‘Our mutual friend,’ he answered ‘- let us call him Lucas: it is less of a mouthful than the other name he has tried to teach me – is a man of just the qualities we need in a ruler of Egypt. However, let us discuss your own interesting position. When I spoke last night about your death, I think we should take that as a statement of possibility rather than of intention.
‘We are expecting to bring an end to the war between our two empires some time in the next six months. It will be an unconditional surrender on the Greek side. I am already considering how what remains of the Greek Empire is to be ruled. I could speak at great length of nothing very important. But I will avoid doing so and simply ask if you would like to be the next emperor? You would, I must clearly state, be an emperor under our complete protection. We would even station forces in Constantinople to ensure the safety of your reign.’
‘Once more, your goodness of heart astonishes me,’ I said with a little nod. ‘But let us leave aside the question of how someone like me could rule the Empire except as a Persian satrap. What interests me more is how you can be so certain the war will soon end. Granted, it’s been going on for the past ten years, and hasn’t gone our way. But you’ve not yet made a breakthrough. Cappadocia was hardly a catastrophic loss. And we are aware in Constantinople of the strain the war has put on your own resources. What makes you suppose we are anywhere close to suing for peace – let alone on the terms you mention?’
Siroes smiled and turned his attention to the camel. I thought he’d be diplomatic about this. Not so. He looked back at me, his smile now become a broad grin.
‘My dear young Alaric,’ he said, ‘how right you are when you say that whoever controls Egypt is in a position to control the world. If only we had known properly a thousand years ago what we think we know today, Alexander would never have taken Egypt from us. Nor would he have conquered us. Our archives earlier than some four hundred years ago are fragmentary. Indeed, we must often rely on Greek sources for our history before then. But some records have survived. The Great King is advised that Egypt contains a prize that brings control of the whole world. I am here to ensure that he gets it.’
‘You know about this prize from records that predate the conquests of Alexander?’ I asked.
Siroes nodded.
‘Yet Alexander died some three hundred and twenty years before the birth of Christ.’
‘I fail to see what the Jewish Carpenter has to do with this,’ he said, giving me a funny look.
‘And what does the Great Pharaoh up ahead think of this prize?’ I asked after a moment’s thinking. ‘If he knows about it what you claim to know, why should he be so willing to hand it over to the Great King?’
‘I think this conversation has continued long enough,’ Siroes said with a grave nod. ‘We shall speak again when the time is right.’ He eased his camel out of the procession and stopped while the sweating, almost naked carriers took my chair past him.
We continued on our slow but steady way. The sun rose higher in the sky and I began to swelter in my chair. I could see the trail of camels in front of me and hear them behind me. I could hear the tramp of feet following. My carriers grew sweatier and were taking regular drinks from bottles strapped to their waists. How, in that heat, they didn’t die from exertion might have been worth asking if I hadn’t already known the limitless capacity of their sort to do as they were told and only die later on. They staggered a few times, but never let up their pace. Once or twice a young man pulled up beside me on his camel and made elaborate gestures that always ended with the sign of the Cross. As often as he began some whining chant, I’d bare my teeth and claw at him like a cat. That would get rid of him for a while. If the natives chose to think I was some kind of monster, that might have its uses.
At last, Lucas came beside me and tried for a conversation. He’d put away his regal finery for a huge black robe that must have been still hotter for him than the chair was for me. Since I had nothing I wanted to say to him, I pretended to doze off. And that, after a long swig of the local finest, plus another mile of swaying about in the heat, is what I eventually did. Whatever was coming next, a good rest would do me no harm at all.
Chapter 56
I’ve only seen the Pyramids twice. My first view of them, I’ll assure you, was from exactly the right direction at exactly the right time of day. It was coming on for late afternoon, and the shadows cast by every jagged rock and every pile of sand were lengthening around me. We were coming out of the desert from the north-west. They must have been about five miles off when I drifted awake, and I didn’t notice them at first. I was thirsty and my wrists were hurting. Looking ahead, I seemed only to see more of the endless heat haze that obscured the horizon.
Then I saw them: three vast and regular mountains that shone a dazzling white as they caught the rays of the sun. I didn’t know where Siroes had gone. But no one around me paid the slightest attention. They’d seen it all so often, they hardly noticed how wonderful it was. My carriers didn’t once look up as they trudged ever onwards. Of course, Lucas had to be different. He bounced up again beside me, pointing and jabbering about his ‘ten thousand years’. I did think of starting another argument over his beloved Egypt, this time sneering at his idea of its antiquity. But I grunted at him and pretended to be still half asleep.
In truth, I was privately willing those carriers to go faster. I badly wanted to get as close alongside the Pyramids as I could before night fell. They were a wonderful sight. Nothing I’d read in Herodotus or Strabo or the other historians had prepared me for how they actually were. According to Herodotus, the biggest of the three took a hundred thousand workers twenty-six years to complete, and its function was to serve as the tomb for some megalomaniacal king. Manetho gives a different account, more flattering to its builder. But no one disagrees on its size. It is seven hundred and fifty feet long on each of its four sides, and around five hundred high. It is a huge structure. You could pack the Great Church inside it several times over, and still have room for some of the other sights of Constantinople. The two pyramids beside this one are also very big, but are dwarfed in comparison.
We came at last to the flat expanse of rock on which the Pyramids are built. In or out of flood, this is far above the level of the Nile, and there are still miles to go before the edge of the black land is reached. Even so, the plateau is crowded with buildings. At this time of year, it was naturally the home of those displaced by the floods. But there is a dense network there of ruined and semi-ruined temple buildings. And there may be dozens of monasteries dotted about, these obviously in continuous occupation.
There had been some kind of market all day when we arrived at a small town. But I paid no attention to the mud-brick buildings and the brown, shouting lower orders of Egypt. I’d long since given up concealing my interest in the Pyramids. The Great Pyramid must still have been a good mile distant. But it loomed over everything. The light around us was fading fast away, but the Pyramid still shone white as if it had been a mountain of snow. I believe the inner part is of granite blocks arranged round a core of rock. But the exterior of each of the pyramids is one smoothness of white limestone.
‘So, Alaric,’ Lucas said as he came yet again beside me, ‘are you willing to agree now that the Greeks have nothing to set beside this?’
‘Get enough men together,’ I sniffed, ‘and work them long enough, with just the right touch of the whip when they get uppity, and I’ve no doubt anyone could put up this sort of thing. The question is who else would have thought it worth the effort?
‘Any chance of another drink?’ I asked, cutting short my paraphrase of Herodotus. The wine flask he’d reluctantly handed over was long since empty, and my tongue was getting ready to stick to the roof of my mouth. I pretended not to notice the flies, which, with the fading light, had begun buzzing about in predatory manner.
Lucas got off his camel and began walking beside me. I was in no mood for a laugh, but the long account he began of the Pyramids as a love gift from the people of Egypt to their kings was absurd both in itself and in its earnest narrating. In its own way, it was more absurd than any miracle of the Church. Those usually involve a deviation from the normal course of things as a result of God’s commanding. This farrago didn’t so much deviate from as suspend the normal course of things. But I did get a full cup of water pushed at me. It was now evening, and we were approaching the centre of this town that huddled so inconsequentially at the foot of the Great Pyramid.
We stopped in a central square that served during the day as a market. I stumbled from the chair and stretched my arms and legs. I looked round. It was rather like Letopolis, but without the appearance of better days past. It might have been far older as a settlement. It might have dated back to the building of the Pyramids. But the jumble of narrow streets that led off from the square in which we’d come to rest looked about as tempting as turd pie.
