The Belt of Gold by Cecelia Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

the Holy Wisdom itself looked like a poorhouse. The monks fought back with the fervor of those for whom death meant salvation, and the Arabs and the Bulgars took the opportunity so advanced to attack the Empire again, and it seemed that all would fall into chaos.
    One among the Imperial court kept faith. One saw the true way. At eighteen years of age, the Athenian noblewoman Irene, named for the goddess of peace, was chosen from eighty others to marry the Emperor Leo IV. While her husband lived she could do nothing but wait and watch and suffer with the rest of right-thinking humanity. But in her thirtieth year Leo died, leaving their son Constantine a mere baby, and Irene became regent and took the government into her own hands.
    She bought off the Arabs with a great tribute, and sent her generals into Macedonia to hold back the Bulgars, and she struck down the decrees of the iconoclasm, and all over the Empire people rejoiced. The women brought forth from their dower chests and cupboards the precious images they had been hiding; the whitewash was scrubbed off the walls and domes of the churches, and once again people could look up and see the face of God.
    The boy Constantine, growing older, grew impatient as well, and would have ruled. He sent his mother away, and ruled very badly. Still Irene kept faith with those that mattered. She spoke soothing maternal words to her son, and he allowed her back from her exile, and she saw what ruin he worked and knew what must be done. With the help of monks and officers of the court, she convinced Constantine to divorce his wife and marry another woman, and when he did, she used the unpopularity of that marriage to dethrone him. His eyes were put out with hot irons, and Irene ascended the throne, not as regent, not as empress, but as Basileus Autocrator, Equal of the Apostles, Ruler of the World.
    In the year 802 after the birth of Christ, Irene was fifty. Her magnificent blonde hair was thick and lustrous as ever; the brilliant grey-green eyes for which the Emperor’s son had chosen her from among eighty of the most beautiful women in the Empire still made men dream and quote poetry and search the lexicons for adjectives that always seemed too tame. In the Palace of the Daphne, where Constantine the Great had tread, she walked with a sure step, and the diadem with its pendants of pearls fit her as well as it had Justinian and Heraclius.
    Now she said, “What does this Pope of Rome? Does he presume to tell me what to think in matters of religion? Pagh.” Opening her fingers, she let the letter drop from her hand onto the tufted Shiraz carpet.
    â€œBasileus, Chosen of God,” said the scribe, bowing so that his nose touched the floor.
    Along the wall, gorgeous in their court clothes, stood a row of her officers, who whenever she glanced their way bent like blades of grass before the wind in elegant submission. Irene walked the length of the room, her step firm, and her head high. She had been sick all the night through, but she could master that. She mastered everything else, and she would master the crushing pain in her chest as well. It was gone now anyway, leaving only the memory, which was almost as bad.
    â€œTell him,” she said, “that since he is so benighted that he would crown some barbarian as emperor of the West, he clearly has no insight into truth of any sort, not even in the most earthy and unpretentious matters, much less doctrines of the most high. Tell him to read the Credo of Constantine, and he will see there, most clearly, that the Son sitteth at the right hand of God, which means to any with sense that the Son is subordinate to the Father, as it is even in the most primitive households.”
    They all murmured, in one voice, “Yes, Basileus, Chosen of God,” and among them the Parakoimomenos, the Grand Domestic, lifted his hands and said in his sonorous voice, “Glory to God on the Highest! Glory to the Basileus whose mind is