Evolution

At last the land ran out. They came to a chalk cliff. Eroded by time, the cliff looked out over the restless Atlantic. The grassy plateau at its top was windswept and barren, save for a skimming of grass littered by rabbit droppings.

As the porters unpacked the party’s belongings from their carts, the Scythian walked alone to the edge of the cliff. The wind caught his strange blond hair, whipping it about his brow. Athalaric thought it a remarkable sight. Here was a man who had peered into the great sand ocean of the east, now brought to the western fringe of the world. Silently he applauded Honorius’s vision; whatever the Scythian made of Honorius’s enigmatic bones, the old man had already crafted a remarkable moment.

Though the members of the party were wearied by the long journey from Burdigala, Honorius was impatient to conclude the jaunt. He would allow them only a brief respite for meat, drink, and the necessary attention to their bladders and bowels. Then, capering gauntly, Honorius led them toward the cliff face. The rest of the party followed — all but Papak’s two porters, Athalaric saw, who seemed intent on making a trap for the rabbits that infested this chalky cliff top.

As they walked together, Athalaric tried to reason with Honorius again about the offer of the bishopric.

It made a certain sense. As the old civil administration of the empire had broken down, the Church, enduring, had proven a bastion of strength, and its bishops had acquired status and power. Very often these churchmen had been drawn from the landed aristocracy of the empire, who had learning, administrative experience drawn from running their great estates, and a tradition of local leadership: their theology might be shaky, but that was less important than shrewdness and practical experience. In turbulent times these worldly clerics had proved able to protect the vulnerable Roman population by pleading for the protection of towns, directing defenses and even leading men into battle.

But, as Athalaric had expected, Honorius refused the offer flat. "Is the Church to swallow us all?" he railed. "Must its shadow extinguish everything else in the world, everything we have built up over a thousand years?"

Athalaric sighed. He had very little idea what the old man was talking about, but the only way to talk to Honorius was on his terms. "Honorius, please — this has nothing to do with history, nor even theology. This is all about temporal power. And civic duty."

"Civic duty? What does that mean?" From a bag he fished out his skull, the antique human skull that the Scythian had given him, and he brandished it angrily. "Here is a creature half human and half animal. And yet it is clearly like us. What, then, are we? A quarter animal, a tenth? The Greek Galen pointed out two centuries ago that man is nothing more than a variety of monkey. Will we ever walk out of the shadow of the beast? What would civic duty mean to a monkey, what but a foolish performance?"

Hesitantly Athalaric touched the old man’s arm. "But even if that is true, even if we are governed by the legacy of an animal past, then it is up to us to behave as if it were not so."

Honorius smiled bitterly. "Is it? But everything we build passes, Athalaric. We are seeing it. In my lifetime a thousand-year-old empire has crumbled faster than the mortar in the walls of its capital buildings. If all passes but our own brutish natures, what hope do we have? Even beliefs wither like grapes left on the vine."

Athalaric understood; this was a concern Honorius had rehearsed many times. In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was — Honorius had explained to his pupil — as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.

"You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading — even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalaric."

"Then take the bishopric," Athalaric urged. "Protect the monasteries. Establish your own, if you must! And in its library and scriptorium have the monks preserve and make copies of the great texts, before they are lost—"

"I have seen the monasteries," Honorius spat. "To have the great works of the past copied as if they were magical spells, by dolts with their heads full of God — pah! I think I would rather burn them myself."