by Albert Noyer
“Dead? Then,” he said casually, “she is with whatever god she believed in…if any other than Priapus.” Papnouthios snatched up the record of when food had entered into the woman’s stomach. “Excellent, I can determine when digestion ceased. Dissection will show whether the nutrient, as Galen thought, was returned to the stomach by the liver and spleen.”
Getorius turned away and went into the hall, sickened at both the experiments and the Egyptian’s callous attitude toward the murder of fellow humans. Perhaps Arcadia was right to protest my involvement.
* * *
Holding a silver wine goblet, Dorothea entered the dining room, trailed by Miu and a girl slave who brought a plate of dates, cheese, and bread. After Abinnaeus’s wife sat opposite Arcadia, the kitten jumped onto her lap to place its front paws on the edge of the table.
“You slept well, medica?” Dorothea asked, selecting a fig from the plate the slave set down.
“Domina, I’m still in training with my husband. Please call me Arcadia?”
“Very well…Arcadia.”
“Sleep? I was worried about the Augusta’s missing instructions and feeling unwell.” She waited a moment before asking, “Will your husband take breakfast?”
“The Prefect is preoccupied with our winter move.” Dorothea paused before confiding, “If I were driver of the mule, as the saying is, I would go straight to Hormos, stay there, and never return to Pelusium again!”
“You don’t care to live here?” After the woman merely shrugged as an answer, Arcadia asked, “Is your husband content to be at this posting?”
“It is his duty.” Dorothea pinched off a bit of white cheese and watched Miu sniff, then lick at it. “A hundred years ago his great-grandfather, Flavius, commanded a fortress guarding the Moeridis.”
“Moeridis?”
“An oasis with an immense lake not far from a Roman strongpoint called Babylon. At that point the Nilus broadens into its delta.”
“The same name as a Babylon in Mesopotamia?”
Dorothea’s smile was thin. “Indeed, Domina, visitors often are confused.”
“I interrupted you, so please continue.”
“Abinnaeus is a distinguished military family. What more is there to tell?”
“You’re saying he feels his duty to the Roman Empire is to stay here.”
She nodded and paused to sip warm wine before adding, “And he has the ‘Serqet’.”
“Pennuta, the Kushite woman?”
“Sergius is a troubled man rowing against the tide,” Dorothea continued, as if not wishing to answer questions about the concubine. “Harbors silt up. Buildings on sand foundations collapse. Desert bandits attack caravans. Worse, heretics pollute the True Faith and Constantinople does nothing.” She fed the kitten another bit of cheese before continuing. “Pennuta? I consider the Kushite woman as I do my husband’s hunting dogs, one more possession that gives him a measure of fleeting pleasure.”
“Domina, that is quite understanding of you.” When Dorothea did not respond, Arcadia told her, “My husband did go with Papnouthios. You…you implied that you didn’t like the man.”
“Oh, he’s a competent enough physician. I object to the human experiments he conducts at the indigent hospital.”
“Yes, he did say he practiced vivisection. Getorius thought he might learn something new if he went with him.”
“I suspect the man also investigates the occult. What one sees of Egypt is like the exterior face painted on a mummy sheath.” Dorothea glanced down at her kitten, now curled in her lap, licking its fur with a pink tongue. “Corruption lies hidden beneath a fine linen wrapping, doesn’t it, Miu?”
Arcadia asked, “What do you mean, ‘the occult’?”
“In medicine, charms and healing spells once again are fashionable.” Dorothea put the fig she had picked up back on the plate. “I’m sure Papnouthios is involved with those satanic practices, perhaps even with necromancy and reanimation of the dead.”
Reanimation and necromancy? To bring her away from an obviously upsetting subject, Arcadia asked if Dorothea was from Pelusium.
“No, my family is from Alexandria.”
“Family?”
“My elder brother, Isidoros, is abbot of Lychnos, a nearby monastery…” Dorothea lifted Miu and put the kitten on the floor, then stood up, having eaten nothing. “I must find the Prefect. If we’re to leave this week, I must be firm with him. He’ll discover a manuscript he hasn’t yet seen and stop to read it through.” She looked away and half-laughed, as if recalling a happier time. “Arcadia, tell the surgeon when he returns that we shall dine at the bishop’s residence this evening. Abbot Isidoros also will be there.”
“Thank, you, that will be an honor.”
“Honor and duty,” Dorothea mumbled softly.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing, Domina. Come, Miu, you can play among the Prefect’s scrolls.”
* * *
A weak sun shone through a thin cover of clouds when Getorius left Papnouthios and allowed him to complete recording his experiments alone. Still unnerved by what he had witnessed, he wandered the area around the hospital. A nearby cluster of mud houses marked a peasant compound where a scum-spotted ditch, dug from the nearby arm of the Nilus, watered fields of bright green alfalfa and legume crops. Three men heaping fodder on donkeys ignored him. Getorius found flat ground at the highest bank of the ditch and sat to breathe in the freshness of an off-sea breeze. He needed to think about what he had seen. Certainly, it’s one thing to speculate about vivisection, quite another to witness its results on human beings. I’ve only dissected dead animals, except for duplicating Galen’s artery experiment on a live rabbit. That was upsetting enough, watching the life force ebb out of the poor beast, its eyes gradually glazing over in death as its struggles ceased. He glanced around at the featureless horizon: flat, shimmering marshes to the west; alfalfa fields and a few palm trees that began at the green belt of river; a sliver of blue Mediterranean just visible to the north. In Italia, the ragged outline of the Apennines relieves Ravenna’s monotonous landscape. Here, only a former monastery lost in the sand color, the far-off roofs of Pelusium, and masts of galleys berthed for the winter relieve the flatness. Pelusium, a port where “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Gamma” eked out miserable lives that ended on a vivisection table.
* * *
When Papnouthios came out of the hospital, the two men returned in silence to the port. At the pretorium, Getorius did not discuss his morning with Arcadia. She was sensitive enough not to ask him about it, but did say that supper would be at the tenth hour in the Bishop’s residence. Abbot Isidoros, Dorothea’s brother, was an additional guest anxious to meet Latins and inquire about the rise of Hibernian monasticism in the west.
Arcadia’s fever had not abated. Getorius gave her a spirea solution and suggested she might better rest in bed that evening, but she insisted on attending the evening meal.
* * *
Pelusium’s bishops resided in the two-centuries-old villa of a wealthy Roman shipping agent, who had built his home as far from the odors of the seaport as possible, while yet remaining inside Pelusium’s protective walls. The Villa of Papirius Turdus, still known as “House of the Thrush,” had been remodeled by various clergymen to accommodate the needs of their expanding ecclesiastical authority in the Alexandrian Patriarchate of the Egyptian Church.
Bishop Eusebios had remodeled a former reception room into an episcopal chapel and torn down bedroom walls to enlarge the library. This latter space also provided a meeting room that could host visiting prelates from other cities or villages.
The most recent addition was to brick walls that surrounded an entrance garden planted with shrubs and pine trees, brought by Turdus from the Italian Peninsula. Mud bricks made the walls taller, an extension designed to keep out rioting citizens or monks. At Constantinople, as well as in provincial towns, holy men who espoused opposite sides of a theological debate might take to the streets and violently demons
trate in favor of their candidate. The most recent destruction of churches burned, and attacks on angry citizens, was caused by supporters of the heretic Nestorios, deposed as Patriarch of Constantinople and now in penitential exile at Hebet, in the Great Oasis of Egypt’s western Thebaid.
Papirius Turdus had faced his dining room toward the north, on that side of another garden that allowed the sea breeze to temper summer heat. Glass-paned folding doors now shut out the dank November weather. The triclinium’s three reclining couches had long since been removed and replaced by a Lebanon-cedar table and set of chairs, yet the walls still retained lush murals of Roman shrubbery that was filled with varied species of thrushes, the brown, speckle-breasted Tvrdidae that were the family patronymic.
Eusebios, aware of the Abbot Isidoros’s reputation for austerity, ordered his cook to prepare a simple meal of gray mullet without the usual herb-vinegar dressing or hardboiled-egg garnish. Boiled carrots in a cumin sauce accompanied the sea fish. There was no sweet dish, but honeyed Ascalon wine was undiluted.
* * *
Abinnaeus’s wife was at the supper, but the Prefect declined to attend, citing his belated preparations for the move to Myos Hormos. When Getorius and Arcadia met Isidoros, they realized that his austere life at Lychnos had not affected the bearing of an aristocrat: his well-trimmed hair and beard framed a face that despite his self-imposed deprivations and advanced age, was remarkably smooth and free of wrinkles.
During the sparse meal Getorius determined not to be taunted again about the deteriorating military situation in the West, and asked about Pelusium instead. Both the bishop and abbot were slightly amused at his interest.
“Pelousion,” Eusebios explained, is a Greek word for the port that means ‘a mire’ and, indeed, we are mired in heresies as well as sand. Arians, Nestorians, and Monophysites all are against orthodox teachings. At Constantinople an ignorant monk, Eutyches, rejects the two natures of Christ and teaches only of His Divinity. Surely, Patriarch Proklos should convene a council to refute such an attack on the Holy Trinity.”
Isidoros nodded his support. “The Lord God warned through Ezekiel, ‘I will cast fear into the land of Egypt…pour out my wrath on Pelusium, Egypt’s stronghold.’ Indeed, the port has undergone a precipitous history.”
“‘Has undergone’?” Eusebios corrected. “Abbot, it is in serious decline now.”
Arcadia wanted to learn more about the church in Egypt. “Bishop, last evening you mentioned that the evangelist Mark preached at Alexandria. Might you elaborate?”
Eusebios demurred with a hand gesture toward the abbot. “Isidoros is a far more competent scholar than I ever shall be. Abbot?”
“Very well. Domina, the tradition of the Egyptian Church is that Mark and Barnabas the Cypriot brought the Holy Faith to Alexandria some twenty years after the Savior’s Resurrection.”
“That rapidly?”
“Indeed, the two converted many from an extensive Alexandrian Hebrew community and undoubtedly a number of Greeks. At that time Paul was just beginning his mission in Macedonia and Mark had not accompanied him.”
“Thus our patriarchate is more ancient than that of Constantinople,” Eusebios boasted, “yet that Patriarch, with the emperor’s approval, would have us conform to his church’s liturgies, even to a rewording of the Creed formulated at Nicaea under the God-loving Constantine.”
Getorius realized the discussion could lead to rancorous accusations against the government: despite the absence of the prefect, his wife was here and might repeat the conversations to him. “Bishop,” he deviated, “what can you tell us about the route of the Holy Family? Our mission from Pulcheria is to verify the sites.”
“Verify, Surgeon?” Eusebios questioned in surprise, glancing at the abbot. “Does Constantinople now doubt the truth of our ancient traditions?”
“I…I may have used the wrong term,” Getorius mumbled.
Arcadia steered the conversation away from the eastern capital. “Bishop, you explained last evening how Bubastis was the Holy Family’s first stop. Where did they go next?”
“The Gospel of the Infancy of the Savior speaks of a town where the Blessed Virgin cast Satan out from a possessed woman.”
Isidoros broke in, “The accounts, of course, are apocryphal…pious legends…and yet largely supported by tradition. Over three centuries of pilgrim visits attest to their validity.”
Getorius asked, “What was the name of that location?”
The bishop took up the story. “Traditions differ. Some say that Joseph went north into the Nilus delta to escape Herod’s men. Yet Egypt was a Roman province, thus I doubt that Judean temple guards would have been allowed to cross the frontier, even in pursuit of other Hebrews.”
“Bishop Eusebios, what do you believe?” Arcadia asked.
“I’m quite positive that Joseph went south along the river, toward Babylon, the Roman fort and settlement beyond Heliopolis. Do you agree Abbot?”
“An angel assuredly guided Joseph and the Holy Child and our earliest pilgrimage sites are in that area. For example the present basilica of Saint Sergius and the cave beneath, where the Family took shelter.”
“Cave?” Arcadia repeated in surprise. “Surely there were inns available at the time.”
“The pagans did not always welcome Joseph, yet the gold given to the Holy Child by the Parthian astrologers would have bought refuge in Judean communities. As I said, back then Alexandria had an immense Hebrew presence, and yet all the sources are silent about the Holy Family ever journeying that far to the northwest.”
Arcadia reasoned, “Then these discrepancies make it all the more urgent that we find Pulcheria’s instructions.”
The bishop frowned. “Domina, we have manuscripts describing the Holy Family’s route. For another example, we know the location where an angel informed Joseph that Herod was dead and thus it was safe to return to Judea,”
“Where was that?”
“Far to the south, near Lycopolis. Abba Pachomios built a monastery on the site of an ancient church to the Holy Virgin and the family’s final dwelling place.”
“Exactly how far, Bishop?” Getorius asked. As intriguing as the information seemed, he recalled his neglected medical practice at Ravenna and did not look forward an extended stay in Egypt.
Eusebios looked over at Isidoros. “Abbot, you once made a pilgrimage there.”
“I was much younger, yet even then I thought traveling upstream on the Nilus most tedious.” Isidoros stroked his beard, thinking back. “Surgeon, with visitations to other holy sites, it was well over a month and a half’s journey.”
“And this is mid-November! Even if we left tomorrow we wouldn’t get up to Alexandria again until sometime in…in late February.”
“Assuming all went well,” the abbot warned. “And you would, of course, require a military escort for the journey.”
Arcadia said, “Pulcheria presumably has made arrangements for one.”
Dorothea, without the solace of her kitten, had brooded and let the men dominate conversation. Now she snapped, “Domina, I would presume nothing about Egypt that comes from Constantinople!”
Frustrated, Getorius threw down his napkin at her rebuke. Eusebios and the abbot took gulps of wine, nervously dabbing at their mouths.
Deacon Paulos, the bishop’s secretary, abruptly interrupted an uncomfortable silence by bringing an excited Nepheros into the room. A red-faced, bearded legionary followed them in. His boots, cape, and leather helmet were mud-spattered from travel.
“Your Holiness,” Nepheros apologized, “I would not intrude, but this courier just arrived from Constantinople bringing important news.”
“Important news?” Eusebios looked toward the man. “Who are you?”
“Bardas, Holiness.” The messenger bowed, removed his helmet, and held up a purple vellum envelope. “I bring an unhappy report to you.”
After the courier glanced at the dinner guests, he hesitated in giving over the envelope. �
�Well, what is it?” the bishop demanded. “We’re not children here!”
As Bardas handed him the message, he explained in poor Latin, “Holiness, Her…Her Piety, Augusta Pulcheria, is now confined in Hebdomon palace.”
“What do you mean ‘confined’? For what reason?”
“Chrysaphios Tzumas, a eunuch who seduce emperor’s mind, raise demon of jealousy in Empress Eudocia. She tell Emperor to banish Her Piety from Great Palace.”
Arcadia recalled, “In October, Pulcheria came to Pergamum to confront a treasonable plot against Theodosius.”
The courier nodded. “When she return, eunuch want make her deaconess, keep her away from government. But Patriarch Proklos, her friend, refuse. Her Piety then go into seclusion outside city, at Hebdomon.”
Arcadia said, “We saw her palace from our galley, Getorius. Remember?”
“Yes, and now the Augusta most certainly is under guard.”
Eusebios added quietly, “And without influence or power.”
“Powerless?” Getorius, stunned at the implication, stammered, “Then that…that could mean that our authorization to be in Egypt at her expense is virtually worthless! When word spreads of Pulcheris’s confinement, no one here will honor her orders.”
Equally disturbed, and feeling increasingly feverish, Arcadia mumbled, “Then…then Abinnaeus need not concern himself about finding the Augusta’s instructions. They would no longer be of any use to us! Where is the governor? The governor should be here to read this.”
CHAPTER III
Lighted by myriad lamps and thick with the scent of incense, the air in a small subterranean room felt mildly oppressive in its clinging heat.
At the far wall red votive candles flickered on the ledge of a shrine where a stiff human figure with the head of a lion held an ankh amulet in one hand. Blue smoke swirled from a censer in front of a silver dish displaying a human heart as an offering. A wide, Roman-styled couch took up most of the opposite wall. Nearby, a medium-size wine amphora stood next to a three-legged table, set with a jug and two pottery cups.
A young woman, whose skin had the warm hue of mahogany wood, raised her nude body on one elbow from the couch, to trace a graceful finger on the lips of the provincial governor.
