Tears began to sting his eyes and he could not read the words on the parchment. It was not a seemly thing to weep, he knew; he was reacting as Penelope would have reacted. The thought brought her closer, as if she had momentarily come back to him from the shadowy land beyond the Styx.
He filled a cup from the jug of wine on the side table. A few days ago he had not been certain he would see this day, given the agony he had been suffering and those damnable Michaelites. Now the pain at least had vanished.
Aurelius raised his cup toward the cupids. He could feel Penelope’s presence as strongly as if she stood behind him. “This is our proudest night, my dearest wife,” he whispered.
Let the Michaelites fulminate outside the city walls, he thought. On this glorious evening, he would banish them from his thoughts.
Standing under the portico of the shrine beside the Bosporos, Michael was preaching a sermon. The sun, its rusty red light no longer finding its way to bless the festivities in the garden of Senator Aurelius’ home, was still visible. Unimpeded by Constantinople’s walls and buildings it cast a ruddy glow across the rapt faces of Michael’s audience.
“What do you witness today within the great walls of the city?” Michael was asking. Despite not possessing the booming voice of an orator, his words carried easily out from the steps of the shrine into the attentive crowd gathered at their foot and on the grassy incline leading up to the road.
“Everywhere demons holding their orgies, everywhere citadels of the evil one, everywhere fornication decked with wreaths of honor,” Michael continued. “Even as I speak, the powerful and the godless are gathering to celebrate their own iniquity. But I say to you that these offenses against heaven will draw unto themselves a fiery wrath.”
A woman scanned the faces of the people pressing around the shrine steps. All classes and conditions were represented, a cross section of society-and the dregs of society for that matter.
“We light our lamps and praise the heat and the light cast by the flame. We praise the oil from which the flame draws sustenance. But what of the humble clay vessel which is necessary to hold the oil?”
As the words flowed on, fear nagged at the woman’s vitals. Could her husband have followed her, found her despite all the care she had taken to obscure her path once she had fled their country estate, taking only her jewelry and a few coins? Again she felt a pang of pity for the slaves. They would doubtless have been interrogated mercilessly as to her whereabouts. Although a gentle man in many ways, her husband had always been very conscious of his social position and it would certainly not be enhanced by his wife running away while he was in the city. She glanced at the wound of the sunset, welcoming the approaching darkness that would help her hide her face more securely for another night.
“Those wealthy men in fine robes who measure the Lord’s riches by the weight of gold on their altars declare me to be a heretic,” Michael continued, “and because I say to you who are gathered here by the roadside that we should venerate not only the Father and the Son and the Spirit but also the Vessel of the Spirit, they accuse me of blasphemously worshipping mere flesh.”
The woman looked up into the fast-darkening sky above the crowd of pilgrims milling around the shrine, reminding herself that she must be ceaselessly vigilant. Discovery was possible at any time, one slip, one error, a careless word, and she would be caught.
What, she wondered, had brought the sturdy peasant family clustered nearby to the shrine? They looked healthy enough, brown skinned from laboring in vineyards or fields. A farmer, perhaps even freed slaves? The man was tall, bearded, his face as bony as the hand that rested on his wife’s shoulder. She was short, with child and very near her time. Looking at the high swell of the stomach under a dusty gray tunic and the small chubby-faced boy sucking on a dirty thumb as he peeked at her from between his parents, his eyes mirrors of a blue summer sky, she felt a familiar stab of pain.
The poor, it seemed, bred as easily as brute animals. In the country there was room for all the little ones. But in Constantinople, did they never pause to consider that here was another mouth to feed, another dweller in a city already bursting with humanity, swarming with people crammed into tiny rooms and spilling out into the raucous streets? Children needed light and air and space, not dirty hovels and cramped rooms, scrabbling for food and growing old before their time.
She found herself wondering what the grubby little boy would look like, playing happily in the garden of her husband’s villa. If only she had not lost the child she was carrying just a few short months after her marriage. Her husband had been overjoyed when she returned from the physician with confirmation of their happy suspicions. “Now I have two reasons for joy,” he had said, stroking her still flat stomach fondly. “A wife and a child. I am a rich man indeed!”
Still Michael’s words flowed on as the crowd murmured to each other, some nodding, others looking around them as they listened. Were their thoughts wandering as much as hers?
“Yet how can there be anything, even mere flesh, which does not proceed from God, who created all?” Michael asked. “And how can that which is created by Him not partake of His own being? Now still there are those of you who may not be fully convinced. But consider the woman who brings forth a child. Is it argued that the babe arrived by cart from another place, or that it is somehow different in substance and in nature from its mother although arising from her?”
The words brought a pang to the woman. She was not meant to be a mother. She felt gnawing pain again, a lamentation in the dark space that dwelt in her heart. She had lost their child and they had turned away from each other. Her husband became distant, not acknowledging or apparently even realizing how much she needed his comfort. Oh, he did not begin to drink too much wine to drown his sorrow and he was always icily courteous. But he became a stony-faced stranger who said little and spent less and less time with her, pleading the polite fiction that official business kept him in the city.
And then one night he had arrived home intoxicated and cursed her as barren, screaming his rage, taking pleasure in revealing in obscene detail that he had consorted with women from the gutter and enjoyed it. Yes, and enjoyed it more than anything he had had with her.
In the morning, when he was sober, he had tried to apologize. But it was too late. The drunken words that had flowed like poisoned wine had done their work too well.
“They believe they are safe,” Michael was saying, “like beasts in their dark dens, yet the sacred fire will reach inside their luxurious houses with their beautiful furniture and painted walls.”
Painted walls. Yes, she had taken to spending most of her time sitting in her room, staring at the frescoes. The finest craftsmen had come from Constantinople to decorate her husband’s villa and their handiwork was exquisite. A meticulously painted window deceived the eyes into believing that it opened out into a classical landscape graced by a temple to Venus, whose symbols were seamlessly blended into the tranquil scene.
Here was a serenely flowing river, clear enough to see the rounded stones over which it gurgled and sang, dancing between grassy banks graced by willows and fringed with violets and roses. There, two stately swans swam in the shallows and on the far side of the water, a young couple walked hand in hand up the slight incline of a hill toward a small temple to the goddess. Two doves hovered over its tiled rotunda, pomegranate trees bloomed outside its open door. Beyond, wooded hills rolled into a misty distance.
It was a beautiful scene, or at least she had thought so when she arrived as a new bride. In the mornings they would lie in bed and spin each other stories about the young couple and what had happened to them and all the other supplicants who visited the temple to offer a sacrifice to Venus or perhaps to ask for divine assistance on the field of love.