‘Well, fancy that!’ I said, changing the subject. Having been very nearly one of his victims, my own recollection of the dungeons under the Ministry were less rosy. I held up a half sheet of papyrus. It had stuck itself to the underside of one of the denunciation letters, and had stayed there during our first sort through of the pages. Now, it had suddenly dropped free on to the desk. It was dated four years after the closing of the case. The Child should then have been about seven.
‘It’s a request from Joseph for a passport to settle in Soteropolis. There had been a plague there,’ I summarised, squinting at the writing too small for Priscus to follow in the light we had now the windows were beginning to steam up. ‘The Jewish community was in need of skilled craftsmen, and was offering to guarantee his support for the first year. The request was refused, but upheld on appeal.’
‘Is Soteropolis close by the Pyramids?’ Priscus asked. He was all eagerness again. It was obvious what he had in mind.
With a stab of annoyance, I told myself I should have kept my mouth shut.
‘It’s five, maybe ten miles distant,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Rather, it may have been, as the city no longer exists, and there is some doubt as to its location. The most certain guess I can make is that the place is somewhere between the Pyramids and Letopolis – where Leontius had his estate.’ I hesitated, then explained something of my plans regarding the excavation of the Library’s reserve stock.
‘Come now, Priscus,’ I sighed as he gave me another of his suspicious looks. ‘You must accept that, until our agreement of yesterday evening, I hadn’t the faintest interest in your piss pot. Until you rolled up here, I really hadn’t even heard of the thing.’
‘But Soteropolis is surely where we look,’ he insisted.
‘Perhaps it is,’ I agreed; a denial would only have made him worse. ‘But we still need more information than we have. Look, Soteropolis may not have been very big. But imagine that Alexandria should one day be in ruins. Imagine even that part of it fell into the sea. It would be very hard for anyone in the future to identify any of the main places.
‘Soteropolis was continuously occupied for three hundred years after the Holy Family must have left. It can’t ever have had that many Christians. The Jews would have had no reason to preserve any objects left behind by the family of what they regarded as a renegade and traitor. Going up there now with what little we have, we’d need a miracle before we knew exactly where to dig.’
‘I would remind you, my dear,’ Priscus said with one of his thin smiles, ‘that we have had a miracle – two, if you consider what’s turned up in this file. And you won’t have forgotten the clear directions that slut gave you.’
‘They weren’t that clear,’ I said, emollient again. I fought to suppress that renewed uneasy feeling: you don’t let the contents of your mind be arranged on the basis of coincidences. ‘But if you want to go off looking for Soteropolis, you’re welcome to the workmen I’ve commandeered. I’ll join you there in due course.’
‘No good,’ he said. ‘It’s you who found this file, and you who found the hidden sheet about Soteropolis. You were the one the slut was talking to. You are the one who must go looking, because you are the one chosen to find.’
‘Priscus,’ I said, gathering the pages back into the file, ‘let’s discuss this again when I’ve finished with whatever leads I can find here in Alexandria.’ I did my best to sound as annoyingly neutral as I normally would have been. A little thought was stirring in my mind. Finding that reference to Soteropolis and then blurting it out might not have been such rotten luck after all.
‘For the moment, I’m hungry,’ I added. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to melt in this box. It can’t be much cooler than the oven you have in mind for Martin and his family.’
‘One step closer,’ Priscus said defiantly as we were finally signed out of the archives.
‘A quarter step, if that,’ I replied. Perhaps five whole steps, I thought.
Chapter 29
I was free. Rather, Priscus had gone off to play with his cat, and there was no immediate claim on my time. I swam for a while in the pool set behind some trees in the Palace gardens. Because it was looking increasingly likely that there’d be another trip into Egypt, I decided to have the canopy taken off so the sun could get at me. Afterwards, I lay in the sun, drowsing while the clerks read to me.
I’d not been away that long from Alexandria. But the administrative mill I’d constructed had continued in my absence to grind out reports and correspondence. There was now a mountain of stuff to be processed. There were the usual survey abstracts, plus all the other matters that had been insensibly diverted to my attention the moment it was realised that I was the only person around able to get Nicetas to listen to anything at all and take any action at all. It didn’t help that the posts were in from Constantinople again, and there was a great stack of newsletters and official bulletins to hold back or to let through censored.
Birds twittered in the trees, and slaves rubbed oil on me as often as I shifted position. It was something of the same delicious feeling as when I took just the right dose of opium. The only difference was that the sun was giving me a slight stiffy. I decided it wouldn’t do to attend to this with so many relative strangers looking on. I would contain myself until the evening. Then, I’d look to Luella for the usual relief.
‘Cut out all reference to the Jewish disturbances in Antioch,’ I said lazily as the clerk who was reading finished one of the newsletters. ‘Fill up the gap by transferring the story from Ravenna of the stolen jewels and their miraculous return.’
The clerk made a note on one of his waxed tablets. He bowed and took up another newsletter.
The news was generally disastrous. There was nothing on the Persian front. It seemed Priscus had been right about the zone of starvation he’d inflicted on the provincials of Cappadocia; that would keep things quiet until the spring. But it was bad on every other front. Rome was under siege again by the Lombards. There could be no help from the Exarch, as Ravenna was also blockaded by land. The Danubian provinces were effectively lost to the Avars; and the Slavs had now taken everything north of Corinth except Athens. There was renewed piracy in the whole Mediterranean. Communications with Carthage were intermittent, and about a third of the taxable land over which it ruled had been definitely written off as claimed by the desert.
In Constantinople, Heraclius had suspended servicing of the Imperial debt, and the banks were failing one after the other. Money just couldn’t be had at the legal rate of interest, and property in even the best parts of the City was going at eighteen months’ purchase. In a private letter, my banker, the Jew Baruch, was recommending against buying at any price; he doubted if the falls had reached anything like their bottom, and doubted also if there’d be any meaningful recovery in the next five years. He’d taken the liberty, he explained further, of calling in all the non-political loans I’d made, and would keep the money in plate and coin pending my own instructions.
The one patch of brightness in these narratives was that pirates had landed between Ephesus and Halicarnassus and had devastated two of the smaller cities. But this was an area where my land reforms had been in place for nearly two years. Without any help from the authorities – not that any was available – the locals had taken up arms and routed the pirates. They’d then burned the prisoners alive at a great feast in which they’d also settled a mass of outstanding boundary disputes without reference to the courts. Back in Constantinople, several members of the Council had complained about a ‘dangerous spirit of independence among the people’ – as if that weren’t the intention of the reforms. Happily, Sergius had flattened their objections with a threat of excommunication, and had got Heraclius to issue what coins he could for the whole of Asia to celebrate the victory.
It was all important – the financial news particularly so: I’d have my Jews in around the midnight hour to discuss its impact on the Alexandrian markets. But it all seemed rather distant as I lay by the pool squinting up at the sun. Uppermost in my thoughts was what to do about the piss pot. This was now the key to everything. Priscus was right: I’d have to do something about Soteropolis. It had been my intention to get the new law implemented, and then go up river with my five hundred diggers. It was plain, however, that I’d never get Nicetas to act, nor the landowners to back down, until we had the piss pot.
Whether and where it might be in Soteropolis, I was increasingly convinced, didn’t matter so much as I’d made out to Priscus. The provenance rules applied only to whatever Martin turned up here in Alexandria. In Soteropolis, I’d be in control of all appearances. My first training in Church affairs had been far off in Canterbury,
