The Beacon at Alexandria Read online

  Thorion and I had had this argument before, but I sighed and repeated my usual points. “If I understand why it died, be in a better position to help next time.”

  “What next time? The bird’s dead!”

  “The next bird. Or the next animal.”

  “Or the next person? Would you chop people up to see why they died?”

  “The surgeons in the school of medicine at Alexandria do that. It helps them to treat diseases if they know how the body works. Galen did that.”

  “I won’t copy that bit of Galen, then,” said Thorion. “And what the doctors in Alexandria do isn’t the point, Charition. You’re not a doctor.”

  “I can study medicine if I want, though.”

  “You shouldn’t. It’s not proper for a woman. For a lady.”

  “Sitting on the ground studying Latin isn’t gentlemanly. But you do it.”

  “That’s different. I’m a man. I can do what I want.”

  I snorted. “Well, when I’m a grown woman, and married, I’ll be able to do what I want. And I’ll be the doctor for my own household. It’ll save my husband money.”

  “What man would want to marry a doctor?” asked Thorion, but without conviction. Saving money was always a powerful argument for him. “You’ll have to do as your husband says,” he added halfheartedly.

  “Can I use your room, Thorion, please?” I asked. “I’ll clean up when I’ve finished, I promise.”

  “I wish you could use your own room.”

  “I wish I had my own room. But you know Maia will spot what I’ve been up to, even if I do it while she’s out. But you won’t find a trace of it, Thorion, I promise.”

  “Oh, very well,” said Thorion. “The knives are in the case in the middle of the clothes chest.” He scratched moodily at the plaster between two tiles of the fountain.

  “Thank you,” I said. I went over, handed him his tablet, and kissed him. “I knew you’d help.”

  He grunted and said, “Be careful. I’m afraid that someone will catch you at it and accuse you of black magic. Or worse, accuse me of black magic.”

  “Is anyone likely to come in?” I asked. There’d been a scare in Ephesus over black magic recently: a charioteer at the racecourse had been found to have worked curses against three of his rivals, including one of my father’s drivers. My father’s man became sick, and didn’t recover till a crucified toad was discovered and removed from the hypocaust under his bedroom. I’d been very surprised at this: personally, I’d thought the man was suffering from an enteritic fever. But charioteers are always working magic. My father’s man always looked very knowing when the subject was mentioned, though he wouldn’t talk about it, and it was said that he had himself killed several rivals either by magic or by poisoning. Certainly anyone found in our house mutilating the body of a small animal would be accused instantly, even if she was the daughter of the house.

  Thorion shrugged. “Father’s got some visitor, someone important, I think. All the slaves are rushing about fetching things for his staff. No, I suppose my room’s safe for you. But bolt the door, will you?”

  I nodded and ran back through the house. The slaves were busy; I had to scramble out of the way of two of the houseboys who were carrying a table down one of the corridors, and when I went through the kitchens, half the household seemed to be there, discussing the visitor and what to do with his staff. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good time for a dissection. On the other hand, it was likely that no one would go near Thorion’s room at such a time. And I ought to do the dissection quickly, while the body was still fresh. Then I could pluck it and give it to Philoxenos to cook, and he’d just think I’d been helpful.

  When I got back to the stableyard, Philoxenos had put the mares in their stalls and was rubbing them down. He didn’t even notice when I went up to the hayloft and picked up the thrush. I put the bird in the belt purse Father had given me. It was a good-sized leather purse, this, and besides being of a useful size, it had a set of cosmetic tools in it. My father had given it to me at the last festival, when two of our chariots won in the races; I’d told him that it was the best present I’d ever been given, and I meant it. The cosmetic tools — the tweezers, the little probes used for applying eyeliner, the little razor on its stem — doubled perfectly as surgical instruments. All I lacked were the larger knives. The only nuisance was occasionally having to use my tools for cosmetics.

  I climbed back down the ladder, picked the straw off myself again, checked my hair, and went back into the house. There was less bustle now: the visitor and his staff had been catered for, and the house could relax. I wondered idly who it was: someone important, judging from the stir. But my father had lots of important friends, and they visited frequently and discussed who was entering what in the next festival’s races, so I wasn’t more than idly curious.

  I was in the corridor where both Thorion and I had rooms, when the door of the room I shared with my nurse opened and Maia came out. “There you are!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Where have you been this last hour? I’ve been looking for you.”

  Damn. “I was down at the stables,” I said truthfully. “I was watching Philoxenos work. Then I helped Thorion with his Latin.”

  “Helped Thorion indeed! It’s most improper for you to be looking at his old Latin, stupid barbarian tongue as it is. You have straw in your hair; what were you doing, lying in the straw to watch the horses? Most improper!” She pulled the “straw” out; it was a piece of chaff that only she would have spotted.

  Maia’s real name was Elpis, “Hope.” She was a devout Christian and fond of her name. But all children call their nursemaids Maia, and I could never think of her as anything else. She was a thin, bony woman, with arms like leather bands and straight red hair, now graying. Her father had been a Scythian barbarian, captured in some war, and her mother was the domestic slave of an Ephesian merchant; her ideas about propriety were her own. She was fond of telling me the story of how Father had bought her and she had come to our house. “There was my husband, dead of the pneumonia,” she’d say. “And there was my little baby boy, just a month old, dead too, and there I was, sitting in the kitchen and weeping my eyes out, and who comes in but my master and your most noble father? ‘There she is,’ says my old master, and I sat up and tried to pull myself together, for it isn’t proper to go weeping and wailing in front of people, especially gentlemen. Then I see that your most generous father is in mourning too, all dressed in black. ‘Her child died just two days ago,’ says my old master, ‘but that was the fever; it’s been very bad, very bad’ — and the dear Lord knows it was bad that summer. ‘Elpis was a good mother,’ says my master, ‘and a good servant too, and I’d not part with her lightly, but because I so esteem Your Excellency, I will sell her to you.’ And your most illustrious father looks at me and says, ‘Well then, Elpis, I need a nursemaid for my daughter; can you care for a young lady properly? She’s just a week old; she’s been passed about among the house slaves, but she needs someone to look after her properly, someone to attend to her alone, for she’s lost her mother. My dear wife’s dead.’ So I said — I don’t know what, that I’d do my best, and your excellent father bought me for sixty solidi. ‘Money’s no object,’ he said. And I packed up my things and went back with him, in his own carriage. Well, what was there to keep me where I was? Though I did wonder what would become of me. And when I saw this great house, like an imperial palace, and all the slaves — hundreds, it seemed to me — phew, I was frightened. But your father himself brought me to our room, and when we got there, there was old Melissa walking you back and forth, and you screaming your little head off: nobody’d enough milk for you, had they? But it was as though you were mourning your mother’s death. Tiny little thing you were, my dear, all bones, and red as a cherry. My heart went out to you. I always wanted a little daughter. I went straight over and took you from Melissa and sat down and nursed you, and when you settled down and clung to me with your little fingers, bless you, I knew I w
as home.”

  In time Maia had become Thorion’s nurse as well (the previous one drank too much, and Father retired her to the farm, where it didn’t matter). She had considerable power in the household, because of her position as guardian of her master’s children, and because of her native acuteness — for she was a sharp-eyed, sharp-minded woman who missed nothing. A less honest woman might have tried to amass a fortune by selling her influence or by petty theft; a more frivolous woman might have tried for the position of my father’s concubine; but Maia adored propriety; she reveled in it. The sight of Thorion and me, scrubbed and curled and sporting our purple-striped cloaks, made her cluck her tongue in an ecstasy of pride. She liked to go to church with us and sit between us at the front, where everyone could see us. (Our family had been Christian, but not devout, since my grandfather was young. Grandfather converted because he saw that Christians got preferment at court; he died of rage when the emperor Julian assumed the purple and preferred pagans instead.) The possibility of showing us off before important, titled visitors made her sharp eyes dance with delight. For our part, of course, Thorion and I cringed whenever she had that light in her eyes. She had it now.

  “You must put on another dress, my love,” Maia told me, brighteyed with pleasure. “Your most noble father has a visitor, a very distinguished visitor, and he wants to present you and Lord Theodoros to him.” (Since Thorion had come of age she always called him Lord Theodoros; in the marketplace she even added “His Excellency” and “the most noble” and so on — though I’m sure she still thought of him as Thorion, really.)

  I wondered what I could do about my thrush. With any luck, Maia wouldn’t look in the purse. Should I give up my attempt at a dissection? That was probably the wisest thing. I could drop the body in one of the courtyards, if I couldn’t get it back to the stables: a dead bird isn’t that suspicious in a courtyard. I wished the visitor in Hell, whoever he was, and let Maia pull me into our room and choose a new dress for me, and rearrange my hair, and give me a better pair of earrings. “There!” she said. “The loveliest young lady in Ephesus!” And she held out a mirror for me to admire myself in.

  I never admired the effect as much as she did. A thin, big-eyed face, elaborate black curls, and gold and pearl earrings — the earrings more impressive than the face, really. I never really felt that the girl I saw in mirrors, the demurely proper, overdressed doll, was me. I was fifteen, just in the middle of puberty, and the changes in my body seemed to make it even less mine. I could see myself at age twenty, married to some gentleman, doctoring his household, but I could never visualize myself getting married. I knew it would happen, but it would happen to the girl in the mirror, not to me. I would have to wait a bit longer before I lived my own life.

  I nodded and smiled at Maia, and she put down the mirror and clapped her hands together. “Well,” she said contentedly, “I’ll bring you in to see the gentlemen.”

  “The gentlemen” were in the Charioteer Room. This was my father’s favorite room for receiving visitors. It was on the first courtyard, which was colonnaded and had a fountain in it. Coming from the street, one walked around the colonnade to reach the room, thus getting an impression of the size and richness of the house before greeting its master. The room was called after its floor mosaic, which showed a four-horse chariot in full career, its driver garlanded with laurels. Officially it was a picture of Achilles, but it looked very like my father’s champion driver, Daniel, and his best team, of bays. Father was very pleased with it; he had commissioned it himself — one of the few times when he had altered the design of my grandfather’s house.

  The room was large, well lit by its windows on the court. Its walls were decorated with patterns of trees and birds and hung with embroidered curtains; it had some paintings in it as well, mostly of horses. It had four couches, a large table for wine and some smaller ones for cups and bowls, and a brazier to warm the water to mix with the wine.

  Maia and I came not through the courtyard but through the corridor from the back of the house. There were soldiers outside the door of the Charioteer Room, huge men in trousers, boots, and military cloaks. They had swords, and when Maia reached for the door, one of them put his hand on his sword and told her to stop. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked with a sneer.

  Maia pulled herself up. She assumed, as I did, that the visitor must be a count or master of arms, and that his bodyguard was being overzealous — as indeed soldiers often are, contemptuous as they are of civilians, especially Asians, whom they despise as soft. “Mind your tongue,” Maia told the soldier. “This is the lady Charis, daughter of the most excellent Lord Theodoros; His Eminence has sent for her, to present her to your master.” She stressed the word master: she and I were going to go see the gentlemen, and not stand about chatting with subordinates.

  The soldier sneered again, and stared at me. I was not used to such stares — hostile, curious, assessing. I felt a slight coldness suddenly, a feeling of shock. I pulled my cloak up and held it over my face. I was for once glad of the maidenly modesty that meant I did not have to meet the stare but could look away and try to think. Something was wrong. Bodyguards might be insolent, but they would not stare that way at a nobleman’s young daughter unless something had happened to the nobleman.

  “Present her to my master,” said the soldier sardonically. “Well, well, very generous of your master, you old bitch. The governor likes presents like that.” For a moment Maia was too shocked to do anything; then she pulled her thin shoulders back and looked ready to spit on the soldier and tell him that she would see him whipped for his insolence. But he laughed and moved away from the door. “Go on then,” he told her.

  She gave him a furious look and opened the door, stood aside to usher me in, then gave him another look before going in and closing the door. I knew she was resolving to complain of him as soon as she got the chance.

  She didn’t get the chance. It was plain as soon as we came into the room that something was indeed wrong. My father was standing in the middle of the room, on top of the chariot mosaic, and he was wringing his hands. Thorion was already there; he was standing by one of the windows, looking upset. Next to him were our tutor Ischyras and Johannes the steward, and they looked equally distressed. Everyone else in the room was a stranger to me; half of them were soldiers of some sort, the rest had the look of court officials. Through the open windows I could see that the courtyard was full of more soldiers and officials.

  “But why?” wailed my father, without glancing at Maia and me. He addressed his question to a large man who was sitting on the best couch, drinking some of my father’s wine.

  “Because your name is Theodoros,” said the man. “If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear. But justice must be served; there must be an investigation. The charges are extremely serious.”

  This man was wearing the purple-striped cloak of the senatorial rank. The cloak itself was green brocade, very richly woven in a leaf pattern, and his green tunic was long, almost to his feet: the dress of a man of rank. He was about my father’s age, tall, stout, with a florid complexion. His chin was shadowy with stubble, but his hair was unusually fair, almost white, and he had blue eyes. He spoke with an accent I had never heard before, a sort of nasal slurring, and sometimes hesitated before his words, as though Greek was not his native tongue. He wore around his neck a chain laden with official signets.

  “But . . .” said my father, and had to stop because the word came out in an undignified squeak. The stranger watched him with amusement. Normally Father looked well bred, refined, lankily graceful — he was a tall man, very thin, with brown hair going bald on top and large hands. But now he looked a pathetic clown. His Adam’s apple stuck out as he swallowed several times, trying to control his voice. He was wearing his best cloak, of white and gold with its own purple stripe, but in his agitation it had slipped over one sharp shoulder and hitched up on the opposite side, showing his thin, hairy shanks under his blue tunic. His h
ands were shaking; realizing this, he pressed them together and again began to wring them. I had not realized that distress could make a man ridiculous.

  “But I have done nothing to deserve such suspicions!” my father protested at last. “No one has been more loyal to Their Sacred Majesties than I have! I have fulfilled all my duties as a citizen and a loyal subject; I have been magistrate of Ephesus five times in the last eight years; I have paid for I don’t know how many races; I’ve contributed money to the repair of the public baths and the aqueduct and the dredging of the harbor; I’ve —”

  “You have done a great deal to win the affections of your fellow citizens,” the stranger put in smoothly. “But His Sacred Majesty, our illustrious and most illustrious lord, Valens the Augustus” — and he rolled the emperor’s titles off his tongue with relish, as though chewing a sweetmeat — “is curious to know why you have done this.”

  My father stood still, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. His expenditure on magistracies and horse racing had always been his great defense when anyone questioned him about, say, our postern. He had never conceived that anyone might interpret it as a deliberate and calculated bid for popularity. He was popular, of course. Few other gentlemen in Ephesus were eager to take the position of municipal magistrate, entailing as it did the vast cost of maintaining the public baths and entertaining the public with chariot races on feast days, and they were pleased that my father relieved them of the necessity. The public, of course, drank his health freely and cheered him whenever he appeared : the most excellent Theodoros, master of the races! They were as keen on racing as my father was.

  “I . . . I am just a public-spirited citizen,” said Father pathetically, “seeking the good of my city. And I like racing.”

  “Perhaps.” The other sat up on his couch, putting down the wine. “Perhaps. We shall see. What did you do when the pretender Procopius attempted to claim the imperial purple?”