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Mary Reed: Two for Joy

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Mary Reed Two for Joy

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“Have you ascertained anything of use concerning his death?” John was eager to take his leave.

Gaius rubbed thoughtfully at the side of his bulbous purplish nose, the nose of a dedicated devotee of Bacchus. “Not much that wasn’t obvious to begin with, John. Look, here.” He pointed his knife at the dark cavity he and his assistants the crows had cut into the blackened corpse.

John leaned closer, waving away the swarming flies buzzing around his head. Matthew, or what remained of him, lay on his back. His head had canted to one side of his body and a large yellowish bone, a thigh bone, protruded slightly from a fire-ravaged leg. The wet mess visible inside Gaius’ investigative opening revealed nothing strange to John, who said as much.

“Our friend’s innards, as you can see, are quite unharmed, barely cooked,” Gaius replied in a matter of fact manner. “That’s because the body is full of watery substances-blood, phlegm, bile-so although the outer parts may be burnt away, the inner organs tend to be protected. It’s a very interesting and surprising effect. I regret to say that I have observed it more than once, but I suppose that’s hardly to be wondered at given that builders will insist on constructing ill-made wooden tenements and then compounding their errors by getting tenants who tend towards carelessness with their braziers.” He sighed. “But Matthew here burned from the outside. He had no brazier, and since there’s nowhere an assailant could have concealed himself, the obvious conclusion is that he was struck by lightning. And so I shall report to Justinian.”

“I would certainly agree, Gaius,” John replied, “but for three stylites to be struck by lightning, at almost the same instant…”

“The storm was severe. The world can be a strange place. It is as simple as that,” Gaius grunted as he struggled upright. “Steady the ladder, Felix!” he called down to the man below.

Pausing as he swung his foot out to the top rung, he grinned cheerily across at John. “We’re done with Matthew now. Only two more to go.”

Chapter Three

When John got home after a day spent examining the unpleasant habitations of the three burning victims he found Philo ensconced in his study. The philosopher had taken to that formerly private room like a stylite to a pillar, as Anatolius had remarked not long after Philo’s arrival.

“You’re late for your meal,” announced the philosopher. He was studying the odd board game- shatranj, he called it-that he had brought back from his travels and which John, unthinkingly, had allowed to be placed on a table in the study.

“I cannot claim much of an appetite after the sights I’ve seen today,” John replied softly. “I’d have arrived back earlier but I stayed somewhat longer than usual at the baths.” He did not add that his long immersion in its tepid pool had not succeeded in making him feel any less soiled.

The chair usually set behind his desk had been pulled over to Philo’s table. Suppressing a sigh, John sat down and regarded the game board. It looked to his eye much like a latrunculi board, but the heavy, carved jade pieces ranged stolidly upon its squares were unfamiliar. Alas, his mind had been occupied with other matters when Peter had brought up the question of the table Philo had requested. What had John told him? “Oh, put it anywhere.”

Now John regretted his inattention, for the study was his sanctuary. He liked to sit there in the evenings when the sun’s dying light, streaming in through its large window, lent a rusty hue to the bright tesserae of the mosaic that transformed the width of one wall into a bucolic scene. John had developed a special fondness for one of its figures, a girl with almond-shaped eyes. He had named her Zoe and had been known to have a word with her from time to time, much to Peter’s distress.

Perhaps, John thought wryly, Peter had placed the table in the study to stop him from sitting in there talking to himself.

He realized he should ask Philo to move to some other room to contemplate the game. But the last time he had seen him, John had been a student, not his equal. Even though that had been a lifetime ago, the two weeks that had elapsed since Philo had accepted his hospitality had not been sufficient for John to overcome the long shadow of that accustomed relationship.

“How has Peter been today? Does he seem recovered?” he asked his guest.

“He’s been going about his duties,” Philo replied.

“And your day went well?”

Philo looked up. The expression of childish curiosity his face had displayed during their previous day’s exploration of Constantinople had been replaced by the exhausted, hunted look increasingly familiar to John since his former mentor’s unannounced arrival at his door.

“I spoke with Senator Aurelius as you advised me, John,” the other said heavily. “He taught at the Academy himself and yet still he refuses to offer me assistance.”

John expressed his surprise.

“He treated me so curtly,” Philo continued, moving pieces idly around the board, “that I thought my mere presence in his study was causing him pain.” A frown nagged his bushy eyebrows.

“This is a wealthy city,” he went on resentfully. “Its beggars don’t ask for less than a follis. Every baker and mason and common laborer has the dignity of work. There are scribes laboring at the palace without knowing a word of Latin, or so I hear. And yet I am to believe there is no employment anywhere in the city or at Justinian’s court for a philosopher, a man of learning such as myself.”

John detected a bitterness in Philo’s tone he had not heard before. But in the old days, this scholar, this man who had taught him to read and write and who, during John’s own brief stay at the Academy, had imbued him with the taste for knowledge, had been little touched by the dark cares of the world. The man who had so recently arrived at John’s door was almost a stranger. The carefully clipped beard and longish hair, now thinner and receding from the forehead, had turned white, the eyebrows were thicker, the eyes sunken, and the hawk-like nose more prominent. Philo had become the perfect physical embodiment of the ideal philosopher. Except for the gnawing bitterness.

“I would say, Philo,” John replied, choosing his words with care, “that a philosopher such as yourself, a follower of Plato, should not perhaps be too shocked to find a less than warm reception at a Christian court in a Christian city.”

Philo’s lips tightened. “I recall quite well that Justinian ordered the Academy closed because of its alleged pagan teachings,” he snapped. “Why do you suppose that Diomedes and I and the others who taught there spent this past seven or eight years in exile? King Khosrow at least is an open-minded patron of the arts and learning without, if I dare say so, our own emperor’s religious agenda.”

John thought it appropriate and necessary to warn Philo against voicing such sentiments in public and as he did so, he looked up into the calm, glassy eyes of the mosaic girl Zoe. He did not, however, voice his thoughts about that other Persian royal patron of the arts whose subjects had captured a young adventurer straying over the border years before and changed his fate forever. If not for them, he thought, he might have been simply John, a small landholder married to his Cornelia, raising a family in comfortable obscurity in some corner of the fertile Greek countryside.

“You must have realized that this lack of opportunity was possible when you chose to come back, Philo,” he pointed out at the end of his cautionary comments.

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