What she really doesn't like, pay aside, is the teaching. And, more specifically, the students.
There's one with her now, an identikit boy of around twenty, a first year, certainly. He's called Tom or Sam, or maybe Josh. The boy is wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, despite being born many years after Kurt Cobain died.
They are discussing an essay he hasn't written.
'It must be a sad time for your people,' said Helena.
'Also a very glorious time,'
'Really, Lactantius, what possible glory can there be in getting into the hands of the police?' said Minervina. 'I never heard such affectation. If you feel like that I wonder you didn't stay at home in Nicomedia. Plenty of glory there.'
'It needs a special quality to be a martyr - just as it needs a special quality to be a writer. Mine is the humbler rôle, but one must not think it quite valueless. One might combine two proverbs and say: "Art is long and will prevail." You see it is equally possible to give the right form to the wrong thing, and the wrong form to the right thing. Suppose that in years to come, when the Church's troubles seem to be over, there should come an apostate of my own trade, a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,' and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit. 'A man like that might make it his business to write down the martyrs and excuse the persecutors. He might be refuted again and again but what he wrote would remain in people's minds when the refutations were quite forgotten. That is what style does - it has the Egyptian secret of the embalmers. It is not to be despised.'
'Lactantius, dear, don't be so serious. No one despises you. We were only joking. I should certainly never permit you to return East. You're a great pet and everyone here is very fond of you.'
'Your majesty is too kind.'
The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam's mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind.
