‘Get it open,’ Priscus said shortly. He was looking hard at the box. He might even have been trembling. ‘You’ – he pointed at one of the slaves – ‘bring those lamps closer. I want to see properly.’
We looked in silence at what had, nearly a thousand years before, been the Great Alexander. He’d been brought in from still deeper into the Library basement than the room in which we’d been settled to wait.
‘That is him, isn’t it?’ Priscus asked softly, not taking his eyes from the dark, shrivelled thing in that box. ‘I expected it would be bandaged all over.’
‘The embalming, My Lord,’ Hermogenes explained, ‘was carried out by his Greek physicians in Babylon. They steeped the whole body in aromatic honey, having first prepared it by some art of the ancients now lost to us. The method was less intrusive than that of the Egyptians. So long as the honey was kept replenished, I understand that the body retained its living freshness and even suppleness for many centuries.’
I pointed at some dark puckering on the right thigh. ‘According to the biography written by King Ptolemy,’ I said, ‘he took an arrow here in one of his Indian battles.’ I stretched my arms out. ‘And, even if we assume a degree of shrinkage, this does confirm the general claims that he was below normal height.’
‘He conquered and united all of Greece,’ said Priscus, still speaking softly. ‘He liberated the Greeks of Asia Minor. He conquered Syria and Egypt. He smashed the Persian Empire. He marched through regions lost before and since in the realms of fable. Had he lived and gone west, Rome itself would never have been known as other than the head town of some Italian league.’ He looked up at me, awed at the mere summary of the man’s achievement.
I ignored him and continued looking at the face of Alexander. There could be no doubt this was him. The documentation Hermogenes had brought in earlier was conclusive. The body had been ordered to be removed from display by Caracalla on his visit. It had been taken from its temple on the legal suppression of the Old Faith by Theodosius. There was an unsealed order for its burial in the necropolis – unsealed because of some dispute among the bishops about what to do with a body that had been so long worshipped as a god. Since then, it had been down here in the bowels of the Library.
It was the man. There could be no doubt of that. But I could look and look at the thin and brittle flesh that held to the skull, and at the lips shrunken back over the teeth into a perpetual snarl, and still see nothing to remind me of the statue by Lysippus set up outside the Imperial Palace in Constantinople. Stone is for ever, bronze for as long as a new shape isn’t found for it. But – Greek method, Egyptian method – the embalmer’s art gives somewhat less than immortality to the flesh.
Priscus was speaking again. ‘I know a lot about Alexander,’ he said. ‘I am, after all, supposed to repeat him in smashing up the Persians.’ He paused and glanced at me.
Still I said nothing.
He continued: ‘When Augustus came here, he scattered flowers on the mummy. He was asked if he wanted to see the mummies of all the Kings Ptolemy. He said: “I came here to see a king, not a row of corpses.” ’ He took a gold ring from his finger and placed it carefully on the mummy’s chest. It rolled slightly and settled into a depression between two of the ribs. It glinted up at us in the lamplight.
‘Get this sealed up again,’ he said, turning to Hermogenes. ‘Keep it safe. I will be back when I have destroyed the Persians a second time.’
As the door closed, leaving us alone again, Priscus sat down. He reached for his drug pouch, and was soon lost in fussing over which blend of powders might most likely produce the mood he wanted. If going into the streets was out of the question, it was decidedly chilly down here. Alexander might be kept in a dry place, but with the waters rising just a few feet below in their brick vaults, this room was bordering on the dank.
I walked over to the far wall of the room and peered into one of the loosely stacked boxes. More old books, I noted. I took one out and read the tag attached to the papyrus roll. It was the volume in which Tacitus narrates the reign of Caligula. I hadn’t known there was a Latin section here. It might be worth looking through what was left of it for rarities.
‘So, my dear, what further thoughts have you had regarding last night?’ Priscus suddenly asked behind me.
‘I questioned the slaves,’ I said, not bothering to turn. ‘Apparently, Leontius came back unexpectedly from his Canopus trip, and sent all the slaves out to a religious ceremony. He was then alone in the house, except for an old crone in the kitchens, who is deaf.’
Priscus put his cup down heavily. In the silence that followed, I turned back to him.
‘Don’t trifle with me over this,’ he snapped, for a moment losing control. ‘I haven’t come all this way to be fucked over – not by you!’ He pulled himself together and laughed. I think it was intended to be light and mocking. The drugs, however, plus the unerased emotions of our viewing, left just enough of his real nature still showing.
‘My dear young Alaric,’ he said, trying hard for his usual slimy charm, ‘if you suppose I give so much as a rotten fig for Leontius, you are sadly mistaken. His death hardly stopped the flowering of a beautiful friendship. I am referring to that slut and her message about the piss pot. You will surely agree that is a matter of greater importance.’
‘Come now, Priscus,’ I said, sitting opposite him. He pushed the jug forward. I filled his cup and then my own. There are times for jollying someone along, and times for trying to talk some sense into him. I’d never quite got the balance of this right with Martin. How to begin with Priscus? Having not the foggiest where his piss pot might be, or how to set about finding it, I decided to try for the second.
‘What we saw in the Egyptian quarter was nothing more than a marketplace trick,’ I said earnestly. ‘Go back there tonight in a different suit of clothes, and you’ll get more of the same. Don’t ask how she knew Greek and put on that funny voice. But we’ve both seen marvels of conjuring at dinner with Heraclius. No one can explain how the tricks are done. No one assumes on that account that silk napkins really are burned to ashes and then produced without so much as a scorch mark.’
‘And is it because they are such frauds,’ Priscus said, now in his tone of menacing lightness, ‘that someone fitting your man what’s-his-name’s description was seen handing them money this morning, since when they haven’t been seen?’
‘I’ll question Macarius about that when I see him,’ I said as smoothly as I could manage. Indeed, I would question him. Whatever could he have been up to?
‘Now, what else did I hear when I was with Nicetas?’ Priscus continued. ‘Ah, yes – that you’d got him to seal an order to dig out some old canal, and then diverted five hundred of the workmen, complete with digging equipment, to your own ends. Would you mind sharing with me what those ends might be?’
‘Priscus,’ I said firmly, ignoring his nasty look, ‘I’m having those men for something that is of no interest to you and that was planned long before you showed up here on your quest for that wretched piss pot.’ Macarius and his doings were still uppermost in my thoughts. I was also beginning to wonder, though, if Nicetas was entirely as useless as he’d always seemed. I dismissed the possibility. As Viceroy of Egypt, he’d surely get the best intelligence reports to be had. As Nicetas, he’d still be an unintelligent slob.
‘No,’ I finished, cutting off the reply Priscus was forming, ‘I promise that, if I ever stumble across the first chamber pot of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, I will have it wrapped in purple silk and sent to you, together with your weight in whatever you’ve just shoved up your nose.’ Not, of course, I wanted to add, that Alexander had needed any piss pot other than his own for conquering not just Persia but the whole East. But you don’t really push your luck with someone like Priscus.
‘After Nicetas, I went to the nursery in your quarters,’ Priscus said, with a change of subject and of tone – he was now all aggrieved reasonableness. ‘I was told Maximin was with Martin. I was stopped at the door of his quarters by that ghastly woman of his. I’ll swear she’s on her way to becoming as fat as he is.
‘You know, Alaric’ – he was becoming easier and more natural in his manner – ‘when the Great Augustus does eventually get as sick of you as everyone else did two years ago, the worst you have to expect, in our wonderful new order of things, is being shut away in a monastery. This isn’t a privilege, though, that stretches down far enough to touch your secretary and his family. Come the day, I’ll see that bastard Celt and his bitch wife walled up in an oven with that child of theirs. I’ll even provide the oven – the one I showed you back in Constantinople, with the inspection window I had fitted. Since Heraclius probably won’t have you blinded, I’ll allow you to watch.’
‘Well, really, Priscus,’ I answered, trying to match his mood, ‘you overestimate the space you take up in my thoughts. I had Maximin moved for other reasons. I have no objection to a short visit every day after his afternoon
