But the abbot did not need to know that.
“We are grateful for your quick thought in saving him,” he said gravely. “Perhaps you will tell Zoe Chrysaphes that?”
“I will convey whatever message you wish,” she replied.
“Thank you,” the abbot said gravely. “One of the brothers told me you are from Nicea. Is that correct?”
“Yes. I grew up a little distance from here.”
He smiled, a slight, sad gesture, but it reached his eyes with a startling tenderness. “One of our brethren does not ever leave here. There was a man who visited him, but he has not been lately. I think it would be a great kindness if you would spend an hour with Brother John.” He barely made it a question.
Anna did not hesitate. “Of course. It would be my pleasure.”
“Thank you,” the abbot said again. “I shall take you.” And without hesitation he led her out of the room, along a narrow, slightly echoing passage and through a huge carved door studded with brass, then up a steep and winding stairway. He stopped on a small landing at the top, high over the rest of the vast building. He knocked at the only door, and at the word of command, he opened it and went in ahead of Anna, holding it for her to follow.
“Brother John,” he said quietly, “Brother Cyril has been ill and a physician has come from Constantinople to help him. He has done well, and will shortly leave, but he is from Nicea, and I thought you might like to speak with him for a while first. His name is Anastasius. He reminds me somewhat of the man who used to come to see you three or four years ago.”
Anna looked at the young man who rose slowly from the hard wooden chair and thought how odd it was for the abbot to describe her when she was only a step behind him. Then she saw the man’s face, thin and worn with pain and yet startlingly gentle. He was no more than in his twenties, but the thing that made her heart beat wildly so the blood thundered in her head and her mouth went dry was that he had no eyes. The ugly sockets were sunken, giving his face a hollow, mutilated look. With a shock like fire, she knew who he was-this was John Lascaris, whose eyes had been put out by Michael Palaeologus so he could not succeed to the throne. No wonder she reminded the abbot of the man who had come to see him-it could only be Justinian.
She choked on her own breath as it caught in her throat. “Brother John…,” she began. How desperately she wanted to tell him that she too was a Lascaris, Zarides was merely her married name, but of course that was impossible.
He nodded slowly, an instant of surprise in his expression because the abbot had not told him she was a eunuch, and her voice betrayed her. “Come in,” he invited. “Please sit down. I believe there is another chair.”
“Yes, thank you,” she accepted. This man was not only the rightful emperor, he was now held by many to be a saint, a man of holiness so close to God as to be capable of calling upon Him for miracles. But it was Justinian’s time with him that filled her mind.
“The Father Abbot told me that you had a friend who came to visit you some years ago, a man from Nicea…,” she began.
John’s face lit with pleasure. “Ah, yes. What a fire there was in him to learn. He was truly seeking God.”
“He sounds like a fine person,” she said carefully. “Would that more of us were seeking, rather than assuming we already know.”
He smiled, a sudden, radiant warmth in his sightless face. “You sound like him,” he said simply. “But perhaps a little wiser. You already begin to know how vast is our capacity yet to learn, and what we do not know is without end.”
“Is that heaven?” she asked impulsively. “Is it heaven to learn endlessly, and to love?” she explained herself. “Is that what he was looking for?”
“You care about him,” he said gently. It was not entirely a question, more a realization. “A friend? A kinsman? He did not have a brother, he said so, but a sister. He said she was a physician, a very gifted one.”
She was glad he could not see her sudden tears.
Justinian had spoken of her, even here with John Lascaris. She swallowed the tightness in her throat. “A kinsman,” she replied, needing to tell him as much truth as she could and claim the tie that was so close inside her. “But distant.”
“He was a Lascaris,” he said softly, rolling the name in his mouth as if the sound of it were sweet. “He doesn’t come anymore. I fear he was involved in something dangerous. He spoke of Michael Palaeologus, and a union with Rome, and how he wanted to save the city without either the bloodshed of war or the corruption of betrayal, but it would be almost infinitely difficult.” John Lascaris frowned, the lines puckering his forehead and deepening the other lines of pain in his face. “Something happened to him, didn’t it?”
There was no possibility of lying. “Yes, but I don’t know what it truly was. I am trying to find out. Bessarion Comnenos was murdered, and Justinian was implicated in helping the man who did it. He is in exile in Judea.”
John let out his breath in a sigh. It carried sorrow and infinite weariness. “I’m sorry. If he could have anything to do with that, then he did not find what he was seeking. I sensed that the last time he was here. He was different. It was in his voice. A disillusion.”
“Disillusion?” she asked, leaning closer to him. “With the Church… or something else?”
“My dear friend,” John said, shaking his head a fraction from side to side. “Justinian was looking for answers to questions of purpose and loneliness. He wanted reasons that made sense to our incomplete grasp. He would have been a better emperor himself than Bessarion Comnenos, and I think he knew that. But the throne would not have made him a better man. I’m not sure if he understood that also.”
Emperor! Justinian? He must have misunderstood. “But he loved the Church,” she insisted. “He would have fought for it!”
“Oh yes,” he agreed. “He hungered to belong to it, to preserve its place, its rituals, its beauty, and above all its identity.”
A new idea flared up in her mind. “Enough to die for it?”
“I cannot answer that,” John replied. “No man knows what he will die for until the moment comes. Do you know what you would die for, Anastasius?”
She was taken aback. She had no answer.
He smiled. “What do you want of God? And what do you believe He wants of you? I asked Justinian that, and he did not answer me. I think he did not yet know what he believed.”
“You said he loved the Church,” she said softly. “Why the Orthodox, and not the Roman? They have beauty, too, and faith, and ritual. What did he believe in that he was willing to pay so much to keep it?”
“We love a familiar path,” John said simply. “None of us like to be told what to think, what to do, by a stranger imposing his will from another land in another tongue.”
“Is that all?”
“It is a great deal,” he said with a small, weary smile. “There are not many certainties in life, not much that does not change, wither, deceive, or disappoint at some time or other. The sanctities of the Church are the only things I know of. Are not these things worth living or dying for?”
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Did he find that… at least that hope?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, his voice sad and very lonely. “But I miss him.” He looked tired, the strength gone from his voice, the sunken eye sockets more deeply shadowed.