may prefer to rule through outsiders like us. But he can’t altogether snub the old families. Priscus is trouble on legs. And how did he get here? He turns up at the Palace with a change of clothes and has another ready for dinner, yet tells me he came alone. He says in particular he came without guards. Yet he must have come overland from Pelusium – and we know that road is notoriously infested with bandits. If I hadn’t other matters to deal with, I’d have Macarius checking him out even now.’
I noticed that Martin wasn’t paying attention. It couldn’t be the trouble now blowing up over by the gate. He was mostly staring down with a worried look on his face.
‘Are your guts giving trouble again?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘I suppose it was the lead sauce,’ I said. I’d called him back from his clerking the night before to finish dinner with us. He’d gorged himself proper on the mice.
‘Do you think there might be a place of easement here?’ he whispered with a downward glance.
‘Oh, you don’t want one of those horrid places,’ I said airily. ‘You’ll have flies crawling all over you.’ I stood up and looked round. As luck would have it, there was a potty man within hailing distance. Alexandria might be past its best in many respects, but it still had all the civilised amenities. I snapped my fingers very hard and gave the man a significant look.
‘I can tell you, sir, you’ll not find cleaner tools in all Alexandria,’ he said, answering my question. ‘Just take a look at this
…’ His slave assistant brandished the brass pot: it gleamed in the sunlight that was reflected up from the pavements. ‘You could eat your dinner out of that.’ The man stood before me, at once obsequious and calculating.
But he was right. For sure, I wasn’t having Martin go and get his sandals all pissy in one of the public latrines. I fished into my purse. The bookseller had cleaned me out of gold. But I had a mass of goodish silver. I took out one of the smaller coins and put it on the table.
‘Oh, sir,’ he said, impressed though trying not to look too obviously at the coin, ‘you can rest assured of a new sponge for your assistant.’ He took one from his bag and waited as his assistant arranged the framework of curtained wood beside our table.
As he got reluctantly up, I gave Martin a shove towards it. The slave guided him in and fastened the thing shut around his neck. As Martin was forced by its weight into a squatting position, the cone made contact with the pavement. I raised my cup again and looked at his flushed, straining face. As we waited, a man at the next table looked up from his bread and olive paste. At last, with a long noise of farts and splashing, Martin emptied himself into the pot. And it was a long one. The whole framework about him trembled as, with purple face, he strained again and added to his deposit. I’d not have liked to be sitting downwind of that performance.
‘Do you know what that chanting means?’ I asked the potty man. I took another sip of wine and nodded at the growing crowd of Egyptians over by the gate. ‘I think I can hear the word “Alexandria”. Whatever it is, they seem to like the sound of it lately.’
‘Don’t know nothing of the wog language, sir,’ he said proudly. ‘Nor never been on their side of the Wall. But I’m told there’s not a single bathhouse working on the other side – no, nor no potty men neither. If a wog gets taken short, why – rich or poor – he squats down and shits in the street. Pardon my expression,’ he said hurriedly, ‘but that’s how it is.’
I glanced over at the Wall. In places twenty feet high, it bisected the whole city, and joined with the city walls. It had first gone up a hundred years before to keep the Greek and Egyptian trash from tearing at each other. Passport control at the gates and the cutting off of all public services had now made the Egyptian quarter into another world. We let some of the better workmen into the Greek side as often as they were needed, but always pushed them out again before dusk.
‘But pardon me for saying it, sir,’ the potty man went on. He’d now reached inside the framework with his sponge, and was rubbing vigorously. ‘I don’t think you’s from round here.’
I made no reply. That much was obvious. My colouring screamed West. My accent should have said Constantinople. It wasn’t surprising hardly anyone in the streets recognised me. In the capital, everyone below the Emperor was always going about in public. Here, just about everyone of real quality went about in a closed chair with an armed guard.
‘Well,’ he said, breaking the silence, ‘I can tell you there is money on the other side of the Wall. The wogs ain’t all low-grade scum. Some of them have big money. Can you believe it, though, sir? Some of them is rolling in gold, and nowadays they just won’t turn Greek. I do some of them now and again when they come over on business. Not a word of Greek. They need interpreters even to get their bums wiped. Can you believe it, sir? They get money, but won’t turn Greek. They don’t believe nothing about the Conjoined Human Nature of Christ. Some of them even says – or so I’ve heard – that Our Lord and Saviour was just some ghost with God looking through the eyes. It ain’t natural, I tell you, sir. It ain’t like the old days.’
He was right there. The nice thing about orthodoxy is that, however nonsensical, it can be defined by an agreed set of words that have a reasonably agreed meaning. Monophysitism, though, wasn’t a single heresy, but a heading under which any number of heresies took shelter. Some of these were so close to orthodoxy, they barely needed settling. Others were so radical and bizarre, they hardly counted as Christian.
It was here in Alexandria, while sifting through the rubbish that now clogged the shelving racks in the Library, that I’d fully appreciated the nature of heresy. Sergius and I had taken our sounding among the Syrians, and found that most of them weren’t opposed in principle to a Single Directing Will for Christ. But this wasn’t Syria. Here, we had against us all the ingenuity of Alexandria wedded to the fanaticism of Egypt. Getting these crazies even to discuss a settlement would be like herding cats.
‘Oh, sir!’ the potty man said to me, or perhaps to Martin.
I pulled myself out of a reverie that was branching into the decay of Greek as a common language, and looked back at him. He’d stopped his wiping. He rinsed his sponge again in vinegar and pushed it back inside the framework. Martin winced and groaned. The Potty Man took it back and held it up to me. It was covered in fresh blood.
‘Cruel things is piles, sir,’ he said to me. ‘And these ones is hanging down like ripe figs. I’m surprised your man can sit down.’
‘Martin,’ I sighed in Latin, ‘I have told you many times. Wiping isn’t enough. You really do need to wash down there. A dirty arse, and in this climate – why, you’re asking for trouble.’ I would have said more. But it was now that the babble of Egyptian voices over by the gate took on an ugly sound. Perhaps the Greeks had given offence. I paid attention as they came to the end of their own chant:
Let us ever recall for whom
This city is the living room,
And know ourselves the master race,
And keep the natives in their place.
‘Never a truer word,’ the potty man said approvingly. ‘Never a truer word.’ He listened to more of the commotion, then recalled his business. ‘I can recommend some truly good ointment for those piles.’ He looked into his bag again and pulled out a small lead container.
I took it from his hand and sniffed the contents. So far as I could tell, it was opium in a kind of bird fat. It wouldn’t do Martin any harm, and might lift his mood. I handed it back and nodded.
‘Of course, there is some that disagree,’ the potty man said as he set to work again.
I stared at him and frowned.
‘Oh, I mean, sir, about the wogs. Why, it was just this morning that I applied this very cream to someone who told me the wogs too were God’s Children, and we had more to bind than divide us. Right quality he was, I can tell you. He said that, with all the corn being shipped off to Constantinople, we’d soon all be starving together. So we might as well act together.’
For the first time, I pricked up my ears. Who was sowing concord between Greek and Egyptians? I tried not to sound too interested as I asked the question. I didn’t succeed. But another coin got the man going again.
‘A great fat man, it was,’ he said, ‘a fat man with a bald head and a red spot on his nose. Terrible piles, he had. He nearly screamed as I touched them. But he said the government was trying to fuck us all over – pardon the expression, but those were his very words. He promised me a reward if I’d spread the word of unity. ‘‘There’s success in unity,’’ he said, ‘‘success in unity.’’
