‘She needs no passport,’ the guard repeated to one of his juniors. He spoke in a strange tone.
I heard the creak of the wooden bar placed across the gate to stop all but pedestrians. It lifted and guards stood back, dreamy looks clouding their faces. Soon, the maidservants were clipping along the road at a surprising speed, bearing in mind their double burden. The smell of death still followed us on the breeze from the sea. But the cracking of whips over the slaves of the digging parties and the disorganised shouting of the overseers and guards was fading quickly away. The Mistress had hung her bells along the chair again, and their merry jingle was soon the only sound I could easily hear.
‘How did you do that?’ I asked. I knew I shouldn’t have asked, but it was one of those questions that pops out from pure astonishment. I’d pulled off my covering. Now, the curtains were open wide, and I was glad of the cooling breeze to take the sweat off my face.
The Mistress arranged her clothes to keep them from fluttering too much in the breeze. She reached under the seat and took out a small book. ‘Yours is the empire of the sword and the tax gatherer,’ she explained. ‘My empire is of the imagination.’ She fell silent and began reading from what looked like a tale of dazzling stupidity.
I wanted to ask how we were expected to make any time at all in this chair. It made sense that taking the road to Canopus, or going directly by barge along the canal, would have invited Brotherhood spies. But a chair, carried by women, along even a good road would take us days and days to get anywhere close to where we needed to be. This time, though, I didn’t ask. I’d agreed not to plague the Mistress with questions over her methods, and it was too soon to start bending the agreement.
It goes without saying that I would bend it. Martin and Nicetas and Priscus – indeed, everyone I knew – would have accepted the Mistress as a sorceress. Even if they had sought her help, they’d never have dared to question, considering how she achieved her effects. But I’d told her the truth the previous night. I didn’t think there was anything in the least supernatural about her. There comes a time when the accumulation of evidence is such that you have to change some opinions. The odd message given to me in the Egyptian quarter I’d firmly dismissed as nothing at all. Coming then upon the Mistress ‘between the dead palms and the monument to human folly’, I’d also dismissed as coincidence. But if the pursuit of knowledge requires a certain blinkering, wilful blindness is another matter.
No – things had been happening during the past twenty-five days that couldn’t be explained in everyday terms. But I had no doubt that they could be explained. And if I’d not made it obvious what I was about, I’d have my explanatory hypotheses formed and tested long before I saw the walls of Alexandria again.
Alexandria lies on the far western tip of the Nile Delta, and the floods had turned the land either side of the road to marsh. We were on higher ground than further into the Delta, and the land wouldn’t disappear. And I knew from my survey maps that the road going due south was embanked. It would be passable at all times of the year, even if the floods were catastrophic. The Mistress, though, had other ideas. We weren’t going south. Instead, we were taking the western road into the desert. This began about five miles further along. At our present speed, we might be there come nightfall. I say ‘at our present speed’. But if those women didn’t seem particularly tired yet as they carried us briskly along the paved road, I didn’t see how they could keep this speed up once the sun rose higher in the sky.
I looked right over the dreary expanse of marsh to the sea that shone in the distance. Large birds of various kinds flew overhead, or burrowed into the clumps of reeds that rose out of the mud. Every so often, I heard the splash of something in the larger puddles. The road itself was absolutely empty. It was entirely a military road, and all our mobile forces had been sucked into Alexandria. There was no cause for any but the occasional group of pilgrims to use it otherwise.
‘What does this word mean?’ the Mistress asked suddenly.
I looked away from the increasingly distant line of the sea and pulled my thoughts into order. I focused on the narrow column of text in the place where her finger pointed.
‘That’s a corruption of the Latin word hospitium,’ I said. ‘It is used by the more careless modern writers to mean a house.’ She sniffed – and well she might. From what I saw of the surrounding text, the whole style was atrocious. ‘I suppose you are familiar with Latin?’ I added, trying to keep too much of a questioning tone from my voice.
‘Even where not of collapse,’ she replied, ‘most ages are times of decadence and stagnation. I did wonder, even so, if the Greeks had avoided the common lot of humanity.’
There was no answer to that. I reached between my feet and pulled up a flask of wine. No point offering any to the Mistress. I tried, nevertheless, not to drink it all.
The sun was growing hotter. There was nothing to see and nothing to do. The Mistress continued reading with evident – and, in my view, embarrassing – enjoyment. The bells that jingled with every swaying of the chair seemed to sound louder and louder in the surrounding silence. I leaned back and pulled my hat over my eyes. I drifted off into a world of luxurious warmth.
The sun told me it was around noon when the Mistress prodded me awake.
‘Come along, Alaric,’ she said. ‘It’s time for you to make a contribution to the journey.’
I blinked in the brightness and looked ahead. We were approaching the first post station outside Alexandria. It was of standard design: two storeys of mud brick around a central courtyard. With only slits for windows – and these on the upper floor – the outer wall doubled as fortification. We must have been seen from a long way out. By the time we were approaching the station, the bar had been lowered across the road, and a single guard was lounging wearily in the shade.
‘You can show your passport here,’ the Mistress said. ‘This far out of Alexandria, I don’t think we need worry about leaving some footprint in the records.’
I looked at her. While I was asleep, she’d changed out of the elegant dress in which she’d started the journey. Now, she was dressed in the black riding clothes of the desert nomads. With a scarf wound about her head, it was hard to tell that she was a woman.
‘You can change once our business is complete,’ she said. ‘If these people have camels to give us, so much the better. If not, we’ll settle for their best horses.’
I took out the passport I’d prepared for myself back in the Palace. I’d done my best to copy out not just the words of the sample I’d found in Martin’s files, but also the smooth penmanship. It still appeared rather crude. Then again, it carried the Lesser Seal. That would have covered up many worse defects in its form.
Lips moving, the guard squinted over the passport. He handed it back with a stiff salute, and then a bow. He went back inside, and came out with his commanding officer. They’d both made an effort to brush themselves down, and we were ushered straight through the gate into the colourless, dusty courtyard.
After wine and dates and a brief account from me of the rioting, we were led back out from the coolest room in the building for an inspection of the stables. The pair of camels on the far side of the block seemed decidedly inferior to the horses. They were big, surly-looking creatures. They were mangy. Their smell brought back unpleasant memories of my last ride through the desert. But the Mistress pointed straight at them, ignoring the horses, and watched closely as they were saddled and provided with the usuals.
‘Would His Magnificence care to state destination and reason for his journey?’ the senior officer asked with another bow. He sat back down at his desk and scratched with his reed pen on a blank page in his ledger. Nothing came out. He squeezed the spongy length of the pen and scratched again. He muttered an apology and looked at the congealing mass at the bottom of his ink well.
‘There is no need for any record to be kept,’ the Mistress said. She stretched nonchalantly back in her chair. Except for the two slight bumps on her chest, she might have been a younger male companion of the Lord Senator.
‘There is no need for any record,’ the man repeated in the low pitch of one who talks in his sleep. He dropped his pen on the desk, and went right back to commenting on the account I’d long since finished of the rioting.
Back out on the road, the Mistress looked at me in my own nomad clothes.
‘With your height, you’d never pass,’ she said. ‘Still, the clothes aren’t so much for disguise as for convenience.’
‘What about the chair?’ I asked. If those women had been fed and watered, it must have been while I was asleep. Though in the shade, they’d stood quietly by the chair the whole time we were inside the station.
‘They go back to Alexandria,’ she said. ‘How they get back in is of no importance to you. They will come out again as and when I see fit to summon them.’ She continued loading her things into the saddlebag. She dithered
