Attila: The Gathering of the Storm Page 10

  They were captivated by the story of a crow which recently lived in the marketplace beside the Church of St James the Apostle. Apparently the crow had spoken perfect Latin, to general amazement, and attracted sightseers from far and wide. But it had, alas, been bludgeoned to death by an irate shoe-seller for continually defecating on his stall. The other traders in the marketplace had given the shoe-seller a sound drubbing, and paid for the crow to have a lavish funeral.

  Such is the arrant nonsense that delights the unlettered multitude. They gasped with horror or cackled with loud gusts of halitotic laughter: the urban masses in all their ghastliness.

  In another corner a religious madman stood on an upturned wooden crate, addressing a small but devoted audience. Athenaïs stopped to listen, and learned that this man had had revealed to him the secret Book of Elchasai the Prophet. He had met the Son of God in the desert, who was ninety-six miles high with footprints four miles long, and was accompanied by his Holy Sister of similar dimensions. He recommended the use of dust and toads’ blood to treat skin diseases, and forty days of consecutive baptism to cure consumption.

  Athenaïs thought back to Athens the Beautiful, Pindar’s violet-clouded citadel, and she saw it being eclipsed and replaced by these great, swarming, fanatical cities of the east; the religion of Athens, the religion of reason and public argument, obscured by strange cults and devotions, hidden mysteries; private ecstasies in small, dark chapels filled with incense and gloom.

  She walked on through the neighbouring Forum of Theodosius; by the Amastrium, and the immense Aqueduct of Valens, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. After some time she left the Mese and plunged into the darker alleys of the city, heading north, past a scruffy little colonnade grandly called the Portico of the Lentil Dealers, and then an even scruffier called the Portico of the Scribes and Booksellers. Here they sold salacious tales of the lowest type called novels, that most wretched and plebeian of all literary forms over which no muse presides, and which shall never know respectability. She glanced briefly at their grubby covers, vulgarly bound into pages rather than traditional and elegant scrolls. One grimy, ink-stained and impoverished-looking bookseller tried to sell her The True and Astounding Adventures of the Whore Lubricia, Throughout Every Land and Also in the Underworld, but she looked away and hurried on.

  From thence she made her way down Rim of the Jar Lane, then left into Three Birds Alley, quickly along the Street of Doubtful Fortune and past the drunks and wolf-whistlers at the Sign of the Melancholy Elephant. She declined their offer of a cup of wine and stopped instead to refresh herself briefly at the Fountain of the Four Fishes, wondering as she did so what terrible curses all the little gold curse-plates might bear, nailed face-down to the bottom of the fountain so that only the spirits might read them. There was a lot of graffiti round the side of the fountain, much of it of a lewd nature, but she was unable to prevent herself from reading some of it: ‘Amaryllis is a slut ... Silvius sucks cock ... I had the barmaid at the Melancholy Elephant.’

  She went on eastwards until she came to the Golden Horn, and looked out over the great ships riding at anchor there, the salt-faded reds and blues of their furled sails, the gulls wheeling, the smaller lighters bringing grain and textiles and amphorae to the docks along the shore, and the ever-obscene cries of the dockers as they worked. Then she wound back again westwards, and rested a while, leaning against a wall, slipping one tired and dusty foot from her sandal and rubbing it between her fingers.

  A man rested his hand on her shoulder, leaned close to her ear, and muttered with vinous breath, ‘I’d give you a plump roast quail for it, love, or even a brace of ’em, so I would.’

  She slipped her sandal back on and stood straight, brushing his hand from her shoulder as she would a bluebottle. She looked down and saw a crooked, bleary-eyed, unshaven creature grinning up at her.

  ‘A quail?’ she repeated in bewilderment.

  ‘Or a brace, so I would, now I see you from the front up straight and proud and all lovely like that.’ A runnel of spittle appeared over his stubbly chin. ‘You could be like my fresh young wifey for an hour. Just back in my cookshop over the street.’ He jerked his head and the spittle flew into the air. She pressed herself against the wall. ‘Just in the back there,’ he said; ‘the wife’s down the market.’ His legs appeared to be trembling with expectation, and his voice grew strange in timbre. His hands were agitated beneath his tunic ‘Bend you forwards over me breadoven, so I would, hitch your skirts up, run my hands through your lovely raven hair ...’

  She felt that she was about to be sick.

  Abruptly, the man turned and raised his hands against the attack of a skinny old woman with a stick, who was filling the air with the foulest language imaginable. Athenaïs put her hands over her ears, but still heard both the male and female pudibunda freely adverted to.

  The man swore as foully at the old woman in return, but under the thwacks of her stick he began to retreat, and finally broke and ran back to the greasy darkness of his cookshop over the street.

  The woman set her stick on the ground and leaned over it, bent almost double, gasping for breath after her exertions.

  Athenaïs stared at her uncertainly.

  At last the woman creaked upright again and regarded the girl with her one good eye; the other was milky white.

  ‘Where’s your guardian, girl?’ she demanded crossly. Her voice was hoarse and her breath wheezy. ‘You can’t just wander around round here on your own, you know. About as safe as a lamb in a wood full of wolves you are here.’

  ‘I . . . I’m alone,’ said Athenaïs.

  ‘You’re a young fool,’ said the woman. She fumbled in her ancient woollen wraps and pulled out a breadroll. ‘Yours for a copper.’

  Athenaïs shook her head. ‘I haven’t got any money.’

  The woman looked at her more closely. ‘What’s your story?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Hm. Nice rich husband you had, till he come home late one night and finds you in bed with one his Armenian slaveboys lying between your open thighs, showing his bottom to the moon.’

  ‘Certainly not!’ said Athenaïs indignantly. ‘It’s none of your business, anyway.’

  ‘Hm,’ said the old woman. She tore the breadroll in two and pushed an entire half into her wrinkled mouth, where she began to chew it as best she could with her one remaining incisor. ‘You look wore out,’ she mumbled through the mouthful.

  Athenaïs looked down. ‘A little.’

  The old woman considered, and then thrust the other half of the breadroll into the girls’s hand. ‘Here you are, dearie.’ She cackled. ‘Never thought I’d be the one people’d come to for charity!’

  Athenaïs looked the old woman over, from the filthy woollen cap covering her wispy white hair, down to her cracked and curled-up feet.

  ‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘You have to eat.’

  So Athenaïs took the breadroll and ate it slowly. It tasted surprisingly good.

  ‘The baker down there, he gives me a loaf or so every morning, God bless him.’

  The girl nodded and swallowed. When she had finished she said, ‘Do you live hereabouts?’

  The old woman grinned, showing her single mustard-coloured tooth. She pointed across the street under the arches, where there was a neat little bundle wrapped in a brown woollen blanket. ‘My house,’ she said, beaming.

  Athenaïs smiled. ‘Thank you for the bread.’

  ‘Not at all, dearie.’

  As she walked away the old woman called after her, ‘You want to make for the Metanoia, my girl. The House of Repentance is the only place for you now.’

  She walked in the city all afternoon. She was thirsty, but another from among the nameless poor, a blind and legless beggar who sat beside the Fountain of Saint Irenaeus, lent her his old chipped drinking-pot to drink from.

  Then she went into the dark cavern of the Church of St Stephanos, and saw amid the flickering candlelight the famous icon of
Theotokos Pammakaristos, the All-Joyous Mother of God. She had the distant, serene face of one far removed from the squalor and troubles of the city and the world. The gold, worm-eaten frame from which she looked out was covered in the red lipstick kisses of the city’s whores who came here every day out of love for her. They revered her as their own, talking softly with her as their gentle all-seeing mother in heaven, kneeling for hours in the aromatic dark with their red lips and their bruised eyes, the sweat and odour of their last client still upon them.

  She was sitting outside on the steps of the church, considering the fickleness of fortune and longing for some ripe, juicy grapes, when a gilded carriage, drawn by a single white mule caparisoned in crimson, stopped at the bottom of the steps. The door was opened by one of the six statuesque, fashionably Nubian slaves who accompanied the carriage on foot, dressed in immaculate white tunics, and a great lady of the city stepped out. The kind of lady who keeps numberless ‘whisperers’ in her grand townhouse, which is to say those little naked slaveboys kept by rich ladies for amusement, to bring them almonds and candied fruits and whisper compliments and sweet nothings in their pearl-ringed ears.

  This lady wore a magnificent cloak of midnight-blue silk, stiffly brocaded with pearls and golden thread, illustrating the miraculous life and martyr’s death of one of her favourite saints, Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna. He was shown in three separate embroidered panels, bound to a stake, slain with a sword, and then finally burned. It was a remarkable piece of work. Furthermore this great lady had at home many more such embroidered cloaks, each one carrying illustrations of a different favourite saint and, ideally, martyr. On the whole she preferred her saints to be martyrs as well, because the embroidered illustrations of their deaths in pearls and gold were so much more elaborate and striking. Her favourite of all, perhaps, was her cloak in bright spring green, showing the dramatic martyrdom of dear St Ignatius of Antioch, thrown to the lions in the Colosseum in the reign of Emperor Trajan. She always looked forward to his feast-day, 17 October, when the cloak could correctly be worn without spiritual pride or impropriety. Furthermore, on her fingers she wore an assortment of massive gold rings, set with precious stones or decorated with cloisonné enamel. Within one of them, inside a tiny locket, was curled a single lock of John the Baptist’s flaxen hair.

  She was a very great and holy lady indeed.

  No sooner had she begun to ascend the steps of the church which she herself had so generously endowed, the hem of her cloak raised up from the dusty ground by two of her slaves, when a street-girl stepped in front of her, as bold as you please.

  The great lady arched her delicate pencilled eyebrows.

  Athenaïs held her hand out, and drew breath to speak, but got no further.

  The great lady looked her up and down in one swift movement, and then turned haughtily away.

  Athenaïs stepped in front of her again and looked her straight in the eye.

  The great lady was outraged. ‘Out of my way, you hussy! And how you dare you look at me so!’

  Athenaïs smiled softly. ‘The day will come soon when you will not dare to look at me.’

  The great lady turned to one of her attendants, astonished. ‘Why, the girl’s mad! Or drunk, more probably. Move her out of my way.’

  ‘Remember me,’ said Athenaïs, speaking softly still, even as one of the handsome attendants took her firmly by her arm and pulled her aside. ‘Look me in the face, and remember me.’

  The great lady, despite herself, looked at the impertinent jade, who was pretty in a sluttish, plebeian sort of way, and found to her intense irritation that, even during the most moving and rapturous moments of the ensuing high mass in the Church of St Stephanos, she was still able to picture the girl’s face quite clearly.

  It was growing dark when Athenaïs came back to the great square of the Imperial Palace, and saw the lamps burning in the tall windows, and felt the air growing cool. She wrapped her arms round herself, sat in the corner of an alley and brooded. She could not go begging at that grandiose door. Not yet. Not yet, though this city was a wood full of wolves.

  It was after the great cathedral bells had tolled midnight, and few were left in the streets but whores and thieves and vigiles, the watchmen of the city, who crouched round their braziers, wrapped in their cloaks, with their long, sharpened staves, themselves as wretched and often as drunk as the scoundrels in the streets they were policing. It was not a good place for a solitary girl.

  Finally she asked one of the watchmen about a house called the Metanoia. After an obscene invitation to her, to which she did not deign to reply, he grudgingly pointed the way. She walked for a few minutes and came to the door of a low building beside a chapel in a side street. She knocked timidly on the wooden door. After some time a panel was drawn back and a woman’s face appeared.

  She didn’t need to say a word.

  Almost immediately the door was opened and she stepped inside.

  She spent seven days there. Among the prostitutes of the House of Metanoia, which is to say Repentance, cared for wordlessly and with infinite kindness by the nuns of that place, themselves often high-born daughters of noblemen who would not spare the dowry to find their daughters a husband.

  She ate and slept and chattered among those prostitutes, young and old, haggard, withdrawn or laughing still, despite the foulness and the outrageous injustice of their short lives hitherto. Pocked with sores, scarred with drunken knife-cuts, some still bruised from the last client they had had before they finally revolted and fled to this place for sanctuary. She told a simple story of herself. The other women also told their stories soon enough, unburdening themselves in stumbling sentences, and her eyes grew round with horror.

  She learned a lot in those seven days.

  It was in the twilight of the following Sunday when she presented herself at the great doors of the Imperial Palace again. A beautiful, unknown girl in a plain white stola.

  How many ranks of household servants, eunuchs and chamberlains she had to pass through, saying to each one, ‘The emperor himself is expecting me’; how much scorn, incredulous laughter, impatience, indifference. It was many hours before she was admitted into a vestibule and told to wait.

  Very soon, a man stepped into the room, closed the door behind him and looked across at her. A young man, eager, kindly, with much to learn still.

  He was tongue-tied, so she went to him.

  ‘You knew I would return,’ she said with mock resentfulness. ‘What choice did I have?’

  ‘I,’ he said, ‘I . . .’ Hesitantly he took her hand in his. ‘No, but I hoped you would.’

  The elderly, arthritic but still zealous Bishop Atticus was instructed to teach the young pagan girl the rudiments of Christianity in time for her baptism and subsequent marriage. The bishop was shocked to find that the girl - clever, articulate, and as pretty as one of those she-demons who so tormented St Anthony in the Theban desert - already knew the rudiments of Christianity, and a lot more besides. He was shocked because it was evident that the girl, having previously heard and understood the Gospel preached with perfect clarity and doctrinal orthodoxy, had nevertheless, on consideration, rejected it as untrue. As if still blissfully unaware of her own wretched sinfulness, and her urgent need to be washed clean in the blood of the Lamb who was slain!

  Atticus had been commanded not to pry too closely. So he ran through the essential doctrines of the True Church once more, with brief but ferocious digressions on the ghastly and damnable creeds of the Arians, the Monophysites, the Hieroconodulians and other hell-destined heretics, until he was satisfied that the girl, expressionless and without any obvious spiritual ardour, was able to recount them herself with reasonable fluency.

  She was baptised in the private chapel of the palace, where she was given the new name of Eudoxia: rather more Christian a name than the distinctly pagan Athenaïs. One of the ladies-in-waiting was overheard to say after the baptism that it seemed a shame, as Athenaïs had been such a pretty n
ame. At which the emperor’s grim-faced sister Pulcheria shot the foolish woman such a look as might wither a cedar of Lebanon.

  The woman left the imperial household the following day.

  Eudoxia accepted everything with smiling sweetness and serenity. But in private, it was whispered, the emperor still called her Athenaïs.

  They were married on the seventh day of June, in the Year of Grace 421, in the great rectangular basilica of the Church of Hagia Sophia, by Patriarch Epiphanius.

  They travelled there in a lavishly carved and gilded coach, drawn by four white horses through the streets of Constantinople. Heralds and trumpeters acclaimed the procession, while the people surged through the streets, strewing herbs and flowers in their path, casting wreaths over every statue and garlanding every doorway they passed with myrtle, rosemary, ivy and box, in the ceremony of ‘crowning the town’.