the three other principals in this endeavour. Once you have done so, you and Martin will be taken to Letopolis and sent in a postal boat safely back to Alexandria. Siroes, Lucas and I will swear later this day in public to keep our word. The Bishop of Letopolis will witness our swearing, and you must rely on his influence with virtually the entire Brotherhood and all the local population to ensure that we keep our word.
‘If you have not located the relic within fourteen days, you and Martin will be put to death. Be assured that I would give you longer than this. However, Siroes has been privately advised that the only auspicious time for locating the relic will soon pass. I cannot dispute his advice, and so must bow to his insistence.
‘There is one further point to these conditions. We are in a hurry, and wish to make it clear that seven days mark the reasonable limit of our patience. Today is nearly half gone, and so does not count. Tomorrow is a Sunday, and I have already been worsted in an argument over that. I will give you one day beyond that. Three days, I hope, will be sufficient for you to do your work. However, if you have uncovered nothing that I find interesting by noon on Tuesday, I will have Martin’s other ear sliced off. If you have uncovered nothing by the noon following, I will have the little finger of his left hand cut off. We shall then proceed by such stages as I think suitable until Friday, which is the twenty-seventh day of the month of Mechir that Lucas specified in his letter. At midnight, I shall have Martin blinded or perhaps castrated. Enough of him will survive the full time specified either to be sent back with you to Alexandria, or to be put to death with you in such manner as we shall find appropriate. Do you understand me?’
I nodded. Forget the fourteen days. We had three. Martin was taken back to wherever he was kept. I sat down to lunch with the other persons of quality. From where I sat between Lucas and someone who kept quietly farting, I could hear Priscus and Siroes toasting each other and refighting the Battle of Daras. They used cups and pieces of bread to show the various dispositions of forces. I ate in silence. I kept wondering if Martin hadn’t been right. I’d been so sure of myself in Alexandria. Even since giving myself to Lucas, things hadn’t gone so badly. I now realised I was fixed in a timetable over which I had no control and from which there was no obvious escape. Thanks to me, four people might now die instead of one. And what of Maximin? What if Isaac hadn’t been able to get him out of Alexandria? At best, he’d be brought up as a cross between Priscus and that bloody cat.
‘If you need anything not already provided,’ Lucas told me as we stood in the shade of the monument, ‘you will ask me. For the simple relaying of orders to the diggers, you will use my assistant. I believe you have already met. This being so, you can trust his skills as an interpreter.’ I’d already seen Macarius during lunch. Lucas had got up several times from his place to give instructions. Macarius had taken these with his usual impassive look and bowed. There was no element of surprise when he now stepped forward. I’d long since guessed he was serving more than one master. Still, I went through the motions of showing disgust.
‘Fucking wog traitor!’ I snarled.
Macarius bowed gravely and looked back as impassively as if I’d been complaining about the flies.
I now put myself to the matter in hand. The more detailed map Hermogenes had promised before the rioting had somehow arrived in my tent. I unrolled it and oriented it with the monument and the sun. The street plan was vague and perhaps even conjectural. Its indication of where the Jewish quarter had been was at best unreliable. Looking straight ahead was the big dune on the other side of which the Brotherhood tents were pitched. Under that may have been the reserve stock. Then again, from what Hermogenes had told me, the place had never been large, and was a building by itself. Digging for it would need, at the very least, to wait. The city centre was around the monument. The most reasonable place to start the digging was about five hundred yards north of the monument.
I paced out the distance. I didn’t look round, but I knew Macarius and one of the big armed men would be close behind me. I stopped and again unrolled the map. I looked back at the monument. This was a fairly level expanse of sand, and it may have been only a little higher than the sand around the monument. I waved around me and looked now straight at Macarius.
‘I want that lot uncovered,’ I said. ‘I want it uncovered as far down as it takes.’
‘How is it going?’ Priscus asked.
I looked up from the ruins of a cook shop. We were moving fast into the evening of the second day. I’d consented to release the whole workforce for a big Sunday service. I could have kept the diggers going in relays. I’d even been thinking how long I could keep them all going until they really did start dropping from exhaustion. I’d been getting increasingly funny looks as I made my rounds. Word had spread, it seemed, from the Brotherhood to the diggers. As hoped, this had kept everyone in awe of my word. But there is a limit to what even Egyptian muscle can achieve with a spade.
‘You will be happy to know that another delivery has just been made of pitch for night digging,’ Lucas added.
They stood together in the doorway of the building. I’d now had the whole area excavated down to pavement level, and had spent much of the afternoon having the interiors of the buildings cleared of sand.
‘So what have you found?’ Priscus asked again.
‘Soteropolis is turning out to be larger than expected,’ I replied. And so it was. Everything I’d seen about it in Alexandria indicated a smallish city. Now that I’d widened the area of excavation into the centre, I could see how large it had been. It didn’t help that digging below the level of the Greek city had turned up foundations of earlier buildings that may have been as massive as anything in Constantinople.
‘I’ve said you can’t have any more people,’ Lucas said hurriedly. ‘I’ve given you every able-bodied man in the area. You have nearly all the women and children to carry baskets of sand. I’m flooded with complaints about essential work to dykes that has been disrupted.’
‘Oh, is that what they’re all moaning about,’ Priscus said satirically. ‘I was beginning to think they were frightened of something.’
Lucas scowled and looked away. Priscus stepped in through the doorway and straightened up. He beckoned Lucas in behind him. We all stood for a moment looking at a tiled floor I’d recently had cleared of sand. I’d been hoping there might be a hatchway to a cellar.
‘My dear Lucas,’ he said, the beginnings of a stern look on his face. ‘We are for the moment partners in this venture, and I expect to be kept informed of all relevant circumstances. It isn’t because their dykes are crumbling that your wogs have been in and out of the shithouses all day, squirting and jabbering. They’re frightened of something. Now they’ve seen him shitting and being rubbed with oil for his sunburn, it isn’t young Alaric who’s the cause of their terror. They’re frightened of something else – and they’re frightened of whatever that thing is almost as much as they are of you. Any chance of telling me what it might be?’
Lucas scowled again and muttered something about tales told to children by the old.
Priscus snorted. ‘Then you’d better just make sure your wogs remain more frightened of you than they are of ghosts,’ he said flatly. ‘So far as I’m concerned, if Alaric asks for women and children to dig the sand, I suggest you find more shovels. In the meantime, I suggest you get that Bishop to lay on more services. He might also be persuaded to consider an exorcism.’ He turned back to me. ‘Now, Alaric, I’ll ask again – what have you found?’
The shortest and most truthful answer was nothing. This particular Soteropolis had been vacated with careful deliberation. It wasn’t like Richborough, where decline had been gradual, or other cities back in Kent that had been taken by storm and burned with the corpses of all the slain. There, you could dig down a few feet and find any number of treasures: bronze pens, lead cooking pots, even the occasional handful of unlooted cash. Soteropolis had been systematically stripped of everything that could be moved. Even roof tiles from the more expensive buildings had been carefully pulled off.
I’d worked several thousand men through the better part of two days and a night. We’d uncovered two acres of city, bleak and skeletal in its ruination. We’d turned up broken pottery. We’d turned up broken furniture. We’d turned up a few sets of bones – probably of sick, and therefore unwanted, slaves knocked on the head and left behind in the move. Much earlier in the present day, I’d smashed open a large crate, only to find it filled with packets of nails that may have been brought in from Smyrna. In general, we’d exposed enough of the street plan to suggest what I’d said about the size of the city. Beyond that, we’d found nothing.
‘I have a feeling that the collapsed wall over there’ – I pointed to the edge of the excavated area: it was a length of mud brick that vanished into a sloping cliff of sand – ‘is part of the synagogue. If you put some broken stones together, they may show Hebrew writing. If it is, we’ve found the Jewish quarter. Once I’m sure that is what we’ve found, I’ll have the courtyard gardens dug up as well. There will be objects there concealed or simply lost before the evacuation.’ What I didn’t say was that the Jewish quarter may have been close to the walls. Outside those, there would be graveyards and grave goods.
