I couldn’t follow the details of what passed next. But the outlines were clear. There was an offering from Lucas of flowers and dried fruit. In return, the old priest set up a long chant filled with references to Isis and Horus and Sekhmet and other divinities of the former national religion of Egypt – a religion now proscribed under penalties that made the wilder extremes of the Monophysite heresy by comparison a matter of petty theft.
Not surprisingly, since he’d called for the ceremony, Lucas took all the words and gestures in absolute earnest. He’d pulled some headgear from his saddlebag and put it on. It was too big for him, and the gilded snake that jutted out in front was continually overbalancing and pulling the whole thing down over his face. But, unaware of – or perhaps indifferent to – how ridiculous it all made him appear, he danced around and joined in the responses, a look on his face of demented exaltation.
His men took it very badly. They sat with their backs to him. One of them took out a rosary and counted its beads. Two of the others muttered to each other, every so often crossing themselves. The others sat in glum silence until the service was over. Without a word, they got us and themselves mounted again.
I managed to twist myself round once to look back. Though we’d covered about a mile, I could see the old priest, standing on the mound outside his temple. Still dancing in his arthritic way, he was now waving like a sailor sending messages to the shore.
‘Is not the desert beautiful?’ Lucas slimed at me as his men were packing up after another rest. It was now the very late afternoon, and he’d told me we were to travel through the night. I looked at the untidy bleakness that stretched all around.
‘It takes all sorts,’ I said morosely. ‘Any chance of untying me?’ I asked, holding up my bound wrists. ‘I doubt I’d get very far in this waste, even if I could break away on that thing.’ I nodded at the camel. ‘Besides, I’ve no doubt your men have better things to do than wipe my arse.’
‘But surely a man of My Lord’s high station cannot find such hospitality unwelcome?’ Lucas replied with another stab at sarcasm.
I grunted and went back to an inspection of the desert. Now the shadows were lengthening, its reds and browns had been joined by patches of black that gave the whole scene a thoroughly diseased look. No wonder all the monks who’d settled out here went barking mad in the end. Perhaps that was how the old priest had started, and ancestral recusancy was the form his own madness had taken.
‘The desert is, of course, part of Egyptian life,’ Lucas opened again. ‘It is the red lands that mark the boundaries within which our life has always gone on. For ten thousand years, we worked the black lands watered by the Nile. Except when invaders swept out of the desert, we lived in brotherhood and freedom. Always, the invaders were cleared out again. Always, the clearing out was followed by an age of glory. Do not the Holy Scriptures themselves record how once we ruled Syria as far as Jerusalem itself?’
‘Brotherhood and freedom?’ I snorted. ‘Nothing else in all the known world lends itself to tyranny and extortion so much as the Nile Valley. There’s a natural demand for officials to keep records of the flood and for surveyors to measure out the land afterwards. And with nowhere to run if these turn oppressive, it’s hardly surprising if the people become little more than two-legged farm animals.
‘Now, I don’t know any of your language,’ I went on, warming to my theme. ‘But there are histories of Egypt written in Greek. You can insist till you’re black in the face that they are all lies made up to justify foreign rule. But I’ve seen any number of those temple carvings and statues. They perfectly corroborate what I’ve read. You’re welcome to spout all you like about brotherhood and freedom. It only becomes true if you put meanings on words that would shock a theologian.’ I reached both hands up together to brush away some large fly that was flapping ineffectually about my face. Lucas gave me a thin smile. If he’d been expecting meek assent to the sermon he was trying to preach, he’d have to address himself to someone else.
‘You are mistaken,’ he said, lunacy back in his eyes. He put his face close to mine. For the first time, I noticed the smell of decaying teeth. The teeth I could see, though, were white and sharp. Unless the back ones had gone, he might be rotting away within from some disgusting cancer. It would have been nice to speculate whether this had begun to hurt yet. But Lucas gave me no time.
‘You are mistaken,’ he repeated, now emphatic. ‘The loyalty of the people to their Pharaoh was always freely given. How else could we have endured in peace and plenty for ten thousand years? How else could we have developed all science and all mathematics that the Greeks then stole from us?’
I laughed outright. Oh, he could have reached forward and struck me. But that would have broken the mood of triumphant dignity he was trying to impose. And if I was eventually to be done away with in some grotesque way, oiling him up wouldn’t make that any better. But pissing him off might be both enjoyable and useful.
‘Freely given?’ I sneered. ‘Ten thousand years? I’ll tell you this, my lad: Phocas himself never put up images of himself standing three times the height of his nobles, nor the nobles three times the height of the poor bloody people who worked to make their lives easy. All government, in every time and place, rests on fraud and force – the force of soldiers and officials hired by the rulers, and the fraud of the priests who assure everyone that the force is just. You’ll need to work much harder to convince me you didn’t have ten thousand years of that, before you had a thousand of the same from the Greeks.
‘As for what you dare call science and mathematics, you had nothing beyond the crude ingenuity to build those pyramids and all the other ugly things that haven’t yet fallen down – and to build them with slave labour. Before the Greeks showed up, you were as ignorant as any other barbarian race of mathematics as an abstract science able to explain all of nature. Your cosmology involves a flat earth with some naked goddess stretching over it as the sky. Your history is of kings ten feet tall and reigning for a hundred years. The glory you speak of is just more of the usual plunder mixed with bloody murder.
‘And, let’s face it, my poor, dear Lucas, you can no more read the picture writing of this literature than I can. All you have to read in the alphabetic writing your people learned from the Greeks is a mass of third-rate polemic against the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. What little they know about your brand of heresy makes you an embarrassment to the Monophysites of Syria. You’ve already acknowledged the debt you owe for alphabetic writing. Well, just accept that you owe the Greeks everything else in your culture that isn’t actually a joke.’ I paused to draw breath. I didn’t bother swivelling my eyes: I could feel Martin’s look of horrified despair. But I was enjoying myself, and I did have a more constructive purpose.
‘It has never, I’m sure,’ I went on, ‘crossed your tiny minds that there is in human affairs, as in the world around us, a natural order in which your kings and their priests – of whatever faith – have no place.’
His mouth was working. But Lucas had no words to throw at me. So I let my own roll straight forward over him.
‘Let us imagine a state of nature,’ I said, ‘that is, a world in which all are at “perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man”.’ I was quoting here verbatim from Epicurus – his Second Letter to Scatodotes of Cyrene. ‘This being given, let us suppose that everyone uses his freedom to supply himself with all his needs. Some he will abstract directly from the earth, which is common to all. Others he will acquire by free exchange with others. Therefore, some will raise crops. Others will take materials from the ground. Others will refine these things into other products. All property in this state of natural freedom will be based on the efforts of the possessor.
‘Men may gather together to appoint judges for those disputes that cannot be resolved by good will or by individual force of arms. They may further appoint generals for the defence of the whole community. But they’ll never voluntarily establish the system described in the Greek histories of your country or shown on your monuments.’ Well, that wasn’t direct quotation from the Great Man, though it was fair summary. I could have gone on to my own belief about the limitless improvement that might result from free exchange and the steady use of reason to understand the world about us. But it didn’t serve my purpose, this being more attack than exposition.
‘Don’t waste more of your hot air on how all this is for the people of Egypt,’ I said, my voice rising to a shrill scorn that could be noted if not followed by his men. ‘If that poor bugger you tore apart on the boat is any guide, I know exactly what you think about the people. I’ve heard that your sort refer to Greek rule as a cup of abominations. That may be a fair description. Perhaps the Greeks haven’t followed through in their actions the ideas they gave the world. But, let’s be honest, you don’t want to dash that cup to the ground. What you really want is to transfer it from Greek hands to your own with as little spillage along the way as can be managed.’
‘You lie! You’re worse than the Greeks you love. You lie! You lie!’ Lucas was on his feet, shouting now like a maniac. Two of his men were openly laughing at him. They couldn’t understand what we’d said – but they probably
