On a casual glance, if choked with rubbish and piles of booty, the street seemed pretty well empty. In fact, it was so long and so densely packed with shops and other businesses that it had absorbed a mob and a half like water into a sponge. The shopkeepers had based their defences on the assumption that the police would be round before things turned really nasty. But there were no police any more, and these competing groups of Greeks and Egyptians amounted to a plundering army. They’d managed to pull all the wooden screens off those shops that had windows. Some of the buildings were already on fire. All along, we could hear breaking glass and the screams of those who’d made their homes behind or above their shops. The looters were mostly interested in laying hands on whatever might be valuable and could be carried away. But any living creature they stumbled over in their search was fair game for them. Then, it was a matter of maiming and dismemberment, of roasting and of rape. The lucky ones died soon. The bodies and parts of bodies that littered the carriage tracks and the paved area under the central colonnade were a grim sight.
‘Keep going,’ I’d said several times to Martin. ‘We can’t afford more trouble.’ He’d nodded. He only slowed down when it was a matter of helping me over the more chaotic piles of smoking rubble and pieces of smashed furniture.
Over on my left, a woman screamed. It was close, and it stood out from the background cries of pain and terror. I tried hard to follow my own advice. But the scream came again and was closer. I heard a broken sob and looked left. I should have looked away at once and pressed on along the street. Instead – for just a moment – I stopped. A woman had broken free from whatever place of horror had been her home. Naked, her body a mass of cuts and burns, the place between her legs visibly a swollen mush, she staggered towards me. I didn’t think at first she’d seen me or anyone or anything else. It was the fixed stare about her eyes. She screamed not at me, it seemed, but to take her own attention from what she’d seen or experienced. I was wrong.
She caught me as I tried to hurry past. She took hold of my arm and almost had me over. She pushed the bag at me she’d been carrying. It was a large thing, and heavy. There was something in it that moved feebly. She pushed it firmly and even desperately into my hands. I tried to think of words. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Perhaps there was nothing I could say that would have made sense to her, let alone have brought the comfort I felt I was expected to give. I looked round for some piece of cloth or other covering among the rubbish.
‘Oho, running off, eh?’ a voice called from behind her. He was a big man, with a face too scarred to carry much of a beard. For what it mattered, he was probably a Greek. There were five or six other men still further behind. They swayed drunkenly on the threshold of the smashed-up building the woman had just left. They laughed noiselessly, pointing at the woman as she fell down and then avoided me as I tried to help her to her feet. The big man had straightened up on seeing me. Now, he had a sword in his hand. He waved it at me and laughed loudly.
‘Get behind me,’ I said to the woman. I put the bag carefully down beside me and reached for my knife.
‘Take him!’ she screamed at me. ‘Take him!’
I felt the bag pushed back into my hand. I tried to grab her again, but she lurched out of reach, and I was in no position to dance after her. With a wild, chilling wail, she was rushing back at the big man. She picked her way over the heaps of rubbish, and ran unsteadily across the clear stretches of pavement. She opened her arms as she got close. But for that nightmarish cry, it was as if she were rushing to meet her lover.
He cut her down with an incompetent slashing stroke at her neck. Still screaming, she fell to the ground. She tried to clutch hold of his legs as he advanced. He finished her with another blow to the neck that did more to smash the vertebrae than separate them. Waving his sword again, he ran at me. He turned once to call his friends into the battle. For the moment, they chose to watch things from where they were. I had my knife out. I held it at waist level and tried to look able-bodied.
‘Not so fast, my fine little lord!’ he rasped. He jumped off a heap of stones dug out of the road and smiled and went at me.
If you can imagine it, I held fast to my walking staff while going into some kind of fighting position. In the normal course of things, this scarred, shambling item of trash wouldn’t have dared give someone like me a second look. Now, it was as if he’d smelled blood. I barked at Martin to keep moving on.
As he came at me, he discovered to his cost that there was more to fighting with a sword than waving it like a cudgel. Watching more of his incompetent slashing, I gave up on the knife and went at him with my staff. He did succeed in dodging back. But I got him now with a lunge hard forward into his crotch. He fell screeching backwards on to the cobblestones.
That would have been the end of him, if I hadn’t fallen as well. I’d put my full weight on to the bad ankle, and I went straight down with the agony. I breathed deep in and out, and fought to regain control. It was only a few moments before I had my eyes open again and was pulling at my knife. But it was already over for him. Martin had finished the creature for me. He’d done it from behind with a cobblestone the size and shape of a loaf. Looking at the splashed red and grey all over his face, Martin had no need of a second blow.
The big man hadn’t meant much, it seemed, to his friends. By the time I’d got his sword in my own hand, and was testing its weight, they’d vanished back inside the building.
‘What is it?’ I asked, pushing the sword clumsily into my scabbard, where it was a very bad fit. It was a redundant question. Martin had already tugged at the restraining straps of the bag. So far as I could tell, the baby was about six months old. He should normally have been screaming his head off. But if somewhat bashed about, he seemed to be in good shape.
‘Oh, bring him along,’ I groaned. The mother – assuming that had been her – was dead. It was an easy guess what had become of the rest of the family. We couldn’t stop here much longer. Nor could we leave the boy behind. If we got through this, I could see, I’d have another adopted child. But there was no time for the formalities of acceptance. We had to keep moving. Already, we were attracting more than passing looks. Half-cut, bleary-eyed men were staggering together in the street as if from nowhere. There were still things to steal, and rapes and murders to be committed. But we looked interesting, and might not be able to run away. Though ragged and filthy, my clothes put me obviously into the higher classes. Though I had a sword again, it was plain I was injured.
We got another fifty yards along the street, then swung left into a side turning. I was desperate for water and any kind of a rest. And further on, there was what we agreed was an unpleasantly tight grouping of men sitting under the colonnade. Most of them lounged in the shade. A few of them were standing. They were all staring in our direction with what struck me as more than passing interest. We turned in, and then turned again, and then again. We were now in one of the narrow, airless streets common to poor districts in every city. The differences between this and what I’d seen of the Egyptian quarter would have been hard to list. I’d never been here in any of my wanderings through Alexandria. The sunlight was blocked by the upper storey of the buildings on either side, and it was impossible to know which way we were going. But we were alone. And this was the last place mobs bent on blood and plunder were likely to frequent.
For the first time, I was able to sit down and have a proper look at my ankle. It was horribly swollen. I was glad I’d put on shoes, rather than the jewelled sandals the slaves had tried getting me to wear. Even touching it was painful, and it wasn’t possible to say if it really was broken or just badly sprained. I cut the tattered remnant of my cloak into strips and had Martin bind them as tightly as he could around the ankle. Afterwards, I stood up. Running was still out of the question. But movement would be easier. I might even be able for a half-dozen steps at a time not to look so disabled.
‘Keep him in the bag,’ I said, nodding at the baby. �
��He’ll come to no harm in there – and it mutes the crying.’ Food was something we’d consider later. That would be for all three of us. Of course, this was a district without running water and there were butts placed on every corner. With all the hard work of rioting, these hadn’t been filled for at least a day. But they had moderately clean water for anyone willing to risk falling in as he stretched over to get it. Martin cupped some in his hands for the child, who now became somewhat quieter. All we needed after this was some place of safety, preferably inside the Palace, or in some place from where we could get to the Palace.
I looked around me. It was a poor district. Yet the mean, crumbling buildings were also well-secured. A few old women and children were darting glances from upstairs windows. But the streets were empty, and there was no chance, it was soon made clear to us, of being let in anywhere.
‘Which way do you suppose to the Palace district?’ I asked. Even if we couldn’t get all the way, there were some churches where Martin might be recognised.
‘I think that way is east,’ he said with an uncertain wave back the way we’d come. He listened closely. ‘But surely there’s a main street not far off,’ he said.
I also could hear the faint commotion. It was an annoyance, showing, as it did, that the rioting wasn’t confined around the Church of the Apostles. But it wasn’t surprising. Every poor district borders eventually on to somewhere richer, and we knew that we were only in the first few streets. This particular mob might be a few hundred yards away as it went about some mischief that, given luck, would keep it from any place we wanted to be.
‘Did you bring any money with you?’ I asked, pulling him back to the matter in hand.
Martin shook his head.
Nor had I. The golden slide for my hair hadn’t survived the climb to the church roof. Beyond that, I’d deliberately not put on any jewellery. The knife was valuable – but much more at present for its blade of Damascus steel than for the weight of its hilt. I didn’t suppose anyone here would accept a promise to pay. For food and for shelter, then, we might have been beggars in the city that I helped rule.
‘Do you think it’s getting closer?’ Martin asked anxiously.
I would have told him to shut up. But I listened again. I looked at Martin. He looked at me. The baby was beginning to cry piteously.
Chapter 45
‘They are coming closer,’ Martin said.
I nodded. There was no point in denying the obvious. The street around us was as still and quiet as in one of the abandoned suburbs of Constantinople. But the distant noise of rioting was growing louder. It wasn’t the rushing about and screaming of the mob back outside the church. That sort of rioting soon burns itself out. This was the tramp of perhaps hundreds of feet, and that rhythmical – and, in my view, that increasingly tiresome – chant about the Tears of Alexander. Add to this the regular thumping of cudgels against wood when people are marching past close-packed properties and checking to see which, if any, are not locked and barred.
It was Egyptians. And they weren’t marching by this poor district, on their way to rob and murder more Greeks of quality. They were inside the poor district. And they were getting closer.
‘It’s fair to assume they’re after us,’ I said flatly. ‘They were waiting for us and hoping to cut us off as we approached the Palace district. Who wants us and why, and what’s to be done with us – search me. If only we could find somewhere to hide . . .’
But where to hide? As I said, every place worth entering was already secured. The streets, though filthy as any pigsty, had no shelter. Unless we could find an open door, the best we could hope for was to keep out of sight, and wait for the mob to give up whatever search had brought it our way, or for the Greek residents to come back from their own rioting to deal with these invaders. Yes, with all this noise, there must soon be a Greek mob on the scene. That would complicate matters nicely.
With a muffled crying, much heavy breathing and the scrape of my staff on the dried mud of the street, we started off again. Even as we covered the distance to the corner of the street, the chanting grew louder.
‘But where is it coming from?’ Martin asked.
Good question. The sound was bouncing from every wall. It was impossible to tell what was original and what its echo. How Martin was avoiding one of his fits of the vapours was another mystery of the day. To be sure, I was increasingly rattled by this hunt with us as the quarry. For all the usual reasons of nationality, there was no chance of cooperation between invading mob and those residents here not of rioting age. What we most likely had was a methodical search of one slum by dwellers of another who knew the ways of all. But it seemed to me, as I hobbled painfully on, as if someone were watching us from the sky and somehow advertising our position to the mob. It didn’t matter which way we moved. We could hurry as best we could along the full length of a street. We could make turns at random and double back on ourselves. No matter what we did, the joyous chanting grew steadily louder.
Or it grew louder while it continued. Every so often, it would fall silent. Then it would be the soft tramp of many feet. Or it would be total silence. Then it would start all over with a burst of sound. It was the silences that were most unnerving. Why, if they were hunting us, these people advertised their presence at all was beyond me. Why the silences was equally so. Whether we tried to get away from the chanting, or worried we’d come face to face with the silent hunters, we pressed on deeper into the labyrinthine slum.
‘They’re coming from down that way,’ I said, pointing along one of the wider and less winding streets. And they were. I turned back and began to stump heavily towards one of the smaller turnings. I wanted to stop and rest. I should have taken the armour off while we were resting. It had started as a minor inconvenience. It was now dragging me down. Martin put his free arm round my back and began pulling me forward. It got us moving faster. But where were we going? There was no point complaining we were lost. That was a problem to be sorted out later. For the moment, it was enough that we couldn’t find a scrap of cover. There wasn’t so much as a doorway for squeezing into. It didn’t help that I’d come out dressed as brightly as a songbird.
There was an alley leading into a courtyard. I saw the dark opening as Martin hurried us past. I managed to stop him and push him towards it. We threw ourselves into it. I stood leaning against a wall, wheezing and gasping as I tried to catch my breath. No one had come yet round any of the corners. If we could get ourselves into the courtyard, and stay there, the mob could look to its own affairs.
‘Get out of here!’ It was a man in late middle age. A stained leather apron covered his belly. One of his massive hands was wrapped round a hammer. In the other was what looked like a sharpened iron pole.
‘In the name of God,’ I cried softly, ‘give us shelter. There are wogs in this quarter, killing every Greek of whatever condition. Ask what you will of me. But give us shelter.’
Martin held up the twitching bag, as if the muffled crying from within wasn’t enough. I thought of offering my knife with the golden hilt. Another man, equally big, appeared. This one had the sort of metal saw you normally see two slaves working. He raised it threateningly.
‘Get out,’ the first man repeated. He jabbed the metal spike in our direction.
I’d have had trouble taking on the pair of them in the best circumstances. These weren’t anything like the best circumstances. Even the sword I’d picked up was a cheap thing I’d not have trusted to stay in one piece for a serious fight. I pointed at the bag.
‘Then at least take the child,’ I begged. All else aside, the poor thing was slowing us down.
‘Get out or I’ll kill you both,’ he replied. He jabbed viciously forward, and caught me in the stomach. The armour stopped the blow from doing any actual harm. Even so, I was knocked to the ground, and I was sure the spike had forced a small gap in the chainmail. I groaned and clutched at the probable if minor stab wound. As I pulled myself back up, the man’s friend
lashed out with the saw and got Martin in the face with one of its wooden handles. Martin dropped the bag and pointed to it as we retreated backwards from the alley. I looked behind. The chanting had started again, and was loud and close But the street was clear. We could still make a run for it.
‘Take it with you,’ the man snarled. ‘Take it up – or I’ll cut it in pieces and throw it after you down the street.’ He stabbed at the bag, pinning one of its hems to the packed earth.
‘Bring him with us,’ I said to Martin. Leaning heavily on my staff, I followed Martin towards the light of the open street.
Once in Constantinople, I saw some lunatic jump on to the Circus racetrack. I think his idea was to hold up the race while he addressed us on its sinfulness. I saw him stand and hold up his arms for attention. I saw him take in breath. Then he was simply gone. He’d been struck by one of the racing chariots that had been going too fast to veer aside. What was left of him was eventually carried away from a spot fifty yards from where he’d been alive.
That’s how it seemed to be with Martin. As he emerged into the light, the mob reached us. No longer marching, it was breaking into a stampede. It crashed straight into Martin. He vanished, propelled forward by the unstoppable rush of hundreds of tightly packed bodies.
‘Martin,’ I screamed. I pulled out my sword and hobbled forward. I’d dropped my staff and fell into the mob as it rushed past. For a moment, I was caught up in that surging, cheering mass. Then I’d fallen. Now I was dragged forward on the ground. Feet trampled and kicked at me. I tried to roll out of their way. But now arms reached down and pulled me on to my back and dragged me down the road. I tried to kick on the ground to get myself upright as I was pulled backwards. I was going too fast, and my ankle didn’t allow more than a notional effort. I screamed and screamed again with the pain and the terror.
The Blood of Alexandria Page 33