looked up at the sunlight that streamed obliquely through the ceiling window.
‘Very good,’ I said in a final tone. ‘Since nothing has come here directly from Constantinople, I’d be most grateful if you could look again through your own correspondence from His Excellency the Governor of Corinth, to see if there is anything forwarded to me. My commission gives me a free hand with the council. But I did expect at least one supplemental letter from the Emperor.’
As soon as he decently could, he ended the conversation and went back to pushing his box along. He vanished round the corner, and I stood listening to a diminishing sound of long scrapes and grunts of exertion. I found myself looking at the cupboard within which was the door set in the wall. I did remember pulling this shut the night before. It was now ajar. I resisted the urge to open it and walk in. That could wait until the following day, or even the day after. I turned and walked back into the confused layout where the grander rooms at the front of this block gave way to the main living quarters. I’d not bother with exploring. The smell of damp and unswept dust was getting on my nerves. Instead, I’d make my way out into the main courtyard garden. There, I could sit until the sun went altogether. Until dusk came and turned the wild flowers a uniform pale, I could sit by myself and try to put my thoughts in order.
As I passed by the staircase that led up to the library, I heard the muffled, rhythmical sound of someone reading.
I’d been right about the palace library. It was, in its basic plan, as fine and elegant by day as I’d imagined. It even had a few dozen books that might be worth reading. The other few hundred were forbiddingly theological. Gregory of Nyassa was light reading by comparison. In my view, they were all fit at best for cutting up and pasting on to the spines of cookery books.
Young Theodore was plainly of a different opinion. He’d been so absorbed in one of Gregory’s sermons on the infinity of God that he hadn’t noticed the crunch of my feet on those beads, and then across the loose mosaic tiles, until I was standing on the other side of his table. ‘Please don’t get up,’ I’d said as he finally caught sight of me. I’d insisted he should carry on in his bright, childish and faintly Syrian voice while I made my own inspection of the place.
Now, I was sitting opposite him in an unbroken chair I’d pulled over from one of the corners of the room, a battered scroll of the historian Dexippus open on my lap. Theodore was less shy than I’d seen him in the afternoon. He was larger than I’d seen him in his bed. He was now just a very clever boy, making the best of a dreadful time by reading everything in sight.
‘But how can My Lord read without speaking?’ he asked with less of a stammer now we were alone.
I smiled and let the book roll shut. Even then — yes, back then, at the very opening of my days of glory — I had the makings of a schoolmaster. It wasn’t an inclination I could practise on Martin. Though I’d now exceeded him in whole areas of ancient literature, it was only a year since he’d really left off being my own master. Here was a little boy, though, on whom I could impose to my heart’s content — and on whom I had my own reason for imposing.
‘I believe Syria is a place where reading is considered a communal activity,’ I said grandly. ‘It’s the same in Constantinople.’ I paused and waited for his eyes to widen at the mention of the City. ‘Where I come from, though, it is considered rather common to read aloud.’ That was a lie. If I’d got into the habit of reading to myself, it was only because that nature of what I was reading half the time in Canterbury would have got me straight into trouble if I’d recited it for all to hear. But I smiled as if silent reading were the most natural thing in the world. ‘It also allows you to read much faster. You’ll find that, once you’ve got out of the habit of reading aloud, you can go ten or twenty times faster.’
‘Then I will endeavour, My Lord, to still my own tongue when reading,’ came the grave and implicitly trusting response.
I felt a sudden stab of shame and took up Dexippus again. I unrolled him to the place where he described how he’d got everyone on to the Acropolis for his final defence of Athens against the Gothic raiders. That had been under three hundred and fifty years earlier. But his refusal to call any weapon or place or people by its modern name — indeed, his refusal to mention any building that wasn’t already built by the time of Demosthenes — made his account incomprehensible in places. To be sure, it left me no wiser about the fate of the buildings on the Acropolis. I twisted the spine of the book in my right hand, and watched as the glued pages scrolled further and further towards the probable climax of the work. There was a two-inch hole in the antepenultimate page. It wouldn’t stop a determined reading. But I was already going off a man who’d been so universally praised by later historians. I put the book down on the table and watched as the stiff papyrus rolled back on itself.
‘How long have you been in Athens?’ I asked in a more normal voice.
‘We came here just over three years ago, My Lord,’ came the reply.
I nodded and waited.
‘It was after my father died,’ he went on, now squeezing his eyes shut as if to remember the chronology of events. ‘There had been a poor harvest in our district. There was little food for the authorities to requisition from the country people, and want among the poorer classes brought on a plague in which many died throughout the whole city.’ He stopped and tried not to look confused. ‘My mother — I mean the Lady Euphemia — applied for help to one of her own relatives. But he refused to accept me into his household. So my Uncle Nicephorus offered us a roof. He was unable to pay for our journey. But my mother sold some of her jewels, and we took ship from Zephyrion.’
‘That would have been while Phocas was Emperor,’ I prompted.
‘Yes, My Lord,’ he said, more eagerly. ‘I’d been in Athens a whole year, when officials came over from Corinth and threw down the statues of the Tyrant and announced the beginning of a new age of freedom and perfect justice.’ He stopped and looked down at the table.
I could see he’d covered all his waxed tablets in notes from what Gregory had told him. I had no wish to discuss theology — not with a boy, at any rate. I smiled and leaned carefully back in my chair. Though unbroken, it had the rickety feel about it of old furniture on the turn. Theodore stared up at the sudden creak of old wood. ‘So how do you find the Glorious City Crowned with Violets?’ I asked. ‘I suppose Tarsus was hotter — and less past its best.’
The boy looked cautiously back. ‘It is a privilege, My Lord, to stay in so famous a city,’ he said. He stopped and looked down again.
I leaned forward and tried to see what was on one of the loose papyrus sheets he’d had stacked up on his left. It was more about Alexander, but the writing was too stained and faded for me to see from upside down where Theodore had reached in the story. He saw my interest and passed the sheet over. It was Ptolemy again; he was describing how he’d seized possession of Alexander’s body on its journey back to Macedon and brought it to Egypt, which he’d just grabbed in the dissolution of the Empire.
The boy screwed his face up as if for some great effort. He stammered a little. Then: ‘Is it true, My Lord, that you were in Egypt?’
I nodded. Egypt wasn’t a subject I’d have wanted to discuss, given any choice. But I was eager for any conversation that went beyond extracting one sentence at a time from him.
‘I did see the mummy of Alexander when I was there,’ I said. I thought of that ghastly riot in Alexandria, in which the mob had laid hands on the thing, tearing it in pieces — and even eating parts of it. ‘You don’t often set eyes on a genuine hero,’ I went on with a laugh. Couldn’t the boy have asked about something that brought back more welcome memories? Priscus might see the suppression of the Alexandrian mob as one of the high points in his career. I couldn’t see it as other than part of the disaster that had made my job here essential to succeed. But I’d now managed a look at the sheet that had been underneath the fragment of Ptolemy. This was one of the attacks that Plutarch had made on Epicurus.
‘Have you read any of the pagan philosophers?’ I asked.
‘No, sir,’ he answered. ‘They have nothing to add to the truths given by the Holy Fathers of the Church.’
I tried to look devout. By much squinting, I now managed to read a few bits of Plutarch:
