The Blood of Alexandria a-3

by Richard Blake

  ‘I’m told Nicetas is under absolute orders now from Heraclius to get the grain fleet under sail,’ I said with a nod at the far side of the roof. At least from the Harbour side of the Palace, the streets were dark. ‘I’ll speak to the Captain tomorrow about it sailing at night. I think we can still get it out safely if we start the Christmas distribution early and call it something else. But the longer it sits down there stuffed with grain people here think is better directed at their own bellies, the harder everything becomes.’

  I looked round at the soft pad of feet on pavement. It was the nephew or son of one of my Jews. Demonstrations or none, my lamp in the inspection room had worked its usual magic. I’d known someone would come, but hadn’t expected a reply till morning. I took his knife and opened the letter.

  ‘I look forward to seeing Isaac at the time appointed,’ I said at last. ‘Will you be staying here till morning?’ He wouldn’t. He always looked more Greek than Jewish. Dressed as he was now, no one on the streets would have given him a second look. And that was a big knife. I was surprised he’d been let in with it. Still, Jews always find a way. I shrugged and wished him safe passage back to the Jewish quarter. Even if his kinsman didn’t, he deserved some courtesy.

  ‘Leontius wasn’t made bankrupt after all,’ I said to Martin. There was no point going beyond the basics. But he was looking interested, and it took our minds off Sveta and what she’d said to and about Priscus. ‘That draft he was expecting from non-Imperial territory across the Red Sea came through early just after we’d left. Given that some of his larger creditors have refused payment, it’s enough to settle all outstanding debts.’

  Martin didn’t ask about the oddity of refusing payment from a solvent debtor’s estate – not that I could have answered him: it made damn-all sense to me. He did ask about the deal I’d made with the Mayor of Letopolis. But since there were two possible answers to that one, and he’d not have understood either, I looked back over Alexandria to Lake Mareotis and the dark but horrid mysteries of Egypt that lay beyond.

  ‘I’ve decided,’ I said, rolling the letter up and putting it under my arm, ‘not to bother with an enquiry. The Brotherhood, we’ve every reason to suppose, has agents throughout the whole government. If I order an investigation into who leaked our travel plans, it will only rumble on for months. Some low clerk might be sacrificed for Nicetas to burn to death. But we’ll never get to the bottom of things. This being so, we might as well not bother even going through the motions.’

  Martin nodded.

  I continued looking into the darkness of Egypt. I’d had a lucky escape – all told, a very lucky escape. Lucas and his friends, I had no doubt, would haunt my dreams for years to come. But they were somewhere far out in Egypt, and I was back in the safety of Alexandria. The less I brought myself to their attention, the better it would be for me and mine.

  ‘One useful outcome of dinner with Priscus,’ I continued – and this was agreed after the guards had removed Sveta – ‘is that he’ll do his best to help get Nicetas to seal those warrants. Now Leontius is out of the way, the landowners have no convenient single voice for their opposition. With the warrants sealed, we can set the surveyors and lawyers to work. All that in motion, we can start preparing a return to Constantinople. The various deals I’ve made are safe enough in the hands of my agents.’

  ‘God be praised!’ said Martin.

  All through my own inspection of where Egypt began, I don’t think he’d taken his own eyes off those swirling, moderately angry processions of torches down in the main streets. I leaned forward over the rail and looked hard right. I could see the southern fringes of the Egyptian quarter. There was some vague light coming off there. For the moment, however, the protests seemed to be a purely Greek matter.

  Things might be better, I told myself. They might also easily be worse.

  Chapter 27

  ‘After Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem, we have the biggest collection of relics in the whole Empire. They took over a century to catalogue, and the supplements fill two shelves in my library. But if we have never heard of such an object, belief in it is surely proof of its existence.’

  Spoken like a true Father of the Church! I thought as the Patriarch wittered on about the piss pot. Come tomorrow’s Sunday service, I had no doubt there’d be a good half-dozen of the things on sale, each with its crowd of attested cures of the blind and the lame. Two of them, I was equally sure, would be snapped up by Nicetas. No – if he carried on crossing himself and exclaiming like this, he’d buy the lot, and believe all the miracles.

  But I’d thought too soon. The Patriarch had now changed tone, and was sounding horribly like one of the senior clerics in Rome. With the provenance criteria he was setting out, you’d have had trouble authenticating the True Cross in Jerusalem. If only the Church had thought of these back in the early days of establishment, the Faith might not have become such a joke. Stated now, they were a wretched inconvenience. If I’d supposed I could pass off any old piss pot and get myself out of this mess, I’d have to suppose again.

  The Viceroy’s Council was reaching the end of its meeting. I’d just finished my report, thereby putting flesh on the skeleton of lies Priscus had called into being for me. Now, a word of advice, my Dear Reader – and I speak with greater authority today than I’d had back then in Alexandria – there is much occasionally to be said for the full truth; and you should, as often as possible, keep to it. When that is not possible, however, you should lie while keeping as close to the truth as you can. A lie appears always to best effect against a background of truth.

  I confirmed that I’d travelled south, that I’d fallen into the hands of pirates in the services of a seditious conspiracy, that I’d been carried out into the desert, from where I’d escaped and made my way to Letopolis. All perfectly true, you’ll agree. All that was missing was the connecting thread of a desire to get my hands on those various documents that Leontius had possessed at his death. Oh, and since she’d now vanished, the Mistress too was missing from the account, together with my less than glorious last meeting in the desert with the Brotherhood.

  Added was some romance about my attempt – successful, by the way – to throw the Brotherhood off the trail of the first chamber pot of Our Lord and Saviour. The idea had come to me, I implied without actually stating, in a vision sent by Saint Mark himself. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would have rejected this new connecting thread out of hand. For minds nurtured, though, on the lives of the desert saints, it managed just the right note. Nicetas believed me. The Patriarch believed me. Whatever they might prefer to think, or might suspect, the landowners had joined in the chorus of holy praise. If anyone in the public baths dared say otherwise, he really could go fuck himself.

  ‘Whatever the case, we must have it,’ Priscus struck up. ‘We can’t have a relic of such holy importance in the hands of this wog conspiracy.’ Someone nodded and stroked the heavy gold crucifix about his neck. Nicetas looked set to start babbling nonsense again. But Priscus wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘We must have it,’ he repeated, now looking down. ‘Isn’t that so, my little Margarita?’ He pulled the cat towards him and buried his face in the horrid thing’s fur.

  ‘No, my sweet pretty,’ he went on, ‘Daddy can’t have it in wog hands, can he? It’s too good for unholy trash like that. It’s for him – all for him so he can fuck the Persians over.’ I thought Priscus would drift off into a reverie of smiting in the Service of the Lord. Instead, he picked up the cat and held it out before him at arm’s length. ‘But what is Daddy doing?’ he asked in a tone of shocked horror. ‘Pussy’s had no lunchy munchie yet. Oh, wicked, neglectful Daddy!’

  Setting the cat down again, Priscus reached under the table and pulled up a small lead box. Opening it carefully, he took out a mouse. There was a gasp further down the Council table. The Patriarch, sitting beside Nicetas, stood suddenly up. Quite understandable, this – mice can be a great embarrassment if you never was
h and insist on going round in this climate wrapped in about fifty yards of heavy cloth. But Priscus had the creature firm in his grasp. Holding it in his right hand by the tail, he pinched a back leg hard between his left forefinger and thumb. The mouse must have dragged itself barely nine inches over the table before the cat was upon it. There was the usual dabbing and biting while Priscus cooed on his encouragement. As if frozen, the rest of the Council looked on in silence.

  ‘If it may please Your Imperial Highness,’ I said, when the cat had finished walking up and down the table, a mouse tail hanging from its mouth, ‘now that the main business of the meeting is over, there is the matter of the grain fleet that awaits your permission to leave for Constantinople. His Magnificence the Commander of the East and I have taken the liberty of discussing this at some length. We defer absolutely to your greater knowledge of circumstances in Alexandria. But it does seem to us that the continued presence, down in the Harbour, of the fleet is an excuse for disorder among the lower classes.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Priscus said, looking up from an embrace of his now purring cat. Except for the spot of blood on the whiteness of his painted face, he might once again have been gracing the Imperial Council back home. ‘I must concur with His Magnificence the Imperial Legate. I too have little knowledge of the particular circumstances here. But I do have much experience of city disturbances. Given the evident paucity of forces in Alexandria-’

  ‘But Priscus,’ Nicetas broke in, as moved by this suave formality as by my own, ‘you claim ill of yourself by speaking so low of your abilities. Though your right to sit in this Council is of some ambiguity, it would be a crime against the good of the Empire if we were to do other than take advantage of your wisdom and experience. Isn’t that so?’

  There was a buzz of agreement through the room as Nicetas threw the discussion open. As it faded away, the Trade Commissioner coughed and tapped significantly on the pile of documents he’d been fidgeting with all through our discussion of the piss pot and associated matters. The Master of the Works got as far as opening his mouth to speak. But this was it. Even before a couple of monks were shown in for Nicetas, one with a stack of icons, the other with a bandage, it was plain the meeting had broken down into a series of conversations.

  Slumped at my desk, I stared blearily up at Martin and Macarius. The padded door of the office was shut, all the slaves on its other side. Macarius looked less than his usually composed self. Martin shuffled nervously. I took a sip of the second lot of wine I’d had sent in and grimaced. I put the cup straight down. Not a big one, I reflected, but another annoyance, this, to add to all the others. I screwed my eyes shut and opened them. I sat up and spread my hands on the cool wooden surface.

  ‘Well, Martin,’ I asked, ‘any messages from God about this? The Patriarch knows nothing. How about you?’

  ‘If I might be so bold,’ Macarius answered for him, ‘did the Lord Priscus receive any guidance from the Monks of Saint Antony? Their desert monastery is of the highest repute.’

  ‘He did,’ I snapped. ‘He was granted forgiveness for all his sins – and a confession of those would explain why he was away almost as long as we were. Otherwise, he was told to follow “the Light from the West”. Sadly, he took that as another invitation to get me on the job.’

  I looked at the bronze bust of Alexander my Jewish agents had hurriedly sent over after I’d finished shouting at them about their negligent near breach of confidence. It was a pretty object, and there was every reason to believe the claims that it was made by Lysippus himself as the draft of one of his full statues. If it was genuine – and it probably was: a dealer had confirmed it from the casting method – it would be the most valuable single object I owned. If I’d been asked to give that up in exchange for the genuine piss pot of Christ, I’d have had to think hard. Anything else, though, I’d gladly have given up at that moment.

  ‘We are required,’ I said, pulling myself into a more positive mood, ‘to find a relic that nobody appears to have known about before this year, and that therefore may not exist. If it does exist, nobody appears to have seen it or to know where it is. However, both Priscus and the Brotherhood believe that I am able to find it, and have been competing in their own ways to secure my assistance. Priscus has now won, and I am not able to doubt that giving him the first chamber pot of Jesus Christ would serve every interest with which we are connected.

  ‘Consider’ – getting into my stride, I held up one finger as I made each point – ‘whatever good it may do Priscus against the Persians, the thing can do the Empire endless harm if the Brotherhood gets to it first. At the least, we’ll never get the redistribution law implemented if the people can be brought over to back the landowners. If we get it first, on the other hand, the Brotherhood will have suffered a moral defeat, and our own credit will go through the roof. In return, I already have that promise of help from Priscus. He’s even said he’ll put up with having Sveta in the room when he visits Maximin.’

  I might have added that I did owe Priscus something for having spread just the right mix of vague and solid untruth for me to complete. But I’d said enough. What I had now to do was find something that looked like a piss pot and that I could squeeze through those bastard provenance rules.

  ‘Macarius,’ I said, sniffing again at my cup, ‘do make sure the next wine you have sent in here is imported. I’m not too drunk to notice the taste of river mud in this stuff.’

  Macarius bowed stiffly and turned to leave the room. I raised my hand to keep him. I had work for him yet.

  But first – ‘Martin, as you often used to tell your students, when there’s no short cut to be had, you start at the beginning. I want you to draw up and seal a request from me to the Patriarch, giving you unlimited access to every collection of relics in Alexandria. You may care to begin with looking through the catalogue. His Holiness may insist that our relic isn’t mentioned there. I’ll believe those words more when I’ve heard them from you. In any event, please arrange for a physical inspection of everything. A catalogue that size is unlikely to be wholly accurate. Alexandrian scholarship isn’t what it was, and our relic may turn out to be hanging beside the altar of the Patriarch’s own chapel.’

  Martin nodded, an exalted look coming over his face. Able to pass days and days, going from one object of the utmost holiness to another – if this didn’t lift the burden of his sins, I could see him thinking, nothing would. Good luck to him, I thought. For myself, I could find better uses for time than looking at several thousand pickled body parts and bloodstained implements of torture.

  ‘Macarius,’ I said, taking up a letter I’d written in my own hand early that morning, ‘I want you to deliver this in person.’

  He looked at the tag on the sealed boards enclosing the papyrus and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Deliver it in person,’ I repeated, ‘and wait for a reply.’

  As I stood up, there was a knock on the door.

  ‘The Lord Priscus begs a moment of your time,’ the secretary called out, omitting his bow.

  As he stood away from the door, Priscus walked in. He’d left his cat behind this time, and had put on a robe of shimmering orange silk. His eyes flickered briefly over Martin and Macarius. I nodded at them. As the door closed behind them, Priscus threw himself into the chair just in front of my desk and grabbed at the wine jug.

  ‘You know, my dear boy,’ he sighed, ‘until I actually met Nicetas, I could never work out how Heraclius won the race from Carthage to Constantinople and became Emperor. Mind you, the quality of everyone else in the government here leaves much to be desired. I’m astonished the wogs didn’t kick us out centuries ago.

  ‘It may have been the Brotherhood,’ he conceded, noticing the look I gave the gash on his forehead. Now he’d taken off the lead paint and replaced it with a green wash to set off the robe, the gash showed again. ‘Bear in mind that I only heard of this movement when I got back to Alexandria. But I do think it was bandits. I kept one of them back for
questioning. Despite my very best endeavours’ – he smiled, giving his face a less lugubrious appearance – ‘I was unable to persuade the piece of filth to say a word of Greek. If it was the Brotherhood that waylaid me, it might have been to hold me to ransom as well. But as we both know, only you can lead anyone to the piss pot.

  ‘And this brings me to the main subject in hand. What progress can you report?’ He sniffed at my explanation of what I’d set for Martin. ‘The little slut in the Egyptian quarter referred to a place in Egypt,’ he reminded me.

  ‘Until we know which place,’ I said emolliently, ‘we search for leads in Alexandria. You know perfectly well now that Egypt is rather large. When you came in, I was about to begin my own search. Bearing in mind its nature, it isn’t something I thought suitable for Martin or anyone else outside the governing class. Since you’re here, though, it might be something for us to share.’

  ‘I’d be delighted to assist,’ he said. He sniffed at the wine. ‘You know,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘this stuff smells and tastes just like a poison I’ve often used called Tittymilk of Hera. Shall I tell you what it does?’ He sat watching my face change colour several times, then laughed.

  ‘Oh, my dearest, darling Alaric,’ he said, dabbing at his eyes, ‘if it really were Tittymilk of Hera, we’d both be twitching on the floor. I just couldn’t resist the look on your face. Welcome to the grown-up world where every cup and every corner is suspect, and where every bed is one in which you might never wake. Now, let’s have another cup of this doubtful but probably not deadly vintage, and then proceed with the search you mentioned.’

  Chapter 28