The Emperor entered and fell to his knees before the small silver couch. He did not need to see the physical presence of St Demetrius to know that the holiest of martyrs and most potent of saints was spiritually present. St Demetrius’s parreshia, access to the Heavenly Father, was proven beyond all doubt. How many times had he saved Thessalonica from the Bulgars? How many torments of the flesh had he eased with his healing oil, how many carnal sins had he absolved with his cleansing waters? Heal me, absolve me, begged the Lord of the Entire World in silent, desperate prayer. I know you have approached the Throne of Heaven so many times on my behalf, beloved Martyr. You have presented my case to the Divine Trinity with such graciousness and conviction that my heart bursts with gratitude for your Holy offices. And yet I still suffer. And yet I am not forgiven.
Tzintzuluces knelt beside the Emperor, crossed himself, and bowed deeply in prayer. He took the Emperor’s powerful hands in his own spindly fingers. He gently urged the Emperor’s hands towards the empty silver couch. ‘Let him touch you,’ whispered the monk. ‘His one hand has now taken that of Our Father Almighty. His other seeks your mortal grasp. Reach out to him.’
The Emperor’s hands trembled slightly as he reached out. He sighed; it was as if his fingers had vanished into a warm ether, and the pain – the terrible strangling torment – flowed from his entire body, through his fingers, into this all-accepting void. It flowed joyously, cathartically, for a moment, and then the pain was suddenly excruciating, as if his skull had turned to hot iron and crushed in upon his brain. The effluence of pain trickled and ceased, obstructed by a sin too great to pass through any medium.
The monk looked anxiously at this suffering human being next to him. Yes, Tzintzuluces reflected, he could, without blasphemy – indeed it redounded to the glory of God -consider the Autocrator a far more humble man, indeed a mere novitiate in a universal monastic order. For when Christ the King summoned him, the King of the World would have to appear before the Heavenly Tribunal as naked as any man.
And like any man, even the Pantocrator’s Viceregent on earth had to prepare for that time. For men, Tzintzuluces reminded himself, are like oxen whose life cannot last; they are like cattle whose time is short. ‘Let him guide you, whispered the monk.
The Emperor choked back the searing, vision-blackening pain. The Holy Martyr spoke, soothed, guided. His voice, transmitted through the spiritual ether within which he resided, seeped through the hard shell of pain that crushed upon the Emperor’s brain. ‘Confess,’ whispered St Demetrius in a wonderful melody that was more music than voice. ‘Confess.’
Dazed, the Emperor allowed Tzintzuluces to raise him to his feet and lead him to the vaulted crypt beside the altar, the very spot where St Demetrius had accepted Holy Martyrdom. They stopped before the sunken marble font; the saint’s holy oil shimmered, a fragrant, faintly golden pool. The Emperor fell to his knees again. When he looked up, two holy men stood before him. Both of these living saints were maned with voluminous beards and unshorn, lice-crawling hair but otherwise were as withered and desiccated as desert lizards; the taller of the pair wore a soiled loincloth, the other stood in a coarse, tattered tunic. If the Emperor noticed their unwashed stench, he gave no indication. Instead he turned to Tzintzuluces, hands clenched before his breast, the tears welling in his eyes. ‘These are new treasures,’ the Emperor whispered hoarsely, and began to weep.
‘Yes, yes,’ whispered Tzintzuluces, his own dark eyes glazed with adoration and rapture. ‘David and Symeon. The former a dendrite; the latter, as you have certainly heard, the stylite from Adrianopolis, the very Symeon whose fame has begun to spread throughout Christendom. They have left their perches to succour the holiest of all their brethren.’ Tzintzuluces looked aside briefly as a priest in silk vestments set a silver bucket, a sponge and a towel beside the Emperor.
The Emperor spread his arms wide and his eyes swept from one Holy Man to the other like a drunken reveller forced to choose between two equally desirable courtesans. Finally he settled on the shorter, cloaked man. David the dendrite’s tunic, hair and bare legs were soiled with the droppings of the birds that had shared his home of the last four years, a solitary tree on the outskirts of a small Anatolian village; already the dendrite’s virtuous self-denial had been credited with bringing widespread prosperity to the entire Charsianon theme. The Emperor reached almost reflexively for the pail and began to sponge the filth and bird excrement from the feet and legs of David the dendrite. He caressed the man’s rough brown ankles and worked the sponge in between gnarled toes. The Emperor’s eyes were stricken, tender, above all grateful.
After he had carefully towelled David’s feet the Emperor turned to Symeon. The stylite had lived atop a single stone column for thirteen years now – the Emperor reflected on the holiness of this number, that of the twelve apostles plus their Lord. That Symeon the stylite had blessed the world with healing grace was beyond any doubt; hundreds of miraculous cures had already been attributed to his touch. In exchange Symeon had surrendered his own flesh; his toes, eaten away by the maggots that lived in the filth – his own filth – at his feet, were raw nubs. Delirious with joy at beholding the evidence of this sacred act of mortification, racked with guilt over the crimes his own flesh had lured him to – yea, even to the very fires of perdition – the Emperor fell upon Symeon’s grotesque, filth-encrusted feet; he kissed these feet, he bathed them with his tears, he salved them with the golden oil of St Demetrius.
Finally the Emperor turned his tear-stained face to Tzintzuluces. He fought to control his sobs. ‘You know why the Pantocrator has struck me down with the lightning bolts of this madness that visits me, ever more frequently, do you not?’
‘Why, Brother?’ asked Tzintzuluces softly.
‘I engaged in adulterous intercourse with her, even as I served her husband Romanus, the same Romanus who preceded me beneath the Imperial Diadem, even as I served him in the capacity of servant and friend.’ The Emperor snorted and struggled for air. ‘Suspicious of the rumours that attended our flagrant and unlawful – yea, unholy – dalliance, her husband and my Emperor questioned me of these matters and’ – here the Emperor began to wail – ‘upon the Holy Relics I denied my crimes! If not damned before, there I threw my immortal soul into the fiery lake!’
Tzintzuluces crossed himself with a quick, frantic gesture.
‘There is more,’ said the Emperor, his eyes now fixed with an expression of utter horror, as if he saw before him the demons who attended the gates of Hell. ‘They murdered him. It was not my hands that forced his head beneath the waters of his bath, but those hands acted in my interest. I know now the foul crime upon which my throne was raised. I will never escape the torment of that knowing!’ The crypt echoed with the Emperor’s shattered voice, as if the gates of Hell had now opened and the damned shouted forth, begging for release.
Tzintzuluces’s face mirrored the terrible fear that racked his Imperial disciple. His lips parted with a curious slurping sound but he could say nothing. The Emperor stared at him, a drowning man who had just realized that his saviour on the shore had no rope, no bit of flotsam to throw to him. And then Symeon spoke. His voice was shockingly elegant, as if he were an actor rather than a self-mutilated hermit. ‘Because you have listened to your wife and eaten from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account.’
The Emperor, still on his knees, looked with shadowy, pleading eyes at Symeon. Symeon answered with barking syllables that echoed against the gleaming plaster vaults of the crypt. ‘And Cain sayeth to the Lord, “Thy punishment is heavier than I can bear; thou hast driven me today from the ground and banished me from thy presence. I shall be a vagrant and wanderer on the earth and anyone who meets me can kill me.” And the Lord answered: “No.” ‘ Here Symeon’s voice boomed mightily. ‘ “If anyone kills Cain, Cain shall be avenged sevenfold.” So the Lord put a mark on Cain.’