The Blood of Alexandria (22 page)

Except it was dry and there was no thunder and lightning, it was just like a storm at sea. The winds howled around us with a terrible noise. Great clouds of dust were now whipped up to blot out the late remainder of the sun. The camel continued stolidly forward, but its head was down and it made little of its earlier speed. Ahead of me, men were shouting. It was the angry shouting of an argument that neither side wanted to concede.

Another while of this, and then we stopped. I felt arms reach up to pull me from the camel. I hit the impacted surface of the road with a heavy bump. I opened my eyes just a little. They were stinging from dust that had mixed like some caustic cement with the tears.

‘Get down there,’ Lucas shouted above the howling. He motioned at the outline of some rocks that were the nearest approach we’d find to shelter. ‘Put your cloak over you and keep your face down. Try anything funny, and I’ll kill your secretary.’

I did as I was told. The storm was now at its height. Keeping that cloak even over my mouth was as much as I could do. It was as much as I needed to do. Over my legs and trunk, I could feel the cold softness of the dust – or, after all, I should perhaps call it sand. Dust isn’t the right word for something that moves and settles like this stuff was doing. At first, it was a welcome softness. Then I began to worry about being buried alive. There was a whole army of Cambyses, I recalled, that had vanished in these deserts during a storm. After a thousand years, no one had come across the bones.

It was now every man for himself. We all cowered as best we could in the growing darkness. No one was paying attention to me. Time for what I guessed would be my only chance. I wriggled and stretched until my bound wrists were in my left armpit. It was there that I’d secreted the razor shortly after dinner on the boat. It had been the best I could do in the circumstances. While Martin was left to keep up his desperate pretence of normality, I’d slipped off to the stern, ostensibly for a shit. While alone, I’d stuck the razor there with a dressing from our medicine chest. Of course, my knife and sword had been taken as soon as the trap revealed itself. But I’d given such appearance of not noticing the preparations around me, that no one had thought to make a closer search. Now, it had been chafing and cutting me all day. Using it on the leather thongs wasn’t easy. Once or twice, my heart beat fast at the thought that I’d severed a vein. But once I’d got the first effective slice at the leather, the rest was easier. Still lying in the shelter of those rocks, I rubbed at the sore flesh and clenched and unclenched my fists.

Looking for Martin, I had to cut one throat. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. We’d been treated well enough so far, and I didn’t want that to change if I found myself back in captivity. Luckily, Martin’s was only the second mound of sand I’d disturbed. Now I had a knife, he was free in no time. It would barely have mattered in those winds had he shrieked like a eunuch singing in the theatre. As it was, he was remarkably calm.

‘I’ve been waiting all day for this,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘I knew God would help you think of something.’ He’d altered his tune! Such, though, was Martin. But what next? If the storm was losing its main strength, the sands were still blasting everything uncovered like a rain of quicklime. If we waited for them to fall still, we might as well tie ourselves back up and hope the dead man wouldn’t be held against us.

‘This way,’ I shouted, pulling him towards where I’d seen the camels tethered. Could I get one of the things to move in this storm? How fast could it go with the two of us on its back? How much distance could we cover before we were missed? The storm over, we’d have the full moon directly overhead. We’d show up in that desert like lice on white skin.

All questions worth asking, but to be answered as and when.

‘If the sun is up there,’ I said, ‘this must be the way back to the Nile.’ I pointed uncertainly at the horizon. It looked like every other view from the top of the dune we’d managed to climb. We were in the middle of some vast, burning waste. Go where we pleased, its borders seemed to move with us, keeping us ever in its middle. If only that fucking camel hadn’t taken off as soon as we’d got down to nurse our sore bottoms.

‘Well, at least we had the water with us,’ I said, trying to sound more positive than I felt. I shook the heavy skin. There was still about a half-gallon. I’d stopped sweating some while ago. But we’d agreed it might be for the best to be economical with its use.

‘I did read somewhere,’ Martin croaked, ‘that the natives in the desert cover themselves in sand during the day and travel by night.’

I ignored him and squinted to see more of the horizon. We were now in desert roughly as I’d imagined it. There were still rocks to fall over if you didn’t keep looking. But the rippling sands spread out around us now, almost as white in the sun as a snowfield. Mostly, they lay flat. Here and there, though, the wind had piled them up into dunes fifty or sixty or perhaps even a hundred feet high. There was no wind now. From a perfectly clear sky that seemed almost black by comparison, the small disc of the sun burned steadily down from directly overhead.

‘Do you think we should even try pressing on in this heat?’ Martin asked.

I nodded. We’d also tacitly agreed it would be for the best to keep going. Lucas and Company might be miles behind us. Or they might be over the next dune. Perhaps hiding for the day was the right thing to do. But I felt an overpowering impulse to keep going as long as we could.

‘Aelric,’ Martin said, now in Latin, ‘I really do feel that God has reserved you for some higher purpose – and I suppose we have been in worse troubles – but I want to say now while I still can how grateful I am to God for having brought us together. If we are to die here, I want to say what an honour it has been to know you.’

Typical of Martin always to look on the gloomy side of things, I thought. But at least he’d stopped babbling about the supposedly miraculous wind sent to overcome the unrighteous. But the ‘honour’, of having known me! If he’d only kept himself from being sucked into that stupid plot with poor dead Lucius, he’d still be snug in the Papal Chancery back in Rome. He’d have known me a month, if that. Being a slave of the Church can’t be fun. But there are few better masters.

‘You’ll not be dying out here, or any other place soon,’ I snapped back at him. ‘I promise you, we’ll be back in Alexandria soon enough, drinking beer made in the German style. I’ve no doubt before then Sveta will have made you wish you
had
died. But you’ll live to tell this escape to your grandchildren.

‘Now, since we are still north of the equator, and the sun still rises in the east, I do say the Nile must be over there.’

‘It was God, I tell you, Aelric,’ Martin said as I shook my tunic again to get the sand out of it. I was having little success. Even without the sand that had settled on the great blood smear from that cut throat and that had now set like church brocade, the cloth was permeated with the stuff.

‘God made them go right past without seeing us,’ he added with a pious expression.

‘Then let us give thanks in the appropriate place,’ I said evenly. ‘However, you will have seen that they didn’t have that camel with them. This being so, they weren’t looking for two men on foot.’

Burying ourselves in the sand had also helped. It was a stroke of luck we’d paused before reaching the peak of the dune we were climbing. We’d heard the recriminations in plenty of time as they rode slowly up the other side towards us. I’d allowed myself one look at them. Lucas was almost jumping up and down as he’d screamed at his men. Most of them had looked half-inclined to jump on him. One had even shouted back at him. We’d waited until the shouting died away before digging ourselves out. Now, relief was mingled with discomfort. I’ll not mention the bastard flies that had been hopping all over me and biting.

‘I grant it would have been best not to have seen them at all,’ I continued, giving up on rubbing at myself. I was brushing as much sand on as off, and just a few moments in the sun were making my back feel tight. ‘But it does show we’re on the right course. It’s plain they were trying to cut us off before we could get back to the water.’

Martin began one of his edifying lectures on the Grace of God. Since I didn’t fancy skulking here until dark, I thought I’d put his claims to the test by carrying on through that burning waste – even if every step in it was beginning to feel an effort. Though I’d made sure we had good sandals on before we were taken, you need special boots for walking in the desert. Our lower legs had soon turned an alarming shade of red, and the soles of our feet were hurting as if we’d been dancing on crumbled pumice.

‘What I want to know,’ I said as we rested just below the peak of another dune, ‘is how the Brotherhood knew we were going to Letopolis. I know it has its agents in the government. But the orders I issued gave less than a day’s notice, and our voyage to Bolbitine was as fast as can be imagined. I can’t see how notice could have outrun us – certainly not to produce the level of organisation we met there, nor so far up river.’

‘Do you suppose those documents were left with Leontius in the knowledge that you’d feel drawn out of Alexandria?’ Martin asked.

I took the tiniest sip of water and moved it about with my tongue. I had been wondering that myself for a day and more. But to get all this arranged, the Brotherhood must have worked faster than the wind. The natives had never struck me as good for anything beyond whining and a bit of casual violence. Macarius had always seemed more than a cut above the rest of them.

Yes – Macarius. What had become of him? If he hadn’t chosen to vanish when he did, he’d have been there on the journey. With him in tow, we’d never have been suckered into that trap set by Lucas. It wasn’t worth setting Martin off again – not here, at least – about the worthiness of any native to receive my trust. Even so, I went grimly over the piece of my mind I’d make sure to give Macarius when he eventually did turn up again.

It beat reflecting on my own catastrophic want of common sense. If I’d been less eaten up with worry about those documents, we’d never have left Alexandria.

Chapter 22

It was as we climbed over the third – or perhaps it was the fourth – dune after our shock about how much water we had left that we saw the monument. It was one of those granite things you see all over Egypt, of a man sitting stiffly in a chair, a false beard stuck to his chin, some elaborate crown making his head almost as long as the body. It was leaning over pronouncedly in the sands, and might have been there since the beginning of time.

Size and distance just aren’t things you can gauge in the desert. With nothing comparable around them, things stand purely in their own terms. It seemed an age to get to the monument, and it was huge. It may have been half the height of the Royal Palace in Alexandria. There was no sign of any buildings around it. Perhaps they were buried in the shifting sands.

‘Never mind the picture writing,’ I said to Martin, fighting to keep the eagerness out of my voice. ‘It’s probably the same flatulence you see on the bilingual inscriptions in Alexandria. Look at this!’ I pointed down near the base. It was carved so low that it was half buried in the sands. It was a patch about the size of a large paving stone, where those endlessly varied bugs and crudely depicted plants within their ovals had been smoothed out and overlaid with Greek.

I brushed some sand out of the letters and read the opening of the inscription, which was in hexameters:

They died like rats confined, the men

    Who crawled away from Assinaros,

No roof they found to hold the autumn sun:

    Nor straw to keep the winter frost

        From off their shrivelled, naked bodies.

        And the quarry choked with corpses,

            All among the stinking shit unburied.

    And, brought to see what poets mean by Nemesis,

        Children came to see the living suffer,

            And, while its glowing embers long shall remain

    To dazzle generations with their brightness,

    O proud City crowned with violets,

Your flame of glory died that day with those

Who crawled away from Assinaros.

‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ I asked. I scrubbed more sand away from the bottom of the inscription. If I’d seen the Latin version of the Creed there, it wouldn’t have surprised me more.