The Blood of Alexandria (18 page)

‘To tide him over,’ I said, dropping the letter back on the table, ‘he entered the financial markets; not a wise move for someone as thick as he appears to have been. My own positions were taken through those Jewish bankers. This should normally have kept me in the clear. You can always trust Jews to keep quiet about who their clients are. But the bankers used by Leontius told him who my people were. That, plus the contract I got Nicetas to award them to handle the customs arrears in Ptolemais, provides at least the ghost of a trail for anyone of intelligence to follow back to me. Leontius wasn’t clever enough to follow the clues. His executors may not be so stupid.’

‘I warned you not to get involved in speculations on the price of bread,’ Martin said, finding something at last he could understand and condemn. ‘When the people learn you’ve been behind the price rises, there will be endless trouble.’

And that – in spite of what I’d told Nicetas and everyone else – is what had me still investigating Leontius. Who had murdered him and why were matters of no importance. What he’d been up to that involved getting me out of Alexandria would normally have been of some importance. What really concerned me, however, was the avoidance of scandal.

‘Martin,’ I said very patiently, ‘I have explained many times that my speculations have been on lower prices come the harvest. I’ve been selling corn in advance at lower prices than others expect, but at much higher prices than I know will be the case. Generally, speculating on future prices has the same effect on those prices as bets on a charioteer have on the speed of his horses. If not, the only effect such speculations can have on present prices is to lower them from what they would otherwise be. If prices are rising at the moment, it’s because the corn is actually running short.’

‘So, if you want the prices to be lower,’ Martin asked, clutching at random words, ‘why did you oppose the price controls?’

I sighed again, and put my thoughts into order. I needed to settle this with Martin. If I could persuade him, I might have an excuse ready for everyone else if the worst came to pass.

‘Martin,’ I said, ‘there will be a good harvest. I’ve already explained how I know this. Therefore, speculating on the fact will tend eventually to release stocks of corn on to the market that would otherwise be stored longer than was needed. Fixing the price by law, on the other hand, will either encourage the people to be less thrifty than they should be, or give merchants reason to withhold stocks from the official market. It will turn shortage into famine.’

Oh dear, I’d lost Martin for sure. He wasn’t stupid, and he always tried to think the best of me. If I couldn’t make myself plain to him, what chance might I have against those landowners in persuading any of the Alexandrian mobs?

Martin opened another of the boxes and took out a document written on parchment. He looked at it and frowned.

‘This is in Persian,’ he said.

I looked. He was right. There was no mistaking those neat squiggles. It had been covered all over the other side in Egyptian writing that may have been a translation. A shame it hadn’t been translated into Greek.

‘I think you should hand all this over to the Intelligence Bureau,’ he said.

I shook my head. Bearing in mind what we knew of these documents, I didn’t fancy having so much as a sniff of their contents pushed under noses that answered to Nicetas.

‘Did you say Priscus would be here in the afternoon?’ Martin asked with a change of subject.

I looked at the furnishings he and Sveta had insisted on bringing out with them from Constantinople. I had told him much better could be picked up for remarkably little in Alexandria. But for all they’d struck me as tatty, and for all the additional carrying cost I’d had to pay, Martin had been too proud of them to think of leaving them behind. He hadn’t changed the subject. Indeed, he’d simply moved the discussion forward.

‘Priscus had me out of bed at dawn,’ I said. ‘He needed a passport and money for a trip to a monastery somewhere off the road to Siwa. He’d heard a rumour that the first chamber pot of Jesus Christ was kept there. I didn’t try disabusing him of this. Since it was at Siwa that I believe Alexander first discovered he was a god, Priscus will surely find something there to keep him happy. He’ll be gone, I rather hope, at least fifteen days.’

‘He went alone?’ Martin asked. ‘He went into Egypt alone?’ he repeated, aghast. ‘He went without guards at a time like this?’

‘He came here alone,’ I said with a shrug. ‘And you’ll not deny that Priscus, still more than Macarius, is not a man easily murdered. Even quite large groups of bandits will take one look at him riding along that road and go off in search of someone else to accost. A shame, I suppose – but there you have it.

‘Now, this leaves a most convenient space in my diary. Priscus is out of Alexandria, and I really need to be in Letopolis. Leontius called a meeting there for later this month of his main associates in the opposition. I know that packet of dirt on me is waiting there. I suspect full details of his financial dealings will be there as well. I did vaguely discuss a trip into Egypt with Nicetas last month. Even if it’s now under six feet of water, it might be useful to look at the land we’re supposed to be dividing. This being so, a trip to Letopolis – not that I plan to advertise it – would be wholly appropriate.

‘Do you fancy coming up river with me?’ I asked with a nonchalant stretch of my arms. I looked over at some faded wall hangings. ‘Taking in the sea voyage to Bolbitine and back, and assuming this north wind holds good for the Nile journey, I reckon we could be back within ten days.’

As Martin opened his mouth to reply, the door flew open . . .

I rolled off the whore with a long, contented sigh. I took the wine the slave had ready for me, and then I lay back with arms and legs spread out for the eunuch to dab at me with his scented sponge.

I hadn’t taken up the bawd’s offer of the two boys he’d just brought in from the south: ‘Twin brothers,’ he’d said with a smack of his decidedly flabby lips, ‘fully thirteen and well-developed, but still not a hair on their ebony bodies.’

I’d been tempted, mind you. But women do have their uses – or they do when they aren’t waddling about a room screaming at you and smashing any piece of ceramic within reach. I thought of Sveta again and shuddered. For once, I hadn’t bothered with the usual precautions. I should have realised she’d be listening outside the door instead of attending to her duties, whatever these might have been. I’d escaped with a fig juice stain on my sleeve, but my dignity more or less intact. I didn’t care to think what horrors Martin had faced once I was back in the peace and order of my office.

Still, scream as she would, she knew that I was the boss. I’d said a trip into Egypt, and a trip into Egypt there would be. In my office, I’d issued the necessary orders. Soon, there were the passports in the purple ink of the Viceroy’s staff, and letters of instruction. Macarius would have been faster and more comprehensive than the low-level secretaries I’d set to work. But I couldn’t think of anything more than we’d finally settled. It would be the dawn packet to Bolbitine, and then a swift sailing boat up the Nile.

We’d not be going far enough up river to see the Pyramids. They were a good twenty miles south of Letopolis, and I didn’t trust myself to go looking at them and still be back here before Priscus. Even so, it really would be interesting to see something of the country we’d been reading about and reapportioning for months now. I’d spent the remainder of the afternoon with Hermogenes in the Library, reading up what little he still could find of the history and general situation of Lower Egypt.

‘Has My Lord had time to study the documents I sent over the other day?’ he’d asked with a significant glance at the statue of Alexander.

‘They must wait for my return,’ I’d said, making sure to thank him for his diligence in going through so many of those boxes of as yet undestroyed books. If the jumbled mass of literature he had in the basement was any indication of the reserve stock in Soteropolis, it might even be worth diverting all effort from the canal to my work of excavation. Best not, though. Nicetas had recently woken up to the canal project, and was oddly interested in the ability to move warships from the Cyprus station into the Red Sea.

The whore stirred and looked up at me with the dreamy look of a confirmed opium eater. I gave one of her nipples a hard pinch. She grunted and rolled over on to her side. ‘It’s like fucking a corpse,’ I’d complained after our first encounter. But I’d found Luella was herself very like opium – a taste slowly acquired, but long appreciated. So long as you made sure to ask very clearly, she always gave exactly what was wanted. And she never plagued me with any of that chatter you get in bed even from slave women. Oh, she’d cry a bit when the poppy juice wasn’t up to strength. It was then she’d rock backward and forward, the lamplight bouncing with every sob from the whip scars on her back. Apart from that, she was ideal evening entertainment.

For the moment, though, I’d worn her out – that is, she’d gone beyond submissive and was now verging on the comatose. I looked up at the eunuch.

‘Do ask your master,’ I said, ‘if those black twins are still on offer.’

He nodded, going into a fawning speech about the delights kept ever waiting for persons of my quality.

‘Excellent,’ I cut in. ‘Do remind him I know if flesh has been shaved or plucked.’ I wasn’t going that far south. Even so, it did no harm to continue my education in southerly matters.

As the door closed behind the eunuch, I took out some silver from my purse.

‘One is for you,’ I said to the slave. ‘And do try to persuade Luella not to spend everything at the drug stall. She really does need to put something aside for buying her freedom.’

Chapter 18

‘There’s another one coming up on the right,’ said Martin in his depressed tone.

I looked up from the shitty brown water and followed his pointed finger. At first, the reflected glare of the sun was too much for me. But I squinted and looked again. Sure enough, it was another body. Its belly was puffed up like an inflated bladder, and it bobbed about, face just visible beneath the water. I watched as the current from the south and the wind from the north drew us closer and closer together. It passed by about a dozen yards from the prow of our boat. I forced myself not to turn and continue looking at the bloated face and the white, bulging eyes. Not a pretty sight, I said to myself. Still, it affected Martin less than the occasional crocodile.

It was the second day of our journey up the Nile to Letopolis. After a little trouble with the winds of the sea crossing, and then a brief difficulty over further transport, it had been a smooth and uneventful voyage from Bolbitine. I’d somehow imagined the Nile as about the width of the Tiber, and passing between masses of lotus plants and various reeds on either side, with wide expanses of black land beyond. I hadn’t fully appreciated the scale of the annual floods. They’d swollen the river as wide in places as Lake Mareotis, and had covered up the black land almost to where the desert started.

We were now coming out of the Delta – that immense fertile plain watered by the seven branches of the Nile. As its branches came closer together, the river itself was more embanked and no longer so impossibly wide. Even so, it remained wider than I’d expected, and I now understood that the undivided Nile above Letopolis would continue wide. Moreover, since we were leaving the great flood plains behind, the narrower waters had wholly covered up the black land. On each side of us, the desert was increasingly evident – a line of red, its interior hidden by the heat haze.

If I hadn’t conceived the details of their appearance accurately, I knew well enough that the waters would eventually recede, leaving behind them a thick layer of mud. This would be the virgin soil in which the harvest would be sown come October, and from which, come March, the fabulous wealth of Egypt would be reaped. If those who sowed and reaped it had never yet seen much of this wealth, that, I told myself, I was here to change.

Here and there, the tops of the taller palm trees poked above the waters. Every so often, we’d pass little clusters of dwellings crammed on to artificial mounds, looking for all the world like islands in the sea.

‘Boats setting out from the left bank,’ Captain Lucas called out in his flat Greek. I stopped myself before I could look to the left. We were passing up the Nile, I reminded myself. Left and right here were defined by the position of one looking downstream. Over on my right, a flotilla of tiny canoes had set out from one of those artificial mounds. Each one carrying a man and a few runtish children, they rowed close beside us. It didn’t need any grasp of the language to know what was wanted. With piteous wails, the children stretched out their arms towards us, now and again pointing into their unfilled mouths.

Had I seen this a dozen times already? Two dozen? It was hard to tell. On that dreary, unnaturally silent expanse of water, all events of the same class blended eventually into one. I know that the first time we’d come across these desperate wretches, I’d told Lucas to throw our waste into the river. He’d shaken his head. Do that, he’d assured me, and they’d follow us up river until their strength failed. So now, as before and a forgotten number of times before that, I looked steadily down until the cries were out of hearing.