The Evening of the World

by Allan Massie

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

First novel in the Dark Ages trilogy THE EVENING OF THE WORLD is set in the period of the barbarian invasions. Its hero is a young Roman nobleman named Marcus. He undergoes extraordinary experiences as he searches for meaning and stability in a twilight world where the old gods are dead or dying, but their mysteries still attract, and the new religion is threatened by new barbarisms. Marcus's journeys take him over the empire, from Italy to Greece and Byzantium, to the camp of Alaric the Goth and the wastes of the northern forests, from a Christian monastery to the horde of Attila the Hun. His is a world where everything is possible and nothing solid, a world that is full of danger and mystery, of love and terror, of simple faith and abstruse philosophy, of cruelty, strange perversions, treachery and undaunted courage.

Release date: December 8, 2011

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 308

Sample

One day in September 1999 I got a telephone call from Sando Clanroyden.

‘Been digging about in my grandfather’s papers,’ he said. ‘Have come on something that might be just your sort of whatsit.’

Sando, I should say, though still in his early thirties, affects a vagueness that some find charming and others, among them frequently his wife Tatiana, intensely irritating. It is not all affectation; he was just as vague when at the request of his father, a Trinity contemporary of mine, I crammed him for Eton more than twenty years ago. But he does put it on a bit too, in order perhaps to mask a powerful will.

‘What sort of thing?’ I said.

‘You’ll love it. Come to lunch.’

And he rang off.

Lunch at Laverlaw is hit or miss. It will be delicious if Tatiana is in cooking vein, or you may get only bread and cheese and a pickled herring if she isn’t. But it was a beautiful autumn day, with the Border countryside at its marvellous best. So we went over and were greeted as usual by a troop of Dandie Dinmonts, so that the first half-hour was spent reintroducing them to our spaniels – a Clumber and a black-and-white Springer – and walking in the woods which Sando’s great-grandfather planted.

It was a good lunch day: a dish of macaroni with anchovies, black olives, capers, onions and hard-boiled eggs (Tatiana’s family are Genoese), followed by a blaeberry tart with cream; and it wasn’t till we had finished eating that Sando was ready to talk about his find.

‘You remember that old scandal of the Three Hostages and the Tory MP Medina, in which my grandad played a part?’ he began, knowing I did and had indeed once written a piece on Medina’s sub-Housman verses for Alan Ross’s London Magazine.

‘Sit vini abstemius qui hermeneuma tentat out hominum petit dominatum.’ I quoted the line Medina had spoken at a dinner of the Thursday Club, the line indeed which had put Sando’s grandfather on the alert; he identified it as coming from Michael Scott’s Physionomia, his manual of the arts of spiritual control.

‘Snap,’ said Sando. ‘Michael Scott’s rather one of your subjects, isn’t it?’

‘In a small way,’ I said. ‘An interesting fellow. I agree with old Sandy that it’s absurd to call him “the Wizard”, even if legend has it that he divided the Eildon Hills where Arthur waits his second coming in a cavern surrounded by his knights, and that he was really a very subtle and original thinker. But I’ve never done any real work on him.’

I drew on my Toscano – that cigar made from what looks like twisted tarry rope, which these days I find so much more satisfying than Havanas. Low taste, I suppose, but my own.

‘No,’ I said, ‘the chap I’m really interested in is the Emperor Frederick the Second, Stupor Mundi. I’ve long thought he might make the subject of a novel. And of course you know, don’t you, that he was Michael Scott’s pupil.’

‘Well, yes. Dante put Michael in the Inferno, didn’t he? Why was that, d’you suppose?’

‘Oh, reputation as a magician. Michele Scotto fu, che vera-mentel delle magiche frodo seppe il gioco.’

Sando nodded and sipped his coffee. (Laverlaw is one of the few houses in the Borders where the coffee is good. Tatiana gets the beans sent down from Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh.)

‘You never heard of him writing a novel, did you?’

‘Who? Michael Scott? Sounds unlikely. Novelists were thin on the ground in the Middle Ages.’

‘Well, a sort of novel … look …’

He indicated a pile of typescript on his desk.

‘It’s a copy, of course. A copy of a copy if we are to believe it. My grandfather’s hand was vile, but …’

He passed me a note in that vile hand, which I had encountered previously when Sando had showed me a portion of a memoir, too slight, we concluded, for publication.

The note was brief.

This manuscript was copied by me from the original in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, October–December 1938, and subsequently typed up for me by Mile Jeanne-Marie de Lorenzac. She kept it throughout the years of the German Occupation, and handed it over to me in September 1945.

‘The old man died a couple of months later, you’ll recall,’ Sando said. ‘Heart failure. And my dear old dad wasn’t a man for the library, as you know. Kept the books dusted and that was about the size of it. So this just lay in a drawer for more than fifty years. It was pure chance I came on it.’

‘And you say it’s a novel – written by Michael Scott. Ridiculous.’

‘Just my impression. What it looks like. Course, I haven’t read it. It’s in Latin, you see, medieval Latin, I suppose. Sandy never had a translation made. So it’s beyond me. I dropped Latin after O level. But up your street. Why don’t you take it away, translate it, and see if it’s publishable?’

I sighed. I’m sure I must have sighed.

‘You don’t know what you’re asking, dear boy. I’m swamped with work, swamped. I’ve three columns to write every week, not to mention reviewing and trying to get a couple of my own books done. Impossible.’

Sando smiled. He has a sceptical sort of smile. Then he went and found a box for the typescript.

‘Michael Scott,’ he said, ‘written for the edification of the young emperor. I’ve made that much out.’

Well, yes, indeed, ridiculous or not, that is what it seems to be: a novel, a medieval novel – or, better, Romance – set in the Dark Ages, and written by the scholar, mage and philosopher for his pupil, the young Frederick. Sando was right: my curiosity overcame my disinclination. I let other work slide. When I had translated half the first volume – purely, I told myself, for my own amusement and as an intellectual exercise – I even paid a visit to Paris to hunt up the original. And it exists, it really does, though it took the wonderfully helpful archivist, M. Albert Saniette (a distant connection of Proust’s palaeographer), two days to unearth it. No one, he said, appeared to have consulted it since the English milord before the war. Well, of course, it would have been grotesque otherwise – to have imagined that Sandy Arbuthnott, 16th Lord Clanroyden, should have gone to the trouble of concocting a fraudulent manuscript.

On the other hand, somebody, sometime, may have done so. It’s quite beyond my powers to establish whether Michael Scott was truly the author of this strange farrago, a mixture of history, romance, myth, legend, magic and, occasionally, nonsense. But there is no reason why he shouldn’t have written it. He was certainly a remarkable man.

A brief biographical note may be of interest.

He was born, probably in Upper Tweeddale (John Buchan country), around 1175. He is sometimes styled Michael Scott of Blawearie. He studied mathematics, law and theology at the universities of Oxford, Paris and Bologna. By his middle twenties he was master of all the knowledge of Christian Europe. Around the year 1204 he was in Palermo as tutor to the young Emperor Frederick, grandson of the great Frederick Barbarossa and hope of the House of Hohenstaufen. Palermo was then the most brilliant court in Europe, open to Greek, Roman, Arab and Norman influences. At some point Scott added a knowledge of Greek and Arabic to the Latin in which he wrote and thought; he would reintroduce Aristotelian philosophy to the West by way of translations from the Arabic of Avicenna and Averroes. His translations were censured by the Church. A strong anti-papalist vein runs through this Romance. No doubt it contributed to Frederick’s lifelong challenge to the pretensions of the Pope. Scott, in addition to this book (if it is his work), wrote for Frederick a handbook on astronomy and another on physiognomy; he believed that “the inward disposition of the soul may be read in visible characters on the bodily frame”. (There are shadowings of this doctrine in the novel.) Scott also instilled in the the young emperor a love of natural history, dedicating to him his translation of Aristotle’s work on animals. Frederick later made a fine collection of elephants, giraffes, dromedaries, etc., and rare birds; he introduced the pheasant into Calabria, and probably into Europe. Generations of English landowners and sportsmen have therefore reason to be grateful to him – and, by extension, to Michael Scott.

Scott later taught for some years at Toledo, where he pursued his Arabic studies, before returning to Palermo as the Emperor’s physician and astrologer. He was offered the Archbishopric of Cashel, but declined on the grounds that he knew no Irish. This shows, a scrupulousness rare among medieval clerics.

In later life he is said to have suffered from depression. He returned to Scotland – seeking a cure? – and died there around 1235, perhaps at Melrose.

Dante, as Sando remarked, put him in the Inferno, placing him in the fourth chasm of the eighth circle among the sorcerers and enchanters. Nevertheless, Dante was not above borrowing from him – or so this manuscript suggests. There is a passage in its last chapter so uncannily like that narrative which Dante puts in the mouth of Ulysses that one can scarcely doubt that Dante had read what Scott wrote. Nobody in the Middle Ages thought twice about borrowing from other writers. It was indeed regarded as a sort of compliment. Compare Chaucer and his borrowings from Petrarch and Boccaccio.

The manuscript seems to have had two previous editors, or rather commentators. The first declares himself to be a knight of the Order of the Temple. He wrote after the dissolution of the Order on trumped-up charges of heresy, homosexuality, and idol worship. One may conjecture that he was one of those knights who escaped to Scotland, where they found a protector in the St Clair family and were established at Rosslyn (or Roslin) Chapel near Edinburgh. It is not difficult to understand how a Scottish-based Templar might have access to Scott’s manuscript, or to a copy of it.

The second commentator, by his own account, would seem to have been a Rosicrucian scholar, perhaps living at the ‘magic court’ of the Emperor Rudolf in Prague. How he came to have possession of the manuscript must remain a mystery. There are suggestions, however, of a hermetic tradition linking the Templars and the Rosicrucians, however loosely.

Because the observations of these two commentators have their own peculiar interest, I have left them in the text. The Templar’s interjections are signalled thus: *(…)*; the Rosicrucian’s: **(…)**.

As to how the manuscript, thus annotated, found its way to the Bibliothèque Nationale, again one can do no more than guess. There was, however, a seventeenth – and eighteenth-century French Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (Les Frères de la Croix Rose), which influenced, or is associated with, eighteenth-century Illuminist writers such as Fabre D’Olivet and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and it is not perhaps a rash supposition to suggest that it was deposited in the library among some of their papers. Unfortunately not even the most assiduous researches of M. Saniette have succeeded in establishing when or how it was deposited in the library. Nevertheless, he does not dispute my hypothesis, and I am eternally grateful to him for his enthusiastic co-operation.

What then of the novel itself – for novel is, I think, what we must call it, the term fortunately being one of almost infinite elasticity?

It is tempting to offer a critique, tempting but unnecessary. Novels should be read before criticism of them is read, for criticism prejudices the reader. All I shall say, therefore, is that it is a narrative of the Dark Ages, more imaginative than historical; and that what now appears is but a third of the whole, the other parts being reworkings of the Arthurian Cycle (the Matter of Britain) and the Charlemagne cycle (the Matter of France). The whole, it may be said, is the Matter of Eternal Rome, for its theme is the nature and necessity of Empire: imperium sine fine – limitless empire – as Vergil wrote.

Finally I must thank Sando Clanroyden for giving me the opportunity to undertake this arduous but fascinating task, and I am happy to say that, in his opinion, ‘the old boy may have been a bit off the wall, but it’s good stuff, highly enjoyable’.

I hope that you, Michael Scott’s readers across the silent centuries, agree.

The day of the Winter Solstice in the Year of Our Lord 2000

Know, most noble Prince, that the Holy Apostle John, he who was loved by Christ, and who is the Guide and Inspiration of all who seek after the knowledge that is born of the Spirit, knowledge which yields itself only to those who, by courage and insight, have broken the veils of Time and Flesh, wrote of the Last Days thus:

‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death; neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain; for former things shall have passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said: behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me: write, for these words that I speak are true and faithful.’

And so I write, for this is the story that I have to impart to you, my Prince, now in the apple-blossom of your beauty, youth and strength. For it is necessary and meet that you learn of these things which are the nature of your inheritance and so the burden you bear for all mankind.

You must learn that this world is a battlefield where the Forces of Light and those of Darkness contend for mastery. You must learn that it is needful and proper on occasion for the wise man to conceal his wisdom and purpose, as a wary traveller will hold his lantern concealed under his cloak when he ventures into a forest, even of night. No enemy can be defeated till he is thoroughly known, and it is for this reason that even the Godly may be required to traffic with the Prince of Darkness, author of all Sin and Death, and of that suffering and misfortune which goes beyond the understanding of the unlettered.

For myself, who have been entrusted by Almighty God (and also by your most pious mother, Constance, Princess of Sicily, to whom I now make expression of my most reverent gratitude and duty) with your education in worldly knowledge and understanding of the Great Mysteries, let me say merely that, reared in the wintry extremity of the North, at that point where the armies of imperial Rome wavered and fell back, and having subsequently sojourned many years here in the land where the lemons bloom, I have, in the avidity of zeal for understanding of the spirits that move and order the world of men, delved deep and perilously. Nothing human or natural, nothing that goes beyond the human and natural, has been alien to me.

I am therefore, as I may testify in the face of malignant foes (sadly numerous, on account of envy), the choicest guide you might have, one qualified not only by the dangers I have confronted in my search for knowledge, but also by the ardent love I bear to your lustrous person, of which, as you will grant, I have given abundant proof.

The story I am about to relate to you is both that of your illustrious and puissant forebears, like you God’s Regents here on earth, companions of the archangels and especially of the most glorious Archangel Michael who, on the mountain in whose shadow I now write, appeared before Laurentius, Bishop of Sipontum, by way of whom he delivered the charge which it is your destiny to keep. But it is also the History of Thought as revealed by God’s Grace, in that most noble institution, the image of Paradise here on Earth, the Holy Roman Empire.

Our tale begins in a rude farmstead set on an island in the marshes that surround imperial Ravenna, now fallen from its former glory. It was four centuries to the day since the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. As dusk fell, a thin winter rain slanted landwards from the Adriatic, succeeded by a mist creeping over the reed-beds. In the farm’s stable, for the dwelling-house had long fallen into desuetude, a woman turned, twisted, and howled in labour. Towards midnight she gave birth to a son. Before the dawn broke the Lord took her soul into his keeping.

The woman was Julia, daughter of the senator L. Julius Corvinus, a staunch conservative who held by the old ways, prized the honour of his family and his noble order, and was the author of an epic poem in the manner of Vergil, celebrating the expulsion of the kings from Rome and the establishment of the Republic. For this exercise in poetry and patriotism he was, by imperial order, blinded and exiled to the island of Pandeteria, where however he long survived, before dying none knows how or when. As a member of the Julian gens he claimed descent from the kings of Alba Longa, who flourished before Rome was, and so from Aeneas, father of the Roman people, who had carried his aged sire Anchises from burning Troy. According to pagan legend his heredity was still more distinguished, for an original ancestress was the goddess Venus. But you are not to believe this, my prince; the line was already sufficiently noble and impressive.

The paternity of the new-born babe is, in contrast, uncertain and disputed.

Julia had a husband, also of noble Roman birth, for he was descended on his father’s side from Marcus Antonius, the avenger of the murdered Caesar and rival of the Emperor Augustus, and on his mother’s from Marcus Aurelius, wisest of emperors and of pagan philosophers, possessed, in the opinion of the learned Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan, of a soul ‘naturally Christian’. But this marriage, it is said, was never consummated, either for reasons too disreputable to be related in writing, or, conversely, because the young husband was visited on the wedding night by a vision of the saints and in consequence took a vow of lifelong chastity. Both versions were current in Ravenna for several hundred years and are recounted impartially by the chroniclers.

Some, however, maintain that the child was fathered by Stilicho, the great Vandal general who defended the Empire against the barbarian Visigoths. Certainly, when Stilicho, abandoned by the ignoble Emperor Honorius whom he had served with the utmost loyalty, was put to death, he was accused among other crimes too numerous to relate of the rape of one Julia, described in the indictment as ‘a Bride of Christ’. And so it is averred that this is that same Julia who gave birth that Christmas in the Ravenna marshes, and that she was a nun of candid beauty whom the rude Stilicho ravished. But many deny this.

Others relate a still more scurrilous story, of which the origin might once have been overheard in the low taverns of Trastevere.

A day’s journey from Rome the little town of Aricia looks over the golden Campagna. I have myself spent choice hours in its gardens, and know it well.

A dark and gloomy wood climbs the steep hill behind the little town, and if you follow the winding path to the summit, your gaze is held by a deep lake, black as pitch and of sinister import. Descend the hill, wary of emanations, and you come upon a grove wherein you will discover, to this very day, ruins of a pagan temple.

In former days this was dedicated to the goddess Diana, whom some call also the Great Mother. On a certain tree within the grove hung a Golden Bough which must be plucked by any man brave enough to seek entry to the underworld; for this lake, now called Nemi, was the Ancients’ Avernus, the gateway to the nether regions. The shrine of Diana was guarded by a single priest who was both runaway slave and murderer, for he won his position of honour and peril by slaying the previous incumbent. And it was said, by some, that the father of Julia’s child was none other than a household slave of her father’s who had escaped to become the priest of Diana at Nemi, and who caressed his mistress with bloodstained hands.

But others, believing with a tender faith that no Christian hero could have such terrible pagan origins, maintain that he was fathered by the Archangel Michael in that cavern on Mount Gargano where he alighted to reveal himself to the Greek bishop of Sipontum, Laurentius by name.

Certainly this is the most pleasing of the legends that have encrusted our hero’s birth.

Be that as it may, the boy Marcus survived his mother and was reared by an aunt, in a mighty castle set on a crag on the north-facing flank of Mount Gargano, and grew up strong in body and mind, and as beautiful as if St Michael was indeed his father. Of this there is no dispute. All chroniclers and commentators praise his golden aureole of hair, his countenance in which was combined the strength of men and the delicacy of women; they speak of his eyes blue as cornflowers, his rosy lips, his smooth skin and strong straight legs. His courage was as wonderful as his beauty. At the age of twelve he slew a marauding wolf, and yet he was so gentle that the nightingales came at his call. He studied deeply, being well versed in languages, though – it is reluctantly admitted – his attention to the Holy Scriptures was less than it might have been; and there are suggestions that he even preferred the pagan authors of Greece and Rome. Nevertheless his tutors were unanimous in declaring that they had never known a youth who so exemplified all the Christian virtues.

In short, he was a prodigy. But it may be the accounts we possess are partial.

Even as a youth, in those years when the sap runs strongest, he is reputed to have had no inclination towards vice. The maidens of his aunt’s household flashed their black eyes at him in vain, and when the aged Bishop of Benevento laid a too exploratory hand on his smooth thigh, Marcus removed it with a calm remonstrance.

Reports of his virtue and heredity being carried to the Emperor Honorius, he was summoned to the imperial court at Milan.

Marcus set forth on his journey on a lambent May morning as the sun’s first rays touched the escarpment of the Apennines with pink. We may suppose that his soul danced with the morning, but that he was also not free of that mood of tingling apprehension proper to a youth embarking on his first adventure. He had with him three companions: his chaplain Father Bernardo; Chiron, a Calabrian Greek, who had charge of the horses; and young Gito, his page, who was also the child of his old wet-nurse. The priest was pious and timid, the groom taciturn and cunning, deep-dyed in the deceits of horse-trading, and young Gito bold, impudent, and merry and skittish as a kitten.

As they journeyed, the priest told his beads, the groom scanned the horizon and drew rein at every turn of the way, and Gito chattered till Chiron gave him a buffet with his leathery fist, and bade him be silent. But Marcus rode as if in a dream, pondering the adventures that must lie before them.

Towards noon they found themselves in a thick wood which eclipsed the light of the sun, and where the way was beset with briars and long strands of twining reeds. It was such a wood, Gito said, as was known to be the habitation of dragons; and indeed, as they penetrated further, he saw their eyes flashing like demons amongst the trees. Though Father Bernardo, having made the sign of the Cross, stoutly declared that dragons were but pagan fancies of which no true Christian should be afeared, still Gito trembled with terror, which, however, in the manner of boys he appeared also to enjoy. Marcus himself felt the sinister allure of the dark wood, and, less than convinced by the assurances of the priest, who for his part kept his eyes closed, his lips moving as if in prayer while his fingers rattled his beads, had to summon all his fortitude to maintain his calm.

‘For,’ he told himself, ‘this is but a test of manhood, and there will doubtless be more severe trials to come.’

On the subject of dragons, if I may interrupt my tale scarce yet begun, there is much to be said. That there be dragons is denied by no learned man, for their existence is well attested to by the Ancients. Hesiod, the Greek poet whose works are lost to us, is reported to have insisted on the dragon’s terrible eyes. Other writers say that the dragon feeds on poisonous herbs, sure sign of its enmity to man. The habitat of dragons is varied. Some lurk in thick forest, through which their fiery breath cuts a path. Some dwell in deep waters, or in vast roomy caverns under lakes. Others lie, ever watchful, concealed amidst reeds and rushes.

The dragon never sleeps, which renders him fit companion for the Great Enemy of mankind. Indeed it was in the form of a dragon, mistranslated as serpent, that Satan first seduced Eve, the ancestress of all, and so condemned us to Sin and to expulsion from Eden.

Other dragons are known to guard the gold that is lodged in the bowels of the earth, and these dread creatures scorch with fiery breath any mortal bold enough to seek the treasure over which they stand sentry. And it is for this reason that gold itself, being tainted by the dragon’s breath, is noxious. No man can satisfy a lust for gold without suffering corruption.

**(Here, it may be said, our learned author errs. The Fortalitium Scientiae, of Hugo de Alverda, erudite praepositus of the Sacred Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, has demonstrated that a man, schooled in the mysteries, may himself make gold, and that indeed this is but the least of the many feats of which the truly learned who have delved deep in search of knowledge are capable. Therefore it is evident that the metal itself is innocent of all malignity and has no need of dragons to guard it. Which nevertheless is not to deny the existence of such monsters, but merely to show that another explanation of their purpose is necessary. That they have a purpose, like all other created things, is certain. A learned Persian – it may be Zoroaster – maintains that dragons are rather guardians of the Divine Wisdom which wise men seek and yet wisely fear.)**

Plunging more deeply into the wood, they came at last to a clearing where the overarching trees, oaks and chestnuts, hid them from the sky. There they saw an altar which, declaring it to be pagan, as was indeed the case, for it had been raised in honour of the goat-foot Pan, the good Father Bernardo would have had Chiron strike down. But he drew back and refused saying that, while he was a baptised Christian, he yet feared the ancient gods who had not abandoned their power over men. He was wise in this, though it be heresy to say so, for there are powers beyond our understanding, and Chiron felt the numen of that place. The priest was angered by his refusal and would have struck him before himself advancing to smite the altar, but Marcus laid his hand on him, and bade him desist. ‘It does us no harm,’ he said, ‘and besides it is solidly constructed. Let us wage war only on evil men, and not on images.’

Scarcely had he spoken when they were surrounded by a troop of wild-looking fellows who emerged from the shadows of the trees. They were dressed in the skins of wild beasts, and on their heads they wore the masks of wolves. They babbled in a tongue long abandoned by citizens, and incomprehensible. Paying no heed to Marcus’s questions, they seized the bridles of the horses, and led them out of the clearing.

Gito whimpered with terror, but Marcus said:

‘There is nothing to be afraid of. This is merely the beginning of the first of our adventures.’

Their captors led them for many hours through the forest along tracks twisting like serpents, until at last they emerged on to an open plain and saw in the distance the ramparts and battlements of a mighty castle. Touched by the rays of the declining sun, it sparkled like fine glass. It was protected by a moat, filled with black water, but on their approach a drawbridge was lowered, and they proceeded into the courtyard. There, the sign was given that they were to dismount. An old man with a long white beard, like one of the Patriarchs, recognised Father Bernardo as an ecclesiastic, and, taking him by the hand, led him away. Meanwhile his three companions stood amazed, for they had none of them seen so splendid a castle before.

Then. . .