Eventually her argument was finished, and she stood silently awaiting judgement.
If the court found against her, she would be turned out onto the streets without a penny. A beautiful girl like that – it was clear how she would have to make her way in the world. Some of the greybeards on their benches even began to delve surreptitiously beneath their robes and into their purses, to see how many solidi they had on them. Why, they could hurry after her and make her a kindly offer even on the steps of the court…
At last, after muffled discussion with his private circle of jurisconsults, Theodosius rose to give his verdict.
He cleared his throat and looked steadily down at the girl. ‘I find the will of Leontius just,’ he said.
Those there commented that, even as he spoke the words, he seemed to grow in stature and gravity. It was as if in those few short minutes in court, in the presence of Athenais, he had suddenly grown up into a man of strength and character. Which was true: he had grown up, because for the first time in his life he had fallen in love.
‘Leontius, your wise and far-sighted father, was correct,’ went on the emperor. ‘You have no need of any legacy. You will prosper quite well on your own.’
Athenais’ eyes flamed with dark anger but she said nothing.
‘You will depart from our court as penniless as you arrived,’ said Theodosius, seeming to add more cruelty to the verdict. His courtiers heard his words and looked to the girl. Her expression was a powerful mix of resolution and despair.
Unspeaking, she turned to go.
‘However,’ Theodosius called after her, and his voice was gentler now, ‘if you will consent to be my wife, you will find your present poverty of less concern.’
She halted, her back turned to the emperor against all etiquette, her head still bowed.
The silence in the court could have been snapped in two.
Then she turned to face him.
Any other girl in her situation would have consented immediately, would have fallen at the emperor’s feet and wept with humble gratitude. But Athenais was not any other girl.
She looked the young emperor in the face, once again breaching all rules of court etiquette. She saw before her, for the first time, not an abstract symbol of power and majesty, more gilded icon than man of flesh and blood, robed in the legendary Tyrian purple and the dazzling gold of a living god. She saw a young, fresh-faced, rather lanky boy, with gentle features and myopic eyes, but eyes nevertheless full of intelligence, humour and longing. Perhaps she also saw in him some of the melancholy and loneliness that always accompany emperors and kings.
She thought in a flash that this was a man she could grow to love.
‘I’ll consider it,’ she said.
And without another word, or a single copper coin in her purse, she turned and swept out of the court.
She wandered the streets of Constantinople as if in a dream.
All this… all this could be hers… Empress of half the Roman World. What power and wealth she would have. What good she could do. But she would have to forswear all pagan philosophy, a thousand years of the finest thought and striving of the Greeks, and submit to being baptised into that Asiatic mystery religion of miracles and blood and human sacrifice which the rulers of the empire now professed.
What would her father say? Her father had been wiser, perhaps, than even he knew.
She stood at the heart of the city, that crowded square of the Augusteion bounded by those four monumental buildings which seemed to represent the soul of humanity in all its nobility and squalor: from the most lofty, spiritual and orderly, to the darkest and most chthonic forces in the hearts of men. Along one side, the great complex of the Mega Palation, the Imperial Palace and its courts, which she had just left. Along another, the grave Senate House. Along the third, the fine old Church of Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom. And along the fourth, the Hippodrome, the arena for the chariot races between those bitter rivals, the Blues and the Greens. Almost daily the poor of the city crowded inside to watch their teams gallop furiously amid the dust and sometimes the carnage of snapped axletrees and flying chariots, broken men and screaming horses; or erupted into scuffles and fights after the contest was won, cornering some poor isolated supporter from the opposite team in a dank, shadowy alley and slicing off an admonitory ear, a nose, a finger…
She looked up at the four great buildings and they seemed to revolve around her. Then she shook herself and left the square and began to wander westwards up the Mese, which runs like a gleaming marble artery through the city, and is one of the wonders of the world. She passed through the marvellous marble-paved oval Forum of Constantine, with its towering hundred-foot column of porphyry in the centre, transported by ship from Egypt, from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. (Oh, I can see it all now before me, as real and sunlit as ever: I, Priscus, knew it well; and never, never, never will I set eyes upon that beloved city again.) The plinth on which the column stood contained the hatchet with which Noah built the Ark, the baskets and the remains of the loaves with which Christ had fed the multitude; and, out of respect for the more ancient ways, the figure of Athene brought from Troy to the Old Rome by Aeneas himself. On the summit of the column, far away in the upper air where only birds and angels flew, gazing out over the rooftops of the city, stood another figure. The body was that of Apollo, carved by Phidias, but the head, surrounded by a halo representing the rays of the sun, was that of Emperor Constantine himself, Ruler of all the Earth under Heaven.
Here half the citizenry of the city was gathered, so it seemed. A vast, milling throng of whores and hucksters, fishwives, fig-sellers, knife-grinders, songbird-vendors, pickpockets, con men and worse. The gangs of child pickpockets were the worst, all bright, gleaming eyes and deft little fingers, like felonious dormice looking to store away a secret hoard against the winter to come.
In one corner a coarse-voiced man was reading aloud to an entranced crowd of illiterate listeners from that scandalous daily news-sheet, The Acts of the Roman People. They cheered raucously when he announced that today was the birthday of one of the minor members of the imperial family, and they listened agog as he read from the list headed ‘Crimes, Punishments, Weddings, Divorces, Deaths, Portents and Abominations’. They were moved to tears at news of the recent death of the Blessed St Thecla, over in Asia, in the wilderness beyond Nicopolis. She had been thrown to savage beasts by a wicked and idolatrous emperor back in the time of the persecutions, but her virginal followers had cast flowers into the arena to calm them. Then she was thrown into a lake of savage seals, but they had all been killed by miraculous lightning. She had baptised herself in a ditch, and later lived for over a hundred and fifty years in a cave, eating nothing but juniper berries. Many sick, lame and blind had come to her there, and she had healed them all. Now she had passed away into a better world. The crowd crossed themselves reverently and prayed that St Thecla would remember them in heaven.
They were captivated by the story of a crow which recently lived in the marketplace beside the Church of St James the Apostle. Apparently the crow had spoken perfect Latin, to general amazement, and attracted sightseers from far and wide. But it had, alas, been bludgeoned to death by an irate shoe-seller for continually defecating on his stall. The other traders in the marketplace had given the shoe-seller a sound drubbing, and paid for the crow to have a lavish funeral.