The Blood of Alexandria a-3
Page 51
‘If there is,’ he said, still smiling, ‘I don’t think either of us has much to fear. If not in law or in theology, there is in moral philosophy the concept of the set-off. Whatever I have done – whatever I may yet do – is for the benefit of the Empire. Without your efforts, I freely concede, the Empire will not be worth saving. Without mine, however, it cannot be saved.’ He dropped his voice, ‘Whether I really believed there was anything under Soteropolis worth having, you’ve made sure it can’t be had. That means the Empire must be saved, if at all, as something more like one of your barbarian kingdoms than as the Empire established by the Caesars on the foundations laid by Alexander. We shall need our peasant militias. That will inevitably mean the loosening of control that you and Sergius have been crying up these past two years.
‘But, in one form or another, the Empire must and can be saved – and we are the men to do it. Now that you have talked sense into Nicetas, I will give you back these most embarrassing documents. You can also forget any instructions my people in Soteropolis may have misunderstood regarding your safety.’
He stood up and brushed his tunic. I looked again at the documents he’d managed to acquire. Whatever gloss I might put on it to others, there was no doubt I’d been blackmailed into getting Priscus out of trouble. He’d not be going back to Constantinople in chains, but carrying a relic that had now been authenticated by two patriarchs as of the highest potency. According to Anastasius, it had cured the lame and restored sight to the blind. According to Martin, it had wondrously eased his haemorrhoids. Priscus had told everyone he was sure I’d found it in the very house of Joseph. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
And, if I really tried, I might in time even deceive myself. If Nicetas had managed to withdraw the warrants for Egypt – ‘reasons of state, you must understand,’ he’d sobbed at me while his leg was dressed again – the rest of the Empire had so far been untouched by land reform outside the Asiatic provinces. Without me to drive on the process…
I stopped myself. I could deceive myself, but I wouldn’t. It would soon be time for the burial of Alexander. Now his head had been found, a funeral could take place at which one Patriarch would officiate and another would be present; a funeral at which Nicetas would repeat the full amnesty he’d ordered as soon as he was back on one of his feet, and which he believed would dry the tears of Alexandria. Some hope, that! Even so, Priscus and I would need to be there to take our places in the still pageantry of Alexandrian and Egyptian government.
‘Where is your cat?’ I asked suddenly.
Priscus smiled again. ‘There was nothing to eat in that prison where you had me confined. I had to bite her throat out and drink the blood. The taste was perfectly horrid. But you never did like cats, did you? After that experience, I think I too might become a doggie man.’
Epilogue
Jarrow, Thursday, 4th October 686
Bede brought me some overly ripe pears for lunch. They had a hint of mould about them, but were a pleasant change from bread and milk. When the only teeth you have left are in the wrong place, anything soft is to be welcomed. We sat and reviewed his progress in Greek, which has been most encouraging. I was unable, even so, to keep a slightly melancholic note from the conversation. Getting more advanced texts for him to read than the Gospels is a matter of sending to Canterbury. That’s easy. Guaranteeing that I shall live long enough to move him to the stage of self-sufficiency is another matter.
Yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about death since the coming of autumn. It may have been the piss-poor summer, and then the arrival of frost at night a couple of months early. It may, on the other hand, be those bastard novices. They treat me like some living saint. As often as I step into the refectory to get a refill for my beer jug, they’re lining up for benedictions. It wouldn’t be so bad if even one of them was worth a second look. But I think I am beginning to repeat myself.
Now, you will recall, my Dear Reader, that I did promise to describe and explain the facts of what happened to me out in the Tyne. You will have noticed the double stack of papyrus heaped up since then, and the fact that I have neither described nor explained anything. If I were younger, I might worry about the decay of my faculties. When I was younger, I always explained myself perfectly well if explanation was what I wanted. Call it an infirmity of age, then, if I have failed now. Whatever the case, I have done all that I can to set the facts before you. On their basis, you may decide as you will.
Speaking for myself, I have decided that whatever I may have seen and heard beneath those dark waters was a trick brought on by lack of air in an aged body. That may seem a feeble explanation. It may even have left a couple of important facts unexplained. But when faced with the apparently miraculous, a reasonable man looks for a natural explanation. One will generally be found. Where not, it hasn’t been sought hard enough. Let that be an end of the matter.
However, I did begin my main narrative on ‘the day we began to lose Egypt’. Since I end it with Egypt saved – or saved so far as most people judge these things – you may feel doubly cheated. That is your right. My defence, though, is that – little as we could have suspected at the time – the Empire was scarcely yet begun on an age of multiple and interlocking crises from which only now it may be emerging, and emerging with losses that, if irreparable to the Empire as it had existed, may yet be seen as the political equivalent of an amputation of a diseased limb from an otherwise healthy body. Priscus and I thought we had saved Egypt. The Persians still took it from us, and Syria too. Eventually, of course, we did beat the Persians. We did find the second Alexander that Priscus always wanted to be. He didn’t so much defeat the Persians as annihilate them. It was as if he’d laid hands on the object. The pressure they had brought, during four hundred years, on the Empire’s eastern frontier was completely lifted. Back into every province from which we’d been driven we marched in triumph.
Then we had another letter from the Saracens in bad Greek. We ignored that one. What followed couldn’t be ignored.
Other questions may come to mind. My narrative doesn’t so much end as reach a sudden halt. What became of us all once we’d left Alexandria? Did Priscus ever get his just deserts? What about Martin? How did Maximin turn out? What did Heraclius think of that less than glorious attempt to redistribute the land of Egypt? Dear me, questions, questions, so many questions! I can answer all of them. And I will answer them if I can evade that threatened canonisation long enough.
But something I will not discuss is the dreams. I must, during the past seventy years, have seen that face a thousand times in dreams. But time, as with a much handled coin, had inevitably blurred over the cold perfection of its beauty. I hadn’t expected ever again to see it so clearly in my mind’s eye as I find myself now able to do.
No, I will not discuss that. Call it, if you will, another infirmity of age.
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