The Blood of Alexandria (5 page)

‘Leave us,’ I said in Greek, dropping the Latin I’d been using with Martin.

They bowed low and packed up their stuff.

‘Do lock the door, Macarius,’ I said when we were alone. I leaned back in my chair and looked at the ceiling. It was a good twenty feet above me. But still the air didn’t circulate.

I turned to Martin, who was now fussing through a satchel of notes. It hid the sulky look he couldn’t keep off his face. I took up a handy sheet of parchment and fanned myself.

‘So, what’s all this about payments to pagan temples?’ I asked.

‘It’s news to me,’ said Martin, still looking away. He shrugged. ‘We’ve been investigating the trends and ratios of spending, never the budgetary details. Even so, I’d have noticed that sort of item.’

‘If Leontius is telling the truth, the payment is buried under some innocuous heading.’

‘If I might intervene, My Lord,’ Macarius said, speaking smoothly, ‘there
was
a Temple of Isis at Philae. This town was always on the fringe of Imperial control in the south. For some years now, it has been somewhat beyond.

‘The temple was exempted from the law that suppressed the Old Faith. It was an important cult centre for the kings of Ethiopia, who would come every year down the Nile to worship there; and diplomatic considerations prevailed. My understanding, however, is that the exemption was ended seventy years ago, when the Ethiopians were brought over to the True Faith of Jesus Christ.’

‘Thank you, Macarius,’ I said.

He allowed his hairless, desiccated features the ghost of a smile. Was there any end to the man’s usefulness? He’d come to me on my second day in Alexandria. From running the household, he’d progressed into a general adviser on all matters Egyptian. He and Martin stood looking at me in respectful but also anticipatory silence. I was their leader, and they were waiting to be led. I swallowed another mouthful of wine and thought quickly.

‘I want full details of the subsidy,’ I said to Martin. ‘You will be aware of my dealings with Jacob, who is Undersecretary in the Disbursements Office. I quashed the investigation into his return to Judaism. That is a favour he will now be able to return.

‘Go to Jacob. Tell him to do or promise whatever it takes to get the information. Make it clear we aren’t interested in punishing whatever fraud or corruption attended the subsidy. I want my involvement kept secret, but I want the information fast. I want it preferably before dinner tonight – certainly by this time tomorrow.

‘And the moment you’ve got it, I want a proclamation drawn up, cancelling the subsidy. Fill it with the usual attacks on the Old Faith and threats against recusants. Make a big point about how Leontius brought it to our attention. Call him “Our right trusty and beloved friend” and so forth.

‘I also want an order unblocking his appointment to the Commission of the Nile. It’s plain Nicetas messed up there, with his talk of “graduated pressure”. The man’s turned out brighter than expected. Threatening us with the mob wasn’t the limit of his abilities. Making non-payment of taxes into a religious duty was almost admirable. We’ve lost our present campaign against him. We might as well give way in style.

‘I want this done by you alone and in your best impersonation of the local chancery style. Again, secrecy and speed are of the essence. Ideally, I’d like both documents ready before dinner. I’ll force Nicetas to seal them. We can get them into the Friday
Gazette
.

‘As for you, Macarius,’ I went on, ‘I think it’s time to forget all that bleating from Nicetas about “clean hands”. I want you to investigate Leontius yourself. Reasonable caution, of course – plausible deniability wherever possible. But there’s dirt on
everyone
. It’s just a matter of finding it. He’s the biggest man in Letopolis. He must be up to something dodgy.

‘I want sworn statements, conversation transcripts, original documents. When I invite that man here again for a private dinner, I’ll serve him a meal he won’t forget.’

I put my cup down and smiled. I looked about me. Martin wasn’t looking too happy. Then again, he never did. Macarius, though, was looking as pleased as his impassive face would reveal. Whatever the case, I’d spoken. They’d wanted leadership. Now, they’d been given it.

‘Be aware,’ I took up again, ‘that Leontius has limited active support against the law. His threat of the mob was intended to scare us. At the same time, it will have terrified many others in that meeting. But the subsidy matter is important. We can’t risk getting the priests involved in matters of taxation. You never know with Heraclius. They might just win.

‘We cannot afford further delay. The whole thing must be knocked on the head before Sunday service. That being done, we go back to the main issue – preferably without Leontius against us. This morning, things went badly for us. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost.’ I had another thought.

‘I feel one of my “anonymous” pamphlets coming on,’ I said to Martin. ‘I may have said this morning that Heraclius is not Phocas. They didn’t seem that convinced. We can work on this. It may be useful to remind them how, when Caracalla turned up here, he organised a massacre in pretty short order. Diocletian was hardly the Lamb of God.

‘There’s something about Alexandria that brings out the worst in an emperor. This being so, dealing with me might be better than having to face Heraclius in person.

‘Leontius must be made to understand that, if he draws it, his sword will have two edges.’

I stood up. I really had finished now. Macarius hurried forward with a towel. I let him wind it round my waist.

‘Do arrange a cold bath for me,’ I said, ‘and something light and simple to put on. I’ll be in the Library, if anyone needs me.’

It was early afternoon, and the streets of Alexandria were baking in the sun. Elsewhere, the heat would have driven people indoors for a rest. The hours of business in Alexandria, though, were always when there was business to be done. If I’d taken my official chair, or put on finer clothes, I could have relied on a clear path through the crowds. As it was, I was jostled continually to the street edges. Even in the fifty-yard width of Main Street, I had to push back at people to avoid being pitched into shops I had no intention of visiting.

The street demagogues didn’t help. In this heat, of course, even they couldn’t be really active. But enough of them had taken up their usual positions – and they’d attracted enough of the usual scum – to add to the general unpleasantness. As I tried to pass by one of them, I had no choice but to stop and listen. He was ranting on about the floods. Apparently – and he assured us all he was the greatest expert on the matter – the Nile had risen too late, and was now rising too fast.

‘You mark my words,’ he bawled above the chatter of the passing crowds, ‘it will be evil as well as mud washed down from the south this year. These will be floods never to be forgotten.’

‘What I want to know,’ a strongly Syrian voice struck up beside me, ‘is where the police have all gone. In Antioch, this liberty of speech among the lower sorts would never be permitted.’

The answer I could have given was that the police had no manpower for pushing the demagogues off the main streets. Most of them were manning the Wall that kept our own central district sealed off from the Egyptian quarter. The rest were down in the Harbour, keeping the Greek trash from rioting as the supplemental grain requisition was loaded. But I was in no mood today for putting a finger on the pulse of street opinion. I tilted the brim of my hat to cover more of my face and prepared to move off.

‘Is it true the government is planning to require different grades of bread to be sold each side of the Wall?’ the Syrian asked again.

I stopped and looked hard at the man. Where had he picked this up? It had been raised in the Viceroy’s Council just a few days back. It had been a vague option, and the Patriarch and I had got it dismissed out of hand. But this was the sort of rumour that, Wall or no Wall, could set off intercommunal war.

I would have asked a few questions. At this moment, though, there was one of those tidal movements in the crowd that pulled me away from the Syrian and brought me to rest just a yard or so from a column of monks, dressed all in black, who were pushing their way towards some mischief.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God,’ one of them cried, waving his club for emphasis. ‘Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ another bellowed. I squeezed myself far back out of their path. Wherever they were going, they really were about no good. Besides, they were almost dripping vermin. Just looking at them made me want to scratch.

‘Spare some change for the hungry!’ came the practised whine.

I’d now got through the stationary crowd and was the other side of the statue put up to celebrate the Great Constantine as the Thirteenth Apostle. I’d been looking up at the colossal meekness of the thing, and hadn’t considered where I might be treading.

‘Piss off!’ I snarled. I stepped smartly back before the beggar could lay scabby hands on me. I could have given him a lecture on the virtues of working for a living. But I’d had enough that day of explaining myself.

He shuffled back to his patch of shade and sat down again with as hard a bump as a starved body could manage.

His begging cry was soon lost in the noise around me. But soon it wouldn’t just be the beggars who were hungry. There’s a limit even in Egypt on how much grain you can take out before people begin to starve. For the moment, so long as I could keep Nicetas from signing his price control order, there was still bread to be had in the market. But it was hard to say how much longer the poor could afford to buy anything at all.

Chapter 4

I looked again at the tattered sheet.

‘I can’t say I’ve heard of a Lake Smegma,’ I said. I looked closer still at the sheet. Why was it, I asked myself, that papyrus always crumbled under the most important words in a document?

‘I think you will find this helpful, My Lord,’ Hermogenes quavered. He pointed to another of the sheets stretched out before us on the table. I shifted position, to see if the faded writing might look any better from another angle. How at his age he could read a word of this was beyond me. Then again, as Head Librarian, his job was to read far worse.

‘Ah,’ I said at last, ‘a transliteration of an Egyptian name.’ I’d raised my voice only slightly. But it echoed in the cavernous main collection room of the Library. Perhaps thirty yards away, some bearded scholar looked up and scowled at me. ‘It gets us a little closer to what we want,’ I continued. ‘At least we can be sure it did exist. But we still don’t know what it contained – or, indeed, exactly where it is.’

‘That may be so, My Lord—’ Hermogenes broke off as one of the lead weights shifted, and the map rolled shut. As he reached with palsied hand to keep it from moving any futher, he knocked it and a whole stack of rolls on to the floor. They fell with a crash that echoed through the room.

‘No, My Lord,’ Hermogenes gasped as he went down on all fours. ‘Please allow me.’ The rolls scraped harshly on the pavement as he tried with all the feeble uselessness of age to gather them all together again.

‘I must inform you,’ the far away scholar hissed with pompous self-importance, ‘that I am here on work of the highest importance to Holy Mother Church. I do not expect endless disturbance from the prattle of some barbarian child. Show some respect as you breathe in the sacred dust of these four hundred thousand volumes.’

Hermogenes tried to get up and splutter a protest. But I kicked him gently in the side, and he went back to trying to re-sort his documents. ‘Work of the highest importance’ to the Church, he’d said? Well, he must have been pretty far down the scale of human importance not to have recognised me now I was wearing no hat. And if he had recognised me, a bishop himself would sooner have kissed the dust beneath my boots than call me a barbarian. I could have called for security and had him arrested. A good racking and the loss of his eyes wouldn’t have been thought unreasonable to anyone told the facts of his treason. But I’d grown used to living in a world where my looks made me an object either of lust or of contempt. I turned my back on him and stared again at the racks that housed just part of the biggest collection of books in the known world.

Oh, how excited I’d been on my first visit here back in April. Here, at last before me, was the greatest research library in the world: the treasure house, begun by the first King Ptolemy, of all the arts and sciences. It was here that the standard text of Homer had been settled, here that the world had been measured, here that the secrets of the human body had first been laid out and classified.