Now I was clear of all the dockyards, I looked over at the Lighthouse. If you walked westerly along the Embankment Road lining the shore, you’d pass some of the oldest and grandest buildings in the city, including the back of the Library. There was the old University Building. There were the old temples, all now converted into churches. There was the Spice Exchange. Then you’d get to the punctuated causeway that led across to the Lighthouse Island. A clever structure, this. It allowed easy access to the island without closing off access for ships to the Western Harbour. When it came to engineers – and, for that matter, to everything else – the Ptolemies had demanded and got the best the ancients had to offer.
But I didn’t fancy crowds got up in their afternoon finery and the babble among them of greetings and pleasantries in a Greek so exaggerated yet so corrupt that I still couldn’t listen to it without wanting to laugh. And Hermogenes and his message about more documents could easily wait another day.
I turned east, going back towards the Palace. It loomed before me, about twice as big as the Great Church in Constantinople. The elaboration of columns and statues and marbles of different colours never once took away from the knowledge that this was a vast, impregnable fortress, complete with access to its own harbour. It was the largest building in the city. For much of its history, it had been the most hated. In every park and square, and in every street in the city not too narrow or too twisting to block the view, it was a looming presence.
The guards at the southern gate pulled themselves presentable and saluted as they saw me approaching. But I looked at it. I thought of those airless corridors and those rooms with their heavy silk hangings. If Priscus wasn’t sleeping off some new exotic drug or teaching his cat to scratch out slave eyes, he might come looking for conversation. Or there was Martin, jumping at shadows while Sveta nagged him viciously about matters that probably involved me. Or there were those clerks, sweating away together over the latest set of price ratios I’d given them to calculate. If not that, there’d be . . .
I turned and went back to the Embankment Road. I turned east again. Walking briskly, I skirted the Jewish quarter, and made for the Gate of Pompey. Here, I was recognised a few times. My dealings with the Alexandrian Greeks had so far been limited. I wasn’t sorry for that. Except for Hermogenes and a few other scholars, I had little reason to deal with any of them. With the Jews, it had been a little different. One of the clerks in my preferred banking house almost bumped into me as he hurried about some business. Blinking in the sunlight, he stared up at me. With a muttered and vestigial obeisance, he turned and continued on his way. I looked at the rather dumpy buildings that surrounded one of the larger synagogues. But I had no business here today, so kept to the common faith area of the main road to the gate.
Being on foot, I expected I’d be allowed through without formalities. Normally, it was a matter of turning up and showing my face. With an obsequious bow, I’d be escorted round the heavy bar that blocked the gate by day and waved into the lush countryside beyond to continue my walk. Today, however, the guards had been changed, and a couple of unsmiling creatures looked hard at my passport. They didn’t so much as nod acknowledgement of the golden ink on the parchment.
If delayed a little, though, I was lucky. On both sides of the gate, wheeled traffic was stuck in queues a hundred yards long. This was one of the days in the month when the priests had all the death bins outside the city gates opened. They’d been here with the dawn – scented cloths tied to their faces while they turned over the bodies of the unconnected poor and choked out the required words. The priests had long since staggered off to get drunk. However, the public slaves were still fussing with their buckets of quicklime. In the now recovering heat of the mid-afternoon, the smell and the flies were unendurable. I’d try to find out from Nicetas at our next meeting what was the idea of all this delay – not that he’d make much sense even if he knew and even if he were inclined to share the knowledge with me. For the moment, it was enough that I was soon through the gate, and the high, grey walls of the city were fading out of mind behind me.
Chapter 10
It was here, outside the city, yet within reach of its protective walls, that the very rich had once built their country villas, and the district had been quite a garden suburb. With the decline of population, and of order beyond the city gates, the villas had long been abandoned, and were now mostly fallen down. Slaves still toiled in the occasional cultivated field, growing lettuces and other delicacies for the city markets. Slaves still trod the occasional wheel, raising water from the low canals to irrigate the land. Otherwise, the area was a near-solitude of rocky green bordering the blue solitude of the sea.
About a mile outside the walls, the solitude became complete. The birds twittered in the little trees. There was a continual rustling under the bushes of lizards and small furry creatures. Over to my left, the sun sparkled on the sea. I was on a fairly narrow spit of land that separated Lake Mareotis from the sea, and the road to Canopus ran through this. But I was on a side road that ultimately led nowhere. Here, there wasn’t a human being in sight.
It was hard to say what had got me out this way. Partly, of course, it was the joys of solitude. You got none of that in the Palace, and still less in the streets of Alexandria. If Martin had been working hard, so had I.
Then, it was the news I’d had of Leontius. He’d told the potty man he was setting out along the Canopus Road. Priscus had told me he’d not have set out till after lunch. Taken together, these might be significant facts. You see, no one ever set out by chair on the road to Canopus in the afternoon – not even with two relays of carriers to go at a steady trot. The Police Chief there had started locking the gates well before sunset, and was famous for not opening them for anyone till the sun was well up again. By day, the road could be as delightful over its whole stretch as the countryside around me. By night, it was a haunt of bandits and God knows what other mischief. No one ever started a journey that would have meant being stuck on that road after dark. Nobody local was stupid enough to do that, even with an armed guard.
But if the potty man had been accurately reporting what he’d been told, Leontius was on a journey along the Canopus Road. Now, the settlements that had once lain between the two cities had been abandoned a good century before. If it wasn’t Canopus, then he might well be up to something decidedly fishy.
I had thought at first to leave all this to Macarius. If Leontius was under continual surveillance, whatever he was up to would surely be known without my intervention. But little as I had any faith in his judgement, Martin’s endless mutterings about Macarius were getting to me. Perhaps I could take some hand in digging up the dirt on Leontius.
I turned up a slight incline. It was about the only high ground on the entire spit of land that stretched east of Alexandria. From the top, you could see down on the other side over a longish part of the Canopus Road. I stood and looked up and down the road. It was as empty as the road I’d just left. No one, of course, would be going down from Alexandria. Neither, though, was anyone coming up.
Leontius would have been long since out of sight. That is, if he’d done other with Priscus than make a polite excuse from his company – hardly a surprising act.
I swore at myself and turned back to look over the sea. But no one can be really out of sorts when looking over that wonderful ocean that washes every civilised shore. It sparkled so prettily in the sun. About a mile out, a few coastal ships were hurrying into port from Canopus or perhaps further out. If I strained, I could just hear the regular beating of time for the oarsmen chained to their benches.
Uton we hycgan hwær we ham agen,
ond þonne geþencan hu we þider cumen
I sang in English. Other than for secret notes to myself, I hadn’t used my own language in years. I no longer thought in it, though I believe I did sometimes dream in it. Now, its harsh sounds grated in my throat, nearly as unfamiliar and as menacing as Egyptian. I’d spent so long away from the
language that any other Englishman who might overhear me would surely have thought I was a foreigner.
I fell silent. Once again, I asked what I was doing here. Again, the question had nothing to do with immediate circumstances. What was the point in this lunatic mission to stabilise the Empire by raising up the low? Hadn’t that landowner been right? Perhaps there was a reason for the difference between high and low that went beyond human injustice. Give it as you will, would not the cultivators of the soil eventually lose the soil again?
What was I doing here? On the other hand, what else should I be doing? There was a question worth asking. If only I could think of the answer . . .
I turned from looking over the endlessly fascinating sea and walked over to the little ruin.
I’d come across the abandoned shrine on one of my earlier walks. I call it a shrine, but it might have been a tomb. After so many centuries of neglect, it was hard to tell what the thing once had been. Roughly the shape and size of a small house, it stood up here about fifty yards off the Canopus Road.
It had plainly been intended as a place of some importance. Now, its roof had long since fallen in. Its walls held, but were buried up to perhaps two feet above their original base. The inscriptions covering the inner and outer walls might have been younger than that inscription in the Library. But they’d been in the open, exposed to the sea air. Reading even a few words here and there had so far been as much as I could manage.
I sat down on a fallen column. With a wild olive tree for shade, I reached into my satchel and took out the bread and cheese I’d brought with me. As I chewed on the slightly stale crusts, I fixed my eyes on the least worn area of the outer wall and willed myself to make sense of what could still be read.
Was this a dedication to one of the Kings Ptolemy? Or did it record an erection by a commoner called Ptolemy? Who was Aristarchus? What significance had these repeated quantities of oil and grain?
Land redistribution, Martin, Priscus, even the spring prices – these were all forgotten. Perhaps, I thought, after an endless scanning and re-scanning of those broken words, the place had been neither a tomb nor a shrine. Perhaps it had been some kind of civic building. If so, however, why so far outside the city walls? I took a swig from my wine flask and got up to look again at the rear inside wall. There had been words carved here that I’d already tried to read. They might now make sense.
Behind me, over on the road, there was the crack of a whip and a shrill cry. I turned and looked through the boughs of the olive tree. It was a chair for longish distance travelling, and one of the slaves had put his corner down too roughly. I could hear angry scolding from behind the curtains, while some steward laid about the offending slave with one of those flexible leather rods you use when pain is intended rather than actual bodily harm. If there was still a queue back at the gate, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the owner of the chair to be thoroughly pissed off.
There was a sound of hooves further along the road. Still keeping behind the tree, I looked far to the left. Yes, it was a horseman. Dressed all in black, hood pulled over his head, he came on at a slow canter. So far as I could tell, he was alone. Or he might have been the first of several from round the far bend in the road. But unless those slaves were armed – and ready to fight – I doubted if their owner would be up to very much in the way of resistance, to one man or to many. I squinted into the now lower sun and looked at the monogram on the curtains.
Well, well, well, I told myself. Who was it but Leontius himself? He’d been telling the truth about his journey. And how late he’d set out! Well, if he were to get his throat cut, it would be no loss to me. Even if it was a question of lifting his purse and personal jewellery, it would be a sight worth the journey to behold. I pulled myself back deeper behind the boughs of the olive tree and squeezed myself harder against its trunk. It would never do to be seen.
The horseman came level with Leontius. No sword showing, I noted with disappointment – only a salute. Another moment, and he’d swung off his beast and was standing on the smooth slabs of the road, stretching his arms and legs and brushing the dust from his cloak. Two of the slaves pulled the curtains aside and helped Leontius on to the road. He waddled forward as if to embrace the horseman. But the horseman stepped back. Going over to his horse, he dug into his saddlebag and pulled out a large package.
There was a conversation that I was too distant to hear. Then Leontius pointed straight up to where I was standing. I cursed and prepared to go down towards them. The thought of politeness to the man was enough to make the bread and cheese heavy in my guts. I’d not have put anything past Leontius, but I didn’t expect I’d have any need of the sword I had at my belt. At worst, I’d have to cry off the dinner invite with the real excuse of Priscus. It was worth asking which of the two’s company I least fancied for the evening.
But no – he wasn’t pointing at me. He was pointing at the shrine. Leaving horse and chair and slaves behind, they were picking their way through the brush as they came up for some quiet conference. Given more time, I’d have backed round to the other side of the far wall. But there was no time. The best I could manage was to drop down on hands and knees and crawl as fast as I could over to the fallen column. If I squeezed underneath it from behind, it would need to be rotten luck if either of the approaching men were to push through those bushes and find me lurking there.
Chapter 11
Leontius wasn’t at all used to walking – especially uphill – and I heard his rough breathing from a good ten yards away.
‘So, my friend, your journey was uneventful?’ he gasped with an attempt at pleasantry. He evidently thought enough of his company to put on a comical drawl that wouldn’t have impressed a barbarian slave in Constantinople.
‘If you’re asking if I was seen,’ came the reply, ‘the answer is no. I’m here for one piece of business. This being done, I’ve a passage booked on a ship calling at Canopus. You will understand my disinclination to savour the delights of Alexandria.’ It was a deep, rather slow voice. The accent said educated Syrian. Something about it also hinted at time spent in Constantinople.
I felt a slight tremor above me as Leontius sat heavily on the column, and then another as, with a little yelp, he shifted position. He’d knocked loose a cloud of dust, and I had to suppress a sneezing attack. He sat where I had been, his back to where I now was.
‘Well, my dear fellow, I think it’s time we discussed terms for the no doubt excellent work you’ve done for me,’ he said.
I thought from his tone he’d move to a boast about his estates and his position among the quality of Letopolis. Instead, he left his words dangling as he waited for a reply.
There was a silence. Then: ‘Our terms were settled several months ago,’ the horseman said, a hint of impatience in his voice. ‘This meeting is to complete our business. As said, I have no wish to remain even outside Alexandria longer than I need. You have the gold with you?’
Leontius began one of his blustering speeches. He was allowed to run on a while.
Then the horseman broke in. ‘You have the gold with you?’ he asked again, not bothering now to smother his impatience. ‘If you don’t care to pay what was agreed, I can take myself and all I brought with me back to Canopus.’ That shut up Leontius.
‘You’ll find it all in order,’ he said, trying to sound cheerful. I heard the thump of at least one heavy purse. ‘It was a large sum to gather in cash, and not all of it is the new-minted Imperial coin you specified. But weight and fineness are correct. Would you like me to help you count it?’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ the horseman said. ‘With all my clients, I like to think I deal on trust. Let me give you what is now your property, to do with what you will.’
There was a rustling of smooth leather and then another silence. I was dying for a look at what they were trading. I almost had to hold myself from twisting my head up. Something was crawling on my neck. I hoped it wasn’t one of those yellow b
ugs. They had a nasty sting.
‘My, but aren’t those big, heavy scrolls,’ Leontius said uncertainly. ‘What am I supposed to do with them?’
‘When I am asked for information,’ he was answered, ‘my practice is to give it in full. If there is a lot here, it is because there was a lot to be gathered.’
‘I will read all this,’ said Leontius. He was still disconcerted. ‘But could you oblige with a verbal summary?’
‘Very well,’ the horseman said. I could hear a little smile. ‘Remember, though, that the written texts are the full report. Those are what you have bought. I hold out no warranties for any verbal summary.’ As if getting back on his horse, he twisted himself astride the column and faced Leontius. His booted left foot swung maybe four inches from my face.
‘Your target is not a natural-born citizen of the Empire,’ he said. ‘He comes from Britain, which I believe is an island to the west of Africa. Though this was in ancient times a province of the Empire, it is now given over, like much of the West, to barbarian occupiers.’
My heart skipped a beat. I’d normally have felt an overpowering urge to brush those bugs off me. There were two others now – brown ones – crawling up one of my arms. But, frozen in my place, I hardly breathed.
‘He is himself of barbarian stock,’ the horseman continued. ‘His claim to be descended from citizens of good quality is as false as the name he uses. His real name is also barbarian, but far less easily pronounced among the civilised. As for his claim to be thirty-five, that too is a lie. So far as I can gather, he is at least twelve and perhaps fifteen years younger.
The Blood of Alexandria Page 8