SHE IS A skeleton bound in salted hide. Her chest sunken as any man’s who has spent months vomiting up all of his food and most of his water. Her feet enflamed with burst pressure sores, legs spindled as a newborn kid. At each port Christians appear to carry the suffering monk in their carts or sling him gently over mules, beg him to stay in their camp, their home, their guesthouse overnight, to be allowed to wash his putrid feet and spoon broth between his crusted lips before the next terrifying, sick-making stage of the sea journey.
She is not aware she has reached Athens until she hears the man who has placed her corpse-weight onto yet another cart tell the driver his passenger is to be delivered to the monastery at the base of Wolf Mountain. Words Randulf breathed into his sex-drugged lover’s ear in Marseille, repeated by her like a prayer through months of delirium, transubstantiated now into clear direction from Venetian sailor to Hellenic porter.
The cart careens over stones the size of her head, each jolt stunning her bones anew. I will write to him, she thinks. I will give him that much, at least: the knowledge that I live still.
But if he knows he may come. Come and reclaim her and this time, perhaps, she will give in to his want for a wife, her own depraved want of earthly love. Perhaps this time his seed will take root, flourish and all will be lost.
She stares up into the blistering sun until the light obliterates all.
Her vision and wits return slowly. She is seated on a bench of stone. Someone drips water on her lips, holds a cold cloth to her brow. Strong, musky incense fails to disguise the smell of rotting flesh but is welcome anyway. She focuses on the scent, lets it draw her further into this room which is cool and dim, the walls and floors washed with white. Men in blue robes and long beards move so quickly around her she can’t tell if there are three of them or more. They murmur in Greek and click their tongues and pass a vessel, a pot, a box back and forth.
A man the others call Abba kneels in front of her, washes her feet. His beard is the colour of the walls, his face like just-cracked ice, though his hands move with the ease and strength of youth. ‘I will ask our herbalist for a potion for the suppuration,’ he says in Latin. ‘But first these novices will take you to the bathhouse and scrub your travels from your flesh.’
Sharpened in an instant, she sits straighter. Randulf warned her of eastern bathhouses. Not wilfully wanton places like in Rome, but a danger all the same. It is a rare man who can truly keep his eyes down when surrounded by the naked flesh of his brothers.
‘Abba,’ she says, ‘I thank you, but my order demands modesty.’
‘Of course.’ He smiles, a father humouring his foolish child. ‘I will have a sitting bath prepared and ensure you are undisturbed.’
The bathhouse is carved into the base of the mountain. Limestone walls and floor and four wooden tubs, each large enough for several men. The servant who brought her here told her she should make use of them all, which strikes her as decadent until she sees the sweet-smelling water blacken as she sinks into it. She stays awhile in the cooling filth, gathering strength before climbing into the next tub. Only in the final bath does the water stay clear and reveal her body in all its starved and pristine wrongness.
The servant has left her a shift and robe, both of blue linen so soft she might be wearing a cloud. She is escorted to another mountain-carved cell, where a table is laid with olives and figs, dark, gamy meat, white cheese and warm bread. ‘All things are clean to the clean,’ Abba says, urging her to take from every plate.
As she eats—slow and careful, her stomach shrunk to that of a gnat—men dressed in robes like hers (though some soiled enough to appear Benedictine at first sight) join the feast. Most of them speak a Latin so mangled as to be almost another tongue, though a very few have the accent and grammar of Roman scholars. She urges them to speak Greek, and then she is the one with shameful grammar and clumsy pronunciation, but nobody minds. The men want to know every step of her journey, every detail of her life in the distant and strange western empire. It is just as St Paul found eight centuries ago; the men of Athens like nothing more than to hear something new.
She speaks more in these hours than she has in months, and when exhaustion hits she is led across grounds scented by things she has no names for and into another limestone cell with a mattress almost as thick as the one she had as a child.
‘We are not a monastery as you understand it,’ Abba tells her in the morning over more warm bread and olives under a tree outside the hut where she was greeted yesterday. ‘We are a community of monks who value contemplation and service to God above all else. The manner of such contemplation and service will be different for each. After all, God does not ask the fish to fly nor the bird to swim.’
She is welcome to stay in the guest cell, Abba tells her, or to wander their valley and beyond to find a place that sings to her soul. For instance, he says, there is a modest hut on the edge of the valley. Its previous occupant has lately abandoned the community to return to his family, leaving the hut open to any man willing to care for a small clutch of chickens and a family of goats.
So it is that her mornings are spent milking goats and gathering fresh eggs. At first her enfeebled body must rest for hours after each task, but soon she is strong enough to finish it all before the sun is fully overhead and then spend the afternoons perched at a high table by the front windows copying lives of the saints for local scholars who pay handsomely for texts produced in fine Carolingian minuscule.
When the light begins its soft and gradual fall, she puts aside her work and walks across the valley to deliver the day’s bounty to the communal cellar, then continues up the hill until all of Athens is sprawled beneath, the dark gleaming Aegean at its edge. Feels again as she did in the Fulda library, in the room in Marseille, for the first moment on deck of the ship: that God has blessed her truly by placing so much of His glorious creation in her path.
At nightfall she drags her work table outside beside an ancient, fragrant stone pine and loads it with her portion of the blessings of the day: fresh vegetables from the garden, eggs and milk, as well as whatever her new friends bring from their own allocations. In bursts of two or three they come down the hill and across the valley, arguing among themselves or laughing and singing or sometimes all of these at once. One may carry a freshly roasted rabbit, another a fish stew. Sometimes there is bitter wine the colour of stream water, sometimes a sweet rich ruby drink far less strong but so much more palatable that all around the table are equally drunk by the end of the night.
Sometimes she forgets that the table is hers, that she sits at its head, that it is her attention the men compete to attract with their outrageous blasphemies or pious righteousness. Sometimes—warm air on her skin, soft light making spritely shadows, belly and head full to bursting—she suspects she has fallen asleep at her father’s feet. If she stands or speaks the dream will dissolve; she will be scolded and sent to her bed.
When her visitors leave each night and she attempts to sleep she is besieged by thoughts of Randulf, who should be here, living as he yearned to do, as both her husband and her brother. She should write to him. She cannot.
At least, having a hut of her own, she can keep the candle burning all night. She can strip off her shift and bindings and rub oil into the heat rash and welts. She can talk to God without the formalities of public prayer, ask Him to explain the Pantheon, built by pagans for a pagan goddess, now the church of Theotokos, the Mother of God. She has taken to walking there before the morning’s work, and as the sun rises it flits and twirls between the columns, and though she knows it is an illusion, every time she feels sure that the building itself is dancing.
To build temples open to the air as these ancients did seems right, she tells God. To view the sun, the stars while praying, rather than stone. What were you thinking, Lord, she asks, leaning her blissfully bare chest out of the window, in allowing pagan men worshipping false gods to create spaces of pure divinity? I know it is not Satan who gave these men such inspiration. The creation is too pure, too holy. I know these places as Yours. But how did they become so at the minds and hands of men who sacrificed goats and prayed to slabs of marble? Why use the hands of sinners to create monuments to heaven?
Ah, and why allow me, Lord, sin-soaked and false, to enjoy such glory and grace every day?
By winter—which hardly deserves the name here, the days barely cooler and shorter, the nights occasionally cold enough to require a single fine-woven blanket—men of religion and academia are crossing the city to visit the hut of the man known as the Benedictine, the Frank, Brother Ioannes, John the English.
Priests and scholars and scribes from the city monasteries come to interrogate her on the filioque controversy, which has been stewing tepidly for at least five centuries and which, as a good western Christian, she declares not a controversy at all. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son together, she tells and retells the gathered men. That they continue to ask for her opinion means they must doubt their own, she teases. Either that or they enjoy poking their little Frankish bear to make him dance.
March 843. She has been in Athens a little more than a year when news reaches their community that Empress Theodora has restored the icons of Constantinople. The younger men around her table are all delight, full of plans to bring this fresco painter from Rome, this famed illuminator from Naples. The older ones weep and wring their hands as they tell of seeing the Christ child washed over with lime and St Paul smashed to dust. Can you imagine, they implore the younger men, the torment of watching some imperial brute scrape away Mother Mary’s beloved face with a filthy hunk of pumice? Better to wait and see if this edict lasts rather than commission the artists. Better to worship within blank walls than to experience again such mutilation and destruction.
Ten years ago, she thinks and cannot say, a young monk asked for my thoughts about iconoclasm and it was the most extraordinary thing. I could not have conceived this greater marvel, still, that one day I might sit with the men whose case I so earnestly argued at my father’s table. Lord, you have made a wonder of my little life. What astonishments beyond this moment’s imagining do you have in store for me yet?
Word of Brother John’s charisma and hospitality grows. By her third year in Athens it’s not unusual for there to be a dozen men at her table and the same again sprawled on the ground beneath the stone pine. Teachers from the largest junior school in Athens come often to argue with those from the senior school about whose role is more important in shaping the minds and characters of the future leaders of the empire, only to unite, after a certain amount of wine, in railing against those who choose private tutors for their sons. Always, there are at least two or three such tutors at table, and if one of them is George Constantine or all of them are drunk the schoolmasters will finish the night with bloody noses.
As long as he is not provoked by public schoolteachers, George Constantine is a mild, good-humoured man who made his fortune teaching the sons of royalty in Alexandria and Antioch. He speaks of Athens like Hrabanus spoke of heaven; makes it easy to believe he chooses to be in this outpost, teaching the children of merchants by day and drinking with monks and schoolteachers by night. Perhaps. Or perhaps, as the gossip said, he was driven from Antioch in disgrace for laying with his students or their mothers, or both.
The monks say gossip is devil talk and then methodically milk every drop of intrigue and scandal from the city men at table. Hours are spent on the infant emperor Michael and whether it is his mother or the eunuch Theoktistos who wields the power in the imperial palace. More hours still on whose wife turned up to the agora in silks beyond her husband’s means and whose garden this prominent teacher or that pious priest has been secretly tending.
Most of all, the monks of the community gossip about whichever of them is not present: Brother Romanus takes double portions of bread and cheese from the cellar; Brother Nikolas spends so long bathing his skin is permanently shrivelled; on certain nights Brother Damianus leaves his cell stark naked and shouts obscenities at the moon but Abba will not intervene as Damianus’s father donates near half of the community’s funds, without which Abba would not be able to keep three servants as well as a handful of spritely young novices.
What do they say of Brother John when I am absent? she wonders. In her hearing they say he is so clever you would not know he was a Benedictine, so refined in manners you would not believe him a Frank. George Constantine says he knows a dozen families who would pay handsomely to have the English monk tutor their sons. Brother Theodore says the novices speak of almost nothing else than these forbidden-to-them gatherings. At least half of the boys who come to join the community, Theodore says, are driven by the desire to join Brother Ioannes’s table rather than to serve God.
She does not know what they say when she is not present and increasingly she does not care. Each day she copies and translates texts from every corner of the empire, and with no one watching over her shoulder is able to read as slowly as she likes, to make notes and sometimes copies for herself. She walks through the Acropolis at dawn and her thoughts expand to fill the space around her. She climbs to the top of Wolf Mountain at dusk and ideas swoop like eagles. At her table each night she launches them back into the air, testing their hardiness and loftiness both. To a man, her companions take every utterance with equanimity, arguing robustly but never censuring. Her ideas fly and fly. They soar.
Her fourth year in Athens, a typically warm night, a full moon the colour of bone overhead.
A scholar recently returned from Ravenna brings news that Saracen forces have sacked Rome this summer just passed.
‘Whatever for?’ says George Constantine. ‘Surely there is nothing left worth taking in that tired town.’
There is laughter at this, though it is evident that some laugh in agreement while others take it as a joke that a man in Athens—of all sad, depleted outposts!—would disparage Rome in this way.
Some are not laughing at all. A grammarian whose name she forgets, despite him reintroducing himself each time he comes, is outraged. ‘Do you even know what it is you mock?’ He slams his little fists on the table, spilling wine and making George Constantine laugh harder. ‘The resting place of our St Peter—yes, you scandalous atheists: our St Peter—this sacred site pillaged by Saracens. Saracens! The church of St Paul desecrated as well. The crosses torn off the walls and used for the devil only knows what purpose. It is a monstrous attack on every Christian. You should all be ashamed. Ashamed!’
His fists pound again. The wine jug, having been emptied during his rant, rolls about harmlessly.
‘Brother John, do you have nothing to say on this?’ The grammarian is wet-eyed, raw-voiced. ‘Your Benedictine brother sits on the throne of St Peter. This pretender enjoying his worldly riches while the eternal riches of our church are pillaged and destroyed!’
‘I have no great love for Sergius,’ she says. ‘Nevertheless, it is vile to laugh at the desecration of any holy site. Barbaric, in fact, to speak lightly of such an attack. As though a city is a block of stone rather than a community of living beings.’
‘You are quite right, brother,’ one of the loudest laughers says, sombre and contrite. ‘We must pray for the souls of those killed by the invaders.’
‘The Frank calling us barbarians!’ Constantine scoffs, but he is alone in his merriment now. The others have bowed heads, praying—or pretending to, at least.
She too has bowed her head. She thinks: These men turn to me as an authority. Prays: Lord, protect the holy city of Rome and your faithful children living within her walls. Thinks: I should like to see Rome before it is gone forever. Thinks: Look how they all wait to speak, drink, smile, laugh, eat. Look how they all look to me.