Doctor Who_ Byzantium! - Keith Topping [81]
It would be painful and hard, but it was necessary.
While Hieronymous had been discouraging about the chances of her companions surviving the terrible atrocity of almost two weeks before, there had still been no definitive word from anyone as to whether Ian and Vicki and the Doctor had been among the casualties. Unlikely as it was that any or all of them may have survived, it was, Barbara had decided, time to find out one way or another.
Only once that question had been settled within her own mind could Barbara face the prospect of what was to come.
She felt a little like someone walking towards their own execution.
In the way that only a moment of clarity amid clouds of confusion can produce a line from Steinbeck, an image of Tyburn Hill and the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots shared sudden and equal prominence within Barbara's mind.
And then they were all gone and she felt hollow, sad and alone.
Yet there was so much going on around her that she could have stopped and observed for hours and days. If she'd been interested in them any longer.
Dionysiac House o f Mysteries artwork surrounded the approaches to the market-place. These depicted devotees of the Bacchae, and other Euripidian forms of pleasure, performing wild and ecstatic dancing to the accompaniment of the aulos and working themselves into a delirium while watched by Dike, the Greek goddess of justice.
Just waiting to administer the pain that must go hand-in-hand with the joy.
Much to her discomfort, this upset Barbara greatly. She had always found masochism (religious, or otherwise) really tacky.
At the entrance to the market was a temple to Isis and Osiris, Egyptian gods drawn into the Hellenistic-Roman spheres of influence, like Byzantium, by those who travelled through the empire and brought back with them to Greco-Roman shores these strange and exotic foreign ideas. The incorporation of the pagan goddess Isis into Roman society was, Barbara remembered, largely due to the mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know Emperor Caligula, who had erected a temple to her on the Campus Martius.
Was that before or after he'd made his horse a senator, Barbara briefly wondered? Then she let the thought pass and moved to the edge of the square itself.
She paused, frozen to the spot by a fear that had no rationality, but was there just the same.
The bloodstains that still marked the spots where so many had been crushed and trampled to untimely deaths made her wince.
For a moment she almost turned and ran from the market-place.
But, just as the fear was present, so also a strange fascination held her steady.
The colours were brilliant.
Simply breathtaking.
Blues and purples and reds and yellows of every shade of the rainbow. And beyond.
The mosaic-tiled floor of the market square was chiefly what caught Barbara's attention, despite the dust, the footprints, the blood and the horse manure - a representation of Zeus at the top of Mount Olympus, looking down upon the world.
His world.
The Romans had, of course, replaced an original Greek inscription, renaming the portrait as that of their own Father of the Gods, Jupiter, the centre of family life, of authority and discipline.
The God of the Gods themselves.
Al around, she noticed statues of Greek deities that had become Roman, like a series of irregular fractions changed beyond all recognition, simply by being rechristened. A beautiful metaphor for the way in which the Romans had simply stretched themselves across the template of Greek culture and had become it. Poseidon into Neptune. Artemis into Diana. Hermes into Mercury. Aphrodite into Venus. Prometheus into Vulcan.
ReChrist-ened... The word, and all of its connotations, amused Barbara greatly.
Just as the bustling, thronging masses of plebeians, freedmen, citizens and slaves, of Greeks, Mesopotamians, Jews, Arabs and Romans excited her. A melting-pot of civilisation. Where the east meets the west and produces something neither