The Beacon at Alexandria

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “I am sorry,” Amalberga went on, after a pause. “I do not want us to be enemies. I will try to see that you are allowed to treat Romans. And I can protect you from any more suitors — they’re all going into the south now anyway. But I can’t do more for you than that.”

  “If you’ll let me do something for my own people, it will be enough,” I said. “Yes, I would like some barley broth. And maybe a little honeyed wine.”

  It was a couple more weeks before I was well enough to treat anyone, and when I was on my feet again, no one seemed to mind much what I did: there was too much else to worry about. Fritigern had gone south with nearly all the men, leaving Carragines under a light guard with Amalberga in command. Edico went with him, and most of the hospital attendants. I was left unofficially in charge of the health of the camp, with a few midwives and wisewomen. I was not really trusted and was still kept under a constant watch, but there wasn’t really anyone else to put in charge.

  The emperor Lord Valens the Augustus had concluded a peace treaty with Persia and was said to be hurrying to Constantinople, gathering troops along the way. The western Augustus, Gratianus, was reported to have defeated the Alamanni in Gaul, and was coming east with the Gaulish legions, ready to attack the Goths. The troops already in Thrace had a new commander: Sebastianus’ father, the former count of Illyria. He was a very active and skillful general, with a formidable reputation he had no trouble living up to. He had scarcely arrived when he succeeded in ambushing and annihilating a particularly large raiding party, and so alarming Fritigern that the other raiding parties were called in — not to Carragines, but to a town in the south called Kabyle. The men were not eager to be trapped north of the mountains again. They gathered together — the Theruingi, the Greuthungi, the Halani, and the Huns — and they waited for the Romans to arrive.

  It was a hot summer that year, hot and wet. The camp was old and stinking now, full of flies and disease. Even when I was back on my feet, I found that I tired very easily, and didn’t have the energy to fight for the things I should have — aqueducts to bring in fresh water, rubbish dumps outside the walls. I had seen so many patients die over the winter, it scarcely moved me anymore. I was allowed to treat the Roman prisoners again, but after all I had been through for that, I couldn’t seem to help them much. Edico had taken nearly all the drugs with him, and I couldn’t get the prisoners better conditions to live in. My barbarian suitors were all gone now, but it didn’t make the difference I had expected. I couldn’t think straight, and my feelings seemed blunted, thick and heavy like the air. One evening I realized that the camp was lightly enough guarded that it should be easy to slip out of it; but wretched as I was, I could do nothing about it. I was too tired to plan an escape, too tired for anything but a mechanical, helpless imitation of work. Even news of the war could not make much impression on me. Valens had left Constantinople with a great force; the Goths were retreating toward Hadrianopolis; the emperor and Count Sebastianus were considering attacking them without waiting for the additional troops from the West — great events, and my own fate depended on their outcome, but they seemed somehow tedious, as though they had happened many times before.

  And then, one sticky afternoon in early August, I came into the hospital after visiting some convalescents and found Athanaric sitting quietly among a group of new patients waiting to be examined.

  He was dressed in a rough woolen tunic, like a common soldier, and he had his arm in a sling. For a moment I doubted my eyes, but then I saw the recognition in his face, and a look of shock. He quickly looked away again and scratched his beard with his unbandaged hand, and I managed to understand. I changed my stare into a sneeze, wiped my face, and began examining the patients.

  I had a midwife to help me with this task, luckily a woman who had never met Athanaric. When she tried to see to his arm, he protested. “I want the Roman doctor,” he said in Gothic, “not some old witch who only knows about babies.”

  “The Roman doctor will not treat men injured in the war,” said the midwife, pulling at the sling. Athanaric winced and clutched his arm as though it pained him.

  “Oh, leave it!” I told her. “I’ll look at this one. Can you fetch some more cleansing solution?”

  She left to fetch it, and I went to look at Athanaric’s arm. I still did not dare to talk, not in front of the other patients. I felt dizzy, and my blood roared in my ears. “What happened?” I asked Athanaric, undoing the sling.

  “Sword wound,” he replied in a sullen tone. “It’s broken. The doctor in the south set it. But now it’s infected.”

  I took off the bandage carefully. The arm was perfectly whole and uninjured, to my relief, but there was a note folded up inside the bandage. I hesitated, then palmed it, looked up, and raised my eyebrows, and he said, still in the sullen tone, “See?”

  “Very bad,” I said. “You should not go shoving magical charms into it. But you’re lucky; it doesn’t need cauterizing yet.”

  The midwife came back with the cleansing solution, and I directed her to one of the other patients, a sick child. I pretended to clean and rebandage the arm. I told him to wait while I fetched another drug, and went into the pharmacy. It was empty, thank God. I unfolded the note. It was very brief: “Treat me and send me off. Then go as soon as you can to the wall behind the hospital.”

  I thought I would faint, from excitement and from the suddenness of hope. I tore the note up and ate it, then went back into the examining room; I had to stop, go back, and fetch the drug I had ostensibly gone for. I gave it to Athanaric and ordered him to go home to his family and rest, and to come have the wound cleaned and rebandaged next morning. He went.

  I had no opportunity to follow him immediately. I treated a few more patients and prepared some drugs. By then it was late afternoon, and my usual escort showed up, prepared to take me back to the women’s quarters of Fritigern’s house. Fritigern’s companions, who’d originally performed this task, had all gone south. My escort now consisted of two of Amalberga’s ladies who liked to take a walk about the camp every afternoon and picked me up on their way back to the house. I went with them quietly almost all the way back, and then exclaimed that I had forgotten my medical bag.

  “Well, leave it,” said one of the ladies. “It will be there tomorrow.”

  “Oh no!” I said. “The drugs in it are dangerous; I can’t just leave them lying about. I’ll run back and fetch it. You go on to the house. It’s not worth your while going all the way back to the hospital.”

  They were tired, it was hot, and no one expected me to try to escape now. They agreed. I started back toward the hospital, forcing myself to walk calmly as though there were no hurry and no excitement. It was the first time in months that I was alone, and my thoughts seemed to run circles around my head, like a troop of cavalry at full gallop: Athanaric, escape, freedom, release, the great world. I stopped and looked up into the deep sky, which was overcast with a damp haze, and I thought I could fly into it, right up to the sun itself. I was abandoning my patients and probably my career as well, but I no longer cared. I was sick of death. I wanted to live, to be free. I made myself keep walking.

  The hospital backed directly onto the camp walls, and it was set a little apart from the other wagons and shelters, to keep infectious diseases isolated. I walked straight past it, trying to look confident, as though I had some business. When I had almost reached the palisade, I heard a soft hiss off to my right; I looked, and there was Athanaric, waiting under one of the wagons. I ran over as though my feet were winged.

  Athanaric wasted no time in greetings or explanations. He caught my arm, pulled me under the wagon, and pushed me toward the palisade; a hole had been scooped out underneath it. I slid down, under, and out, and Athanaric followed. He jerked his head toward a clump of trees a bit further on, and we ran for it.

  “A guard comes along about every ten minutes,” he explained when we reached the trees. “He’s just gone. Now we wait for him to go past again, and th
en we head out. I have some horses waiting about three miles from here; can you walk that far?”

  “Of course.” I sat down and leaned my head against a tree trunk, staring at the walls of the wagon city.

  “You don’t look well.” He stooped over me, looking concerned.

  “I’ve been ill,” I told him, “and it’s very sudden. But I can walk three miles. Eternal Christ, I’d be ready to crawl them. Thank you. I don’t have any words for it. Thank you.”

  He touched my shoulder, frowning, then crouched down beside me as the guard came into sight, walking slowly along the outside of the wall, his spear over his shoulder. He paused, took his spear down and shoved it idly into a rabbit hole, then shrugged and walked on. Athanaric touched my shoulder again, and we slipped out of the wood and walked briskly across the open field that ringed the camp.

  Across the field, down into a ditch, along the ditch (“Can you run? Then do it!”), along another ditch, across other fields and ditches, striding and running, then up into a patch of woodland. Late afternoon sun slanting through the leaves; the smell of leaf mold and damp moss, strange and delicious after nothing but camp stink, medicine, and wood smoke for so many months. Athanaric indicated a direction and strode off in it, and I stumbled after. Birdsong, the crunch of leaves underfoot, my breath panting harshly after the run. Then the jingle of harness and the soft snort of a horse; the slanting light picked out the rich brown and light gray of horses. “Athanaric!” someone said in relief, and then, “Chariton!” And Arbetio ran up and embraced me.

  “You?” I said stupidly. “But what are you doing here?”

  “Athanaric needed someone to hold the horses,” Arbetio said, smiling. Then the smile faded, and he stepped back, looking at me. He didn’t make any stupid comments about my apparent change of sex; he just said, “But you’ve been ill.”

  “A couple of months ago now. I can ride — oh, damnation!” I’d forgotten about the long skirts, impossible for riding. I stared at them, mortified.

  “Just pull them up,” ordered Athanaric, untying one of the horses and leading it over. “There’s no time to do anything about them now. They must know in the camp that you’re missing.”

  “They’ll search inside first,” I said, but I tried to climb into the saddle. My foot caught in the skirts. Arbetio bent and offered me his shoulder, and I clambered up, trying to keep the skirts out of my way. Athanaric was already mounting his own horse, and Arbetio ran over to the third animal and leapt into the saddle, smiling again. Athanaric set off at a gallop, riding northeast across country, splashing through streams and over stone to confuse the scent if the Goths tried to track us with dogs. I was soon too busy trying to stay in the saddle to think.

  We rode for hours, until it was dark and the horses were too tired to continue, and then Athanaric found a place in another wood and we stopped. By then I was too exhausted to ask questions. I hadn’t ridden for more than a year, and had had a full day’s work before the escape. I simply lay down in a hollow in the ground and pulled my cloak over me. In a little while Arbetio woke me up and pointed to a bed of bracken he’d made for me, so I moved over on to that and went back to sleep.

  I woke at dawn next morning. The wood smelled alive, and the birds were singing. I was covered with mosquito bites, ached from the riding, and felt wonderful. I sat up. The other two were already up: Athanaric was feeding the horses, and Arbetio was unpacking some breakfast. Arbetio smiled. “Sleep well?” he asked.

  “Better than I have for months,” I said honestly, and got up — very stiffly, since my muscles ached and I had two or three raw patches from riding with my skirts pulled up. I hobbled over to help the others, but Arbetio handed me some bread and a cup of watered wine and told me to rest. “You don’t look well,” he said again. “What did they do to you in that camp?”

  I shrugged. “Tried to marry me, mostly. But as I said, I’ve been ill. Dear God, it’s good to see you. But why are you here? I wouldn’t have thought Novidunum could spare you.”

  “I’m absent without leave,” Arbetio said cheerfully.

  “I needed help from someone I could trust,” Athanaric put in, coming over. “So I wrote and asked Arbetio.”

  “And why are you here, too? I thought you were in Egypt,” I said. He stood there holding a bridle and looking down at me with a frown, the early sun dappling his face with light.

  “I’m absent without leave as well,” he told me, and sat down. Arbetio handed him his own chunk of bread.

  “Won’t that be dangerous for you? You said before that the authorities no longer trust any Goths, and if you abandoned your post in Egypt to come to Thrace . . .”

  “It’s all right if I come back with you. You can vouch for me. If I came back without you, I suppose I might be accused of treason. But I haven’t come directly from Egypt, only from Constantinople. I had to take a message there. The Master of the Offices was going to send me to Armenia, but I didn’t wait for him to arrange it. His Sacred Majesty was marching into Thrace, and I thought Carragines might have been left unguarded. So I sent Arbetio a letter asking him to meet me in Tomis.”

  I looked from one to the other of them. “You were taking a horrible risk.”

  “You are my master in the art,” said Arbetio. “And I owe you my freedom. But Athanaric wouldn’t let me go into the camp.”

  “It wasn’t dangerous for me there, and it would have been for him,” said Athanaric apologetically. “The Goths wouldn’t have harmed me, even if I was caught.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking from one to the other again. “I thank you both, more than I can say. I think I would have died if I had had to spend another winter in Carragines.”

  “You look like you half died already,” Athanaric said harshly. “You’re nothing but bones and eyes. You said they kept trying to marry you. They didn’t . . . that is —”

  I was a bit surprised at this delicacy. “Rape me? No. But . . well, my brother once said that no one would want to marry a female doctor. I began to feel that absolutely everybody I disliked did want to. I felt like Penelope of Ithaca.”

  Athanaric smiled hesitantly. “Circumspect Penelope?”

  “And circumscribed, too!” I said, smiling back. “Spied on all the time. And then there wasn’t much to eat last winter, and people kept dying, until I wanted to die myself. But now . . . ‘Oh radiance, oh light of the four-horse chariot of the Sun, oh Earth and Night which filled my gaze before, now I behold you with free eyes!’ “ I leaned back and looked up at the sun with free eyes; I felt as though the whole year of wretchedness and confinement had dropped away like the muddy shell of the caddis fly, swept off downstream when the fly grows its wings.

  Athanaric snorted. “Sebastianus said you went into captivity quoting Euripides. I suppose it makes sense that you come out the same way.” He bit off a mouthful of the bread and chewed it hard.

  “And how is Sebastianus?” I asked.

  Athanaric swallowed quickly, and he and Arbetio looked at each other uneasily.

  “He’s well,” Arbetio said after a moment. “He’s with the army. With his father, the count.”

  “His father had the marriage contract annulled,” Athanaric said bluntly. “He said it was invalid because it lacked his consent, and he tore it up and burned it. He . . . disapproved of you.”

  “Oh,” I said, rather feebly. “What did Sebastianus say?”

  “He swore that if his father wouldn’t let him marry the woman of his choice, he wouldn’t marry the woman of his father’s,” said Arbetio.

  “But he won’t run off and marry you anyway,” said Athanaric. “He would risk his career.”

  “Oh,” I said again. “Well, I never believed in that marriage. I suppose Sebastianus still has Daphne?”

  “You don’t have to be jealous of her!” said Athanaric.

  “Jealous? I’m not jealous. I’m relieved: I’m just as glad that marriage is out of the way again. But when I saw you before, you swore that Sebastianu
s had his heart set on this scheme, and I thought Daphne could console him.”

  Athanaric watched me with a frown. I ate some of the bread. It was journeybread, full of rough grain and hard; I had to gnaw on it like a mouse. But it tasted good.

  “He still has Daphne,” Athanaric admitted. “That is, she’s in Tomis, waiting for him to get back from the war. I thought you’d be disappointed.”

  I shook my head. “I never expected Sebastianus to want to do something like that, I never really believed it would happen, and I don’t think it would have worked very well if it had. But I’m surprised. You . . . that is, I thought you’d come to fetch me for Sebastianus, as a favor to your friend.”

  “You’re a friend too,” Arbetio said. “That you’re a woman doesn’t change that.”

  Athanaric nodded. “We couldn’t leave you in there. I promised to get you out, and now I have.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and then Arbetio asked, “What will you do now? Do you have somewhere to go?”

  “I’ll find something to do with myself,” I replied, trying to think of what. I was not used to having a future. Perhaps I didn’t have one, really; perhaps I was fated to grow old in my brother’s house. But perhaps I could persuade Thorion to let me go. I decided, suddenly and recklessly, that I would assume that I could choose for myself, order my life as I pleased; and I thought about what I would do. After a minute I added, “Maybe I’ll go back to Alexandria. I presume my army contract’s been torn up.”

  Arbetio laughed. “Could you teach in Alexandria?”

  “I suppose not. But my old master, Philon, would probably take me on as a partner. That is, unless I’m still under suspicion for my part in Bishop Peter’s escape.”