Daphne & Sebastian: Part Four (Daphne and the Ravenna Mob)
a novella of war, politics, theater, sports, and religion
Daphne & Sebastian (all links)
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Bloodbath at the Ravenna Cathedral
After reporting to Daphne about the assembling of the mob, Lucille rushed back out into the streets to continue monitoring the situation.
“What is about to happen will change everything,” Daphne had said confidently.
When the Archbishop Leo and the other bishops emerged from inside the cathedral they were greeted by an enormous crowd that was screaming, hoisting icons into the air, and taking up the whole square. Lucille was tucked away in the back, but she saw Leo staring in horror at the crowd. Blades reflected sunlight into his eyes and only a thin line of city guards separated the bishops from the enraged iconophiles.
“Death to Leo!” someone screamed, and others joined in the chanting.
Leo’s heart was beating fast. Why would they want him dead? He had done nothing against the icons! He glanced at the other bishops but saw the same fear in their eyes as he felt in his chest. When he looked back into the crowd the faces of Jesus and Mary and various saints were everywhere, as if floating in the air above the mob, such that it seemed as though Christ himself had descended from Heaven to take vengeance on His enemies.
“Death to Leo! Death to Leo! Death to Leo!” the crowd chanted over and over again.
“Idiots!” Leo muttered.
“Death to all the bishops!” came another cry.
The cry came from an old woman at the front of the mob. She fearlessly stepped toward the City Guards, who ominously did nothing to stop her from drawing near, and she lifted the face of Jesus into the air. “You have failed to protect the holy icons!”
“The City Guards,” another panicked bishop whispered, “are they iconophiles as well?”
“Leo,” Konstantinos said, grabbing him by the arm, “how do we escape?”
And when Leo turned to look at this stupid man, this man he despised so deeply for creating this situation by zealously destroying art, he was overcome with hatred. Leo turned away from Konstantinos and raised a hand to try and silence the crowd. “Please!” he said. “Please!”
The shouting gradually dissipated into a murmur and the people waited.
“Please!” Leo said again, not knowing what else to say.
“Death to Leo!” the old woman spat, and again the City Guards stood inertly.
“When will the Isaurians return?” Konstantinos whispered to another bishop.
But there was no answer. Who could know? They’d been gone for over a month.
“I have done nothing against the icons,” Leo stammered at the crowd. “I myself have many icons!” He pointed at the bishops beside him. “It was these men, these foreign men from the east, who did all this to the monasteries. It is this man,” he pointed at Konstantinos, “who has been laying waste to the monasteries in the countryside! It is these — ”
“Liar!” the old woman screeched. “Liar!”
“You bastard,” Konstantinos fumed with a whisper.
Several old women at the front of the crowd again held up various faces of Christ.
“No!” Leo pleaded. He was so terrified to die. Just a few more years, he thought. Please, God, just a few more years of life. “No!” Leo shouted. “Not me!”
“We should lock ourselves in the cathedral,” Konstantinos suggested as the crowd went back to screaming. “We will wait for a miracle. The Isaurians will arrive and save us.”
“We’ll starve to death by the time they arrive,” another bishop answered.
And the crowd was pressing forward now. The old women were talking with the guards, demanding to know whether they too were content with the destruction of holy icons.
“You serve Jesus Christ,” the leading old woman said to the guards, “not these mortals.”
“Guards!” Konstantinos shouted. “Cut them down! Cut the heretics down!”
One guard immediately obeyed the order and stabbed an old woman straight through her chest. He pulled the bloody sword out from her body and she fell dead to the ground. At this the crowd momentarily went silent, and then another guard obeyed: he thrust his sword into another old woman and her body went down in a bloody heap. But then two other guards turned on these first guards, and a sword fight erupted at the base of the stairs up to the cathedral entrance. All the guards were involved now, the majority of them clearly on the side of the protestors.
“No!” Leo screamed, backing up to the open cathedral entrance. “No! Not me!”
The crowd roared and pressed forward, forcing some of their own members into the tips of waiting swords, and soon both guards and protestors were dropping dead as it became unclear which guards were on which side.
Several guards turned around completely. These men skipped deftly up the steps until their swords were cutting into the bodies of the eastern bishops beside Leo and Konstantinos. Bishops began dropping dead around him. The whole delegation from the east was going to die, and Leo would be among the corpses.
“No!” Leo exclaimed, retreating through the large open doors back into the cathedral as bishops fell limp around him. “No! Not me!”
“Treason!” Konstantinos shouted at the guards. He was the only eastern bishop still alive. The bodies of the others were inert and bloody on the ground, swords having run through their flesh. “Treason!” Konstantinos repeated. “Treason! You will be executed! You will be — ”
Three guards simultaneously thrust their swords into Konstantinos’s body.
“Leave him to us,” came the voice of the old woman who had first spoke. “The Archbishop of Ravenna belongs to us!”
Leo looked at her. She was standing over Konstantinos’s corpse and pointing at Leo. City Guards were on either side of her, obeying, as if she were their general.
Soon several filthy men — “peasants!” Leo thought with horror — were stripping off his robes, shaving his head, and taking his naked body into the crowd.
“No! No! No!” he kept screaming it. “No! No! Not me!”
“Shut up you bastard,” a man said, and then Leo felt the man’s blade on his tongue. He screeched in horror, such a scream that many in the crowd went silent in the face of his raw terror. “No!” he screamed. “Please! Please!”
Three other men helped hold Leo in place while the first man cut Leo’s tongue out and threw it on the ground. Soon he was in the middle of the crowd, alive, his naked body lifted up into the air by several men and women. He felt himself shivering and convulsing with shock. “No,” he wanted to say, but blood erupted from his mouth every time his body turned to the side. A knife went into his side, and soon he was coughing up thick red goo from somewhere deep inside him, thick red goo that flowed out onto the street. Blades were everywhere, glistening in the sun, sometimes piercing into his flesh, leaving scratch marks and bloody gashes, but these people would not kill him. Torturing him, they carried him naked toward the palace.
“Daphne,” the thought occurred to him. “Daphne.” But what did that matter now?
In that moment, he was castrated by three frantic blades emerging from below.
Daphne and Lucille
Reports came into the palace that the city was on the verge of anarchy as the Archbishop’s naked, mutilated, and living body was paraded through the streets by an enormous and furious crowd. By the time the crowd was half-way to the square outside the palace, Lucille, who was witness to the events at the cathedral, had rushed back to Daphne. Because of this, Daphne knew that a majority of the City Guards had turned against the bishops and cut down those guards who did not do the same. She also knew that all the Palace Guards were both iconophiles and ardently loyal to Sebastian. They even listened to her, took her seriously, and she’d gotten into the habit of giving them small orders, which they obeyed.
“What now?” Lucille asked, looking around at the icons in Sebastian’s office.
Daphne hadn’t thought so far ahead. Even through the palace walls she could hear the screaming crowd approaching from the distance. What was happening in the city was beyond what she had imagined. “I’m living a fantasy from a history book,” she thought, remembering how often she had read about these types of riots. But she had never seen one. Never caused one.
At the thought of a city mob stirred up by her own initiative, she felt that same rush that she had felt when she took the stage as Aphrodite with Leo watching. She loved this feeling: the rush of power. She was a goddess. She was an agent of historical action now, not just a reader, and this was her moment to win support for herself. Infamous as an actress throughout the city, she would emerge from the palace today putting on the front of a newly pious and zealous woman. The people would see her as a champion of their cause and a story of redemption.
“Now we meet the crowd,” Daphne said, a maniacal grin on her face.
“Daphne,” Lucille said, “no, you can’t be serious. They could kill us too. This is a religious riot and you were an actress. It’s not even clear who is in charge of the city right now.”
The prefect of the city guards, normally in charge of security for the entire city, had insisted on following protocol and obeying the bishops. He had been killed in the action at the cathedral, another murder to which Lucille had been witness.
“They won’t kill me,” Daphne said assertively. “Look around you at my icons. Now is when I meet the crowd, lift the face of Jesus into the air, and they will worship me, Lucille. Don’t you see? We’re going to be saints!” She giggled. “The iconophiles will prevail and we will be saints!”
Lucille looked concerned. “That’s a fantasy, Daphne,” she said. “This is real life.”
Daphne shook her head. “You told me yourself,” she said, “that it was old women who stirred up the crowd and led them to the cathedral. And it was an old woman who first started demanding the death of Leo. Why do you think that is? It’s because women are the ones most attached to the icons. Women are the guardians of a sacred spiritual heritage, a rich paganistic worldview that can only find expression within Christianity with the aid of images and incense. They will see me as one of them when I step out into the square with icons in my hands. I’ll kill Leo myself!”
She stopped at this idea. She had only killed one person before. Sometimes she liked to think about it. She was intoxicated at that moment with the idea of her right to do so.
“The original plan,” Lucille reminded Daphne, “was that these people would kill the eastern bishops, not that they would kill Leo. What has Leo even done beyond be a coward?”
“In these times,” Daphne said, “being a coward is enough to deserve death. And besides, we knew they were going to kill Leo. Of course they blame him. He’s the Archbishop. He’s supposed to be in charge and yet he does nothing. I only hope he’s still alive when the crowd arrives here so I can kill him myself!”
“Daphne!” Lucille exclaimed. “This is real life. This isn’t a book. The crowd will rip you into pieces before you’ve even set eyes on Leo!”
Lucille just looked at her. The crowd was now right outside the palace walls, booming.
“If we stay in the palace,” Daphne went on, “as if we are hiding from these people, they’re only going to want to get inside and kill us. They know Sebastian is an iconophile, and they know that I am Sebastian’s wife. We should show them we know that we have nothing to fear from them. What else can we do?”
“We can send out the prefect of the palace guards to reassure the people,” Lucille said. “There is no reason why we need to go out there. We have no idea how the people will react. They are worked up into a fanatical religious state and you are still a former actress. A harlot, Daphne, if you’ll make me use the word. These people don’t think of you as a pious woman.”
“But they will after today,” Daphne clarified.
“Daphne,” Lucille said, “don’t do this. You could die.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Daphne said assertively. “I’m a woman who takes risks. How do you think I got to this point, Lucille? And if I am to get us both to Constantinople then we’re both going to need to take risks.” Daphne paused. She reached out and took Lucille’s hands. “Come with me, Lucille. Come with me out to the crowd. We’ll be saints together.”
But Daphne could tell from Lucille’s face that her oldest companion was petrified. She stroked Lucille’s fingers and palms and wrists.
“It’s going to be okay, Lucille,” she said. “I promise.”
She almost started touching Lucille elsewhere, but a knock came on the door.
“My Lady,” came the voice of the prefect of the palace guards, “we have a situation.”
Daphne rushed away from touching Lucille. They both smiled tenderly at one another.
“You have to trust me, Lucy,” Daphne said.
Lucille took a deep breath of happiness at the sound of the nickname.
“I’ve gotten us this far, Lucy,” Daphne said, “and I can take us further from here.”
“I’m trying to trust you, Daphne,” Lucille said, yearning for the touch of her hand. “But I’m so afraid. You didn’t see what happened. It was so gruesome, Daphne.”
“You have to trust me,” said Daphne.
“I’m trying, Daphne,” said Lucille.
“Then come with me to greet the crowd, Lucy,” Daphne said. “You’ll see. We’re going to be safe, Lucille. We don’t have guards who will betray us like the city guards betrayed the bishops.”
Then Daphne opened the door to Janus, the Prefect of the Palace Guards.
Daphne Greets the Mob
Soon Lucille was standing with Janus, Daphne, and around three dozen palace guards in the receiving hall of the palace, all of them waiting for Janus or Daphne to give an order to open the doors. Everyone near Lucille aside from Janus and Daphne seemed terrified, but Lucille could feel that she herself must be most terrified of all. She had witnessed the gruesome deaths of the bishops. She had seen the crowd rip out Leo’s tongue and castrate him before she rushed back ahead of them to the palace, and the idea that she and Daphne might meet their demise at those hands was petrifying.
Lucille looked at Daphne for reassurance as the roar of the crowd continued. Many of them were chanting something, but Lucille could not make it out due to interference from so much other screaming and even, to her horror, laughing. Some in this crowd were having fun. And no wonder: this was their chance to play at power. But what did that mean for Daphne?
“Open the doors,” Daphne said, and Janus’s men did so.
The noise of the crowd grew exponentially louder as the three dozen guards rushed out through the doors before Daphne and formed a barrier between her and the crowd. Into the space behind that barrier then stepped Daphne, Janus, and Lucille. They were on a platform at the top of some stairs, just in front of the doors, and they could see the whole crowd before them, stuffed tightly into the square.
Lucille had heard Daphne talk of power, of her love for power, but never before had Lucille seen her friend display such confidence of her own omnipotence. Even when Daphne was acting out the role of a goddess on the stage in some old Greek myth, she did not display this much confidence. Just as if Daphne herself were a seasoned soldier, there was not a trace of fear anywhere on Daphne’s face or body. She was still, calm, collected, and even excited. Lucille knew that her friend saw herself as in control of this blade-wielding mob, and Lucille wondered if she herself were the real fool for trusting Daphne so deeply.
The crowd began to quiet down at a sign from Daphne’s hands.
“Harlot!” a man in the crowd shouted at Daphne.
“Whore!” another man exclaimed.
“A slut from the theater,” snickered an old woman, and several around her laughed.
“Death to Daphne!” exclaimed yet another man, and a few joined in the chant. “Death to Daphne and death to the theater!”
Lucille shuddered. She looked nervously back and forth between Daphne and Janus, but neither of them displayed even a hint of fear or concern. They stood still and solemn, facing down the crowd, and Lucille had never felt so much admiration for this woman she loved so deeply. “How could someone be this fearless?” she wondered.
Because however fearless Daphne might seem, Lucille could not get over her own fears. Lucille saw Leo’s naked living body in the distance. He was being passed around as if surfing on top of the crowd, and sometimes they would toss him into the air, catching him when he fell, blood dripping down from the sky onto their heads. For a brief moment, Lucille sensed as if she even made eye contact with this poor man, whose head was often turned toward the palace as his bloody body rolled and hopped and skipped across the crowd like a toy in the hands of toddlers. An enormous gash of blood was in the spot where he’d once had genitals: they’d gone far beyond the initial castration and Lucille was sure he would bleed to death at any moment.
Daphne hoisted up an icon of Christ and then, other than a large group of men still chanting demands for Daphne’s death, the crowd began to go silent. Lucille’s heart beat ferociously. She remembered the feeling of Daphne’s fingers against her own and prayed to the Goddess that she would feel those fingers on her own again. Then Lucille prayed that the Goddess would let her die first if all of this went to shit, if only so that she would not have to see what this crowd would do to Daphne.
“It’s true,” Daphne boomed from nowhere, “I was once a harlot. I was once a whore. I was once an actress.”
Lucille stared at her. Was she going to denounce her pagan heritage too? Was it not enough to denounce Leo? Was she going to denounce her own theater company? What would happen to their fellow actresses if Daphne stirred this crowd up against her former profession in order to build up her own support? Lucille knew how calculating Daphne could be: but this was a step beyond what she had imagined.
“Once I was a harlot, but see now: I am redeemed by the blood of Christ Jesus!” Daphne boomed again. “I am redeemed by the purifying presence of my icons, my relics, and my Gospel books! This is the power of Christ’s blood. Christ’s blood is powerful enough to cure us all of our sins and to transform us into better people, and that is what Christ’s blood did for me when Sebastian found me, a slut and a whore and a harlot, working the theater and dishonoring the Lord.”
Now the crowd was almost completely silent. Leo’s body had disappeared, swallowed up beneath the feet of the people in the square. “He must be dead now,” Lucille thought, and she, a secret pagan, actually crossed herself with the wish that this would not happen to Daphne.
“But God,” Daphne continued, “cannot work upon us without the mediums of icons and incense. It is vital that we connect with the Lord through these mediums which engage all of our senses in the worship of Christ.” She held her Christ icon high again, his dark face surrounded by gold and sunlight glittering off the gilded space around his head. “Do you know how I converted?” Daphne, still holding up the head of Christ, asked the crowd, and their icons were high in the air as they listened. “For years I had been trapped in the wickedness of sin, and then I came across this very icon in a church.” She moved her body left and right, ensuring that everyone in the square saw her icon. “The moment I looked into Christ’s eyes in this image was the moment I realized how evil I had been. It was as if he were speaking to me, reprimanding me, but also offering me love and forgiveness and redemption, and after I looked into these eyes I could not continue as an actress. After I looked into these eyes I felt the spirit of the Lord inside me, and Sebastian came into my life.”
Lucille wondered if Leo was still alive out there, listening to this lie. But the crowd was enthralled; they were silent and swaying peacefully while holding icons in the air. Never before had they heard a person of power speak so vulnerably and openly.
“Now, however,” Daphne continued, “I look back on my conversion and I wonder if my salvation was tainted with baptism at the hands of a wicked man, the Archbishop Leo, a man who stood by doing nothing while monks were slaughtered across the whole of Italy and even within the bounds of Ravenna’s lands themselves. I commend you for killing this man and bringing his body to us. Bring his body to me and we will display him on the steps of the palace, for all to see, as a warning of the fate that awaits us when we forsake the love of God.”
People were cheering now. Leo’s body re-emerged from the depths of the crowd. They were passing his bloody corpse from the back of the crowd toward the line of Palace Guards. Lucille saw how his body moved like a stuffed animal, his limbs inert and unresponsive, and she shuddered again in the face of this violence.
She was mesmerized by Daphne’s calm and commanding presence. How was it possible?
“Bring me his body!” Daphne shouted, and the crowd erupted in hysterical cheering.
Lucille glanced at Janus.
For the first time, Janus looked uncertain. He leaned toward Daphne and whispered something to her, but she batted him away.
To display the dead body of an archbishop at the palace was a step beyond anything these men had ever contemplated. The prefect was hardly able to speak to Daphne at all before Leo’s corpse reached the Palace Guards, two of whom took his body and dragged it up the steps to Daphne, where they dropped him on the stones. Lucille could not look at the gruesomely twisted corpse. Nor could she believe that these Palace Guards were simply acting according to Daphne’s wishes, or that Janus was not taking charge of the situation to stop this madness.
Daphne was effectively ruling like a regent in her husband’s absence.
“We will leave his body here,” Daphne said, “on the steps of the palace to be consumed by birds and dogs and cats. This is the destiny of anyone who forsakes the commandments of the Lord.”
The crowd erupted into mad cheering, some even chanting her name. “Daphne! Daphne! Daphne!” Lucille heard her friend’s name over and over. Even the men who had called her a harlot, a whore, and a slut were cheering now.
“We will have justice for the monks,” Daphne boomed to the crowd. “Anyone who has been involved with killing these holy men will face the consequences.”
The crowd seemed… satisfied, Lucille noticed. Despite her concerns for their fellow actresses at the theater after Daphne’s speech, she was in awe of her friend. Lucille would never have been able to sustain that kind of powerful presence, and just as Daphne talked about so often, she had actually done it: Daphne had harnessed the violent powers of the mob toward her own ends.
Without waiting for them to settle down, Daphne turned around and walked back through the doors into the palace. Behind her the crowd was chanting her name. Lucille trotted after her. Janus, hoping to maintain security as the crowd dissipated, stayed outside with the Palace Guards as the doors closed behind Daphne and Lucille. When Lucille looked at Daphne now, behind the closed doors of the palace, she saw how her friend was breathing heavily.
“You were right,” Daphne said, taking a deep breath, “that was fucking terrifying. That took everything out of me. But we are safe now, you see, Lucille, and we will be saints, Lucy. We will be saints.”
As soon as they entered Sebastian’s office and closed the door behind them, they were kissing.
Lucille was tremendously relieved that Daphne was still alive, that she’d still be able to feel the touch of Daphne’s fingers and body.
Daphne was ravenous for sex. She took off her friend’s clothes and ate her out on Sebastian’s desk. Lucille struggled to contain herself in the midst of her orgasm, breathing heavily and feeling petrified that they would be caught, but she was unable to resist her friend after what she had seen.
As far as Lucille was concerned, Daphne was not only a goddess: she was the hottest person alive.