I, too, knew her. For at about this time, as well as continuing to serve as chief clerk in the office of the Count of the Sacred Largesse (the title is more impressive than the office, I assure you), I was raised to the rank of clerk-in-Consistory. This meant that I took records of all the proceedings in the Imperial Council Chamber. After some years of diligent service here, it was not unknown for some of the senior senators, or even the emperor himself, to turn to me on a point of order, or to ask if there was a precedent for such and such an imperial decision or decree. In time, in fact, it began to feel as if I was not so much a mere clerk as a valued counsellor. For this reason I was often despatched to the court of the Western Empire in Ravenna or Mediolanum or Rome, and so had intimate acquaintance with all the operations of the time.
And I, too, fell under the spell of the new, girlish empress. What man could not?
Once, I recall, she encountered me scurrying along a marble corridor of the palace in Constantinople, uncharacteristically late for that morning’s session in Consistory, owing to my having had to spend a longer time than usual at stool. Indeed, I was still writing a hurried mental note to myself to eat more lentils in future, when the empress stopped and smiled at me, and all thought of stools and lentils fled. I slowed my pace, and she asked me in the sweetest, softest voice to come and take a letter for her.
‘Your Sacred Highness,’ I began to babble, ‘I fain would do as you command, but I, I…’
But one fatal glance into those huge dark eyes, and I was lost for ever. Knowing that I would earn a terrible scolding for my absence from Consistory that morning, I nevertheless followed her meekly back to her private chambers to take a letter, imagining the words flowing honeylike from her sweet lips to my pen. My heart pounded within me. The woman was a witch, a spellbinder, of the most enchanting kind. A dream-weaver, weaving dreams from which you never wanted to awaken.
Of course she knew it. Her mouth twitched with amusement at my stammering, hopeless, infatuated obedience to her every whim. She could have ordered me to stand on the high window ledge of the chamber and throw myself to the ground three floors below, and I would have obeyed. But naturally she would not. Proud she may have been; vain of her beauty, certainly – what woman would not be? But cruel? No. In a cruel world, and a cruel and fickle court, Athenais was never cruel. She loved all humanity with a generous, spontaneous outpouring of affection.
She began to speak.
My pen quivered, and I began to write.
When I ran to make my humblest apologies for my absence later that morning to the court chamberlain, a tall, unsmiling eunuch called Nicephorus, he merely waved me away with his long-fingered hand, festooned with signet rings.
‘The empress has already made your pardons for you,’ he said. ‘You were required elsewhere this morning.’
No one else would have troubled thus to save a humble court clerk from a tongue lashing. But that was Athenais: loved as much for her kindness of heart as for her beauty.
They are rare companions in a woman.
I doted on her. Sometimes to the sly ridicule of my fellow scribes and clerks, I adored her.
This then was the palace and its inhabitants on the eve of the arrival of Galla, Aetius and her small retinue, only months after the imperial wedding. It was a moonless night when they arrived at that great fortified compound with its mighty walls of red Egyptian granite, and its interior lavishly decorated with porphyry from Ptolemais in Palestine, Attic marble, rich damask hangings from Damascus, ivory and sandalwood from India, silken brocades and porcelain from China. A dream-palace where even the chamber-pots were made of purest silver.
The fugitives from the West were treated with great kindness upon their arrival – Galla Placidia and Theodosius were, after all, aunt and nephew: she the daughter and he the grandson of Emperor Theodosius the Great. And perhaps the pure Pulcheria admired Galla the more when she found that the reason for her precipitate flight from Italy had been to preserve herself from the unchaste advances of a man.
They were given some of the finest suites in the Imperial Palace, overlooking that bright sunlit sea, so different and so far away from the marshes and the gloom of Ravenna, and they were lavished with gifts of gold, and precious gems, and fine robes. All these things Galla rejoiced in. Aetius was perhaps less impressed, but he said nothing. He had been to Constantinople before. He knew the city of old.
At dusk the following day a firm knock came on my door.
I was engaged in some tedious but necessary work for the Count of the Sacred Largesse – adding up columns of figures, in other words. I couldn’t help wishing there were a symbol… It seems madness to say so, but I couldn’t help wishing there were a symbol for nothing, as well as for all the numerals denoting somethings. A special number signifying no number. Idly I even drew a round ‘O’ in the margin of my paper, to signify emptiness, absence. Surely it would make adding up easier in some ways? But I scribbled it out again. It was a foolish notion, and would only earn me ridicule; and I suffered enough ridicule as it was from my fellow clerks, owing to my great devotion to the Empress.
‘Enter,’ I said, not looking round.
The door opened, and someone stood behind me. Still I did not look, but then the power of his presence was overwhelming, and I glanced back.
It was him. My pupil. My dear, my much-missed, grave-eyed, tall, lean pupil. A general, at twenty-five!
Before I knew what I was doing I had scrambled to my feet and embraced him. It was contrary to all court etiquette, of course, for a mere slave-born pedagogue even to approach a nobleman unbidden, or address words to him first, let alone to embrace him. But Aetius and I had always been more to each other than mere slave-teacher and master-pupil. He embraced me fondly in return, his blue eyes shining with affection, and perhaps amused remembrance of our long hours of learning together which he had so openly detested.
We stood back and regarded each other.
It was good to have him back in the court, for however short a while. His very presence, so still and strong, was a calmative, in a world which seemed increasingly beset by winds of violent change from without, and unhealthy miasmas of weakness and madness from within. News from Ravenna of Emperor Honorius was not good. Aetius stood through it all, this lean, hard young man, steady-eyed, unflinching, like a pillar of granite in a hailstorm.
‘So,’ he said, his hands on my shoulders, looking down at me. ‘You work here in Constantinople now?’
I nodded. ‘After my years of pedagogy had finished, and I had seen my most brilliant though idle pupil off into the wide world – you remember faithfully all your lessons in logic, I trust? And the three categories: demonstrative, persuasive, and sophistic?’
‘Only in your late twenties yourself,’ said Aetius, clapping me on the arm, ‘and talking like an aged pedant already.’
‘Already talking like an aged pedant,’ I corrected him. ‘It is vulgar to end a sentence with an adverb.’
He smiled. ‘What little logic I ever learned is long forgotten. Besides,’ he added, the smile fading, ‘the wide world you saw me off into but rarely conforms to its laws.’
I looked away, out of the window and across the shimmering Golden Horn. Gulls wheeled low in the twilight beyond the bars.
‘After you had gone off to the frontier to learn soldiering, I was despatched from the court of Honorius to come east. It is peaceful here.’ I looked back at him. ‘But what of yourself? I have no other great news, but what of you? What news?’
‘I hear that the emperor has married,’ murmured Aetius. ‘News enough, I would have thought.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘Athenais.’
‘You speak of her as a man speaks of his beloved.’