The Blood of Alexandria (51 page)

I took up the bag of clothes and other items I’d packed earlier and looked out of my office. The junior clerks were in their copying room. Barnabas was standing by the window, looking out over the still glowing embers of Alexandria. If he had heard the gentle click of the door catch, he didn’t turn to me. I quietly crossed the room and looked out into the corridor. As usual, the lamps burned low in the silence of a Palace that – the passing visit aside of some bad Emperor – hadn’t been a place of riotous pleasure since Antony and Cleopatra had killed themselves. In bare feet, I padded across the carpeted floors to the slave staircase located in a turning-off that led nowhere.

The entrance hall had a few eunuchs fluttering about on whatever duties they had that continued by night. I evaded their attention by keeping to the wall behind the rows of statues. From behind, the statues tended to look alike – all in the same triumphant style brought in by Alexander and taken up by every ruler since then influenced by Greece and its artistic traditions. The statue of Anastasius was a wretched thing; because he’d been regarded here and in Egypt as a fellow Monophysite, it deliberately owed something to the last gasp of the native tradition. After his came Justin, and then the Great Justinian, and then another Justin, and then Tiberius, and then Maurice. Phocas was still there, though the head was broken off. Squeezed in beside him, with barely a foot between it and the gate, was Heraclius. There could have been room for another. But Nicetas had ordered something in a full return to the ancient style.

There were guards outside the Palace gates. Now the rioting was over, though, they were back to huddling in a corner with dice and wine. I stood behind the statue of Heraclius and listened to their conversation.

‘Came back here more dead than alive,’ I heard one of the Slavonics say in Latin. ‘Sure enough, though, the bawd comes knocking with a whole bloody troupe of whores swathed in black. Signed them in, signed them out, I did. Me – I’d not be up to wanking in his position.’ He giggled and went back to shaking his dice.

There was a slow reply by one of the locals in Latin. He’d picked up something about my afternoon in the poor district, and didn’t like it.

‘Oh, shut the fuck up, dark eyes,’ came the dismissive reply. ‘You’ll be saying next it was Saint George’s big toe protected the Palace, not the swords in our own hands. As for numbers, you didn’t say nothing at the time. And what would it matter – one tart more or less?’

The exchange merged into an argument over the odds someone had failed to make clear. I dodged through the open gate, and then into a dark recess.

There was a moon very dim in the sky. It was enough – the street lighting was still not back in order – to show the outline of those thousands of still bodies in the square. It was just a few yards of open square. Then I was lost within their cover, and could change quickly into my going-out clothes. Now it was night, and there was no one even to think of asking for identification, the forest of dead held quiet multitudes of the living. They darted about with dimmed lanterns and stepladders, looking for someone they’d loved. There were bodies pulled off stakes and dumped by the side, so lower bodies could be lifted off and taken away for burial. There was a continuous whisper of argument between the living over identification of the dead, and of soft weeping by women and the old.

‘Have you seen my husband Nicodemus?’ some old woman asked.

I looked up from tying my bootlaces. I told her to come back in the daylight. She’d never find anyone by herself tonight, except by a miracle.

‘He didn’t come back from buying bread,’ she added. ‘I was told that men arrested him in the street and brought him here.’ She spoke now in the confused, wandering tone of those who are beginning to outlive their faculties.

I took her gently by the shoulder and led her to the far side of the square. I told her to go home and look to her family. It was hard to read anything for sure from the silence that followed.

‘Go home at once,’ I said again. ‘Take this with you and don’t linger on the streets. Come back here if you must in the morning. But go home now.’ I pressed one of my purses into her hand and hurried past. I tried to put her sense of total helplessness out of mind. On a night like this, it wasn’t hard.

Before we’d gone back inside the Palace earlier, Priscus had stood on the highest step and reached out his arms to the dead.

If I perceive some mischievous design

To sap the State, I will not hold my tongue,

he’d intoned, quoting Creon from the
Antigone
of Sophocles. Then he’d filled his lungs, and to the accompaniment of flapping wings and that endless buzzing of the feasting flies, he’d continued:

But for the miscreant exile who returned

Minded in flames and ashes to blot out

His father’s city and his father’s gods,

And glut his vengeance with his kinsmen’s blood,

Or drag them captive at his chariot wheels—

For Polyneices ’tis ordained that none

Shall give him burial or make mourn for him,

But leave his corpse unburied, to be meat

For dogs and carrion crows, a ghastly sight.

So am I purposed; never by my will

Shall miscreants take precedence of true men,

But all good patriots, alive or dead,

Shall be by me preferred and honoured.

Some of the police officers had looked up at him, unable to follow the complexities of the ancient grammar. The Slavs, for whom any Greek was a trial, had continued about their business of keeping the death lanes clear of sightseers and relatives.

‘I think I’ll publish an amnesty tomorrow,’ he’d giggled once we were back inside. ‘And I’ll levy a charge for the return of bodies. After all, if I don’t charge, the police certainly will!’ He’d tripped off, saying it was time for his cat to be fed.

I’d tried not to look back. It was impossible not to.

Now it was over. All were dead. Tomorrow, the bodies would have been cleared away and the stakes would be taken back into storage, ready for the next time they’d be required. Alexandria could go back to such business as might still continue. We’d even go ahead with the promised bread distribution. So would the Empire temper Justice with Mercy.

The streets too were unlit this night. But the Prefecture slaves were working day and night to clear away the bodies; and their torches flared in every central street. Evidently high on something powerful, they shouted cheerfully to each other as they worked deeper and deeper into the heaps of putrid, rat-infested flesh. Their voices bounced oddly from the walls of the buildings that still stood undamaged. The smell was now overpowering, and it was not just to avoid being recognised that I hurried past with my face buried in my cloak.

The embanked road took the breeze straight off the sea, and it blew without shifting. It was a blessing to breathe clean air again. Though the street, so far as I could tell in the unlit gloom, was empty, I kept to the shade of the acacia trees. The curfew was mostly unpoliced, but it would never do to be stopped. Every so often, I stopped and looked back the way I’d come. I made all the usual checks, and unless there was a really skilled agent on my tail, I was unfollowed. I could hear the lapping of the sea over on my right. Far ahead of me, I heard the barking and howling of what might have been a pack of wolves, for all the noise the dogs were making.

The little palace was in darkness; and though the gates were open and unguarded, I thought at first I’d misremembered the location, or got lost in the dark. But the starlight shone down bright enough in the central courtyard to which the gate opened for me to know I was in the right place. I crossed the courtyard, passing the little statue of Niobe that adorned the fountain. I walked in through the open door to the main wing of the palace. At first, it was all in darkness. There was a glazed window near the top of the entrance hall, but only enough light came through to show where it was and to reflect on the polished stone of the floor. I stopped and looked up. If I went left, I remembered, there was another doorway. Beyond this lay a staircase leading up.

There was a little sound a few yards to my right. I reached for my sword, but never got there. I heard the nonsensical twittering before the maidservant emerged from behind a screen. She’d been waiting there with a covered lamp. Balancing the now uncovered lamp in her hand, she bowed and set up a regular stream of greetings in her own language. I didn’t understand what she was saying. But I did understand the outstretched arm. It motioned me towards a double column on the other side of the hall. Behind this, I could just see the glint of what seemed a silver door handle.

Still reading, the Mistress was in her library now. She sat within a ring of lamps that made the room, by comparison with where I’d been, as bright as day. She put her book down as I was ushered in and stood up. She’d changed her clothes since I’d parted from her in the late morning. Otherwise, she was still veiled and wrapped up as if for a visit. The maidservant bowed and left. I stood looking at the Mistress.

‘Do you want to go through the motions of asking what brings me here so late at night?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Shall I bother asking why you think I will help you – or why you should trust me, of all people, to help you? Did I not make it sufficiently clear that you should remain in the Palace?’

I shrugged.

She got up and moved to a table by the wall. ‘Am I right in believing your favourite wine is red?’ she asked. She poured me a cup and turned back to face me.

‘Do you think I’m a sorceress?’ she asked.

I took a second and then a third mouthful of the good Syrian wine. I thought of that bizarre evening in the Egyptian quarter. I thought of the knuckles on my left hand. Forget anything else that might have happened that day. I clearly recalled how I’d scraped them to the bone when sliding down from the church roof. That had been five days earlier. They weren’t now even scabbed. I thought of many things between these events. But there was no doubt of my answer.

‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘if by magic you mean possession of knowledge that is not yet, or is no longer, generally available, you are perhaps a sorceress. If you ask if I believe you to be in contact with powerful but invisible spirits that can divert the normal courses of nature, my answer is no.’

She smiled.

I put my cup down and moved to the other side of the large central table in the room. I took up the leather sheath for the book she’d been reading and looked at its tag.

‘You are familiar with Zosimus?’ she asked.

‘As an historian,’ I said, ‘he’s highly derivative. He’s often obscure. His judgements of character verge on the extreme. But if you want a narrative in one place of Imperial history from Augustus to Anastasius, you’ll not do better. How far back do you need to start in order to bring yourself up to date?’

She laughed and sat down again in front of the book. I stood hastily back from her place. I looked at the book racks lining the walls. Every niche contained its leather sheath, each one containing its tightly rolled book. I stepped towards one of the racks and scanned the book tags. There was a certain amount of history and geography. Most of it, though, was poetry and romances – all from the modern period. Not having read much of this stuff, I was in no position to judge it individually. But the Mistress would need to be very lonely wherever it was she lived to be collecting this as reading material.

‘Sit down, Alaric,’ she said. ‘Before I have you put to bed, there are several questions I need to ask you about the things I have read. I do not welcome comments on the nature of my questions, nor on whatever their tendency may seem to show. We shall speak for a while in this bright room. Then you will be put to bed. In the morning, we will leave Alexandria. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

‘Good,’ she went on. ‘Let us begin with this concept of the Trinity.’

Chapter 51

The gates of Alexandria had been open all night for the passing and repassing of the burial carts. The dogs, the rats, the flies, the carrion birds – these were annoyances. The real enemy was a sun that could turn the twenty thousand corpses stacked up in the side streets into mountains of pestilential slime. I’d sealed the order myself to override all the normal security measures. Everything had to be in burial pits outside the walls by noon. There was a shortage of quicklime, but officials from the Cleansing Department had assured me that three feet of packed earth should keep the miasma from seeping out. If it rained, they added, we were stuffed. Otherwise, we could find a little comfort in having reduced the number of idle mouths to be filled.