The Blood of Alexandria (25 page)

I sat up again and pressed myself against the wall behind me. I pulled the blanket to my face. The faint smell of piss was oddly comforting. Without lifting my face, I looked up at the still and familiar things around me. They were exactly as they were. They always had been so. They always would be so.

But they weren’t the same – not quite. There was a new shadow. Confused as I still was, I knew the pattern of light and shadow in that room at every time of the day or night. This was a new patch of darkness in the room. About eighteen inches from my sleeping mother, it had no obvious relationship with any other object. Still not lifting my face, I looked and looked. Like a spreading stain, the shadow grew. And insensibly, as it grew, it was changing shape, and acquiring substance as it changed. It seemed a puff of smoke. It seemed a ball of dark wool. It grew and changed and took on substance. And all the time, I sat on my bed of filthy straw, my lower face pressed into the blanket.

‘Mother!’ I wanted to call. But I had no voice. I could move my uplifted eyes from one place in the room to another. Otherwise, it was as if I’d been turned to stone. The mass of blackness was finishing its transformation, or perhaps its arrival. Without seeing eyes, I felt the close inspection. I felt the cold menace. In a weak, hesitant step towards me, it moved.

But it had moved too soon. It was like smoke again in its partial disintegration. It paused. Now, I could feel the impatience of something forced to wait for what had been thought so easy.

Still soft, the voice was urgent now. Its steady pulse of calling and then silence hadn’t broken or altered in any way. Yet between two beats of this pulse that, if far apart, were not that far apart, the Dark Thing had managed its entire appearance out of nothing – and had done so in what seemed a very long time. It was as if I were within two distinct streams of time, each moving at its own speed.

The voice came now from behind me. Between each call, I could hear breathing. It was a long, soft rising and falling of breath. My back was pressed hard against the wall. It was a wall built in the old days by men of the race we’d driven out. Through those courses of stone and brick and stone again, you don’t hear anything. Yet I could hear breathing from behind me. I wanted to jump up and run. I wanted to run to my mother. Or I just wanted to run. The Dark Thing was moving again. It was a shuffling but now confident motion as it closed the distance to where I sat. Still, though, I had no strength to uncurl my legs from under me.

There was a flash of light above and behind me. Suddenly, I could at least move my head. I looked up. Without any breach in those courses of brick and stone, a woman’s arms – bare and white – had come straight through the wall. It might have been mist for all the resistance it gave. There was no head or body. It was just the arms, and they shone white as if bathed in the glare of the moon at its fullest. At first, they moved around over my head as if feeling for something. At last, they found me, and fingers that were ice-cold and unyielding fluttered over my face, and began closing themselves round my throat and pulling me back through the wall.

The Dark Thing was itself reaching out to me as I felt my head bump against the hardness of the wall. Then the hardness yielded, and, as if through honey, I was passing through the wall into – into—

I woke screaming. I screamed until my throat was raw and my voice cracked. As I fought to control the terror, some inner cordon snapped, and it came back into my understanding that I wasn’t Aelric any more, dispossessed starveling in England, but Alaric, Legate Extraordinary of His Imperial Majesty. The familiar things of the dream had been dispersed four years ago following my mother’s death. My brothers had been dead for years. My little half-sister – what had become of her was a question I couldn’t begin to answer, never having seriously asked it. And it had all been a dream. I wasn’t back in Richborough, some little child waiting to mature into the most literate bandit Kent had ever known. I was in Egypt, where my word was often close to law.

But I still wasn’t in my own bed in the Letopolis administrative building, or in any other place where I was in control. I was in motion. Beneath the hard, wooden surface on which I lay, there was the rumble of wheels on a paved surface. Close by was a hubbub of voices, all speaking Egyptian. I flexed myself to sit up. My head banged hard on the wooden boards as I fell back. As on that journey into the desert, I was bound again at the wrists.

While I was trying to work out in my still fuddled mind what was going on, the canopy that had kept me in darkness was pulled away. My eyes adjusted slowly to the light of the Egyptian day that was all about me. It was some while before I could see for sure that it was Lucas grinning at me through the bars of the cage in which I was shut.

‘Has My Lord slept well?’ he asked as I rolled back into a seated position. ‘Was he calling out perhaps for breakfast? Or for the ministrations of some native harlot?’

‘What the fucking hell . . . ?’ My throat was too raw for me to get out more than a few words. I pulled myself on to my knees and looked out through the bars. We weren’t in any part of Letopolis that I knew. Except it was still Egypt, we weren’t in any other place I’d visited. Pulled by two oxen, the wheeled cage in which I was the one exhibit rumbled down streets as crowded and as wide as those of Alexandria. On either side rose buildings of an opulence that had nothing in common with anything of the Greeks, old or modern. Lucas walked beside me. Children danced round and about, keeping roughly level with our slow procession, their elders looking on in angry excitement. In starched loincloths, their bare torsos burned a reddish brown by the sun, some of them called eagerly at Lucas. Others bowed low before him.

Lucas had turned from me and was shouting something in Egyptian that had more of those alien, jabbering faces looking in at me.

‘Do you suppose you could escape the Brotherhood?’ Lucas asked when he’d turned back to face me. ‘Did you suppose you would be safe anywhere in Egypt, or in Alexandria itself? Your sorceress friend has powers that do not reach this place.’

‘What are you going to do with me?’ I gasped. There was much else I might have asked. But this was the first real question I could get out – and, I suppose, the most important.

‘Drink before speaking,’ said Lucas, pushing a cup of something liquid through the bars. ‘You’ll not be needing eyes to see the places where you’ll be seen. But you will need a voice for proclaiming the end of Greek dominion and the restoration by me of the people’s ancient and most perfect freedom.’ He dropped his voice – as if it mattered what he said: we were as far beyond the hearing as the reach of any Greek.

‘But let us continue our debate of the other day. You spoke about your own state of perfect freedom. You may wish to explain to me how, if there is no room here for kings or any government, you have allowed yourself to be sent among us as the representative of the most powerful king in the world. Is there some subtlety in your argument that my wog mind is not up to appreciating? Or is there just the smallest touch of hypocrisy in what you say?’

‘Fuck off, shittybreath wog!’ I snarled. ‘Laying hands on me is high treason.’

‘Not the answer, I confess,’ said Lucas, speaking very even, ‘I had expected from a subtle and learned student of the Greeks. But let it be as you declare. My real interest in speaking with you is to discuss your possible release, and even safe return to Alexandria.

‘You have in your possession, I am reliably told, an object of considerable value. The moment I have this in my own hands, let me promise you—’

‘Now, why should I trust your word in anything?’ I asked, checking the obvious protest that I had no idea whether this bloody piss pot existed, let alone where it might be. ‘I’ll consider giving you what you want when I’m in a better position to rely on your side of the bargain.’

Lucas shrugged. He turned and shouted out a rapid stream of orders. With a frantic pulling of oxen, the wheeled cage came to a stop. The crowd about me thickened, and those dark faces pressed in closer and closer against the bars. I could see the blank ovals of their eyes, and smell the stale garlic on their breath. From every side, hands reached through the bars. Even cowering in the dead centre, I wasn’t out of reach of those sweaty yet chill hands as they plucked at my clothing, uncovering and touching and squeezing every part of my body.

‘Behold how the Day of Reckoning is at hand!’ Lucas was shouting above the babble. For some reason, he shouted now in Greek. ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last. Indeed, O ye children of soil, the last shall be first and the first last.’

I could already smell the charcoal when I saw the man with the blinding instruments – who had appeared as if from nowhere – standing beside Lucas. They conferred in hushed tones, with significant looks at me as I lay bound in the cage, trying desperately hard to blot out the horror of those cold sweaty hands still at work on exploring every part of my now naked body.

This time, I really was awake. I lay in my bed, safe on the top floor of the Letopolis administrative building. The netting hung white above me in the moonlight that streamed through both windows. There was a regular chirruping of insects from outside. The air about me was sultry in ways that no Alexandrian could have imagined. But I lay there freezing and unfreezing with terror. With every beat of my rapid pulse, there were bright flashes of pain in my head.

I couldn’t really have been crying out. That would at once have brought people into my room. Instead, I lay alone in the moonlit silence. But my throat was parched as if I’d been shouting all night. I scrambled out of the netting. The flies it was there to repel had long since gone off to sleep. I lifted the cover from the wine jug and drank deeply. I forced myself to ignore the sour taste of the local vintage and drank again. Feeling better, I got up and went over to the window through which the moonlight shone most directly.

I looked over the low huddle that remained of Letopolis, all colours bleached out in the whiteness. There was the street where I’d been speaking with Macarius. The church lay at the far end, where the street forked before leading down to the Nile. The moon looked pretty on the water, for all I could smell the mud.

Was that a shadow that had moved? It had been on the edge of my field of vision. My heart began its hammering again, and I clutched at the stone sill of the window. I looked straight ahead and ignored what might have been two glowing green eyes. If I’d never gloried in danger, and if I’d usually had to deal with an attack of nerves after what I thought an unreasonable danger, I’d always so far managed the combination of resolution and trusting to luck that passes for courage. Now, for the first time, I realised what it was to be a coward. I was jumping at shadows. I knew there was no one and nothing out there that intended me the slightest harm. And I was shitting myself with fear at the sight of Letopolis in the moonlight.

I took another drink and breathed deeply. I really was awake, I told myself. I’ll grant there are dreams that seem real enough – I’d just had two of them. But they can always be known afterwards as dreams. What distinguishes them from reality is a lack of full self-awareness, or some observed deviation from the laws of nature, or, failing that, a set of events that cannot be related in space or time to the rest of my experiences. But here I now was – in a place where I expected to be, at a time that followed on from that dinner with the Mayor. Whatever I thought I could see outside could be dismissed as tricks of the moonlight on a heated mind. I was awake, and I was safe.

But I was still cold, and still dripping with sweat. And I could feel another fit of the shakes coming on. There was a faint doubt in my mind.

‘How much of that filth have you been taking?’ Martin asked sharply. He sat up and stared into my eyes. I wasn’t sure what he could see in the dim light, but he already knew what he was looking for.

‘It was dried resin,’ I muttered. ‘You can’t always judge the dose when it’s not an apothecary’s pills.’

‘You’re as bad as Priscus in your own way,’ he said flatly. He poured me a cup of sour fruit squash and watched as I drank it. He was still angry at the shock of being woken. But he was growing calmer, and I could hear a slight satisfaction in his voice as he went on.

‘You first told me when we were living in Rome about the Richborough dream,’ he said. ‘You’ve been having it since you were still a boy in Richborough. I think you had it most recently in Alexandria, just before the floods began. Did the monster take hold of you this time? Or did you sit in that bright room, talking with the woman?’

I shook my head. You can dream about having had dreams, and you can dream about having had dreams about having had dreams. I needed Martin’s assurance that I wasn’t suffering some disorder of the mind. It was just the opium working with the after-effects of a difficult few days. I remained sitting on the bed. I was feeling better with every breath. I was even beginning to see the absurdity of running to Martin – of all people – with an attack of the vapours. But I didn’t feel inclined to go back to my own room.