they formed into a hollow square within which the chairs now huddled, and we were off.
Though the heat was headed again towards the sweltering, Martin insisted on keeping the curtains pulled. With those plumed helmets all around at eye height, there wouldn’t have been much to see in any event. But, from the steady crunch of their boots on broken glass, and muttering of the slaves as they skirted the larger debris of the night’s rioting, I had the impression of moderate to considerable damage. All around was the smell of stale wood smoke. From beyond the steel square that encased us, I could hear the continual but low murmuring of the crowd. It was a resentful, short-tempered sound, coming from throats that must have been numbered in the tens of thousands. But it was only a crowd, I kept telling Martin and myself. It wasn’t yet worth calling a mob.
In the chair beside us was one of the Council members who dealt with finance. He was complaining – I think to his secretary – that the Patriarch wasn’t with us.
‘Where is John?’ he asked peevishly over and again. ‘With His Holiness among us, we’d be in no danger at all. Where is John?’
‘Isn’t the crowd coming with us?’ Martin asked nervously. ‘If there’s to be a native delegation allowed on to our side of the Wall, what’s to keep everyone apart?’
‘I imagine that has already been considered,’ I said. There was no point even trying to sound reassuring. Martin was right. Even if it wasn’t moving with us, the crowd was immense enough to stretch far in the streets beyond the Palace square. We must have covered half a mile, and still that murmur wasn’t letting up.
‘Make way for His Imperial Highness the Viceroy!’ the herald continued crying. And it wasn’t just for show. Once or twice, our chair wobbled as the guard was unable to push its way through at uniform speed, and the carrying slaves had to vary our own speed. My hand trembled as I squeezed quietly on my sword. I had a knife in my belt. Neither would be of much use if our outer steel casing were breached. But if not so much as the cruciform relic box Martin was clutching and unclutching, it gave a little comfort.
Chapter 41
One of the larger churches in Alexandria, the Church of the Apostles was in the early style of ecclesiastical building. With not a dome in sight, nor any elaborate patterning of brickwork, it had the plain look of a courthouse. There was a wide flight of steps leading up to an unadorned portico. A large door, plated with bronze, led into the church. The only variation from its overall plainness was two large bronze torch brackets set equidistant between the door and each end of the portico. They were so incongruous, it would have taken a want of taste not visible in any other feature of his design for the original architect to have put them there. More likely, they’d been transferred at some time following the closure and demolition of the temples. I’d seen the church often enough from the outside, though had never thought it worth the effort of looking inside.
I hadn’t missed anything, I realised as I got out of the chair and looked around. We’d all been carried inside the church and set down before the altar. There was the usual jumble of paintings on the wall, and the usual memorial plaques. There was the usual smell of incense, and the usual smell of unwashed bodies that lingers in these places even when the active cause is absent. And there was the usual morose, bearded priest. I grunted and turned back to the chair to help untangle Martin from the curtains.
‘This is a most auspicious choice of His Highness,’ Martin said in his first normal tone of voice since we’d left the Palace. He stepped forward and fell heavily into my arms. With the extra weight of his armour, he almost had the pair of us on the floor. But I recovered my balance. Martin waved at the priest, who was beginning to look alarmed at the number and quality of the persons invading his church.
‘Do you realise,’ Martin asked, ‘that this building contains the chastity belt with which Saint Eulalia held off the forty thousand soldiers commanded to take her virginity?’
‘My compliments to the locksmith,’ I said. But I dropped the matter. This wasn’t the time or the place for entertainment. Directed by one of the eunuchs we’d brought along, the slaves were getting everything as ready for the audience as it could be made at this notice. This was a matter of getting the paint touched up on our faces and our clothes rearranged. We’d managed to pack only one chair, and this would be for Nicetas. After endless fussing arguments between the eunuch and the slaves, it was placed on the far right of the portico outside. Once he was lifted on to it, Nicetas would be looking down the side flight of steps. This, I gathered, would be convenient, if not so completely dignified in its effect as the eunuch had at first wanted.
‘Any trouble,’ I whispered to Martin as I let myself be arranged in my place behind Nicetas, a foot or so to the left, ‘not, of course, that there will be any, and I want you in the topmost gallery. If the doors swing shut, you don’t argue for them to be opened. Those are my instructions as Imperial Legate,’ I added. Despite this, Martin would have answered. But Priscus was now standing beside me, and was drifting in a snarling row with the eunuch, who wanted him to twist slightly on his hips and lean in my direction. By swivelling my eyes right from where I’d been placed, I could just see the church door. Once Martin was back inside, I gave up on the strain and looked forward again.
Once we were all in position, the makeshift curtains were pulled aside and I stood blinking in the sun. I looked around as well as could be done without moving my head. The church had sat originally on the central island of a vast circular junction. Then the Wall had been built to keep Greeks and Egyptians apart, and the junction was now more or less bisected. The back side of the church formed part of the Wall. The front of the church looked over what was now the semicircular confluence of three wide streets that led back to the absolute centre of Alexandria. Still impressive, if dilapidated, the buildings that stared back at the church had once been palaces of the commercial aristocracy. Most of them, I think, were now monasteries.
I could see most of this if I turned my eyes sharp left. In front of me and to my right, the Wall stretched high and blank. Looming over it from the other side was the weather-beaten facade of what had once been the Baths of Hadrian. What else, if anything, was still there I couldn’t see.
The police and the guards had cleared the hundred yards in front of the church. Beyond that, though, it was an unbroken sea of faces that filled the semicircle and stretched as far back along the three streets as I could strain to see. They were all the usual urban trash. I was too far away and standing at the wrong angle to see the directors this time, but had no doubt they were lurking somewhere in that mass of gawping, unwashed humanity.
With a few grunts and hisses of pain, the Viceroy shifted ever so slightly on his chair. Otherwise, it was the statue act again for us all. Our clothes fluttered freely in the breeze. Our bodies were locked into poses of careless elegance.
There was a shouted command over on our right, and the gate to the Egyptian quarter opened a couple of feet. The police officers squeezed wedges under the gate, and stood ready to push it shut again. The herald went forward and called out in a stiffly ceremonious Egyptian. His words seemed to stick in his throat, and he stood a moment looking through the partly opened gate. Then, with a scared look in our direction, he was moving quickly back to stand on the church steps a few feet below Nicetas.
I’d not been able to speak with him. But the impression Nicetas had given me in his message was that he’d arranged a conference with the leaders of the Egyptian mob. These would be allowed through to state their case and then make their submission. Otherwise, the Egyptians would be kept to their own side of the Wall. If that was what had been arranged, it wasn’t going to plan.
Even as the herald took his place, the first Egyptians began pouring through the gate. They came at first in their dozens. For all they pushed to cut off the flow of bodies, the police officers might as well not have been there. The wedges scraped on the hard granite of the pavements and gave way. The gate now swung fully open, and – the police scattering with a sudden panic – the pouring of dozens became a flood of hundreds and then of thousands. The slight difference of their smell aside, they were mostly the same refuse as on our side of the Wall. Perhaps a quarter of them, though, had the smaller – often much darker – appearance of recent arrivals from the south. Between them and the Greeks, the guards formed a thin but, I hoped, an impenetrable line. Between us and the Egyptians, who’d flowed forward right to the foot of the steps up to the portico, there wasn’t so much as a eunuch with a cane. Keeping still, we looked uneasily back at those hungry, desperate faces.
‘Ask for their spokesmen to come forward,’ Nicetas said without moving his lips.
The herald climbed on to a lectern that had been brought out of the church. He was perhaps two yards away from Nicetas, and stood a yard higher. He gripped hard on the rail of the lectern to steady his hands.
