by Albert Noyer
Eusebios was too shaken to respond. Nepheros stabbed the air with a warning forefinger, “If this should reach the exiled Nestorius….”
Nestorius, again. Getorius asked to know more about the disgraced churchman. “Bishop, when we went to a tavern on the evening that courier arrived, the heretic was discussed, yet I’m not sure I understand what this controversy is about.”
Nepheros said, “Yes, I mentioned the deposed patriarch’s arrogance and his humiliation of the Augusta, the banning of citizens’ games.”
“Enough!” Eusebios shouted, indignant at any further mention of Nestorios. “His spiritual aberrations are far more serious. He denies that the Virgin is Theotokos, the God-bearer, thus rendering meaningless Paul’s words to the Philippians regarding Christ’s adopted humanity, ‘He did not regard equality with God something to be grasped, rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in a human likeness’.”
Isidoros took up the passage “He humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
Eusebios noted Getorius’s confusion. “Surgeon, perhaps these theological concepts are difficult for your clergy in the west to grasp.”
“True. Fighting off those barbarians that Nepheros mentioned earlier does disturb our bishops’ time for contemplating such arcane matters.”
Getorius regretted his impudent retort, but Eusebios was distracted by his deacon, Paulos, signaling from the doorway. He motioned for him enter.
The bishop listened to the man speaking in Greek, nodded acknowledgement, then looked toward Getorius. “An unhappy message, Surgeon. Papnouthios wishes you to come to your wife. Evidently, she is very ill with puretos, a debilitating affliction which I believe you Latins call ‘marsh fever’.”
Alarmed, he asked, “The governor’s physician is treating her?”
“Paulos said as much.”
Getorius excused himself to the clergymen and stood to hurry back to the pretorium. He recalled the gruesome medical experiments he had seen at the indigent “hospital.” Would Arcadia become one of them in Papnouthios’s search for a cure?
CHAPTER VII
Arcadia lay against a raw linen pillow, pale, eyes closed, her face, neck, and bare arms glistening with perspiration. Dorothea, leaning forward in a chair next to her, dabbed a wet cloth against her skin. Papnouthios stood at a table, mixing a brownish powder into a cup of diluted red wine. No braziers were lighted, yet the room was warm: Dorothea had ordered furnace slaves to direct heat into to hollow flues in the walls and under the floor.
“I thought my wife was suffering a humor imbalance in this cold weather…the persistent rain,” Getorius said, as if apologizing to the Egyptian for his misdiagnosis.
“The symptoms are similar,” he replied, “yet puretos will afflict your wife all her life. It is a scourge to peasants living in the Delta marshes.”
Getorius told him, “Febris pali…marsh fever…is not common at Ravenna despite swamps around the port. Vitruvius writes that a scouring action by the Adriatic tides cleanses the lagoons twice each day. A few stagnant pools remain in the countryside, but the ill who can afford treatment see a physician, not a surgeon.”
Papnouthios grunted understanding. “Galen considers the illness a yellow bile imbalance and thus prescribes blood-letting and intestinal purging.”
“Unpleasant procedures, but I’ve had to perform them.”
“Quite unnecessary in puretos, Surgeon, and I disagree with him. Celsus…of whom you undoubtedly are ignorant…and Terentius Varro believed that marshes breed ‘animalcula,’ invisible entities which enter a body through the mouth and nose. You have been near contaminated water recently?”
“Physician, Isn’t everyone who travels overland to Egypt from Palaestina?”
Papnouthios ignored his sarcasm. “Your wife drank from oasis wells?”
“Not directly, but the inns serve watered wine.” Agitated, Getorius complained, “Your questions waste time, Physician. What is your treatment for the disease?”
He held up the goblet and swirled its wine. “In Egyptian, sam, yet you may know this plant as artemisia, an effective remedy to control the quartan outbreaks.”
“Quartan?”
“The fever returns with regularity every four days. Artemisia diminishes its intensity.”
“What is your own opinion of the disease’s cause?”
“I noted red welts on your wife’s arms and ankles.”
“Those were merely insect bites―”
“Do not interrupt me!” Getorius bristled at being treated like a novice medical student, yet kept silent as the physician explained, “I experimented by having subjects drink various types of marsh water. Others were isolated in a small chamber infested with culex.”
“Mosquitoes?”
“Correct. Some who drank the stagnant water came down with afflictions such as bilious diarrhea, yet none contracted the intermittent fevers of puretos.”
“So the animalcula theory is correct in principle.”
“And yet the invisible creatures of Varro are quite visible. I believe culex transmits fever daemons to the body.” When Arcadia stirred and mumbled erratically, tossing her head from side to side on the pillow, Papnouthios was pleased, “Fevered dreams open unknown gates inside the mind. Surgeon, you must record these mysterious visions.”
Is the physician conducting an experiment with Arcadia’s mind? “Just give her your artemisia.” Getorius gently shook his wife. “Cara, I’ll help you sit up so you can drink this. What is the dosage?”
“Administer a spoonful of the powdered leaves dissolved in red wine twice in a day.”
“For how long a duration?”
“Seven days.”
“A week!” Getorius exclaimed. “We should be on our way to Bubastis before that.”
“The will of gods is not always that of man.” Papnouthios closed his medical case and touched a second wine jug. “As you prescribed, give valerian root in this honeyed wine to help your wife sleep.”
After the physician left, Arcadia sipped the medication. “Getorius, I had terrible dreams…” She shuddered at her recollection. “You …you were…not here. I…I don’t know where you had gone. Those horrible reptiles were threatening me.”
“Cara, you’ve contracted marsh fever, but Papnouthios has medications we don’t know about at Ravenna.” He took back her cup and mixed a spoonful of valerian powder in the sweetened wine. The drug’s unpleasant smell was stronger than what he had in his clinic at Ravenna. He handed Arcadia the potion. “I’ll let you rest and come back in an hour or two.”
Dorothea had stepped back during the treatment, but came closer. “Arcadia, I shall assign a female slave to this room with instructions for tending you. The Physician said you would experience a copious perspiration.”
“Gratias…efharisto.” Arcadia eased her head back onto the pillow.
Dorothea turned to her husband. “Surgeon, will you accompany me to the prefect’s office? I’m curious about this mummy that it is so important for him to see.”
“Of course, Domina…” He put the empty goblet back on the table, wiped his wife’s forehead a final time with the damp cloth, then kissed both her closed eyes.
Arcadia asked weakly, “Did…did you have a mid-day meal?”
“No, but I’ll find something to eat before I come back.”
Dorothea said, “Surgeon, food will be brought for you. Rest well, Domina.”
Arcadia nodded without opening her eyes.
Dorothea stopped by the kitchen and gave orders to Karitina, the freedwoman who had supervised her dinner on the evening the couple arrived. She was to bring food and wine for the surgeon to the prefect’s office, and send old Agathe to the sick woman’s room.
In Abinnaeus’s office, Dorothea looked around to see what progress her husband had made in packing, then indicated a chair for Getorius. She sat behind her husband’s desk. “Surgeon, what was this mummy the Prefect was called to se
e? He was furious at the interruption.”
How much can I tell her? The bishop is adamant about keeping the Kashat document secret until theologians can evaluate the text. “Domina, an…an ancient papyrus was discovered, concealed in the body wrappings of an embalmed Kushite prince. Bishop Eusebios took the document to his residence to determine authenticity.”
“Then my husband is there with him?”
“No, but he ordered Nepheros to accompany the bishop. The governor left the temple to return here and offered to bring Arcadia back with him. Did he not arrive with her?”
Dorothea scowled and shook her head. “Surgeon, she came alone and quite ill, as you saw. When Papnouthios returned shortly afterward, I overcame my revulsion at the man to ask for his help.”
“I…I’m grateful, Domina.”
She waved a gesture of acknowledgement. “What is the nature of this papyrus, this document?”
“Perhaps the bishop or your brother, Abbot Isidoros, should be the ones to tell you.”
“I see.” Any anger at being rebuffed was submerged in Dorothea’s smirk. “Your discretion, Surgeon would be seen as simplemindedness in our cynical world, but I find your lack of guile admirable. I shall ask the abbot―”
Dorothea was interrupted by the freedwoman bringing in a tray of bread, pork slices, olives, and a pitcher of wine. She filled two glass goblets. “Efharisto, Karitina. Take a moment to eat, Surgeon, while I glance through documents on the Prefect’s desk.”
Getorius ate slowly, watching the woman sip her wine and shuffle through various manuscripts and bound ledgers set to one side of the cluttered desk surface. Eusebios wants the manuscript kept secret, as was Galla Placidia’s forged will of Christ. The bishop realizes the impact of such a revelation, genuine or not. I don’t quite understand the doctrinal controversy with this Nestorius, yet it evidently has serious religious and political repercussions. He looked up when Dorothea gave an involuntary gasp and clapped a hand over her mouth. He bolted up to help. “Domina, are you all right?”
She waved him back with a small book she held. “It…it’s nothing,” she replied, tucking the volume into her sleeve. “What were we talking about? Oh, yes, this mummy that Sergius went to see…” She paused, staring at the far wall rather than looking at Getorius.
“Domina, as I said, the papyrus is really a matter for you to discuss privately with the abbot.”
“What?” Dorothea seemed profoundly distracted by a ledger she had found. “Oh, the papyrus. Of…of course.” She stood up to indicate the room with a sweep of an arm. “The Prefect should be here to finish organizing his things. Where is he?”
“Domina, I don’t know.”
Getorius realized that the woman had found something of compelling interest among her husband’s records. He was ignorant of Abinnaeus’s whereabouts, but recalled that Arcadia had said that his concubine, Pennuta, had run into a house located across from the temple.
* * *
Sergius Abinneus, hunched over in his hooded cape to avoid recognition, doubled back through a side alley and reached the rear entrance of a three-story apartment building. The entrance door was not bolted. He walked through a hallway littered with children’s toys and reeking of urine. After rapping softly on the piortal of a room on the first floor, he heard a bolt click aside. Pennuta, red-eyed from sobbing, brightened as she opened the door and saw the governor.
“Sergis!” she squealed. “Isis protect you. I know you come!”
“Quiet, woman,” he hissed, slipping inside a room whose opulent furnishings belied the shabby look of the building: lion and leopard pelts hung on the walls above tables of African origin that displayed ceremonial knives and ebony sculptures of grotesque fetish deities. An incense burner was unlit, but a sweet, residual fragrance permeated the room.
Pennuta’s smile metamorphosed into her usual pout. “You talk to me like slave, Sergis.”
He took off his damp cape, flung it over a couch upholstered in silk damask, then grasped her arm. “You embarrassed me in the temple, rushing in and clinging to my legs like…like a leech.”
She shook her arm free. “I not want curse to hurt you. I love you, Sergis.”
When she leaned against his body on tiptoe to kiss him, he pushed her back. “We can’t continue this way,” he told her, brushing a nervous hand over his forehead and eyes. “Even you implied that Dorothea knows about us.”
“Dora.”
“It’s ‘Dorothea’! Can’t you Kushites pronounce simple names correctly?”
Pennuta stared at him in disbelief as she sagged to her knees on a woolen rug that covered the floor. Between renewed sobbing she told him in a voice choked with emotion, “You…promise…marry me.”
“I did not! Look, Pennuta”―Abinnaeus’s tone softened―“you can keep everything here…the furniture, those sculptures, that…that Parthian rug you’re kneeling on.” He took off his belt purse and shook out silver and gold coins in front of her. “Here….”
She suppressed her sniffles and glared up at him. The pouting mouth abruptly curled into a snarl, and a hardness he had not seen before dulled her eyes. “You, think, Sergis, you can pay me to go away?”
“Not…go away, exactly,” he stammered, abruptly realizing that Pennuta would not be easy to discard. “You can live here in Pelusium. I just…just don’t want trouble. This political situation at Constantinople has me concerned. My cargo at Hormos….”
She stood up slowly and brushed a remnant of tears away with the palm of a dusky hand. “You not love me, then?”
“Love you? Well, I…you…you’re a wonderful girl.”
“Girl? I am woman, Sergis.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, a…a woman.”
“But you not marry me?”
“No. I…I’ve told you that before. It quite impossible for us to―”
Before Abinnaeus could finish his sentence, Pennuta snatched a slim-bladed Kushite dagger from a mahogany table and slashed out at him. The blade nicked the left forearm he raised as a reflexive shield. In a swift motion, his other hand wrenched the knife from her and threw it aside on the rug. “Canicula…little bitch!” he muttered through clenched teeth, grasping his arm wound with a neckerchief, to staunch seeping blood. Pennuta bolted to pick up the knife, but he stepped on the blade; the steel had bent from the force of taking it away from her. Thwarted, the woman snarled at him in Kushite and leaped for his face, her nails bared like the claws of a desert lioness charging at prey. She managed to gouge a scratch in his left cheek, before he used both hands to grasp her bare arms and throw her against an opposite wall. The impromptu bandage slipped off; blood from his arm wound spattered the rug. Pennuta, dazed by the impact, found her hands unable to stop her slide to the floor.
Breathing hard, Abinnaeus recovered her knife and lurched toward the woman. He paused, then threw the bloody weapon onto the couch and stalked out, trembling from emotion at the squalid encounter.
* * *
To give Arcadia a longer chance to rest, Getorius went to spend time in the pretorium garden. The rain had let up: date palms, acacia, and tamarisk trees glistened with bright jewels as an emerging afternoon sun struck residual water droplets on their leaves. Sedge grass, bent under the downpour, struggled to upright itself again. With the air cleansed, a perennial smell of the sea was less prominent. A pool in the garden’s center grew aquatic plants unlike any he had seen at Ravenna. Long-stemmed, round, flat-leaved plants that grew white and pink blossoms floated on the surface, along with thick, bulbous masses of hyacinth-like purple flowers. Several spindly-legged white birds with curved beaks strutted among the shrubs, hunting lizards out to sun themselves.
A stand of papyrus reeds at one end of the pool brought Getorius’s mind back to the Kashat document. The prince’s account of Christ’s childhood had been as unnerving as his wife’s fever. The papyrus sheet has the look of authenticity and was found in much more plausible circumstances than that forged will of Christ at Ravenna. The
abbot pointed out that the known stories of Christ’s infancy were pious fables, yet Jerome permitted a spurious Hebrew translation to be circulated because it did no moral harm to the faithful. But this Kashat account would be of real concern to churchmen. If true, it shakes the doctrinal foundation of the Christian Church’s teaching about Christ’s dual Natures, by depicting him as a human sorcerer in touch with dark forces. Nepheros fears that this heretic, Nestorios, could use the document to seize political as well as religious power. He said that his exiled followers had done so at Edessa, farther to the east. And from what the abbot believes, Arianism here seems to have survived as much more of a competing religious force than in the West.
A warming sun gradually lulled Getorius into a doze. After he awoke, the air was colder. Long, dark shadows of a short November day stretched across the walkway and black water in the pool. When he returned to the guest room, Arcadia lay awake in bed, wearing a fresh night tunic and sipping meat broth from a mug. An older woman sat in a chair nearby, spinning a reed basket full of flax fibers on a hand spindle.
After he nodded to the slave, Arcadia told him, “Her name is Greek, Agathe. She barely knows the Latin name of foods.”
“Again, it seems that Dorothea is making sure we don’t learn too much about what goes on around here.” He felt his wife’s forehead and wrist pulses. “You seem better.”
“Temporarily. The fever will return in a few days.” Arcadia finished the broth and handed him the mug. “Now, tell me what was on that papyrus.”
Getorius summed up Prince Kashat’s account: how he was traveling to Judaea to reinforce his country’s alliance with a prophesied new king when he heard of Herod’s murderous order; how his guards told him about the Hebrew family fleeing to Egypt with a newborn male infant. The prince’s priest-advisor had suggested the infant could replace his own stillborn child, who with his wife had died a year earlier. Kashat befriended Joseph and settled his family in a summer palace at the Moeridis Oasis, then raised the child in both Hebrew prophetical writings and Egyptian esoteric lore.
