‘To this day, the Sisters of Her Order maintain the custom. They are permitted to eat only enough to maintain their efficiency. If inadvertently, or through weakness of the flesh, one morsel above this is permitted to pass their lips, they are required to purge themselves and eat no more for three days. During this time, they must abase themselves with lack of sleep and piercings of the flesh and other holy penances.’
I paid no attention to the rest of his narrative. I’d known the woman by her Latin name, and it was all coming back. She’d died in some overturning of her chair as it was carried too fast down the street. The event itself was unclear, and several mutually exclusive miracle stories had fastened themselves almost at once to it. It was a happy day for the Empire – if not for the Church, which now had to wait for Constantine to come along and convert – that her father-in-law had outlived her equally if differently insane husband.
I was seated and left alone in a small office that I supposed was near the main body of the church. The neat desk and the racks bulging with correspondence reminded me of the Dispensator’s office in Rome. Joyous times those had been – I didn’t think – when he’d called me in there to charge me with one of his ‘little missions’. They were never small, and they’d usually involved me in escapes from death by the skin of my teeth. As often as Martin could be bullied or tricked into joining me, they’d involved me in some very hard moments with Sveta. It was with one of these that he’d tricked us into the journey to Constantinople. That hadn’t ended, I thought with a smile, entirely as he’d expected. Recollections of that meeting with him on my last visit to the Lateran Place could cheer me at the lowest moments.
Deep inside the church, there was a late service still taking place. I could hear the chanted responses. They weren’t in Greek, but the translation had kept the Greek rhythms well enough for me to follow whereabouts the service had reached. Closer by, there was a Sunday school in progress. In high, clear voices, the boys all together read their lesson from the board. Again, I could just follow what they were reading. The few Greek words placed strategically, and the proper names given at the right intervals, told me it was the trial of Saint Paul from the Acts of the Apostles.
There was no wine on the tray of refreshments left beside me. Most welcome, though – bearing in mind how worn out I was feeling from all that sun – was the very hot, sweetened kava juice. I drank the liquid straight down from the jug. I went back to listening. Yes, the boys had reached what could only be the verse ‘Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.’ I might not believe a word of it. Even so, I knew my Scripture backwards.
I felt a sudden tremor of interest in learning Egyptian. It might come in handy for the journey to and my stay around Soteropolis. It couldn’t be that hard to learn. The hardest language to learn is always the second, and I was now fluent in seven. And if the Egyptian versions of Scripture were as faithful as they seemed, I’d have a wondrously smooth key to the language. I might not even need a tutor.
I drifted into thoughts of how much I could get of the language in private between now and Soteropolis. It might not do to let anyone else know what I was about. If I had to set up a miracle, it would be handy to know something of what the natives were saying to each other under my nose. I could probably get the texts I needed out of Hermogenes. I’d be seeing him anyway in the next day or so.
I twisted round and looked at the icon of Saint Mark hanging above the door. It was in exactly the same style as the one Martin had bought and set up in his office. The only difference was that the text wasn’t in Greek. A new and uneasy thought came into my mind. Back in Constantinople, Sergius and I had worked on the assumption that a settlement of the Monophysite dispute would solve most of our troubles with the non-Greek Churches in the Empire. Sitting here, I wasn’t so sure. This wasn’t like in the West, where orthodox and heretic Churches all worked in Latin, and a switch to orthodoxy meant very little in practice. The native Churches here were in worlds of their own. They didn’t know Constantinople. They didn’t need Constantinople. They were almost like ripe figs dangling from a tree. They could drop off at any moment. If they rotted where they fell, that was their problem. It might even be good for the tree.
Was Egypt a problem for the Empire, I asked myself, because it was heretical? Or was its heresy part of a deeper problem? Suppose we gave in, and accepted the whole Monophysite case: would that be an end of the matter in Egypt? Or would the Egyptians only find another trifling point of difference to justify their steady drift out of the Greek orbit? I thought of my conversations with Lucas. I’d think more about this when I wrote another of my coded reports to Sergius.
I’d just finished crunching on the residue of the smashed-up beans when the door opened.
‘Let the ground be kissed where His Holiness cares to stand,’ the Deacon called in his flat Greek.
I stood up and bowed respectfully as Anastasius, Monophysite and so-called Patriarch of Alexandria, walked in. Still dressed in full canonicals, he’d come, I could see, straight from Sunday service.
Chapter 31
‘Do please be seated, My Lord,’ the Heretical Patriarch said once the door was closed again and we were alone. He took off the jewelled episcopal crown of a kind I’d only ever seen the Pope wearing – both Sergius and John wore rather modest copes: then again, no one doubted their status as patriarchs – and put it heavily on the desk. As he struggled to reach back for the ties securing the immense brocade of his robe, I jumped up and helped. Together, we managed to get him down to something that approached sensible clothing in this climate.
A small, bearded man of about fifty, Anastasius finally took his place behind the desk. He had none of the scowling, broody manner fashionable among priests who looked other than to Rome. His face bordering on the jolly, he might, indeed, have been a Western cleric. Untouched by the sun, his face had no more than the sallow appearance of every Mediterranean race. He looked at the now empty kava jug. Before I could speak, he leaned forward and looked closely at me.
‘I had a letter the other day from Constantinople,’ he said. ‘My dear Brother in Christ Sergius sent what I am happy to regard as friendly greetings to me, and therefore to the whole Church of Egypt.’
I didn’t bother saying that I’d been sent a copy of the letter. Certainly, I didn’t question his claim to leadership of the national Church. Back in Constantinople, Sergius had assured me – and I’d seen no reason here to correct him – that Anastasius was accepted by somewhere between a third and half of the Egyptian Monophysites. He mattered for our purposes because that included almost everyone in and around Alexandria. The further you went into Egypt, though, the crazier and more independent the heretics became.
‘I have not spoken this month with John, the – ah – Imperial Patriarch of Alexandria,’ he added. ‘But please do convey to him all my brotherly love.’
I nodded faintly in reply. This was an informal visit. But if, for a generation past, the viceroys had left off persecuting the official heretics – and even gave the Heretical Patriarch a degree of recognition – I was still sitting opposite a man who, in strict law, was a criminal. If it was out of the question to treat him as a criminal, it was barely less so to acknowledge the status he was impliedly claiming.
‘Your Grace,’ I opened – the man was undeniably a valid bishop of the Church, and the form of address was ambiguous enough to cover the more deniable claim – ‘I am grateful for your being able to see me at such short notice. I am here on business that you may find surprising, but that has become of considerable importance to the Empire.’
‘Your Magnificence,’ Anastasius replied – he paused and laughed softly, though at what he laughed was as ambiguous as the form of address I’d used – ‘your visit, though welcome, is anything but a surprise. There is very little in Alexandria that escapes my notice. If my dear Brother in Christ John could bring himself to sup with me more often, we two patriarchs could be known, here and throughout Egypt, as the two eyes of the Church.’
He paused again as there was a knock at the door. A monk entered with a pile of letters. I looked up briefly, and then looked again. Even before the guttural conversation opened, I knew there was something odd. Then it hit me: the unmistakable smell of unwashed menstrual discharge. The monk looked male enough. There was even a thoroughly unclerical though empty scabbard on display. But this was a nun.
‘The Sisters of Saint Artemisia are a military order,’ Anastasius explained to me. ‘With the present state of things in Alexandria, I find their term of duty here a great support.’ He switched back into Egyptian and was lost for the moment in some kind of directions.
I continued looking at the nun. Her face was turned away from me. For her shape and general bearing, she really might have been a man. Except among the wilder barbarians, I’d never seen armed women, and I did nothing
