Count Belisarius (8 page)

My master Barak starved me and treated me very cruelly, and
brought me with him to Palestine, where he changed my name to ‘Eugenius' and castrated me. Then with the money that he had earned in Ireland he bribed the Bishops who ruled in the Holy Places to appoint him general overseer of monuments and chief guide to pilgrims. By their leave he greatly enhanced the wonder of the shrines, and grew very rich. It was he who put the two stone water-pots in the marriage-chamber at Cana of Galilee. They were so constructed that if one poured water in at the mouth they discharged wine in return. For there was a partition to each bottle, just below the neck, and water poured through a funnel into one part of the bottle did not mix with the wine already stored in the other. Barak also supplied the Potter's Field, called Aceldama, with the original iron chain from which the Apostle Judas hanged himself; and, because pilgrims in the Church of Constantine at the mount of Golgotha often inquired after the sponge of hyssop from which Jesus was given sour wine to drink during His Crucifixion, Barak rediscovered this sponge – pilgrims could drink water through it if they fee'd the attendant well. In the synagogue at Nazareth he also deposited the identical horn-book from which the infant Jesus had been set to learn His alphabet, and the bench on which He sat with other children. My master Barak used to tell the pilgrims: ‘This bench may be easily moved or lifted by Christians, but no Jew can stir it.' He had a Jew or two always within call to prove the truth of one-half of this assertion; the pilgrims themselves could prove the other half, if they paid for the privilege.

To the Church of the Holy Sepulchre my master Barak had no need to make any pious additions, for the brazen lamp which had once been placed at Jesus's head was already there, burning day and night; and the stone by which the tomb was closed lay there, too, at the entrance. It was as large as a millstone, and encrusted with gold and precious stones. From iron rods on the walls of the shrine hung armlets, bracelets, chains, necklaces, coronets, waist-bands, sword-belts, crowns bequeathed by Emperors, of pure gold and Indian jewels, and a great number of rich head-ornaments bequeathed by Empresses. The whole tomb (which recalled the winning-post at the Hippodrome on New Year's Day hung with prizes for the Inaugural Stakes) was plated with solid silver – walls, floor and roof. An altar stood in front of the tomb, under hanging golden lamps in the form of suns.

Barak visited Constantinople one summer (the pilgrim-seasons being spring and autumn) to sell relics to the monks there. He had
forged a document purporting to be a testimonial from the Patriarch of Alexandria that a certain couch was the identical one on which Jesus had reclined at the Last Supper. He was asking ten thousand gold pieces for it. It happened that the private secretary to the Patriarch had just arrived in the City; hearing of the matter, he denounced the testimonial as a forgery. But my master Barak, not wishing to be scourged and mutilated as the law required, fled away at once, and took ship, and was not seen again in our Eastern part of the Empire for a great many years. Then a warrant was sworn against him by the landlord from whom he had rented a furnished house. This landlord was a Hippodrome charioteer, the father of the girl Antonina. He was owed a considerable sum of money; and the judge allowed him to distrain upon any goods that Barak had left behind. But Barak had succeeded in carrying away all his possessions except myself; for I had been sent by him on a shopping errand and had lost myself in the City streets. When I came home at last, very late, expecting a severe beating, I found my master Barak gone. Thus it was that I passed into the ownership of the charioteer, who handed me over to his wife to help in the kitchen, who later bequeathed me to her daughter Antonina, whom I served faithfully for more than fifty years.

You may perhaps have been puzzled by the term ‘Megaraean Sphinx': that was the name given by some epigrammatist or other to the prostitute of Constantinople. The Sphinx was a devouring monster that kept its secrets to itself, and it was from the Greek city of Megara that Constantinople was first colonized. The story is that the prospective colonists were instructed by an oracle to sail to the north-east until they came to the land opposite to ‘the city of the blind men'; they were to found their own city there, which would become the finest in the world. So they sailed north-east across the Aegean, and up the Hellespont until they reached the Bosphorus, and there they founded their city on the European bank – opposite Hieron, which was already colonized. This was clearly the place intended, for the men of Hieron had built their city on the more unfavourable bank, where currents were troublesome, fish scarce, and the ground unfertile, when they could readily have chosen the other bank with its fine natural harbour, the Golden Horn – so blind they were. Now after all these centuries Hieron is still a small place, but the Megaraean foundation has become a place of a million inhabitants, with magnificent buildings enclosed by a triple wall. It is the city of many names – to the Greeks officially ‘Constantinople', familiarly ‘Byzantium', to literary Italians ‘New Rome', to the Goths and other German barbarians ‘Micklegarth', to the Bulgars ‘Kesarorda', to the Slavs ‘Tsarigrad' – the wonder of the world, which I regard as my home.

My master, the father of the girl Antonina, was as I have said a charioteer of the Green faction at Constantinople. His name was Damocles, and he treated me kindly. He won many races for his Colour before he died, as quite a young man, in circumstances which require that I should tell the story in detail. He was a Thracian from Salonica, the son of a charioteer at the Hippodrome there, where the racing standard is a very high one – though not, I admit, as high as at Constantinople. He was noticed one day by a wealthy supporter of the Greens who had come to Salonica in search of talent; and, in return for a large sum of money paid to the local faction funds, his services
were transferred to the Capital. There he drove the second chariot in important races, his task usually being to make the pace and jostle the two Blue chariots off their course, in order to give the first Green chariot, which had the faster horses, an opportunity for a clean run through. He was very skilful at this business, and sometimes at the last moment won the race with his own chariot by a feint at jostling that allowed him to slip in and thrust ahead himself. He had a great talent for getting the best out of difficult or lazy horses. He was also the cleverest manager of the whip in the whole profession: with it he could unerringly kill a bee in a flower or a wasp on the wall at five yards' range.

This Damocles had a friend, Acacius of Cyprus, to whom he was greatly devoted, and one of his conditions for coming to Constantinople was that Acacius should be given an appointment of sorts at the Hippodrome: enough for a decent living, because he was married and had three little children, all girls. The condition was faithfully observed, Acacius being appointed Assistant Bear Master to the Greens. Later he was given the Chief Bear Mastership, a responsible and lucrative post. Here I must go back in history, to make everything plain.

Now, the year of our Lord 404, exactly a hundred years before the story that I have to tell, was marked by two very inept innovations. In the first place the Sibylline prophetic books, which were consulted by the Senate in all cases of national perplexity and danger and had been kept carefully stored in the Palatine Library at Rome ever since the reign of the Emperor Augustus – these precious and irreplaceable treasures were wantonly burned on religious grounds by an illiterate Christian, a German general in the service of Honorius, Emperor of the West. This stupidity was foretold in the books themselves; for it is said the final set of hexameter verses ran:

When two young fools between them do divide
Our world, the elder (on the younger side)
By banning bloodshed in his Hippodrome
Bloodshed redoubles, while in elder Rome
The younger, yielding to barbarian folk,
Sees his most trusty Council rise in smoke.

Arcadius, the Emperor of the East Romans (‘the younger side'), fulfilled his part of the prophecy in the same year. One day, in the
Hippodrome at Constantinople, a mad monk darted between two armed gladiators just as they had reached the most exciting phase of their combat. He called on them in a loud voice to refrain from murder, in Christ's most holy name. The gladiators were chary of killing the monk, which would have brought them bad luck – gladiators are naturally superstitious. They broke away, and by signs asked the Emperor, who was acting as President, what they were expected to do next. The spectators were affronted by the monk's tasteless interference with their amusement; swarming over the barrier, with lumps of concrete in their hands and bricks torn from the seats, they stoned the monk to death. Arcadius was equally affronted at this usurpation by the audience of his authority as President. He took the very severe step of forbidding all gladiatorial displays for an indefinite period. This decree provoked riotous protests, in punishment of which he dissolved the gladiators' guild altogether and allowed the monk, whose name was Telemachus, to be proclaimed a martyr and honourably enrolled on the diptychs. The consequences were not happy.

In the first place, as the Sibyl seems to have foreseen, the populace, denied its customary pleasure of seeing men kill one another publicly and professionally, sought satisfaction in unofficial sword-fights in the streets and squares between the young coxcombs of the Blue and Green factions. In the second place, the disappearance of the gladiatorial part of the Hippodrome games raised bear-baiting from an inferior position to a very high one. The mastiffs which fought the bears were, I may mention, not jointly owned by the faction, as the bears themselves were, and the horses, but privately trained by wealthy sportsmen. Occasional fights were also staged between lion and tiger (the tiger always won) or wolves and bull (the wolves always won, if in health, by attacking the bull's genitals) or bull and lion (the odds were even, if it was a strong bull) or wild-boar and wild-boar. But bear-baiting provided the most consistently good sport, and was more popular even than the spectacles, still permitted at some hippodromes, in which armed criminals attempted, more or less ineptly, to protect themselves from the attacks of these various wild beasts.

The more devout Christians either left their seats or shut their eyes during such set fights; and by some encyclical letter or other bear-keepers and lion-keepers and chariot-drivers and other Hippodrome entertainers were not allowed to profess Christianity. Or rather, they were forbidden to take part in the Eucharist, since their professions
were supposed to be wicked ones that excited men's minds and drew them away from calm contemplation of the Heavenly City. For this reason the entertainers were naturally hostile to the Christian religion as one that despised their traditional callings, of which they were by no means ashamed. They took pleasure in circulating stories to the discredit of Christianity, especially about the hypocritical behaviour of devout Christians. There was more than one high officer of the Church who used secretly to send a present of money to the Green or Blue Dancing Master, asking him to select a clever woman to enliven a dinner-party; and yet, in the streets, these same men would draw their garments away in horror if they met an actress, as though afraid of pollution.

I was at one with the entertainers in this: my experiences while in the employment of my former master Barak had given me profound suspicions of the Church, suspicions which I still retain. It is something ingrained in me and not to be washed away; just as the colour Green was ingrained in my master Damocles' soul. But I have met some honourable men among the Christians, and therefore cannot in justice write anything against Christianity itself – only against those who have used it to their own ends and made a parade of holiness as a means of self-advancement. At any rate, there was this hostility to the Church among the Hippodrome people (I include in this term the entertainers from the Theatre, which was closely connected with the Hippodrome); and their rooms and offices were a sanctuary for the few priests of the Old Gods who survived, and for Egyptian and Syrian sorcerers and fortune-tellers and Persian mages, who were adepts in the interpretation of dreams. Only the Dancing Masters, who acted as our intermediaries with the faction management and thus with the Court and the Church, were, by custom, Christians; and a sly, unlovable set of men they were, to be sure.

Damocles' friend, the Bear Master Acacius, was killed in the exercise of his duty. The he-bears were excited by the presence of a she-bear in a neighbouring stall. They became refractory. One of them managed to break his chain and then beat in the door of his stall, furious to get at the she-bear. Acacius offered him honeycomb on a stick, and tried to persuade him to return peaceably to his stall. But the bear seemed insulted to be offered one sort of sweetness when he had set his heart on another, and struck petulantly at Acacius, though with no intent to hurt him seriously, and tore his arm. The wound became
poisoned, and Acacius died that same evening, to the great grief of his associates of the Green faction, and especially of my master Damocles; and to the grief, I am told, of the bear, who mourned for him like a human being.

The Assistant Bear Master, Peter, was a sort of cousin to Damocles-most of the Hippodrome people were related by marriage – and it was decided that he should marry Acacius's widow and apply to the faction management to be appointed Bear Master in his place. This was done; and, though the marriage might seem a little lacking in good taste, celebrated so soon after the Bear Master's death, it was necessitated by circumstances. None of the Greens thought any the worse of either of the contracting parties.

But the dead Bear Master's term of office had been so successful – he had improved the defensive powers of the bears by giving them regular exercise and a careful diet, instead of keeping them always locked up in the dark, as the custom had been – that the management had recently voted for his salary to be doubled. It now amounted to 500 gold pieces a year, apart from perquisites. This bounty was justified by the huge increase in the ringside betting on the bear-baiting shows, for three per cent of the winnings went to the faction funds. Five hundred a year was a tempting sum, and the Dancing Master, who was typical of his class, did not wish to give it away for nothing. When Cappadocian John, who happened to be a prominent Green, offered a thousand for it on behalf of a retainer of his, the Dancing Master was not deaf. The matter was easily arranged, Cappadocian John being chairman of the Committee for Appointments. The Dancing Master stated at the meeting that the only other candidate was Peter, the Assistant Bear Master, who not only should be refused the rise in position but did not deserve to keep his present post. He insinuated to the Committee that Peter might have had something to do with the escape of the bear that killed Acacius; and made Peter's haste in marrying his dead master's widow seem indecent.