by the heat into something so ripe it makes me gag.
The room is round and wide, with overhanging balconies under a domed ceiling painted with cyclamen and roses. It was designed to be a garden of knowledge, ordered architecture to grow cultivated thoughts. But already, the shelves around the rotunda have grown wild like thorns, tangled and dark, sometimes even spilling their fruit on the ground. All the windows are glazed shut, trapping the smell in the room and magnifying the sun’s heat. The whole room seems to sweat out its poisons.
A dozen anxious conversations fall silent as I step through the door. I can tell the men who recognise me by the way their faces fall. I don’t take it personally. In my pomp, I used to enjoy it.
A man’s waiting for me. He looks older than me, though he’s probably younger. He squints, leaning his head forward like a quail pecking grain. He’s wearing a calf-length tunic in grey cloth, and unlike the others he doesn’t have ink splashed on his hands or sleeves. I guess he makes his living carrying books, not copying them.
‘Are you the librarian?’
He just about manages a nod. His face looks crushed, like a balled-up scrap of cloth. He’s lived his life among his scrolls, neatly rolled and stored. He didn’t expect this in his library.
‘Is the body still here?’
He looks horrified. ‘The undertakers came an hour ago.’
A murder with no body. ‘Can you show me where you found him?’
He leads me down a narrow aisle between shelves, twisting and turning until suddenly we come out by a wall and a window. Yellow light leaches in and falls on the desk below, which is littered with papers and scrolls. The stool’s pushed back – it’s easy to imagine the reader has just gone to relieve himself, might come back any moment to find us leafing through his things.
‘Do you know who did it?’
It’s an obvious question, but it has to be asked. The librarian shakes his head vigorously, affronted. He gestures at the walls of manuscripts hemming us in.
‘No one saw anything.’
‘Who found him?’
‘His assistant – a deacon called Simeon. The Bishop was lying face down on the table. The deacon thought he was asleep.’
‘Is the deacon here?’
Without answering – or perhaps by way of an answer – the librarian scuttles away. He holds out his arm like a stunted wing, trailing it along the shelves as he moves. A lifetime staring at books must have left him almost blind. No use as a witness.
And what can I see? An inkpot and a reed pen on the table, with an ivory-handled knife and a small jar beside them. Thin shavings litter the table where the Bishop sharpened his pen.
I uncork the jar and sniff the white paste inside. It smells like glue. I put it back down and examine the pile of papers beside it. Bishop Alexander was a voracious reader: half the table is filled with scrolls, some untouched, others left open half-read. A few seem to have shaken off the spindles that held them down and rolled themselves up, perhaps when the dead man hit the table.
In the centre sits a different sort of volume. A codex, individual vellum pages bound together to make a book. It seems an awkward and fragmented way of reading, but I know the Christians like it. I peer down to see what he was reading when he died.
It’s impossible to tell. His broken face fell straight on to the book, drowning the words in blood. The left page is illegible, the right unwritten. His past obliterated, the future empty. I try to wipe off the written page, but the blood’s congealed. All I do is smear it. Shadows of words swim beneath the stain like fish under ice – unreachable.
‘Do you think you’ll find answers in there?’
I look up. The librarian’s returned with a young man – tall, with a handsome face and tousled black hair. He’s dressed in a plain black robe and sandals, his hands are stained so dark at first I think he must be wearing gloves. Then I realise it’s ink. Then I wonder if there’s anything else with it.
I gesture to the empty desk. ‘You found the body?’
The youth nods. I scan his face for guilt, but it’s such a mess of emotions I can’t tell. There’s sadness, but also anger; anxiety, but touched with defiance. If he didn’t know who I was before, the librarian’s probably told him. He’s determined not to let my reputation cow him.
‘Your name’s Simeon?’
‘I’m – I was – Bishop Alexander’s secretary.’
His dark eyes watch me, wondering what I’m thinking. Does he really want to know?
But that’s not what Constantine wants. Not yet.
‘How did he die?’
‘His face was smashed in.’ The deacon says it viciously: he wants to shock me. He’ll have to try harder than that.
‘How?’
He doesn’t understand. ‘Smashed in,’ he repeats. ‘He had blood all over him.’
