The Cybelene Conspiracy Read online

  The Cybelene Conspiracy

  Albert Noyer

  THE CYBELENE CONSPIRACY

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2005 Albert Noyer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without

  express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-935597-85-8

  With special thanks to the writing group:

  Jennifer, Melody, Mary, Frank, Russell

  and

  Leslie S.B. MacCoull Ph.D.

  Coptic Archeological Society (North America)

  Res humanas ordine nullo

  Fortuna regit spartisque manu

  Munera caeca, peiora fovens;

  Vincit sanctos dira libido,

  Fraus sublime regnat in aula.

  Fate without order rules the affairs of men,

  Throws about her gifts with a blind hand,

  Cherishing the worst; violent desire defeats the virtuous,

  Deceit reigns sublime in the palace halls.

  Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Phaedra

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Getorius Asterius

  Surgeon at Ravenna, Western Roman capital

  Arcadia Valeriana Asteria

  Wife of Getorius, training with him to be a medica

  Thecla

  Arian Presbytera of the Basilica of the Resurrection

  Gaius Quintus Virilo

  Master of the merchant galley Cybele

  Claudia Quinta

  Virilo’s daughter

  Diotar of Pessinus

  Archpriest of the cult of Cybele

  Adonis

  Disciple of Diotar

  Leudovald

  Investigator for the palace Judicial Magistrate

  Flavius Placidus Valentinian III*

  Emperor of the Western Roman Empire

  Licinia Eudoxia*

  Valentinian’s wife, Empress

  Galla Placidia*

  Mother of the emperor, daughter of Theodosius I

  Publius Maximin†

  Wealthy senator at Ravenna

  Giamona and Tigris

  A gladiatrix and gladiator

  Zhang Chen

  Importer from Sina (China)

  GLOSSARY OF PLACES MENTIONED

  GERMANY

  Mogontiacum—Mainz

  Treveri—Trier

  FRANCE

  Autessiodurum—Auxerre

  Lugdunum—Lyon

  ITALY

  Arminium—Rimini

  Classis—Classe

  Ancona—Ancona

  Comum—Como

  Aquileia—near Trieste

  Forum Livii—Forli

  Bononia—Bologna

  Mutina—Modena

  Caesana—Cesena

  Ravenna—Ravenna (Somewhat fictionalized)

  AUSTRIA

  Brigantium—Bregenz

  Vindobono—Vienna

  BALKANS

  Aquincum—Budapest

  Sirmium—Sremsk-Mitrovka

  Epidamnus—Durres

  Siscia—Sisak

  Issus—Vis Island

  Spalato—Split

  Olcinium—Olcinj

  Risinium—Risan

  Scodra—Shkoder

  Viminacium—Kostolc

  TURKEY

  Constantinople—Istanbul

  Pessinus—Balhisar

  RIVERS

  Bedesis—Montone

  Padus—Po

  Gallus—near Skarya River

  Rhenus—Rhine

  Padenna—ancient branch of Po

  Rhodanus—Rhone

  Contents

  Ravenna

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Olcinium

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Ravenna

  Chapter twelve

  Forum Livii

  Chapter thirteen

  Ravenna

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  About the Author

  Ravenna

  Chapter one

  Thecla, the woman presbytera of the Arian-sect Basilica of the Anastasis, repressed a light belch with her hand—a rancid taste of cumin and crayfish—and glanced up at a flight of evening swallows.

  The darting birds speckled the sunset sky like spatters of black ink on a vermilion manuscript page.

  She winced at a persistent dull pain in her abdomen and sighed. “Hirundines, how I wish I had your energy. Your…freedom.”

  Ahead of her, across the Via Armini, the brick bulk of the Anastasis church and its octagonal baptistery were somber silhouettes against the fading afternoon light. Already their bluish shadows stretched out to the curb where she stood. Thecla realized her stomach held a daemon, but she still needed to fill the oil lamps in the basilica for the morning service, before it became too dark. After letting a wagon pass, she made to step off the curb, but then two oxcarts loaded with matting rushes blocked her way as they rumbled slowly along the stone paving. At least because of market day yesterday the street was relatively free of animal droppings. The farmers’ slaves would have shoveled up all the manure to take back and add to the steaming piles in their yards.

  “Move on, move on,” Thecla grumbled at the slow-moving beasts. “It’s not as early as I thought. I can’t see that well even in daylight, and the lamp openings are small.”

  The presbytera impatiently tucked a wisp of gray hair back under her veil and touched her cheek. Wrinkled as the rind on a Calabrian melon. You’re old, woman, and you still haven’t learned to be patient. Eugenius used to tease you about it. Patience is above learning, he’d say. Strength grows in the garden of patience. Patience wins the argument. Even though her husband had been dead for fifteen years, Thecla felt a welling of tears and wiped a threadbare sleeve across her eyes.

  After the two oxcarts with their load of green fronds finally passed by, Thecla hurried diagonally across the paving toward her church, clenching her jug of olive oil against her chest and skirting around a trail of manure that had dribbled from one of the oxen. She had crossed the Via Armini from her apartment every day for thirty-four years—the street measured exactly fifteen paces wide. The presbytera paused on the curb to catch her breath and watch a group of children playing a noisy hoop game in front of their apartment building. They recalled to her her childhood long ago in Philippi, in the province of Macedonia, far from this north Adriatic port of Ravenna. She had been Euodia Apollonia then, the only child of a pagan father and an Arian Christian mother. After the family moved to Constantinople, she was tutored by a deacon, then ordained an Arian presbytera at the age of twenty-nine, and Euodia became Thecla, named after a female disciple of the Apostle Paul, whose life and martyrdom she had read about in The Acts of Paul and Thecla.

  After serving eight years as an assistant in the Eastern Roman capital, Thecla had b
een assigned to Ravenna, with the mandate of resurrecting its declining Arian community. Now, at the age of seventy-one, she was a gray-haired widow who had helplessly watched her responsibilities shrink to one scattered congregation in the decrepit port quarter of the city. Her energy and freedom had gradually diminished along with her flock over the past years, and Thecla’s sense of humor recognized the irony of her church being dedicated to the Anastasis—the Greek word meant “Resurrection.”

  Thecla watched two members of the civic guard light torches at the street corner on the shadowed west side of the road. Near the first evening hour, the Armini was almost deserted. Only a few customers were in shops, and it was still too light for women from the local brothels to begin soliciting for temporary lovers. Although the late afternoon sun softened the port buildings’ scarred stucco faces with a clean wash of apricot-colored light, and a faint glow from unshuttered windows gave the area a deceptively well-off look, Thecla mused that if the poor indeed were to inherit the earth, the Kingdom would certainly be inaugurated in the squalor of Ravenna’s harbor area.

  Apartment blocks along the Armini formed the bulwark of a warren of artisans’ workshops and two-or three-story dwellings where dockworker families lived, or slaves were quartered and rented out by their masters. Under arcades and awnings at the sidewalk level, shop owners struggled to make a living selling bread, meat, vegetables and household furnishings. Others held street-corner booths or walk-in taverns that sold cooked food and regional wines. Too many of the shops were vacant, and few of the merchants were in her congregation.

  The Via Armini was the unofficial eastern boundary line beyond which Arian Christians in Ravenna could live in relative peace. The Anastasis basilica, set in an open space just west of the road, dated from an earlier time, and its walls were marred by occasional damage from the city’s more rowdy youths.

  Thecla saw that lamps were gleaming at Videric’s food stall on the corner of the Via Porti, outlining a few customers who were buying his lard-fried squid or pork for their evening meal. She inhaled the cool air with a frown. The ever-present smells of animal dung, and salt-and-fish on the Adriatic off-sea breeze, had been overlaid by that of greasy smoke and garlic-laced meals being prepared in port quarter kitchens or taverns. Her stomach reacted to the smells with another gurgle of colic.

  A short time earlier she had finished a supper of boiled crayfish. Now, a growing queasiness made her realize that the honey-sweetened sauce of cumin and pepper had probably masked spoilage of the crustaceans. As an unpleasant, acrid after-taste rose in her throat, Thecla swallowed hard and hoped she would not publicly embarrass herself by vomiting in the street.

  “Christotokos, Mother of Christ, help me,” she muttered, hoping that an upset stomach was not of too little significance to warrant divine attention.

  Covering her mouth with the edge of her veil, Thecla walked onto the new grass in the shadow of the basilica and immediately felt the damp chill of the April air seep through her black tunic. In her haste she had forgotten to slip on a cloak. At the same moment, a northeast wind gusted in from the harbor and whipped the veil over her head. As she struggled to pull the tangling folds from her face without dropping the jar, Thecla heard a voice behind her.

  “Havin’ trouble, Presbyt’ra?”

  She turned to see a lanky man dressed in dirty wool trousers and a scuffed leather vest; the son of an invalid parishioner. “Fabius, you…you startled me. How is your mother? Legs still bad?”

  “That surgeon in the Julius Caesar makes me treat her with vinegar.”

  “Good. Oh, do you recall his name, Fabius? I might need a physician to purge my stomach.”

  “Getorix. Geturios. Somethin’ like that.” He held his nose and made a face. “I’m sick of th’ stink from th’ vinegar I rub on mother’s legs.”

  “I’m sure it’s not pleasant for Felicitas, either. Are you working, Fabius?”

  “Th’ port’s open again after th’ winter, so I been unloadin’ here and there. Nothin’ steady.”

  Thecla studied his face. Gaunt, Germanic, eyes a bit too close together. Untrimmed blondish hair and mustache. Probably handsome once in a barbarian sort of way. No wedding band, so just an old mother to criticize his ways. And from the smell on his breath, he’s already made a dent in tavern wine kegs to get away from a tongue that’s probably as acid as the vinegar he complained about. She turned Fabius by the arm and pointed along the straight line of the Armini, to the masts of stone-lifting cranes at the Anastasia Gate, a quarter mile off.

  “The Augustus is extending the north wall around to the harbor. You could get employment there.”

  “Haulin’ brick with slaves?” Fabius spat and indicated the nearest building with a toss of his head. “Valentinian ought to spend th’ gold fixin’ up around here, instead of on his palace. Y’ heard that his mother just built herself a fancy tomb?”

  Galla Placidia. All of Ravenna gossiped that Valentinian III passed most of his time hunting or drinking with his bodyguards, while his mother ran the government. “Yes, well, Fabius, Bishop Chrysologos is probably advising her that not a siliqua be spent in our Arian quarter. Have you thought of moving to Classis? There’s work there. Because the Vandals have captured Carthage, the Classis harbor is being dredged, and a fleet of war galleys reconditioned.”

  “Mother would never go,” Fabius mumbled, rubbing a hand across his stubble of blond beard. “Presbyt’ra, they say th’ Vandals are Arian Christians, like us. That’s good, no?”

  Thecla considered the recent Vandal victories in Rome’s African provinces to be a mixed fortune for her sect. The tribe’s reputation for destruction had already created a new verb, “to vandalize.”

  “There’s a measure to all things, Fabius,” she answered, evading his question. “They threaten an invasion of Sicily, even Italy itself. There would be more killing, demands for tribute. Possible retribution against Ravenna.” Thecla decided to end speculations that Fabius would report as facts in the next tavern he entered. “Where were you going?”

  “Gettin’ mother some supper. Y’ know how she loves her fried pork.”

  “I’m bringing oil to fill lamps at the church. Will you be at the Eucharist Meal in the morning?”

  “Meal?” Fabius echoed.

  “It’s the Lord’s Day.” Thecla scowled. “Or Sunendag, under the Frankish names just adopted. I prefer the old term. Will you be there?”

  “Uh…mother might need me.” Fabius looked toward the food booth and nervously jingled his belt purse.

  “Another time then.” No point in pushing the man, or he’ll never come. “Greet Felicitas for me, tell her I’ll look in tomorrow afternoon.”

  Fabius grunted agreement. Thecla watched him slouch off to Videric’s, and then turned back toward the basilica.

  The building’s unrepaired lower courses of dark brickwork were scarred, parts even chiseled out in places, the result of vandalism by local Christians who professed the Roman creed. The spring rains had not washed off all the charcoaled graffiti that attacked the Arian belief that Christ was not co-eternal with his Father. Homoiousians, her people were called—those who believed Christ had a nature that was similar to God’s, but not the same, as the Roman Nicenes proclaimed. Still, she was grateful that the two factions generally left each other alone, even while realizing that could change like the sudden fury of an April thunderstorm, now that Carthage was in Arian hands. Danger might make men devout, as the saying went, but it also made them fearful and intolerant.

  After a glance at the rounded apse and high dark windows of her basilica, Thecla decided to look into the baptistery. She put her jug down on the sill to unlock the door. Inside, three of the room’s eight alabaster-covered windows admitted a final red glare of slanting rays. She shaded her eyes against the brilliant light that illuminated the water in the central pool.

  “Mother of Christ!” Thecla exclaimed, startled by its color. For an instant the reddish rays had seemed to tint the
pool water the color of blood. “Half my flock would see this as an omen of evil.”

  The Feast of the Resurrection had been two weeks earlier, yet only three converts, all women, had consented to be immersed in the chill water and emerge as Reborn Souls of the Arian Creed. Thecla wondered if her Nicene rival, Bishop Chrysologos, had fared any better, or if there was general apathy among all of Ravenna’s non-baptized citizens. She realized that the sacking of Rome by Visigoths a generation earlier, and the present Vandal victory at Carthage, had shaken people’s faith. Other potential catechumens undoubtedly were attracted to the foreign cults seamen brought in on galleys. Last month was an example.

  Early in March, she had seen a procession of shaven Egyptian priests from the cult of Isis bless the opening of the navigation season. A good-sized crowd had watched them move from their temple, south of the harbor, to the breakwater wharf. Men dressed in women’s tunics acted as escorts for a bear and monkey, which were costumed as demigods and carried in litters as parodies of the human and divine. Women crowned with forsythia blossoms scattered more of the yellow flowers in front of the priests. Behind them, musicians playing flutes and jingling silver sistra preceded a group of men who wore animal masks representing various Egyptian gods.