Carver's Quest (47 page)

He heard a sound behind him and turned to find that Fields had emerged from his cell and was standing on the walkway.

‘Good morning, Professor. I trust that you slept well.’

‘I did not, Adam.’ Fields was flapping a hand in front of his face and looked to be in a cantankerous mood. ‘Perhaps you recall the story of Domitian and the flies? Of how he
spent days in seclusion doing nothing but catching flies and stabbing them with a sharpened stylus?’

‘I believe I do remember it. From Suetonius, is it not?’

‘I have often thought it a curious occupation for an emperor but, after a night amidst the insects of Agios Andreas, I can only wish that I possessed the same skills Domitian had. Do you
suppose it is possible to stab fleas as well as flies?’

‘It is probably an art that requires practice.’

‘We shall undoubtedly have the opportunity for much practice before we leave this wretched abode of penury and superstition. I am bitten half to death and I am filthy. I could see no means
of performing my toilet in that dingy stall they gave me.’

‘Cleanliness seems to be a virtue not much admired in monastic circles,’ Adam said.

‘The old bastards stink is what you mean.’ Quint had also left his cell and was standing by the wooden railings, scratching his stubbled chin and hitching up his trousers. ‘I
could smell ’em from yards off last night.’

‘These are holy men, Quint,’ Adam said. ‘Their concern is with their souls not with their bodies. Anyway, if truth be told, neither you nor I nor even the professor can lay
claim to great fragrance after traipsing the plains of Thessaly for several days.’

‘I can accept the bodily odours of the monks,’ Fields said. ‘Anyone who has spent any time in the Senior Common Room of a Cambridge college has learned to accustom himself to
the redolence of his fellow man. It is the insect life that I cannot abide.’

The same monk who had conducted them to their rooms the previous night now appeared to usher them towards their breakfasts. Beckoning the three of them to follow him, he set off along the
walkway. He took them down a short flight of stairs and into a stone-flagged corridor which led to a massive wooden door. The monk pushed it open and entered a room larger than any other they had
so far seen in Agios Andreas. Three long tables, with benches by them, stood within it. One crossed the room at its far end. The other two were set at right angles to it. In the far left-hand
corner was a lectern.

‘The refectory, I assume,’ the professor said, as Theophanes indicated by smiles and gestures that the far table was to be theirs. ‘And we are to be guests at their equivalent
of high table. The similarity to colleges by the Cam grows. Although I suspect the food may not be as appetising.’

‘But healthier, perhaps,’ Adam suggested.

An elderly monk with a beard of particular luxuriance was standing by the top table, bowing repeatedly.

‘This will be the hegumen.’ Fields examined the old monk as if he were some curious animal of which no specimen had previously come to his attention. ‘As ignorant as his
fellows, I have no doubt.’

The monk, smiling beatifically, continued to bow and nod.

‘The hegumen?’ Adam sounded momentarily puzzled. ‘Ah, the one in charge.’

‘The abbot, in effect.’

‘We must hope that he does not speak English, Professor. Or he might take offence at your words.’

‘He will be a monoglot Greek, I have no doubt.’ Fields, still staring at the hegumen like a visitor encountering one of the odder beasts in the Regent’s Park zoo for the first
time, was unabashed. ‘And his Greek will be some barbarous dialect that is barely comprehensible.’

Adam responded to the monk’s politeness with bows of his own and a greeting in Greek. The old man looked delighted to be addressed in his own language. He replied with a volley of swiftly
delivered remarks, few of which Adam was able to catch. They all took their seats and watched as the door opened again and the other monks trooped in together. Behind the
caloyeri
were
Rallis and his huge servant. Fields waved at the empty places on the bench and the two Greeks joined the Englishmen in their place of honour. Andros, struggling to accommodate his vast legs beneath
the table, made it rock gently on his knees before he was able to settle into his seat. Rallis, taking his place more gracefully, greeted his fellow travellers warmly. He bowed respectfully to the
hegumen. There was no trace of embarrassment in his manner, Adam noted, no suggestion that he knew they had witnessed his midnight excursion and his mysterious signalling or that, if he did know,
he cared greatly.

The young servant who had been present the previous day when the visitors were hauled up the rock now appeared, placing plates of dry bread and salt cheese in front of them. Another boy set
glasses and a tankard of red wine on the table. Adam picked up the tumbler he had been given for the wine and examined it in the dim light. It looked very ancient and bore on it several unmonastic
engravings of little cupids wrestling and shooting arrows. Was the tumbler Venetian, he wondered? It certainly looked to be. If it was, what roundabout journey had brought it to this remote spot?
As he was pondering this, one of the monks moved away from his companions and stood by the lectern. Opening the large and ancient Bible on it, he began to read aloud. His fellow monks were silent
but otherwise seemed to be paying little heed to him. Their attention looked to be more focused on the breakfast to come.

When, after a minute or two, the reader ceased speaking, closed the Bible and returned to his place, the others fell on the bread and cheese like men who had scarcely eaten that week. A slight
hum of hushed conversation rose from the monks’ table. From time to time, one of the younger
caloyeri
raised his head and looked at the visitors, but if Adam caught his eye, he
looked down immediately at his plate. The others seemed remarkably uninterested in anything other than their food. The hegumen continued to chatter cheerfully to Adam in Greek which the young man
found difficult to follow. The old man, he thought, was asking him about London. He wanted to know about the state of the monasteries there. Were they rich and well-populated? Adam laboured to
provide the hegumen with adequate answers to his enquiries. Fields, meanwhile, was taking the opportunity to question Rallis.

‘You have put forward our request to see the objects these monks possess?’ he asked.

‘I did so,’ the Greek replied. ‘But there was no need. The
hegu
menos
assumed that the only reason we travelled so far was that we wished to pay our respects
to the relics. He could imagine no other. He has agreed to show them to us later this morning.’

‘And their library?’

‘I believe that will also be included in the tour.’

* * * * *

Once breakfast was finished, the hegumen led his guests from the refectory. He beckoned them into a squat building that stood next to the chapel where Adam and Quint had admired
the wall paintings the previous night. The two servants were left outside. The hegumen ushered Adam, Fields and Rallis into a rectangular stone cell where the treasures of the monastery had been
laid out on a wooden desk for their inspection. From a cupboard in the corner, he took an embroidered stole and placed it round his neck. He waved his arm at the desk. The three visitors moved
closer to examine what was on it.

‘There are beautiful objects here,’ Adam remarked, pointing to a jewel-encrusted box.

The hegumen made encouraging noises as he did so, like a schoolmaster trying to embolden a bright but bashful pupil.

‘That is a very holy relic,’ Rallis said. ‘The monks believe it to be part of the body of Agios Andreas. Saint Andrew.’ He reached his right hand behind his neck and
tapped on his own back. ‘I do not know the name of it in English but it is here.’

‘The shoulder blade,’ Adam said.

‘Ah, the shoulder blade. Like the blade of the sword.’ Rallis smiled at the curiosities of the English language. ‘The monks believe they possess the shoulder blade of Agios
Andreas in the jewelled box. It is their greatest treasure.’

Fields grunted with distaste. ‘These Eastern Christians are worse than papists,’ he said. ‘All these saints’ bones. What else do they claim to hold here? The right hand
of St Thomas? Mary Magdalen’s left foot?’

‘They are not sophisticated, perhaps, Professor,’ Rallis said soothingly, ‘but their religious feelings are sincere.’

‘They are mired in unreason. In thrall to absurd superstitions. Do they seriously expect us to believe that bits and pieces of the body of Saint Andrew, a man who died eighteen hundred
years ago, are scattered about the monasteries of Greece and the Levant?’

‘The relic is certainly many centuries old.’ Rallis continued to speak to Fields in a placatory tone of voice. ‘The monks say it belonged once to the emperor Constantine
Porphyrogenitus. It was brought from Byzantium by the first abbot of the monastery.’

‘Nonsense,’ Fields barked. ‘It is as likely to be my grandmother’s shinbone as it is to be the shoulder blade of an apostle.’

If the hegumen realised, from the professor’s voice, that the relic was not proving a success with one of his visitors at least, he gave no sign. Instead, he pointed to the wall behind the
desk where an image of the Madonna, wide-eyed and solemn, looked down on them.

‘Holy Mother,’ he said in English, gesturing towards the icon. They all peered at it, the professor still tutting with irritation.

‘The painting has been damaged, I see,’ Adam remarked, indicating an area on the Virgin’s gown which had clearly been repaired.

Seeing Adam’s gesture, the hegumen launched himself on an excited speech in Greek which only Rallis could follow.

‘It was a very bad man who did that, he is saying. A soldier, many years ago. He struck the icon with his sword. The Holy Mother began to bleed.’

Fields snorted in derision.

‘She bled for many days. Only when the bad man repented and confessed his crimes did she stop. He became a very good man. He threw away his sword and became a monk himself. He died a
saint.’

‘Is there no limit to the fatuities these people will believe?’ the professor asked of no one in particular.

‘She does not bleed any more.’

‘I should think not!’

‘But she does weep.’

‘Oh, I will hear no more of this!’

Fields was, by this time, in a paroxysm of exasperation. He turned his back on the icon and moved as far away from it as he could in the confined space of the room. The old monk, apparently
baffled by the professor’s behaviour, looked reproachfully at him.

‘She wept in the wars forty years and more ago when the Greeks were defeated,’ Rallis went on. ‘And when the monasteries were obliged to remain within the lands of the Turks.
The
hegumenos
is too young to remember this but the oldest monk, Brother Donatus, saw the lady weep. He can tell you about it.’

‘He need not bother himself,’ the professor said, from his position in the corner of the room. ‘We have no interest in these preposterous superstitions.’

The hegumen had finished his short lecture. He picked up the icon and kissed it reverently before returning it to the table.

‘Do they have no books or manuscripts to show us?’ Fields had returned from his sulk but he was still beside himself with impatience and irritation. ‘Do they think we have come
all this way to look at ham-fisted daubs of the Virgin Mary and the scapulae of the long dead?’

‘These monks are not learned men, Professor,’ Rallis said. ‘Mostly they are peasants and artisans. They are ignorant and uneducated. The relics and the icons they love but the
books in their library often mean little to them. Some of them can barely read.’

‘But they continue to look after them,’ Adam interrupted.

‘Not with any great efficacy, I would conjecture,’ the professor said. ‘Any volume that we get to see will doubtless be ruined by damp and neglect.’

‘They tend their gardens because they relish the food that comes from them,’ Rallis said. ‘They do not so much relish the food of the mind. They tend their books only because
the monks here have always done so. They respect them for their antiquity.’

‘The books and manuscripts should be removed from the monasteries and from the hands of these ignorant men,’ the professor said. ‘Otherwise mice and mildew will destroy
them.’

The hegumen, who had been waiting in polite silence, now spoke swiftly to Rallis. He had clearly understood at least something of what had been said.

‘They do not keep their books here,’ the lawyer interpreted.

‘Their library is elsewhere. Perhaps, the
hegumenos
says, it will be possible to see it later. But now he must return the relics to their places of safe keeping.’

* * * * *

‘The
hegumenos
was distressed by the lack of respect the professor showed to the relics and to the icon of the Holy Mother.’ Rallis and Adam were talking
together in the latter’s room. Fields, still muttering to himself about the childish gullibility of the monks, had retired to read his Thucydides. The two servants, when Adam had last seen
them, had been sitting on a stone wall above a precipitous drop, playing cards. Quint had been endeavouring, with little success, to teach Andros the rudiments of three-stake brag. ‘He cannot
bring himself to show more treasures to such a disrespectful man.’

‘Aha, Fields has shot himself in the foot, has he?’ Adam could not help but feel a little amusement that the professor’s bad temper had rebounded upon him. ‘With his
inability to stay quiet?’

‘So it would seem. But the
hegumenos
was impressed by the reverence you showed to the relics. He speaks a little English. He understood that you were asking about the
books.’

‘He will let us see them?’

‘Only you and I are to see them. Not the professor. He will send Brother Demetrios to open the library for us.’

‘Demetrios? The monk who helped me to my feet after that wretched journey up the rockface? I shall be almost as pleased to see him again as I was to see him the first time.’