My first thought is that I’ve been kidnapped by a committee and this is the secretary. He’s a dour-faced man in a priest’s cloak and cowl, but he’s etiolated: almost absurdly tall and thin with matching fingers, so that he looks like a langoustine. That resemblance is reinforced by his odour: he smells of the harbourside, of fish guts and seagull shit. Father Fish. Or, better, Father Fishy, since this is a disreputable sort of business for a good vicar. He’s from the church of Peter the Fisherman, what was the old Temple of Portunes, or I’m a goose. A good Christian, no doubt, if you’re prepared to stretch a point about the incomplete assimilation of small pagan gods into the canonical architecture. Since the Emperor Theodosius made the worship of pagan deities a crime a couple of years ago, that "if" is rather a large one and depends on the mood of your local spiritual authority. In this case, that authority is Augustine, and for all that I am angry with the man and will be until I die, I will not tell you he is a bad priest. He loathes the intolerance of Donatism—he is, after all, a former heretic himself—even as he feels an obligatory compassion for its suffering root. He is prepared to take the long view and gentle his enemies into agreement on both sides. In consequence, Carthage and its surroundings do have a more Christian air than other places beyond his writ, at least as I understand the term, but at the same time there are all kinds of not-quite-heresies running about, each adding its own little apocrypha to the story of the godly carpenter. Or maybe the Orphic wanderers have it right, and the different gods are but aspects of one vast and incomprehensible thing that exists so far beyond us that we have not the means to describe it, save by this accretion of divine surfaces. Perhaps God is an object with an infinite number of faces only a limited few of which can be viewed from a single point, but each of which may view us from all sides at once. That would sit well with the discipline of alchemy, in which almost everything is representative of something else: a cavalcade of masks behind masks, gods revealed in elements and geometry in gods. Less well with the Holy Father in Rome, no doubt, but contrary to what he may believe, God does not have to heed his opinion. Although I suppose it would be polite at least to listen to it.