The Ghosts of Athens

again, I promise not to raise it of my own motion.’

I said nothing, and we sat together in silence as the sky turned dark, and, one by one, the stars began to come out. The wild flowers were turning pale in the dusk, and I could tell it would be a chilly evening, when Priscus finally told me to help him up, and we turned to go in and see what progress Sveta had made with the packing.

‘I don’t think I can be blamed for any dereliction of duty,’ Priscus opened as we passed into one of the lit areas of the residency. ‘I can still regret, though, that I wasn’t able to direct things yesterday as they reached their crisis. I have no doubt, however, your report to Heraclius will narrate things not as they were, but as they should have been.’ He stopped and looked slyly into my face. ‘After all, my dearest of friends, we do stand or fall together.’ He leaned against the wall for support and giggled.

I said nothing, but looked into a bronze mirror someone had hung on the wall to reflect daylight along the corridor. So far as I could tell in the gathering darkness, even the dull red mark of my spots had now faded. It was as if they’d never been there. I stared long at the smooth and supremely beautiful face in the mirror. And still I said nothing.

Epilogue

Canterbury, Wednesday, 10 June 688

Oh, what a great heap of papyrus I’ve made again! And how my wrist aches from the burden of covering it all in my spidery Greek handwriting. I do allow there is more that I ought to say. I have stopped almost still in the middle of things. But this is as much as I feel inclined to say.

Well, there is a little more that I need to say. I did get my unanimous vote, and I even went back home in a triumph that Heraclius didn’t choose to piss all over — not, at least, in the short term, and not deliberately. Yes, I’d done what anyone might have thought the impossible, and got provisional agreement on the doctrine of a Single Will for Christ. We did nothing with it at first. There was still a long war to fight and win. But, once the Persians had been driven back and utterly destroyed, Sergius and the Emperor brought all sides together in our long-promised ecumenical council, and it seemed that agreement had been reached. I stepped modestly back and let others take the credit, but I had finally settled the Monophysite heresy on terms that both sides could reasonably call a victory for their own position.

Or so I was able to think for a couple of years. Sadly, the Church authorities in Rome eventually decided that the Sergian Compromise was itself heretical, and anathematised it under the new name of the Monothelite heresy. By then, however, it no longer mattered. The Empire had put forward what was nearly its last effort to regain Egypt and Syria from the Persians. We had nothing left when the Saracens popped out of nowhere to take them away from us again. It was rotten luck, everyone agreed, and it meant that Heraclius ended his reign on a disastrous note that even I couldn’t avoid for him.

As said, though, the new dispute no longer mattered. The loss of the Monophysite areas was a military and strategic disaster, but removed all need for theological compromise, and the Empire was easily brought back to orthodoxy as it was maintained by Rome. His Grace Theodore, even before he was made Bishop of Canterbury, was of critical importance in all communications between Rome and Constantinople; and it was due largely to his own efforts that the dispute was settled as it was.

It could have been different, mind you. We can blame the Saracens all we like. But they’d have got nowhere if the Syrians and Egyptians hadn’t been so utterly disenchanted with the victorious and restored Empire. As ever, it was that bloody fool Heraclius who was the real villain. If only he’d left things with Sergius and me, the Pope himself would have lain down with the followers of Eutyches. Instead, he’d had to keep telling everyone he was the Emperor, and that all should believe as he directed. Then there was the army of tax-gatherers he set loose on provinces that were already bled white by the Persians. No wonder it all went tits up.

But it was such a very long time ago, and it does me no good to set myself brooding over it again. What does matter is how fat Sophronius will take my story. He came in and stood over me the other day, clucking over how much longer I’d take. He told me then he’d brought in a couple of monks from France who could translate my Greek into Latin. He’ll scream blue murder if he ever gets to read the unvarnished truth about the Little Council of Athens. It may not show a Pope as directly in error. It doesn’t say much good, though, about Saint Fortunatus of the Lateran — whose dying breath, sealed in a vessel of many-coloured crystal, has worked so many undoubted and miraculous cures of the feeble-minded.

But it’s always if, isn’t it? Sophronius would scream blue murder if he were ever to read my manuscript. But there are fifteen stairs to the room where I’m now sitting. I’ve counted them many times for myself. Many more the times I’ve counted the heavy tread of Sophronius as he’s passed up and down them. Later today, as he passes down them with my immense heap of papyrus in a box that I know he will insist on carrying by himself, he will reach the seventh stair. When I’ve pulled hard on the length of twine that snakes so unobtrusively from the stairs into this room, I promise that he will never set foot on the eighth. Two really can keep a secret, if one be dead.

I haven’t seen my dear, young Theodore in over a month. But, when I stand behind him at the funeral, whispering into his ear, will he really be able to resist the matchless eloquence of the Magnificent Alaric, his adoptive though somewhat estranged father? I’ll lay a bet with you, gentle reader — the next chapter of my story will be written in Jarrow.

Oh, you just wait and see!