‘I want these copied by morning,’ I said to the exhausted clerks. ‘I have business with the Lord Priscus all night. Bring them to us in the Viceroy’s office. We will both seal them there.’
They bowed low and left my office. I sat alone behind my desk.
‘The Empire can’t take effective possession of it,’ Priscus had told me earlier. ‘So what if it all now goes to the wogs? I’ve told you it won’t work in Egypt. But someone has to own the land.’ He’d shrugged at my further suggestion and gone back to scanning his lists.
The minimal scheme of redistribution I’d agreed with the two patriarchs had lapsed, no one could dispute, outside the Church of the Apostles. Priscus was right. I could now have something like the maximal scheme. It was simply a matter of racing through the various drafts I’d prepared with Martin, and making sure that the innocent interests were exempted. It was easy in principle. Doing it all by myself, and at breakneck speed, had been a dreadful job. Then there had been all the supplemental work that Priscus had taken on himself when he’d lifted the Great Seal but not had ability or inclination to discharge. The loss of the only trilingual secretary in Alexandria had only made things worse.
But it was all done. Priscus would have the warrants before breakfast. I had no reason not to trust his promise to seal them without delay, nor very much to doubt that he’d tell the clerks I had been taken ill in his company. I hadn’t asked him to promise much because he’d only deliver on what struck him at the time as in his interest to deliver. But on the warrants he would deliver.
‘I shall be grateful, Barnabas, if you could stay a moment,’ I said as the Head Clerk was about to close the doors. He came back and stood before my desk. Was that a little dart of his eyes to the cupboard where Martin had locked all those documents? So what if it was?
‘Barnabas,’ I said, looking closely into his face, ‘there are some letters in this bag that I want you – and only you – to deliver. I cannot stop you from opening them and reading their contents. I cannot stop you from frustrating my intentions. But I feel that you are a man who believes in obedience, where possible, to lawful authority, and otherwise to what is right.’
He looked back in silence. I didn’t insult him with offers of gold or of preferments. I’d known the man, in a very limited degree, four months. In all this time, we’d exchanged barely a word that wasn’t connected with some aspect of official business. But I had to trust someone in this place. Isaac might be good for many things. But I’d now exhausted every possible favour with him, and the contents of those letters might easily get whoever was caught carrying them a place all by himself on an impaling stake. I had to trust someone. Without that, this whole risky scheme – risky even with that someone beyond the verge of lunacy – would fall straight to the ground. This really was one of those times when you have to step into that barrel and push yourself into the current that leads over the waterfall.
‘My Lord’s devotion to the people of Egypt,’ Barnabas said softly, ‘has been appreciated in very few quarters. Be assured, however, that the Brotherhood speaks not for the whole of Egypt.’ He took up the bag and stuffed it into his satchel of writing materials. He left without looking back.
I took up the bag of clothes and other items I’d packed earlier and looked out of my office. The junior clerks were in their copying room. Barnabas was standing by the window, looking out over the still glowing embers of Alexandria. If he had heard the gentle click of the door catch, he didn’t turn to me. I quietly crossed the room and looked out into the corridor. As usual, the lamps burned low in the silence of a Palace that – the passing visit aside of some bad Emperor – hadn’t been a place of riotous pleasure since Antony and Cleopatra had killed themselves. In bare feet, I padded across the carpeted floors to the slave staircase located in a turning-off that led nowhere.
The entrance hall had a few eunuchs fluttering about on whatever duties they had that continued by night. I evaded their attention by keeping to the wall behind the rows of statues. From behind, the statues tended to look alike – all in the same triumphant style brought in by Alexander and taken up by every ruler since then influenced by Greece and its artistic traditions. The statue of Anastasius was a wretched thing; because he’d been regarded here and in Egypt as a fellow Monophysite, it deliberately owed something to the last gasp of the native tradition. After his came Justin, and then the Great Justinian, and then another Justin, and then Tiberius, and then Maurice. Phocas was still there, though the head was broken off. Squeezed in beside him, with barely a foot between it and the gate, was Heraclius. There could have been room for another. But Nicetas had ordered something in a full return to the ancient style.
There were guards outside the Palace gates. Now the rioting was over, though, they were back to huddling in a corner with dice and wine. I stood behind the statue of Heraclius and listened to their conversation.
‘Came back here more dead than alive,’ I heard one of the Slavonics say in Latin. ‘Sure enough, though, the bawd comes knocking with a whole bloody troupe of whores swathed in black. Signed them in, signed them out, I did. Me – I’d not be up to wanking in his position.’ He giggled and went back to shaking his dice.
There was a slow reply by one of the locals in Latin. He’d picked up something about my afternoon in the poor district, and didn’t like it.
‘Oh, shut the fuck up, dark eyes,’ came the dismissive reply. ‘You’ll be saying next it was Saint George’s big toe protected the Palace, not the swords in our own hands. As for numbers, you didn’t say nothing at the time. And what would it matter – one tart more or less?’
The exchange merged into an argument over the odds someone had failed to make clear. I dodged through the open gate, and then into a dark recess.
There was a moon very dim in the sky. It was enough – the street lighting was still not back in order – to show the outline of those thousands of still bodies in the square. It was just a few yards of open square. Then I was lost within their cover, and could change quickly into my going-out clothes. Now it was night, and there was no one even to think of asking for identification, the forest of dead held quiet multitudes of the living. They darted about with dimmed lanterns and stepladders, looking for someone they’d loved. There were bodies pulled off stakes and dumped by the side, so lower bodies could be lifted off and taken away for burial. There was a continuous whisper of argument between the living over identification of the dead, and of soft weeping by women and the old.
‘Have you seen my husband Nicodemus?’ some old woman asked.
I looked up from tying my bootlaces. I told her to come back in the daylight. She’d never find anyone by herself tonight, except by a miracle.
‘He didn’t come back from buying bread,’ she added. ‘I was told that men arrested him in the street and brought him here.’ She spoke now in the confused, wandering tone of those who are beginning to outlive their faculties.
I took her gently by the shoulder and led her to the far side of the square. I told her to go home and look to her family. It was hard to read anything for sure from the silence that followed.
‘Go home at once,’ I said again. ‘Take this with you and don’t linger on the streets. Come back here if you must in the morning. But go home now.’ I pressed one of my purses into her hand and hurried past. I tried to put her sense of total helplessness out of mind. On a night like this, it wasn’t hard.
Before we’d gone back inside the Palace earlier, Priscus had stood on the highest step and reached out his arms to the dead.
If I perceive some mischievous design
To sap the State, I will not hold my tongue, he’d intoned, quoting Creon from the Antigone of Sophocles. Then he’d filled his lungs, and to the accompaniment of flapping wings and that endless buzzing of the feasting flies, he’d continued:
But for the miscreant exile who returned
Minded in flames and ashes to blot out
His father’s city and his father’s gods,
And glut his vengeance with his kinsmen’s blood,
Or drag them captive at his chariot wheels For Polyneices ’tis ordained that none
Shall give him burial or make mourn for him,
But leave his corpse unburied, to be meat
For dogs and carrion crows, a ghastly sight.
So am I purposed; never by my will
Shall miscreants take precedence of true men,
