The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [123]
What had happened? It was the mark of a good priest to recognise facile emotion. It was the mark of a good man to refrain from exploiting it. Unwillingly, the priest in Godscalc considered the enigma beside him. Had there been some response? But to what? Here was great music. Here was an ancient and beautiful church, living shrine of the Logos, replica of heaven upon earth. Here was the last remnant of a great empire embodied in the Basileus, consecrated leader and lord of his people; guardian of the First and Purest Light.
A worthy emperor who, by his coronation oath, had sworn to uphold the most holy great Church of God: I, David, in Christ God faithful Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans submit to all truth and justice…All things which the holy fathers rejected and anathematised, I also reject and anathematise… The Emperor, who ruled like his forebears with God’s favour, and was kept hourly conscious of his mortality. Remember death! had chanted his minister, over and over, as the Basileus rose from his coronation and walked out to his people. Remember death! For you are dust, and to dust you will return. No man had fought more bravely for Constantinople, the Tabernacle of God, than its emperor, who had died there. “The city is taken, and I am still alive?” he had said, before dismounting, sword in hand, to lose his life to the Turks. What man on the threshold of life could fail to be stirred by those things? Passing Constantinople, Nicholas had said something of it. He should have understood better.
Thinking, insensibly Godscalc himself became drawn into the course of the mass whose words and music continued, clear to follow. For a while, his cares melted. But men were only men, and one couldn’t hope to ignore them. He knew, through it all, that Julius was still outstaring the cockerel opposite. Tobie, a reliable man when he wanted to be, had moved discreetly nearer. Tobie who believed in nothing, Godscalc thought, but his masters of nature, his antidotary and his urine glasses; and suffered for it sometimes more than he deserved.
Now, knowing the shape of the service, Godscalc heard the eucharistic rites draw to a close. About the time he expected, there came the blessing and dismissal, and the rustle that meant the procession was assembling and would shortly emerge. This time the churchmen came first and took their places on either side of the porch. The Patriarch and the archons with their names from the past: the Sceuophylax, the Sacellarius, the Chartophylax, the Staurophoroi. The bishops, the priests and the deacons. And now, given to God once again, David, the twenty-first Emperor of Trebizond and the superb Helen Cantacuzenes, his Empress. He stepped out, and Godscalc bowed with the rest as the procession formed and moved past, its silks beating out incense. The Emperor’s family first. The princess Anna his daughter, and an angelic host of young princes, her brothers and cousins. The Emperor’s exquisite Akocouthos, the page with the ceremonial bow. And the dark and beautiful woman who must be the Genoese widow Maria, who had married the Emperor’s brother.
Behind her was another lovely woman whom, this time, he knew. Violante of Naxos, their late fellow-passenger, wore the open diadem of a Comnenos princess, and was dressed, like the others, in the long, severe tunic with its high neck and tight sleeves, thickened with pearls and embroidery. Like the others, she looked neither to right nor to left although his eyes, and those of Julius,