I unrolled the cloth. Within it, still reddened by exposure of northern flesh to the sun, was a left ear.
Chapter 49
The sun was fully up. The wind had fallen. The smell of death in the Palace square was omnipresent and oppressive. Priscus breathed in with an appreciative sigh and held the breath.
‘How many do you think you’ve killed?’ I asked with a change of subject. Priscus had pressed me to an early and liquid lunch. Now, we were outside, and free to take our conversation up again.
‘I’ll have the full report once all the bodies have been cleared away,’ he said. ‘My experience tells me, though, that it won’t be under twenty thousand. That will include the three thousand executions I’ve warranted. I think on our side we lost thirty men. If I could be left to manage that sort of proportionality against the Persians, I’d have Chosroes under siege in Ctesiphon.’ He breathed in again, and smacked his lips.
We fell silent as we made our way through the elaborately spaced avenues of the dead. They spread out before and around us. Wherever I looked was the blank look of death on faces still twisted in their final agonies. Like the sighing of winds in a forest was the soft groaning of the nearly dead. It sounded clear when the flies weren’t rising up in great buzzing swarms. You need a lot of opium and a bad night for dreams to produce the same horrors as Priscus had managed here. I resisted the urge to run back inside the Palace. I forced myself not to shudder.
‘There was no other way of settling the riots,’ he said, starting again. He must have seen something on my face of what I felt. ‘If Nicetas had taken my advice before the rioting began in earnest, the body count would have been closer to a thousand. But when you’ve lost control of a city as totally as he did, and when you have limited forces, promiscuous massacre becomes the only option. If you’re as disgusted as you seem to be trying not to show, I’ll tell you bluntly that you are partly to blame for the whole thing.’
I looked at him. Had the scale of killing embarrassed even Priscus?
‘Until you rolled into town with your notions of reform and improvement,’ he said, warming to his argument, ‘Nicetas was doing a good job – given the circumstances he’d allowed to come into being – of keeping Alexandria quiet. It’s a question of keeping the national groupings within the mob more at odds with each other than with us, and of neutralising dissent within the higher classes. What you did was to drive the higher classes to an alliance with this wog Brotherhood, and then into a desperate attempt to use the combined mob to put pressure on Nicetas. Even when they heard the Persians were sniffing about, they were so scared of what you were trying that they weren’t willing to back out until it was too late. Your “compromise” with the bastards came just a few days late. By the time you got that deal brokered in your office, the Brotherhood was already here in force, and had taken control of the Egyptian mob.
‘Oh, he could have handled things better than he did – and I look to you to countersign the letter of protest I’m drafting to Heraclius. But if you hadn’t presented Nicetas with a situation beyond his abilities to manage, he’d not have failed so completely.’
‘The land reforms have already been a success in Asia Minor,’ I said firmly. I thought round for a better argument to get me off the hook. You can’t argue with success, and Priscus had regained control in Alexandria with minimal forces. But if I could put up with accusations from fools like Nicetas, I didn’t like to hear them repeated and fleshed out by Priscus. Before I could find the words I wanted, Priscus stopped to admire one of the more inventive impalings. Here, the victim had been driven on to the stake through his collarbone. All vital organs had been avoided, and there were still remnants of life in the twisted body. The lips moved in some silent prayer. Priscus called to one of the police officers.
‘Wine for the malefactor,’ he ordered curtly. ‘Bring him back so that he knows he is dying.’ He turned back to me. ‘I’ll grant your scheme has been working out better in the Asian provinces than I expected,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I’m convinced enough by it to have had the law implemented in the areas I recovered from Persian control. But Egypt is different – as you’d have quickly noticed had you paid more attention to people than to ideas. The wogs are slaves by nature. They are slaves for us or for someone else. Between enslavements, they are dangerous animals. You don’t get the same system of control, replicated century after century, with every variant of foreign and domestic rule, without a very good cause.
‘I want to tell you, however, that we both deserve a better master than Heraclius. I represent order. You represent hope. Within the space that we together create, there can be civilisation. Let us somehow work together, and we can save this Empire.’
‘You can try all you will for a soldierly ring to your argument,’ I said, looking at the dying face while trying not to see it. ‘But you came here already knowing that the Persians were in the plot. I’ll grant you got names and details from that racking that you didn’t already have. But you’d been lecturing Nicetas for ages on the need to guard the Red Sea ports. You were doing that two mornings after you first announced your arrival to me. I’m not sure how long before then you’d been lurking out of sight. So why wait for the rising? Did you come here to keep Egypt from the Persians? Or was it to win a battle in Alexandria that you couldn’t win outside Caesarea?’
‘The answer to your question, dear boy,’ Priscus said, ‘is Nicetas. If he’d taken my advice, I’d have had half a dozen landowners into the Prefecture dungeons. A day later, none of this killing would have been necessary. As it is, however, Alexandria is pacified, and Egypt cannot be taken from us.’
We watched awhile in silence as a sponge soaked in wine was applied to the victim’s lips. The eyes fell open for a moment. Then life faded rapidly away. The police officer stood back apologetically, waiting further orders.
‘Dear me,’ said Priscus, poking at the now still body. ‘I could have sworn the creature had more capacity to bear pain.’ He sniffed and looked up at the burning sun. ‘Carry on about your business,’ he said to the police officer. We moved into another avenue of stakes. A few yards further down this one, and we’d bumped into a group of relatives weeping and praying over someone they’d eventually found.
‘What do you think about Martin’s chances?’ I asked. I could see no point in letting Priscus think other than that I wanted Martin back to the exclusion of all else.
He smiled and stopped his inspection. ‘You’ve been given twelve days to save him,’ Priscus said. ‘Let us assume you can get a digging party together and up to Soteropolis, and let us assume you can find the relic on your first dig – both rather unlikely assumptions, I must say. Let us then assume you can get it authenticated by whatever counts with these people as the appropriate religious authority. That doesn’t give you long to hurry over to the Great Pyramid and make the exchange. I’ll also ask what reason you have to trust a mad wog like your friend Lucas. Martin was alive when that ear was cut off. That doesn’t mean he’s alive now. It also doesn’t mean that either of you will be alive once the relic is in his hands.’
I steadied my features. Priscus knew what I was thinking. I knew he knew, and he knew that I knew he knew. But I’d not give him the satisfaction of seeing what I thought.
‘And if it were that I could lay hands on the relic and get there in time,’ I said, ‘and if I were sure I could get away with me and Martin in one piece – would the effective power in Alexandria allow me out through the city gates?’
‘He wouldn’t,’ Priscus said with a bright smile. ‘We can agree among ourselves that I’d sooner have a month’s rations for an army than some piss pot to send before them into battle. But now I’m here, and now that everyone else appears to want it, I do rather fancy having the thing for myself. Certainly, I’d not be keen to know it was in Brotherhood hands. And do bear in mind it would be high treason to give the Brotherhood anything that could make our position in Egypt more uncertain than it already is. The reinforc
ements you brought in are enough to hold Alexandria. If we send them away too soon, we risk losing Alexandria again. Even given time, there are no other forces available in the Empire to send out here. Here, as elsewhere, we rule by custom and by threats of violence we dare not allow to be tested.’
‘And if I were to go up river alone for the purpose of getting Martin back?’ I asked.
‘Then you’d be mad,’ he said. ‘I’ll not bother arguing about Martin’s actual value as a human being. He’s a good draughtsman, I’ll not deny. But he really is neither your equal nor intrinsically worth the risk of your own life. And I do think you’d be running straight into a trap. Your absence from Alexandria would be noted at once. I’ve had a few names out of the fucking snake Nicetas nursed in the bower of his secretariat. But you can be sure the whole government is riddled with traitors. Order a passport, have horses saddled or a boat readied, and there would be a messenger speeding off to Lucas before you could set eyes on the city walls.
‘We agree you can’t lay hands on the piss pot in the time specified. That means Lucas is using Martin as bait to get you into his hands, when you can be kept alive just long enough to supervise the digging in Soteropolis. For that reason alone, I’ll not allow you out of Alexandria. Besides, I need you here to help manage Nicetas when he eventually does come out from under his bed.’
‘Priscus,’ I said, speaking low. I led him into one of the denser thickets of the dead and dying. I wanted to avoid more of those shocked, silent groups of relatives. If there was anyone here able to pick up my words, he’d be in no position to pass them on. ‘You know that I’ll do whatever I must to get Martin back. You know that I can’t lay hands on the piss pot in anything like the time specified. You also know where it is, and you do have sufficient forces to stop anyone but you from having it dug out.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ he broke in, savouring the mastery I’d given up trying not to acknowledge. If Lucas had me by the balls, so, in his own way, had Priscus. ‘But why are you saying it? Can’t you see that you’ve won? You’ve got the widest scheme of land reform even you could have wanted. You don’t need to argue with the landowners over every acre of land you want to hand over to the wogs. We’ve just confiscated half the private estates in Egypt. The only landowner you’ll be depriving is Heraclius himself. Are you seriously proposing to risk all this for some fat Celt who doesn’t know when and when not it’s permissible to fart in public?’
‘Supposing I were to die – and die perhaps in disgraceful circumstances,’ I said, ignoring an argument I could answer, though not to Priscus. ‘You wouldn’t get the piss pot, and the Brotherhood might. But my loss would change the whole balance of power in Constantinople. Heraclius, we know, is so short of anything approaching talent, that . . .’ I trailed off. I could tell from the smile on his face that Priscus had got there first. He’d give me what I wanted. He’d give it to me because, either way, he won.
‘If you do leave Alexandria,’ he said, ‘it will be with the full knowledge of Lucas. I could make Nicetas regard it as desertion of your post. He’ll be looking for scapegoats to cover himself, and I might not stand up for you with him, or with Heraclius. I could then be waiting to arrest you in Soteropolis, assuming you ever got there. And I can be there after the date set by Lucas. If I can’t leave now, I do expect to hand control back to the Prefecture within the next few days. If you didn’t make it there, so much the worse for you. And without you to back Sergius up, I’m sure I could get the True Cross out of the authorities in Jerusalem.
‘On the other hand, I could announce a fever brought on by exertions too soon after your escape from the mob, and I could have prayers laid on in all the churches for your recovery. That might give you a couple of days before the truth leaked out. If you got a move on, that might be enough. I could then wait for you in Soteropolis, though this time not to arrest you. If you rolled in with Martin, you’d be the hero of the day. You know what Heraclius would make of that – one of his key men, willing to risk all for a person of no consequence. That’s exactly the spirit he wants to encourage in his new Empire of Love and Justice.
‘In that case, of course, I’d regard you as duty bound to start digging with your own hands if need be to get my relic out of those sands. Can you object to that?’
We were back at the gates to the Palace. We stood on the steps up to the gate and looked back over that gigantic and level Calvary.
‘We have a deal,’ I said.
‘Then you’re a bigger fool than I ever thought you.’ He laughed. ‘I did once try telling Heraclius you were an atheist. Sadly, though he knows about heresy and apostasy to the Old Faith, he can’t get his head round the idea of belief in nothing. Watching you sweat over that flabby little Celt, anyone would think you believed all those teachings about the absolute value of every life.
‘But if God has made you a fool, who am I not to take advantage?’
It was late evening. Maximin was on my lap. Sveta had heard me out in calm silence.
‘If you are the man he’s always told me you are,’ she said, ‘you’ll get him back.’ She looked at her child and then at Maximin. ‘If you fail, though, what then?’ Good question.
‘What I’ve arranged for your safety isn’t something I’d ever consider in normal circumstances,’ I said bluntly. ‘Patriarch John cannot protect you or the child. Don’t even ask about Nicetas. We need to trust other forces or no one. If I fail in what I’m about to try and then in what I’ve arranged, you and your child will need to face Priscus. Maximin, of course, he’ll take back and corrupt in no time at all into a younger version of himself.’
The boy looked up at me with his big, scared eyes. He couldn’t understand the details of what was happening. But he knew something was wrong.
‘What I need you to tell me is that you are willing to take that risk. If I do nothing, Martin dies for certain. But he may already be dead. If I try and fail, you and the child may die. If I do nothing, we all go back to Constantinople, where you and the child can stay in my household, or from where you can retire to some other place of comfort. I will risk myself for Martin. I must risk having Maximin grow into something evil. But I need to know what you are willing to risk. You also have a child.’
Sveta looked at the severed ear. I hadn’t wanted to show it to her. But she told me that Priscus had already been round waving it under her nose. The only reason, he’d assured her, she wasn’t already among the impaled masses outside was that he took this as evidence I was still alive. She got up and walked about the room. She seemed to be stopping by and touching every stick of furniture and every other object she and Martin had bought for themselves. She paused before the icon of Saint Mark she’d had from his office. She turned back to me.
‘God tells me you are the man Martin says you are,’ she assured me.
At any other time, I’d have laughed in her face. It was obvious that Martin’s lunacies were contagious. But I put on a solemn face and looked back.
‘You will not fail. But if you don’t come back – both of you – with Priscus from Soteropolis, neither I nor the child will be taken alive. Will you resign Maximin to me on the same terms?’
I thought hard. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Whatever Priscus tries to make of him, Maximin stays alive.’
And that was it. No tears. No recriminations. Just a calm exchange of risk assessments. Underneath her ungovernable wife act, I’d always known Sveta was made of steel. Martin had chosen well back in Rome. And I’d done well to spare him and free him and pay for the wedding.
But that wasn’t quite the end of matters. As I was kissing Maximin and preparing to leave, Sveta got up again.
‘Take this,’ she said, holding out a silver medal of Saint Peter. ‘It was blessed by the Pope himself. Martin is sure it saved the pair of you from the Lombards. It may save you now.’
It hadn’t been blessed by anyone. I’d lied about that to Martin when getting him to agree to the Lombard mission. But I took
it anyway and put it round my neck. I left her with the two children. They sat silent together in the light of a single lamp.
Chapter 50
‘I want these copied by morning,’ I said to the exhausted clerks. ‘I have business with the Lord Priscus all night. Bring them to us in the Viceroy’s office. We will both seal them there.’
They bowed low and left my office. I sat alone behind my desk.
‘The Empire can’t take effective possession of it,’ Priscus had told me earlier. ‘So what if it all now goes to the wogs? I’ve told you it won’t work in Egypt. But someone has to own the land.’ He’d shrugged at my further suggestion and gone back to scanning his lists.
The minimal scheme of redistribution I’d agreed with the two patriarchs had lapsed, no one could dispute, outside the Church of the Apostles. Priscus was right. I could now have something like the maximal scheme. It was simply a matter of racing through the various drafts I’d prepared with Martin, and making sure that the innocent interests were exempted. It was easy in principle. Doing it all by myself, and at breakneck speed, had been a dreadful job. Then there had been all the supplemental work that Priscus had taken on himself when he’d lifted the Great Seal but not had ability or inclination to discharge. The loss of the only trilingual secretary in Alexandria had only made things worse.
But it was all done. Priscus would have the warrants before breakfast. I had no reason not to trust his promise to seal them without delay, nor very much to doubt that he’d tell the clerks I had been taken ill in his company. I hadn’t asked him to promise much because he’d only deliver on what struck him at the time as in his interest to deliver. But on the warrants he would deliver.
‘I shall be grateful, Barnabas, if you could stay a moment,’ I said as the Head Clerk was about to close the doors. He came back and stood before my desk. Was that a little dart of his eyes to the cupboard where Martin had locked all those documents? So what if it was?
The Blood of Alexandria Page 36