Though half gone now, the moon was still bright enough to show all the streets below. I stood on the roof of the Palace, looking down. Priscus hadn’t been wrong. The streets were almost alive with people. With torches to make up whatever light the moon didn’t supply, the crowds swarmed around the main squares. I couldn’t make out the words of the leaders as they stood on the fountains or clung to the legs of statues. But I could hear the angry buzz. In Constantinople, the custom was for trouble to start in the Circus and then spill on to the streets. Here, it began in the streets. Because the days were so hot, it made sense for protests to take place in the evening.
‘Without actual provocation,’ Macarius had told me earlier, ‘it will be just gatherings and speeches. There is hardly ever serious rioting except in the spring.’ He was probably right, I thought, still looking down. On the other hand, I knew that food supplies had barely ever been so short except in the spring. Nothing would happen tonight. It was too late. Priscus had told me of his meeting with the Police Secretary. There weren’t the forces to disperse the crowds. But so long as they could be kept apart, nothing at all might happen. But rioting was something no person of quality in Alexandria ever wanted to see. Even when the city was new and still mostly settled by Greeks who hadn’t yet had time to go rotten, the mob had been a fact of life. The reason the Ptolemies had built the Palace so close to the harbour was so they could make a quick getaway to Cyprus or Cyrene if the mob got out of hand – which it had been doing periodically ever since.
‘You’ll have to make it clear to her,’ I said, turning back to Martin, ‘that, whatever she says in private, she just can’t go about the whole Palace making threats against the Emperor’s Legate.’
‘I think I’ve talked some sense into her,’ Martin said uncertainly. His black eye shone clearly in the moonlight. ‘I can promise she’ll not embarrass you again with Priscus.’ He tried to say something more, but trailed off and turned back to an inspection of the streets. A column of armed police was pushing its way between a dangerously large crowd in the Square of the Ptolemies. Divided in two, it might soon disperse of its own accord.
‘It really is because she was so worried for the pair of us. You see, I did tell her we’d be away just a few days. When we didn’t come back in the time I said, she grew worried. Then Priscus came back early, and he kept turning up at the nursery. Then news of our difficulties began coming through in Alexandria. You can’t imagine the things Priscus said to her when she locked all the doors and kept Maximin under her own bed.’
‘Let’s drop the matter,’ I sighed. Imagining what Priscus had said was something easily within my capacities. Back in Constantinople, I’d made an agreement with Sergius to get Martin and his family plus Maximin shipped straight out in the event of my fall. There was money pledged to get them all the way to Rome, and even, if need presented itself, on to Ireland where Martin might still have a few relatives who recognised him. Priscus was now in Alexandria, where I’d never thought it necessary to make any plans at all.
‘I’m told Nicetas is under absolute orders now from Heraclius to get the grain fleet under sail,’ I said with a nod at the far side of the roof. At least from the Harbour side of the Palace, the streets were dark. ‘I’ll speak to the Captain tomorrow about it sailing at night. I think we can still get it out safely if we start the Christmas distribution early and call it something else. But the longer it sits down there stuffed with grain people here think is better directed at their own bellies, the harder everything becomes.’
I looked round at the soft pad of feet on pavement. It was the nephew or son of one of my Jews. Demonstrations or none, my lamp in the inspection room had worked its usual magic. I’d known someone would come, but hadn’t expected a reply till morning. I took his knife and opened the letter.
‘I look forward to seeing Isaac at the time appointed,’ I said at last. ‘Will you be staying here till morning?’ He wouldn’t. He always looked more Greek than Jewish. Dressed as he was now, no one on the streets would have given him a second look. And that was a big knife. I was surprised he’d been let in with it. Still, Jews always find a way. I shrugged and wished him safe passage back to the Jewish quarter. Even if his kinsman didn’t, he deserved some courtesy.
‘Leontius wasn’t made bankrupt after all,’ I said to Martin. There was no point going beyond the basics. But he was looking interested, and it took our minds off Sveta and what she’d said to and about Priscus. ‘That draft he was expecting from non-Imperial territory across the Red Sea came through early just after we’d left. Given that some of his larger creditors have refused payment, it’s enough to settle all outstanding debts.’
Martin didn’t ask about the oddity of refusing payment from a solvent debtor’s estate – not that I could have answered him: it made damn-all sense to me. He did ask about the deal I’d made with the Mayor of Letopolis. But since there were two possible answers to that one, and he’d not have understood either, I looked back over Alexandria to Lake Mareotis and the dark but horrid mysteries of Egypt that lay beyond.
‘I’ve decided,’ I said, rolling the letter up and putting it under my arm, ‘not to bother with an enquiry. The Brotherhood, we’ve every reason to suppose, has agents throughout the whole government. If I order an investigation into who leaked our travel plans, it will only rumble on for months. Some low clerk might be sacrificed for Nicetas to burn to death. But we’ll never get to the bottom of things. This being so, we might as well not bother even going through the motions.’
Martin nodded.
I continued looking into the darkness of Egypt. I’d had a lucky escape – all told, a very lucky escape. Lucas and his friends, I had no doubt, would haunt my dreams for years to come. But they were somewhere far out in Egypt, and I was back in the safety of Alexandria. The less I brought myself to their attention, the better it would be for me and mine.
‘One useful outcome of dinner with Priscus,’ I continued – and this was agreed after the guards had removed Sveta – ‘is that he’ll do his best to help get Nicetas to seal those warrants. Now Leontius is out of the way, the landowners have no convenient single voice for their opposition. With the warrants sealed, we can set the surveyors and lawyers to work. All that in motion, we can start preparing a return to Constantinople. The various deals I’ve made are safe enough in the hands of my agents.’
‘God be praised!’ said Martin.
All through my own inspection of where Egypt began, I don’t think he’d taken his own eyes off those swirling, moderately angry processions of torches down in the main streets. I leaned forward over the rail and looked hard right. I could see the southern fringes of the Egyptian quarter. There was some vague light coming off there. For the moment, however, the protests seemed to be a purely Greek matter.
Things might be better, I told myself. They might also easily be worse.
Chapter 27
‘After Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem, we have the biggest collection of relics in the whole Empire. They took over a century to catalogue, and the supplements fill two shelves in my library. But if we have never heard of such an object, belief in it is surely proof of its existence.’
Spoken like a true Father of the Church! I thought as the Patriarch wittered on about the piss pot. Come tomorrow’s Sunday service, I had no doubt there’d be a good half-dozen of the things on sale, each with its crowd of attested cures of the blind and the lame. Two of them, I was equally sure, would be snapped up by Nicetas. No – if he carried on crossing himself and exclaiming like this, he’d buy the lot, and believe all the miracles.
But I’d thought too soon. The Patriarch had now changed tone, and was sounding horribly like one of the senior clerics in Rome. With the provenance criteria he was setting out, you’d have had trouble authenticating the True Cross in Jerusalem. If only the Church had thought of these back in the early days of establishment, the Faith might not have become such a joke. Stated now, they were a wretched inconvenience. If I’d supposed I could pass off any old piss pot and get myself out of this mess, I’d have to suppose again.
The Viceroy’s Council was reaching the end of its meeting. I’d just finished my report, thereby putting flesh on the skeleton of lies Priscus had called into being for me. Now, a word of advice, my Dear Reader – and I speak with greater authority today than I’d had back then in Alexandria – there is much occasionally to be said for the full truth; and you should, as often as possible, keep to it. When that is not possible, however, you should lie while keeping as close to the truth as you can. A lie appears always to best effect against a background of truth.
I confirmed that I’d travelled south, that I’d fallen into the hands of pirates in the services of a seditious conspiracy, that I’d been carried out into the desert, from where I’d escaped and made my way to Letopolis. All perfectly true, you’ll agree. All that was missing was the connecting thread of a desire to get my hands on those various documents that Leontius had possessed at his death. Oh, and since she’d now vanished, the Mistress too was missing from the account, together with my less than glorious last meeting in the desert with the
