But Priscus had now finished his conference with the militia heads. He stepped out from the porch, sword in one hand, my convenor’s bell in the other. He stopped in the middle of the street and ignored the roof tile that landed at his feet. He turned and grinned at me. I wondered how he’d got the bell from where I’d left it. But he stepped a few paces towards the mob that was continuing to move steadily forward, clubs in hand, looks of twisted hate stamped on their faces. He laughed into the faces and began ringing the bell. It sounded loud in the still air of the afternoon, and the mob came to an uncertain halt. As I wondered if he’d gone raving mad, I heard a shuffling from up the hill. They came from the top of the hill, where I hadn’t seen them. They came from the side streets, which is where they must have been sitting about all day. It looked at the time as if they really had emerged like armed men from the dragon’s teeth in the legend of Jason. But, as the bell stopped ringing, and Priscus raised his sword, the several dozen armed men from the better classes of Athens formed a dense and organised mass in the street, and stood waiting for instructions.
‘You have a choice,’ Priscus cried at the mob. ‘You can get back to your filthy burrows, and leave your lives to the defence of your betters. Or you can suffer the penalty of those who really piss off the Commander of the East.’ He looked round at his men. Some of them had swords. Some had long, spiked clubs. Some had bows with arrows already in place. He looked back at the mob, which still hadn’t come forward, but didn’t look inclined to disperse. He laughed and put himself at the head of the militia. ‘If these vermin really mean business,’ he said, ‘so do we! Keep together — no falling out for any purpose — but we go forward and kill until the streets are clear.’
The Dispensator took hold of my arm. ‘I think we can leave things with the Lord Priscus,’ he said.
As he drew me back inside, I continued looking at the opening moves of a street battle that, with Priscus on one side, could have only one outcome. The men right at the front of the mob did make some effort to stare back. But those behind were already making a quiet bolt for the side streets that radiated from the bottom of the hill. And then the front men themselves turned and ran.
And that was it. Priscus sheathed his sword and bowed in our direction. ‘I can’t answer for the enemy outside the walls,’ he called out. ‘But the enemy within should take no further interest in your exploration of the Nature of Our Lord and Saviour.’
His men put away their weapons and let up a happy cheer.
The Dispensator was plucking harder at my sleeve. ‘My Lord Gundovald is ready to take up his speech again whenever you choose to reconvene the council,’ he said.
I nodded and forced myself not to hurry forward as we walked back inside.
I should have expected there would be a trap. But the immense length and irrelevance of his text, combined with an inclination to dwell on external events, had left me unprepared for when Gundovald finally looked up and began to speak extempore. Much of this was as irrelevant as his text. Three sentences, however — uncharacteristically clear sentences, I might add — had skewered me on one of my weak points. Back in Constantinople, I’d dithered for months between making up a doctrine of a Single Will and making up a similar but separate doctrine of a Single Energy. I’d finally decided on a Single Will because it had a more logical neatness, and because it was better calculated to turn Monophysite heads. Now the old fool had raised the possibility of a Single Energy, and gone straight on to cite the Acts of two ecumenical councils against it. Luckily, without Martin there to assist, the duty interpreter had so mangled his words that the Greeks were unaware of what he’d really said. But the Latin delegates were beginning to look as if they might start thinking for themselves.
I was coming to the second half hour of the water clock in my speech of clarification. The interpreter was totally lost, and reduced several times to consulting with his colleague for the right words in Greek — and a fat lot of good that did him or his listeners: his stammered paraphrase was as wildly off mark as an arrow shot by a dying cripple. But I had to stamp out the fires of doubt among the Latins.
‘You will find the same declared clearly in the eighth chapter of definitions to the Acts of the Council of Constantinople held in the reign of the Great Justinian of august memory.’ Here, I shut my eyes and made my best job of translating the relevant passage from memory into Latin. ‘Moreover, before coming to any conclusion about particular facts of orthodoxy, I would remind the most learned fathers here assembled of the rules by which orthodoxy is distinguished from heresy. A man may depart from orthodoxy in two ways. First, he may deny the Gospels outright. Second, he may deny those logical inferences from the Gospels to which he chooses not to submit. A heretic departs from orthodoxy in the second of these ways. As such, he remains within the True Faith, though in more or less grave error.
‘I do venture here to correct a verbal slip of the most learned Bishop in his definition of apostasy. An apostate does not deviate from orthodoxy. Rather, he moves from a position of belief in the Gospels to a position of disbelief. Apostasy is further to be distinguished from heathenism and blasphemy. A heathen is one who has never believed in the Gospels. A blasphemer may or may not believe in the Gospels, but always treats them and all based upon them in a manner that causes deliberate scandal among the Faithful.’
There was a loud breaking of glass overhead, and a large stone crashed on to the floor a few feet to my left. A few shards of broken glass settled on my robe. I raised my arms to quell the rising panic within the hall and looked at the Dispensator. He shrugged and got up. Just before the main door, he turned and made a long bow to me. Listening in the silence that followed, I heard a shouted order that wasn’t from Priscus, followed by a scream of pain. I swallowed and tried for a smile as I looked round the hall. The interpreter had vanished under his table, and the minute clerk had thrown down his stylus in despair. But the Dispensator was now back in the room. He shook his head and sat down again. Another moment, and he was scratching away with his stylus as if there had been no disturbance.
I looked at the water clock. This session had been prolonged far beyond what I’d expected. But I pulled my thoughts together and continued: ‘If I may return to the main issue, a man can be a heretic either from ignorance or by act of the will — that is, he may be a material or a formal heretic. So far as material heresy is not an act of the will, it cannot be regarded as a sin. Therefore, the fanciful theology of women or of the lower classes should be corrected whenever encountered, but not punished. However, any person of intelligence and learning, who is made cognisant of his deviation from orthodoxy, and who persists in his deviation — he is rightly considered a formal heretic, and may anathema fall upon his head. .’
So I spoke on in the still and heated air, to a rising chorus of shouting and screams from the street outside. There was a trumpet blast, and now the clatter of what may have been a single horse. From the intense look on his face, the Dispensator might never have been out of the room. Certainly, he’d not be followed by a hundred enraged and stinking beggars, come to beat us all to death. Even so, the Greeks, who now had not the smallest notion of what I was saying, sat looking nervously at each other. A few twisted their beards with the strain of all that had happened and was still happening. Others fell into various modes of silent prayer. But I had little doubt the militia was winning. If Priscus was right, and the barbarians wouldn’t attack until at least the following day, this was just the right excuse for imposing order on the city. Once the barbarians did move against us, we couldn’t afford a rising of the urban trash behind us. As I reached a dramatic pause in my discourse on the various meanings of ‘Person’, I looked again at the Dispensator. He caught my look, and stopped scratching away on his oversized wax tablet. He stared briefly back, one of those thin and mildly triumphant smiles on his face.
Someone at least was enjoying himself.
Chapter 43
In its best age, I’ve already noted, the Athenian taste ran to buildings small but perfectly formed. The great Temple of Jupiter was an exception. Though not big at all by the standards of Rome or Constantinople, it was vast in Athenian terms. Its bulk loomed high over the wall that it nearly joined. Then again, it had been started by the tyrant Pisistratus as a symbol of his might. It had then been left unfinished by the democracy that followed the downfall of his son — too expensive and now too old-fashioned, I could suppose. After seven hundred years, it had been completed by Hadrian on his celebrated visit. No expense had been spared, I’d once read, and the archaic design had been followed as if all the improvements in construction of the intervening centuries hadn’t taken place. Now, its outer colonnade had been bricked up on its conversion to some other use, and it was surrounded by other low buildings that made the original plan hard to follow.
‘Oh, there is a sort of administration here that’s independent of Nicephorus,’ Priscus said with an airy wave.
