The corpses looked sightlessly down at me, twisted in their death agonies, blackened by the sun. Some were naked. Others had shreds of clothing that scavengers and the shifting winds hadn’t yet torn away. Here and there, though faded, I could make out the purple border of the senatorial classes.
Martin cleared his throat, directing my attention to the open mouth and outstretched arms of the official.
‘Executed traitors,’ he whispered again with a momentary glance at the gibbets. ‘You should pretend not to notice them.’
As I stepped ashore, the official hurried forward to embrace me.
‘Greetings, Alaric of Britain,’ he called in a voice that might have been a woman’s but for its great power. His flabby, painted jowls shook with the force of his greeting. ‘I bid you welcome after your journey from the Old Rome to the New. Welcome, Alaric, welcome to the City of Caesar!
‘I am Theophanes, and I represent the Master of the Offices himself. In the name of His Glorious Excellency, and in the name of the Great Augustus whose benevolence shines upon us as a second sun, I bid you welcome. Yes, young and most beautiful Alaric, I bid you a fond welcome.’
Theophanes must have seen my furtive look beyond him to the jumble of attendants. He continued:
‘His Excellency the Permanent Legate is sadly indisposed. Rather than send down a subordinate from the Legation, he took up our suggestion of an official greeting. It was no less than we could offer for a scholar of such pre-eminent qualities as yourself.’
He paused and put a slight emphasis on the elaboration of the flattery: ‘A scholar whose qualities are no stranger to the city – though we were unprepared for such personal beauty to be so artlessly combined with youth and learning. Please regard me throughout your stay as entirely at your service.’
His face creased into a smile and he spread his arms as if about to begin a declamation: ‘All that you require for your mission – all that you may desire for your convenience – you will look to me to provide.’
He spoke in good Latin, though with an accent that wasn’t quite Greek. I answered in my best Greek, praising the Emperor for his forethought in all matters and thanking Theophanes for his own eminent goodness of heart.
So there was no mistake. I was indeed the object of this fuss. The Emperor’s most senior Minister had taken an interest. He had sent one of his own most senior officials to greet me.
As we drew back from our second kiss and were about to begin a new round of mutual flattery, the breeze shifted. The perfume that hung like a suffocating fog round Theophanes gave way to a smell of death from the gibbets above our heads. I resisted the urge to gag at the sudden stench and controlled my features. In a moment, the breeze shifted again and the smell of ropes and tarpaulins filled the air.
We moved towards the litters placed for our service, and the armed men lined up into a guard of honour. Behind me, I could hear Martin giving subdued but curt orders for the unloading of our luggage. The customs officials who’d been hovering behind Theophanes and his entourage had given up hope of inspecting this and were dispersing.
That ship had been our home for what seemed an age. I never looked back to it.
2
Oh, but this will never do! The ancient poets may have opened in the middle of things, working backwards and forwards as they felt inspired. You can do that when writing a diary. I seem, however, to have begun a regular chapter in the history of my life. One day soon, when I’m gone to a place condemnation cannot reach, I like to think Bede will take this up and further practise his Greek. I’ll need to do a great deal better than I have to explain myself.
Let us, then, leave things as they were on the Senatorial Dock – no one left frozen there is likely, I think, to complain – and go back to the real beginning of the story.
That was a month earlier in Rome, where I’d now been living for a year, and life was sweet. It was the morning after the Feast of Saint Rubellus, and the bodies of some of those who hadn’t recovered from their stupor had not yet been taken away by their next of kin. Fortunately, the Lombards were on the prowl again, and there were fewer pilgrims than usual. I was making my way down to the financial markets. The fortune I was hoping to make on some Cornish tin had taken an interesting turn, and I needed a meeting with my associates. I was so busy keeping my new shoes from getting blood on them that the monk’s greeting took me by surprise.
‘His Excellency the Dispensator would be glad of the citizen Alaric’s company,’ he said, looking down at me. If he was trying for a grand effect, it didn’t work. As he spoke, the heap of rubble on which he was standing gave way, and his last word ended in a squawk as he landed at my feet.
I could have laughed – especially at the dull sound of the corpse that broke his fall – but didn’t. As you might imagine from his name, the Dispensator’s job was to oversee the Papal charity that bound people materially to the Church. In fact, he had for some time been doing rather more than this. Now he was sinking deeper into his illness, poor old Pope Boniface signed whatever the Dispensator put before him, and did whatever he was advised. The Dispensator ran the Church. The Church ran Rome. If he wanted me now, my time was his.
So, having sent my slave on to the financial district with my excuses, I found myself for the first time since Christmas in the Lateran Palace.
‘I can find my own way in, many thanks,’ I said to the monk. He was plainly glad of the chance to go and get cleaned up before anyone saw him.
I turned left out of the lush beauty of the main hall and made as if for the Papal apartments. Then I took another left turn down an unlit corridor and found myself in the decidedly unlush waiting room outside the Dispensator’s office. I nodded to the clerical monk who kept order and walked past the various supplicants who waited there in silence.
After a while of sitting alone in the office, I heard the door open behind me from an inner room. With a rustle of linen and his usual dry cough, the Dispensator was with me.
‘Do feel free to remain seated,’ he said in a tone that barely hinted at my impertinence. I twisted round and smiled at him. Paying no attention to this, he paused before one of the overstuffed filing racks that had lately taken up what little room was left in the office. He raised his hand to a sheaf of documents but thought better of taking anything out. He sat himself on his side of the desk and looked intently at his manicured nails.
‘I must thank you, Alaric,’ he began, ‘for having come so promptly. I appreciate that you have much else to occupy you at the moment. But it is on a matter of the highest importance that I have called you here.’
He fell silent as another clerical monk shuffled into the room with more papers. He picked up one of the larger sheets of papyrus and read its contents with slow deliberation. At last, he signed it and rolled it up and sealed it.
‘Get this to a courier at once,’ he said. ‘I want it on the first packet out of Ostia. Do not send it overland via Ravenna,’ he added, a finger raised for emphasis.
The clerk bowed silently and left the room.
While he was reading, I had a good look at the Dispensator. He was even thinner than at our last meeting. The weatherbeaten look his face had taken on gave him still more the appearance of a dried stick. But he was wearing a very nice robe, of a cut I hadn’t seen before. For a moment I thought of asking for the name of his tailor, but decided not to push my welcome.
As the door closed and we were alone again, he continued. ‘You may be aware that it is now twenty years since the Spanish King abandoned the damnable heresy of Arianism that his barbarian ancestors introduced into the country. He and his successors have been ever since firm in the true Orthodox Faith of Nicaea.’
I was vaguely aware of the fact. But whether Christ was One
with the Father
or merely
of the Father
had never much troubled me. Nor was I much concerned what view any of the barbarians who’d planted themselves in the old Western Provinces took of the matter. When both parties to an argument scream incomprehensible formulae at each other, and threaten any observers with hellfire unless they fully agree with one against the other, the time is for men of sense to make their excuses.
But I knew it was the Dispensator’s duty to stand up for Nicaea. For all that it had started as an argument among Greeks, the Roman Church had for centuries been defending the Creed of Nicaea against anyone who presumed to doubt it. This had raised troubles in the West where most barbarians had – accidentally – converted to the wrong side. More importantly, the further argument over the Single or Double Nature of Christ had turned the Greek and other Eastern Churches upside down, and kept them from uniting against Rome. So I nodded and tried to look interested.
‘You will be aware then’, he continued, ‘that an insignificant but vocal minority in Spain have persisted in the darkness of heresy. The secular authorities have exhausted all the loving care at their disposal to win them over. Here in Rome, therefore, we have arranged one last meeting between the Orthodox and the spokesmen of heresy. These latter are to attend under a flag of truce. They may yet be brought over without need of a truly disruptive severity.’
‘And you want me to go to Spain’, I broke in, ‘to complete the work you began there of dishing out bribes to, or gathering dirt on, the Arian bishops?’
I thought this an inspired stab. A Spanish trip would have fitted my Cornish plans, and a mission for the Church would have been a fine cover. Mainly, though, I just wanted for once to break through that smooth, bureaucratic exterior.
No such luck. The Dispensator gave me a withering look and went on with his exposition.
‘Our problem’, he said, ‘is that one of the leaders of the Arian party – I do not, by the way, think “Bishop” an appropriate title for a heretic – is a person of some pretence to learning. He has raised questions regarding the procedural regularity of the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, and of the authorised Latin translation of their Acts. In particular, he notes that the Holy Ghost is said in the Creed to proceed only from the Father and not from the Father and Son. Making use of this alleged ambiguity, he denies that the Creed truly expresses what we have always taken it to mean.
‘These questions must have been raised at least once in the past three centuries, and doubtless fully answered. Sadly, neither we nor the Spanish Church have been able to find any discussion useful to our purposes.’
That must have been embarrassing, I thought. Forget theology – this was politics. If you’re English, you’ll be used to the fact that our churchmen look directly to Rome. Our secular authorities aren’t up to much at the best of times, and only get attention out of politeness or when something is wanted. It was different back then in the French and Spanish Churches. Of course, they accepted the spiritual primacy of Rome but they looked to their local kings much as they had to the Emperor when there was still one in the West.
This annoyed Rome like nothing else. Its ambition was to be
Omnium Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput
– the Mother and Head of all the Churches of the world. From the Pope down, the words hung on every pair of lips in the Lateran.
Now it was faced with an admission that it couldn’t flatten some heretical Goth on the meaning of the Creed. Yes, most embarrassing.
But the Dispensator hadn’t paused to give me time for a gloat. He put down the lead seal he’d been toying with and looked straight at me.
‘I therefore need someone competent in theology and in Greek’, he said, ‘to travel to Constantinople to consult the libraries and the religious scholars of that city.’
Well, you could have buggered me with a bargepole and I’d not have noticed. I think my mouth fell open. I sat for a while looking at him and trying to gather some reply.
‘According to what I’ve picked up on the Exchange,’ I said at last, ‘the Danube frontier has collapsed and Slavs are pouring into the Balkans. The Persians have invaded Mesopotamia and may already be in Syria. The Exarch of Africa is in revolt against the Emperor, and his people have taken Egypt. These are all converging on Constantinople and it’s an open bet who will get there first. Whoever does get there will find an emperor who is incompetent for every purpose but murdering anyone who might have some ready cash to steal, or who may have given one of his statues a funny look.
‘I’ll not deny, My Lord Dispensator, you have some right to my services. But you’ll need to try a lot harder to get me into that shambles. The two of us may have agreed that certain events here and outside Ravenna never took place last year. I hardly think Emperor Phocas considers himself bound by our agreement.’