rising fast in the sky, and it lit up the dimpled waters of the now empty Harbour. Far out, beyond the exit, the grain fleet rode safely at anchor. The wreckage of the burned ship was being methodically broken up and cleared away. A few men lay on the dockside, where they’d collapsed from exhaustion. Officials stepped over them as they counted and recorded the saved cargo.
Of course, I hadn’t been able to count the sacks carried off. Still, the impression I had was that most of the cargo had been saved. It was spoiled, and would never do for transporting all the way to Constantinople. One sniff at the bread made from it, and the mob there would start a riot of its own. Any but the most desperate barbarians would throw it back in our faces, and probably burn a few more cities out of wounded pride. But, washed and dried, it would fetch something on the local market.
‘But, little Martin, how delightful of you to remember breakfast,’ Priscus crooned, suddenly beside me. He took the unstopped flask from my hands and took a long pull from it. Face and hands black from the smoke, his armour discarded somewhere among the grain sacks, he still seemed to loom over the pair of us. He glowed, though exhausted. It was as if he’d taken the entire contents of his drug satchel – and had got the relative doses exactly right. He fell onto the pile of ropes that I’d vacated and mopped happily at his face. The wound he’d picked up on the road towards Siwa had opened up again, and the cloth came away covered in blood as well as sweaty soot.
‘Any news of events further inland?’ he asked.
I looked at Martin. He looked back, plainly confused.
‘Never mind,’ Priscus said. He turned his attention for the moment to the bread, and tore ravenously at the loaf.
‘I imagine there will be an emergency meeting of the Council once we get back,’ I said.
‘Not if what I’ve seen of Nicetas is representative of his behaviour in a crisis,’ Priscus grunted. ‘No, not if he’s anything like his dear and Imperial cousin.’ He put the bread down and laughed. I thought I might like some of the wine. But Priscus had the flask again.
‘You didn’t see him as I did outside Caesarea,’ he said, laughter giving way to bitterness. ‘The Persians had smashed through the wafer-thin front of our best troops. They’d found we had no reserves. Even so, I might have scared them back inside the gates if only I’d been able to pull the two wings in tight.’ He looked at me and Martin. I struggled to imagine what I now realise was an obvious tactic. Priscus noticed I wasn’t really following and shrugged. ‘But you’ll hear it all from the poor bloody veterans when Heraclius commissions you to write up the history of his reign,’ he said. ‘All you’ll have to do to make him shine like another Belisarius is to cut out the time he spent puking up his breakfast, and transfer to him my own part in organising the skirmish around his travelling chapel that kept the Persians from swallowing up the whole wreckage of his army.
‘No, my dearest boy, if Nicetas is anything like Heraclius, you’ll not want an emergency meeting this morning of his Council or with him.’ He sprawled back on the pile of ropes and stretched his trousered legs.
I chewed on the crust of bread he’d left me and tried to look more like the Emperor’s Legate than I felt. Priscus ignored my efforts and turned to Martin.
‘Well, my little secretary,’ he asked, ‘how goes your trawl of all the churches in Alexandria?’
‘We’ve so far come up with nothing,’ I said, cutting short the mumbled response. This was a good time to announce I’d given in and was planning a digging trip to Soteropolis. That would recover some of my lost equality with him. I got no further, though. I as good as had the words in my mouth when one of the junior police officers came in sight round the brick building.
Priscus took his message and read it. He gave me an amused look and bent the sheet back into its containing band.
‘I would send you back to the Palace to recover yourself after this most stressful night,’ he said, just the right touch of irony in his voice to remind me of my own uselessness when it came to organised force. ‘However, something’s come up where it would be most valuable to have the pair of you as witnesses. I might also find Martin’s famed scribal skills of more than passing use.’
Chapter 37
The police officer bowed and stood back as he pushed the door open. One smell of what lay beyond, and the breath caught in my throat. It was like a butcher’s market at the end of a hot day. I’d been in the City Prefecture building any number of times. But it was never on police business, and never in the cellars, which were sealed from the main building by doors at each end of the narrow, winding stairs that led down from a room just off one of the side entrances.
I must have known this place existed. I’d been twice in the dungeons under the building in Constantinople that had served much the same purpose before the revolution. But these are places normally considered only when brought undeniably into mind.
As if he’d been going there every day for a lifetime, Priscus went up to the crabbed, pasty-faced official who sat in the first room of the City Prison. An underground room, about fifteen feet by fifteen, it would have been normal enough but for the smell. It was a place of filing racks and keys on numbered hooks. We’d entered through the door that led directly from the bottom of the stairs. Immediately opposite this, and to the right of the reception desk, another door led to what I could easily guess lay beyond.
‘I take it you have the investigation room prepared,’ Priscus said easily, dropping his message on to the desk.
The official looked closely at the unrolled sheet and nodded. He got up and bowed to Priscus and to me, and motioned us towards the other door.
Some of the more imaginative – or perverted – divines have written about Hell as a series of levels, beginning with the moderately unpleasant and finishing with the indescribably awful. I suppose the long, dimly lit corridor that ran from that door under the whole length of the Prefecture would rank about halfway down the scale of horror. Imagine cells five feet square and barely that high, each one crammed with half a dozen naked wretches beside whom the lowest trash of the mob in the streets above was clean and well fed. Imagine the smell of putrid excrements and sores burst open and left to fester. Imagine those desperate faces pressed against the bars of their cell doors. Imagine the whispered, hopeless cries for justice or simply for mercy, and you have the smallest gears of the machinery with which such order as Alexandria normally enjoyed was maintained.
If Priscus had seemed to have grown physically larger from the joy to setting things to right in the dockyard, he now almost filled the passageway separating those two lines of dehumanised horror. I heard a continual whispering of prayers behind me from Martin. For myself, if I could have squeezed my eyes shut and stopped up my ears and nose, I’d have done so. I wanted to be through this as quickly as possible. I wanted to get back to the Palace and soak myself in a bath until the afternoon, and stupefy myself with opium and with wine. If no fragmentary recollection of this ever came back to haunt my dreams, I told myself, I’d die content. But Priscus walked ahead of me exactly as if he’d been inspecting some guard of honour. He stopped once – I could scarce believe it – and actually pushed his arm through one of those grilles to stroke the bowed head of one of the prisoners.
‘Like Christ Himself,’ he whispered exultantly, ‘we must bear whatever cross Our Heavenly Father makes for us. Let His Will be done!’
‘Let His Will be done,’ came the response in cracked unison from the few voices that still could be understood at all.
We stood at last in a room deeper beneath the Prefecture. If low enough for the ceiling to brush my topmost hair, it was otherwise too large for the one lamp set into a recess by the door to do more than throw vague shadows beyond its pool of light. I could hear the gurgling rush of the flood waters through the stone grilles in the floor. With the waters came a chill breeze that made the smell almost bearable by comparison with what had been so far.
‘Do you know why I’ve had you separated from your companions and brought here?’ Priscus opened in conversational tone. He sat himself carefully on a small table that shifted under his weight, and looked at the three tightly bound figures who lay on the floor about a yard from his crossed feet. They could move their heads for looking around. Otherwise, they could do no more than shuffle like serpents on that cold and damp and sick-
