I was dropped down at one of the junctions of the streets. I lay in the middle of a circle of men. The sun was directly overhead, and I couldn’t see their faces. I tried to sit up. I did begin babbling for mercy. But someone struck hard at me from behind. The blow glanced off the armour, but knocked me over on my side. Someone kicked me hard in the stomach. Again, the harm was limited, but I was winded. Hands reached down and began ripping at my clothes. I was rolled on to my front as someone began pulling at the leather straps holding the armour to my body. Still wearing it, I was rolled on to my back again. Someone struck at my good leg. I heard the dull sound of wood on bone before I felt the pain.
Men were kneeling beside me, pulling at me and striking and jabbering incomprehensibly in an ecstasy of joyous hate. I was pulled into a sitting position. Someone had found the child. He dragged the poor creature from the bag – writhing and crying in the sudden light. He held up my knife – how he’d got it from my belt I didn’t know. He slit the stomach across and pushed his face close to catch the splashing of the blood. He pulled out the little entrails. They came out in tight coils. All round me, there was a great cry of triumph, so I didn’t hear the wailing. But I vomited as the dead or dying body was rubbed hard into my face. I got my hands over my face and tried to turn away. I think someone kicked me in the head. I know someone hit me very hard across the shoulders. As I jerked round to avoid going over on my face, I dropped my hands. I couldn’t see from my left eye. I panicked again and screamed.
I was pulled straight. My arms and legs were stretched out as if I were on the Prefecture rack. I felt a sharp pain and then numbness in my hands as if a vice had closed over my wrists. I felt hands reach under my tunic. I screamed again. I screamed and screamed. The faces all around me pressed in closer and closer. From my good eye, I could see the leering grins. One of the mouths was stopped with a tiny hand and wrist. I could see how it was sucked and chewed as if it had been a child’s comforter. I could smell the garlic and the rotting teeth. I began to black out with the horror.
I heard a sudden roaring, and the breath was stopped in my throat. The ground beneath me began to ripple and convulse as if in an earthquake. I felt a still greater tremor in the air around me. There was wailing from the back of the crowd. I heard one man scream, and then be cut off in mid-flow. The faces twisted again – now into fear and then outright terror. All around me was a pandemonium of screams and wild threshing. Someone collapsed forward on top of me. Then he was lifted off me as if by some vast but invisible force.
No one was pulling on my limbs, and I was able to roll myself into a ball of liberated agony. As the waves of blackness grew shorter and shorter, and sound and vision faded, I had the impression of being absolutely alone in a sunlight that was no longer hot. All pain and all fear slipped away from me. My last feeling that I recall was an immensely serene calm.
Chapter 46
I was in a tunnel lined with glass blocks that shone with some inner light. I was moving rapidly towards one of its ends. I tried to see what was there, but was dazzled by the warm light that flooded in from whatever lay beyond. I looked harder. But whatever I did see was so indefinite, and so changed from moment to moment, that I was no more certain than if I hadn’t looked at all.
I say that I was moving. I wasn’t walking, though. Instead, I floated, as if carried on some invisible chair. I tried to shift position, but seemed to have no control over my body. Indeed, it was hard to tell if I had a body at all.
I felt that I was coming to a moment of understanding. The shapes within the light were beginning to resolve themselves into something definite and perceptible. Even as I focused, however, I was moving back the way I’d come. The light still dazzled, though from a growing distance. The distance stretched and stretched as I flew back at a now incredible speed. The tunnel was miles long – hundreds of miles long – and still I moved back along it, away from a light that may have been more distant, though it shone with undiminished brightness.
My speed was increasing. The glass blocks were merging into a single blur, and still I was going faster. I had no sense of hearing. I couldn’t feel any resistance of the air about me. I felt none of the forward rush you get when a chariot or a fast ship accelerates. It was enough to know that I was moving. I don’t think I was falling – though it was hard to know if concepts of up and down had any meaning here. I was sure I wasn’t falling. That couldn’t have accounted for the speed I was moving. I was like one of the atoms that Epicurus conjectured – small and unimportant by itself, and moving at inconceivable speed through a universe infinite in space and time.
I was no longer moving. I lay still on a soft surface. I opened my eyes and looked round. I was in a strange room. It was crowded with furniture of immense elaboration. There was a window of glazed panes looking out into blackness. The walls were hung with silk and with paintings in a realistic style of men in clothes I’d never seen before. There was an open fire in a grate against the wall. I heard its steady crackling and smelled the clean vapour of the sea coals. On a shelf above this was a machine with a dial set round with numbers in the Roman style. From it I could hear a slow, steady clicking of its works.
As I looked about in the candlelight, I saw a man dozing in a chair. A fat, dumpy creature, dressed in the silk brocade of the men in the paintings, he had a book in his lap. It was a book in our own modern style – folded and bound in sections – but surprisingly small. Other books of the same kind were heaped about him on the carpeted floor. Beside him, on a table of polished wood, was a glass bottle containing something dark. There was a glass drinking cup beside this, about a third full.
I climbed to my feet. I saw that I was dressed in the plain white and purple-bordered robe of a senator. The fat man shifted back deeper into his chair and snored. I stood over the fat man. He’d drunk himself into a doze that meant I was quite alone in the room. I took up the drinking cup and raised it to my lips. Its taste was sweet and much more powerful than any wine I knew. I drained the cup and refilled it.
Cup in hand, I moved towards the desk and reached for one of the crumpled balls of what looked like very white parchment. I smoothed it out and squinted at the neat but unknown writing. It made no sense to me. I saw there was ink in a silver pot. There were no pens, though, of the usual reed or wood. For writing, there was a collection of bird feathers, cut and split at the ends into the right shape. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. It didn’t strike me as at all a convenient sort of pen. I looked again at the neat writing. It was all, I supposed, a matter of custom. So too the idea of filling a room with expensive objects, and spoiling it with an open fire.
I was picking up sheet after sheet and still trying to see if I could understand any of it, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round. The fat man was stretching his arms. He grunted and opened his eyes. I looked full at him. He looked back at me and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his drinking cup. He looked round in some confusion before staring at the cup, now empty on his desk.
He said something nasty in a language I’d never heard before and tried to stand. The effort was too much and he fell back into his chair. He reached for a silver bell, but then looked at me again. I smiled nervously back. He raised his voice and spoke again in the unknown language. I shook my head. He spoke once more in a language that sounded different from the first, but that I still couldn’t understand.
‘Do you know Greek?’ I asked in that language.
He smiled, and with an evident collecting of thought, replied in Latin.
‘There are those who stand between us,’ he said in a slow and oddly accented manner, ‘who say you served a higher purpose. We, of course, know otherwise.’
He laughed gently and repeated himself: ‘We both know better than those monks and barbarians.’
With that, his eyes closed again and he drifted back into his doze. As he did so, the room began to darken and its various objects took on a weirdly translucent quality.
I snatched up the book from his lap. It fell straight through my hands as if they didn’t exist. It fell open on the floor. I dropped to my knees and tried to see what was on the pages. Written on the left page in very small and neat characters that looked like a variant on the Greek script, and on the other in something equally small and neat that contained Roman letters and might have been Latin, I wanted to look at it in better light. Particularly interesting was that the words appeared to be separated by spaces between, and there were obvious punctuation marks. But the darkness was spreading around me like a mist.
I grabbed again at the book to try to lift it. Again, my hands went through it. All I could see before the darkness became total was the separated words written in Roman letters at the head of each page:
SANCTI AELRICI DE UITA SUA DECEM LIBRI
As everything around me faded into nothingness, I could hear the faint chiming of a bell in that machine above the fireplace.
Then it was all gone.
I woke with a simultaneous contraction of every muscle. I lay naked on a bed in a room hung with yellow silk. Just out of sight, I could feel the breeze from a window, and hear the calling and fluttering of little birds. A black hand was mopping at my face with a sponge soaked in something that smelled of lemon. I sat up, but fell back again with the sudden effort. I tried to put my thoughts in order.
‘Where’s Martin?’ I cried. I tried to sit up again, but was pushed gently back by the black maidservant. She looked across me and began a twittering call to someone on the far side of the room.
‘I thought you would wake around this time,’ the Mistress said. She was perched on a little table, and had been reading from a book that she was scrolling in both hands with practised elegance. She placed a bone clip in the book to hold her place and rolled it shut. She clapped her hands, and more of the maidservants came into the room, carrying dishes.
I was still trying to get my thoughts working. Questions were pouring into my head, and I couldn’t think which ones to ask at all, and which ones first. I looked down at myself and reached feebly for the sheet that was folded away from me.
‘Dear me, Alaric.’ She laughed so that her veil shook – she was wearing one of the loose but shapely robes that covered her whole body. ‘You may be unusually pretty. But I do assure you that you have nothing I haven’t seen many times before.’ She crossed the room and sat beside me. She motioned to one of the women, who began spooning broth into me. It had a taste of menthol and of fish, over something else I couldn’t even begin to recognise.
‘Do you know what has become of Martin?’ I asked when the feeding was over.
The Mistress sat back a little and stared carefully into my face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You made keeping up with you difficult even for me. By the time I did find you, it was only you who could be rescued.’ She put a hand up to silence me. ‘No, let me be as clear as I can be. I had a search made of the whole area. Martin was not among any of the animals who failed to get away. If your poor secretary is dead, he was not killed where he was taken.’
‘Where is this?’ I now asked. If this was another dream, I was at least with someone who seemed inclined to answer some questions. And if this wasn’t a dream, there were questions that had to be asked.
I now had an increasingly clear recall of my time in the poor district. It seemed she had turned up in time to save me from being torn apart by the mob. But how had she done that? And – I looked again at myself. I had a few superficial bruises on my chest and legs. I could move my left arm without pain. The swelling had gone from my ankle. I moved the foot. There was a slight stiffness, but nothing to stop me from walking and even running. I know that fear can magnify injuries. But the impression I’d had of those last few moments was of a brutal smashing to every part of my body not protected by the chainmail.
I did now sit up. I was weak – no doubt of that – but there was no sense of internal bruising, still less of breakages.
‘What happened back there?’ I asked. ‘How long have I been here?’
‘Taking into account the day you came here, you have been with me five days,’ the Mistress answered. ‘That makes today the festival you celebrate every seven days of Christ your Prophet and Deity.’ She’d answered my second question. The first she was unlikely to have forgotten, but showed no inclination to answer.
‘How have you escaped the rioting?’ I asked. I looked about me. ‘You’ve armed your male slaves?’
She laughed again very softly. ‘Male slaves?’ she said. ‘I have none. They displeased me shortly after my arrival in Alexandria. I had them sold to a Saracen for export to his own country. There, they will be castrated and set to guarding the harems of the great. I have no male slaves – nor desire for any.’
I sat back again and closed my eyes. I was awake. It wasn’t a matter of the surrounding normality – there was precious little of that for the moment. Nor was there much sense of continuity of space and time with what I knew had been real. But self-awareness carried the whole burden of assuring me that, somehow, I was alive and well, and still in Alexandria.
I swung round and sat on the edge of the bed. My feet brushed the cool tiles of the floor. What I wanted to ask was how the Mistress had got herself about Alexandria in the middle of a gigantic riot, without male slaves, and had rescued me from a baying mob. And since I didn’t doubt her assurance, how had she also been able to have the area searched for Martin? I’d have to do better than I had.
‘When we first met,’ she went on, ‘I reminded you of the old truth: that those who rescue strays take on further duties for their welfare. I remain firmly convinced of that truth. I only wish I could have helped Martin. To have you both here safe and well would be delightful indeed.’
She got up and motioned to the maidservants. They darted noiselessly around, clearing away various pots and boxes. Two of them went over to a cupboard and pulled out a robe of white silk. I stood carefully up as they brought it to me. Yes, the ankle was a little stiff, but I could walk on it without pain. What I’d looked like when brought here was hard to say. Since then, though, I’d been washed and shaved and anointed. I could feel that my hair would be in need of further attention. Apart from this, I was soon about as respectable to behold as anyone might have wished.
I thanked the Mistress. I’d learn more later, I resolved, about the details of how she’d saved me. The firmer my recollection, the odder it all seemed. For the moment, though, it was enough to give thanks. She acknowledged these with a nod of her veiled head. I went over to the window and looked out. So far as I could tell, we were on the upper floor of one of the palaces overlooking the Harbour. This was no longer the fashionable district it had been when the palaces were built. But it was one of the quieter parts of the centre, and it caught the sea breezes very nicely. My window looked away from the sea – it looked out over the city, or would have but for other buildings that prevented a full view. I could see one public street. It seemed completely untouched by the rioting. Slaves carried messages along it from one palace to another. I saw a fine lady being carried past in her chair – with guards, certainly, but no apparent sense of danger.
Looking up, into the distance, showed a different picture. The smoke rose in an almost continuous haze above the higher buildings. With Priscus dead, and Nicetas possibly still holed up in the Church of the Apostles, I tried to think what might have happened in the past few days. Had the rioting burned itself out? Even urban mobs eventually grow tired of murder and rape. Or had some coalition of interests formed to use what force and persuasion might be available? How much damage was there to the buildings of Alexandria? How many had died?
Above all, had the Palace remained safe throughout? I thought of Maximin. I thought of Sveta. The mob was a beast without conscience and without mercy. It chilled me to think of the baby I’d seen killed. The Palace was easily the strongest point in the city. But Nicetas had gone out with much of its garrison. I wanted to be polite to the Mistress. She had saved me.
She had nursed me back to health. There was much I wanted to discuss with her. At the same time, I wanted to be back in the Palace.
I turned back to face the Mistress. She had already moved beside me.
‘You will find that the rioting is at an end,’ she said, pre-empting my question. ‘Much as I am amused by your company, I see no point in seeking to detain you under my roof. You will find you are fully rested and in no further need of my attentions. The streets are safe enough for persons of quality, and I am sure you have duties that require your attention. If you wish to accept any further help from me, please be advised to go back to the Royal Palace and stay there. No harm can attend you there. Nor can you be made a source of harm to others. Stay there and await such time as you can return to the Imperial City.’ She went back to where I’d seen her on first waking. She reached again for her book.
‘You will forgive me if I do not accompany you back to the Royal Palace,’ she said. ‘All else aside, you and I together would be an unreasonable burden to my maidservants, whose job it is for the moment to carry my chair.’
Chapter 47
I was carried back from the western end of the Embankment Road. On my right, the shops and restaurants were opening late because of the Sunday service. There were hardly any customers. Still, the effort was being made. Slaves had set out the tables and chairs. Shopkeepers were gently crying up their goods. Every so often, the few passers-by would stop and watch the oddity of a blonde man carried past on an obviously feminine chair, and by some very young black women. I paid them no attention. I set my gaze eventually to the left, where stretched the immense crescent of acacia trees and the docks beyond. Not much could be seen of these through the heavy boughs. Every so often, though, there was the sight of lifting machinery and of the sea that sparkled far out in the sun. It all looked so normal. But I couldn’t escape the smell, whenever the breeze let up from the north, of death and of burned-out buildings.
The Blood of Alexandria Page 34