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.He beat his arms around him as he walked; the night wind was coming up.Hagen went along behind him, wondering why Nicephoros had brought him here.They walked about a hundred feet along the top of the wall.The sun had just gone down.The twilight was rising off the sea like a transparent veil.Here the wall broke steeply downwards, down a short difficult slope toward the beach, and on the outward side was nothing but thickets and overgrown trees and wild meadows, while on the inside were groups of little houses, surrounded by gardens and goat pastures, in which, now, as the twilight deepened, one window after another grew yellow with the light of lamps.Nicephoros stopped.“It was here,” he said, “that the Virgin Mary appeared on the walls, when the Arabs and their fleet were besieging the City; she came to warn us that the infidels were launching a surprise attack.You can see that cove, down there, where they came ashore in little boats.”He pointed down the hillside toward the sea.Hagen nodded; he had been at the siege of Milan, and he saw the possibilities of an attack up this slope.Nicephoros was looking from one side of the wall to the other, from the wilderness to the City, his head moving steadily back and forth.He said, “I have been thinking of becoming a monk.”“A monk!”The Treasurer sighed.With one hand he rubbed quickly at his huge arched nose.“I come here, you see, because to me this is the edge of the Empire.Not—we have territories outside the walls, of course, but they are ancillary.It is here that Constantinople ends.”Hagen put his back to the brambly wilderness and stared into the great City.Here, close to the wall, the houses were sparsely scattered among fields and meadows, but as the slope mounted, rising and falling in a succession of hills that climbed toward the great summit of the headland where the Palace stood, the buildings thickened and gathered to a solid mass of worked stone and tile roofs and domes.Over there he could see the Mesê, where now the streetlamps were being lit, starting at the Charisian Gate.The smoky orange flames in pairs mounted halfway up the uneven slope, and as he watched, more appeared, rising through the gathering dusk like a bed of fallen stars.He said, “To me, this City is like a woman, who turns her back on me, but flirts with me over her shoulder, and seems ugly and plain at first, but becomes more beautiful than any other, and is good to me and foul to me—”He stopped.He did not want to say what he felt, that the City’s fascination frightened him.He thought of Theophano.In his memory she was pure and white and good as the Virgin herself, who had come here to warn her people against evil, and he ached for what he had lost.Nicephoros was saying, “Indeed.Well: corroboration from an unexpected source.I too feel her to be an illusion.”He locked his hands behind his back, looking out over the land wall into the thorny thickets and tumbled boulders.Hagen could hear the surf on the beaches of Marmora, and he could make out also the sounds of animals in the wild brush, the birds hopping from branch to branch, the first faint piping of the night frogs and the little tree-toads.Above the brush, the bats whirled and dove after insects invisible in the gathering darkness, and something larger was crashing through the brush almost directly below him, browsing.A deer, or a wild goat, perhaps.Beside him the Treasurer’s voice began again, freighted with meaning.“Life, my friend, is a castle of illusion.The only reality is death.We may strive against it all we will, and imagine great bulwarks of art and science and faith to put it off, but in the end it takes every one of us.Christ Himself could not elude death.”Hagen glanced at him, wondering; he saw the Treasurer’s face fixed in an expression of fierce decision.“Yet even Christ had to live in the illusion,” Nicephoros said.“He lived thirty-three years upon this earth, awaiting the moment of His Godhead, and while He lived, He lived in the Empire.”At that he caught a quick breath, as if he had walked into something.Hagen kept still.In Nicephoros’s voice more than his words he sensed a struggle going on.“If one must live in the illusion, even when the reality is elsewhere, then what matters is the quality of the illusion.There is this, or that.” He indicated first the wilderness, and then the City.“There is the brutish life of savages, or the rational, humane life of Christian men.”Hagen said, “You think too much, Nicephoros, and act too little.”“Ah, yes.One might expect such criticism from such as yourself, my dear barbarian—in your smaller sphere, you may brawl and blunder as you will, harming no one but yourself.But my failures are disaster for the Empire.”“Then why are you becoming a monk?”“I—” Nicephoros lifted his arms and let them fall.His gaze swiveled from the wilderness to the City and back again.Finally he turned to Hagen once more, and his face was grave and eaten with doubts.“As long as she needs me, of course, I will stay.”“Nicephoros, if you give it up, if all men of heart and mind give it up, who will do it?”“Clowns, and fools, and wicked sinners,” said Nicephoros.“Which is very little change, it seems to me.”Then suddenly he was weeping.Hagen stepped back, surprised at the vehemence of the other man’s tears.“I am sorry.” The Treasurer struggled for composure.“A friend of mine died recently, I am not myself.” His eyes burned lunatic bright behind their gloss of tears.Under his breath, he whispered, “But I am alive! Alive.”Hagen looked toward the City again.He was resisting the impulse to touch this Greek whose passions contended so nobly, who struggled so stubbornly to make sense of the inconceivable.Beside him, Nicephoros, with a certain superb practicality, blew his nose.“You drove the Arabs back,” Hagen said.“The City will survive this, too.”Nicephoros was putting away his napkin.He said, “It was my fault the Arabs came at all.I am not much of a soldier—she gave me an army, and I lost it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]