‘Me – I don’t never mix with wogs. Nasty, dirty people, I say they are. Shit in the street: can you believe it? He was a generous tipper, though, sir. He even took a whole pot of my ointment. He said he was on his way to a journey along the Canopus Road. He thought it would help with the pain.’
I looked again over at the gate. About fifty of the Egyptians were getting up more of their chant about Alexandria. Even as they gathered, though, reinforcements were pouring out of the guard house, their swords already drawn.
Chapter 8
‘Of course it was Leontius,’ I said. ‘Who else is there to fit that description? Who else is likely to be going about preaching unity against us from both sides of the Wall?’ I’d finished with my meeting in the Food Control Office, and we were now heading back to the Palace. I’d said I wanted the new land survey reports on my desk after lunch at the latest. It was now surely pushing towards the sixth hour of the day.
‘But what can you do about him?’ Martin asked. He tagged along beside me, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quiet, as the opium worked its magic on his fairly virgin body. I stopped. We were about to come from a side street we’d taken to avoid the public executions into the square containing the obelisk and the statues of all the Ptolemies. From here, it was a short walk along the Processional Way into the Palace square itself. I looked at a pair of yellow shoes in the glazed window of a shop. They were pretty enough, but I preferred something cut a little lower to show off my ankles.
‘Among other matters Nicetas hasn’t decided to share with me are security and public order,’ I said. ‘That means I can’t just have the man taken up for suspected treason. But we had a threat of this yesterday – and Nicetas was watching. We now have some evidence that he’s going through with the threat. Stirring up the mob, especially both sections of it, is something that even His Highness will accept requires action.
‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow. At the least, I can have Leontius kicked out of Alexandria. And unless we’ve pushed them over the edge of desperation, I don’t think the dissident landowners will stand a moment by his side if they think he’s actually planning to raise the mob against us.’
As we passed into the square, we bumped into the front of a long procession. There wasn’t time to get past it. The best we could do was jump backwards out of its way. We stood in front of what had once been the Department of Medicine at the University, and was now a training college for missionaries, and watched it go by. It was soon obvious this would take some time. Led by three bishops I hadn’t seen before, its centrepiece was a great wooden image of Saint Mark. It was smeared over in elaborate patterns of mud, its feet kept ever wet from pitchers of clear water. The patterns were repeated on the bodies of the humbler celebrants. Waving papyrus imitations of corn sheaves, they sang their thanks for plenty in the year to come.
If anyone there knew what I’d just learned about the black mould on the remaining stores of grain, he didn’t seem inclined to spoil the party.
Still, there could be no doubt the Nile was rising nicely. The silver stream I’d seen the day before in the canal was become a dark flood. It gurgled loudly through the cisterns that ran under every street. Already, Lake Mareotis was seven inches up on the day.
Martin switched into Latin. ‘What does this mean for your speculations?’ he asked, a disapproving tone in his voice.
‘Nothing at all,’ I answered, following him into Latin, though the noise around us would have defeated the most intrepid spy. ‘The contracts I made last month were for sale at the current, very high prices. The lower the forward price drops from now on, the higher the value of those contracts. As it happens, there’s an excellent chance of a good harvest to come.’
Martin gave me one of his funny looks. So far as he understood financial matters, he took the view that I was profiting from misery, and probably increasing it. But this blessed change in the weather had cheered me no end, so I decided in turn to give him one of my little lectures on the science of enrichment.
‘If you take the March price of corn in Alexandria during the past eight hundred years’ I began ‘- yes, I’ve had those dozen clerks I commandeered extracting this for months now from the tax records – there is a fairly stable cycle. What makes it hard to spot is the quite independent cycle that correlates with the timing of the flood.
‘But if you can separate these two cycles, and take account of plagues and other disturbances, you’ll then be able to guess the future price. I’m not so fast as I’d wish at brute calculations, and I’ve applied the method to any past year chosen by lot. In eight-elevenths of cases, the answer has been sufficiently close to the actual price.’
Martin looked back at the image of Saint Mark. ‘That sounds rather like divination,’ he said still more disapprovingly, going now, for greater security, into Celtic.
‘Not at all,’ I said, warming to my theme. The flute and cymbal players were coming closer, so I raised my voice and went back into Greek, which is better for discussing these things. ‘Divination and astrology and all those other frauds rest on the claim that one class of future events can be known from the study of present or past events of another class. Since there is no proven connection between any of these classes, the predictions made are all worthless.
‘With the method I’m trying to develop, you can predict future events from the study of past events of the same class.
‘Have you noticed how lucky I am at all games of chance? Well, if you throw a single die a very large number of times, the ox will come up one-sixth of the time, and every other side one-sixth. That’s easy. But I’ve discovered that, if you throw two dice the same number of times, the chance of each combination will be-’
Martin broke in: ‘The purpose of mathematics,’ he said primly, ‘is to supplement Revelation by letting us see – however darkly – the Mind of God. I don’t think it was ever intended to assist commercial speculation. And didn’t your Epicurus dismiss mathematics as useless?’
He turned his mouth down into a very sour look. I knew, though, his mood had been improving by leaps and bounds ever since the potty man had slapped on the ointment. We’d had this argument and others like it more times than I could remember. It was Martin’s duty at this point to disapprove.
‘Martin,’ I said, trying to parry his attack on one of the few completely stupid things Epicurus had said, ‘I do believe that, the usual miracles aside, everything that happens in the world can be understood by the use of reason. And I further believe that understanding allows prediction and even control…’
I trailed off. We were now on such familiar ground, words were hardly needed. Martin could have made his usual move: that Epicurus had been interested in rational understanding only as a way of diminishing fear of death, not at all of improving the comforts of life. But he wouldn’t make the move. Even he must have seen how nice the afternoon would surely turn out.
We looked away from each other and crossed ourselves with varying piety as the image of some other saint was carried past. The procession would soon thin out, and we’d be able to continue back to the Palace. We could settle down after lunch to a long examination of how best to reapportion land in the Lower Thebaid region.
For the moment, it was enough to know I really had stumbled on a method that allowed vast personal enrichment without harming the poor wretches of Alexandria. They’d be able to fill their bellies in the season to come, and at low prices – if only, that is, they could get through this one.
‘My sweet young Alaric, how delightful to bump into you!’
Oh shit! I ground my teeth. Priscus had worked his way through the dancing maniacs who made up the rearguard of the procession, and was now beside me. Flanked by a couple of slaves he could only just have bought, he was wearing something new of the best Alexandrian silk. One of the slaves carried a wicker cage containing perhaps the nastiest cat I’d seen in ages. It glared balefully at me through the strands. Holding the cage as far away as he could manage, the slave already had a deep scratch on his face.
‘You seem to have found your way about town soon enough,’ I said coldly. The cat reached out at me with an open claw. I stared back into the hate-filled eyes.
‘Now, I thought you’d remark on that,’ Priscus gushed. Except he had definitely lost weight since Christmas, he’d become quite his usual self again.
‘Our mutual friend Leontius has proved most accommodating,’ he said with a flash of his dark teeth. He put his face close to the cage and smiled broader still. The thing shrank back. ‘Isn’t she just a beauty? I had a most
