[Getorius and Arcadia 01] - The Secundus Papyrus

by Albert Noyer

  The air inside the small room was damp, and as cold as that of outdoors, but it smelled of mold and rotting food, instead of the pungent evergreens and frost-speckled earth of the garden. Arcadia’s leather boots were instantly saturated with icy water that soaked a layer of pine needles, which had been laid down to absorb the wetness. A high window admitted a feeble light from a torch set outside on the opposite wall. The glow reminded her that she had forgotten to bring a lamp. You fool…totally unprepared for this. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, a flicker of lights on the left became apparent, above an oblong box. Deacons had left small vigil candles burning on the storage shelf behind the wooden coffin in which the monk’s body lay.

  After she came closer, Arcadia detected a faint odor of spices coming from the bier, instead of the stronger smell of putrefaction she had braced herself to expect. She thought that might help ease the grisly task ahead.

  “Behan,” she whispered, taking the golden case out from under her cloak, “as I said, you brought this with you and now you’ll take it back.”

  After loosening the cylinder’s cover, Arcadia placed the tube on the back shelf, then moved the vigil candles closer to the edge, so she could see better. The oak coffin was set on two barrels, bringing its top up to the height of her waist. She was relieved to see that the lid was pegged down only part way, probably because the bishop would ask the abbot to identify Behan before his burial. She blew on her cold fingers to restore circulation, and thought back to the night she had helped her husband dissect the corpse of Marios.

  Getorius had begun to feel sick at what he was doing. Will I really be able to go through with this? What must Behan look like after being in the water so long?

  Arcadia sucked in a breath and pulled up on the nearest peg. The squarish dowel held fast. Damp air had swollen the wood and expanded it in its retaining hole.

  Blessed Cosmas. Please.

  It took Arcadia half an hour, broken fingernails, and the sides of her thumbs and index fingers scraped raw before she was able to coax the six stubborn pegs loose. By then she was shaking, both from the exertion, and from the dread of realizing that the most horrifying part of her task still lay ahead.

  The oak lid was heavy. After struggling to slide the cover off, Arcadia managed to lean it against the coffin’s side. The smell of putrefaction was stronger now, almost strong enough to overpower the sweetness of the powdered spikenard, myrrh, and cassia bark that had been sprinkled on the corpse. Balsam branches covered the body. She slowly removed the evergreens, laid them on the wet floor, took a candle off the shelf, brought it closer and forced herself to look at the dead monk.

  The deacons had dressed Behan in a new tunic of undyed gray wool and covered his face with a linen cloth.

  “Mercifully so for us, Cosmas,” Arcadia murmured, hoping that a whispered conversation with the patron of physicians would bolster her courage. “Bloated features that have been soaking in river water for almost seven weeks would not be a pleasant sight, would they?”

  Arcadia set the candle down, clenched her jaw, and lifted the monk’s robe. Above a loincloth, the dark cavity from which the organs had been excised by the embalmers yawned open. She wished she had taken a more active part in the animal dissections Getorius performed, rather than relying on him to tell her only as much as he felt she should know. Now she was faced with an abdominal cavity that was exposed down to the posterior tissues.

  The deacons had sprinkled the three fragrant spices inside the cavity to help control the stench of decay, but in any case Arcadia’s sense of revulsion was tempered by admiration for the clean way the Egyptian priests had taken out the organs. Herodotus described how embalmers cut along a body’s flank with a sharpened Ethiopian stone. If the Isis priests followed tradition she thought they might have used a blade of black volcanic glass—the obsius mentioned by the Elder Pliny.

  Struggling to stem a rising sense of nausea in her throat, Arcadia took the Celtic case and worked it lengthwise into the cavity, then angled it up until it pushed against a collarbone and the base rested on the pelvic wall.

  “Cosmas, our cylinder fits! Now all we need do is sew the opening together, replace the lid, and get out of this charnel house without being seen.”

  With stiff, cold fingers, Arcadia fumbled in her purse and found the suturing needle she had already threaded with silk. Her raw bruises stung and her hands were numb from handling the chill metal case. She made an attempt to warm her fingers by passing them over the candle flames, but, nervous at being discovered, decided she could not delay any longer.

  Tears blurred her vision as she strained to pull together the cold, shrunken flaps of abdominal skin. They finally joined, but although she began suturing the tissues using the technique Getorius had shown her, she became impatient to close the gap, and finished with a stitch she had learned as a girl in working with cloth.

  By the time Arcadia completed the closure her fingers were as hard and white as marble. The sour taste of bile coated her throat. She smoothed down Behan’s tunic without rechecking the sutures, then clasped her frigid hands a moment in the relative warmth of her armpits.

  Levering the heavy coffin lid back into position further drained Arcadia’s strength. She began shivering uncontrollably. Her feet were deadened from standing in the icy water. Half-limping to the door, she opened it and stepped outside to gulp in the clean night air. After pushing the portal shut, she turned to lean against a porch column, retching in painful heaves, and blew on her bruised fingers.

  “Cosmas, we’ve still got to get back to Getorius’ room,” she murmured, after wiping her mouth on a sleeve. “Help me.”

  At the end of the portico, Arcadia turned onto the garden path, and was shocked when she bumped into someone in the dim torchlight. She gave a reflexive gasp of fright, and was stunned when she recognized Heraclius. A disheveled, ascetic-looking man with him held a lantern higher so the eunuch could see who had collided with him. Heraclius squinted at Arcadia, and his soft, fleshy features hardened into a scowl.

  “Ah, the woman ‘surgeon’,” he said without concealing the sneer in his tone. “What are you doing here at night?”

  “I…I was given permission to stay with my husband.”

  Heraclius glanced around in mock surprise. “Your husband has strange bedroom arrangements. No, woman. Look at your wet shoes. Why were you in the ice storage room?”

  Arcadia could think of nothing except to tell the truth. “I…I couldn’t let that poor monk be buried without…without suturing his wound closed.”

  “You, a woman?” the eunuch’s companion snarled. “I am Brenos, abbot at Culdees. You dared touch the flesh of one of my holy men?”

  “I…had already examined Behan with my husband, after he drowned.”

  “And how did you enter tonight, to perform this charity?”

  Heraclius’ question reminded Arcadia that she had not relocked the door. Under the circumstances a lie might be acceptable to Cosmas. “The door was unbolted,” she replied as evenly as possible. “Perhaps a…a slave was careless.”

  “Perhaps, also, you will show the abbot and me the example of your brilliant needlework?” The eunuch’s voice had lost none of its sarcasm.

  “Of…of course.”

  At the ice room door, Heraclius grunted after he saw the bolt pushed to one side. Once inside, he pulled out the wooden pegs and eased aside the coffin lid.

  One last favor, Cosmas, Arcadia silently prayed. Don’t let his light reveal a bulge in Behan’s abdomen.

  While Heraclius held the lantern, Brenos moved aside the evergreen branches, then lifted the monk’s robe and peered underneath. He eyed the sewn-up wound a moment, gave a snort, and flipped down the material in a gesture of irritated frustration.

  After forming a mental thanks to Cosmas, Arcadia exhaled quietly. As the abbot turned and stalked out of the room, she heard his sandals make an absurd squishing sound on the soggy pine needles and choked back a nervous laugh. Herac
lius glared at her, then followed Brenos outside.

  At the door Arcadia watched the two men disappear in the direction of the palace’s second story, where the library and hospital were located.

  They’re looking for the papyri. If Heraclius is a partner in the conspiracy and is searching the palace, Behan made a poor choice in recruiting him. Placidia loathes the man and would never allow him in her private rooms, where he might expect the documents to be found. How ironic that a plan which probably took years to devise might fail by a matter of fractions of an hour.

  When Arcadia eased herself into Getorius’ room, the twin-spouted oil lamp was burning, but Getorius was still asleep. She desperately wanted to call a servant and have hot water brought in—a bath was out of the question—but contented herself with rinsing her hands and bruised fingers in the icy water of the room’s bronze washbasin. She wiped them over and over again on a hand towel until their greasy feel was lessened, if not gone completely. The dank feel of the ice room and its smell of decay would take longer to leave her. Trembling from the strain of her ordeal, Arcadia lay down on the bed, pulling her cloak over herself. The movement woke her husband.

  “Arcadia? Where have you been?” he demanded, sitting up and looking at her. “You’re dressed again and…and your shoes are soaking wet.”

  “I went outside to look at the December stars,” she hedged, slipping her injured fingers under her cloak. “I met Heraclius with that abbot in the garden.”

  “Heraclius? How would Heraclius know…what did I hear his name was, Brenos?”

  “Yes, the abbot told me.”

  “How would a holy man like Brenos know Valentinian’s castrated procurer?”

  “Getorius. Don’t talk like that.”

  “I don’t trust the man. Or what there is left of a man in Arcadia let the comment pass, but sat up on the edge of the bed, laid aside her cloak and removed the wet boots. “We guessed that there had to be accomplices in the palace, Getorius. Who better than Heraclius, who must have a passkey to every room? Both were headed toward the library.”

  “They probably ransacked Theokritos’ room and his office. We are fortunate that Charadric got there first.” Getorius looked over at the tabletop. “Arcadia, where is the case…the two papyri?”

  “Y…you said you’d trust me, Getorius.”

  “They aren’t here? Arcadia, what have you done? You can’t just destroy them.”

  “I’ve promised not to,” she snapped and slipped down under the blanket. “I’m tired. May I get some sleep now?”

  Getorius shrugged. The smell of their lovemaking was still in the bed, but was now augmented by an inexplicable scent of spices. Why destroy that pleasant memory with an argument? He lay down beside his wife and slipped an arm over her shoulder.

  Just before the dawn watch, Charadric rapped at the door. Arcadia would have to leave until the order for Getorius’ release came through.

  She combed her hair before going outside. Behan’s funeral was only a few hours away. Would anyone have occasion to open the coffin again before that?

  “I’ll let you know what happens at Behan’s funeral,” she told her husband, then hurried out before he could notice the bruises on her fingers. him.”

  Chapter twenty-four

  At the second hour after sunrise on December twenty-fourth, Getorius answered a knock on the door of the room where he was confined. Heraclius stood outside, together with a gaunt man who looked seriously ill.

  “Surgeon,” the eunuch said in his high-pitched, womanish voice, “this is Brenos, from the monastery of Culdees. The abbot is ill from his winter journey. His right side is especially tender.”

  “Then he should see Antioches. I have no medical supplies here.”

  “Surgeon, you must examine him,” Heraclius insisted, pushing his way into the room. “Brenos is to give the eulogy for his dead monk, Behan, this morning. Prescribe a potion for the abbot’s fever.”

  “Very well. Abbot, sit down on the bed.” So this is the man who may be responsible for the forged will. Arcadia said she saw him with Heraclius last night. Brenos is obviously ill, but perhaps both men are here to see how much I know about the papyri. “I can probably get you arctium for the fever,” Getorius told him after feeling his face and forehead, “but what happened to your side?”

  “Chafed from carrying a case with…that held my valuables for the journey.”

  “An incredible accomplishment. You came all that distance from Gaul just to bury your monk.”

  “As the Nazarene commanded us.”

  Nazarene. Both the letter of Peter and the will papyrus used that archaic title in referring to Christ. That’s a definite connection with this man. “Abbot, you’ll have to lift your robe so I can examine the wound.” After Brenos complied, Getorius removed a dirty linen rag that was tied around the raw area. An inflamed area the size of his palm suppurated pus. “A very nasty wound, Abbot, the main source of your fever, but both your hot-cold and wet-dry humors are also seriously out of balance. I’m ordering an immediate warm bath, then the hospital sisters can apply a boiled symphytum root poultice to this wound—”

  “Impossible,” Brenos objected, standing and tugging down his robe. “I’m to be at Behan’s funeral in two hours.”

  “I advise against it, Abbot, you need medical treatment immediately. Can’t you write down something for the bishop to say?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps the abbot could return immediately after the funeral,” Heraclius suggested.

  “If it’s that important.”

  “I assure you it is, Surgeon,” Brenos insisted. “Behan, unfortunately, died before he could preach a p—”

  “Preach penitence,” Heraclius quickly interposed. “Come, Abbot, we must make you more presentable for the funeral.”

  Strange birds, to flock together, Getorius thought, as he watched the two turn the corner into the atrium corridor. How had this Brenos connected with the emperor’s eunuch so quickly? The abbot had arrived in time for the Nativity, and Heraclius would be a powerful ally in a conspiracy. Arcadia had suspected as much, but Getorius couldn’t talk to her about it yet. She would be away all morning attending the last rites for Behan.

  Because the Basilica Ursiana was being prepared for Nativity services, Behan’s funeral had been scheduled to take place in the church of Saint John the Evangelist. Galla Placidia had commissioned the smaller basilica as a votive offering to fulfill a vow she had made to the Apostle sixteen years earlier, after returning to Ravenna from Constantinople for the funeral of her half-brother Honorius. During a storm on the Adriatic, between Aquileia and the capital, she had prayed to John for her survival and that of her small son and daughter. “…Galla Placidia cum filio suo Placido Valentiniano et filia sua Iusta Grata Honoria Augusta liberationis periculorum maris votum solverunt,” read her dedicatory inscription. It definitively told everyone that her offering of the basilica to the Apostle had dissolved her debt to him for being rescued from the dangers of the sea. To make the votive more graphic, Placidia had ordered the miraculous rescue to be depicted among the mosaics in the apse.

  Bishop Chrysologos, who had dedicated the basilica, was disturbed that it had since become the only island of Nicene orthodoxy in Ravenna’s port quarter, an area that was known as a refuge for Arian heretics. Three blocks north was the sect’s Church of the Resurrection, administered by a woman presbytera named Thecla.

  Arcadia stood in the nave of the Basilica of John the Evangelist, behind the first scattered row of citizens who had come for Behan’s funeral. None had known the reclusive monk, so most came out of curiosity to hear a eulogy by the Hibernian abbot from far-off Gaul.

  Beyond Behan’s oak coffin, sunlight filtered through alabaster windowpanes, illuminating the nave and apse mosaics with a soft glow. On the central arch, two scenes of Placidia’s rescue at sea flanked a picture of Christ giving the Book of Revelation to John the Evangelist. Below her apse votive inscription, members of
the imperial family—Arcadius, Eudocia with Theodosius ii and their daughter Licinia Eudoxia, now the wife of Valentinian III—were shown in mosaics, on each side of Bishop Chrysologos, as he celebrated the dedicatory Mass in the company of an angel.

  Arcadia felt good despite her ordeal in the icehouse. A deacon had arrived earlier that morning with the message that Getorius would be released after the midday watch, in a Nativity amnesty granted by the bishop.

  She looked up again at the mosaics. Despite the troubled times, the elegant, formalized portraits were reassuring symbols of Roma Aeterna, Eternal Rome, a state and government, but also an attitude of mind that had endured for twelve hundred years. Neither disastrous defeats in war, civil anarchy, bloody dictatorships, mutinous legions, nor recurring barbarian invasions had destroyed the concept of Romanitas, a semi-mystical “Roman-ness” that survived and rose again, phoenix-like, after each calamity.

  Constantine had hoped that the growing influence of Christians would act as a unifying force to institute a Pax Christiana, which would rival the Golden Age of Augustus as both a temporal and spiritual empire. It was ironic, Arcadia thought, that Christian fanatics like those who destroyed pagan temples and libraries and had murdered the Alexandrian woman philosopher Hypatia, went against Constantine’s vision of peace. And now this Hibernian abbot was attempting to bring about the horrifying apocalyptic vision in John’s book.

  Arcadia stroked her bruised fingers, where fragile scabs were forming, and glanced at Bishop Chrysologos sitting on a cedar wood throne behind the altar table. The golden light coming in through seven apse windows silhouetted the bishop, his presbyters, and deacons in a heavenly radiance.