resign these objects of the Old Faith to Holy Mother Church?’
As I stopped before him, unknown hands – possibly it was Macarius – reached from behind and pulled off my cloak, revealing the best approximation we’d managed to the robe of an Imperial Councillor.
‘In accordance with the law made in the seventh year of the Great Theodosius of blessed memory,’ I responded just as loudly, ‘these accursed objects, already confiscated to the Sacred Treasury, I hereby resign to the disposal of Holy Mother Church.’ I bowed low before him, making sure to keep off my knees; whatever the circumstances might require, however convincingly he might be dressed, Anastasius still wasn’t the Orthodox Patriarch. ‘Let their fate be oblivion.’
Anastasius lapsed into Egyptian, now walking about the piles of accumulated rubbish to shake holy water over them. At last, it was done. With a dramatic gesture to the Sisters, he stepped back. Again bowing to me and receiving my own response, he stood beside me about six feet from the chasm. Two of the Sisters pushed everything over the edge. There was nothing ceremonial in the motions. The ritual was over. I walked to the edge and looked over. I heard things knock against the walls of the chasm. Once again, I heard no final impact.
Attention had now shifted to the statue, still suspended on the brink. There was the same committal in Greek from Empire to Church, and the same endless chanting in Egyptian. Then this too went over the edge. The Patriarch himself achieved this with a sharp little axe that he took to the retaining ropes. I heard the rush of air as the thing fell and gathered speed. I heard it knock once or twice against the wall. Yet again, there was no final crash. I ignored Martin’s whisper about the Pit of Hell. The chasm was deep, I’d allow, but I’d probably seen deeper in the mountains inland from Ephesus.
‘It is time now for My Lord to act,’ Macarius prompted.
I smiled and took from beneath my robe the sheet of parchment Siroes had brought all the way from Persia. I had skimmed it in the sunshine above. It was just as Macarius had paraphrased it. All I could add was a knowledge of scribal fashions and of how ink and parchment blended together over time. I could tell from this that the document was very old – it might have been contemporary with Eratosthenes: it might have been older still.
‘Does My Lord act in this of his own free will?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ I said. Anastasius was watching with surprise as we made up another ceremony on the spot. I tried not to giggle as I went through the responses. When these were over, I looked round for something heavy. All I could see was the topmost nine inches or so of the stone erection. Somehow, this had broken off the statue as it was dragged over to its committal and somehow had escaped the last clearing up. I now lifted it, then wrapped about it the sheet of parchment, securing all with a leather office band Macarius produced as if out of nowhere. I stood on the edge, waiting for every eye in the room to settle on me.
‘There is a story,’ I said loudly in Greek – if the Sisters didn’t understand, there were three men with me who could at least understand the words – ‘of a Syrian trade expedition to my own country. This was after my people had displaced the original Celtic inhabitants and before the arrival of the Faith. The Syrians went ashore with strings of coloured glass beads. They returned with pearls of jet black and, where these had been insufficient, with the fair-headed children of their customers.’ I paused and looked appreciatively at the two baffled male faces about me. To call Macarius baffled would be saying too much. He just looked stiffer than usual.
‘Each side, I have no doubt,’ I continued, ‘bade farewell to the other in the assurance that it had driven the harder bargain. We know who truly gained and who lost. It is a sure sign of barbarism not to understand the true value of things.’ I held up the package of stone and parchment. I waited until even the Sisters had their eyes turned to it. With a contemptuous gesture, I tossed it over the edge. Without bothering to see how it fell, I turned and walked back to where the statue had stood. I stopped here and looked again towards the chasm. I stared at Macarius and pointed at the rope bridge. ‘I’ve done all that was required of me,’ I said, now in Latin. ‘The rest you can do by yourself.’ I watched as he took hold of one of the torches set into the portable brackets, and then as he walked with it over to where the bridge stretched deceptively across the chasm. He held it up and threw it hard towards the middle of the bridge.
I heard the ‘whizz’, of fire through the air. I heard its soft impact on the wooden planks. I shaded my eyes to avoid the short but intensely bright flare as dry rope and wood turned into ash and took their place in that bottomless chasm. I stared hard with all the concentration I could manage. It was for the shortest moment of which human senses can take account, and it was too brief a moment for me to give any close description of what I saw. But the impression I had was of immense and metallic instruments of torture. They were to the instruments I had seen in Alexandria, or even in Constantinople, as the light in that cavern was to the sunshine far above. If no one ever throws another bridge across the chasm that completes their separation from the world, humanity will not be the loser.
‘You may not choose to share it with me,’ I said to Macarius as he came and stood beside me, ‘but is there anything about this place or these objects that I have not been able to work out for myself? What is it that prompted Leontius and Siroes, and perhaps any number of others down the ages, to risk and to lose all?’
‘Why must you always assume,’ Macarius replied, ‘that, if only it can be clearly asked, every question has an answer?’
‘Because it has.’ I smiled. ‘Every question has an answer. There are no mysteries for those who know where and how to look.’ As we walked back to the steps that led to the upper corridor, I looked over to the right. There a single lamp burned brightly in the tomb where Eratosthenes had for seven years looked unblinkingly into the nature of things. He’d been dismissively called the second greatest mind of his age in all that he attempted: the second best mathematician, the second best geographer, the second best general scholar, and so on. I’d held in my hand the crowning achievement of his life. It may have revealed him as an inspired lunatic, or as by far the greatest mind of his age after all – perhaps the greatest of all the Greeks. And my decision had been to leave it where I’d found it. Yes, I’d leave the fruits of his labour in there. If Macarius had insisted, I’d have let him add it to the rubbish thrown into the chasm. But he hadn’t, and I wouldn’t. Neither, though, would I take them with me. I thought again of Priscus in the dungeon, gloating as he gave his instructions for the use of the rack. I couldn’t take thought for those hundreds of the impaled or thousands and tens of thousands of the indiscriminately slaughtered. It was like trying to pay attention to a single flake in a field of snow. But I could think of that boy who’d been broken up and then violated till he died.
‘Let the world have liberty,’ I said aloud, ‘before it steps from the shadows.’ I followed the Sisters up the steps. I stopped and turned back. For the first time in five months, I saw Martin and Macarius in an earnest if whispered conversation. I laughed and beckoned them up behind me.
Dirty from the cavern, we emerged blinking into the sunshine of an Egyptian high afternoon. The captain of the guards whom Priscus, it had turned out, had ordered to the right Soteropolis saluted me as I climbed through the entrance and turned back to help Martin. He’d told me of the verbal orders given for my death in whatever skirmish there might be with the Brotherhood. Live rescued captives are better than dead. But Priscus, being Priscus, had wanted to make sure no one could challenge whatever story he eventually made up for Heraclius.
‘My son, would you care to witness the final interment?’ Anastasius asked.
I nodded. Taking up another pose in robes that, even without the dirt, looked far less impressive in the natural light, I watched as he made his arrangements. The remnants of the Brotherhood were no longer to be seen. Those inclined to lurk behind dunes and heaps of rubbish after the Imperial forces had moved in had run off at the first sound of female battle cries. There was no chance of a counter-attack. Broken in Alexandria, the Brotherhood had been killed off in Soteropolis. The locals drafted in to do the digging were now willing and eager, under the direction of their Patriarch, to undo all that they’d been terrorised into doing.
It took much washing and oiling of granite to get the plug free of sand and tightly back in place. But it was done. As men frantically shovelled sand back into the crater, Anastasius stood over them, pronouncing what he later told me was the most horrifying curse on the place even the heretical Church of Egypt could manage. As if by an afterthought, the bodies of Lucas and of Siroes were thrown into the crater. Siroes was nothing to me. He was just a lesser Priscus; and, because lesser, he’d perished in the contest with Priscus. For Lucas, though, I did feel a certain pity. The man had been a dangerous lunatic. He’d been delighted to think I was dying from the very poison that had instead killed him. If he had made it to Pharaoh, he’d have done no better for the Egyptian people than any other of the native kings had managed. He might easily have been worse. But was it wholly bad that he’d worked – with whatever self-delusion and lack of judgement – for the liberty of his people from an empire that had, since time out of mind, shorn them like a flock of sheep? Whether the questions Macarius had asked of me about my own reaction in like circumstances were serious was of no importance. They were certainly worth considering. We buried Lucas face down, his body – rigid as a wooden statue – still twisted in its death agony.
