seemed almost black by comparison, the small disc of the sun burned steadily down from directly overhead.
‘Do you think we should even try pressing on in this heat?’ Martin asked.
I nodded. We’d also tacitly agreed it would be for the best to keep going. Lucas and Company might be miles behind us. Or they might be over the next dune. Perhaps hiding for the day was the right thing to do. But I felt an overpowering impulse to keep going as long as we could.
‘Aelric,’ Martin said, now in Latin, ‘I really do feel that God has reserved you for some higher purpose – and I suppose we have been in worse troubles – but I want to say now while I still can how grateful I am to God for having brought us together. If we are to die here, I want to say what an honour it has been to know you.’
Typical of Martin always to look on the gloomy side of things, I thought. But at least he’d stopped babbling about the supposedly miraculous wind sent to overcome the unrighteous. But the ‘honour’, of having known me! If he’d only kept himself from being sucked into that stupid plot with poor dead Lucius, he’d still be snug in the Papal Chancery back in Rome. He’d have known me a month, if that. Being a slave of the Church can’t be fun. But there are few better masters.
‘You’ll not be dying out here, or any other place soon,’ I snapped back at him. ‘I promise you, we’ll be back in Alexandria soon enough, drinking beer made in the German style. I’ve no doubt before then Sveta will have made you wish you had died. But you’ll live to tell this escape to your grandchildren.
‘Now, since we are still north of the equator, and the sun still rises in the east, I do say the Nile must be over there.’
‘It was God, I tell you, Aelric,’ Martin said as I shook my tunic again to get the sand out of it. I was having little success. Even without the sand that had settled on the great blood smear from that cut throat and that had now set like church brocade, the cloth was permeated with the stuff.
‘God made them go right past without seeing us,’ he added with a pious expression.
‘Then let us give thanks in the appropriate place,’ I said evenly. ‘However, you will have seen that they didn’t have that camel with them. This being so, they weren’t looking for two men on foot.’
Burying ourselves in the sand had also helped. It was a stroke of luck we’d paused before reaching the peak of the dune we were climbing. We’d heard the recriminations in plenty of time as they rode slowly up the other side towards us. I’d allowed myself one look at them. Lucas was almost jumping up and down as he’d screamed at his men. Most of them had looked half-inclined to jump on him. One had even shouted back at him. We’d waited until the shouting died away before digging ourselves out. Now, relief was mingled with discomfort. I’ll not mention the bastard flies that had been hopping all over me and biting.
‘I grant it would have been best not to have seen them at all,’ I continued, giving up on rubbing at myself. I was brushing as much sand on as off, and just a few moments in the sun were making my back feel tight. ‘But it does show we’re on the right course. It’s plain they were trying to cut us off before we could get back to the water.’
Martin began one of his edifying lectures on the Grace of God. Since I didn’t fancy skulking here until dark, I thought I’d put his claims to the test by carrying on through that burning waste – even if every step in it was beginning to feel an effort. Though I’d made sure we had good sandals on before we were taken, you need special boots for walking in the desert. Our lower legs had soon turned an alarming shade of red, and the soles of our feet were hurting as if we’d been dancing on crumbled pumice.
‘What I want to know,’ I said as we rested just below the peak of another dune, ‘is how the Brotherhood knew we were going to Letopolis. I know it has its agents in the government. But the orders I issued gave less than a day’s notice, and our voyage to Bolbitine was as fast as can be imagined. I can’t see how notice could have outrun us – certainly not to produce the level of organisation we met there, nor so far up river.’
‘Do you suppose those documents were left with Leontius in the knowledge that you’d feel drawn out of Alexandria?’ Martin asked.
I took the tiniest sip of water and moved it about with my tongue. I had been wondering that myself for a day and more. But to get all this arranged, the Brotherhood must have worked faster than the wind. The natives had never struck me as good for anything beyond whining and a bit of casual violence. Macarius had always seemed more than a cut above the rest of them.
Yes – Macarius. What had become of him? If he hadn’t chosen to vanish when he did, he’d have been there on the journey. With him in tow, we’d never have been suckered into that trap set by Lucas. It wasn’t worth setting Martin off again – not here, at least – about the worthiness of any native to receive my trust. Even so, I went grimly over the piece of my mind I’d make sure to give Macarius when he eventually did turn up again.
It beat reflecting on my own catastrophic want of common sense. If I’d been less eaten up with worry about those documents, we’d never have left Alexandria.
Chapter 22
It was as we climbed over the third – or perhaps it was the fourth – dune after our shock about how much water we had left that we saw the monument. It was one of those granite things you see all over Egypt, of a man sitting stiffly in a chair, a false beard stuck to his chin, some elaborate crown making his head almost as long as the body. It was leaning over pronouncedly in the sands, and might have been there since the beginning of time.
Size and distance just aren’t things you can gauge in the desert. With nothing comparable around them, things stand purely in their own terms. It seemed an age to get to the monument, and it was huge. It may have been half the height of the Royal Palace in Alexandria. There was no sign of any buildings around it. Perhaps they were buried in the shifting sands.
‘Never mind the picture writing,’ I said to Martin, fighting to keep the eagerness out of my voice. ‘It’s probably the same flatulence you see on the bilingual inscriptions in Alexandria. Look at this!’ I pointed down near the base. It was carved so low that it was half buried in the sands. It was a patch about the size of a large paving stone, where those endlessly varied bugs and crudely depicted plants within their ovals had been smoothed out and overlaid with Greek.
I brushed some sand out of the letters and read the opening of the inscription, which was in hexameters:
They died like rats confined, the men
Who crawled away from Assinaros,
No roof they found to hold the autumn sun:
Nor straw to keep the winter frost
From off their shrivelled, naked bodies.
And the quarry choked with corpses,
All among the stinking shit unburied.
And, brought to see what poets mean by Nemesis,
Children came to see the living suffer,
And, while its glowing embers long shall remain
To dazzle generations with their brightness,
O proud City crowned with violets,
Your flame of glory died that day with those
Who crawled away from Assinaros.
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’ I asked. I scrubbed more sand away from the bottom of the inscription. If I’d seen the Latin version of the Creed there, it wouldn’t have surprised me more.
‘It’s a lament on the failure of the Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War,’ Martin said. ‘It’s taken from the Theseus of Sophocles.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘I know that play very well. There’s nothing there about the Sicilian Expedition.’
‘You’ve read the standard edition,’ Martin said with his first smile in months. ‘This is in the version that he rewrote for a revival towards the end of his life. He was in pessimistic mood at the time, and thought the defeat in Sicily marked the beginning of the end for Greece as a whole.’
I deferred to Martin’s greater learning. He’d read through some very obscure stuff when he was still helping his father run that school they’d had in Constantinople. I stood back from my scrubbing and read the attestation
