grant — and this was plainly uppermost in his mind — I heard the door open to the interpreter’s house.
‘You’d better come in, Aelric,’ Martin whispered in Celtic. ‘It isn’t very good.’
I stood in the larger of the two rooms in the house. Though bare, it was neat and clean. There was an icon of Saint Luke on the longest of the walls. Beneath this were a writing table and the pens and many inkpots of one whose living is words and their exact equivalents in another language. Felix himself sat in bed, a threadbare blanket wrapped about his shoulders. It took a while for my eyes to adjust fully to the darkened interior. I could see at once, though, that this was an old man. He might or might not have been as old as he seemed from his unkempt white hair and beard. There was no doubt his wits weren’t all that were needed of someone employed for his job.
‘But where is she?’ he asked as if repeating himself. ‘She went out with letters for the Lord Count. She should have been back long before evening. Where has she gone?’ He looked up into my face.
I caught the haggard despair in his eyes. Much truth is got from strangers by a course of questioning and observation. Sometimes, like a flash of lightning, it will cross from one mind to another. One look at the face is then enough. I swallowed and ordered myself not to let my shoulders sag.
‘Please stay where you are,’ I said gently. I sat down opposite the old man and took his hand in mine. ‘Tell me — when did your daughter go out?’ Getting a meaningful answer did now take questioning. She might have gone out seven days before. It might have been five. If I really needed to know, I could turn and ask the Dispensator exactly when the man had gone from eccentricity to apparent madness. But the description Felix gave me confirmed what Martin had also guessed.
How do you tell an old man that his only child — a daughter he’d loved, and who’d been his one reason for staying alive in this ghastly world — has been murdered in some obscene and utterly worthless ritual, and then dumped like a scraped-out melon husk? I could have taken the easy path and pretended ignorance. I could have made smooth promises of a search and left the news to be broken by someone else. After all, without a positive identification, I could have told myself, I might be mistaken, and that there was no point in giving what might have been an unnecessary shock. But the birthmark he’d mentioned on the right forearm was undeniable identification. I told the man as gently as I could what had happened.
I was trying again for some words —
‘Felix,’ he said.
The old man looked up bleakly.
The Dispensator raised his arms and stretched them out to the old man. ‘Felix, it is the settled conviction of our Faith that the end of this life is no more than a gateway through which all must pass into a new life. Whether you had gone before your daughter, or she has now gone before you, is a matter of the Divine Providence that it is not for us to question. It is enough for us to know that whatever happens must assuredly happen for a purpose that is ultimately good. Your daughter is with Jesus, and you will, it is the promise of our Faith, see her again on the latter day. I tell you this from my own conviction. I tell you also as representative of the Universal Bishop.’
The old man wept as the sermon continued. But he was no longer looking wildly about. In matters of faith, as in all other matters, you might as well have argued with the waves on Dover Beach as with the Dispensator. Odd to say — and he’d never dressed otherwise, or acted other than as chief functionary of the Pope — but I’d never thought of him as any kind of priest. Now, as I heard that irresistible flow of comfort, I realised what a good missionary the Church had lost when the Lord Fortunatus first took possession of his mean little office in the Lateran. Given that mood of bleak despair, even I might have drawn comfort from his words. A reasonable man must face facts as they are, not as he might wish them to be. Equally, there are times when no reasonable man will challenge false consolation. There is something in what Plutarch said against Epicurus.
‘She will be forgiven her sins?’ the old man asked.
‘There is not the smallest doubt, my son,’ came the reply.
Trying for a devout look of my own, I listened to the conversation. Once or twice, when the poor old creature lapsed into Greek, I had to give a whispered translation to the Dispensator. I was glad he’d come along, to show me the house and join me in the act of bullying I’d had in mind. I could never have managed this flow of commanding comfort. Even Martin could only have had the authority of a firm but untonsured believer. I listened, impressed — and I worked hard to make sense of the incidentals of what Felix had let slip about the nature of his daughter’s dealings with the Lord murdering Count of Athens. They were broken. They were repeated. They were contradictory in their details. The senility that despair can throw like a blanket over an aged mind is one of the few mercies in life. If he was never to recover his wits, and if his days would not now be prolonged, the old man’s suffering would not be all that it might otherwise have been. The bitter despair of the old has no other cure. But I’d learned something.
Chapter 31
‘You have no choice, Aelric,’ Martin whispered beside me. ‘You
Still silent, I looked again at the icon of the Risen Christ. He glared disapprovingly back at me from the wooden panel, the Virgin clutching at His left hand, the tomb broken open beneath His feet. I had to grant that, once you accepted the glitter all about us of jewelled relic boxes, and the endless profusion of bright colours, Justinian had employed architects and workmen of great ability to convert the Temple of Athena into a church. You really couldn’t tell that the main structure had been turned round, so it was now entered from the west, nor that the internal columns had been removed to make room for worshippers to stand inside. I’d seen the gold and ivory statue of Athena in Constantinople; it had been placed in the covered Theatre of Oribasius, so the seats flowed round it. Here, it must have been placed behind me, where the main door was now located. I looked up at the ceiling. This had been replaced at some time during or before the conversion, its weight now supported by a couple of brick arches in the modern style.
But there was to be no more thinking about architectural details. Martin drew breath to carry on in his whispered Celtic. I almost wished he could have gone back to insisting on a dishonourable flight from Corinth. I sighed and got in first. ‘He was fucking the girl,’ I conceded. ‘I have no reasonable doubt of that. He was fucking her, and leading her along with all the usual promises. What happened next, though, may be doubted. We might assume this was a sex killing. A man in the Count’s position is able to develop and indulge some questionable tastes. .’
‘You know perfectly well it was sorcery!’ Martin hissed. ‘We both heard that he sacrificed her to whatever demon was being asked to drown us at sea. Why else his behaviour when you found the body?’
I could have thrown doubt on all of this. What we’d heard in the library was at least ambiguous. All that Nicephorus had said and done beside the tomb of Hierocles could make sense on the assumption of a mere sex killing.
The Dispensator, though, had now finished his own long prayer for the soul of the dead, and was standing behind us. ‘God understands all,’ he said in a voice that, however softly he spoke, echoed from the curved ceiling. ‘But I choose to think it both unfriendly and a sign of guilt if your conversation is in a language that neither I nor any other worshipper here can understand. You know, Alaric, that the poor girl was murdered. Will you resist me if I claim the right to
I certainly would resist him, and I did. Not so buggery Martin. After a few promising evasions and shifty looks, he gave straight in and told the lot, probable sorcery and all.
The Dispensator got down again on his knees, this time beside us, and prayed for what seemed a very long time. ‘We have been called to Athens,’ he finally said, now very grim, ‘to agree some process by which heretics may be reconciled to the Faith as laid down at Chalcedon. I now learn that the Count of Athens himself is in communion with the demons of the Old Faith, and that this communion has not stopped short of human sacrifice. Might I ask His Magnificence the Lord Senator Alaric why this fact has not been reported?’
The plain answer I could have given was that Nicephorus was the normal authority to which these things should be reported. Since that was out, I was the next authority, and I already knew all about his crime. What I did about it was a matter for me alone to decide. I turned and looked nervously about. We weren’t alone in the church.
