Count Belisarius (16 page)

My mistress asked for forgiveness, explaining that she had not been sure whether Theodora wished to see old associates, now that her position had become so exalted.

‘That was unjust of you,' Theodora said, embracing her again. She fingered the cross at my mistress's breast. ‘So you have turned Christian too? I should never have thought it of you – you pagan, you witch!'

My mistress's confidence had returned completely. ‘I learned it from Theodora,' she joked.

Theodora slapped her lightly, and assumed a mock-scowl. My mistress, with no least feeling of anxiety or embarrassment left now, remarked that the children had had nothing to eat since breakfast. Theodora summoned the Major-Domo again and told him to punish the person responsible for starving her guests. She also said that the audience would not be resumed that afternoon, and that the remaining petitioners must return on the next day. Then she took my mistress and her children to her private room, off the banqueting hall, where a wonderful meal was served from gold plate encrusted with amethysts. There followed easy, placid talk of old times. My mistress learned that Indaro had made a good marriage and gone to live at Smyrna, but that Chrysomallo was still here – she would be summoned presently. And what did my mistress say to becoming a Lady of the Bedchamber, with patrician rank, like Chrysomallo, and living at the Palace?

My mistress did not dare to ask Theodora about her relations with
Justinian, but Theodora told her a good deal of her own accord. ‘He is a clever fellow, cowardly, vacillating, manageable. The one difficulty I have with him is that he is religious, guiltily religious, and anxious, above all things, to keep his soul clear of any taint of heresy. He and I have a compact to be known to disagree on theological questions but not to pull in opposite directions. This keeps the general peace and brings intriguers to us from both sides, the Orthodox and the heretic; we pool our information.'

‘And Cappadocian John?' my mistress asked.

‘Our oath still holds.'

‘To reduce him to utter beggary?'

‘Presently, presently. Antonina, my dear friend, you will marry again, of course?'

‘Why not?'

‘I have a husband in mind for you.'

‘O Theodora, a suitable one, I hope?'

‘A man who is altogether too pious and upright, a man who avoids marriage by all manner of excuses – afraid, it seems, of falling into sin by making the wrong choice. I wish to do both him and you a service.'

‘A patrician?'

‘A patrician. Young, handsome, a fine soldier – the finest cavalry-leader we possess.'

My mistress began to laugh. ‘O Theodora, you and I have evidently hit on the same choice for me. But what if Belisarius refuses?'

‘He will not refuse. It will come as an order from me, in the Emperor's name.'

In her joy my mistress remembered her basket. She said: ‘Theodora, this is the luckiest day in my life. Yet I have it in my power to make a present to the Emperor and yourself which, I believe, will repay your kindness to me a hundred times over.'

She took out a spray of mulberry and showed Theodora three caterpillars feeding on it. ‘The secret of silk,' she said.

The Empress looked incredulous. But then my mistress showed her the silk-cocoons in which the caterpillars, when wishing to become moths, are accustomed to wrap themselves; and told the story of how she came by this precious merchandise, as follows.

‘My late husband happened to be a Nestorian in his religious opinions, because he was born at Antioch, where the heresy originated.' – She did not need to explain to Theodora what Nestorianism was, but
to my readers let me explain that it was merely another of those various opinions concerning the nature of the Son, and a logical rather than a mystical creed. The Nestorians hold that the Son had two complete natures, human and divine, and that each was complete, and each therefore personal, personality being an essential part of a complete nature; and that in consequence one could not think of these two natures as united (which was the Orthodox view) but only as conjoined. As for the divine nature of the Son, this was an indwelling of the Father in Him, comparable with the indwelling of the Father in the Saints; though the Saints had it to a far lesser degree. This view was anathematized as lessening the dignity of the Son, and as approaching dangerously near the Plotinian heresy, which brutally denies to the Son any divinity whatsoever.

‘One day two Nestorian monks came secretly to my husband and complained that their monastery in the Lebanon had been closed by order of the Patriarch of Antioch and that they were now cast adrift on the world. They proposed to go to some far-off country – India or Abyssinia or China – and preach the word of God there. But they had no money, and their sandals were already worn out and their robes in rags, and alms scarce. So my husband comforted them and arranged that they should join one of his caravans going to Persia, and gave them money to proceed, if they wished, as far as China, where the mission-field was wide and where a Nestorian community had already settled. So they praised God and thanked him and inquired whether they could do anything for him in return. He replied, half in jest: “Pray for me every morning and evening and, when you return, bring back the secret of silk; for that will earn you religious freedom for the rest of your lives.”

‘These simple men went to China, suffering much by the way, and stayed there for a year, preaching the gospel. They trusted that the gift of tongues would descend upon them as upon the primitive Apostles, so that they could make themselves understood by the natives. But it was not granted; and the Chinese language is most difficult to learn by human means, consisting, as it does, of very few words, which change sense continually according to the accent with which they are spoken. These monks, therefore, could only sigh and frown and point to the sky and speak earnestly in their own Syrian dialect, as they went from village to village. Of the inhabitants some laughed, some pitied, some took them for holy men and gave them alms.

‘One day they passed through an unguarded mulberry plantation and saw women in a shed near by unwinding silk from cocoons and winding it up again in skeins. They stole a cocoon, unravelled it, and found a caterpillar inside, resembling the caterpillars that they had noticed as swarming on the mulberry leaves, and guessed that the cycle must be: grub, caterpillar, cocoon, moth, egg, and grub again. They waited in the neighbourhood until it was the season of moths; then they returned to the plantation and collected what they deduced to be silkworm eggs and hid them in a hollow stalk of bamboo – as the legend is that Prometheus once hid the fire stolen from heaven in a hollow stalk of fennel. Having sealed the stalk tightly with wax, they set out on the long journey homewards, returning by way of Persia. They arrived at Antioch one year and two months after the sealing up of the eggs, but these hatched out after being laid in a warm midden; the grubs fed on mulberry leaves which the monks had ready for them. Some cocoons, see, have already been formed.'

You may imagine with what delight Theodora greeted my mistress's story. The monks had attentively observed the routine of the silk-farming industry, and it was clear that with these small beginnings a silk industry could be started which would eventually make us independent not only of Persia but of China. Factories for weaving and dyeing the raw silks were already established in many of our cities. Theodora promoted the monks to be abbots of Orthodox monasteries, and wrote a letter to the Patriarch of Antioch informing him that they were under her protection. These two monasteries became silk-farms, with forests of young mulberry trees, and the abbots, though not recanting their Nestorian views, were too busily employed to argue fine points of dogma with the monks. The scandals of heresy are the product of idleness.

Soon Justinian made King Kobad a present of a costly silk cloak dyed in Tyrian purple which, he pretended in the accompanying letter, was made by Syrian silkworms; and sent cocoons of silkworms in proof. This was a great vexation to Kobad, who had also recently come to know the secret of silk: it had been communicated to him by one of his vassals who married a Chinese princess – she had concealed a batch of eggs in her turban upon leaving her own country. But he had made no attempt to exploit his knowledge. It was safer to let things continue as before, making his middleman's profits on the sale of silk to the West cover the expense of his own large consumption,
rather than inaugurate a new industry and risk its being observed and copied by ourselves. Now the worst had happened: his monopoly was broken and the higher the price he now asked for silk, the greater would be the encouragement to our Syrian silk-farmers. He therefore informed the Chinese that both Persia and Constantinople knew the secret of silk, and did not wish to pay such high prices abroad for what they could raise cheaply at home. The price fell somewhat, but even now our silk-farms cannot clothe us without help from China and Persia; for the rearing of silkworms is by no means a simple matter. Justinian made the sale and manufacture of silk a State monopoly.

Within two days of her arrival at Court any mistress Antonina was created a patrician, the Illustrious Lady Antonina of the Bedchamber; and was presented to Justinian, who was condescending to her, but pretended not to know her. Meanwhile she had been involved in an alarming adventure. On the evening of the day that she had this audience with Theodora, she left the Palace and went on foot to the nearest point of the Bosphorus where she could hire a boat to row her home past the docks of the Golden Horn. But a burly-looking, black-bearded fellow in a merchant's cap stopped her in the street. He drew her aside and asked whether her name was Antonina; for if so he must have a word with her. ‘I am an official from the Palace,' he said.

My mistress refused to go with him into a nearby house, as he suggested, because the man might be an impostor who intended in reality to carry her and her children off, after stupefying them, and sell them as slaves to some chieftain of Colchis or the Crimea or some other wild region. There was considerable traffic in kidnapped women and children to remote parts of the Black Sea coast. She replied: ‘No, come into this church with me. We can talk privately there.'

He agreed, and they went in. My mistress said: ‘Now show me your warrant. How can I be sure that you are from the Palace?'

He drew out a commission written in purple ink, which is only used by the Emperor. It was to the effect that the loyal and beloved patrician, the Distinguished So-and-So (but he held his finger over the name) was commissioned as a superintendent of secret police in the City of Constantinople by the grace of His Most Sacred Clemency the Emperor Justinian. My mistress read it only in the flickering light of the long, scented candles burning in a draught before the shrine of some martyred monk or other; but it appeared genuine.

‘Well, what do you want of me?' she asked.

‘An account of everything that passed between yourself and the Empress this afternoon.'

She laughed, resolved not to display the least fear. ‘It would surely be better to ask the Empress. I have a wretched memory for royal interviews.'

‘Prison and a little torture would improve it,' he threatened. ‘And there is another more important matter which His Clemency is anxious to learn about, and which you as a former associate of the Empress…'

My mistress interrupted: ‘If the Empress has been gracious enough to recall certain trivial services of mine to her in the years before she was raised to the purple, that is her affair. I have no recollection of them myself.'

He lowered his voice and said: ‘No hedging, I beg of you. Is it a fact that the Empress had an illegitimate son in her theatrical days by a Red Sea merchant who visited frequently at your club-house?'

My mistress raised a cry, and two monks who were hovering in the shadows darted forward. ‘This man is blaspheming the Christ,' she said. ‘He is an idolator, a Manichee, a vile sodomite, and I do not know what else. Protect me from him, you pious monks!'

The Superintendent flourished his commission in their faces. ‘The woman lies,' he said. ‘I am questioning her in the Emperor's name. See, I am a superintendent of police. Go away, holy brothers, and leave me to conduct this inquiry in private. I have soldiers waiting outside.'

My mistress asked the monks: ‘On whom does this church of St Mary Magdalene depend for its endowments? On His Sacred Clemency the Emperor, or on Her Sacred Resplendency the Empress?'

They made a reverence as they acknowledged their indebtedness to Theodora. ‘I am in the service of the Empress,' she warned them. Then she asked the Superintendent, stretching out her forefinger: ‘Do you recognize this ring?' It was a small gold ring with a blue human eye pictured on the enamel, and in the iris of the eye was a tiny golden initial, a capital
Theta
. Theodora had just given it to my mistress, as a token that she was now one of her trusted people.

He attempted to pull it from her finger. My mistress struggled with him and kicked him in the groin and escaped. She ran with her children for sanctuary to the high altar, where he did not dare pursue her. Then she said to the younger of the two monks: ‘Run to the Palace,
brother in Christ, and let the Empress know at once that the woman of the mulberry leaves is in danger here in your church.'

The terrified monk excused himself: ‘I am not permitted to leave this church without the orders of my Superior, and he is attending mass in the Cathedral.'

My mistress asked: ‘Are you more afraid of the Empress or of your Superior? Off now, and the sooner you start, the sooner you will be back.'

He hitched up his gown and ran. Then the Superintendent sullenly left the church, and said: ‘You will fall under His Clemency's grave displeasure.'

My mistress replied: ‘Or perhaps under the pleasure of Her Resplendency.'