“Poor souls,” Helen said with her ready compassion. “They must not have heard aught’s amiss.”
“I’m surprised the gate guards didn’t warn them,” Argyros said, but on second thought he was not surprised at all. The guards at a minor gate, say the gate of Selymbria or that of Rhegion, might well have decamped, leaving the portal standing wide for rustics to saunter straight into the city. The magistrianos shouted across the square to the farmers. At the dread word smallpox, they crossed themselves in alarm and began rounding up their animals. “I wish we were coming home from church instead of on our way there,” Argyros said. “A sheep could feed us for days.”
“We would have got a good price, too,” Helen sighed. “Ah, well. I hope their owners get home safe.”
Only in the Augusteion, the square on which Hagia Sophia fronted, were there signs Constantinople was not a ghost town. Even there, the booksellers’ cubicles and perfumers’ stalls were all closed. But some food shops were operating, to serve the people who came to the great church to pray. Argyros smelted breaded squid frying in olive oil and garlic. His stomach rumbled hungrily. He had to force himself to walk past the smoking charcoal braziers.
People filled the great church’s colonnaded atrium. Argyros waved to a clerk he had not seen for several days. Other such meetings were going on all over the atrium. Many folk felt as he did, that going to church was the one safe outing they could make.
Keeping a protective arm around Helen, he led her into the exonarthex, the hallway between the atrium and the church proper. I le bent to kiss her and Sergios, saying, “I’ll meet you right here after the services.”
“All right,” she said, and turned away to head for the stairs up to the women’s gallery: as in any other church, men and women worshiped separately.
Someone close by let out a loud sneeze.
“Your health,” Argyros said politely.
Entering the nave of Hagia Sophia was an experience overwhelming enough to make the magistrianos forget for a while that smallpox was running free in the city. No man could enter the great church and remain unmoved. When Justinian rebuilt it after the Nika riots, he had chosen the two best architects he could find and let them draw on the resource of the whole Empire. The result deserved his boast when the magnificent structure was complete: “O Solomon, I have vanquished you!”
Polished marbles of green, red, yellow, polychrome, drawn from the Bosporos, Greece, Egypt, Isauria; gleaming lamps—gold, silver, brass; a forest of columns with intricately carven acanthus capitals; four semidomes, each full of mosaic-work ornament: all led the eye up to the central dome that was the grandest triumph of Justinian’s brilliant builders.
Supported on pendentives, it reached 180 feet above the floor. Forty-two windows pierced its base; the rays of sunlight shining through them left the dome eerily insubstantial, as if it were floating in space above the church rather than a part of it. The ever-shifting light glittered off the gold mosaic tesserae in the dome and off the cross of Christ at the apex.
Had that dome not existed, the great church’s sanctuary would have sufficed to seize the eve. The iconostasis in front of the altar was of gold-plated silver, with images upon it of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. The holy table itself was pure gold, encrusted with precious stones. So were the candelabra, the thuribles, and the eucharistic vessels: ewers, chalices, patens, spoons, basins. Red curtains with cloth-of-gold figures of Christ and Sts. Peter and Paul flanked the altar. As always, the divine liturgy took Argyros out of himself, made him feel no longer a man alone in the world but part of the great Christian community, past, present, and future. The liturgy was ancient, ascribed to St. John Chrysostrom, the theologian and scholar who had been patriarch of Constantinople less than a century after Constantine refounded the city.
The service was celebrated with splendor appropriate to its surroundings. The slow dignity of the prayers, the rich silks of the priests’ dalmatics and chasubles, the sweet incense emanating from the thuribles, the choruses of perfectly trained men and boys that sang the hymns—all added together to convey to both spirit and senses the glory of God.
Prayers for the dead appeared twice in the service, after the reading of the Gospel and in the prayer for the church before communion. That was customary; it stressed the bond between the living and the dead and the close relationship between this world and the next. In this time of pestilence, though, the prayers were specially poignant.
Argyros shook his head in sorrow when at last the priest sang St. Symeon’s song of leavetaking, removed his vestments, and brought the service to an end. Hagia Sophia seemed to bring the world to come so close to this one. Returning to simple mundanity was never easy afterward. Helen, as she usually did, looked at things from a different perspective. “Thank you for taking me, Basil,” she said as they were walking home. “I needed to be reminded how God still watches over us.”
She was without the dogged curiosity Argyros brought to his faith, but he often thought her belief the purer. She accepted where he, by nature and training, always looked to question. The longer the smallpox epidemic went on, the more he saw good people dying along with the bad, the more he began to wonder why God was not watching more closely.
His mind still shied from the notion. Undoubtedly God had His reasons. When He wanted Basil to learn them, Basil would.
“That was delicious, dear,” Argyros said, putting aside his plate of garlicky lamb stew with real regret.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Helen said. “Would you like some more?” She offered him her own plate.
“You’ve hardly touched it,” he said in surprise. “You’ll have to do better than that. I remember my mother and my older sister back in Serrhes saying they were hungry all the time while they were nursing.”
“I have been too, till now,” Helen said, a little defensively. “I just haven’t felt much like eating, the last couple of days.”
“Do you think you’re pregnant again?” Argyros asked, remembering how nauseated she had been when she was first earning Sergios.
But she shook her head. “This is different; more like I’m tired all the time.” She laughed. “I don’t know why I should be. You’ve helped a lot around the house, and I’ve hardly been out since we prayed at the great church a couple of weeks ago.”
She stood to pick up the dishes and take them back to the kitchen, where she would set them to soak. She paused to undo the top two clasps of her tunic. “I think the heat lately has helped take away my appetite,” she said, fanning herself with her hand.
Argyros’s thick eyebrows shot up. Summer in Constantinople was hot and sticky, but the latest bad heat wave had broken three days before. He rose from the table, went around, and kissed her on the forehead.
She smiled. “What was that for?”
“For you, of course,” he answered easily, returning her smile. He would not show her the twinge of fear he felt, but it was there. Under his lips, her skin had been warm and dry. She slept restlessly during the night and was a long time falling back to sleep after she got up to feed Sergios. So was Argyros, but for a different reason.
Helen woke in the morning with a headache. “Would you go out and pick me some willow twigs?” she asked; the bitter sap in them was soothing.
Argyros did as she requested. Along with its splendid buildings, (Constantinople boasted several large parks, one not far from the church of the Holy Apostles. Many Constantinopolitans, city dwellers for generations, would not have known a willow tree from a rosebush. The magistrianos, from his childhood in a small Balkan town and also as a veteran of lift-in the field, had no trouble finding what he sought. He used his dagger to slice off a handful of the youngest, tenderest shoots, then hurried back to his home. He gasped in dismay: though the day was warmer than the previous couple had been, Helen huddled under every blanket in the house. He could hear her teeth chattering across the room. “So cold, Basil, so cold,” she whispered, but when he put his hand to her head he found her burning hot.