I was bored. My only distraction was to walk up and down the ravine or gamble with one of the lodgers who’d brought dice. Even in the years of my greatest isolation I had been able to talk to the servants, watch the city from the roof, and, when the need took me, drift through the night crowds. A week after I arrived at the monastery, I sent to Jerusalem for an actress. She came the next evening and set up outside the guesthouse. I brought my chair out to sit before her, and the other lodgers came out and reclined along the ledge. We watched as she performed the Rape of Lucretia — she played well the shocked virgin, her hand cupping her mouth — then Leda and the Swan. It was during this last, done with an ingeniously stuffed bird and a skillful gyration of her hips, that I noticed Brother Sergios. Since my attempted wanderings into the monastery, he had been ordered to stay outside the guesthouse. Normally he spent his hours in prayer, eyes hooded as he mumbled and rocked. But when I glanced his way, I saw he’d ceased praying and was watching the actress, who at that moment let fly another startled shout of pleasure.
The next day I sent for a flutist and a dancer, and after that, tumblers. I monitored Brother Sergios. Each night he struggled with his prayers, opening one eye, then the other, before giving in to the spectacle. He applauded the flutist and his dancer, gasped at the tumblers’ tricks. The evening after the tumblers, he asked me about Constantinople, and I told him about the races in the Hippodrome and the painted women in the market, about the ships in the harbor from every sea and the warrens of winding streets that seemed to lead to the ends of the earth. The next night I hired another actress, who presented scenes from the life of the empress Theodora, then a conjurer who made cups disappear and told fortunes by burning a plucked hair. Brother Sergios had rushed forward, offering one of his own.
It was the clown who came on the sixth evening that proved to be my masterstroke. He juggled firebrands while repeating rhymes about female genitalia. Brother Sergios’s laughter echoed up and down the ravine. It must have caught the ears of the higoumen, for the next morning, as I was sitting in my corner of the guesthouse during the hot midday hours, reading, I heard again a hush among the other lodgers and the thump of a walking stick on the stone floor.
“Corrupter!” the higoumen shouted as soon as he passed through the hanging carpets. “Violator! Give up your tricks and leave us!”
“I prefer to stay,” I said.
“You are a devil,” he said. “I shall cast you out.”
“I am a guest, and you are sworn to hospitality. Or have you already forgotten the lesson in the Miracle of the Cisterns, Most Holy Father?” In the Miracle of the Cisterns, one of the more widely repeated wonders of Theodosios, the monks had been punished for putting their own needs above those of their guests.
At my mention of the miracle, the higoumen’s face reddened. He raised his stick and held it before him as if he were going to strike me, but a moment later he put it down and burst out with a chain of prayers. Then he turned and left without a further word.
That afternoon, Brother Sergios visited me. He bowed and reported that Theodosios had agreed to receive me, and that he, Brother Sergios, would take me to him at nightfall. I sent away the magician who had just arrived and for the rest of the day hid in my quarters.
I HAD PRACTICED ON THE SHIP, and thoughts of the gelding had weighed ever in the back of my mind, but only now was I confronted with the imminence of my task. Very soon, I would have to cut the flesh of another man, a man I’d not yet even seen. When my father was my age, he led a sortie across the Danube and captured an Avar prince. I wondered what he had thought in the hours before setting out. I tried to prepare myself, to ready my mind, to imagine the emperor’s wrath, the silver thorns in the Chamber of the Golden Meadow that awaited me if I failed. But nothing worked. I could only wait and hope I acted well when the moment came.
Brother Sergios entered my quarters in the first minutes of dusk. All day he had been absent from his watching post — attending, I imagined, to the offices of repentance. He refused to meet my eye, and as he led me up the ravine’s side he kept his silence, so I kept mine. I felt for him, but I had my own concerns.
The moon was still down, but the last streak of red remained glowing in the west. We soon passed into a part of the monastery that Brother Sergios was unfamiliar with. At each fork in the trail he had to stop and consult his memory before choosing the way. Pitch-dark caves echoed with the mumble of prayers, and desert creatures, invisible in the blackness, skittered from our path. After a stiff climb we suddenly topped the ravine, the night sky leaping into place all around us. We only stayed a moment, long enough for Brother Sergios to find a new path, marked by a small stack of pebbles, and lead me back down. A few yards in, we crossed a fissure in the rock by a bridge of dried sticks. The bridge squeaked and shifted beneath our weight, and once we were over, Brother Sergios halted and pointed to a far boulder. Its surface flickered with reflected lamplight, the source deep in an unseen hollow. We had arrived.
I stood for a moment, paralyzed. I was here at last, and had to master several flutters of panic. When I finally turned to Brother Sergios, to ask if it was time, I saw he had gone.
“Come,” a voice said, from the same direction as the light. I stepped forward, toward the boulder and into the hollow, which opened into the wide mouth of a grotto. Inside, a monk my age stood with his hands clasped before him. Beside him sat a man weaving a basket, his body made of lumps, his jaw too large for his face. Next to this man was the lamp, and before him lay a reed mat.
“The mat is for you,” the monk said.
I couldn’t understand. What game was Theodosios playing, having me sit before this unfortunate while he watched? Just as I wondered this, the unfortunate moaned, like a man with an over-thick tongue, and the monk said to me, “I ask your indulgence. I wish to finish the basket. Two of the brothers are taking another load to Jerusalem tomorrow.”
It took a moment, but, with a prickle of surprise somewhere beneath my gut, I understood. The monstrous imbecile was Theodosios. The other monk was translating for him. Briefly, the thought crossed my mind: was my task necessary? But Heraclius had given his command. Besides, they’d made emperors from worse. I sat and watched as Theodosios wove the basket’s rim, twisting and tucking the reed at an expert pace.
He finished the basket, set it aside, then began to moan at me. “I apologize,” the monk translated. “I should have received you the moment you came. It was vanity that made me think I could hide myself from the world while others cannot. For this vanity, for this pride, I allowed one of our brothers, whose soul should be my greatest care, to be corrupted.”
Theodosios looked at me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, so I said, “For my part, I forgive you.”
This seemed to offer him some solace. He smiled crookedly and nodded. He was about to speak again when he stopped and fixed me with a stare. His left eye was not level in his head — it was as if it had been pushed into the raw dough of his face — and it was with this eye that he studied me. He let out a low moan.
“Something troubles you,” the monk translated. “Speak.”
“There’s nothing,” I said.
Another low moan. “I know what it is,” the monk translated. “I can see it in you.”
“I tell you there’s nothing,” I said, but I rose. I had sent a message to my goatherd to have a horse waiting up the ravine. I could be in the crowds of Jerusalem, disappeared, by noon.
Before I could take a step, Theodosios leaned forward and grabbed my ankle and held me fast. He uttered a long chain of hurried moans. “I see your father in the garden. He’s throwing his glass. I see you hiding and weeping and pitying yourself. I see the black knot within you. It was not tied by the devil and it was not tied by God—”