I wanted to say that the tents might be covering the area under which the Library reserve stock was buried. Sadly, even a twenty-mile ride had left me bruised and stiff again. I pulled my hood back, and let the breeze rustle my hair. A few of the locals stared with dull interest at my unusual colouring. The Brotherhood people, however, let up a terrified clamour. Those who’d seen me the night before last had got almost used to the idea of having in their midst what they took for a corpse brought back to life by a sorceress. These evidently hadn’t been given prior warning. Pointing at me, and calling out an unfamiliar phrase over and over again, they shrank back. ‘My empire is of the imagination,’ the Mistress had said. I was beginning to see there might be advantages in being one of her provincial governors. I smiled back at the scared, jabbering throng.
No one could claim Priscus had been brought back from the dead. Still, he was able to cause a big commotion of his own. Here, among them, was the Hammer of the Brotherhood, the man who’d skewered so many of their Grand Masters through arse or belly and had saved Alexandria from what might otherwise have been their most spectacular success in a thousand years. I was almost forgotten in the now threatening buzz. Lucas had to come out of the tent he’d been inspecting and work hard to keep his people from butchering at least Priscus on the spot.
But the commotion was eventually settled. I still got any number of funny looks, and Priscus got worse. But the Brotherhood was again following the orders of its leaders, who now set in earnest about doing the bidding of the one Grand Master who’d not come to an end in Alexandria.
‘I was serious when I told you last night to follow my instructions,’ Priscus said softly to me in Latin as we found ourselves together in the jostling crowds.
‘No Latin!’ Lucas shouted from nowhere. He pushed his way past a couple of grooms and stood before us. ‘You will not be alone together,’ he said firmly. ‘All you have to say to each other will be in front of me and in Greek. I must remind you, Priscus, of how little loved you are among the Brotherhood. Without my protection, your safety cannot be guaranteed.’
‘Oh, Lucas, Lucas!’ Priscus said, rolling the hated name in his mouth with cheerful satisfaction. ‘I’ve given you Alaric. I’ve given you the one man all the prophecies say is the One. And I’m not the only one needing to remember that it’s thanks to me that anyone up to challenging you is now rotting in one of my mass graves. Don’t presume, Lucas dear, the pair of us to be in anything together. That would need to be a very deep plot.’
Lucas wasn’t impressed. He took me by the hand and led me up the dune to look over the monument.
‘We’ll eat,’ he said. ‘Then you will supervise the digging.’
I looked across the still clear expanse of sand that covered the centre of Soteropolis. From what I knew of his way with his beloved people, he’d have a few flogged to death if they slacked. The rest would dig as if someone had buried gold coins for them to find. Even so, it was a large area, and there was nothing at surface level to indicate street plans or other buildings. I heard Priscus following behind me.
‘I don’t think, Alaric, introductions will be in order,’ he said.
I turned. Martin stood beside him. He was manacled with eighteen inches of chain between his wrists. There was another manacle about his right leg. This was attached by another length of chain to a large iron ball that needed two hunched brown bodies to lift off the ground. Someone else held a sunshade over him.
For the first time, I lost control. I broke down at the shock of seeing him. I didn’t bother trying to hide my sobs as we embraced. He pushed me gently back.
‘Aelric, you’re a fool for coming,’ he said in Celtic. ‘I prayed you would simply light a candle for me in church and get everyone out of Alexandria.’ He sat down in the sand. The sunshade was moved to keep it in position. ‘I prayed for you to use some common sense. But I knew in my heart you wouldn’t.’
Martin hadn’t shaved, and his red beard was flecked with grey. So far as it wasn’t covered in a stained bandage, there was a haunted look on his face. Otherwise, he was in good health. I looked more closely at the bandage. Priscus caught my glance.
‘A regrettable but necessary loss,’ he said loudly in Greek. ‘But I found Martin unusually firm about signing the letter I’d had drafted for you to read. All things considered, though, has the Legate’s secretary any complaints about his treatment?’
‘No, My Lord,’ Martin said. Not bothering to look up, he stared glumly at the heavy manacle round his ankle.
‘Then let us keep it that way. Alaric,’ Priscus said, still with raised voice, ‘I must inform you of these conditions. You will supervise the digging as you see fit. You will lay hands on the relic and pass it immediately to the three other principals in this endeavour. Once you have done so, you and Martin will be taken to Letopolis and sent in a postal boat safely back to Alexandria. Siroes, Lucas and I will swear later this day in public to keep our word. The Bishop of Letopolis will witness our swearing, and you must rely on his influence with virtually the entire Brotherhood and all the local population to ensure that we keep our word.
‘If you have not located the relic within fourteen days, you and Martin will be put to death. Be assured that I would give you longer than this. However, Siroes has been privately advised that the only auspicious time for locating the relic will soon pass. I cannot dispute his advice, and so must bow to his insistence.
‘There is one further point to these conditions. We are in a hurry, and wish to make it clear that seven days mark the reasonable limit of our patience. Today is nearly half gone, and so does not count. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and I have already been worsted in an argument over that. I will give you one day beyond that. Three days, I hope, will be sufficient for you to do your work. However, if you have uncovered nothing that I find interesting by noon on Tuesday, I will have Martin’s other ear sliced off. If you have uncovered nothing by the noon following, I will have the little finger of his left hand cut off. We shall then proceed by such stages as I think suitable until Friday, which is the twenty-seventh day of the month of Mechir that Lucas specified in his letter. At midnight, I shall have Martin blinded or perhaps castrated. Enough of him will survive the full time specified either to be sent back with you to Alexandria, or to be put to death with you in such manner as we shall find appropriate. Do you understand me?’
I nodded. Forget the fourteen days. We had three. Martin was taken back to wherever he was kept. I sat down to lunch with the other persons of quality. From where I sat between Lucas and someone who kept quietly farting, I could hear Priscus and Siroes toasting each other and refighting the Battle of Daras. They used cups and pieces of bread to show the various dispositions of forces. I ate in silence. I kept wondering if Martin hadn’t been right. I’d been so sure of myself in Alexandria. Even since giving myself to Lucas, things hadn’t gone so badly. I now realised I was fixed in a timetable over which I had no control and from which there was no obvious escape. Thanks to me, four people might now die instead of one. And what of Maximin? What if Isaac hadn’t been able to get him out of Alexandria? At best, he’d be brought up as a cross between Priscus and that bloody cat.
‘If you need anything not already provided,’ Lucas told me as we stood in the shade of the monument, ‘you will ask me. For the simple relaying of orders to the diggers, you will use my assistant. I believe you have already met. This being so, you can trust his skills as an interpreter.’ I’d already seen Macarius during lunch. Lucas had got up several times from his place to give instructions. Macarius had taken these with his usual impassive look and bowed. There was no element of surprise when he now stepped forward. I’d long since guessed he was serving more than one master. Still, I went through the motions of showing disgust.
‘Fucking wog traitor!’ I snarled.
Macarius bowed gravely and looked back as impassively as if I’d been complaining about the flies.
I now put myself to the matter in hand. The more
detailed map Hermogenes had promised before the rioting had somehow arrived in my tent. I unrolled it and oriented it with the monument and the sun. The street plan was vague and perhaps even conjectural. Its indication of where the Jewish quarter had been was at best unreliable. Looking straight ahead was the big dune on the other side of which the Brotherhood tents were pitched. Under that may have been the reserve stock. Then again, from what Hermogenes had told me, the place had never been large, and was a building by itself. Digging for it would need, at the very least, to wait. The city centre was around the monument. The most reasonable place to start the digging was about five hundred yards north of the monument.
I paced out the distance. I didn’t look round, but I knew Macarius and one of the big armed men would be close behind me. I stopped and again unrolled the map. I looked back at the monument. This was a fairly level expanse of sand, and it may have been only a little higher than the sand around the monument. I waved around me and looked now straight at Macarius.
‘I want that lot uncovered,’ I said. ‘I want it uncovered as far down as it takes.’
‘How is it going?’ Priscus asked.
I looked up from the ruins of a cook shop. We were moving fast into the evening of the second day. I’d consented to release the whole workforce for a big Sunday service. I could have kept the diggers going in relays. I’d even been thinking how long I could keep them all going until they really did start dropping from exhaustion. I’d been getting increasingly funny looks as I made my rounds. Word had spread, it seemed, from the Brotherhood to the diggers. As hoped, this had kept everyone in awe of my word. But there is a limit to what even Egyptian muscle can achieve with a spade.
‘You will be happy to know that another delivery has just been made of pitch for night digging,’ Lucas added.
They stood together in the doorway of the building. I’d now had the whole area excavated down to pavement level, and had spent much of the afternoon having the interiors of the buildings cleared of sand.
‘So what have you found?’ Priscus asked again.
‘Soteropolis is turning out to be larger than expected,’ I replied. And so it was. Everything I’d seen about it in Alexandria indicated a smallish city. Now that I’d widened the area of excavation into the centre, I could see how large it had been. It didn’t help that digging below the level of the Greek city had turned up foundations of earlier buildings that may have been as massive as anything in Constantinople.
‘I’ve said you can’t have any more people,’ Lucas said hurriedly. ‘I’ve given you every able-bodied man in the area. You have nearly all the women and children to carry baskets of sand. I’m flooded with complaints about essential work to dykes that has been disrupted.’
‘Oh, is that what they’re all moaning about,’ Priscus said satirically. ‘I was beginning to think they were frightened of something.’
Lucas scowled and looked away. Priscus stepped in through the doorway and straightened up. He beckoned Lucas in behind him. We all stood for a moment looking at a tiled floor I’d recently had cleared of sand. I’d been hoping there might be a hatchway to a cellar.
‘My dear Lucas,’ he said, the beginnings of a stern look on his face. ‘We are for the moment partners in this venture, and I expect to be kept informed of all relevant circumstances. It isn’t because their dykes are crumbling that your wogs have been in and out of the shithouses all day, squirting and jabbering. They’re frightened of something. Now they’ve seen him shitting and being rubbed with oil for his sunburn, it isn’t young Alaric who’s the cause of their terror. They’re frightened of something else – and they’re frightened of whatever that thing is almost as much as they are of you. Any chance of telling me what it might be?’
Lucas scowled again and muttered something about tales told to children by the old.
Priscus snorted. ‘Then you’d better just make sure your wogs remain more frightened of you than they are of ghosts,’ he said flatly. ‘So far as I’m concerned, if Alaric asks for women and children to dig the sand, I suggest you find more shovels. In the meantime, I suggest you get that Bishop to lay on more services. He might also be persuaded to consider an exorcism.’ He turned back to me. ‘Now, Alaric, I’ll ask again – what have you found?’
The shortest and most truthful answer was nothing. This particular Soteropolis had been vacated with careful deliberation. It wasn’t like Richborough, where decline had been gradual, or other cities back in Kent that had been taken by storm and burned with the corpses of all the slain. There, you could dig down a few feet and find any number of treasures: bronze pens, lead cooking pots, even the occasional handful of unlooted cash. Soteropolis had been systematically stripped of everything that could be moved. Even roof tiles from the more expensive buildings had been carefully pulled off.
I’d worked several thousand men through the better part of two days and a night. We’d uncovered two acres of city, bleak and skeletal in its ruination. We’d turned up broken pottery. We’d turned up broken furniture. We’d turned up a few sets of bones – probably of sick, and therefore unwanted, slaves knocked on the head and left behind in the move. Much earlier in the present day, I’d smashed open a large crate, only to find it filled with packets of nails that may have been brought in from Smyrna. In general, we’d exposed enough of the street plan to suggest what I’d said about the size of the city. Beyond that, we’d found nothing.
‘I have a feeling that the collapsed wall over there’ – I pointed to the edge of the excavated area: it was a length of mud brick that vanished into a sloping cliff of sand – ‘is part of the synagogue. If you put some broken stones together, they may show Hebrew writing. If it is, we’ve found the Jewish quarter. Once I’m sure that is what we’ve found, I’ll have the courtyard gardens dug up as well. There will be objects there concealed or simply lost before the evacuation.’ What I didn’t say was that the Jewish quarter may have been close to the walls. Outside those, there would be graveyards and grave goods.
‘And you suppose Jews would leave even their toilet scrapings behind?’ Lucas asked with a laugh. ‘I would remind you,’ he said to Priscus, ‘that it’s only Siroes who says this relic shall be uncovered by a blonde man from the West. Before he got in touch with Leontius, the story was very different. If only you hadn’t killed Leontius . . .’
‘You were pleased enough when I did kill him,’ Priscus snapped.
Again, I wanted to ask how he’d done it. He had been with me – so had Macarius – the whole evening of the murder. If Macarius had disappeared for a while, it wasn’t anything like long enough to get out of the Egyptian quarter, commit that lovingly slow murder, and then get back to meet us near the Wall of Separation. And it wasn’t Macarius, but Priscus who was claiming responsibility for the killing. Given time, I’d have sat down and gone through the evidence again. But there was no time. As if he’d read my thoughts, Priscus pointed up at the setting sun.
‘You have until the day after tomorrow, Alaric,’ he said. ‘I may have broken more promises than I can remember, but I’ve always been punctilious about delivery when it comes to hurting people. You just think on that – and keep digging.’
Chapter 59
It was dawn the following day. I stood on the top of the sand dune, looking down over the excavated area. The diggers on the morning shift were being pushed away from their earnest conversations with the night diggers. Some of them were looking up at me.
‘What do you suppose is frightening them?’ I asked.
Martin looked down at the cluster of humanity nearest the foot of the dune. A couple of the Brotherhood guards were clubbing one of the diggers to pulp. He wasn’t screaming. No one was intervening on his behalf. Martin swallowed and looked away.
‘His Grace the Bishop comes and speaks to me now and again,’ he said. ‘He’s a native and a convinced Monophysite. But his Greek is good, and he means well. He tells me the diggers can feel they are being watched by night. Some have seen thing
s they can’t describe. There are stories – stories that I don’t think you want to hear . . .’
I sighed. Reports of ghosts were the last thing we needed. For sure, it had been a difficult night. Every time the wind shifted, men had been throwing their shovels down and trying to run away. I had managed some sleep, though only after being kept awake by thoughts of a strike – or even a mass walkout.
I thought of asking Martin about the Bishop. He’d been brought in to supervise a thoroughly shifty oath regarding our safety. If he couldn’t lift a finger to save us in the event of failure, I didn’t see how he could insist on our release if we did find the thing. Having him turn up with his Gospels in Egyptian and his relic of Saint Antony was the best I could get. But I didn’t think it that good. Now, he seemed permanently on call about the camp. If he and Martin were starting up a friendship, it might come in handy.
My trail of thought came to an end. Lucas had now staggered from his tent. He stood about ten yards down from us, straining to watch the clubbing. It didn’t seem to concern him that he’d soon be minus yet another of his loving subjects. Since we were at one in wanting these poor buggers to work their guts out, I wasn’t inclined to think ill of his methods. I looked again over the excavated area. The sun was behind me to my right, and was still casting long shadows from the ruined walls. Nevertheless, it was possible to see the scale of what had already been achieved. We were nowhere close to uncovering the whole city; even at this frenzied pace, that would take nearly a month. But the whole centre was now exposed, and much of what had undoubtedly been the Jewish quarter.
‘You were a fool to come looking for me,’ Martin said again, now in Celtic. He was less bitter than sad. ‘It should have been obvious you were walking straight into a trap. You had one miracle in Alexandria. Don’t suppose you’ll get another one out here.’
The Blood of Alexandria Page 43