The Blood of Alexandria (70 page)

I heard the ‘whizz’, of fire through the air. I heard its soft impact on the wooden planks. I shaded my eyes to avoid the short but intensely bright flare as dry rope and wood turned into ash and took their place in that bottomless chasm. I stared hard with all the concentration I could manage. It was for the shortest moment of which human senses can take account, and it was too brief a moment for me to give any close description of what I saw. But the impression I had was of immense and metallic instruments of torture. They were to the instruments I had seen in Alexandria, or even in Constantinople, as the light in that cavern was to the sunshine far above. If no one ever throws another bridge across the chasm that completes their separation from the world, humanity will not be the loser.

‘You may not choose to share it with me,’ I said to Macarius as he came and stood beside me, ‘but is there anything about this place or these objects that I have not been able to work out for myself? What is it that prompted Leontius and Siroes, and perhaps any number of others down the ages, to risk and to lose all?’

‘Why must you always assume,’ Macarius replied, ‘that, if only it can be clearly asked, every question has an answer?’

‘Because it has.’ I smiled. ‘Every question has an answer. There are no mysteries for those who know where and how to look.’ As we walked back to the steps that led to the upper corridor, I looked over to the right. There a single lamp burned brightly in the tomb where Eratosthenes had for seven years looked unblinkingly into the nature of things. He’d been dismissively called the second greatest mind of his age in all that he attempted: the second best mathematician, the second best geographer, the second best general scholar, and so on. I’d held in my hand the crowning achievement of his life. It may have revealed him as an inspired lunatic, or as by far the greatest mind of his age after all – perhaps the greatest of all the Greeks. And my decision had been to leave it where I’d found it. Yes, I’d leave the fruits of his labour in there. If Macarius had insisted, I’d have let him add it to the rubbish thrown into the chasm. But he hadn’t, and I wouldn’t. Neither, though, would I take them with me. I thought again of Priscus in the dungeon, gloating as he gave his instructions for the use of the rack. I couldn’t take thought for those hundreds of the impaled or thousands and tens of thousands of the indiscriminately slaughtered. It was like trying to pay attention to a single flake in a field of snow. But I could think of that boy who’d been broken up and then violated till he died.

‘Let the world have liberty,’ I said aloud, ‘before it steps from the shadows.’ I followed the Sisters up the steps. I stopped and turned back. For the first time in five months, I saw Martin and Macarius in an earnest if whispered conversation. I laughed and beckoned them up behind me.

Dirty from the cavern, we emerged blinking into the sunshine of an Egyptian high afternoon. The captain of the guards whom Priscus, it had turned out, had ordered to the right Soteropolis saluted me as I climbed through the entrance and turned back to help Martin. He’d told me of the verbal orders given for my death in whatever skirmish there might be with the Brotherhood. Live rescued captives are better than dead. But Priscus, being Priscus, had wanted to make sure no one could challenge whatever story he eventually made up for Heraclius.

‘My son, would you care to witness the final interment?’ Anastasius asked.

I nodded. Taking up another pose in robes that, even without the dirt, looked far less impressive in the natural light, I watched as he made his arrangements. The remnants of the Brotherhood were no longer to be seen. Those inclined to lurk behind dunes and heaps of rubbish after the Imperial forces had moved in had run off at the first sound of female battle cries. There was no chance of a counter-attack. Broken in Alexandria, the Brotherhood had been killed off in Soteropolis. The locals drafted in to do the digging were now willing and eager, under the direction of their Patriarch, to undo all that they’d been terrorised into doing.

It took much washing and oiling of granite to get the plug free of sand and tightly back in place. But it was done. As men frantically shovelled sand back into the crater, Anastasius stood over them, pronouncing what he later told me was the most horrifying curse on the place even the heretical Church of Egypt could manage. As if by an afterthought, the bodies of Lucas and of Siroes were thrown into the crater. Siroes was nothing to me. He was just a lesser Priscus; and, because lesser, he’d perished in the contest with Priscus. For Lucas, though, I did feel a certain pity. The man had been a dangerous lunatic. He’d been delighted to think I was dying from the very poison that had instead killed him. If he had made it to Pharaoh, he’d have done no better for the Egyptian people than any other of the native kings had managed. He might easily have been worse. But was it wholly bad that he’d worked – with whatever self-delusion and lack of judgement – for the liberty of his people from an empire that had, since time out of mind, shorn them like a flock of sheep? Whether the questions Macarius had asked of me about my own reaction in like circumstances were serious was of no importance. They were certainly worth considering. We buried Lucas face down, his body – rigid as a wooden statue – still twisted in its death agony.

The crater was filled in. Time and the desert winds could be trusted to restore the obliteration of Soteropolis as a whole. I thought of that girl back in the Egyptian quarter. It was here that she’d assured me I’d find my ‘heart’s desire’. Well, if it was here, the reserve stock would be underneath the city of tents the other side of the big dune. Since I imagined the whole area would be taken as subject to the Patriarch’s curse, getting any of the locals here again with a shovel was out of the question. One day, perhaps, I’d make a second journey – this time with an army of diggers from elsewhere in Egypt, and a regular army of Greeks to make sure the locals didn’t make a fuss. But this was it for the moment. All had ended as well as might have been expected in the circumstances. Even so, it wasn’t wholly to my taste.

‘Come on, Martin,’ I said once the crater was filled in. ‘I need a good, long drink.’

‘Why did she have to do it in this way?’ I asked Macarius. ‘The lack of simplicity robs her entire work of elegance.’

Macarius turned back from examining his saddlebags. He looked at me and actually smiled. ‘What makes you assume she had any direction of what has now passed?’ he asked in turn. ‘You have called all this a game. Except where they have constrained your own actions, you are ignorant of its rules. Is it not conceivable that even the Mistress herself is constrained? You will have noticed how little control she had over you. Is it not possible that she must answer to powers far greater than her own?’

‘Will I see her again?’ I asked.

‘Is there any reason why you should?’ came the answer. ‘You have acquitted yourself just as was hoped. I do not think you will ever tell the story now ended exactly as it happened. Certainly, no one would believe you if you tried. But I know you well enough to believe you will take the more credible fragments and work them into a narrative from which you emerge with shining credit. Is that not always the case?’

He climbed onto the camel. I watched him as he rode out to the south. I watched him a long time, until, far distant, he vanished over a sand dune. Being Macarius, he never looked back.

‘I knew you’d see reason, my dearest,’ Priscus said with one of his brilliant smiles.

We were in my office back in the Palace in Alexandria. On the other side of the closed door, I knew without being able to hear that Martin was fussing over some dereliction of filing that had accumulated in his absence. Priscus sat on the edge of my desk, his legs swinging back and forth.

‘I told you it was a simple matter of explaining things clearly to Nicetas,’ he continued. I looked at the heap of papyrus he’d dumped in front of me. ‘You’ll now have to trust me that I didn’t have copies made of all this. Forgery of a public document to enrich yourself at the Treasury’s expense is not something even Heraclius could overlook in your case. Then there’s the matter of your consorting with an obvious sorceress. I’d not be able to prove that in Constantinople. But you know it would come out soon enough in any enquiries made on the spot.

‘As my friends in the Intelligence Bureau often say, “There’s dirt on everyone, if you only look hard enough”.’

I ground my teeth.

‘You’re a fucking beast and murderer,’ I said flatly. ‘When I look at you, I’m reduced to wishing, if not perhaps believing, that there is a Final Judgement.’

‘If there is,’ he said, still smiling, ‘I don’t think either of us has much to fear. If not in law or in theology, there is in moral philosophy the concept of the set-off. Whatever I have done – whatever I may yet do – is for the benefit of the Empire. Without your efforts, I freely concede, the Empire will not be worth saving. Without mine, however, it cannot be saved.’ He dropped his voice, ‘Whether I really believed there was anything under Soteropolis worth having, you’ve made sure it can’t be had. That means the Empire must be saved, if at all, as something more like one of your barbarian kingdoms than as the Empire established by the Caesars on the foundations laid by Alexander. We shall need our peasant militias. That will inevitably mean the loosening of control that you and Sergius have been crying up these past two years.

‘But, in one form or another, the Empire must and can be saved – and we are the men to do it. Now that you have talked sense into Nicetas, I will give you back these most embarrassing documents. You can also forget any instructions my people in Soteropolis may have misunderstood regarding your safety.’

He stood up and brushed his tunic. I looked again at the documents he’d managed to acquire. Whatever gloss I might put on it to others, there was no doubt I’d been blackmailed into getting Priscus out of trouble. He’d not be going back to Constantinople in chains, but carrying a relic that had now been authenticated by two patriarchs as of the highest potency. According to Anastasius, it had cured the lame and restored sight to the blind. According to Martin, it had wondrously eased his haemorrhoids. Priscus had told everyone he was sure I’d found it in the very house of Joseph. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

And, if I really tried, I might in time even deceive myself. If Nicetas had managed to withdraw the warrants for Egypt – ‘reasons of state, you must understand,’ he’d sobbed at me while his leg was dressed again – the rest of the Empire had so far been untouched by land reform outside the Asiatic provinces. Without me to drive on the process . . .

I stopped myself. I could deceive myself, but I wouldn’t. It would soon be time for the burial of Alexander. Now his head had been found, a funeral could take place at which one Patriarch would officiate and another would be present; a funeral at which Nicetas would repeat the full amnesty he’d ordered as soon as he was back on one of his feet, and which he believed would dry the tears of Alexandria. Some hope, that! Even so, Priscus and I would need to be there to take our places in the still pageantry of Alexandrian and Egyptian government.

‘Where is your cat?’ I asked suddenly.

Priscus smiled again. ‘There was nothing to eat in that prison where you had me confined. I had to bite her throat out and drink the blood. The taste was perfectly horrid. But you never did like cats, did you? After that experience, I think I too might become a doggie man.’

Epilogue

Jarrow, Thursday, 4th October 686

Bede brought me some overly ripe pears for lunch. They had a hint of mould about them, but were a pleasant change from bread and milk. When the only teeth you have left are in the wrong place, anything soft is to be welcomed. We sat and reviewed his progress in Greek, which has been most encouraging. I was unable, even so, to keep a slightly melancholic note from the conversation. Getting more advanced texts for him to read than the Gospels is a matter of sending to Canterbury. That’s easy. Guaranteeing that I shall live long enough to move him to the stage of self-sufficiency is another matter.

Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about death since the coming of autumn. It may have been the piss-poor summer, and then the arrival of frost at night a couple of months early. It may, on the other hand, be those bastard novices. They treat me like some living saint. As often as I step into the refectory to get a refill for my beer jug, they’re lining up for benedictions. It wouldn’t be so bad if even one of them was worth a second look. But I think I am beginning to repeat myself.

Now, you will recall, my Dear Reader, that I did promise to describe and explain the facts of what happened to me out in the Tyne. You will have noticed the double stack of papyrus heaped up since then, and the fact that I have neither described nor explained anything. If I were younger, I might worry about the decay of my faculties. When I was younger, I always explained myself perfectly well if explanation was what I wanted. Call it an infirmity of age, then, if I have failed now. Whatever the case, I have done all that I can to set the facts before you. On their basis, you may decide as you will.