Once out of the square I tried to tidy my clothing. I smoothed wrinkles and shook off dust and cobwebs, but I wasn’t really in any state to present myself to a wealthy patron.
I intended to cut across the Augustaion in front of the Great Church but I began to have the sensation I was being watched.
Possibly I still felt the gaze of those colossal eyes. It wasn’t the painted eyes that bothered me so much. It was what they represented. That ‘being’ up in the sky, seeing everything, all the time. Looking and looking, but never doing anything about what it saw.
A beggar sat slumped at the base of the towering column atop which the Emperor Justinian endlessly rode his chariot.
The beggar who had been sitting in Macedonia’s doorway.
No. Constantinople was filled with beggars and there was nothing to distinguish one pile of rags from another.
Nevertheless, I veered on to a side street just in case.
I went through an abandoned space where a mansion or church or an imperial building had once stood. Statuary — and pieces of statuary — stood and lay amidst brown weeds jutting through the crumbling pavement. My friends and I had come here when boys and played catch with the heads of ancient philosophers. Sometimes we convinced ourselves we saw demons darting in and out among the frozen figures. I had soon learned that there really are demons in the world, but all of them are human beings.
You just have to stay one step ahead.
When I got to my destination I was sure I had lost anyone who might have been following me. Glancing up and down the street, I noticed nothing suspicious. The large, luxurious house where I had delivered more than one icon showed passers-by only a plain brick front without windows at street level. Beyond its roof loomed the vast dome of the Great Church. When the interior of the dome was lit at night, it must illuminate the whole third storey of the house.
My patron agreed to talk to me. A few servants passed through the atrium while I waited, but I didn’t see Arabia.
Florentius was a heavy-set man with thick lips and a red nose. He looked more like a bacchant than a pious Christian. He led me through his office, where we met in the past, and along the peristyle, bordering what had been an ornamental inner garden in more prosperous times. Now the space was filled with pigsties. Several monstrous hogs — mounds of undulating flesh — drank from a basin, overlooked by a marble Aphrodite. Chickens scattered in front of us.
Florentius kicked a plump marble foot out of our path. “Cupid,” he told me. “He keeps turning up. Pieces of him, that is. Fell into a pigsty during the earthquake. Must have surprised the pig.”
As we passed under the peristyle and into the rear of the house, he frowned at several labourers busy with trowels and mortar in the hallway.
“Did you suffer much damage?” I asked.
“Enough to keep too many unwashed labourers tracking mud around. Don’t like having such people underfoot. At least a man knows his own servants; and labouring types can never be counted on. Worse than donkeys. The job’s only half finished and they vanish and need to be replaced. On the other hand, I’ve tripped over the brutes wrapped around my serving girls in the storeroom.”
“It must be vexing for a man like yourself.”
“Indeed. But I thank the Lord it wasn’t worse. I hear there are cracks in the foundation of the Great Church and the Patriarch lost most of the wine in his cellars.”
We came to a metal-banded wooden door which Florentius unlocked. “It’s a sin to keep my holy men hidden away back here. Every day I pray we will soon be rid of the beast who sits on the throne.”
Perhaps he felt safe expressing treasonous thoughts to an icon-painter.
After all, I was a criminal in the eyes of the law.
I had never seen his private bath. Doubtless he had kept it locked even before he used it to store illicit icons. The frescoes on the walls and domed ceiling of the tiny room depicted ancient gods embroiled in an Olympian orgy in garishly coloured detail.
“I bought this place from a bishop,” Florentius explained.
Icons were stacked in the dry bath. Several hung on the painted walls, including my depiction of Saint Laurentius being martyred on a red-hot grid.
Florentius noticed the direction of my gaze. “An exquisite work! The saint’s pain is palpable. How it pleases me! What can such a young man as yourself know about pain, to capture it so perfectly?” He stared fondly at the image.
Demonic figures, seen in twisted profile, prodded Laurentius’ bound, blackening flesh with tridents. I wondered what a man with as much wealth as Florentius could know about pain to appreciate it so much, but I only smiled modestly.
Florentius looked away from the icon and towards the artist. “What fools they are to claim we venerate the wood and paint itself. I venerate your skills. Your talents help me to understand how we must face suffering. How perfectly you capture the saint’s beatific demeanour! After my wife died last year I often looked to this painting for comfort, for a lesson in the way a Christian endures, secure in the knowledge that all is God’s will.” He wiped his glistening eyes. “And now, young man, for what reason have you come to see me?”
“I knew Florentius would agree,” Arabia put the plate of honey-cakes she’d brought on the dirt in front of the Chalke Christ. It made me think of a pagan offering.
“It took all my powers of persuasion,” I said.
“You have a golden tongue.”
“I must have. Florentius suspects Leo and the Patriarch know the icon was salvaged in some fashion and spirited away. Naturally they’re outraged.”
“If it was seen again, people would think it was a miracle, a sign the pair of them are the real heretics.”
“That’s about what Florentius told me. They’re having the city watched. Spies are everywhere. So he needs time to make arrangements. Or to change his mind.”
“He won’t change his mind,” Arabia replied.
“You think not? We’re to meet tomorrow at an early hour at the Golden Milestone to discuss the matter further.”
Arabia clapped her hands together like a child. “How very appropriate. Right where the icon was burnt. Or supposedly burnt. Sit down and try these sweets.”
Florentius probably hadn’t chosen the Golden Milestone for the symbolism but rather because people often lingered beneath it to talk. We would attract no attention, nor would either of us be able to resort to treachery in such a public spot.
All the same, I was uneasy about the arrangement. For one thing whoever was following me could conceal themselves in the crowds. I would need to be careful. I hunkered down and took one of the sticky cakes. It was very sweet indeed. I noticed the plate was silver.
“It was difficult to get away,” I said. “He kept talking.”
Arabia’s large brown eyes narrowed. “What did he want to talk about?”
“Religion. He wanted to know whether a painter could depict Christ as both divine and human at the same time. According to Emperor Leo and the Patriarch, that can’t be done in paint. Another good excuse for destroying icons! The icon will either depict Christ’s physical nature only — which is one sort of heresy — or show his physical and spiritual natures mixed, which is another sort.”
“That’s stupid.” Arabia stretched up on her toes to tap the gilded halo behind the giant head, then rapped her knuckles against the sharp tip of its nose. “There’s your spiritual and there’s your physical. It’s plain to anyone.”
“All the same, I hate to think of him telling the emperor about an icon-painter who — ”
“And Leo, of course, wanting to know who this icon-painter is!”
“Exactly.”
Arabia shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry.” She sat down on the floor, leaned against me, and began nibbling a cake.
