The crater was filled in. Time and the desert winds could be trusted to restore the obliteration of Soteropolis as a whole. I thought of that girl back in the Egyptian quarter. It was here that she’d assured me I’d find my ‘heart’s desire’. Well, if it was here, the reserve stock would be underneath the city of tents the other side of the big dune. Since I imagined the whole area would be taken as subject to the Patriarch’s curse, getting any of the locals here again with a shovel was out of the question. One day, perhaps, I’d make a second journey – this time with an army of diggers from elsewhere in Egypt, and a regular army of Greeks to make sure the locals didn’t make a fuss. But this was it for the moment. All had ended as well as might have been expected in the circumstances. Even so, it wasn’t wholly to my taste.
‘Come on, Martin,’ I said once the crater was filled in. ‘I need a good, long drink.’
‘Why did she have to do it in this way?’ I asked Macarius. ‘The lack of simplicity robs her entire work of elegance.’
Macarius turned back from examining his saddlebags. He looked at me and actually smiled. ‘What makes you assume she had any direction of what has now passed?’ he asked in turn. ‘You have called all this a game. Except where they have constrained your own actions, you are ignorant of its rules. Is it not conceivable that even the Mistress herself is constrained? You will have noticed how little control she had over you. Is it not possible that she must answer to powers far greater than her own?’
‘Will I see her again?’ I asked.
‘Is there any reason why you should?’ came the answer. ‘You have acquitted yourself just as was hoped. I do not think you will ever tell the story now ended exactly as it happened. Certainly, no one would believe you if you tried. But I know you well enough to believe you will take the more credible fragments and work them into a narrative from which you emerge with shining credit. Is that not always the case?’
He climbed onto the camel. I watched him as he rode out to the south. I watched him a long time, until, far distant, he vanished over a sand dune. Being Macarius, he never looked back.
‘I knew you’d see reason, my dearest,’ Priscus said with one of his brilliant smiles.
We were in my office back in the Palace in Alexandria. On the other side of the closed door, I knew without being able to hear that Martin was fussing over some dereliction of filing that had accumulated in his absence. Priscus sat on the edge of my desk, his legs swinging back and forth.
‘I told you it was a simple matter of explaining things clearly to Nicetas,’ he continued. I looked at the heap of papyrus he’d dumped in front of me. ‘You’ll now have to trust me that I didn’t have copies made of all this. Forgery of a public document to enrich yourself at the Treasury’s expense is not something even Heraclius could overlook in your case. Then there’s the matter of your consorting with an obvious sorceress. I’d not be able to prove that in Constantinople. But you know it would come out soon enough in any enquiries made on the spot.
‘As my friends in the Intelligence Bureau often say, “There’s dirt on everyone, if you only look hard enough”.’
I ground my teeth.
‘You’re a fucking beast and murderer,’ I said flatly. ‘When I look at you, I’m reduced to wishing, if not perhaps believing, that there is a Final Judgement.’
‘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
