read between the lines. I gathered that his skin had peeled off in the hot Egyptian sun, and he’d sickened near to death from drinking the Nile water. Then, he’d been sold off cheap to a pimp, who’d prostituted him all the way to Cyrene, where the sun was still unbearable but the air was healthier. He’d almost been sold as a galley slave – though small, he was now growing, and a few months pulling an oar might have thickened his body to be of use until a few years of toil had worn it out. But his learning had saved him. He’d been bought by the Church and taken to Rome to be trained as a papal clerk. He’d been given all the less confidential Greek correspondence to handle. Now that Ambrose was dead, he might be promoted to handling it all.
‘Do you never want to see Ireland again?’ I asked. A look of wild despair crossed over his face. He turned away. I felt stupid for asking the question. We walked on in silence.
‘I do dream of home,’ he said at length. ‘I dream of the faces I haven’t seen in years. I dream of the clean, fresh waves. I dream of the little monastery bell, and the songs of old men around the fire at night.
‘But it was all so long ago. I have… I have friends in Rome. Even if I were to find the money to buy my freedom, what would I be in Ireland? I’d always be a foreigner. I’d always long for the patterns of gold and shadow that play across the broken squares of this still great city.
‘Can you go back to England, sir?’ he asked me. ‘Would you go back? Is there anything for you? Are the people there still your own?’
‘No,’ I said softly. ‘We are both refugees from our own land. We can never go back.’
I wanted to add that we could only look forward. But that would have been crass. I had come into riches great enough to buy Ethelbert and all his kingdom and hardly notice the expense. He was a slave, living for the moments he could steal from the Church to be with his lover and a child who’d be born the bastard of a slave. If the woman were free – unlikely from the look of her – the child would enjoy a purely formal status he didn’t possess. If the woman were indeed a slave, it also would be a slave – the absolute property of a stranger.
The Church did sell freedom to its slaves. But Martin was right: where would he find the sum of money needed to buy an educated clerk out of slavery?’
‘Listen, Martin,’ I said suddenly. ‘I offered you your freedom the other night. That didn’t come off, but I want to reopen the offer. Let’s get these books out of the way. I’ll then beg you from the dispensator. I’m not his favourite Englishman, as you probably know. But he’ll owe me for those books. I’ll have to pay for a new building in Canterbury to house them all by the time we’ve finished. And I will pay for it. The dispensator will owe me, and I’ll collect on that. With all these wars, there must be educated slaves aplenty I can buy from the East to replace you.’
I don’t know what I expected. I’d not have been surprised by polite thanks, or enthusiastic gratitude – or even a kiss. Instead, he broke down in tears. He leaned against a wall, his body shaking with uncontrollable sobs.
I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Martin,’ I said, ‘I promise you’ll be free – free to go and do as you like. If you can think of the approach, I’ll see the dispensator tomorrow. He prays in the Church of Apostles, I think. I’ll catch him after the service.’
Martin pulled himself together. ‘No, sir,’ he said, controlling his voice, ‘it’s best to wait until you can show the first cartload of books. I’ll have them bound just as soon as they’ve been pressed fully into blocks.’
We walked on to the house of Anicius.
32
The library was much as I’d left it – was that just three days before? It seemed like three months. Martin had arranged for collection of the pile of books I’d left on the floor. I’d now start pulling down more of those precious things.
What I really had in mind was a regular institute of higher learning in England. The Church wanted an army of educated clerics. I’d give that to the Church. Those young men could spend all morning copying manuscripts. In the afternoon, they could discuss the meaning of what they’d read. I’d make England the intellectual heart of the entire West – far away from savage barbarians, and stupid, decayed nobles, and imperial officials too weak and lazy to protect the civilisation that had spawned them as meat in the sun generates maggots, but too active and strong to leave it in peace. Our own youth would learn all I could send them of literature and history and philosophy and mathematics and science, and they would bring it back to the world that had lost it.
Looking round, I noticed an open scroll on the reading table. I didn’t recall leaving anything there. I looked closer. It was another old book. Only this one showed greater signs of use and much evidence of care for its condition. It had been mended in all the cracked places. Some of the fainter ink had recently been gone over in a wavering hand. There was no title on it. I carefully pulled it back to the first column and began reading: e tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda uitae te sequor o Graiae gentis decus inque tuis nunc ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis…
It was a rapturous hymn of praise to Epicurus, I discovered with a shock. It went on to explain how he had freed us from the fear of death, and thereby enabled us to live more happily.
It was an odd sort of poetry – none of the smooth perfection I’d been used to in Vergil and the other old writers. I later discovered it was by someone called Lucretius, who’d lived around the same time as Cicero. And he hadn’t lived to complete his poem.
But what this poetry lacked in smooth refinement, it more than compensated for in overwhelming force. It swept over me like an oncoming tide, in wave after wave of didactic passion. We had no reason to fear death, it proclaimed. After death there was nothing, as Anicius had said, and death itself was nothing.
‘As we felt no woe in times long gone when from all the earth to battle the Carthaginians came, so when we are no more and the mind and body are sundered, we shall feel nothing of what may happen then – not even if the earth is confounded with the sea and the sea with the sky.’
No voice like this can ever have proclaimed the nothingness of the soul after death. Not even Epicurus himself can have thundered this Gospel of Death so loudly. Not even the Church Fathers could have encountered this blast of impassioned eloquence without bending before it. Death is annihilation. Why therefore fear it?
I read the piece through. I rolled back and read it again. It’s at times like this that spacing between the words might be helpful. I read it again, committing it all to memory. Seventy-five years later, I can still remember it. Perhaps I will write it down before I die. It would be a shame if the young students at Jarrow miss out on something so astonishing.
I looked up. Anicius must have been standing over me a long time. He’d put on a robe that was almost clean and, except for his breath, didn’t smell today.
‘Please accept my regrets for your own troubled mind,’ he said. ‘Your friend is at peace, however. On the eccentric principles of yourself and your master, his atoms will be reused, for they at least are immortal. They will form the parts of other living bodies. He is now nothing. We all come to nothing. But different lives will make use of our atoms. And, like runners in a torch race, these atoms will hand on the lamps of life.
‘ Post mortem nihil ipsaque mors nihil. ’
I thanked him for the immense comfort he had brought me. In truth, all the bounce I’d got from surviving that knife attack without a scratch and reaping that nice harvest on the Exchange had been knocked out of me by his words. But I wanted to be polite. I also wanted the rest of the poem. From the last sheet inside the book, I’d found that this was Book Three of a longer poem. Where was the rest?
‘There is more, and -’ he waved at the racks – ‘it may be in that lot somewhere. I’ll not dig it out for you. Far better, I think, if you can find it for yourself. You may find other books there that will bring you to a better appreciation of the truth. Yes, my young scholar,’ he sat down and glanced with a curiously soft look at the racks, ‘there is an educational value all its own in browsing. I used to do that when I was your age. It brought me friends who have lasted nearly the rest of my life.’
He looked back at me. ‘Tell me, my dear boy, what for you is the value of all this knowledge that you seek?’
‘Knowledge,’ I said, trying to choose words that wouldn’t give him an excuse for his logic chopping, ‘allows us to live happily. Knowledge of the world gives us power over the world, and enables us to arrange the world for our
