The Water Thief

by Ben Pastor

  Aelius was still too surprised (I’ll never be able to get the document now, he was thinking, and even if it’s still here, stuck somewhere inside the belly of tins mummy, it’s out of reach) to comment on the slight political dig. He spent the following hour in gloomy silence, taking minute notes about the corpse and its coffin, and after prescribed ceremonies of purification and offering, cleansing and sprinkling of incense around the altars, eventually left the temple. His men went to billet at the command post, and he back to his flat, where he wrote and pondered into the night.

  F I F T H C H A P T E R

  4 Epiphi (29 June, Thursday)

  Despite the brush in his hand, Baruch ben Matthias held a finger to the side of his long nose, as if to signify he was on the right scent.

  “I’m not going to ask you why you want to know, although—left to my own devices—I’m pretty sure I’ll figure it out.” He’d just begun the full-length portrait on linen of a sour-faced woman, whom Aelius had met on the threshold as she left her sitting with the painter.

  Mixing colors from various pots, the Jew returned his attention to the easel, on which a starchy shroud was pinned. The cloth still showed little more than a gray background with a sketched face and basic lines, and the air in the shop hung thick with the smell of resin and the sappy odor of melted beeswax. Baruch had smeared his nose with red, and now wiped it clean. “If your description of the mummy is accurate—”

  “It is.”

  “If it is accurate, you were not looking at a mummy of the Butcher’s days.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Later, then?”

  “No. Earlier than Hadrian, by about fifty years. Style of painting, hair treatment, the way you described tablet and casing, its shape—I want to say, give and take five years, that the mummy you saw was made during the reign of that other butcher emperor.”

  Aelius understood the reference to the first destruction of Jerusalem. “Titus?”

  “That’s right.” Ben Matthias quickly stirred the pigments in his pots, applying bold strokes to the cloth. “And I suggest that the mummy was not a local product, either. Maybe Arsinoe, where they leave their tablets square. You ought to know, if you don’t, that moving dead bodies isn’t anything new in this country.” He glanced over his shoulder, like a ram checking if the herd was behind him. “The long cliff not far from the city—yes, the Antinoite ledge, as they call it—used to be filled with burials when I first came, rifled all of them centuries ago, but some still containing their mummies, stripped of all valuables. The tombs were actually old quarry holes, so when the metropolis decided to exploit them again, they hauled the bodies out and buried them in modern coffins, outside the east gate. Why do you look so elated, Commander?”

  Aelius would not say. Theo might have been right after all. Commodus had found nothing in the Boy’s coffin, perhaps because the deified Hadrian had already emptied it upon returning to Rome. However the news had been kept from spreading, the temple priests had quickly taken the opportunity to place an extraneous mummy in the coffin, just in case other powerful visitors tried to view the body. Cult ceremonies and revenues went on as if the body were Antinous’s. But now traveling to Italy became a distinct and urgent possibility, which renewed Aelius’s hopes of discovering the truth.

  “I thank you for the information, Baruch.”

  “Costs me nothing.”

  He left ben Matthias’s shop with a mind to take a ride in the country before the wind picked up enough to generate a sandstorm. Fine silt, like ground glass, was already blowing down from the ledge outside the east gate. Here Aelius stopped to lift the neck kerchief to his face under the triumphal arch of Carus and his two sons. Emperors before Diocletian, those warring upstarts had all been killed years ago. Their commemorative inscription still carried the chisel marks of Aelius’s troopers, commanded during the Rebellion to erase the three hateful names: never mind that from that intrigue of ambition and fratricide, His Divinity had paradoxically risen as avenger of Carus’s youngest son and as new ruler.

  The horse track down the road, set at an angle from the city wall, ran in a precise east-west direction, and funerary monuments lined the verge between here and there. Some of them predated the colony and bore no name, or the name was written in incomprehensible pictographs. He’d twice ridden this way lately, when Christians had been executed, army men who’d without complaint gotten their heads lopped off in the usual place. A fortified cistern of the type they called hydreuma, hastily put up during the Rebellion by Achilleus’s troops (by ben Matthias, for all he knew), had been since left to silt up. It was behind that very wall that the army executed its Christians.

  Beyond the horse track, an elongated, natural butte seemed the convex version of the concave stadium. At less than half a mile of distance, like the ledge above it, it had at this hour the brightness of a copper mirror. It was hard to believe that this was the same rock and the same Antinoite ledge that in the morning was bluer than the sky past it and simmered red in the afternoon.

  He headed for the old hillside graves and quarry holes, so between the rounded end of the horse track and the butte, he left the road and took a sharp right in the bare and shadeless expanse, to seek a climb manageable on horseback. At the foot of the butte he encountered a small, timeworn shrine to Hathor, and through the cloth of his kerchief, by habit, he touched his lips out of respect. Inside her niche, the statue of the goddess stood as if to greet him back. Her curving brow, narrow chin, wide temples, mild, sweet expression, and heifer ears made her into a divine hybrid of farm animal and goddess that reminded him of Anubina’s face. He planned to go to see her at the store before leaving Egypt, and to that end he’d bought a doll for her daughter and would bring sweets to the boy. Should her husband be around, well, he’d meet him too, fortunate chump that he was.

  There had never been a direct, paved way from Antinoopolis to the quarries, and Aelius’s best bet was to follow the bone-dry, pebble-strewn bed of a seasonal torrent, rising moderately at first and then curving at a sharper northbound angle to the rim of the ledge. Minor branches of the torrent spread like fingers of a hand stretching to reach the eastern wall of the metropolis. Scorpions darted from under rocks as the horse clattered up the incline, and the ledge that appeared low and scalloped from the city seemed to grow in height and steepness as he drew close to it.

  The entrance to the principal quarry was not at all like the regular, squared ones he’d seen north of Aspalatum, from which His Divinity’s palace was being fashioned. It really resembled the jagged mouth of a large grotto, and the moment he stepped into it the wind died down in his ears, with a hollow effect of utter silence. Powdery silt followed him in, and settled as well. A few steps ahead, errant rocks and abandoned rubble on the floor revealed that the quarries were once more vacant. In older days, if one could trust the sources, travelers had to be careful about lions and such taking refuge in caves. Now there was scarcely need to smell the air before going in to make sure it was not a den. Lions were so rare, he’d seen signs posted in the city advertising premium pay for a single pride to sell to the circus.

  As Aelius stepped farther in, he met darkness broken by an occasional light shaft cut into the quarry ceiling, to which on the floor corresponded a cone of pebbles and sand fallen from above during sandstorms. Marks made by mattock and pickax pocked the walls like fish scales. There was also dressed stonework where ancient graves had been carved out of these spaces midway through the life of the quarry, and then gutted to extract stone again, perhaps in the days of the deified Hadrian and the building of Antinous’s memorial city. The murkiness that at first had veiled his eyesight after abandoning the outside cleared enough for him to distinguish shapes and, objects all around.

  On the ground, at the end of the corridor of dressed stone, he saw what seemed to be timber piled out of the way. Close up, the heap revealed itself to be cut, planed, and painted boards and planks most of them shattered and broke
n through. Aelius lifted one carefully and used it to prod through the others, causing a race of spiders and jellylike scorpions to surge in all directions. Astonished painted faces, the gilding of wreaths and lips removed long ago, looked back at him from the dust and decay of the pile as he exposed mummy tablets not unlike the one found in the Boy’s coffin. Going deeper into the rubble-strewn corridor might reveal more such remains, but he had no interest in visiting rifled tombs. Still, he spent some time exploring other openings. In some he found human excrements, broken pots, the signs of at least temporary habitation. Afterward, standing at the mouth of one of the quarries, he was afforded a sweeping view of the country below him. Hawks caught the ascending currents of warm, dusty air and balanced themselves on the wing against the green fringe along the bank, the Nile, its islands, and Hermopolis across the water.

  From up here, one could see how the level of the river had risen, and already the lower-lying areas to the south had been flooded, so that seasonal huts of unfired bricks crumbled into mud again and washed like every other detritus to the Delta. Farmhouses farthest to the south were reduced to a small space around the knolls on which they were built, fields were completely underwater, palm groves looked shortened as the lower parts of the trunks were submerged; water, fowl—resembling swarms of gnats from the hazy distance—flocked to swim in newly formed ponds. Soon farmers would get around in boats and dinghies, and one would travel by water; mosquitoes, other insects, frogs would follow, and for the long time of the retreating flood everything would smell like mud and rotten stalks, but grass would sprout up with flowers everywhere. It seemed to him that this yearly expectation shaped the people here, making them both secure and fatalistic, believers in the quirky eternity of seasons, cycles, and stars. He had none of that fatalism and security, relying on himself and what he knew. Trusting less in traditional and remote gods than in philosophical virtues taught to him by good teachers, chosen by his father’s ambition for him.

  But there existed an eternity of sorts, and out of that timelessness into which all who died tumbled forever, he was trying to learn what had happened to Antinous at the now half-sunk Benu grove, or to Serenus Dio and his freedman.

  Overnight, accompanied by a sandstorm, the flood broke through the narrows of the First Cataract, three weeks ahead of schedule. Though it would take another week for the full rage of the water to travel four hundred miles and wash over the banks here, its color was suddenly reddish brown and the level menacingly high. Rats swarmed up from the lower-lying areas and basements, fleeing the seepage that would eventually drown them by the thousands, Across the Nile, the river harbor of Hermopolis and the whole left bank, lower and less hilly, must already be under a foot of water.

  Despite the blowing sand, in Antinoopolis the temples opened early, and there was concourse of the faithful everywhere. By noon, however, the storm was fierce, and the streets depopulated, the shops closed.

  Aelius came back from the city library just in time to avoid the worst of it. He’d found out at the mall when the first ship leaving for Italy would take sail from Alexandria, and made his plans accordingly. For the rest of the day, there was nothing to do but stay out of the weather. Sand managed to enter the smallest chink of doors and windows, and reading in a small inner room afforded the only respite from the confusion. Night took forever to come, and in the dark the wind kept on, to abate only shortly before dawn, as if gates had closed against it in the south, and only the flood were allowed to continue.

  Joke ascribed to the deified Hadrian, also known by the title

  “Even the Powerful Are at Times Mistaken”

  As everyone knows, my father, the deified Trajan, was in the habit of visiting the poor in the City, distributing largesses and consoling them in their plight. One morning, as he walked the streets of the crowded Transtiberim district, accompanied by officers of his revenue who often turned up their noses at the misery encountered, he happened onto a particularly neglected family.

  Huddled in their smoky quarters, mother, father, and a brace of children looked the picture of poverty. Under their breath, the deified Trajan’s officers laughed at their rags, and remarked on the utter ugliness of the youngest child, whom they called “misshapen abortion” and “gruesome tyke.” Meanwhile, the excellent prince handed bread to the mother, placed a handful of coins into the father’s trembling hand, and patted the older children’s heads. Busy in his generosity, he had heard none of the cruel remarks by his retinue. Finally, having come to the corner where the youngest sat, he snapped his fingers to the slave bearing food, and loudly said, “Quick, boy, let us leave no one without: Hand me walnuts for the monkey!”

  6 Epiphi (1 July, Kalends, Saturday)

  When, half packed already, on the third hour of Saturday Aelius went to deposit letters for friends and family at the command post, Tralles saw him through the door of his office. He came to meet him in the hallway, where orderlies swept sand and dust from the floor. “Wasn’t it one of those storms?” he said by way of a greeting. “I managed to get sand even inside my pants!” Because Aelius kept aloof he said, “You’ll be curious to know what happened to our old friend with the shitty name,” he added. “Kopros the cobbler, you know. He finally managed to get himself arrested for setting the house of a tax agent on fire and raved like a lunatic about religion enough to be hauled before the judge as a Christian.”

  “I should have hit him harder in the marketplace. Well, what did the judge decide?”

  “Found him guilty on the counts of arson and superstition, and condemned him to death.”

  Aelius resumed walking, bound for the rooms where his bodyguard quartered. “I wouldn’t have given him the satisfaction. Now they’ll make a martyr out of him though he was the one who turned others in.”

  “That’s where the judge thinks the way you do, Aelius. He commuted capital punishment to hard labor in His Divinity’s new baths in Rome.”

  They hadn’t spoken to each other since the day Tralles had refused to support him, and Aelius had to make an effort to be polite. Cutting the conversation short, he left his colleague for the sandstrewn inner court, where the noncommissioned officer heading his escort awaited. He gave the man orders to precede him with the bulk of the troop to the Delta, carrying luggage, the books, and leaving behind a nominal force of three cavalrymen to accompany him.

  For the balance of the morning, having decided to retain lease of his flat through the summer, he raided the bookstalls once more, and solicited copies of documents he could not acquire or borrow from the shrine library at Hermopolis. To Thermuthis, according to an agreed-upon code, he sent word to “keep the advance,” by which he meant the saddlebag, “until I come back and can settle the account.” A quick lunch was grabbed at the mall. Afterward, a constitutional alongside the river, where he and Theo had fed the ducks, showed him how moorings, piers, even the hexagonal basin for the duckpond, lay under a turbid veil of water. Birds pecked at a dead rat, and in the air hovered an indefinable smell of wetness, decay, and green leaves torn and mashed. Across the racing current, slapping and frothing around the piers of the bridge over the partly submerged islands, Hermopolis took in the sun and—as expected—was already flooded to the foot of the harbor wall.

  At his quarters, Aelius found a long-winded invitation from epistrategos Rabirius Saxa to attend a series of boxing matches in honor of the deified Julius Caesar, whose month it was. He accepted, though it would not keep him from reporting to His Divinity that Saxa, too, had in a pinch declined to help.

  8 Epiphi (3 July, Monday)

  The pretentious central gymnasium, looking wholly Greek except for the potted palm trees, was filled to capacity with crowds arrived in town to witness the trial of Christian clerics, and disappointed by their abjuration. “We’ve been robbed,” Aelius overheard an uncouth visitor tell another. “My friends and me, we came all the way from Ombos to see them suffer, and them Christians turn coat just like that. Robbed, I tell you! This here boxing had
better be worth a Christian trial.”

  In that, he was likely more satisfied than Aelius, who cared little for the waste of energy in the ring: Throughout the afternoon, beefy young men with hands bound. in leather and lead bloodied one another in earnest, and even in the less violent pancration a couple of well-aimed blows of the bare knuckles did commensurate damage.

  Theo the spice merchant and Harpocratio were in attendance. Sitting in different rows, both waved kerchiefs during the intermission to let Aelius know they’d recognized him. Afterward, in the sweaty crowd that streamed out of the gymnasium, they waited only long enough for Aelius to part ways with Rabirius Saxa and other officers to approach him. Aelius told them he planned to leave the metropolis on Friday, though in fact he meant to be gone by Thursday morning at the latest.

  “I am going to Rome to pursue my historical work,” he said, and as he spoke he formulated ideas about how much, or little else, he Would reveal. “Since I have never been there, I should be grateful for names of contacts who might help me in my research. Of course, I’ll be delighted to carry any messages or objects you might want to send along to the capital.”

  Harpocratio looked interested. “What ship will you sail in?”

  “I don’t know yet.” It was not true, but Aelius thought he’d keep the information for himself. “Likely a military transport, unless I can do better. In the past, like everyone else, I had good luck with cereal cargo ships heading to and from Ostia.”

  It turned out that Theo had letters to send and Harpocratio a box of books. Both of them showed themselves eager to expedite shipping through Aelius. Theo volunteered, “You must positively get in touch with my good friend Lucinus Soter, in the III district. He lives on Copper Alley, kitty-corner from the Baths of Titus, anyone will be able to point you to it. He’s a textile wholesaler, and knows everybody among the Egyptian expatriates of Rome. I’ll send his address to your place along with the letters. If you’re going to the Iseum Campense or to the other worship places, they’ll give you a line of official tales there as well, so you’ll need someone like Soter to sieve through the nonsense.”