Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [100]
She was called again to help other monks who had been tortured, but none afflicted her with the same panic as the first one had. She did not save everyone. Sometimes all she could do was ease the agony, stay with them to be there in the last moments. It was never enough.
She hated to be thanked, to accept their gratitude even when she failed. She did not feel brave. She wanted to run away, but the nightmares she would suffer forever, if she left a dying man, would have been worse than any waking horror.
At home she tossed and turned in the night and often woke gasping, her face wet with tears, her lungs aching.
She crept out of bed and knelt in prayer: “Father, help me, teach me. Why do You let this happen? They are good men, peaceable men, trying with all their hearts and bodies, all their time every day, to serve You. Why can’t You help them? Or don’t You care?”
Nothing answered her but the silence, void as the night. If there were real stars, not just dreams and illusion, they were infinitely out of reach.
Once she only just escaped the emperor’s men when they broke into the house, and she ran, half dragged out of the back door by others who were just as passionately against the union. They were willing to forfeit their homes and possessions to rescue the monks who still preached against it and were made martyrs for their faith.
She ran with them through the wind and rain, their feet splashing in the rivulets of water streaming along the gutters, bumping into blind walls and tripping over steps in the darkness. She was pulled along, someone else carrying her bag and her instruments. She had little idea who they were, only gratitude for their courage.
When eventually they burst into a quiet room with an old woman alone beside the fire, she saw in the torchlight that there were three of them, two men and a young woman with long, wet hair.
“You must be more careful,” the woman said, gasping as she struggled to allow the breath into her lungs. “You have answered too many of these calls. They know you now.”
“Why me? Who knows me?” she asked, fighting against the truth.
“Bishop Constantine,” he answered. “People know you are his physician, and you have helped him with the poor.”
No more was said of it. Of course it was Constantine who was behind the rescues, the medicines, the whole resistance of the mass of ordinary people. It had been he who had fought to have Justinian exiled instead of put to death for his involvement in Bessarion’s murder. They were all battling for the same cause, the survival of the faith, the life, the existence of Byzantium, and the freedom to worship as they knew to be right.
She went to Constantine in the quietness of his own house, in the gallery where his favorite icon hung.
“Thank you,” she said simply, standing hungry and bruised, still exhausted in body from the night’s loss and flight, the whole bitter failure of it. “Thank you for all you do, for having the courage to lead us, holding the light high for us to see. I don’t really know how much I care passionately for one faith over another, one creed in the nature of God and the Holy Spirit, but I know absolutely that I care for the love of humanity that Christ taught us. I know with all my heart that it is worth everything we can pay for it. It is worth living and dying for. Without it, in the end the darkness takes everything.”
There was a moment’s prickling silence. She realized what she had said. “If hell were not so deep that it could break your soul, then heaven could not be so high. Would we want God to lower heaven?”
She drew in her breath as he lifted his head from prayer and looked at her.
“Could he ever do that, and still be God?” she asked, although she could have answered it herself.
He said nothing, but he made the sign of the cross in the air.
It did not matter; she did not need his reply.
Thirty-two
HELENA HAD