Such is the arrant nonsense that delights the unlettered multitude. They gasped with horror or cackled with loud gusts of halitotic laughter: the urban masses in all their ghastliness.
In another corner a religious madman stood on an upturned wooden crate, addressing a small but devoted audience. Athenais stopped to listen, and learned that this man had had revealed to him the secret Book of Elchasai the Prophet. He had met the Son of God in the desert, who was ninety-six miles high with footprints four miles long, and was accompanied by his Holy Sister of similar dimensions. He recommended the use of dust and toads’ blood to treat skin diseases, and forty days of consecutive baptism to cure consumption.
Athenais thought back to Athens the Beautiful, Pindar’s violet-clouded citadel, and she saw it being eclipsed and replaced by these great, swarming, fanatical cities of the east; the religion of Athens, the religion of reason and public argument, obscured by strange cults and devotions, hidden mysteries; private ecstasies in small, dark chapels filled with incense and gloom.
She walked on through the neighbouring Forum of Theodosius; by the Amastrium, and the immense Aqueduct of Valens, and the Church of the Holy Apostles. After some time she left the Mese and plunged into the darker alleys of the city, heading north, past a scruffy little colonnade grandly called the Portico of the Lentil Dealers, and then an even scruffier called the Portico of the Scribes and Booksellers. Here they sold salacious tales of the lowest type called novels, that most wretched and plebeian of all literary forms over which no muse presides, and which shall never know respectability. She glanced briefly at their grubby covers, vulgarly bound into pages rather than traditional and elegant scrolls. One grimy, ink-stained and impoverished-looking bookseller tried to sell her The True and Astounding Adventures of the Whore Lubricia, Throughout Every Land and Also in the Underworld, but she looked away and hurried on.
From thence she made her way down Rim of the Jar Lane, then left into Three Birds Alley, quickly along the Street of Doubtful Fortune and past the drunks and wolf-whistlers at the Sign of the Melancholy Elephant. She declined their offer of a cup of wine and stopped instead to refresh herself briefly at the Fountain of the Four Fishes, wondering as she did so what terrible curses all the little gold curse-plates might bear, nailed face-down to the bottom of the fountain so that only the spirits might read them. There was a lot of graffiti round the side of the fountain, much of it of a lewd nature, but she was unable to prevent herself from reading some of it: ‘Amaryllis is a slut… Silvius sucks cock… I had the barmaid at the Melancholy Elephant.’
She went on eastwards until she came to the Golden Horn, and looked out over the great ships riding at anchor there, the salt-faded reds and blues of their furled sails, the gulls wheeling, the smaller lighters bringing grain and textiles and amphorae to the docks along the shore, and the ever-obscene cries of the dockers as they worked. Then she wound back again westwards, and rested a while, leaning against a wall, slipping one tired and dusty foot from her sandal and rubbing it between her fingers.
A man rested his hand on her shoulder, leaned close to her ear, and muttered with vinous breath, ‘I’d give you a plump roast quail for it, love, or even a brace of ’em, so I would.’
She slipped her sandal back on and stood straight, brushing his hand from her shoulder as she would a bluebottle. She looked down and saw a crooked, bleary-eyed, unshaven creature grinning up at her.
‘A quail?’ she repeated in bewilderment.
‘Or a brace, so I would, now I see you from the front up straight and proud and all lovely like that.’ A runnel of spittle appeared over his stubbly chin. ‘You could be like my fresh young wifey for an hour. Just back in my cookshop over the street.’ He jerked his head and the spittle flew into the air. She pressed herself against the wall. ‘Just in the back there,’ he said; ‘the wife’s down the market.’ His legs appeared to be trembling with expectation, and his voice grew strange in timbre. His hands were agitated beneath his tunic ‘Bend you forwards over me breadoven, so I would, hitch your skirts up, run my hands through your lovely raven hair…’
She felt that she was about to be sick.
Abruptly, the man turned and raised his hands against the attack of a skinny old woman with a stick, who was filling the air with the foulest language imaginable. Athenais put her hands over her ears, but still heard both the male and female pudibunda freely adverted to.
The man swore as foully at the old woman in return, but under the thwacks of her stick he began to retreat, and finally broke and ran back to the greasy darkness of his cookshop over the street.
The woman set her stick on the ground and leaned over it, bent almost double, gasping for breath after her exertions.
Athenais stared at her uncertainly.
At last the woman creaked upright again and regarded the girl with her one good eye; the other was milky white.
‘Where’s your guardian, girl?’ she demanded crossly. Her voice was hoarse and her breath wheezy. ‘You can’t just wander around round here on your own, you know. About as safe as a lamb in a wood full of wolves you are here.’
‘I… I’m alone,’ said Athenais.
‘You’re a young fool,’ said the woman. She fumbled in her ancient woollen wraps and pulled out a breadroll. ‘Yours for a copper.’
Athenais shook her head. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
The woman looked at her more closely. ‘What’s your story?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘Hm. Nice rich husband you had, till he come home late one night and finds you in bed with one his Armenian slaveboys lying between your open thighs, showing his bottom to the moon.’
‘Certainly not!’ said Athenais indignantly. ‘It’s none of your business, anyway.’
‘Hm,’ said the old woman. She tore the breadroll in two and pushed an entire half into her wrinkled mouth, where she began to chew it as best she could with her one remaining incisor. ‘You look wore out,’ she mumbled through the mouthful.
Athenais looked down. ‘A little.’
The old woman considered, and then thrust the other half of the breadroll into the girls’s hand. ‘Here you are, dearie.’ She cackled. ‘Never thought I’d be the one people’d come to for charity!’
Athenais looked the old woman over, from the filthy woollen cap covering her wispy white hair, down to her cracked and curled-up feet.
‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘You have to eat.’
So Athenais took the breadroll and ate it slowly. It tasted surprisingly good.
‘The baker down there, he gives me a loaf or so every morning, God bless him.’
The girl nodded and swallowed. When she had finished she said, ‘Do you live hereabouts?’
The old woman grinned, showing her single mustard-coloured tooth. She pointed across the street under the arches, where there was a neat little bundle wrapped in a brown woollen blanket. ‘My house,’ she said, beaming.
Athenais smiled. ‘Thank you for the bread.’
‘Not at all, dearie.’
As she walked away the old woman called after her, ‘You want to make for the Metanoia, my girl. The House of Repentance is the only place for you now.’
She walked in the city all afternoon. She was thirsty, but another from among the nameless poor, a blind and legless beggar who sat beside the Fountain of Saint Irenaeus, lent her his old chipped drinking-pot to drink from.
Then she went into the dark cavern of the Church of St Stephanos, and saw amid the flickering candlelight the famous icon of Theotokos Pammakaristos, the All-Joyous Mother of God. She had the distant, serene face of one far removed from the squalor and troubles of the city and the world. The gold, worm-eaten frame from which she looked out was covered in the red lipstick kisses of the city’s whores who came here every day out of love for her. They revered her as their own, talking softly with her as their gentle all-seeing mother in heaven, kneeling for hours in the aromatic dark with their red lips and their bruised eyes, the sweat and odour of their last client still upon them.