‘Ssshh!’ I hissed, alarmed. ‘Do not even whisper such things!’
He laughed. I glared. Fine for him to fear nothing, but we slave-born pedagogues have a great deal to fear in an imperial court.
‘So,’ he said, ‘this Athenais – Eudoxia, we should say, I think – she is very beautiful?’
‘Hmph.’ I still glared. ‘You can decide for yourself when you meet her. She returns from the Summer Palace at Hieron in two days’ time.’
‘What other news?’
I shrugged. ‘No other news. You know better than that. Humble scribes such as myself do not have news. Whereas generals…’
‘You wish to hear my news?’
I nodded. ‘Of course.’
He considered, then sighed, pulled over a splintery stool from the shadows and sat down. After long rumination he began. ‘During my last season on the Danube station, at Viminacium-’
‘Wait, wait!’ I cried, hurriedly sharpening my goosequill as best I could.
‘You’re writing all this down?’ he said.
‘Every word,’ I said. ‘For the day when…’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘The Annals of Priscus of Panium?’
I nodded sheepishly. ‘It won’t be Tacitus, I know. But-’
He laid his powerful hand on my arm, and said, ‘Do not be so sure. We live in interesting times.’
Our eyes met. We both understood the bleak irony in his words.
I rested my hands on the brim of my writing lectern, dipped my quill, and waited.
‘Well,’ he began. ‘News from the Danube station.’
It was a daily delight to me to see my dear pupil, Aetius, in his red general’s robes, attending the interminable meetings and sessions of statutes in the imperial Consistory with great forbearance for a man of action such as himself. ‘With attainments beyond his years, and a steadiness of character beyond his attainments’, as St Gregory of Nazianzus said.
He served as dutifully in Consistory as on the battlefield. The frontier was quiet for now; there were no major campaigns to be fought and, besides, the summer campaigning season was almost at an end. So he took his place obediently in the great semicircle of the court, with Theodosius enthroned at the centre, and his senators, counsellors, generals and bishops ranged round the sides. Beyond this heart of the imperial administration, the palace teemed with eunuchs, slaves, ladies’ maids, ridiculous ceremonials, titles, grandiose honours. My own immediate master at this time, the Count of the Sacred Largesse, held one of the simpler offices of state.
Two days after the arrival of the little group from Ravenna, the empress returned from a week beside the cool fountains in the gardens of the Summer Palace at Hieron, which she loved. It stands on a wind-cooled promontory where the straits meet the Euxine Sea, and is especially grateful at the dry, rank end of the season, when even the voices of the cicadas sound hoarse and choke with dust.
And I was there; I, Priscus. I was there, present as a humble and unremarked court scribe, when their haunted, bewildered eyes first met. In the Triclinium of the Nineteen Couches. Aetius and Athenais, both so confident and self-assured beyond their years, though in wholly different ways. There I saw all confidence and self-assurance flee from them.
‘The Princess Galla Placidia, and Master-General Aetius of the Western Legions,’ announced the chamberlain.
They stepped into the room, first Galla, then Aetius. Galla and Theodosius smiled politely at each other, then the emperor stepped forward and they kissed.
Aetius seemed strangely frozen to the spot.
Athenais likewise.
For then she knew what true love was. Her whole being seemed to lurch towards him and she thought with instant desperation: This is the man I love and will always love. Oh, what have I done?
I saw how they avoided each other all that winter. How for them even to see the other was the sweetest, acutest pain imaginable. They barely spoke a word to each other. When a diplomatic mission to the court of the Sassanid kingdom of Persia departed, Aetius went with them, to the surprise of some. He spent the winter out east.
Athenais seemed sometimes strangely distracted for a young bride; and at other times she boasted too loudly and too publicly, to some embarrassment, about the marvellousness of her husband. Women who boast excessively of their husbands are rarely the most faithful. But in her case people put it down to natural warmth and generosity of spirit.
In the spring it was announced that the empress would be going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
‘And,’ Theodosius announced, ‘though the route through our empire is perfectly safe, she will be accompanied by the First Cohort of the Imperial Guard, under the command of General Aetius.’
The emperor had a high regard for the young general, and proudly felt that only the finest military escort would do for his beloved wife.
It was the best and worst thing that could have happened. To spend time together – on the orders of her own husband! It could only add to the pain. And yet perhaps they secretly wanted the pain. Does the human heart want to feel happiness, or does it merely want to feel much, greatly, intensely? No matter what the emotion?
I went with them, and I saw all and wrote nothing. But now in these last days, when only I am left of all that brave and beautiful company… now the truth may be told.
The empress’s party stepped abroad the royal barge, which rode at anchor on a mild sea in the Harbour of Phospherion. They traversed the narrow straits of the Bosphorus, and made landfall upon the Asian shore amid crowds of cheering people waving branches of olive and myrtle. There they dined with the urbane governor of the golden city of Chrysopolis. Some already commented that the empress and the general must despise each other, for they barely looked at each other, let alone exchanged a civil word. When forced to be in close company, at dinner for instance, they kept their eyes and their voices lowered as if in obscure shame.
They processed east and traversed the province of Bithynia to Nicomedia. The empress rode in a fine four-wheeled carriage. Aetius and the guard rode far ahead.
The empress travelled next to Hierapolis, to bathe her lovely limbs in the health-giving hot sulphur springs. From thence she visited the Asian Mount Olympus and its monasteries, and held long and learned talk with the monks there, which left them astonished, humbled, and some of the younger and more hot-blooded, adoring of their new empress to the point of idolatry. She was likewise welcomed and feted in Smyrna, and Sardis, and Ephesus, and all the great cities of the Ionian coast, and south to Pamphylia in the shadow of the Taurus mountains, and so on to Seleucia, and Tarsus, the home of the evangelical tentmaker.
So this ostensible pleasure jaunt fulfilled its secret political purpose of cementing the love of the people, the Church, and the political and senatorial classes across the Levant for the young emperor and his beautiful bride, and making the radiant imperial presence known and respected far beyond the walls of Constantinople.
After several weeks of travelling they came to the teeming city of Antioch, ‘the third city of the empire’, a bewildering hubbub of Cretans, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, Persians, Armenians. It was also called ‘Antioch the Beautiful’; its famed marble streets had been laid down by Herod the Great, and it was the place where the term ‘ christianoi ’, ‘Christians’, was first used. Athenais loved it on sight. She visited the sanctuary of Apollo, where Mark Antony and Cleopatra had been married, now half destroyed by her zealous co-religionists. And she insisted on an afternoon trip out of the heat and dust of the city, and beyond the miles of shanty-towns that stretched over the surrounding hillsides, to see for herself the notorious Grove of Daphne, where hundreds of prostitutes still plied their trade ‘in honour of the goddess’.
At a dinner she gave a magnificent extempore speech upon the glories of Antioch’s magnificent past, and quoted from the Odyssey, ‘??????????????????????????????????????.’