‘My name is not important,’ came the reply. ‘Most who have reason to address me, though, call me the Mistress.’ Without another word, she turned and began walking towards the two nearest of those dead palm trees.
Chapter 23
I finished stirring at the cold ashes. A slave took the charred stick from me and wiped my hand with a piece of clean linen.
‘It was still smouldering when I arrived,’ Macarius said. ‘The locals identified some of the household. The others were too badly burned even to show if they had also been tortured.’
All told, it hadn’t been a very productive trip up river. The Brotherhood had been ahead of us at every step. I bent again and took up a scrap of charred papyrus. I thought at first it was in Greek. A closer look showed it was in Egyptian. I let it fall and stood back on to a less cluttered part of what had been the dining-room floor.
‘Then I suppose we’d better start back for Alexandria,’ I said bleakly. Whatever documents Leontius had kept here were now either one with the general wreckage of his house or irretrievably in the wrong hands.
‘If the past few days are any guide to how fast the Brotherhood moves,’ I said after a pause, ‘I imagine word of our escape will be in Alexandria long before we arrive. Even so, I can order an investigation as to who grassed me to these people. We might at the least be able to save on a few salaries and pensions.’
A voice broke in.
‘If you are using an official transport, I will accompany you. I have business of my own in Alexandria.’
I kept myself from frowning. It was the Mistress who’d spoken. Though I was curious to see more of what lay under those white robes, I was decreasingly pleased by her determined and thoroughly masculine way with those around her. Wherever she came from, it seemed that women there had little notion of how to conduct themselves in public.
I’m not saying I wasn’t grateful. Somehow, she’d scared off Lucas and his friends. She’d then got us directly to Letopolis, where I’d discovered Macarius hard at work on making sense of the devastation of nearly all that Leontius had once owned and that the receivers of his bankruptcy would never now be able to touch.
The Mistress had joined in my enquiries, Macarius answering her pointed questions as if they were from me. Now, one of her maids holding up a sunshade, she stood on the cleanest part of the floor. Her right foot was slightly forward, and I could see the large emerald that adorned the ring on one of her toes. It was, bearing in mind what I’d read about the heat of Abyssinia – never mind what lay beyond – an astonishingly white foot. Again, I wondered how and why she could have made her home in so strange and distant a place.
‘Our boat is, of course, at your disposal,’ I said, trying to sound as if I were making the invitation. It was reasonable to suppose there weren’t many shops as far south as she lived. I’d at least have the joy of silencing her with the range and quality of the frocks and cosmetics on sale in Alexandria.
‘I hope My Lord will not be offended if I touch on the unwisdom of leaving Alexandria. I do hold myself responsible, however, in that I left without telling you my business.’
I grunted and made what I thought might pass for a non-committal wave. Macarius had finally managed to get hold of some opium in town, and this had almost restored my mood. And though I remained aware of the sunburn and the raw patches, the pain was largely bleached out.
We stood in one of the few streets in Letopolis that was now inhabited. Before us, the church rose from the ruins of an old temple. Behind us was the dilapidated block that served as the administrative building. I turned and looked at the place again. An old woman hurried past us, a bundle of mouldy reeds on her hunched back. She crossed herself and looked away as we drew level. Once she was a few yards behind me, I heard a clearing of aged throat and the spatter of flob on the crooked pavement.
‘You will understand,’ Macarius added, ‘that I am breaking a confidence if I say that the Honourable Mayor’s illness is entirely diplomatic. In part, he is embarrassed that his Greek is not sufficient for receiving an official of My Lord’s station. While there is no one else qualified to replace him, he fears that a report of his inability to do more than write set sentences in the official language might count against him in Alexandria.
‘In part, he fears the effect it might have on the Brotherhood if it were known he had rendered you active assistance.’
‘So who is this Lucas?’ I asked. I looked at the low mounds of what may once have been the bathhouse. Yes, it must have been that: you could see the remains of the water cistern that had supplied it.
‘He goes under so many names,’ the answer came, ‘that you might as well call him Lucas. The real Lucas, I have no doubt, will by now have been found outside Bolbitine with his throat cut. News of your evident hurry must have been leaked from the government, and this would have been regarded as justifying the risk of discovery.
‘But you ask about the man who called himself Lucas. His position in the Brotherhood is officially rather low. His energy and ambition, however, have made him its effective leader in much of Egypt. In this respect, if you will pardon the comparison, he is not unlike My Lord. He is even about the same age.’
‘I did at first think,’ I said, ‘that his purpose was to trade me to Nicetas for some of the cash I inadvertently took from his people.’ Macarius stood awhile in silence. That had made sense, I thought. Very little of the gold the Brotherhood had been leaching out of Alexandria could have been needed to keep a dozen scabby priests in whatever slops their faith allowed them to eat. But for raising and keeping in being the sort of conspiracy I’d brushed against, it wasn’t gold that could easily be replaced by a tithe on the starving people of Egypt.
‘However,’ I said as we arrived at the top of the street where it simply ran into the desert, and turned back to the centre, ‘he echoed Leontius in saying that my real value lay in my ability to lead whoever controlled me to something important.’ I wondered if it might be worth sitting on one of the stone benches that had, back in the days when Letopolis was a populous commercial and administrative centre, been set before the church. But this was the only clean robe anyone had been able to set hands on that came near to fitting me.
‘I am not entirely sure of his intentions in this respect,’ Macarius said at last. ‘A ransom might have come into it. But I have thought much since our last meeting beside the body of Leontius regarding the Brotherhood’s interest in My Lord.’ He paused again to collect his words.
I raised my eyebrows and tried to look quizzical. I was still slightly rattled by the stupidity I’d shown in putting myself into the hands of the Brotherhood. Now I was back in control of events around me, I was determined to avoid any show of an unseemly curiosity. I waited for Macarius to begin again.
‘Even before the late disaster in Cappadocia,’ he said, ‘news had spread through all Egypt of the Persian military successes. This revived hopes that the empire established here by Alexander and renewed by Augustus might be coming to an end. It was believed within the Brotherhood that My Lord’s arrival – on a mission from Caesar himself – had less to do with changes to the ownership of land than with the search for a very powerful object. This connects with a prophecy that the object will be uncovered by a man from the West fitting your appearance.’
‘Now might that happen to be the first chamber pot of Jesus Christ?’ I asked with an attempt at a grim smile. This couldn’t have anything to do with Priscus. News of his own interest wouldn’t yet have spread far within Alexandria, let alone through Upper Egypt. But he’d assumed my interest in diverting those five hundred workmen from digging out the old canal was to do with the piss pot. It was perhaps only natural the Brotherhood – and Leontius – had made the same mistake.
‘It might, My Lord,’ Macarius answered. ‘The object is said to be of the highest potency. In Imperial hands, it could be used to turn the tide of war against the Persians. In Egyptian hands, it could be turned against the Empire and, at the least, drive the Greeks from Egypt.
‘This may have prompted Lucas to his daring attempt on My Lord. Doubtless, however, there were other motives. You might have been held to ransom. Of course, the Brotherhood has every reason to fear the results of any redistribution of land; and the moral disgrace of your capture might have added to the already considerable difficulties of implementing the new law. Otherwise, the approaching end of Greek dominion might have been advertised by showing off its most eminent representative in a cage. It might also have been hoped that torture would prompt the appropriate words of support.
‘But I also believe that the Brotherhood is under the impression that you know, or are on the verge of discovering, the whereabouts of this most powerful object. This, I am sure, is what weighed heaviest in the
