Byzantium (2 page)

His words sank like a stone weight. But there was no time for consideration. “You have, Emperor,” I said.

At that he guided me from the thorns. “I will not forget your service,” he said, then touched one of the carnelian berries. The door in the wall opened.

The eunuch was waiting for me. He rushed me back through the narrow passage and whispered hurriedly in my ear. “Do not kill him,” he said. “The emperor is superstitious and will not allow the death of a monk. You are to geld him, for a eunuch can never hope to be emperor.” He flashed me a grim smile, then handed me a knife and a leather purse filled with coins. “You will bring back the fruits of your gelding in the purse. For this the emperor will reward you with rank and gold.” We reached the courtyard just as he finished. Once there, he gave me a shove toward the waiting litter, then disappeared behind the crates. One of the slaves was holding open the litter’s curtain; I signed for him to wait. The elephant I had seen when I arrived was now enraged. A gold cover had been set on one of his tusks, but the elephant had crushed the other cover with his foot and, to the delight of the crowd, was now rising on his hind legs and trumpeting as his caretakers scrambled to tame him. It was a rare spectacle, and even in my state I thought it worth a moment’s pause.

WHEN I TOLD MY MOTHER the emperor had trusted me with a commission, she fell to her knees and kissed my hem, swearing she would pray each day in the Church of the Holy Wisdom for my success. I fled to my chamber and prepared to leave. I saw no reason to wait. Rather, I was eager to have the thing done. Rattled from my meeting with Heraclius, I seemed unable to loose the tangle of thoughts that had taken possession of me since our stroll in the Golden Meadow. There was insult: this was an executioner’s task, the kind you hire a wretch from the streets to accomplish. And there was fear: where would I begin, how would I bring myself to castrate a man? But twisted among these, growing like a summer vine, was pride. At last I could do something worthy, at last I could, in my way, serve the empire like my father. I sailed that very night, using the emperor’s gold to buy passage on a Cretan trader, and all during the voyage I stayed in my cabin and practiced. I wrestled with a sack of grain, cut at slabs of meat with the knife. As the ship rocked and the sack lurched, I trained myself to pin it with my lame hand.

My regimen was not perfect, but by the time I landed at Caesarea I felt I had become, if not expert, adequate to the emperor’s task. I purchased three donkeys and spent the day loading them with provisions, then joined a caravan for Jerusalem. Once we reached the city, still in ruins from the Persian occupation, I stopped only to take a meal. Let it be finished, I thought, and that night I hired a guide and set out for the desert.

I ARRIVED AT THE Monastery of the Five Holy Martyrs at noon the next day. The monastery, a collection of paths and caves and small stone buildings, lay scattered along the side of a dry ravine, and as soon as I rounded the last bend, a monk came running down from its tower. He intercepted me and introduced himself as Brother Sergios. He was young, just out of boyhood—his blond eyes and smooth skin would have caused a stir in the baths—and it was his task, he told me, to aid visitors.

“Where do you come from?” he asked, turning around and walking backward to face me. He had taken the donkeys in hand and was leading me toward the guesthouse, which stood, beneath the rest of the monastery, on a ledge overlooking the ravine’s dry bottom.

“Constantinople,” I answered.

“The capital,” he said, releasing the two words with a wondered hush. “We don’t get many visitors from the capital. The higoumen says it is a pit of devils.”

“That may well be so,” I said. Brother Sergios laughed, then tied up the donkeys and showed me into the guesthouse. I had to stifle my revulsion. The guesthouse was a long, low edifice of stone and mud. In its one large room men slept like hogs, one against the other, while others talked as they ate a sorrowful-looking gruel and played a game with stone pegs. Brother Sergios told me they were a party of farmers, come to pray for their crops, and that the others included a rug merchant and his daughter from Jericho—come to be near Theodosios—and two water sellers from Bethel, who were waiting for one of the monks, a Brother Alexander, to settle a dispute between them.

“There are no other quarters?” I asked.

“No,” Brother Sergios said. “Here everyone shares equally.”

Fortunately, I had considered this. On the ship I had decided my plan. I had briefly thought of arriving as a humble supplicant, but felt an aversion to trading on my hand and didn’t want to risk the monks presenting me to someone besides Theodosios. Instead, I would arrive as a great personage from court, impressing the rustics to the point that they dared not refuse my requests. I had bought accordingly in Caesarea. The far back corner of the guesthouse was empty and I claimed it. While Brother Sergios swept away the dust, I enlisted two of the farmers to unload the donkeys. On my orders, they cut open the bundles and pulled out carpets and pillows and the unassembled pieces of a chair with ivory facings. I had them hang several of the carpets from the ceiling to form walls and spread another on the floor, along with the cushions, and then fit the chair together and set it in the carpet’s middle. I now had a private bedchamber and receiving room as luxurious as one could hope. I sent the two farmers back to the common room but kept Brother Sergios near me.

“You must be hungry,” he said, and indicated a tall earthen pot from which I’d seen some of the others taking their gruel.

“Not for that,” I said, then pulled the carpets to and went to my chair, where I struck my best imperial pose. It took all my concentration to maintain the act: the whole time, even as I unwrapped a smoked duck stuffed with larks and berries, I kept my withered hand in my tunic. “I shall meet with Theodosios at his convenience,” I said.

Brother Sergios shook his head. “Brother Theodosios has taken a vow of solitude,” he said. “He meets with no one, unless they are possessed by demons. I believe I’d be correct in guessing you are not so afflicted?”

“I am not,” I said, and slipped a piece of the dark duck meat into my mouth.

“Just last week he drove off a demon who had been tempting a brother monk into acedia, and not two weeks before—”

“Tell him I come from the emperor,” I said.

Brother Sergios blushed, as if I’d somehow blundered. “Oh, I am not allowed to speak to him,” he said. “But I will inform the higoumen.”

Brother Sergios left me then, and I continued picking at the duck as I stared out the slit of a window that was my chamber’s sole source of light. It faced onto the monastery above, which I now saw was a labyrinth. I had not considered this while preparing myself on the boat, and for a moment I despaired. How would I find, among that maze of paths, that tangle of caves and cells, the man I sought, if no one would take me to him?

I SET THIS QUANDARY ASIDE—surely, in time, the monastery would unlock itself to me—and decided to make myself more comfortable. I found I had adjusted rather well to my role as the man from Constantinople, and, as my provisions would not last, I hired a goatherd to cook for me. That first night he roasted a kid on a spit. Thinking it wise to win over the other lodgers, once I’d eaten my fill I offered the rest of the carcass to them. They rushed forward, all gentleness forgotten as they shoved each other and thrust their grubby fingers at the meat.

After they each had taken a portion, the lodgers fell to laughing and boasting. I retired to my corner to read by my lamp. I was only two lines into the scroll (a farce featuring two Armenian princes) when I heard the rest of the guesthouse suddenly fall silent. My interest piqued, I listened closely, and after several seconds I heard the silence break into mumbled prayers. I stood up and went to the edge of my curtain to see what had happened. A stooped old man, leaning on a cane, his beard nearly sweeping the floor, had entered the room. He was making the sign of the cross over the other lodgers, and when he finished, he started toward me with a slow, crooked walk. I left the curtain and returned to my chair. I tried to keep reading, but the words slipped past my mind. All I could hear were the steady, solemn footsteps of the old man.

He entered my quarters, his footsteps muffling as he crossed onto the carpet. I continued my pretense of reading, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

“My name is Andrew,” he said in a voice more commanding than what I’d expected from one so frail. “I am the higoumen of this monastery.”

At that I looked up. “I am honored by your presence,” I said. “Would you care to sit?”

“On one of your silk cushions, such cushions as line the halls of Hell, corrupting the body with false comfort?” he answered, spitting as he spoke, his face turning an apoplectic hue. “Bah! Brother Sergios has told me of you. He said a great man had come from Constantinople, to which I now say, by what measure of greatness? These carpets, that chair? All such stuff that passes from this earth? They might affect young Brother Sergios, but not me. Better for you to have brought nothing and cleaved to humility.”

“If these cushions and carpets offend you, higoumen—” I began, but he cut me off.

“Offend me? I do not notice them. I only warn you for your soul. But enough. Tell me why you have come, worldling.”

“Very well,” I said. “I come at Heraclius’s behest. He has heard the stories of Theodosios and has asked me to meet with him in private and investigate their truth.”

This last, of course, was my own invention.

“Bah,” the higoumen replied, waving his hand at me as if to send me away. “Let the emperor have more faith. Brother Theodosios does not seek fame, nor does he indulge in vanity. He has hidden himself in the mountain so that he may continue his struggle unbothered. Pack up and return to your pit of sin.”

“Father Andrew,” I said, “I will remain here until I see Theodosios.”

“In that case, as you will have much time to yourself, I suggest you take up prayer.”

At that he turned and hobbled as fast as he could out of my chamber. There erupted another mumbling of prayers when he reached the common room. Then he left, and I heard a crush and scuffle. I went to the parting in my carpets to look: the lodgers, in rushing toward the kid once more, had toppled the spit.

THE NEXT DAYS PASSED IN FRUSTRATION. The monks could not force me to leave—they were pledged to hospitality—but neither would they let me see Theodosios. So I tried on my own. Twice I crept up the ravine’s side at night to search for his cave, stumbling and slipping as I climbed blindly in the dark. Both times I was quickly found and escorted back to the guesthouse. Once I offered three gold solidi to a monk who’d come down to pray with the farmers about their crops. He said nothing, only crossed himself and backed away, as if he’d just had a brush with Satan. Even when I asked about Theodosios—it troubled me that I knew so little about him—the monks shook their heads and shied from me. I only stopped when Brother Sergios explained that Theodosios, in his humility, had asked the other monks to speak of him as little as possible. Five days in, I was certain I had my break. A man arrived complaining of a demon in his tongue. He would be taken to Theodosios, and I need only wait and watch. I spent all day in my quarters, next to the window, pretending to write letters by its light. But the monks came for the man at night, before the moon had risen, and I could see nothing of where they took him.

My efforts were clumsy, and by the end of the week I’d gained nothing. But I learned something in growing up as I had, in longing to be near a father who couldn’t stand the sight of me: I learned to notice.

I was bored. My only distraction was to walk up and down the ravine or gamble with one of the lodgers who’d brought dice. Even in the years of my greatest isolation I had been able to talk to the servants, watch the city from the roof, and, when the need took me, drift through the night crowds. A week after I arrived at the monastery, I sent to Jerusalem for an actress. She came the next evening and set up outside the guesthouse. I brought my chair out to sit before her, and the other lodgers came out and reclined along the ledge. We watched as she performed the Rape of Lucretia—she played well the shocked virgin, her hand cupping her mouth—then Leda and the Swan. It was during this last, done with an ingeniously stuffed bird and a skillful gyration of her hips, that I noticed Brother Sergios. Since my attempted wanderings into the monastery, he had been ordered to stay outside the guesthouse. Normally he spent his hours in prayer, eyes hooded as he mumbled and rocked. But when I glanced his way, I saw he’d ceased praying and was watching the actress, who at that moment let fly another startled shout of pleasure.

The next day I sent for a flutist and a dancer, and after that, tumblers. I monitored Brother Sergios. Each night he struggled with his prayers, opening one eye, then the other, before giving in to the spectacle. He applauded the flutist and his dancer, gasped at the tumblers’ tricks. The evening after the tumblers, he asked me about Constantinople, and I told him about the races in the Hippodrome and the painted women in the market, about the ships in the harbor from every sea and the warrens of winding streets that seemed to lead to the ends of the earth. The next night I hired another actress, who presented scenes from the life of the empress Theodora, then a conjurer who made cups disappear and told fortunes by burning a plucked hair. Brother Sergios had rushed forward, offering one of his own.

It was the clown who came on the sixth evening that proved to be my masterstroke. He juggled firebrands while repeating rhymes about female genitalia. Brother Sergios’s laughter echoed up and down the ravine. It must have caught the ears of the higoumen, for the next morning, as I was sitting in my corner of the guesthouse during the hot midday hours, reading, I heard again a hush among the other lodgers and the thump of a walking stick on the stone floor.

“Corrupter!” the higoumen shouted as soon as he passed through the hanging carpets. “Violator! Give up your tricks and leave us!”