role of teacher, and it gave me new pleasure to argue with Plutarch as if he were in the room with me, and to comment on Tacitus as if he were there as well.
Both Avicus and Mael had grown paler and stronger with time. Each had, he confessed, at some moment or other felt the threat of despair.
"It was the sight of you, asleep in the shrine," Mael said without enmity, "that kept me from going down into some cellar and resigning myself to the same slumber. I felt I should never awake from it, and Avicus, my companion Avicus, would not allow me to go."
When Avicus had felt weary of the world and unable to continue, it had been Mael who kept him from the fatal sleep.
Both had suffered extreme anguish over my condition, and during the long decades when I lay unresponsive to their pleas, they had been too afraid of the Noble Parents to lay before them flowers, or to burn incense or to do anything to tend the shrine.
"We feared they would strike out at us," said Avicus. "Even to look at their faces filled us with dread."
I nodded to all this.
"The Divine Parents," I said, "have never showed a need of those things. I am the author of such devotions. Darkness may please them as well as burning lamps. Look how they slumber now in their wrappings and in their coffins, side by side beneath the deck."
I felt emboldened by the visions I had had to say these things, though I never spoke of those visions or bragged that I had drunk the Sacred Blood.
All the while we sailed there was the prospect of one great horror which hung over the three of us¡ªthat our ship might be attacked either by day or night, and that the Divine Parents might be sunk into the sea. It was far too awful for us to talk of it, and that, perhaps, is why we did not. And whenever I brooded over this, I realized that we should have taken the safer route over land.
Then in the small hours a terrible truth became known to me¡ªthat if we did meet disaster, I might rise from the sea, and Those Who Must Be Kept might not. In the mysterious bottom of the great ocean what would become of these Parents? My agony of mind grew too great.
I put aside my anguish. I continued the pleasant talk with my companions. I went out on deck and looked upon the silvery sea and sent my love to Pandora.
Meantime I did not share the enthusiasm of Mael and Avicus for Byzantium. I had lived in Antioch a long time ago, and Antioch was an Eastern city but with great Western influence, and I had left it to return to Rome, for I was a child of the West.
Now we were heading to what I thought to be a purely Eastern capital, and I was afraid that in its great vitality I would find only what I could not possibly embrace.
One must understand: from the Roman point of view, the East¡ª that is, the lands of Asia Minor and Persia¡ªhad always been suspect, for their emphasis on luxury and their general softness. It was believed by me and by many Romans that Persia had softened Alexander the Great thereby softening Greek culture. Then Greek culture with its Persian influence had softened Rome.
Of course immense culture and art had come with this softening. Romans embraced Greek knowledge of all sorts.
Nevertheless, I felt, deep in my soul, this age-old suspicion of the East.
Naturally I said nothing to Avicus and Mael. Their enthusiasm for this mighty seat of the Eastern Emperor was something not to be spoilt.
At last after our long voyage, we came early one evening into the shimmering Sea of Marmara and beheld the high ramparts of
Constantinople with their myriad torches, and for the first time, I understood the glory of the peninsula which Constantine had chosen so long ago.
Slowly our ship made its way into the magnificent harbor. And I was chosen to be the one to use his "magic" upon the officials of the dock to arrange our arrival and give us time within the port to find some proper lodgings before removing the sacred cargo which we carried, the sarcophagi of venerable ancestors brought back to be buried in their native land. Of course we had mundane questions as to where we might find an agent to help us with our