Secrets of the Dead

But I’m stubborn – and I’ve never run away in my life. I stand with my back to the wall and peer around the open door. The room’s dim and utterly ruined. Hangings have been torn off the walls and ripped up; a shelf has been pulled over and its crockery smashed. In the midst of it all, a lone figure stands at a table strewn with papers, slowly leafing through them.

‘Simeon?’

His head jerks up in surprise as I step into view. I stand in the doorway – close enough to make sure there’s no one else, far enough to run if he pulls a knife.

He doesn’t look like he’s going to attack me. He looks more frightened than I do.

‘What have you done?’ I demand. ‘Why –?’

‘No.’ He looks horrified. ‘It was like this when I got here.’

‘When?’

‘Not long ago. I wanted to bring Alexander’s books home. From the library.’ His eyes are puckered trying to hold back tears. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted them left abandoned. Books were like children to him.’

I sweep my arm around the destruction in the room. ‘And this?’

‘When I got here,’ he repeats. And then – gratuitously, given the shattered lock hanging off the door: ‘Someone must have broken in.’

‘You had a key?’ But I can answer my own question: it’s hanging on a string around his neck. I take it and try it in the lock. It fits.

‘Was the lock new?’

‘He had it fitted a month ago.’

‘And is anything gone?’

A slack-jawed look. ‘I don’t know. Some papers, maybe. He had nothing worth taking.’

‘What about the document case missing from the library? What was in that?’

‘He never let me see.’

He gave you the key to his house, but he wouldn’t show you what was in the case? I lean over the writing desk and look at the scattered papers. Prominent among them is the codex that Simeon has brought from the library. Blood has oozed out from between the pages, as if some part of Alexander has been pressed inside it.

I remember what Porfyrius told me.

‘I heard Alexander was writing a history – that the Emperor commissioned it.’

Simeon’s face brightens. ‘The Chronicon. A history of everything that’s ever happened.’

He opens to a page at random. Again, it takes me by surprise. It doesn’t look like the histories of Pliny or Tacitus that we studied in school. It looks like a ledger. Parallel columns line the page, haphazardly filled with short paragraphs. Greek and Roman numerals weave through the margins and run into the text.

I lean over, struggling to decipher it. I’ve never been good with Greek – and this is filled with barbarous names and exotic places.

‘Alexander designed it to reconcile the histories of the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans and the Persians from the beginning of the world,’ Simeon explains. ‘The whole unfolding of God’s creation. A map of time, laid out to reveal its mysteries.

But I don’t hear him. It’s a book of time, and every page is a door. To read it is to step through.

In the sixteenth year of his reign, the Emperor Constantius died in Britain, at York.

York – July 306 – Thirty-one years ago …

There’s blood in the air when we ride into York. It’s accompanied us every step of our journey, a thousand miles across the empire. Blood in the stables the night we left, our long knives wet from the horses we’d lamed. Blood on our knees, our thighs and our hands where the saddles chafed us raw. Thirty-seven days’ hard riding, always peering over our shoulders. It wasn’t until we caught sight of Britain’s dirty-white cliffs that I believed we’d make it.

Constantine’s been living on borrowed time for a year now. The politics are complicated but reduce to this: he’s after another man’s job. Two emperors share the empire at the moment. Galerius rules the eastern half, while Constantius, Constantine’s father, rules the west. Constantine stays at Galerius’s court in Sirmium as a hostage to their bargain. Galerius knows there’s nothing more dangerous than an imperial heir at a loose end, but he can’t kill Constantine while Constantius reigns as his colleague. Instead, he encourages Constantine to occupy himself hunting dangerous animals in remote places, or picking fights with barbarian tribes noted for their savagery.

But now Constantius is dying. The news arrived at dinnertime thirty-eight days ago. If it had come in the morning we’d be dead by now. But Galerius is an insensible drunkard: anything that happens after noon might as well not happen until next morning. By then, we were already a hundred miles away, leaving behind only a stable full of hamstrung horses.

And now we’re here in York. The fortress stands on a hill between two rivers, with the square tower of the Principia, the headquarters, crowning its highest point. On the far bank, the civilian town sprawls up the slope from the jetties and warehouses where sea cargoes are unloaded.

The guards at the gate stiffen as they see us approach, then go ramrod straight when they hear Constantine’s name. That’s a good sign.

‘Is my father alive?’ he demands. ‘Are we in time?’

The guard nods. Constantine lifts his eyes to the sun and touches his forehead, giving thanks.