John laughed at the very thought. “Isis? Playing on that hydra of hers?”
Anatolius shook his head. “Oh, no. No, I would have needed to engage a carter to drag that contraption over here. She has taken up playing the flute. It’s her newest pastime, apparently. Don’t worry, father,” he added quickly. “She will be veiled most modestly. No-one will recognize her, or if anyone does, they won’t be too eager to admit it.”
“My son has even had the foresight to protect the reputation of my house. I never thought to see the day!”
“If you are so pleased, perhaps you will think again about this matter of my laboring with the quaestor?”
Aurelius chuckled. “Now how could I disappoint all my guests? Your poetic imagination will be treating us to some remarkable sights and sounds this evening, but I wager that tomorrow no one will be talking about your earthy Muses, your flute-playing Euterpe, your prize-awarding pisceans or even Philo’s exotic game. No, I predict the chatterers will talk only of how an old senator’s stubborn and wayward son was transformed, as if by magick, into a man of substance by his new appointment!”
They had emerged into the peristyle surrounding the inner garden. Clusters of men strolled along graveled pathways winding around and between flower beds filled with more vases of roses whose heavy perfume sweetened the cooling air. Here and there, deep emerald sprays of ferns soberly emphasized the flaring trumpets of the pale pillars of lilies gleaming in terracotta pots. Shallow bowls of violets glowed purple against the clipped yews forming a somber background for the marble statues and busts set about the garden.
“I will address my guests shortly,” said Aurelius, “but first I must retrieve the notes for my speech. John, after Euterpe and her companions have entertained, if you would be good enough to say a preliminary word of introduction? And then after I announce your august new position, Anatolius, my guests can begin fishing.”
Aurelius made his way down the hall, glancing in as he passed by the sitting room where Philo was still entertaining several guests. The senator’s study was deserted but only because, he supposed as he picked up his notes, it offered neither entertainment nor a convenient couch upon which to rest.
The painted cupids on the walls reminded him of happier times when Anatolius was a baby and Penelope was still alive. This room was where their only child had taken his first unaided, tottering steps. Here, he still hoped, one day he would see a grandson take his first steps across the same mosaic floor on which Anatolius had played under Penelope’s fond care. How quickly the years had marched inexorably along, lately seemingly attended as much by sorrows as by joys.
Now, as the sun fell behind the rooftops of the city, the cupids were illuminated by lamplight. Some of the chubby godlings were playing musical instruments, others drove chariots pulled by donkeys. Penelope’s artistic taste had not favored the classical school of painting. Perhaps it was her influence that had made their only child so tender-hearted, so flighty, Aurelius thought. And this being so, she had spent her last years agonizing over how a poet would survive life in the palace.
This room, so full of memories tonight, was the warmest in the house except the kitchen, and since he had become an old man he had grown to detest the cold. But, although he would admit it to no man, that was not the only reason he had made it his study.
Tears began to sting his eyes and he could not read the words on the parchment. It was not a seemly thing to weep, he knew; he was reacting as Penelope would have reacted. The thought brought her closer, as if she had momentarily come back to him from the shadowy land beyond the Styx.
He filled a cup from the jug of wine on the side table. A few days ago he had not been certain he would see this day, given the agony he had been suffering and those damnable Michaelites. Now the pain at least had vanished.
Aurelius raised his cup toward the cupids. He could feel Penelope’s presence as strongly as if she stood behind him. “This is our proudest night, my dearest wife,” he whispered.
Let the Michaelites fulminate outside the city walls, he thought. On this glorious evening, he would banish them from his thoughts.
Standing under the portico of the shrine beside the Bosporos, Michael was preaching a sermon. The sun, its rusty red light no longer finding its way to bless the festivities in the garden of Senator Aurelius’ home, was still visible. Unimpeded by Constantinople’s walls and buildings it cast a ruddy glow across the rapt faces of Michael’s audience.
“What do you witness today within the great walls of the city?” Michael was asking. Despite not possessing the booming voice of an orator, his words carried easily out from the steps of the shrine into the attentive crowd gathered at their foot and on the grassy incline leading up to the road.
“Everywhere demons holding their orgies, everywhere citadels of the evil one, everywhere fornication decked with wreaths of honor,” Michael continued. “Even as I speak, the powerful and the godless are gathering to celebrate their own iniquity. But I say to you that these offenses against heaven will draw unto themselves a fiery wrath.”
A woman scanned the faces of the people pressing around the shrine steps. All classes and conditions were represented, a cross section of society-and the dregs of society for that matter.
“We light our lamps and praise the heat and the light cast by the flame. We praise the oil from which the flame draws sustenance. But what of the humble clay vessel which is necessary to hold the oil?”
As the words flowed on, fear nagged at the woman’s vitals. Could her husband have followed her, found her despite all the care she had taken to obscure her path once she had fled their country estate, taking only her jewelry and a few coins? Again she felt a pang of pity for the slaves. They would doubtless have been interrogated mercilessly as to her whereabouts. Although a gentle man in many ways, her husband had always been very conscious of his social position and it would certainly not be enhanced by his wife running away while he was in the city. She glanced at the wound of the sunset, welcoming the approaching darkness that would help her hide her face more securely for another night.
“Those wealthy men in fine robes who measure the Lord’s riches by the weight of gold on their altars declare me to be a heretic,” Michael continued, “and because I say to you who are gathered here by the roadside that we should venerate not only the Father and the Son and the Spirit but also the Vessel of the Spirit, they accuse me of blasphemously worshipping mere flesh.”
The woman looked up into the fast-darkening sky above the crowd of pilgrims milling around the shrine, reminding herself that she must be ceaselessly vigilant. Discovery was possible at any time, one slip, one error, a careless word, and she would be caught.
What, she wondered, had brought the sturdy peasant family clustered nearby to the shrine? They looked healthy enough, brown skinned from laboring in vineyards or fields. A farmer, perhaps even freed slaves? The man was tall, bearded, his face as bony as the hand that rested on his wife’s shoulder. She was short, with child and very near her time. Looking at the high swell of the stomach under a dusty gray tunic and the small chubby-faced boy sucking on a dirty thumb as he peeked at her from between his parents, his eyes mirrors of a blue summer sky, she felt a familiar stab of pain.
The poor, it seemed, bred as easily as brute animals. In the country there was room for all the little ones. But in Constantinople, did they never pause to consider that here was another mouth to feed, another dweller in a city already bursting with humanity, swarming with people crammed into tiny rooms and spilling out into the raucous streets? Children needed light and air and space, not dirty hovels and cramped rooms, scrabbling for food and growing old before their time.
She found herself wondering what the grubby little boy would look like, playing happily in the garden of her husband’s villa. If only she had not lost the child she was carrying just a few short months after her marriage. Her husband had been overjoyed when she returned from the physician with confirmation of their happy suspicions. “Now I have two reasons for joy,” he had said, stroking her still flat stomach fondly. “A wife and a child. I am a rich man indeed!”
Still Michael’s words flowed on as the crowd murmured to each other, some nodding, others looking around them as they listened. Were their thoughts wandering as much as hers?
“Yet how can there be anything, even mere flesh, which does not proceed from God, who created all?” Michael asked. “And how can that which is created by Him not partake of His own being? Now still there are those of you who may not be fully convinced. But consider the woman who brings forth a child. Is it argued that the babe
