The Blood of Alexandria a-3

by Richard Blake

  ‘I did live there,’ Macarius answered. I wanted to ask in what capacity. But he continued: ‘In Alexandria and in all areas touched by Greek influence, the dispute is between orthodoxy and heresy. Go far enough up river, and the Old Faith makes up a third party in the dispute. I find it hard to believe that anything so important as the cult of Isis at Philae could be maintained as publicly as Leontius claims. But many of the old temples are quietly kept going.’

  ‘So,’ I asked, coming back to the main business in hand, ‘how do you suppose the man got his information? Has he been sniffing round in the south?’

  Macarius bowed slightly. ‘I shall be better able to answer your questions the day after tomorrow,’ he said. ‘All I can report for the moment is that Leontius has recently been enlarging his manor house at Letopolis. Bearing in mind that his estate is known to be encumbered with various debts left by his uncle, it may be asked where he obtained the money.’

  ‘Men can be very sensitive to news that their financial transactions are being watched,’ I said. ‘But I repeat, we are now willing to take a certain risk of discovery.’

  ‘I can assure you that Leontius has been under close surveillance since our earlier meeting,’ Macarius replied.

  A sudden gust of wind brought a chill to my face. It stirred up the dust on the pavement. I looked out to sea. From behind me, the moon still shone bright. Now, for the first time it was reflected in a tessellated splash from the waters of the Harbour. Further out, the sky, empty of those bright, unwinking stars, was turning a brownish grey.

  ‘The storm approaches,’ said Macarius. ‘It will be a great one. Even if not wet, I think I can promise a cooler morning than in many days.’

  Stronger now, the breeze blew again. I shivered in the sudden chill. This had been an unplanned meeting, and it had run its course. Time to take my leave.

  From the stairs just as I was stepping below the level of the roof, I looked briefly back at Macarius. He’d gone again to the southern edge of the roof. Once again, he was looking intently into nothingness.

  Chapter 7

  Martin stared at me and pursed his lips again.

  ‘Well, I don’t like him,’ he said. ‘If you ask me, there’s something dodgy about him.’

  ‘Martin,’ I sighed, ‘please bear in mind that every local sneer you repeat about the natives is also made behind our backs about us. Are we also “wogs”?’

  ‘What they choose to call us is their business,’ said Martin with a sniff. ‘Personally, I don’t like the natives or the local Greeks. In my experience, there’s nothing between them but the choice their ancestors made of which language to speak. But that isn’t the point. What is the point is that you found the man wandering about the Palace roof at night in what sounds very like an act of sorcery.’

  I gave up on the argument. Praying up a breath of air doesn’t constitute sorcery – not even by the stupid laws Heraclius had just republished to great acclaim. And Macarius was, I’d tried repeating, highly useful.

  It was mid-morning, and the storm had indeed cooled the air. The sun shone brightly as ever, but Alexandria was again a Mediterranean city. The sun was bearable, and slightly more than bearable. I was still wearing a hat, but had left my arms uncovered. We’d had business near the main gate that led to the Egyptian quarter. Now, we sat at one of the covered benches outside a wine shop. A hundred yards away, the police were checking the identity documents of the Egyptian workmen passing in and out of the centre. Some of the Greek trash had gathered, and were setting up a chant. It was one of those ritualised verse insults of the sort I’d heard many times pass between the Circus factions in Constantinople.

  ‘If anyone’s dodgy,’ I said, looking back at Martin, ‘it’s that fucker Priscus. You know as well as I do how often the man’s tried to have me done away with. He made three full attempts under Phocas. He’d no sooner come out for Heraclius when he tried again.

  ‘Now he’s here in Alexandria, and I smell trouble that makes yesterday’s little reverse nothing by comparison. He-’

  ‘From what you tell me,’ Martin broke in, ‘he’s here with his tail between his legs. He’s lost Cappadocia, and-’

  ‘He’s still head of the noble interest in Constantinople,’ I went on. ‘A few defeats don’t change that. Heraclius may prefer to rule through outsiders like us. But he can’t altogether snub the old families. Priscus is trouble on legs. And how did he get here? He turns up at the Palace with a change of clothes and has another ready for dinner, yet tells me he came alone. He says in particular he came without guards. Yet he must have come overland from Pelusium – and we know that road is notoriously infested with bandits. If I hadn’t other matters to deal with, I’d have Macarius checking him out even now.’

  I noticed that Martin wasn’t paying attention. It couldn’t be the trouble now blowing up over by the gate. He was mostly staring down with a worried look on his face.

  ‘Are your guts giving trouble again?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘I suppose it was the lead sauce,’ I said. I’d called him back from his clerking the night before to finish dinner with us. He’d gorged himself proper on the mice.

  ‘Do you think there might be a place of easement here?’ he whispered with a downward glance.

  ‘Oh, you don’t want one of those horrid places,’ I said airily. ‘You’ll have flies crawling all over you.’ I stood up and looked round. As luck would have it, there was a potty man within hailing distance. Alexandria might be past its best in many respects, but it still had all the civilised amenities. I snapped my fingers very hard and gave the man a significant look.

  ‘I can tell you, sir, you’ll not find cleaner tools in all Alexandria,’ he said, answering my question. ‘Just take a look at this

  …’ His slave assistant brandished the brass pot: it gleamed in the sunlight that was reflected up from the pavements. ‘You could eat your dinner out of that.’ The man stood before me, at once obsequious and calculating.

  But he was right. For sure, I wasn’t having Martin go and get his sandals all pissy in one of the public latrines. I fished into my purse. The bookseller had cleaned me out of gold. But I had a mass of goodish silver. I took out one of the smaller coins and put it on the table.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ he said, impressed though trying not to look too obviously at the coin, ‘you can rest assured of a new sponge for your assistant.’ He took one from his bag and waited as his assistant arranged the framework of curtained wood beside our table.

  As he got reluctantly up, I gave Martin a shove towards it. The slave guided him in and fastened the thing shut around his neck. As Martin was forced by its weight into a squatting position, the cone made contact with the pavement. I raised my cup again and looked at his flushed, straining face. As we waited, a man at the next table looked up from his bread and olive paste. At last, with a long noise of farts and splashing, Martin emptied himself into the pot. And it was a long one. The whole framework about him trembled as, with purple face, he strained again and added to his deposit. I’d not have liked to be sitting downwind of that performance.

  ‘Do you know what that chanting means?’ I asked the potty man. I took another sip of wine and nodded at the growing crowd of Egyptians over by the gate. ‘I think I can hear the word “Alexandria”. Whatever it is, they seem to like the sound of it lately.’

  ‘Don’t know nothing of the wog language, sir,’ he said proudly. ‘Nor never been on their side of the Wall. But I’m told there’s not a single bathhouse working on the other side – no, nor no potty men neither. If a wog gets taken short, why – rich or poor – he squats down and shits in the street. Pardon my expression,’ he said hurriedly, ‘but that’s how it is.’

  I glanced over at the Wall. In places twenty feet high, it bisected the whole city, and joined with the city walls. It had first gone up a hundred years before to keep the Greek and Egyptian trash from tearing at each other. Passport control at the gates and the cutting o
ff of all public services had now made the Egyptian quarter into another world. We let some of the better workmen into the Greek side as often as they were needed, but always pushed them out again before dusk.

  ‘But pardon me for saying it, sir,’ the potty man went on. He’d now reached inside the framework with his sponge, and was rubbing vigorously. ‘I don’t think you’s from round here.’

  I made no reply. That much was obvious. My colouring screamed West. My accent should have said Constantinople. It wasn’t surprising hardly anyone in the streets recognised me. In the capital, everyone below the Emperor was always going about in public. Here, just about everyone of real quality went about in a closed chair with an armed guard.

  ‘Well,’ he said, breaking the silence, ‘I can tell you there is money on the other side of the Wall. The wogs ain’t all low-grade scum. Some of them have big money. Can you believe it, though, sir? Some of them is rolling in gold, and nowadays they just won’t turn Greek. I do some of them now and again when they come over on business. Not a word of Greek. They need interpreters even to get their bums wiped. Can you believe it, sir? They get money, but won’t turn Greek. They don’t believe nothing about the Conjoined Human Nature of Christ. Some of them even says – or so I’ve heard – that Our Lord and Saviour was just some ghost with God looking through the eyes. It ain’t natural, I tell you, sir. It ain’t like the old days.’

  He was right there. The nice thing about orthodoxy is that, however nonsensical, it can be defined by an agreed set of words that have a reasonably agreed meaning. Monophysitism, though, wasn’t a single heresy, but a heading under which any number of heresies took shelter. Some of these were so close to orthodoxy, they barely needed settling. Others were so radical and bizarre, they hardly counted as Christian.

  It was here in Alexandria, while sifting through the rubbish that now clogged the shelving racks in the Library, that I’d fully appreciated the nature of heresy. Sergius and I had taken our sounding among the Syrians, and found that most of them weren’t opposed in principle to a Single Directing Will for Christ. But this wasn’t Syria. Here, we had against us all the ingenuity of Alexandria wedded to the fanaticism of Egypt. Getting these crazies even to discuss a settlement would be like herding cats.

  ‘Oh, sir!’ the potty man said to me, or perhaps to Martin.

  I pulled myself out of a reverie that was branching into the decay of Greek as a common language, and looked back at him. He’d stopped his wiping. He rinsed his sponge again in vinegar and pushed it back inside the framework. Martin winced and groaned. The Potty Man took it back and held it up to me. It was covered in fresh blood.

  ‘Cruel things is piles, sir,’ he said to me. ‘And these ones is hanging down like ripe figs. I’m surprised your man can sit down.’

  ‘Martin,’ I sighed in Latin, ‘I have told you many times. Wiping isn’t enough. You really do need to wash down there. A dirty arse, and in this climate – why, you’re asking for trouble.’ I would have said more. But it was now that the babble of Egyptian voices over by the gate took on an ugly sound. Perhaps the Greeks had given offence. I paid attention as they came to the end of their own chant:

  Let us ever recall for whom

  This city is the living room,

  And know ourselves the master race,

  And keep the natives in their place.

  ‘Never a truer word,’ the potty man said approvingly. ‘Never a truer word.’ He listened to more of the commotion, then recalled his business. ‘I can recommend some truly good ointment for those piles.’ He looked into his bag again and pulled out a small lead container.

  I took it from his hand and sniffed the contents. So far as I could tell, it was opium in a kind of bird fat. It wouldn’t do Martin any harm, and might lift his mood. I handed it back and nodded.

  ‘Of course, there is some that disagree,’ the potty man said as he set to work again.

  I stared at him and frowned.

  ‘Oh, I mean, sir, about the wogs. Why, it was just this morning that I applied this very cream to someone who told me the wogs too were God’s Children, and we had more to bind than divide us. Right quality he was, I can tell you. He said that, with all the corn being shipped off to Constantinople, we’d soon all be starving together. So we might as well act together.’

  For the first time, I pricked up my ears. Who was sowing concord between Greek and Egyptians? I tried not to sound too interested as I asked the question. I didn’t succeed. But another coin got the man going again.

  ‘A great fat man, it was,’ he said, ‘a fat man with a bald head and a red spot on his nose. Terrible piles, he had. He nearly screamed as I touched them. But he said the government was trying to fuck us all over – pardon the expression, but those were his very words. He promised me a reward if I’d spread the word of unity. ‘‘There’s success in unity,’’ he said, ‘‘success in unity.’’

  ‘Me – I don’t never mix with wogs. Nasty, dirty people, I say they are. Shit in the street: can you believe it? He was a generous tipper, though, sir. He even took a whole pot of my ointment. He said he was on his way to a journey along the Canopus Road. He thought it would help with the pain.’

  I looked again over at the gate. About fifty of the Egyptians were getting up more of their chant about Alexandria. Even as they gathered, though, reinforcements were pouring out of the guard house, their swords already drawn.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Of course it was Leontius,’ I said. ‘Who else is there to fit that description? Who else is likely to be going about preaching unity against us from both sides of the Wall?’ I’d finished with my meeting in the Food Control Office, and we were now heading back to the Palace. I’d said I wanted the new land survey reports on my desk after lunch at the latest. It was now surely pushing towards the sixth hour of the day.

  ‘But what can you do about him?’ Martin asked. He tagged along beside me, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quiet, as the opium worked its magic on his fairly virgin body. I stopped. We were about to come from a side street we’d taken to avoid the public executions into the square containing the obelisk and the statues of all the Ptolemies. From here, it was a short walk along the Processional Way into the Palace square itself. I looked at a pair of yellow shoes in the glazed window of a shop. They were pretty enough, but I preferred something cut a little lower to show off my ankles.

  ‘Among other matters Nicetas hasn’t decided to share with me are security and public order,’ I said. ‘That means I can’t just have the man taken up for suspected treason. But we had a threat of this yesterday – and Nicetas was watching. We now have some evidence that he’s going through with the threat. Stirring up the mob, especially both sections of it, is something that even His Highness will accept requires action.

  ‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow. At the least, I can have Leontius kicked out of Alexandria. And unless we’ve pushed them over the edge of desperation, I don’t think the dissident landowners will stand a moment by his side if they think he’s actually planning to raise the mob against us.’

  As we passed into the square, we bumped into the front of a long procession. There wasn’t time to get past it. The best we could do was jump backwards out of its way. We stood in front of what had once been the Department of Medicine at the University, and was now a training college for missionaries, and watched it go by. It was soon obvious this would take some time. Led by three bishops I hadn’t seen before, its centrepiece was a great wooden image of Saint Mark. It was smeared over in elaborate patterns of mud, its feet kept ever wet from pitchers of clear water. The patterns were repeated on the bodies of the humbler celebrants. Waving papyrus imitations of corn sheaves, they sang their thanks for plenty in the year to come.

  If anyone there knew what I’d just learned about the black mould on the remaining stores of grain, he didn’t seem inclined to spoil the party.

  Still, there could be no doubt the Nile was rising nicely. The silver stream I’d seen the day before
in the canal was become a dark flood. It gurgled loudly through the cisterns that ran under every street. Already, Lake Mareotis was seven inches up on the day.

  Martin switched into Latin. ‘What does this mean for your speculations?’ he asked, a disapproving tone in his voice.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ I answered, following him into Latin, though the noise around us would have defeated the most intrepid spy. ‘The contracts I made last month were for sale at the current, very high prices. The lower the forward price drops from now on, the higher the value of those contracts. As it happens, there’s an excellent chance of a good harvest to come.’

  Martin gave me one of his funny looks. So far as he understood financial matters, he took the view that I was profiting from misery, and probably increasing it. But this blessed change in the weather had cheered me no end, so I decided in turn to give him one of my little lectures on the science of enrichment.

  ‘If you take the March price of corn in Alexandria during the past eight hundred years’ I began ‘- yes, I’ve had those dozen clerks I commandeered extracting this for months now from the tax records – there is a fairly stable cycle. What makes it hard to spot is the quite independent cycle that correlates with the timing of the flood.

  ‘But if you can separate these two cycles, and take account of plagues and other disturbances, you’ll then be able to guess the future price. I’m not so fast as I’d wish at brute calculations, and I’ve applied the method to any past year chosen by lot. In eight-elevenths of cases, the answer has been sufficiently close to the actual price.’

  Martin looked back at the image of Saint Mark. ‘That sounds rather like divination,’ he said still more disapprovingly, going now, for greater security, into Celtic.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, warming to my theme. The flute and cymbal players were coming closer, so I raised my voice and went back into Greek, which is better for discussing these things. ‘Divination and astrology and all those other frauds rest on the claim that one class of future events can be known from the study of present or past events of another class. Since there is no proven connection between any of these classes, the predictions made are all worthless.