The Sheen on the Silk (8 page)

Palombara looked forward to the challenge of it, and the adventure. It would stretch his intelligence, test his judgment, and, if he was successful, considerably advance his career. And he also looked forward to being immersed in a new culture. The great buildings were still left, the Hagia Sophia, at least, and the libraries, the markets with all the spices, silks, and artifacts of the East. He would enjoy a different lifestyle, more of the Arab and the Jewish thought, and of course more of the Greek than was easy to find here in Rome.

But he would miss what he was leaving behind. Rome was the city of the Caesars, the heart of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Even St. Paul had been proud to claim its citizenship.

But Palombara was also an intruder here, a Tuscan, not a Roman, and he missed the beauty of his own land. He loved the long view of rolling hills, so many of them forested. He missed the light on them at dawn, the color of sunset and shadow, the silence of the olive groves.

He smiled as he walked toward the wide steps. He was halfway up when he realized that one of the men standing waiting was Niccolo Vicenze, his pale, zealous eyes studying Palombara.

He looked at Vicenze’s dour face with its pale brows and felt a chill of warning.

Vicenze smiled with his lips, his eyes unchanging as he moved into Palombara’s path. “I have our instructions from the Holy Father,” he said with no inflection in his voice except a slight lift. It almost hid his satisfaction. “But no doubt you would like the Holy Father’s blessing upon you also, before we leave.”

In one sentence he had made Palombara redundant: an escort, there simply because one was customary.

“How considerate of you,” Palombara replied, as if Vicenze had been a servant who had obliged him beyond his duty.

Vicenze looked momentarily confused. Their natures were so utterly disparate that they could have used the same words to convey opposite meanings.

“It will be a great achievement to bring Byzantium back into the true Church,” Vicenze added.

“Let us hope we can accomplish it,” Palombara observed dryly, then saw the gleam in Vicenze’s pale eyes and wished he had not been so candid. There were seldom meanings behind meaning with Vicenze, only the obsession for control and conformity. It was a strangely inhuman trait of character. Was it holiness, the dedication of a saintly man, or the madness of one who had not too much love of God so much as too little of mankind? Since he last saw him, he had forgotten how much he disliked Vicenze.

“We will be equal to the task. We will not cease until we are,” Vicenze said slowly, giving each word weight. Perhaps he had a sense of humor after all.

Palombara stood in the sun and watched Vicenze walk down the steps and into the square with a slight swagger, papers in his hand. Then he turned and went up past the guard and into the coolness of the shadowed hall.

BY SEPTEMBER, ANNA HAD DISCOVERED MORE INFORMATION about both Antoninus and Justinian himself, but what she had found all seemed superficial, and she could see in it no meaning or connection with the murder of Bessarion. There seemed nothing the three men all had in common except a dislike for the proposed union with Rome.

From all accounts, Bessarion had been not only serious-minded, but extremely sober of nature and spoke often and with great passion about the doctrine and history of the Orthodox Church. While respected, even admired, he allowed no intimacy. She felt an unwilling flicker of sympathy for Helena.

Like Bessarion, Justinian was a member of an imperial family, but much further from the center of it. Unlike Bessarion, he had no inherited wealth. His importing business was necessary for his survival, and he appeared to have succeeded with it, although with his exile all his property had been forfeited. The merchants of the city and ships’ captains in the harbors all still knew his name. They were shocked that he had stooped to murder Bessarion. They had not only trusted Justinian, they had liked him.

It was hard for Anna to listen and control her sense of loss. The bitter loneliness inside her was so vast, it threatened to tear through her skin.

Antoninus had been a soldier. It was far more difficult for her to learn more of him. The few soldiers she treated spoke well of him, but he had been their senior in rank, and all they knew was repute and hearsay. He was strict and he was unquestionably brave. He enjoyed wine and a good joke-not the sort of man Bessarion would have liked.

But Justinian would. It made no sense, no pattern.

She sought the only person she trusted-Bishop Constantine. He had helped Justinian, even at risk to his own safety.

He welcomed her into a smaller room in his house than the warm, ocher one with the marvelous icons. This had cooler earth tones and looked down at a courtyard. The murals were pastoral, with muted colors. The floor was green-tiled, and there was a table set for dining and two chairs beside it. At his insistence, she sat in one of them to leave sufficient space for him to walk gently back and forth, deep in thought.

“You ask about Bessarion,” he said, absentmindedly smoothing his fingers over the embroidered silk of his dalmatica. “He was a good man, but perhaps lacking the fire to stir men’s souls. He weighed, he measured, he judged. How can a man be at once so passionate of mind and so indecisive?”

“Was he a coward?” she asked quietly.

A look of sadness came across Constantine’s face. It was several moments before he spoke again. “I presumed he was simply cautious.” He crossed himself. “God forgive them all. They wished for so much, and all to save the true Church from the dominion of Rome, and the pollution of the faith that will bring.”

She echoed his sign of the cross. She wanted more than anything else to lay the burden of her own guilt at God’s feet and seek His absolution. She remembered her dead husband, Eustathius, with a coldness that still struck: the quarrel, the isolation, the blood, and then the never-ending grief. She would never carry another child. She was fortunate to have healed without crippling. She ached to tell Constantine, to spread all her guilt before him and be cleansed, whatever penance was necessary. But the confession of her imposture would rob her of any chance to help Justinian. There was no punishment fixed for such an offense, it would fall under other laws, but it would be harsh. No one liked to be made a fool of.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. A young priest came in, white-faced and struggling to control his emotion.

“What is it?” Constantine said. “Are you ill? Anastasius is a physician.” He gestured briefly to include Anna.

The priest waved a thin hand. “I am well enough. No physician can heal what ails us all. The envoys are back from Lyons. It was a complete capitulation! They gave up everything! Appeals to the pope, money, the filioque clause.” Tears glistened in his eyes.

Constantine stared at the priest, his face white with horror. Then slowly the blood suffused his skin. “Cowards!” he snarled between his teeth. “What did they bring back with them-thirty pieces of silver?”

“Safety from the crusading armies when they pass this way on their path to Jerusalem,” the priest said wretchedly, his voice quavering.

Anna knew this was a higher reward than perhaps this young priest understood. With a chill passing through her, she remembered Zoe Chrysaphes and the terror that so clearly still haunted her when she felt the flame sear her skin, seventy years afterward.

Constantine was watching her. “They have no faith!” he snapped, his lips drawn back in contempt. “Do you know what happened when we were besieged by barbarians, but kept our faith with the Holy Virgin, and carried her image in our hearts and before our eyes? Do you?”

“Yes.” Anna’s father had told her the story many times, his eyes wistful, half smiling.

Constantine was waiting, standing with his arms spread out, his pale robes splendid in the light. He looked enormous, intimidating.

“The barbarian armies stood before the city,” Anna recounted obediently. “We were vastly outnumbered. Their leader rode forward on his horse, a huge, heavy man, savage as an animal. The emperor went out to meet him, carrying the icon of the Virgin Mary before him. The barbarian leader was struck dead on the spot, and his army fled. Not one of our men was injured and not a stone of the city broken.” Such perfect faith still gave her a strange bubble of excitement inside, as if a warmth had broken open within her. She did not know if the year or the details were exact, but she believed the spirit of it.

“You knew it,” Constantine said triumphantly. “And also when we were besieged by the Avars in 626, we carried the icon of the Blessed Virgin along the halls, and the siege was raised.” He turned to the priest, his face glowing. “Then why is it that the envoys of our emperor, who styles himself ‘Equal of the Apostles,’ do not? How can he even bargain with the devil, let alone yield to him? It’s not the barbarians who will defeat us this time, it’s our own doubt.”

His hands clenched. “We are not conquered by the hordes of Charles of Anjou, or even the liars and hucksters of Rome, but betrayed by our own princes who have lost their faith in Christ and the Holy Virgin.” He swung around to Anna. “You understand, don’t you?”

She saw a desperate loneliness in his eyes. “Michael does not speak for the people,” he said in little more than a whisper. “If we believe enough, we’ll be strong; we may persuade them to trust in God.”

Emotion thickened his voice. “Help me, Anastasius. Be strong. Help me keep the faith we have nurtured and guarded for a thousand years.”

The passions churned inside her, conflicting faith and guilt, love of the beautiful and loathing of the darkness within herself, the memories of hate.

Constantine was quick, sensitive, as if he could taste Anna’s turmoil, even without understanding it. “Be strong,” he urged, his voice now gentle. “You have a great work in your hands. God will help you, if only you believe.”

She was startled. “How? I have no calling.”

“Of course you have,” he answered. “You are a healer. You are the left hand of the priest, the mender of the body, the comforter of pain, the silencer of fears. Speak truth to those to whom you minister. The word of God can heal all ills, protect from the darkness without-but even more, from that within.”

“I will,” she whispered. “We can turn the tide. We will look to God, not to Rome.”

Constantine smiled. He lifted his large white hand in the sign of the cross.

Behind him, the thin young priest echoed it.

“We’d know what to do about it if Justinian were here,” Simonis said grimly as Anna later stood in the warm, herb-scented kitchen, telling her the news. “It’s a disgrace, a blasphemy.” Simonis took a deep breath and turned away from the table to face Anna. “What else have you learned about this Bessarion? We’ve been here almost a year and a half, and his real murderer is still free. Someone must know!” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, her face pinched with guilt. She resumed her work slicing onions and mixing them with aromatic leaves.

“If I’m clumsy, I could make it worse,” Anna tried to explain. “As you said, whoever really killed Bessarion is still here.”

Simonis froze, her body stiffening. “Are you in danger?”

“I don’t think so,” Anna replied. “But you are right. I should look more closely at money. Bessarion was very wealthy, but I can’t find even a whisper that he came by it at anyone else’s cost. He doesn’t seem to have cared very much. He was all about faith.”

“And power,” Simonis added. “Perhaps you should look at that?”

“I will, although I can’t see that it has anything to do with Justinian or Antoninus.”

PALOMBARA AND VICENZE WERE HELD UP BY BAD WEATHER as the year waned and did not reach Constantinople until November. But their first formal duty would be to witness the signing by the emperor and the bishops of the Orthodox Church of the agreement reached at the Council of Lyons. This was to take place on January 16 of the following year, 1275. After that, they would continue as papal legates to Byzantium. It was the job of each to report to His Holiness upon the other, which made the whole exercise a juggling act of lies, evasions, and power.

As envoys of the pope, it was expected that they would live well. Neither humility nor abstinence was expected of them, and their choice of house immediately made even more obvious the differences in their characters.

“This is magnificent,” Vicenze said approvingly of a great house not far from the Blachernae Palace, which would be made available to them at a reasonable price. “No one calling here will mistake our mission or whom we represent.” He stood in the middle of the tessellated floor and surveyed the exquisitely painted walls, the arched ceiling with its perfect proportions, and the ornate pillars.

Palombara looked at it with distaste. “It’s expensive,” he agreed. “But it’s vulgar. I think it’s new.”

“Would you prefer some nice Aretino castle, perhaps? Familiar and comfortable?” Vicenze said sarcastically. “All little stones and sharp angles?”

“I would like something a little less brash,” Palombara replied, trying to keep the coldness out of his voice. Vicenze was from Florence, which had been engaged in a bitter artistic and political rivalry with Arezzo for years. He knew that was what lay behind the remark.

Vicenze regarded him sourly. “This will impress people. And it is convenient. We can walk to most of the places we shall need to go. It is near the palace the emperor lives in now.”

Palombara turned around slowly, his eyes stopping at the heavily crowned pillars. “They will think we are barbarians. It’s money without taste.”

Vicenze’s long, bony face was bleak with incomprehension and a growing impatience. He considered preoccupation with the arts to be effete, a digression from the work of God. “It doesn’t matter whether they like us or not, only whether they believe what we say.”

Palombara settled to the conflict with a sense of satisfaction. The man was obedient without imagination, and dogged as an animal following a scent. In fact, there was something faintly canine in the way he sniffed. Vicenze sought nothing but a sterile, obedient power for himself.

“It is ugly,” Palombara insisted with harshness in his voice. “The other house, to the north, has grace of proportion, and quite sufficient room for us. And we can see the Golden Horn from the windows.”

“To what purpose?” Vicenze asked, his face completely innocent.

“We are here to learn, not to teach,” Palombara said, as if explaining to someone slow of wit. “We wish people to feel comfortable when we speak with them, and let down their guard. We need to know them.”

“Know your enemy,” Vicenze said with a slight smile, as if the answer had satisfied him. He conceded to Palombara’s choice of a more modest house.

“Our brothers in Christ!” Palombara retorted. “Temporarily alienated,” he added dryly, the humor there only to please himself.

Palombara set out to explore the city, which in spite of the winter weather, brisk winds off the water, and occasional rain, he found fascinating. It was not particularly cold, and he was perfectly comfortable to walk. A Roman bishop’s dress was not remarkable here in streets where so many nations and faiths passed one another every day. After a long day of studious walking, he was exhausted and his feet were blistered, but he understood the broad layout of the city.

The following day he was stiff, to Vicenze’s sarcastic pleasure. But the day after, ignoring blisters, he wandered in his own neighborhood. The weather was fine, with bright sun and little wind. The streets were narrow, old, and bustling, not unlike the Roman ones he was accustomed to.

He bought lunch from a peddler and ate it while watching two old men playing chess. The board was set out on a table barely large enough to hold it. The carved wooden pieces were worn from use and darkened with the natural oils of the hands that had held them.

One old man had a lean face, a white beard, and black eyes almost hidden in the wrinkles of his skin. The other was bearded also, but nearly bald. They played with total dedication, oblivious to the world around them. Other people passed by, children shouted across the street, donkey carts rumbled over the stones. A peddler asked them if they wished for anything and was not heard.

Palombara watched their faces and saw the intense pleasure in them, an almost fierce joy at the intricacy of the mental battle. He waited for a full hour until it was finished. The thin man won and ordered the best wine in the house and fresh bread, goat cheese, and dried fruit so they could both celebrate, which they did with as great a delight as they had in playing.

He returned earlier the next day and watched the game from the beginning. This time the other man won, but there was just the same celebration at the end.

Suddenly he was overwhelmed by the arrogance of coming here to tell old men like these what they should believe. He stood up and walked away into the wind and sun, too disturbed in mind to think clearly; yet the ideas raced in his head.

One day in early January, having forced himself to work with Vicenze on the coming signing of the agreement, Palombara escaped to a public restaurant.

He sat deliberately close to another table where two middle-aged men were involved in a fierce debate on the Byzantines’ favorite subject-religion. One of the men observed Palombara listening and immediately drew him in, asking his opinion.

“Yes,” the other added eagerly. “What do you think?”

Palombara considered for several seconds before plunging in with a quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas, the brilliant theologian who had died on his way to the Council of Lyons.

“Ah!” the first man said quickly. “Doctor Angelicus! Very good. Do you agree that his choosing to stop his own greatest work, the Summa Theologica, was right?”

Palombara was taken aback. He hesitated.

“Good!” the man said with a brilliant smile. “You don’t know. That is the beginning of wisdom. Didn’t he say that all he had written was as straw compared with what he had seen in a vision?”

“Albertus Magnus, who knew him well, said that his works would fill the world,” his friend argued. He swung around to Palombara. “He was Italian, may God rest his soul. Did you know him?”

Palombara remembered meeting him once: a large man, corpulent, dark-skinned, and immensely courteous. One could not help but like him. “Yes,” he answered, and described the occasion and what had been said.

The second man seized on it as if he had found a treasure, and both attacked the ideas with intense enjoyment. Then they immediately moved on to discuss Francis of Assisi and his refusal to be ordained. Was that good or bad, arrogance or humility?

Palombara was delighted. The free-flowing urgency of it was like the wind off an ocean, erratic, undisciplined, dangerous, but sweeping in from an endless horizon. It was not until he was joined unexpectedly by Vicenze that suddenly he realized how far he had strayed from the accepted doctrine.

Having overheard some of the conversation, Vicenze interrupted in a tone barely civil, saying that he had urgent news and Palombara was to come immediately. Since it was merely an acquaintance fallen into by chance, Palombara had no excuse to finish the discussion. He pardoned himself reluctantly and walked out into the street with Vicenze, angry and frustrated, startled by his sense of loss.

“What is this news?” he asked coldly. He resented not only the interruption, but the high-handed manner in which Vicenze had made it, and now his tight-lipped expression of disapproval.

“We have been summoned to present ourselves to the emperor,” Vicenze replied. “I have been arranging this, while you have been philosophizing with atheists. Try to remember: You serve the pope!”

“I would like to think I serve God,” Palombara said quietly.

“I would like to think you do, too,” Vicenze retaliated. “But I doubt it.”

Palombara changed the subject. “Why does the emperor wish to see us?”

“If I knew what he wanted, I would have told you,” Vicenze snapped.

Palombara didn’t think so, but it was not worth an argument.

Their audience with Emperor Michael Palaeologus was held in the Blachernae Palace. To Palombara, who had learned a little of its history, the glories of the past seemed to haunt the air like bright ghosts lost in the grayer present.

All the walls he passed had once been without blemish, inlaid with porphyry and alabaster, hung with icons. Every niche had had its statue or its bronze. Some of the greatest works of art in the world had stood here, marbles of Phidias and Praxiteles from the classical age before Christ.

He had seen the smoke stains of the crusader invasion in the city and was ashamed of it. Here he saw the scars of poverty also: the tapestries unmended, the mosaics with broken pieces, columns and pilasters chipped. For all their pretense in serving God, what barbarians of the heart the crusaders were. There were many kinds of unbelief.

They were conducted into the presence of the emperor in a magnificent hall with huge windows overlooking the Golden Horn. The view of the city far below was a vast panorama of roofs and towers, spires, masts of ships in the harbor, and clustered houses on the far shore.

The hall itself was marble-floored with porphyry columns that held up a ceiling ornately decorated with mosaic arches that flickered here and there with gold.

But all that was only a fleeting impression. As Palombara walked toward the emperor, he was startled by the inner vitality of the man. He was dark, with thick hair and a full beard. His clothes were silk, heavily embroidered and jeweled, as one would expect. He wore not only the customary tunic and dalmatica, but also a sort of collar that ended with something like a priest’s breastplate at the front. This was crusted with gems and ringed around the edges with pearls and gold thread. He wore it as if he were accustomed to it and it were of no importance. Palombara remembered with a jolt that Michael was considered to be Equal of the Apostles. He was a brilliant soldier who had led his people through battle and exile and back to their own city. He had regained his empire by his own hand. They would be foolish to underestimate him.

The emperor gave Palombara and Vicenze all the appropriate formal greetings and invited them to be seated. The protocol for the signing of the agreement had already been arranged, there did not seem to be anything further to discuss, but if there were, it would be done with less senior officials.

“The princes and prelates of the Orthodox Church are aware of the choices facing us, and the necessities driving us,” Michael said quietly, glancing from one to the other. “However, the cost to us is high, and not all are willing to pay.”

“We are here to be of any assistance we may, Majesty.” Vicenze felt compelled to fill the silence.

“I know.” A faint smile played on Michael’s lips. “And you, Bishop Palombara?” he asked softly. “Do you also offer your assistance to our cause? Or does Bishop Vicenze speak for both of you?”

Palombara felt the blood burn up his face. He must not give Michael leverage so quickly.

The emperor’s black eyes reflected his laughter. He nodded. “Good. Then we wish for the same result, but for different reasons, and perhaps in different ways-I for the safety of my people, and perhaps for the survival of my city; you for your ambition. You do not want to return to Rome empty-handed. You will get no cardinal’s hat. Not for failure.”

Palombara winced. Michael was rather too much of a realist, but life had given him little chance to be anything else. The emperor chose union under Rome as the only chance for survival, not for any meeting of beliefs. He was letting them know that, in case they cherished any notions that they could reach him with a religious conversion. He was Orthodox to the bone, but he meant to survive.

“I understand, Majesty,” Palombara answered. “We are faced with hard choices. We pick the best of them.”

Vicenze bowed so slightly, it was barely discernible. “We will do what is right, Majesty. We understand that haste would be unfortunate.”

Michael looked at him dubiously. “Very unfortunate,” he agreed.

Vicenze drew in his breath sharply.

Palombara froze, dreading the clumsiness of what Vicenze might say and yet a tiny part of him wishing for his downfall.

Michael waited.

“There would be little to recommend failure, in any way,” Palombara said quietly. As a matter of pride, he wanted Michael to see him quite separately from Vicenze.

“Indeed.” Michael nodded. Then he looked beyond them and signaled for someone to come forward. He was obeyed by a person of curious stature, walking with an oddly graceful gate. His face was large and beardless, and when he spoke, with the emperor’s permission, his voice was as soft as a woman’s and yet not feminine.