[Getorius and Arcadia 01] - The Secundus Papyrus

by Albert Noyer

  “Surgeon, tend to your patients,” Theokritos snapped, pushing him back. “That was part of a blank papyrus sheet from a manuscript by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. He wrote in Egypt around the time of the Galilean. I wanted to compare the nature of the ashes with those of a section I had cut from the Secundus Papyrus.”

  “The what?” Getorius asked, cradling his reddened palm in the other hand.

  “I’ve named our mystery document after Pilate’s secretary, Lucius Flavius Secundus…”

  Arcadia came into the room. She saw the smoking papyrus scrap and scattered ashes around the broken dish and her husband holding his hand, and guessed what had happened. “Let me see, Getorius. Are you badly burned?”

  “It’s nothing. Theokritos was testing papyrus similar to the one we found.”

  “Go find a water pitcher and soak your hand in cold water.”

  After Getorius left, Theokritos muttered, “Impetuous fool. What did he think I was doing? Look over here, young woman.” The librarian indicated a row of small dishes that held ashes or scraps of papyrus immersed in various liquids. “These are soaking in vinegar. Those two are in a solution of vitriol.” He held up a vellum sheet on which he had recorded the contents of each plate. “This will detail my conclusions.”

  “You’re comparing the composition of the manuscript fibers we found and those of a similar age.”

  “Greek manuscripts from the Palestina area, to be exact. You have more sense than that husband of yours. I’m also comparing the weave of the plant in manufacture…its color, texture, brittleness, and so on. The two papyri are comparable, finely made. Alexandria had the best quality papyrus back then.”

  “Clever—”

  “Of course the Seneca manuscript has been here in Ravenna for some time, while…I’m calling what was found the ‘Secundus Papyrus,’ as I told the Surgeon…while that papyrus was presumably in the Hyperborean damp for over four centuries. Fortunately, the case was well sealed. There are stains on some of the fibers, from when the leather case was new, but someone put that gold foil lining in at a later time to protect the contents.”

  “So the case had been opened?”

  “At some point.”

  Getorius returned with a wet cloth around his hand and mumbled an apology.

  “I realize what you must have thought, Surgeon,” Theokritos said in a kinder tone, “but I’m trying to establish the age of the papyri. If they’re recent, there’s no need to go on.”

  “What about the writing?” Arcadia asked.

  “Its style is from the time of the Galilean. I’ve compared it with the Seneca.”

  Still on the defensive, Getorius countered, “Any skilled scribe could copy the hand.”

  Arcadia gritted her teeth, but Theokritos seemed to feel no offense. “True, Surgeon. That’s why the material itself is of more importance.”

  “The ink is brownish,” she noted.

  “It is its nature to change, young woman. Look at the Seneca, the color is quite similar.”

  “Did you discover anything else about the papyri?” Getorius asked.

  “A few signs of mold, as might be expected. But all in all it has been mirac…it has been remarkably well preserved.”

  Getorius noted that the librarian fell just short of saying, “miraculously well preserved.”

  “Theokritos,” he apologized, “I’m sorry for my rashness. It’s been an upsetting afternoon. Have you heard that Sigisvult is dead?”

  “Dead? I understood he was being held under guard here in Lauretum.”

  “He was. We were visiting him when Renatus came in with consecrated bread and wine.”

  Theokritos fingered his Abraxas medal. “Go on, Surgeon. What happened?”

  “We weren’t in the room, but Sigisvult died after drinking the Sacramental wine. The archdeacon called it the judgment of God.”

  “Superstitious fool.”

  “Yes. I believe Sigisvult was poisoned.”

  “Murdered?” Theokritos dropped the medal as his complexion blanched to the same colorlessness as his hair. “Now it seems we have one witness less to the discovery.”

  “A witness? I hadn’t thought of Sigisvult’s death in that light,” Getorius admitted, “yet it makes sense…in a frightening way.”

  “Senator Maximin knows we were in the mausoleum,” Arcadia said.

  “He told you that?”

  “After Mass. It seemed like a casual question about our dinner with Galla Placidia.”

  “Thanks to the man’s wealth, he knows this entire palace as I do its library. His gold buys information.” Theokritos snorted and probed at the papyrus scrap in the vitriol.

  “Sir,” Arcadia asked, indicating the rolled documents at the top of the desk, “are those the manuscripts we found at Behan’s?”

  “They are.”

  “Do you know any more about them?”

  “Young woman”—Theokritos waved an impatient hand toward his experiments—“my concern is what I have in front of me now.”

  “May I look at the Latin text? My husband thinks your…your Secundus Papyrus is linked to Behan’s prophecy.”

  Theokritos gave a shrug of permission. Arcadia unrolled the manuscript, then pulled Getorius aside. “The rooster drawing on this looks like the one on the broken tile.”

  “Broken tile?” Theokritos asked, looking up. “Rooster?”

  “Sir”—Arcadia took the fragment from her purse—“we found this in the mausoleum, part of the Book of John mosaic your assistant pointed out.”

  “I thought it might be an artisan’s mark,” Getorius added, “but someone is using a cockerel as an identifying symbol.” When Theokritos did not comment further, Getorius asked, “Will you let me know if you discover anything?”

  “That, Surgeon, will be for the Regina’s ears only.”

  Getorius took Arcadia’s arm. “Let’s go home. There’s nothing more to learn here.”

  Two days later, on November seventeenth, Childibert told Getorius that a body had been hauled out of the harbor near its silted south end, and identified as that of Miniscius. A magistrate ruled that Sigisvult’s workmaster had probably slipped and fallen off an icy dock early in the morning, while inspecting a cargo of building materials.

  No further inquiry was conducted.

  Lugdunum

  Chapter ten

  Brenos of Slana left the Abbey of Culdees at Autessiodurum on the seventeenth day of the Celtic month of Samon. The abbot rode on horseback, along with his secretary Fiachra, the guide Warinar, and only one packhorse to haul minimal supplies for the journey to Ravenna.

  Four days travel beyond his monastery, in the gloom of a late afternoon, Brenos sat huddled in the prow of a Roman patrol galley that slid downstream along the current of the Arar River. The bearskin coat he wore glistened white, coated with sleet granules that drove in from the northeast. After the tribune in charge of the crew, Liscus, had said that Lugdunum would soon appear in the distance, Brenos wanted to be first to sight the old capital of the Three Gauls.

  He glanced back at Fiachra, hunched with Warinar over a charcoal fire glowing in a brazier under the galley’s sternpost. Blowing on his hands to warm them, his secretary still looked sullen over having to make the winter voyage. Warinar, too, had sulked on the road. The guide wanted to stay at Autessiodurum, and had warned about the dangers of a winter journey, but the offer of a silver siliqua for each day of travel had proven irresistible. Brenos had made sure the man did not take advantage of the generous terms to extend the time of the journey by promising him the bonus of a gold solidus if they arrived at the Western capital within three weeks.

  The abbot pulled the bearskin collar higher around the hood of his cloak. Although the clear weather had turned nasty abruptly, things had gone well since departing from the abbey. The Via Cabellono along the left bank of the Icauna River was paved and the countryside relatively flat. Brenos had counted on his church rank of abbot to receive food and shelter along the way.
The monastic discipline practiced at Culdees had served him well; the horses had made almost thirty miles the first day, before early darkness came on.

  That first night the abbot had found them shelter in a walled farmhouse. At dawn he had shaken his companions awake. Shortly after a breakfast of bread, cheese, and raisins, the trio was once more on the road.

  The second day’s halt had been in the fortified hill town of Flavia Aeduorum. Brenos had gawked at the magnificent four-portal gate, at the stone bridge leading across a river to the citadel, and at the walls Augustus Caesar had built for the Aedui, who were long-time Gallic allies of Rome. Cavarillus, the bishop, had found housing for the travelers with a wealthy merchant. Both men had donated a gold piece to help the abbot defray his expenses. The nervous city prefect had scrawled a hasty petition for the abbot to give to Emperor Valentinian at Ravenna, pleading for a hundred field army legionaries to supplement what Frankish mercenaries he had been able to hire.

  By the afternoon of November twentieth the three men had reached Cabillonum on the Arar River, in a mounting snowstorm. As a market center for shipping goods into northern and western Gaul, the river port housed a naval garrison that patrolled that stretch of the Arar. Brenos had shown his abbot’s ring to Tribune Liscus, the base commander, who was about to board a patrol galley that would tow a barge of lumber and wine casks downstream to Lugdunum.

  Brenos bribed the officer to be taken along with the cargo. The four horses were led onto the transport barge and tethered among the beams and barrels. Two crewmen stayed aboard with the animals.

  The sailors talked among themselves while erecting a leather canopy in the patrol galley’s center as protection against the weather. Brenos understood enough of their regional Celtic dialect—Gallo-Roman descendants of the Aedui—to gather that renegade warriors from the Germanic Burgondi made regular raids on river communities. He had already seen burned and abandoned villas on the riverbanks standing as mute testimony to the barbarians’ incursions.

  Feeling a gust of wind, the abbot glanced out at the muddy, swift-flowing river, whose surface was rapidly being coated with a slush of icy sleet. The crew had mentioned that the normally sluggish Arar was swollen by fall rains, and was now flowing more rapidly to its conjunction with the Rhodanus River at Lugdunum. Brenos had smugly attributed that fact to an act of Divine Providence for his own benefit, yet inexplicably the snow squall was metamorphosing into a full-scale winter storm, blustering down out of Gothiscandza.

  The abbot slipped a hand under his coat and felt at the bulge beneath his tunic. The case strapped next to his body containing the Gallican League Charter was reassuring. Even though the waxed leather cylinder had started to rub a raw wound in his side, that was a small enough discomfort for bringing the work of the Nazarene to completion. Even the snowstorm was merely another test of his resolve.

  At Cabillonum, after the galley had pushed out into the current and the men started rowing, they had begun to chant verses in harmony with their oar strokes. Without understanding all of their dialect, Brenos was nevertheless convinced, from the raucous answering refrain of the barge crew, that the words boasted of carnal intercourse with women.

  The singing eventually ceased, its words carried off in the howl of the wind.

  Brenos was dozing when he was startled by Warinar’s voice saying, “Abbot, you’ll find ‘The Queen of Gaul’ looking a bit ragged.”

  He sat and turned around to squint at the red-faced guide. “Queen? Who?”

  “Lugdunum.” Warinar pointed to the fuzzy outline of buildings materializing on a high ridge in the distance. “After that Dalmatian emperor made Treveri the new prefectural capital, the Queen lost out. They insulted her again a few years ago by moving the mint south to Arelate.”

  “Where do we go from Lugdunum?” Brenos asked, taking advantage of Warinar’s willingness to speak, which he attributed to the guide’s anticipation of spending the night in the city’s taverns, or even worse, establishments of the flesh.

  “The way I came, Cularo to the Genevris pass, then down to Taurinorum in the Padus Valley. We’ll pick up the Via Fulvia and—”

  “And they’ll dig out three stiff corpses in the spring,” Liscus interposed with a hoarse chuckle.

  “Corpses?” Brenos repeated, alarmed. “What do you mean, Tribune?”

  “Word came yesterday, Abbot. Snowstorms have closed both the pass and the mountain roads that lead into Italy.”

  “But I came through there only a week ago,” Warinar recalled.

  “Then some god smiled on you,” Liscus said. “This time Taranis would bury you in his frozen spit.”

  “Warinar, what does this mean?” Brenos demanded. “Isn’t there another route?”

  “A longer one. We could take a barge down the Rhodanus to Massilia. Easy enough—it’s with the current. Then pick up a merchant galley to Pisae…if we can find a master foolish enough to risk his boat and cargo in winter.”

  “A sea voyage?” Brenos recalled his short but nauseating sail across the narrow channel from Britannia to Gaul. “Isn’t there another land route?”

  “The Via Julia Augusta from Arelate, and across to the Mediterranean coastal road.”

  “Either way you’d be pissing into the wind,” Liscus warned. “That Visigoth king, Theodoric, is making trouble down there, wanting to own the whole Narbonensis coast. The prefect at Arelate is working out a treaty with him, but the city is sealed off. There probably isn’t a bargemaster in the region who would risk going downstream now.”

  Brenos frowned at the prospect of a delay. “Do you have any suggestions, Tribune?”

  Liscus blew on fingers numb from the cold, then advised, “Stay in Lugdunum until spring, Abbot, or go back to your monastery while the road is still open.”

  “No, that’s unacceptable. I must reach Ravenna.”

  Liscus shrugged and eyed the snow-covered wharves and a bridge at the lower city, which his galley was rapidly approaching. “Retract oars,” he yelled to the crew. “Prepare for docking.”

  Brenos watched wharf slaves shamble out from the shelter of a warehouse portico and catch ropes tossed to them from the two boats. After passing the coils through holes in stone mooring dogs, they pulled the vessels tight against the dock. When crewmen maneuvered a gangplank into place, Brenos wondered about a place to spend the night.

  “Tribune, is there a presbyter’s residence nearby?”

  “The Basilica of Paul the Apostle is on the Via Bartolomei. The closest residence would be near the church.”

  “Where?”

  “By the Bridge of the Three Gauls. The Bartolomei leads up to the old forum and theaters, but there are inns, Abbot, here along the wharves.”

  Brenos looked at the warren of streets beyond the warehouses. A few people still bought food at vendors’ stalls, but the storm had forced most citizens home. Or to taverns, he surmised from the sounds of loud laughter coming from the curtained doorways of those facing the river.

  A young woman in a fur cape, open in front to show a clinging red-silk tunic, gestured to him from another entrance alongside the tavern. Brenos turned away quickly. Rented rooms would be above one of the taverns, or worse, situated among the cubicles of the woman’s brothel.

  “Have one of your men escort us to the presbyter’s house,” he ordered Liscus. “I’ll not spend the night among prostitutes and drunken louts. Warinar, what about the horses?”

  “I…got a friend at the…uh…‘House of Eros,’” the guide stammered. “I’ll shelter our mounts there, and see about getting a barge to Massilia in the morning.”

  Brenos scowled—the name of the ‘house’ was description enough—but did not protest the arrangement. “Then meet me here at the galley by the third hour. Tribune, I’m ready. Come along, Fiachra.”

  At the Via Bartolomei, Brenos squinted to the right, along a straight paved road. The crewman guide said it sloped up to Old Lugdunum, and the remains of its ancient Roman origins, but the driv
ing snow obscured the height in a veil of opaque white.

  Brenos and Fiachra were led to a two-story dwelling across from the brick basilican church. The building’s doorway was under a porch overhang, still free of snow. The abbot announced himself to the servant who answered the tinkle of the hanging bell. The man took them to a dining room, where a clergyman and his deacon were finishing supper.

  “Presbyter Diviciac, you have visitors,” the porter announced.

  Diviciac glanced up and stood to greet his unexpected guests, but Brenos introduced himself before the man could speak.

  “I am Brenos, abbot of the Monastery of Culdees at Autessiodurum. My secretary, Fiachra.”

  “An abbot? I’m honored”—Diviciac extended a hand—“and you’re…Hibernian.”

  “My accent betrays me, Presbyter?”

  “But not unpleasantly, Abbot. I’m Diviciac…this is my deacon, Epagnatos.” Brenos studied the thin-faced presbyter, who had intelligent brown eyes and a head that seemed larger than it was, due to a receding hairline, then heard him chuckle. “You look like snow creatures. Servilius, take their coats away to dry, move the brazier closer, and bring two more bowls and fresh bread. Refill the wine jug.”

  The servant left and Epagnatos took the opportunity to excuse himself as well. Brenos glanced around the room, which was cold despite the glowing charcoal on a portable grate. A faded mural of a pagan river god decorated one wall. A warehouse scene on another was cracked down the center. He guessed that the house might have once belonged to a merchant, and was very old, perhaps even dating from the time of the Nazarene.

  Servilius returned with the bread and wine, and an old woman who ladled thick soup from a tureen into the bowls.

  “Abbot, Secretary, sit down, please,” Diviciac urged. “I hope barley pottage is to your liking. Take bread.” He watched Servilius pour wine into the goblets. “Well-watered, I’m afraid. Times are hard for my parishioners.”

  Brenos murmured his thanks, then reached down with his spoon, scooped up ashes from the brazier and sprinkled them into his bowl, explaining, “Bishop Germanus observes this penance. I can do no less.”