The Sheen on the Silk (14 page)

“Does Bessarion still have followers alive?” She dragged his attention back to the present issue. “Not just admirers, but people who would continue his cause?”

“Justinian and Antoninus are gone,” he replied with an edge of sadness. “I think the others have drifted back to their own concerns, other loyalties. Bessarion was a dreamer, like Bishop Constantine, imagining Byzantium can be saved by faith rather than diplomacy. We have never relied on great armies or navies. We have always pitted our enemies against each other, and stood apart from their battles ourselves. But that takes skill, willingness to compromise, and above all the nerve to hold on and wait.”

“A rare kind of courage,” she conceded, while thinking of Constantine’s passionate belief in the Virgin’s power to protect them, if they kept the Orthodox faith. Constantine’s way of defending the city was surely what God wanted; the emperor’s was the intellectual way of man trusting to himself and the arm of flesh-or, more accurately, of cunning.

She wondered what Justinian had really believed rather than what it was politic to say.

A servant had come to call them, and she followed Nicephoras into the emperor’s presence.

Michael was still a little feverish, but the rash was definitely improved and no longer spreading. This time, she had brought leaves to make an infusion-a different sort that would reduce fever and pain-and also more ointment of frankincense, mastic, and elder bark, mixed with oil and white of egg.

Two days after that when she came again, the emperor was up and dressed. He had sent for her to thank her for her skill and to pay her handsomely. She did not allow him to see the intensity of her relief.

“Was I poisoned, Anastasius Zarides?” Michael asked, his black eyes searching her face.

She had expected the question. “No, Majesty.”

His arched eyebrows rose even higher. “Then I have sinned, but you did not tell me?”

She had expected that also. “I am not a priest, Majesty.”

He considered a moment. “Nicephoras says you have intelligence, and that you are honest. Is he wrong, then?”

“I hope not.” She made her voice as pious as she could and avoided his eyes.

“Do I sin in seeking union with Rome, and you have not the courage or the faith to tell me?” he persisted.

This question she had not foreseen. There was laughter in his eyes, and impatience. She had only seconds to think. “I believe in medicine, Majesty. I do not know enough about faith. It did not save us in 1204, but I don’t know why not.”

“Perhaps we had not enough?” he suggested, looking her up and down slowly, as if he might read her answer in the way she stood or the hands knotted together in front of her. “Is lack of faith a sin, or is it an affliction?”

“To know whether to have faith or not, one has to understand what it is that God has promised,” she replied, searching her mind frantically. “To have faith that God will give you something merely because you want it is foolish.”

“Will He not protect His true Church, because He wants it?” he responded. “Or does it depend upon us observing every detail, and then standing against Rome?”

He was playing with her. Nothing she said would change his mind, but it might decide her fate. Perhaps he would know if she was lying about her beliefs to please him, and then he would not believe her medical opinions as honest, either.

“I think our blind trust dissolved in blood and ashes seventy years ago,” she said. “Maybe God expects us to find a way to use both our intelligence and our faith this time. We will never all be just, or all be wise. The strong must defend the weak.”

He appeared satisfied and changed the subject.

“So how did you cure me, Anastasius Zarides? I wish to know.”

“With herbs to reduce the fever and the pain, Majesty, ointment to heal the rash, and care to make sure you were not infected by spoiled food, or cloth or oils that were not clean. Your other servants would take care you were not deliberately poisoned. You have tasters. I advised them to be careful of all knives, spoons, and dishes for themselves also.”

“And prayer?”

“Most profoundly, Majesty, but I did not need to tell them that.”

“For my health, and your survival, no doubt.” This time there was quite open laughter in his face.

On the way home, she still wondered if he had been poisoned and if Zoe had had anything to do with it. To be subject to Rome might feel like rape to her. Had she convinced herself that this time blind, passionate faith would save them?

Suddenly Anna was aware of the depth of her own doubt, and perhaps the weight of sin that might have caused it. Were the differences between one church and another of any importance to God, or were they only matters of philosophy, rituals of men adapted to suit one culture or another?

She wished she could have asked Justinian what he believed now, what it was he had learned in Constantinople that he had been willing to fight for to prevent union with Rome and survival against the next crusade.

The loneliness of mind without him was all but crippling.

ANNA HAD BEEN IN THE CITY OVER TWO YEARS. SHE NOW knew exactly what Justinian had been charged with and what the evidence seemed to have been. His trial had been secret and had been held before the emperor himself. Michael was the last resort to justice in all cases, so it was not unusual, particularly since both the victim and one of the accused were of once imperial families.

She had also learned far more about Antoninus, but nothing of it suggested a man prone to violence. On the contrary, he sounded most likable. He was brave and fair as a soldier and reputedly even liked music. People said he and Justinian were good companions, and it was easy to believe it.

Bessarion, on the other hand, was admirable but seemed a solitary man. While gifted with crowds, he was not at ease with his equals and perhaps a bit obsessive in his views.

The more she knew of it, the less sense it made. What possible bond could link Bessarion the religious leader to Antoninus the soldier and good comrade; Justinian the merchant and believer; Zoe the wounded and passionate lover of Byzantium; Helena, her shallow daughter; the lightweight Esaias Glabas, whose name turned up every so often; Eirene Vatatzes, clever but reputedly ugly; and Constantine, the powerful, vulnerable eunuch bishop?

It had to be more than religion. That was shared to a greater or lesser degree by the entire nation.

There was no one she dared speak to about it apart from Leo and Simonis.

Simonis had been there since both Anna and Justinian had studied medicine under their father’s tutelage. She had no children of her own, and when their mother had been ill, as she was increasingly often, it was Simonis who had looked after them.

Then had come Anna’s first practice with real patients, always carefully supervised, every movement watched, every calculation checked, encouraged, or corrected.

That was when it had happened. In her eagerness, Anna had misread a label and prescribed too strong a dosage of opiates for pain. She had left immediately afterward on an errand that took several hours. Her father had been called to a serious accident, and it was Justinian who had discovered the mistake.

He had had sufficient knowledge to realize what had happened and also to understand the treatment. He had prepared it, then raced to the home of the patient, where he had found him already feeling dizzy and lethargic. Justinian had forced the patient to take a strong emetic and then, after he had vomited, a laxative to get rid of the rest of the opiate. He took on himself the blame for the error. To save both his father’s practice and Anna’s future, Justinian had placated the irate and wretched patient by promising to give up all medical studies himself, and the man had accepted and agreed to remain silent as long as Justinian kept his word.

He had kept it. He had turned instead to trade, at which he had proved both gifted and successful. But it was not medicine!

Her brother had never once chided Anna for her error or its cost to him, nor had he spoken of it in front of their father. Justinian had said his decision to leave study and turn to business was simply a personal choice. To his mind, Anna was the better physician. Their mother was bitterly disappointed, but their father had said nothing.

Shame still burned inside Anna like acid. She had begged Justinian to tell the truth and allow her to carry her own guilt, but he had warned her that the patient was sworn to silence only on the conditions now agreed. If she now went to him, it would ruin her career without restoring his, and it might also bring their father down. A second story now would seem devious at best, at worst doubly incompetent. She’d known that was true, and for her father’s sake she had said nothing. She never knew how much he had known or guessed of the truth.

Her mistake had cost Justinian his life in medicine. He had earned the right to ask almost anything of her, yet beyond her marriage to Eustathius-which he had believed at the time to be for her happiness and security-he had sought nothing. Anything she could do now to clear his name and effect his release was little enough, and she had no shadow of hesitation.

ANNA WAS AWARE OF THE DANGERS OF ASKING ABOUT religious contention in a climate already riven with differences and a sense of impending danger. Yet the answer as to who had killed Bessarion was not going to fall into her hands without her actively seeking it.

What did Constantine know? That seemed the best place to begin.

He was in his room by the courtyard with the summer sun bright on the water and the stones beyond the arches, and the shadows cool inside. He looked almost fully recovered from his illness.

“What can I do for you, Anastasius?” he asked.

“I have been thinking how you wear yourself out in helping the poor and those in trouble of heart or conscience…” she began.

He smiled, his shoulders easing as if he had expected something more critical from her.

“My medical practice is sufficiently established to provide for the needs of my household,” she continued. “I would like to offer some of my time to caring for those who cannot pay… with your guidance as to who is the most in need.” She hesitated only a moment. “Perhaps you would like me with you, so I could act both wisely and without delay?”

His eyes widened and his face filled with pleasure. “That is a truly noble desire, and I accept. We will begin straightaway-tomorrow. I was discouraged, uncertain what next to do for the best, but God has answered my prayers in you, Anastasius.”

Surprised and pleased by the vehemence of his response, she found herself smiling. “What ailments will we be most likely to find, so I can bring the best herbs?”

“Hunger and fear,” he replied ruefully. “But we will also find diseases of the lungs and of the stomach, and no doubt of the skin, from poverty, insect infestations, and dirt. Bring what you can.”

“I’ll be here,” she promised.

She went with Constantine at least two days in every week. They traveled the poorer areas down by the docksides, the back streets, narrow and cramped. There were so many sick, especially during the summer heat when there was little rain to clear the gutters and flies swarmed everywhere. It was a difficult course to steer between the spiritual ailments and the bodily ones. It was even more so with Constantine so close and the certainty that all she said to a patient could be repeated back to him.

Often a patient would say to her, “I’ve repented, why aren’t I getting better?”

“You are,” she would reply. “But you must also take the medicine. It will help.” Then she tried to bring back to her memory all the appropriate saints to pray to for the specific illness and realized in doing so that she did not believe it at all. But they did, and that was what mattered. “Pray to St. Anthony the Abbot,” she would add. “And put on the ointment.” Or whatever was right for the problem.

Gradually she let slip from her mind the part Constantine had played in the riots. He loved the people, and he was tireless in ministering to them. He had a purity of thought and a strength of faith that eased away the fear that crippled so many.

Always he comforted them. “God will never abandon you, but you must have faith. Be loyal to the Church. Do the best you can, always.”

She too felt the need for someone who knew more than she did and whose certainty healed her own gnawing doubts. How could she deny it to anyone else?

At the end of one particularly long day, tired and hungry, she was glad to accept the invitation to return to his home and eat with him.

The meal was simple, bread and oil, fish, and a little wine, but with the poverty she had seen in the last weeks, abundance would have been close to obscene.

She sat opposite Constantine at the table in the quiet summer evening. It was late and the torches were all that lit the night, throwing warm, yellow radiance onto the walls, catching the flash of a gold icon. The fish was finished and the plates removed, only bread, oil, and wine were left, along with an elegant ceramic bowl of figs.

She looked across at him. The lines in his smooth face were deep with tiredness, his shoulders slumped under the weight of other people’s pain.

He became aware of her glance and looked up, smiling. “Something troubles you, Anastasius?” he asked.

She ached to tell him and be rid of the burden of guilt that sometimes weighed so heavily that she was not sure she could ever stand upright beneath it. And of course she could say nothing.

He was watching her now, his eyes searching.

“Yes, I am troubled,” she said at last, crumbling bread absentmindedly in her fingers. “But then I imagine many people are. I was called to treat the emperor a short time ago…”

He looked up, startled, and then a darkness came into his face, but he did not interrupt her.

“I could not help becoming more aware of some of his views,” she continued. “Of course, I didn’t discuss such things with him. I think he is committed to union with Rome, whatever the cost, because he believes there will be another invasion if we remain separate.” She gazed at Constantine steadily. “You know better than he does the poverty we have. How much worse will it be if there is another crusade, and it comes through here again?”

His heavy hand on the table clenched until it formed a fist, knuckles white. “Look about you!” he said urgently. “What is beautiful, precious, and honest in our lives? What keeps us from the sins of greed and cruelty, of the violence that despoils what is good? Tell me, Anastasius, what is it?”

“Our knowledge of God,” she said immediately. “Our need for the light we have seen, and can never wholly forget. We have to believe that it exists and that if life is lived well, in the end we can become part of it.”

His body eased, and he let out his breath slowly. “Exactly.” A smile ironed the weariness from his face. “Faith. I tried to tell the emperor that, only two days ago. I said to him that the people of Byzantium will not accept any pollution of who we are, and what we have believed since the first days of Christianity. Accepting Rome tells God that we will sacrifice our beliefs when it is expedient to us.”

He saw the understanding in her face, and perhaps something of the peace that he had brought her. “The emperor agreed with me, of course,” he went on. “He said that Charles of Anjou is planning another crusade even now, and that we have no defense. We will be slaughtered, our city burned, and those of our people who survive will be exiled, perhaps this time forever.”

She stared into his face, his eyes. “God can save us, if it is His will,” she said softly.

“God has always saved His people. But only when we are faithful.” He leaned across the table toward her. “We cannot put our trust in the arm of flesh, deny our loyalties, and then when we are losing, turn back to God and expect Him to rescue us.”

“What should we do?” she asked quickly. She must not let him deviate too far in the conversation. “Bessarion Comnenos was passionately against the union, and for the sanctity of the Church as we know it. I have heard so many people praise him and say what a great man he was. What did he plan?” She tried to make it sound almost casual.

Constantine stiffened. Suddenly the room was so silent, she could hear a servant’s feet on the tiles in the outer corridor. At last he sighed. He looked down at the dishes on the table when he spoke.

“I fear Bessarion was something of a dreamer. His plans may not have been as practical as people thought.”

Anna was startled. Was she at last close to the truth? She kept her expression deliberately innocent. “What did they think?”

“He spoke a great deal about the Holy Virgin protecting us,” Constantine began.

“Oh yes,” she said quickly. “I heard that he told the story many times of the emperor riding out of the city when they were besieged by barbarians long ago. He carried an icon of the Virgin with him, and when the barbarian leader saw it he fell dead on the spot, and all the besiegers fled.”

Constantine smiled.

“Do you think the emperor Michael would do that again?” she asked. “Do you think it would stop the Venetians, or the Latins from invading us from the sea? They may be barbarians of the soul,” she added wryly, “but they are sophisticated in the mind.”

“No,” Constantine said reluctantly.

“I cannot imagine Michael Palaeologus doing that,” she admitted. “And Bessarion was neither emperor nor patriarch.”

Was Bessarion looking to be patriarch? He was not even ordained! Or was he? Was that his secret? She could not let the chance slip away. “If Bessarion was no more than a dreamer, why would anyone bother to kill him?”

This time his answer was instant. “I don’t know.”

She had half expected that, but looking at his smooth face, the anxiety easing away from it now, she did not entirely believe him. There was something he felt unable to tell her, possibly something Justinian had told him in the bonds of the confessional. She tried another approach.

“They tried to kill him several times-before they succeeded,” she said gravely. “Someone must have felt he was a very serious threat to them, or to some principle they valued above even safety, or morality.”

Constantine did not disagree, but neither did he interrupt her.

She leaned a little farther across the table. “No one could care for the Church more than you do. Nor, I believe, could anyone serve it so wholeheartedly and with such honor that all the people of Constantinople must be aware of it. Your courage has never deserted you.”

“Thank you,” he said modestly, but his intense pleasure was almost like a physical warmth radiating from him.

She lowered her voice. “I fear for you. If someone would murder Bessarion, who was so much less effective than you are, might they not attempt to kill you also?”

His head jerked up, eyes wide. “Do you think so? Who would murder a bishop for preaching the word of God?”

She looked down at the table, then up at him again quickly. “If the emperor thought Bessarion was going to make union with Rome more difficult, and so endanger the city, might not he himself have had Bessarion killed?”

Twice Constantine started to speak and then stopped again.

Had he really not thought of it? Or was it that he knew it was not true, because he knew what was? “That is what I was afraid of.” She nodded as if it were confirmed. “Please be very careful. You are our best leader, our only honest hope. What will we do if you are killed? There would be despair, and it might end in the sort of violence that would be not only the ruin of the city, and any chance of unity within ourselves, but think of what it would do to the souls of those involved, who would be so stained by sin. They would die without absolution, because who would there be to offer it to them?”

He was still staring at her, appalled at what she had said.

“I must continue,” he said. His body was shaking, his face suffused with color. “The emperor and all who advise him, the new patriarch, have forgotten the culture we have inherited, the ancient learning that disciplines the mind and the soul. They would sacrifice all of it for physical survival under the dominion of Rome with its superstitions, its gaudy saints, and its easy answers. Their creed is violence and opportunism, the selling of indulgences for more and more money. They are the barbarians of the heart.” He looked at her as if at this moment it were almost a physical need within him that she understand.

It made her uncomfortable, embarrassed by the intimacy of it. She could think of nothing to say that was even remotely adequate.

His voice was thin with pain when he spoke again. “Anastasius, tell me, what use is it to survive if we are no longer ourselves, but something dirtier and infinitely smaller? What is our generation worth if we betray all that our forebears loved and died for?”

“Nothing,” she said simply. “But be careful. Someone murdered Bessarion for leading the cause against Rome, and made it look as if Justinian were to blame. And you say he felt equally strongly.” She leaned forward again. “If that was not the reason, then what was?”

He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “You are right, there is no other.”

“Then please take care,” she said again. “We have powerful enemies.”

“We need powerful people on our side.” He nodded slowly, as if it were she who had pointed it out. “The rich and the noble of the old families, the people others will listen to, before it’s too late.”

Anna felt her stomach tighten and her hands grow slick with the sweat of fear.

“Zoe Chrysaphes could be such a person,” he said thoughtfully. “She has much influence. She is close to the Comneni, as well as to the emperor. She would do things for Byzantium that many others would not.” He nodded his head slightly, the shadow of a smile on his lips. “If I make her see that an act has the Virgin’s blessing, then she will do it. And there is also Theodosia Skleros and all her family. They have great wealth, and they are all devout, she most of all. I have but to preach, and she will obey.” His eyes were bright and he leaned closer toward her. “You are right, Anastasius, there is great hope, if we have the courage and the faith to seize it. Thank you. You give me heart.”

Anna felt the first stab of doubt, fine as a needle. Could holiness use such shadowed means and remain pure? The torches burned in their stands, and there was no wind, no sound outside, but suddenly she was colder.