‘I claim proud kinship with your race and blood.’ It always goes down well when a visiting foreign dignitary claims to be of the same descent as his audience.
The next day they rode out of the city southwards, heading for the magnificent temple of Baalbek; but on the empress’s orders they turned east and headed out into the desert, following the crowds who streamed over the hills in their hundreds to visit the product of a religion very different from that which built proud Baalbek: the celebrated ascetic St Simeon Stylites on his pillar, out near Telanessa. There, in the shimmering Syrian desert, Athenais and Aetius and their entourage saw with their own eyes the famous saint, sitting atop his pillar seventy feet into the sky, where he had already sat for ten years, and would sit another twenty yet. The crowds of devotees sat round the foot of the pillar, gazing up in wonder at the saint’s holiness, and collecting the lice that fell from his filthy, emaciated body to the ground. These they tucked away among their own robes as precious relics, calling them ‘the pearls of God’.
Neither Athenais nor Aetius collected any pearls.
In the years to come, many came to imitate Simeon. News spread of his great act of penance, his self-hatred made manifest, his self-abasement raised high, the odour of him spreading out across the valley. As far away as the Ardennes forest in Gaul, a Lombard deacon tried to emulate his example until his rather more pragmatic bishop told him not to be so foolish.
Near Simeon sat another pillar-dweller, Daniel Stylites. Daniel had started on a rather small pillar, but a wealthy benefactor had paid for a magnificent double-column to be erected for him. He had managed to cross to it from his first pillar, by way of a makeshift bridge of planks, so that he never had to sully his feet with the dust of the world. And there he sat, and prayed, and excreted, and praised the Lord.
When they came to the magnificent temple of Baalbek it was evening, and the deserted temple stood proud and pagan in the late rose-light that stretched across the desert. They wondered at the cedar-roofed Portico of Caracalla, the magnificent mosaics in the marble floors, the bas relief of Jupiter Heliopolitan, and above all, at the breathtaking temple of Jupiter, its columns of a size unrivalled anywhere in the world: some eighty feet in height and eighteen feet in girth. They never shall be rivalled, I think, in all the days and works of man. One of the foundation stones of the temple weighed over a thousand tons. Already the knowledge of how to cut and move such titanic blocks is vanishing from the earth. Never shall we see such majesty again.
They saw, too, the temple of Venus, goddess of love and beauty, now a basilica dedicated to St Barbara, virgin and martyr. It was whispered in the neighbouring town that the ancient rites still took place around the temple complex, to the anger of the Christian authorities but with the secret cognisance of more secular powers; and that these silent stones yet witnessed the nature worship of the old gods, ancient even compared to the Olympians who overcame them: Astarte, and Atargatis, and Baal himself, who glared out darkly over his devotees two thousand years before Christ walked on earth.
Eusebius wrote only a century ago that men and women still came here to ‘clasp together’ before the altar in honour of the goddess. Husbands and fathers allowed their wives and daughters to sell themselves publicly to passers-by and worshippers, in honour of their mysterious goddess of love, and some men even took a lewd pleasure in seeing their womenfolk thus made harlots. All night they sang, and drank, and danced, accompanied by the sound of barbarous drums and flutes. Baalbek was never a place with a naturally Christian soul.
It was a place of sacrificial blood as well as sacred love. Can one exist without the other? There was no gentleness in the ancient religion. Blood was riotously shed upon these stones. ‘Anath, the sister of Baal, waded up to her knees, up to her neck in human blood,’ say the ancient texts. ‘Human hands lay at her feet, they flew about her like locusts. She tied human heads around her neck, and hands upon her belt. She washed her hands in the streams of human blood that flowed about her knees…’
At Baalbek, it seems, gods are mortal. They are born, and worshipped; they flourish, and have mighty temples built to them. Later, when men and women cease to believe in them, they wither and die, and a new generation of mortal gods takes their place. In time, too, even Christ will die for ever from the earth.
None of the imperial party spoke their secret thoughts at Baalbek. But they lingered there a long time.
Finally Jerusalem, the Holy City of Zion. This place, too, Athenais greatly loved, and she lingered here for longer that might seem appropriate. For her husband awaited her in Constantinople, and it was high time she was back in his bed. Her highest duty now was to give him sons. An empress had no other reason to live than this.
It was the last night in Jerusalem, before they were due to descend from that holy mountain to the coast, to Caesarea, and take ship for home. The empress was walking on the lonely terrace of the modest palace where they were residing, overlooking the valley of Gehenna, the valley of Sheol, where the ancient Hebrews had tumbled the bodies of their dead into the smoking abyss below and burned them. From beyond the place of Hell came the gentle breezes from the garden of Gethsemane upon the Mount of Olives.
Another figure stepped out from the shadows of the palace onto the terrace to take the night air before retiring. The two of them almost collided. They stepped back and stared with the same wide-eyed astonishment as when they had first set eyes upon each other, three long months before. Their eyes were wide and bright and innocent under the eastern moon. And then like sleepwalkers they moved towards each other again in the soft velvet night. From the olivegroves across the valley came the harsh warning call of a bird, and the moon was golden in the late summer sky over the Valley of Sheol, where the air was hazed with the chaff beaten from the late summer wheat in the surrounding country, and misty with smoke from the chaff heaped up for the burning.
They said nothing. And with consummate awkwardness, like two adolescents-
It is impossible to say who kissed whom. Their lips met. They both fought not to give in to this desire, or rather this need, to touch the other. Both were proud. But both were defeated.
After they had kissed they drew back and looked at each other for a long time. They said nothing. Minutes passed. Neither of them moved. Neither of them could move.
The next day at dawn they left the city for the long journey down to the coast. They rode far apart, heads bowed and silent, like two people recently bereaved.
Galla knew. Galla saw it, with her gimlet eyes, the moment they returned.
Marriage and hardship had perhaps softened Galla’s heart. Motherhood certainly had. She responded to others’ weakness with pity more than with scorn as heretofore. She saw this living agony before her eyes: Athenais and Aetius unwillingly yet so willingly, so longingly, in each other’s company, constrained by the cruelty of circumstance and the stiff rituals and formalities of the court. Her reaction was that of a woman who is herself a little in love with a man who loves another: a sad smile, and silence.
Perhaps also she recognised already that she and Aetius had something in common, that would endure all their lives: they each loved another, and neither of them would ever in this world possess that other.
Between Galla and Athenais, where you might have expected rancour, cattiness, or worse, there was none. Between Pulcheria and Galla, there was as much warmth as that life-sworn virgin, the emperor’s thin-lipped sister could ever muster for a fellow creature of flesh and blood. Pulcheria’s feelings toward Athenais were, inevitably, seething jealousy and resentment, disguised as pious reserve. (Prudes are driven by jealousy, not morality. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, preach.) But as for cool, green-eyed Galla, perhaps she saw that Athenais’ feelings for Aetius mirrored her own. Perhaps she saw also that the poor girl, married so young and with so much love in her to give, to one whom she was fond of but would never come truly to love, would find only unhappiness in her life. Perhaps. Whatever the reason, she never treated the young empress, so different from herself in temperament, with anything but kindness.