I thanked him. I’d now have to put up with Sveta twice a day; correction, we’d have to put up with each other. Though the heat and flies remained a sore trial, she still found energy for evil looks and God alone knew what private slanders to Martin. The immense and continuing favours I’d done him didn’t seem to register with her.
‘So you go directly off to Sveta,’ I said, taking him back to the door, ‘and get things arranged. See that Maximin is settled in with you. I want you to spend the rest of the afternoon and all evening not thinking about survey reports or Leontius or anything else connected with them.
‘I want you nice and fresh for tomorrow. The engineers will be coming round to discuss the reconnection of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Apparently, there is a difference of height between the two oceans, and we shall need to discover how the ancients managed the flow of waters.
‘Now, do pass on my regards to Sveta. I will try to visit your quarters before whatever Priscus has arranged for the evening entertainments.’
Down in the Eastern Harbour, the supplemental grain ships were still loading up under armed guard. They would be ready, the senior captain told me, to leave within the next five days. Assuming normal winds, all would be in Constantinople in time for Heraclius to pacify the Circus mob with double rations, and to shell out as bribes to get the Avars to leave Thrace alone.
The Harbour area itself was walled and gated. The streets by which it was approached, though, were dotted with small crowds. So far, protest was muted. So far, it seemed to involve men from the almost respectable classes. The supplemental requisition was little in itself. But it could easily be made an example of how the Empire was bleeding Egypt white. We needed to get those ships under way as soon as possible. Even before then, we had to get Leontius out of Alexandria and keep those landowners on side.
Now I was clear of all the dockyards, I looked over at the Lighthouse. If you walked westerly along the Embankment Road lining the shore, you’d pass some of the oldest and grandest buildings in the city, including the back of the Library. There was the old University Building. There were the old temples, all now converted into churches. There was the Spice Exchange. Then you’d get to the punctuated causeway that led across to the Lighthouse Island. A clever structure, this. It allowed easy access to the island without closing off access for ships to the Western Harbour. When it came to engineers – and, for that matter, to everything else – the Ptolemies had demanded and got the best the ancients had to offer.
But I didn’t fancy crowds got up in their afternoon finery and the babble among them of greetings and pleasantries in a Greek so exaggerated yet so corrupt that I still couldn’t listen to it without wanting to laugh. And Hermogenes and his message about more documents could easily wait another day.
I turned east, going back towards the Palace. It loomed before me, about twice as big as the Great Church in Constantinople. The elaboration of columns and statues and marbles of different colours never once took away from the knowledge that this was a vast, impregnable fortress, complete with access to its own harbour. It was the largest building in the city. For much of its history, it had been the most hated. In every park and square, and in every street in the city not too narrow or too twisting to block the view, it was a looming presence.
The guards at the southern gate pulled themselves presentable and saluted as they saw me approaching. But I looked at it. I thought of those airless corridors and those rooms with their heavy silk hangings. If Priscus wasn’t sleeping off some new exotic drug or teaching his cat to scratch out slave eyes, he might come looking for conversation. Or there was Martin, jumping at shadows while Sveta nagged him viciously about matters that probably involved me. Or there were those clerks, sweating away together over the latest set of price ratios I’d given them to calculate. If not that, there’d be…
I turned and went back to the Embankment Road. I turned east again. Walking briskly, I skirted the Jewish quarter, and made for the Gate of Pompey. Here, I was recognised a few times. My dealings with the Alexandrian Greeks had so far been limited. I wasn’t sorry for that. Except for Hermogenes and a few other scholars, I had little reason to deal with any of them. With the Jews, it had been a little different. One of the clerks in my preferred banking house almost bumped into me as he hurried about some business. Blinking in the sunlight, he stared up at me. With a muttered and vestigial obeisance, he turned and continued on his way. I looked at the rather dumpy buildings that surrounded one of the larger synagogues. But I had no business here today, so kept to the common faith area of the main road to the gate.
Being on foot, I expected I’d be allowed through without formalities. Normally, it was a matter of turning up and showing my face. With an obsequious bow, I’d be escorted round the heavy bar that blocked the gate by day and waved into the lush countryside beyond to continue my walk. Today, however, the guards had been changed, and a couple of unsmiling creatures looked hard at my passport. They didn’t so much as nod acknowledgement of the golden ink on the parchment.
If delayed a little, though, I was lucky. On both sides of the gate, wheeled traffic was stuck in queues a hundred yards long. This was one of the days in the month when the priests had all the death bins outside the city gates opened. They’d been here with the dawn – scented cloths tied to their faces while they turned over the bodies of the unconnected poor and choked out the required words. The priests had long since staggered off to get drunk. However, the public slaves were still fussing with their buckets of quicklime. In the now recovering heat of the mid-afternoon, the smell and the flies were unendurable. I’d try to find out from Nicetas at our next meeting what was the idea of all this delay – not that he’d make much sense even if he knew and even if he were inclined to share the knowledge with me. For the moment, it was enough that I was soon through the gate, and the high, grey walls of the city were fading out of mind behind me.
Chapter 10
It was here, outside the city, yet within reach of its protective walls, that the very rich had once built their country villas, and the district had been quite a garden suburb. With the decline of population, and of order beyond the city gates, the villas had long been abandoned, and were now mostly fallen down. Slaves still toiled in the occasional cultivated field, growing lettuces and other delicacies for the city markets. Slaves still trod the occasional wheel, raising water from the low canals to irrigate the land. Otherwise, the area was a near-solitude of rocky green bordering the blue solitude of the sea.
About a mile outside the walls, the solitude became complete. The birds twittered in the little trees. There was a continual rustling under the bushes of lizards and small furry creatures. Over to my left, the sun sparkled on the sea. I was on a fairly narrow spit of land that separated Lake Mareotis from the sea, and the road to Canopus ran through this. But I was on a side road that ultimately led nowhere. Here, there wasn’t a human being in sight.
It was hard to say what had got me out this way. Partly, of course, it was the joys of solitude. You got none of that in the Palace, and still less in the streets of Alexandria. If Martin had been working hard, so had I.
Then, it was the news I’d had of Leontius. He’d told the potty man he was setting out along the Canopus Road. Priscus had told me he’d not have set out till after lunch. Taken together, these might be significant facts. You see, no one ever set out by chair on the road to Canopus in the afternoon – not even with two relays of carriers to go at a steady trot. The Police Chief there had started locking the gates well before sunset, and was famous for not opening them for anyone till the sun was well up again. By day, the road could be as delightful over its whole stretch as the countryside around me. By night, it was a haunt of bandits and God knows what other mischief. No one ever started a journey that would have meant being stuck on that road after dark. Nobody local was stupid enough to do that, even with an armed guard.
But if the potty man had been accurately reporting what he’d been told, Leontius was on a journey along the Canopus Road. Now, the settlements that had once lain between the two cities had been abandoned a good century before. If it wasn’t Canopus, then he might well be up to something decidedly fishy.
I had thought at first to leave all this to Macarius. If Leontius was under continual surveillance, whatever he was up to would surely be known without my intervention. But little as I had any faith in his judgement, Martin’s endless mutterings about Macarius were getting to me. Perhaps I could take some hand in digging up the dirt on Leontius.
I turned up a slight incline. It was about the only high ground on the entire spit of land that stretched east of Alexandria. From the top, you could see down on the other side over a longish part of the Canopus Road. I stood and looked up and down the road. It was as empty as the road I’d just left. No one, of course, would be going down
