The Blood of Alexandria (30 page)

With a stab of annoyance, I told myself I should have kept my mouth shut.

‘It’s five, maybe ten miles distant,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Rather, it may have been, as the city no longer exists, and there is some doubt as to its location. The most certain guess I can make is that the place is somewhere between the Pyramids and Letopolis – where Leontius had his estate.’ I hesitated, then explained something of my plans regarding the excavation of the Library’s reserve stock.

‘Come now, Priscus,’ I sighed as he gave me another of his suspicious looks. ‘You must accept that, until our agreement of yesterday evening, I hadn’t the faintest interest in your piss pot. Until you rolled up here, I really hadn’t even heard of the thing.’

‘But Soteropolis is surely where we look,’ he insisted.

‘Perhaps it is,’ I agreed; a denial would only have made him worse. ‘But we still need more information than we have. Look, Soteropolis may not have been very big. But imagine that Alexandria should one day be in ruins. Imagine even that part of it fell into the sea. It would be very hard for anyone in the future to identify any of the main places.

‘Soteropolis was continuously occupied for three hundred years after the Holy Family must have left. It can’t ever have had that many Christians. The Jews would have had no reason to preserve any objects left behind by the family of what they regarded as a renegade and traitor. Going up there now with what little we have, we’d need a miracle before we knew exactly where to dig.’

‘I would remind you, my dear,’ Priscus said with one of his thin smiles, ‘that we have had a miracle – two, if you consider what’s turned up in this file. And you won’t have forgotten the clear directions that slut gave you.’

‘They weren’t that clear,’ I said, emollient again. I fought to suppress that renewed uneasy feeling: you don’t let the contents of your mind be arranged on the basis of coincidences. ‘But if you want to go off looking for Soteropolis, you’re welcome to the workmen I’ve commandeered. I’ll join you there in due course.’

‘No good,’ he said. ‘It’s you who found this file, and you who found the hidden sheet about Soteropolis. You were the one the slut was talking to. You are the one who must go looking, because you are the one chosen to find.’

‘Priscus,’ I said, gathering the pages back into the file, ‘let’s discuss this again when I’ve finished with whatever leads I can find here in Alexandria.’ I did my best to sound as annoyingly neutral as I normally would have been. A little thought was stirring in my mind. Finding that reference to Soteropolis and then blurting it out might not have been such rotten luck after all.

‘For the moment, I’m hungry,’ I added. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to melt in this box. It can’t be much cooler than the oven you have in mind for Martin and his family.’

‘One step closer,’ Priscus said defiantly as we were finally signed out of the archives.

‘A quarter step, if that,’ I replied. Perhaps five whole steps, I thought.

Chapter 29

I was free. Rather, Priscus had gone off to play with his cat, and there was no immediate claim on my time. I swam for a while in the pool set behind some trees in the Palace gardens. Because it was looking increasingly likely that there’d be another trip into Egypt, I decided to have the canopy taken off so the sun could get at me. Afterwards, I lay in the sun, drowsing while the clerks read to me.

I’d not been away that long from Alexandria. But the administrative mill I’d constructed had continued in my absence to grind out reports and correspondence. There was now a mountain of stuff to be processed. There were the usual survey abstracts, plus all the other matters that had been insensibly diverted to my attention the moment it was realised that I was the only person around able to get Nicetas to listen to anything at all and take any action at all. It didn’t help that the posts were in from Constantinople again, and there was a great stack of newsletters and official bulletins to hold back or to let through censored.

Birds twittered in the trees, and slaves rubbed oil on me as often as I shifted position. It was something of the same delicious feeling as when I took just the right dose of opium. The only difference was that the sun was giving me a slight stiffy. I decided it wouldn’t do to attend to this with so many relative strangers looking on. I would contain myself until the evening. Then, I’d look to Luella for the usual relief.

‘Cut out all reference to the Jewish disturbances in Antioch,’ I said lazily as the clerk who was reading finished one of the newsletters. ‘Fill up the gap by transferring the story from Ravenna of the stolen jewels and their miraculous return.’

The clerk made a note on one of his waxed tablets. He bowed and took up another newsletter.

The news was generally disastrous. There was nothing on the Persian front. It seemed Priscus had been right about the zone of starvation he’d inflicted on the provincials of Cappadocia; that would keep things quiet until the spring. But it was bad on every other front. Rome was under siege again by the Lombards. There could be no help from the Exarch, as Ravenna was also blockaded by land. The Danubian provinces were effectively lost to the Avars; and the Slavs had now taken everything north of Corinth except Athens. There was renewed piracy in the whole Mediterranean. Communications with Carthage were intermittent, and about a third of the taxable land over which it ruled had been definitely written off as claimed by the desert.

In Constantinople, Heraclius had suspended servicing of the Imperial debt, and the banks were failing one after the other. Money just couldn’t be had at the legal rate of interest, and property in even the best parts of the City was going at eighteen months’ purchase. In a private letter, my banker, the Jew Baruch, was recommending against buying at any price; he doubted if the falls had reached anything like their bottom, and doubted also if there’d be any meaningful recovery in the next five years. He’d taken the liberty, he explained further, of calling in all the non-political loans I’d made, and would keep the money in plate and coin pending my own instructions.

The one patch of brightness in these narratives was that pirates had landed between Ephesus and Halicarnassus and had devastated two of the smaller cities. But this was an area where my land reforms had been in place for nearly two years. Without any help from the authorities – not that any was available – the locals had taken up arms and routed the pirates. They’d then burned the prisoners alive at a great feast in which they’d also settled a mass of outstanding boundary disputes without reference to the courts. Back in Constantinople, several members of the Council had complained about a ‘dangerous spirit of independence among the people’ – as if that weren’t the intention of the reforms. Happily, Sergius had flattened their objections with a threat of excommunication, and had got Heraclius to issue what coins he could for the whole of Asia to celebrate the victory.

It was all important – the financial news particularly so: I’d have my Jews in around the midnight hour to discuss its impact on the Alexandrian markets. But it all seemed rather distant as I lay by the pool squinting up at the sun. Uppermost in my thoughts was what to do about the piss pot. This was now the key to everything. Priscus was right: I’d have to do something about Soteropolis. It had been my intention to get the new law implemented, and then go up river with my five hundred diggers. It was plain, however, that I’d never get Nicetas to act, nor the landowners to back down, until we had the piss pot.

Whether and where it might be in Soteropolis, I was increasingly convinced, didn’t matter so much as I’d made out to Priscus. The provenance rules applied only to whatever Martin turned up here in Alexandria. In Soteropolis, I’d be in control of all appearances. My first training in Church affairs had been far off in Canterbury, where my employer, Maximin, had taught me the ways of pious fraud. Our ‘miracles’, had worked there to bring the natives over to the True Faith. I was sure I could produce something really impressive in Soteropolis. We’d dig for a few days here and there. My object, of course, would be the reserve stock. But it wouldn’t be hard to plant something in those sands at night for uncovering by day. Let me round up a dozen or so of those desert hermits. Let me spike the filth they ate with hashish or with opium – or just get them singing Hallelujahs together for a day – and they’d swear to any miracle I cared to arrange at the uncovering.

We could arrive in triumph back in Alexandria. The Patriarch would then lay on the biggest service in living memory. Priscus could bugger off in a fog of holiness. I’d get everything I wanted, and those beastly landowners could kiss my feet in gratitude for what I’d left in their possession.

Naturally, after my last trip into Egypt, security would be an issue. But that I could leave to Priscus. He needed me to find the relic. It would never do to have me other than back safely in Alexandria with him afterwards. His interests being calculated, keeping Lucas and Company away from me in Soteropolis was well within his competence.

Things weren’t turning out that badly, I thought. There may be no such thing as miracles. Even so, there are happy circumstances that, rightly used, can bring on happy outcomes. Finding that reference to Soteropolis – and with Priscus looking on – might have been one such happy circumstance. Having him around was never good news. On this occasion, though, his arrival might have complicated matters, but might well have become a means of breaking the stalemate over the land law.

I did think of sending straight off and telling him to get ready for a trip to Soteropolis. But no – this had to be done properly. If there was to be a miraculous finding of the piss pot, he’d have to be among those deceived. That required a continued show of reluctance to leave Alexandria until I’d done with following every other lead. I’d string him along until the flood waters were at their height, and until I’d got more out of Hermogenes about the probable location of Soteropolis and the reserve stock. By the time I gave in to his nagging, he’d be ready to believe anything, and disinclined to suspect I was ready to feed it to him.

I thought of the Mistress – where was she? It was over a day now since she’d vanished from the canal docks. It was surely time for the message she’d suggested would be sent. She’d come down the Nile with minimal baggage. She couldn’t have brought much cash with her. She evidently knew nothing of Alexandria, and I doubted she had any relationship with the bankers. Whatever independence she’d shown in the wilds of Egypt, she was now on my territory. If she wanted to go about as a grand lady, she’d surely have need of at least a few letters from me. Once his other business was arranged, I’d send Macarius off on a search. If anyone could find her, it was him.

I rolled over on my stomach. Thinking of the Mistress had brought on a very proud stiffy, and those clerks were still droning on beside me. A quick suck from one of the slaves was wholly out of the question. I tried to redirect myself from thoughts of those naked black bodies in her cabin and what she might look like under that veil.

‘The wife of My Lord’s secretary approaches,’ one of the clerks sang out, breaking his colleague’s flow of grain inventories. I sat up and shaded my eyes. Sveta it was, crunching loud on the gravel path, a slave holding a parasol to keep her milky skin from dropping off in the sun. Beside her, Maximin was skipping happily along, a bunch of flowers in his hand.

‘Get me dressed,’ I muttered to the slaves. It was time to do
something
for his birthday. ‘And bring wine and a dish of honeyed figs.’ I looked again at Sveta. ‘Make that two dishes,’ I added.

Chapter 30

It wouldn’t have been hard, but the Egyptian quarter by day was decidedly less forbidding than by night. It was still a sprawl of mostly falling-down slums. Here and there, though, you could see properties that wouldn’t have been out of place in the smarter parts of the Greek centre. I could see now that the potty man had been right. The Egyptian quarter had a decidedly alien feel about it. Even so, there was a fair bit of money this side of the Wall.

There was a stiff breeze coming in from the south. Though nothing could wholly take off the smell I’d now come across all through the Delta – of Egyptians huddled together without means of washing, or inclination to wash – I didn’t need to be so prodigal with my essence of roses. All round me, there was a sound of banging and shouting as the Egyptians went about their business. As in the centre, the streets were crowded. The guards surrounded my chair, swords drawn as they pushed our way through.

‘Oh, the care is for you, my dear boy,’ Priscus had said the day before as I settled myself for the first time into the armoured chair. ‘I’ve never been one for bodyguards myself. As you know, if there are enemies to be killed, I’ve always believed in doing it myself.’

I hadn’t bothered so far myself with guards. Even in Constantinople, after word had got round that I was the one behind cutting the bread distribution, I’d never done more than go about the streets with my sword on show and one of my larger slaves for support. Now, as I looked down from the chair at the sea of jabbering, slightly yellow faces, I was glad of the dozen guards. I was still more glad that half of them were Slavonic mercenaries. They were roughly my size and colouring. And if I paid close enough attention, I could just understand what they were saying to each other.