to keep the shocked look off my face.
‘I may have the respect of the natives,’ Anastasius added with a smile at my face. ‘Do not suppose on that account I have their practical leadership.’ He spoke again to the woman. She bowed and went silently out.
‘You have been in Alexandria just over four months,’ he reopened once we were alone. ‘You were sent here from Constantinople, without any of our language and without any understanding of our ways. You came to impose a new settlement on the land that has much to commend it in the abstract, and that I can hope will, on the Last Day, set off what I believe to be considerable derelictions elsewhere in your attitude to the Faith. But it is a settlement not suited to the ways of our land.
‘I know you have little time for His Imperial Highness the Viceroy. But Nicetas has been here far longer than you have. He may not have the words to tell you all that he knows – he may not be aware of all that he does in fact know. But I assure you that Nicetas has a sounder understanding of Egypt and its ways than is present in your tidy, philosophical mind.’
‘With all respect, Your Grace,’ I began.
He raised a hand for silence as the door opened again. The nun came back in, carrying another tray of refreshments. As she turned to leave, I caught a look at her face inside the hood. It was a flash of screwed-up lunacy and vomit-blackened teeth. It scrambled the reply I’d been about to make.
‘I have not received you here,’ Anastasius went on, ‘to lecture you on the politics of land ownership. I am told you have made yourself as well-acquainted with the relevant facts as anyone could wish. If your judgement of those facts is wrong, that is not a matter I feel competent or inclined to argue. You have, however, been kept, systematically in the dark about other facts. Your ignorance may so far have amused me. It has now become a matter of concern, and I will take this opportunity to make you aware of these facts.
‘What do you know about Leontius and the manner of his death?’ he asked with a shift of tone. The merry twinkle in his eyes gave way to a look of searching intensity. ‘No, let me withdraw that question. I know your answer. You will tell me he was a second-rate politician who got in your way; and in doing so, found himself in matters considerably over his head. Is that what you would tell me, Alaric?’
I nodded.
He leaned forward across the desk. ‘What would you say if I told you that Leontius was only incidentally concerned with your land reforms, and that his death was in the only manner by which a creature of his probable kind could be reliably forced out of this world? What would you say if I assured you, my dear son, that your arrival in Alexandria may have opened the way for the return of an ancient and inconceivably powerful evil?’
If he had said that, of course, I’d have had trouble keeping a straight face. But since he was speaking hypothetically, I managed to continue looking more or less respectful. He poured two cups of kava juice. It was hotter than before, and it was worth sipping and savouring.
‘If you were to tell me such,’ I said at length, ‘I might be inclined to ask what you were talking about. The only evils I have encountered in Alexandria or in Egypt are the usual sort proceeding through the ambitions and greed of those who would have what was not rightly their own.’
‘The relic you are here to seek my help in finding,’ Anastasius answered, ‘does not exist. The reason nobody knew of its existence before the arrival here of your friend Priscus is that nobody before then had heard of it. Your belief that it is identical to the object that the Brotherhood was persuaded by Leontius to seek is purely assumption. If the Brotherhood now seems to share your assumption, that does not make it true.
‘Leontius approached the Brotherhood with a scheme that fitted its own interests as he explained it. His uncle spent his entire life and fortune on researches into a past that was buried at the triumph of the Faith. He sought an intercourse with demons who, for ages, had masqueraded under the names of the national deities. In return for honours of which they had, in recent ages, been starved, he hoped to receive powers that would extend the natural course of his life – and might even put off his death indefinitely. With this would come a more than human ability to gain and hold dominion over the earth.’
‘Yet he died almost penniless,’ I observed drily. ‘And Leontius, who I imagine succeeded to these researches, still died hardly richer.’ I thought again of that old woman outside Richborough. ‘You’ll be dead within ten days,’ she’d croaked when she caught me stealing the eggs I’d been told might keep the pestilence from taking my brothers. My brothers had been taken anyway. But that had all been ten years before, and I was still here. I suppose that had started the train of thought culminating in my discovery in the mission library in Canterbury of those attacks on Epicurus. It wasn’t a train of thought to be upset now by yet more sorcery claims. If I could despise an emperor for believing in the incredible, what authority had some unrecognised Patriarch of a religion that, orthodox or heretical, I thought absurd?
‘They both perished in the same manner,’ Anastasius went on, ‘before they had been able to complete the last irrevocable step to worldly dominion. That step requires possession of an object that sleeps somewhere beneath the burning sands of the desert.
‘When you arrived last spring, Leontius made himself the connecting point between the landed interest that you knew at once was your opposition, and the Brotherhood, whose support was needed should you grow desperate enough to appeal directly to the children of the soil. The landowners would furnish him with money, the Brotherhood with the human means needed for his excavations.
‘The story of the relic is an invention of the present month. It may have been useful for bringing over those elements of the Brotherhood that have some connection with the Faith. In the end, Leontius did overreach himself. But the politics of the Brotherhood are more complex than you realise. The Christian elements never did trust him. They were outweighed by those other elements who thought him a useful idiot for destabilising the government in Alexandria. When he raised the matter of the Philae subsidy, and when you immediately had it cancelled, those in the True Faith appear to have moved – sure there would be no protest now in the higher councils – to end his life in the approved manner for the destruction of such creatures as he was suspected of wanting to become.’
‘So, there is no chamber pot of Jesus Christ?’ I asked, focusing on one of the points that really mattered, the other one being, of course, the treason of those bastard landowners. ‘Not even though much evidence points to its existence in Soteropolis?’
Anastasius sipped long and thoughtfully. Unblinking, his eyes had turned stony cold. ‘Alaric,’ he said, ‘since I plainly have no way of persuading you I am not a superstitious old fool, I see no point in prolonging our conversation. I will simply say that you are guided at present by forces beyond your understanding, and that would be beyond your control even if you did understand them. I beg you to give up the search you have begun. No good can come of it. In particular, I do urge you not to leave Alexandria again. While you remain here, you are safe. So is Egypt. So is the Empire. The moment you leave, you are once more in danger of falling into the hands of the enemies of the Empire – and the enemies of all that is good in this world. If I speak to John, he will speak to Nicetas. Your warrants will be sealed, and you can go back to Constantinople with all necessary evidence of a mission completed. If it eventually gets back that the warrants have been received throughout Egypt as a dead letter, it will be too late for any blame to attach to you.
‘But I beg you: give up this search now. Or if your pride really is committed, give up all meaningful activity in the search. I cannot otherwise do more than pray for your safety, and for the continuation of Imperial rule in Egypt – and for the continued existence of the Christian Faith itself in Egypt.’
I put my cup down and looked steadily at the man. I had no doubt he believed everything he was telling me. And it had been useful. Forget all the nonsense about ancient evils – I could now see a way to having those landowners by the balls. I looked round for a question that would bring us back to the politics of the matter.
‘You are telling me,’ I began slowly, ‘that Leontius was a sorcerer. I will not speculate how this corresponds with his known incompetence in other respects. But I will ask if his sorcery was generally known. I am hearing it from you for the first time.’
‘It was known, and, where not known for sure, it was suspected,’ came the reply. ‘You will have heard that John, my brother Patriarch, refused his body burial in consecrated ground, and that his remaining friends had to arrange an interment outside the walls of Alexandria.’
I hadn’t heard this. I’d been in the south. No one had bothered telling me on my return. But I pursed my lips knowingly.
‘I was consulted by one of your main opponents about a month ago,’ Anastasius continued. ‘I told him to obey the law made by the Emperor. Heraclius may be ill-advised on theology and on the situation in Egypt. But he is the ruler ordained by God. I told him to avoid the counsels of any outside power – a power that has nothing good in mind for Egypt or Alexandria. As I have said, however, I have less influence, even among the better classes, than
