‘I must get down there,’ I cried. This was a disaster. Those ships had sat there an age, waiting for the dispatch orders to be sealed. Now it was all arranged. Come the dawn, they should be away. This couldn’t be happening.
‘Not so fast, my lad,’ Priscus sneered, clamping an iron grip on my shoulder. ‘If you’re going anywhere, it will be with me in front of you. This is a matter for soldiers, and your military experience, I don’t like to rub it in, amounts to fuck-all. I am, I will remind you, the Empire’s most senior commander. If Heraclius has his grain fleet burned while I’m in Alexandria, I might pick up just a fragment of the blame. You leave this to me.’
As he spoke, slaves rushed puffing towards him with his sword and body armour. A eunuch turned round and started babbling something about unauthorised weapons in the Palace. If he got out a dozen words, I’d be surprised.
‘You’re lucky I’m not fully in charge here,’ Priscus hissed down at him. The creature squirmed and squealed, clutching at his smashed nose. Priscus gave him a hard kick in the stomach and stepped back to avoid the fountain of bloody vomit that gushed in the flickering light from the Harbour.
‘Well, come on, my pretty boy,’ he said, turning back to me. ‘Or do you propose to go back to bed and leave this to the professionals?’
When I’d made the exchange, earlier that night, from the chair provided by Isaac back to my own, the streets had been quiet as the grave. With their promise of food to come, it seemed the protesters had kept to their beds. No one saw me as I’d gone in through the side entrance to the brothel, and been shown out at the front to my own carrying slaves. I’d even stopped and got down from the chair on my way back to the Palace for the inspection I’d been promising myself of the obelisk. I hadn’t seen much in the light from the street lamps. But it had been nice to be able to walk again in Alexandria without having to keep looking over my shoulder.
Down by the Harbour, though, it was complete uproar. The police were doing their best to hold back the gathering crowds. They were already through the dockyard gates, and there wasn’t the manpower to force them out again. On the dockside, men ran frantically back and forth, trying to unload sacks of grain from the stricken ship, while others tried just as frantically to put out the flames. This wasn’t easy. The fireboat had been provided with long iron spikes that had fastened themselves hard to the ship, and whatever combustible material had been used burned even under water.
‘Where’s the Harbour Master?’ Priscus roared as he strode purposefully out of the crowd. ‘You!’ – he pointed at one twittery official – ‘I want whoever’s in charge here. Get him now.’
The official dropped his writing tablets and swallowed. He allowed himself one look into that terrible face and was off.
‘Still only one ship, thank God,’ Priscus shouted after a glance at the brightly lit lunacy of the dockside. And it still was only one ship – though showers of sparks were raining down unattended on the decks of the neighbouring ships. How none of them had yet caught fire was a mystery. ‘A piece of silver, from the Viceroy,’ he yelled at the dockyard slaves, ‘for every sack piled up safe over here. One piece of silver!’ The slaves had been flagging. They’d been gazing at the roaring, bubbling flames that looked set to burn the ship to the waterline. Now they rushed back into the flames, pulling frantically at the hatches to get at the deeper sacks.
‘Silver from the Viceroy,’ Priscus shouted at the watching crowd. He took out a purse and emptied it in his hand. He held up the shining pile and, with a theatrical gesture, threw the coins into the crowd. As the cowed, silent onlookers turned into a scrambling mob, he shouted the promise again and stood back to let them past.
The Harbour Master was a fat, bleary-looking creature. He rushed up still in his nightgown and threw himself at my feet.
‘I want those ships out of the Harbour,’ Priscus shouted above the noise. He pointed over at the opening to the sea. The wind was steady in our faces. He was ordering those slow, wide-bellied ships into the wind at night. And they’d be going past the point from where the boats had been launched.
‘The Food Control Office building’s on fire,’ a police officer shouted from behind me.
I turned. He looked ready to drop with exhaustion. It was only the panic that kept him going. That building was a mile back inside the city.
‘Those old women back in the Palace can witter all they like about how the mob has risen,’ Priscus rasped at me. ‘We both know better. This is treason – and coordinated treason too.’ He looked at the Harbour exit. ‘The ships must go out now. They must go that way.’ He pointed again at the northern exit.
‘With all respect, My Lord,’ the Captain of the Fleet said, now beside me as if from nowhere, ‘I can’t risk going out that way. Without light, and into the wind—’
‘Orders,’ the Harbour Master cried, looking up from his prostration, ‘the orders are—’
‘Your orders are to get these ships out,’ Priscus shouted. I say he shouted. Looking at him, he seemed barely to raise his voice. But it cut straight through the surrounding noise as if he’d got hold of a speaking trumpet. He dragged the Harbour Master to his feet and pushed him against one of the growing piles of grain sacks. ‘Your orders are to do whatever you must to get those ships out to sea,’ he said, now menacing. He turned and fixed the Captain with his eye. ‘You do as I tell you, or your seconds in command get immediate promotion the moment I’ve had you bound and thrown into that burning hold. Do you understand me?’
You don’t argue with that sort of order – not when given by Priscus. Dressed in his favourite black, he seemed to have grown a foot taller in the emergency. Where everyone else was in or bordering on panic, he was all calm authority. The two men shrank back as if in unison. They looked at each other. They nodded. Priscus turned back to me.
‘Come with me,’ he said curtly. He didn’t look round as I followed him to the water’s edge. ‘This isn’t the mob’s work,’ he repeated, pointing across at the exit to the Harbour. ‘The easiest way on to that island is from the Egyptian quarter. The building on fire is deep inside the centre. Either the two mobs have joined forces – something that I don’t think has happened in living memory – or this is a coordinated attack. If the latter, your suspicions are right that someone in the Council is leaking to the opposition. The moment Nicetas raised the matter of your arrest warrants in Council, this became inevitable. If both mobs aren’t already on the streets, it can only be because it’s harder to call them out at short notice than to arrange a few terror attacks.’
Someone came over and asked Priscus for instructions. He gave them, calmly and briefly, never taking his eyes off the dark waters of the Harbour. This wasn’t Priscus the effeminate fop, Priscus the superstitious dupe I’d been planning to lead up river to Soteropolis. But you don’t rise high under a competent soldier like the Emperor Maurice unless you know what you’re doing in the heat of battle. You don’t get as close as he’d come to smashing up the Persians with Heraclius breathing down your neck unless you have some of the qualities of Alexander he was always fancying for himself. I turned and looked back at the burning ship. Men on the other ships were now running desperately about, putting out the sparks that continued to rain on their decks.
‘Look,’ said Priscus. I followed his pointed finger as it traced a path right, along the Lighthouse island to the causeway and beyond into the Western Harbour. When the wind blew so steadily from the north, I knew that ships came into the Eastern Harbour, but were sent out through the Western. ‘The plan is to panic us into launching the ships that don’t get fired. They’ll then be cut off with another attack of fireboats. If we can get them straight out to sea, there will be something at least to send off come the dawn.’
‘But what about the wind?’ I asked, holding up my sweaty hands. It blew soft but steady on them from the Harbour exit. I knew little enough of ships and sailing. But I knew ships couldn’t set sail into the wind – not in a crowded harbour, n
or towards a point held by an enemy that might have another fleet of fireboats to send against them.
Well, I thought I knew these things. But Priscus, it was soon obvious, knew more than I did. By threats and bribes and sheer force of personality, he was imposing order on the chaos. The ship that had taken fire was burning beyond hope. Much of the grain might be pulled out of its hold, but it would burn and burn down to the waterline. But the other ships, after an age of yelling and pulling on ropes, were moving away from the dock. Somehow, the Harbour Master had found boats to pull them towards the exit. One of them positioned itself a few hundred yards from the exit, a dozen archers ready to let fly at anyone on shore who dared break cover to send out more fireboats at the other ships. The Lighthouse and the calm seas would help the grain fleet to pull itself into some order out there as it waited for the light and then some kind of formal orders to depart.
If I’d been the centre of attention when we arrived, I was now forgotten. Everyone looked to Priscus as he strode purposefully about the docks, his dark cloak flapping in the breeze, the dying flames glinting on the breastplate of his armour. Several times, I saw him laugh. Once, I even saw him clapping the Harbour Master on the back. There was no point standing where he’d left me. I was beginning to get in the way, as every square foot of dockyard space was rapidly taken up by more or less smoke-damaged sacks of grain. I found a little brick building and sat on a pile of ropes on the land side. After a while, I gave up trying to look dignified for the few people who bothered staring in my direction.
The dawn was now up, and Martin with his satchel of bread and wine had found me. Coward though he was, he hadn’t been happy with my orders to stay behind in the Palace. Now, the emergency past, he’d taken my orders as applying only to the night.
‘I saw some prisoners taken out under guard,’ he said, nodding his head back towards the dockyard gates. ‘They were young men – natives, I think. One of them was wounded.’
That would have been Priscus as well. I’d seen him barking orders at two boatloads of police officers as they set out across the Harbour for the island shore. One had made straight for the point from where the fireboats had come, another for a jetty about three hundred yards to the left.
‘I heard that only one ship was damaged in the end,’ he said.
I nodded and reached for the satchel of bread. I got up and looked uncertainly at the Harbour. The sun was rising fast in the sky, and it lit up the dimpled waters of the now empty Harbour. Far out, beyond the exit, the grain fleet rode safely at anchor. The wreckage of the burned ship was being methodically broken up and cleared away. A few men lay on the dockside, where they’d collapsed from exhaustion. Officials stepped over them as they counted and recorded the saved cargo.
Of course, I hadn’t been able to count the sacks carried off. Still, the impression I had was that most of the cargo had been saved. It was spoiled, and would never do for transporting all the way to Constantinople. One sniff at the bread made from it, and the mob there would start a riot of its own. Any but the most desperate barbarians would throw it back in our faces, and probably burn a few more cities out of wounded pride. But, washed and dried, it would fetch something on the local market.
‘But, little Martin, how delightful of you to remember breakfast,’ Priscus crooned, suddenly beside me. He took the unstopped flask from my hands and took a long pull from it. Face and hands black from the smoke, his armour discarded somewhere among the grain sacks, he still seemed to loom over the pair of us. He glowed, though exhausted. It was as if he’d taken the entire contents of his drug satchel – and had got the relative doses exactly right. He fell onto the pile of ropes that I’d vacated and mopped happily at his face. The wound he’d picked up on the road towards Siwa had opened up again, and the cloth came away covered in blood as well as sweaty soot.
‘Any news of events further inland?’ he asked.
I looked at Martin. He looked back, plainly confused.
‘Never mind,’ Priscus said. He turned his attention for the moment to the bread, and tore ravenously at the loaf.
‘I imagine there will be an emergency meeting of the Council once we get back,’ I said.
‘Not if what I’ve seen of Nicetas is representative of his behaviour in a crisis,’ Priscus grunted. ‘No, not if he’s anything like his dear and Imperial cousin.’ He put the bread down and laughed. I thought I might like some of the wine. But Priscus had the flask again.
‘You didn’t see him as I did outside Caesarea,’ he said, laughter giving way to bitterness. ‘The Persians had smashed through the wafer-thin front of our best troops. They’d found we had no reserves. Even so, I might have scared them back inside the gates if only I’d been able to pull the two wings in tight.’ He looked at me and Martin. I struggled to imagine what I now realise was an obvious tactic. Priscus noticed I wasn’t really following and shrugged. ‘But you’ll hear it all from the poor bloody veterans when Heraclius commissions you to write up the history of his reign,’ he said. ‘All you’ll have to do to make him shine like another Belisarius is to cut out the time he spent puking up his breakfast, and transfer to him my own part in organising the skirmish around his travelling chapel that kept the Persians from swallowing up the whole wreckage of his army.
‘No, my dearest boy, if Nicetas is anything like Heraclius, you’ll not want an emergency meeting this morning of his Council or with him.’ He sprawled back on the pile of ropes and stretched his trousered legs.
I chewed on the crust of bread he’d left me and tried to look more like the Emperor’s Legate than I felt. Priscus ignored my efforts and turned to Martin.
‘Well, my little secretary,’ he asked, ‘how goes your trawl of all the churches in Alexandria?’
‘We’ve so far come up with nothing,’ I said, cutting short the mumbled response. This was a good time to announce I’d given in and was planning a digging trip to Soteropolis. That would recover some of my lost equality with him. I got no further, though. I as good as had the words in my mouth when one of the junior police officers came in sight round the brick building.
Priscus took his message and read it. He gave me an amused look and bent the sheet back into its containing band.
‘I would send you back to the Palace to recover yourself after this most stressful night,’ he said, just the right touch of irony in his voice to remind me of my own uselessness when it came to organised force. ‘However, something’s come up where it would be most valuable to have the pair of you as witnesses. I might also find Martin’s famed scribal skills of more than passing use.’
Chapter 37
The police officer bowed and stood back as he pushed the door open. One smell of what lay beyond, and the breath caught in my throat. It was like a butcher’s market at the end of a hot day. I’d been in the City Prefecture building any number of times. But it was never on police business, and never in the cellars, which were sealed from the main building by doors at each end of the narrow, winding stairs that led down from a room just off one of the side entrances.
I must have known this place existed. I’d been twice in the dungeons under the building in Constantinople that had served much the same purpose before the revolution. But these are places normally considered only when brought undeniably into mind.
As if he’d been going there every day for a lifetime, Priscus went up to the crabbed, pasty-faced official who sat in the first room of the City Prison. An underground room, about fifteen feet by fifteen, it would have been normal enough but for the smell. It was a place of filing racks and keys on numbered hooks. We’d entered through the door that led directly from the bottom of the stairs. Immediately opposite this, and to the right of the reception desk, another door led to what I could easily guess lay beyond.
‘I take it you have the investigation room prepared,’ Priscus said easily, dropping his message on to the desk.
The official looked closely at the unrolled sheet and nodded. He got up and bowed to Priscus
and to me, and motioned us towards the other door.
Some of the more imaginative – or perverted – divines have written about Hell as a series of levels, beginning with the moderately unpleasant and finishing with the indescribably awful. I suppose the long, dimly lit corridor that ran from that door under the whole length of the Prefecture would rank about halfway down the scale of horror. Imagine cells five feet square and barely that high, each one crammed with half a dozen naked wretches beside whom the lowest trash of the mob in the streets above was clean and well fed. Imagine the smell of putrid excrements and sores burst open and left to fester. Imagine those desperate faces pressed against the bars of their cell doors. Imagine the whispered, hopeless cries for justice or simply for mercy, and you have the smallest gears of the machinery with which such order as Alexandria normally enjoyed was maintained.
If Priscus had seemed to have grown physically larger from the joy to setting things to right in the dockyard, he now almost filled the passageway separating those two lines of dehumanised horror. I heard a continual whispering of prayers behind me from Martin. For myself, if I could have squeezed my eyes shut and stopped up my ears and nose, I’d have done so. I wanted to be through this as quickly as possible. I wanted to get back to the Palace and soak myself in a bath until the afternoon, and stupefy myself with opium and with wine. If no fragmentary recollection of this ever came back to haunt my dreams, I told myself, I’d die content. But Priscus walked ahead of me exactly as if he’d been inspecting some guard of honour. He stopped once – I could scarce believe it – and actually pushed his arm through one of those grilles to stroke the bowed head of one of the prisoners.
‘Like Christ Himself,’ he whispered exultantly, ‘we must bear whatever cross Our Heavenly Father makes for us. Let His Will be done!’
The Blood of Alexandria Page 27