7
The bottom of a wine cup isn’t the only place men find courage to overcome doubts. After Arabia helped me overcome mine, she straightened her hair, stood, and quickly pulled the stola back over her head. The flickering lamplight flung the trembling shadow of her body up over the holy visage.
“When we have our farm, we won’t have to rush,” I said. “We’ll be able to lie together all morning if we want.”
She slapped the dust off her cloak. “How did you come to paint icons, Victor? Are you a religious man?”
“I’m a Christian. Who isn’t? But I can’t say I’m particularly religious. My family were killed by a pestilence when I was a child. My mother died screaming in agony.”
“I wouldn’t think you’d be inspired to paint icons.”
“I wasn’t inspired. It came about because I was apprenticed to an artisan’s workshop. I used to paint frescoes too. Frescoes have to be done in warmer weather, so the plaster and paint set right. I realized that in the summer, when most painters are decorating frescoes in churches and mansions, an icon-painter could find plenty of commissions. I’ve always been practical.”
“Is my lip colour smudged?” She leaned forward into the lamplight so I could see.
“Not a bit. You have a beautiful mouth. And what about you? How long have you worked for Florentius?”
“Not long.”
“You’ve always done the same thing?”
“Been a rich man’s servant, you mean?”
“You don’t like being employed by Florentius? He strikes me as a man of decency. He’s always shown me respect in our business dealings.”
She laughed. “You really think a rich man like Florentius respects people like us?”
“He’s told me he admires my skills.”
“Unless you’re rich you’re just a thing to be used. Did Florentius offer to lend you any money to tide you over?”
“Well—”
“What about your other wealthy patrons? What would a month’s rent be to them? Or a year’s? Have they offered?”
“They haven’t,” I admitted. I hated seeing her angry. It worried me. It could ruin everything. “You aren’t from Constantinople, are you?” I said, to change the subject.
“No. I was born in the countryside. I thought it all very boring – dirt and pigs as far as you could see – so I ran away to the big city. Not a very interesting story.”
“Until now!”
“Yes, until now. The best stories are the ones we make up for ourselves. You can’t trust others to make up your story for you. You’re never the hero of someone else’s story.”
She smoothed down her stola and patted her hair. “I’ll be back this evening,” she said. “You can tell me how it goes with Florentius. And then …” When she kissed me before leaving, I wondered whether she was thinking about kissing the emperor on the solidus.
8
I felt distracted. I attempted not to look at the red blot on the floor where the dead rat lay. I avoided the icon’s eyes. From those monstrous windows, was there some theological lesson to be gleaned, into the spirit above and the crushed verminous body below? Would Chrysostom, he of the golden tongue, have penned a Homily on a Dead Rat?
The thought reminded me I had things to do and had better get them done.
For a start, it was time to visit Florentius again.
After going through the archway and climbing the rubble slope up to my entrance to the underworld, I peered through a knothole in the board Arabia had replaced. It was not exactly the great bronze gate to the palace. The space under the iron dog was clear. I crawled out and scanned the square from between scabrous canine forelegs. There wasn’t a living creature in sight except for the stylite high up on his pillar, leaning against its rusted railing like a lifeless icon, and an emaciated cat sniffing the empty donation basket hanging to the ground from a rope attached to the stylite’s railing.
I scuttled away as fast as possible.
I had instructed Arabia to take similar care but could only trust she had taken heed of my warning.
Once out of the square I tried to tidy my clothing. I smoothed wrinkles and shook off dust and cobwebs, but I wasn’t really in any state to present myself to a wealthy patron.
I intended to cut across the Augustaion in front of the Great Church but I began to have the sensation I was being watched.
Possibly I still felt the gaze of those colossal eyes. It wasn’t the painted eyes that bothered me so much. It was what they represented. That ‘being’ up in the sky, seeing everything, all the time. Looking and looking, but never doing anything about what it saw.
A beggar sat slumped at the base of the towering column atop which the Emperor Justinian endlessly rode his chariot.
The beggar who had been sitting in Macedonia’s doorway.
No. Constantinople was filled with beggars and there was nothing to distinguish one pile of rags from another.
Nevertheless, I veered on to a side street just in case.
I went through an abandoned space where a mansion or church or an imperial building had once stood. Statuary – and pieces of statuary – stood and lay amidst brown weeds jutting through the crumbling pavement. My friends and I had come here when boys and played catch with the heads of ancient philosophers. Sometimes we convinced ourselves we saw demons darting in and out among the frozen figures. I had soon learned that there really are demons in the world, but all of them are human beings.
You just have to stay one step ahead.
When I got to my destination I was sure I had lost anyone who might have been following me. Glancing up and down the street, I noticed nothing suspicious. The large, luxurious house where I had delivered more than one icon showed passers-by only a plain brick front without windows at street level. Beyond its roof loomed the vast dome of the Great Church. When the interior of the dome was lit at night, it must illuminate the whole third storey of the house.
My patron agreed to talk to me. A few servants passed through the atrium while I waited, but I didn’t see Arabia.
Florentius was a heavy-set man with thick lips and a red nose. He looked more like a bacchant than a pious Christian. He led me through his office, where we met in the past, and along the peristyle, bordering what had been an ornamental inner garden in more prosperous times. Now the space was filled with pigsties. Several monstrous hogs – mounds of undulating flesh – drank from a basin, overlooked by a marble Aphrodite. Chickens scattered in front of us.
Florentius kicked a plump marble foot out of our path. “Cupid,” he told me. “He keeps turning up. Pieces of him, that is. Fell into a pigsty during the earthquake. Must have surprised the pig.”
As we passed under the peristyle and into the rear of the house, he frowned at several labourers busy with trowels and mortar in the hallway.
“Did you suffer much damage?” I asked.
“Enough to keep too many unwashed labourers tracking mud around. Don’t like having such people underfoot. At least a man knows his own servants; and labouring types can never be counted on. Worse than donkeys. The job’s only half finished and they vanish and need to be replaced. On the other hand, I’ve tripped over the brutes wrapped around my serving girls in the storeroom.”
“It must be vexing for a man like yourself.”
“Indeed. But I thank the Lord it wasn’t worse. I hear there are cracks in the foundation of the Great Church and the Patriarch lost most of the wine in his cellars.”
We came to a metal-banded wooden door which Florentius unlocked. “It’s a sin to keep my holy men hidden away back here. Every day I pray we will soon be rid of the beast who sits on the throne.”
Perhaps he felt safe expressing treasonous thoughts to an icon-painter.
After all, I was a criminal in the eyes of the law.
I had never seen his private bath. Doubtless he had kept it locked even before he used it to store illicit icons. The frescoes on the walls and domed ceiling of the tiny room depicted ancient gods embroiled in an Olympian orgy in garishly coloured detail.
“I bought this place from a bishop,” Florentius explained.
Icons were stacked in the dry bath. Several hung on the painted walls, including my depiction of Saint Laurentius being martyred on a red-hot grid.
Florentius noticed the direction of my gaze. “An exquisite work! The saint’s pain is palpable. How it pleases me! What can such a young man as yourself know about pain, to capture it so perfectly?” He stared fondly at the image.
Demonic figures, seen in twisted profile, prodded Laurentius’ bound, blackening flesh with tridents. I wondered what a man with as much wealth as Florentius could know about pain to appreciate it so much, but I only smiled modestly.
Florentius looked away from the icon and towards the artist. “What fools they are to claim we venerate the wood and paint itself. I venerate your skills. Your talents help me to understand how we must face suffering. How perfectly you capture the saint’s beatific demeanour! After my wife died last year I often looked to this painting for comfort, for a lesson in the way a Christian endures, secure in the knowledge that all is God’s will.” He wiped his glistening eyes. “And now, young man, for what reason have you come to see me?”
9
“I knew Florentius would agree,” Arabia put the plate of honey-cakes she’d brought on the dirt in front of the Chalke Christ. It made me think of a pagan offering.
“It took all my powers of persuasion,” I said.
“You have a golden tongue.”
“I must have. Florentius suspects Leo and the Patriarch know the icon was salvaged in some fashion and spirited away. Naturally they’re outraged.”
“If it was seen again, people would think it was a miracle, a sign the pair of them are the real heretics.”
“That’s about what Florentius told me. They’re having the city watched. Spies are everywhere. So he needs time to make arrangements. Or to change his mind.”
“He won’t change his mind,” Arabia replied.
“You think not? We’re to meet tomorrow at an early hour at the Golden Milestone to discuss the matter further.”
Arabia clapped her hands together like a child. “How very appropriate. Right where the icon was burnt. Or supposedly burnt. Sit down and try these sweets.”
Florentius probably hadn’t chosen the Golden Milestone for the symbolism but rather because people often lingered beneath it to talk. We would attract no attention, nor would either of us be able to resort to treachery in such a public spot.
All the same, I was uneasy about the arrangement. For one thing whoever was following me could conceal themselves in the crowds. I would need to be careful. I hunkered down and took one of the sticky cakes. It was very sweet indeed. I noticed the plate was silver.
“It was difficult to get away,” I said. “He kept talking.”
Arabia’s large brown eyes narrowed. “What did he want to talk about?”
“Religion. He wanted to know whether a painter could depict Christ as both divine and human at the same time. According to Emperor Leo and the Patriarch, that can’t be done in paint. Another good excuse for destroying icons! The icon will either depict Christ’s physical nature only – which is one sort of heresy – or show his physical and spiritual natures mixed, which is another sort.”
“That’s stupid.” Arabia stretched up on her toes to tap the gilded halo behind the giant head, then rapped her knuckles against the sharp tip of its nose. “There’s your spiritual and there’s your physical. It’s plain to anyone.”
“All the same, I hate to think of him telling the emperor about an icon-painter who—”
“And Leo, of course, wanting to know who this icon-painter is!”
“Exactly.”
Arabia shook her head. “I wouldn’t worry.” She sat down on the floor, leaned against me, and began nibbling a cake.
“Florentius might see this as an opportunity to gain Leo’s goodwill, by turning us and the icon over to him,” I said. What I was thinking was that maybe I could arrange for Arabia alone to be turned over, if it came to it.
“Is that why you look so shifty? You’re expecting the emperor’s guards or the urban watch to barge in?”
“I didn’t realize I—”
“Oh yes. I’ve noticed.” She smiled at me as she carefully licked honey off her fingers. Her pink tongue darted in and out and her moistened fingers glistened in the lamplight. “But remember Florentius doesn’t know where the icon is or where we are.”
“At some point, though, we’ll have to trust him. We can’t move the icon above-ground ourselves. If we cleared some of the bricks in front of that hole we might be able to squeeze it out of this place, since clearly whoever hid it here heaped those bricks up to help conceal the entrance. But it will never fit through that gap under the hound. Someone would have to make an opening somewhere in the outside wall, fast, and get the icon away faster, before the urban watch showed up to see what was causing the commotion.”
“You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” Arabia leaned her head on my shoulder and I was enveloped in her warmth. “Have you painted many images of Christ?”
“A few. The last one is still back in my room. I’m afraid I left him eyeless.”
“He doesn’t need eyes, does he? If he wants to see without them, he could see with his hands or his nose.”
“There’s a lot of extra work to be done on eyes. But then you probably aren’t interested in egg tempera techniques.”
She didn’t dispute the statement so I shut up.
“Don’t worry so much,” she told me. “Everything is going to work out perfectly. It’s been preordained. Don’t you see? Our running into each other, taking shelter from the rain, finding the icon, both of us working for Florentius, who collects icons … it’s all too much to be a coincidence. We’re being guided by the hand of God. Have faith, Victor!”
I didn’t have a chance to reply. There was a scrabbling noise outside our hiding place.
I went over and looked into the dimness, but saw nothing.
I was turning away, chiding myself for my nervousness, when there was another scuffling sound and a figure appeared out of the gloom.
At first I thought it was a feathered demon or a giant bird. Then I saw it was a man, waving his arms wildly, flapping the tattered garment he wore.
A beggar.
He shouted in a voice as ragged as his clothes. “Ye who gaze upon the great face of the Lord, repent! Repent! Repent!”
Arabia screamed.
The ragged man turned and scuttled away towards the cistern.
I went after him. He must have seen the icon, not to mention Arabia and me.
He scrambled over the fallen columns and I followed him into the darkness beyond.
I could hear his feet slapping across the stones better than I could see him. More than once I heard him fall. I shouldn’t have been able to catch him otherwise, since he was surprisingly nimble. It was like trying to catch a desperate beast.
The man kept crying out to the Lord. Down here, the Lord was the only one likely to hear. I didn’t want him to get back above ground where he could tell his tale to anyone who would listen.
I began to gain on him. I managed a burst of speed born of desperation, and my cold-numbed fingers brushed a fluttering scrap of cloth. I leapt forward and dragged him down.
He was stronger than I expected, and more agile. Claw-like nails tore at my neck. A sharp knee caught me in the stomach. Teeth sank into my shoulder. It felt as if I was being attacked by a pack of feral dogs.
I tried to get up and he slammed me backwards. My head hit the ground and lights flared behind my eyes.
Then there was a loud thud and the beggar grunted. I couldn’t feel him flailing at me any longer.
There were more thuds. I blinked. We were surrounded by the orange glow of the lamp Arabia held in one hand. In the other she gripped a bloody half brick.
I pushed myself up.
The beggar lay crumpled face down.
His skull had been caved in.
My chest burned from exertion and I hurt everywhere. If Arabia had arrived too late it would have been me lying there.
She’d saved my life.
I couldn’t take my gaze off the corpse. She’d hit the man again and again. Bloody shards of bone jutted through the matted hair.
Arabia started to sob. “I was so frightened, Victor. So frightened for you.” She threw the brick away. Her narrow shoulders shook.
I put my arm around her. “We’ll go back now. I’ll hide his body later.”
By the time we were back at our hole in the wall we were both shivering uncontrollably.
“Your clothes are ruined,” Arabia said. “I’ll bring you new ones.”
“Steal them from Florentius, you mean! That’s where you’ve been finding the food you bring me, isn’t it? I noticed his household seal on the plate.”
“We’re not stealing. It’s an advance payment.”
“Then again, what’s theft compared to murder?”
“We were only defending ourselves. We had to kill him.”
We? I hadn’t killed the beggar. But, on the other hand, there was Philokalas. I didn’t correct Arabia. We thought alike. “No,” I said, we’re not guilty of murder or theft, or greed or coveting another man’s possessions either, since all we want from Florentius is enough to keep us safe. And as for worshipping graven images, that’s a matter of opinion anyway.”
Arabia laughed. She gave me an appraising look. “You’re forgetting lust,” she said. “And I’m afraid that’s a sin you can’t deny.”
10
Arabia left, returned with food and the clothes she’d promised, and departed again. I set the clean clothing – plain garments of the type servants wear – to one side, for my meeting with Florentius next day. Then I sat down and tried to avoid the gaze of the icon.
Sometimes, when I painted an image, I had the uncanny sensation that the saint in heaven was also right in front of me, under my brush. At such times I felt I was painting a hole in the world and an otherworldly presence was stepping through.
Yet paints were paints. Pigments, wine, water, egg. There wasn’t anything else. Just raw materials and artistic technique.
I tried to keep my gaze on the floor. The crushed head of the rat still poked out from behind the icon. I got up and pushed it out of sight.
What time was it? The middle of the night? Probably earlier. It seemed as if I’d been sitting alone, in the cold, with my thoughts, forever.
Possibly Florentius would have me arrested when I showed up at the Golden Milestone.
I could feel the icon looking down at me. I looked up into those cold, bottomless eyes.
The girl is nothing more than a miserable sinner, the icon seemed to say. Not in words, but in my own thoughts. I swear it spoke to me in my thoughts, stirring them into a resolve I could not have reached on my own.
She is no better than yourself, the thing counselled. A killer. If Florentius betrays you, pretend your intent all along has been to turn over to the authorities a treacherous servant named Arabia who unwisely led you to the hidden icon which you wanted returned to the emperor for proper disposal.
“But Arabia saved my life,” I whispered.
By killing a man, brutally, the icon countered. She was no innocent.
But would Christ offer such advice? Why not? He had administered to men’s human needs when he walked the earth. He had fed the starving. Wasn’t I starving?
There are things that need to be done, the icon told me.
I walked back into the cistern and slung the body of the beggar over my shoulder. I’d had no reason to cross the cistern before but now I followed a line of pillars into the darkness, staggering under the dead man’s reeking weight, balancing my lamp in one hand, until I came to what remained of a concrete wall that had exploded inward, scattering massive chunks of masonry over a collection of chariots beyond.
I must be underneath the Hippodrome. There were ranks of chariots, all in good repair, except where portions of the ceiling had fallen on them. How long had they sat here? When had there last been a chariot race in Constantinople?
When I was done with the beggar I went back for Philokalas.
What was left of him wasn’t as heavy as the beggar, but I was shaking with revulsion by the time I’d shoved most of his bones under a chariot. A few had fallen out of his robes and rattled on to the floor of the cistern. I’d left them there. In the unlikely event the bodies were found, the natural impression would be the men had taken shelter during the earthquake and picked the wrong place.
Technically I was a murderer but I didn’t feel like one. It had been an accident. Taking my usual route early one morning, I’d seen Philokalas scuttle under the iron hound, and followed out of curiosity.
True, thieves were known to hide stolen goods in the abandoned depths of the city and it may have occurred to me that, if I discovered an illicit collection, who could fault a starving icon-painter from taking sustenance from a criminal’s hands?
Honestly, I had formed no particular plan as I slunk behind him, through the archway at the bottom of the rubble slope.
I saw the gigantic icon at the same time Philokalas saw me.
If only he had not been so hot-tempered! How else was I supposed to respond when he drew his dagger?
I used a piece of jagged brick, the same as Arabia. Luckily I had thought to pick one up as I followed him, just in case.
I didn’t hit him as many times as Arabia had hit the beggar.
The one crunching blow sickened me so much I dropped the brick and if I hadn’t hit Philokalas in exactly the right place – purely by chance – he’d still be alive.
As soon as I had examined the icon I recognized it but couldn’t work out how to use the knowledge to my advantage.
Now, standing beside the chariot that concealed the dead men, I wasn’t anxious to hurry back into the icon’s stern presence.
Why not explore?
Beyond the storage room lay an area which had been shaken by the last earthquake, or possibly previous tremors, until it resembled a natural cavern strewn with jagged boulders and stones. It might have been a basement or several basements. Dark passageways led off in different directions.
What drew my attention was the stone stairway leading upwards.
The stairs must have traversed more than one floor, but the floors were gone. I climbed to the top and peeped out through a small space between enormous double doors.
Scattered torches illuminated an otherwise dark courtyard. A grist-mill of the sort powered by a donkey sat in the middle. What I could distinguish of the surroundings told me nothing, although the little I could see of it showed that the building rising behind the courtyard looked uncommonly large. Twisting uncomfortably and craning my neck to see upwards I had a shock.
Over the roof the sun was rising.
How had I managed to misjudge time so badly? How could it be dawn already? I wouldn’t be there to meet Arabia when she arrived! I wouldn’t be on time for my appointment with Florentius!
Understanding arrived a step behind panic.
The orange glow was not the rising sun but the flames of a thousand lamps. I wasn’t far from the Great Church with its lighted dome. I might be looking into the rear courtyard of the Patriarch’s residence for that matter. At any rate, if I was close to the Great Church, I was close to Florentius. Here was the answer to how he might transport the icon.
A donkey brayed in the night as a dark figure moved across the courtyard.
I ducked away and started back down.
That was when the stairway tried to shake me off.