them out. Felix, with a wolfish grin, had pointed out that that was one of the advantages of being emperor. Someone else would handle unseemly matters or those liable to soil imperial hands. Felix, however, was now standing safely and cheerfully below. It was Gaius and John who were aloft, staring down at the blackened ruin of what had once been a man.

Grunting with effort, Gaius knelt heavily down beside the charred corpse. If the physician had indeed been inebriated the night before, he showed no ill effects. John wondered if the maidservant had mentioned his futile visit to her master. Perhaps not. Both he and Gaius had awoken to a summons to an audience with Justinian. Now here they were, standing on a windswept platform high above the city, seeking an answer to an impossible death.

“Sanitary conditions up here should be much worse,” noted Gaius, gesturing expansively with a curved bronze knife he had produced from his bag and barely missing John’s hip. “But these holy men eat and drink very little and they evacuate dryly, like sheep.”

John nodded silently.

The physician pushed aside one of the heavy chains lying across what remained of Matthew’s body and continued his study. “I see that our ravenous winged friends have already begun my investigations for me,” he commented.

John nodded again, then glanced at several large crows perched expectantly on the wooden crosses rising from the roofs of the nearest houses. He preferred looking at them to observing Gaius at work. After a moment, he forced his attention back to his own task, that of examining the departed Matthew’s cramped living quarters.

There wasn’t much to see. The platform was so small that it took but a few paces to cross it from one side to the other. It was obvious at a glance that there was nowhere a murderer could have concealed himself.

John voiced the thought while examining two wicker baskets beside the rusted railing. One basket held a few loaves of the bread whose enticing aroma John had smelled the afternoon before, the other a small heap of olives and figs. The hungry crows had touched neither bread nor fruit. It struck John that while the olive branch promised peace, for Matthew the Pure, the peace that comes with death had been hard won.

John squeezed sideways past Gaius, who, muttering a mild protest, continued wielding his knife intently. An impossibly filthy and tattered rag that had once been a tunic was tied to the railing. Perhaps it had been part of the stylite’s wardrobe. John prodded at the disgusting scrap with his booted foot.

“It always amazes me how these stylites attain such advanced age, given their living conditions,” remarked Gaius conversationally, glancing up. “A good many of my patients succumb to disease or accident by the time they’re thirty, despite my ministrations and not, I hasten to add, because of them, no matter what you hear from the palace gossips.” A smile briefly illuminated his ruddy face. “And yet,” he continued thoughtfully as he returned his attention to the dead man, “Matthew lived up here for longer than that, half-naked, tormented by vermin, exposed to the elements. Of course, I am told that like our emperor, he abstained from meat. Perhaps that was his secret.”

“Have you ascertained anything of use concerning his death?” John was eager to take his leave.

Gaius rubbed thoughtfully at the side of his bulbous purplish nose, the nose of a dedicated devotee of Bacchus. “Not much that wasn’t obvious to begin with, John. Look, here.” He pointed his knife at the dark cavity he and his assistants the crows had cut into the blackened corpse.

John leaned closer, waving away the swarming flies buzzing around his head. Matthew, or what remained of him, lay on his back. His head had canted to one side of his body and a large yellowish bone, a thigh bone, protruded slightly from a fire-ravaged leg. The wet mess visible inside Gaius’ investigative opening revealed nothing strange to John, who said as much.

“Our friend’s innards, as you can see, are quite unharmed, barely cooked,” Gaius replied in a matter of fact manner. “That’s because the body is full of watery substances-blood, phlegm, bile-so although the outer parts may be burnt away, the inner organs tend to be protected. It’s a very interesting and surprising effect. I regret to say that I have observed it more than once, but I suppose that’s hardly to be wondered at given that builders will insist on constructing ill-made wooden tenements and then compounding their errors by getting tenants who tend towards carelessness with their braziers.” He sighed. “But Matthew here burned from the outside. He had no brazier, and since there’s nowhere an assailant could have concealed himself, the obvious conclusion is that he was struck by lightning. And so I shall report to Justinian.”

“I would certainly agree, Gaius,” John replied, “but for three stylites to be struck by lightning, at almost the same instant…”

“The storm was severe. The world can be a strange place. It is as simple as that,” Gaius grunted as he struggled upright. “Steady the ladder, Felix!” he called down to the man below.

Pausing as he swung his foot out to the top rung, he grinned cheerily across at John. “We’re done with Matthew now. Only two more to go.”