‘My place is by your side,’ Martin said when I’d shown him the message. It probably was, and he could be insistent when all his loyalty required was letting himself be dragged into passive danger. But I had other ideas for him.
‘No,’ he said firmly when I’d shut up. ‘We both know the Palace is the safest place anyone can be in Alexandria. Sveta will look after the children. My place is by your side.’
And so it was the pair of us who, as the trumpeter sounded the hour, joined the silent and apprehensive crowd in the main hall of the Palace. They’d all been dressed for the Council meeting, and getting them assembled at short notice for what Nicetas had now planned instead of the meeting had been easy enough. Getting them into a better mood hadn’t been thought worth the trying. Priscus alone was looking cheerful. He seemed to have got over the lost chance of a massacre, and now had his cat with him. He was showing it the statue of Domitian beside which his own chair was being made ready.
‘From the unusual lack of grace about your movements, dear boy,’ he said as I came up beside him, ‘do I gather you’ve had the forethought to put on protection? For myself, I’d never dream of going to these events without.’
Back in my dressing room, Martin had bullied the slaves into getting all my clothes off again so he could pack me into a mailed shirt. He’d then stood for an age, breathing in with his hands above his head, while they’d strained to get another one around him. It was a deadweight on me. Just from walking downstairs to the hall, I’d sweated so much the silk lining was soaked.
‘But how will you protect Pussy?’ I asked with a nod at the cat. It gave me a hateful look, then nestled closer to Priscus as he stroked the fur.
‘Oh, Margarita will stay behind,’ he said carelessly. ‘She’s had such a disturbed few nights,’ he added. ‘Have you never marvelled at the places these creatures can squeeze themselves behind and shit?
‘Will Maximin be putting in an appearance down here?’
I shook my head. There was much I wanted to discuss with Priscus. But Nicetas had now arrived in his internal chair, and was being carefully transferred into his outgoing chair. I thought of trying again to speak with him. By the time I’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk of a public rebuff, the twittering eunuchs were thick about him. I turned back to Priscus, but he was now strolling off to look at another of the more worthless emperors.
My own chair was ready, and it was a matter of squeezing Martin in beside me. Hard luck on the carrying slaves, I thought. But the instructions were one chair only per member of the Council. Mine wasn’t the only chair sagging below the usual height of eighteen inches above the ground. In one or two cases, secretaries had actually to be left behind. No doubt, their masters would have preferred to swap. Tempers were short in that hall.
At last, though, we were all carried out into the courtyard. There, a couple of eunuchs arranged our chairs into a short cluster, two abreast. The curtains twitched on the single chair right at the front, and a greyish, Viceregal hand gave the signal. With a loud crash of bolts and the pulling back of armoured wood, the gates swung open, and we moved out into the square.
‘Make way for His Imperial Highness the Viceroy!’ the herald cried in a loud voice. What effect his words might have had on the crowd now packed into the square wasn’t something we had to find out. First through the gate were about a hundred heavily mailed guards, all with drawn swords. The crowd backed away before them. With a shouted command in Latin – whatever else could be held against him, at least Nicetas was using the Slavs – they formed into a hollow square within which the chairs now huddled, and we were off.
Though the heat was headed again towards the sweltering, Martin insisted on keeping the curtains pulled. With those plumed helmets all around at eye height, there wouldn’t have been much to see in any event. But, from the steady crunch of their boots on broken glass, and muttering of the slaves as they skirted the larger debris of the night’s rioting, I had the impression of moderate to considerable damage. All around was the smell of stale wood smoke. From beyond the steel square that encased us, I could hear the continual but low murmuring of the crowd. It was a resentful, short-tempered sound, coming from throats that must have been numbered in the tens of thousands. But it was only a crowd, I kept telling Martin and myself. It wasn’t yet worth calling a mob.
In the chair beside us was one of the Council members who dealt with finance. He was complaining – I think to his secretary – that the Patriarch wasn’t with us.
‘Where is John?’ he asked peevishly over and again. ‘With His Holiness among us, we’d be in no danger at all. Where is John?’
‘Isn’t the crowd coming with us?’ Martin asked nervously. ‘If there’s to be a native delegation allowed on to our side of the Wall, what’s to keep everyone apart?’
‘I imagine that has already been considered,’ I said. There was no point even trying to sound reassuring. Martin was right. Even if it wasn’t moving with us, the crowd was immense enough to stretch far in the streets beyond the Palace square. We must have covered half a mile, and still that murmur wasn’t letting up.
‘Make way for His Imperial Highness the Viceroy!’ the herald continued crying. And it wasn’t just for show. Once or twice, our chair wobbled as the guard was unable to push its way through at uniform speed, and the carrying slaves had to vary our own speed. My hand trembled as I squeezed quietly on my sword. I had a knife in my belt. Neither would be of much use if our outer steel casing were breached. But if not so much as the cruciform relic box Martin was clutching and unclutching, it gave a little comfort.
Chapter 41
One of the larger churches in Alexandria, the Church of the Apostles was in the early style of ecclesiastical building. With not a dome in sight, nor any elaborate patterning of brickwork, it had the plain look of a courthouse. There was a wide flight of steps leading up to an unadorned portico. A large door, plated with bronze, led into the church. The only variation from its overall plainness was two large bronze torch brackets set equidistant between the door and each end of the portico. They were so incongruous, it would have taken a want of taste not visible in any other feature of his design for the original architect to have put them there. More likely, they’d been transferred at some time following the closure and demolition of the temples. I’d seen the church often enough from the outside, though had never thought it worth the effort of looking inside.
I hadn’t missed anything, I realised as I got out of the chair and looked around. We’d all been carried inside the church and set down before the altar. There was the usual jumble of paintings on the wall, and the usual memorial plaques. There was the usual smell of incense, and the usual smell of unwashed bodies that lingers in these places even when the active cause is absent. And there was the usual morose, bearded priest. I grunted and turned back to the chair to help untangle Martin from the curtains.
‘This is a most auspicious choice of His Highness,’ Martin said in his first normal tone of voice since we’d left the Palace. He stepped forward and fell heavily into my arms. With the extra weight of his armour, he almost had the pair of us on the floor. But I recovered my balance. Martin waved at the priest, who was beginning to look alarmed at the number and quality of the persons invading his church.
‘Do you realise,’ Martin asked, ‘that this building contains the chastity belt with which Saint Eulalia held off the forty thousand soldiers commanded to take her virginity?’
‘My compliments to the locksmith,’ I said. But I dropped the matter. This wasn’t the time or the place for entertainment. Directed by one of the eunuchs we’d brought along, the slaves were getting everything as ready for the audience as it could be made at this notice. This was a matter of getting the paint touched up on our faces and our clothes rearranged. We’d managed to pack only one chair, and this would be for Nicetas. After endless fussing arguments between the eunuch and the slaves, it was placed on the far right of the portico outside. Once he was lifted
on to it, Nicetas would be looking down the side flight of steps. This, I gathered, would be convenient, if not so completely dignified in its effect as the eunuch had at first wanted.
‘Any trouble,’ I whispered to Martin as I let myself be arranged in my place behind Nicetas, a foot or so to the left, ‘not, of course, that there will be any, and I want you in the topmost gallery. If the doors swing shut, you don’t argue for them to be opened. Those are my instructions as Imperial Legate,’ I added. Despite this, Martin would have answered. But Priscus was now standing beside me, and was drifting in a snarling row with the eunuch, who wanted him to twist slightly on his hips and lean in my direction. By swivelling my eyes right from where I’d been placed, I could just see the church door. Once Martin was back inside, I gave up on the strain and looked forward again.
Once we were all in position, the makeshift curtains were pulled aside and I stood blinking in the sun. I looked around as well as could be done without moving my head. The church had sat originally on the central island of a vast circular junction. Then the Wall had been built to keep Greeks and Egyptians apart, and the junction was now more or less bisected. The back side of the church formed part of the Wall. The front of the church looked over what was now the semicircular confluence of three wide streets that led back to the absolute centre of Alexandria. Still impressive, if dilapidated, the buildings that stared back at the church had once been palaces of the commercial aristocracy. Most of them, I think, were now monasteries.
I could see most of this if I turned my eyes sharp left. In front of me and to my right, the Wall stretched high and blank. Looming over it from the other side was the weather-beaten facade of what had once been the Baths of Hadrian. What else, if anything, was still there I couldn’t see.
The police and the guards had cleared the hundred yards in front of the church. Beyond that, though, it was an unbroken sea of faces that filled the semicircle and stretched as far back along the three streets as I could strain to see. They were all the usual urban trash. I was too far away and standing at the wrong angle to see the directors this time, but had no doubt they were lurking somewhere in that mass of gawping, unwashed humanity.
With a few grunts and hisses of pain, the Viceroy shifted ever so slightly on his chair. Otherwise, it was the statue act again for us all. Our clothes fluttered freely in the breeze. Our bodies were locked into poses of careless elegance.
There was a shouted command over on our right, and the gate to the Egyptian quarter opened a couple of feet. The police officers squeezed wedges under the gate, and stood ready to push it shut again. The herald went forward and called out in a stiffly ceremonious Egyptian. His words seemed to stick in his throat, and he stood a moment looking through the partly opened gate. Then, with a scared look in our direction, he was moving quickly back to stand on the church steps a few feet below Nicetas.
I’d not been able to speak with him. But the impression Nicetas had given me in his message was that he’d arranged a conference with the leaders of the Egyptian mob. These would be allowed through to state their case and then make their submission. Otherwise, the Egyptians would be kept to their own side of the Wall. If that was what had been arranged, it wasn’t going to plan.
Even as the herald took his place, the first Egyptians began pouring through the gate. They came at first in their dozens. For all they pushed to cut off the flow of bodies, the police officers might as well not have been there. The wedges scraped on the hard granite of the pavements and gave way. The gate now swung fully open, and – the police scattering with a sudden panic – the pouring of dozens became a flood of hundreds and then of thousands. The slight difference of their smell aside, they were mostly the same refuse as on our side of the Wall. Perhaps a quarter of them, though, had the smaller – often much darker – appearance of recent arrivals from the south. Between them and the Greeks, the guards formed a thin but, I hoped, an impenetrable line. Between us and the Egyptians, who’d flowed forward right to the foot of the steps up to the portico, there wasn’t so much as a eunuch with a cane. Keeping still, we looked uneasily back at those hungry, desperate faces.
‘Ask for their spokesmen to come forward,’ Nicetas said without moving his lips.
The herald climbed on to a lectern that had been brought out of the church. He was perhaps two yards away from Nicetas, and stood a yard higher. He gripped hard on the rail of the lectern to steady his hands.
‘No,’ Nicetas said again, ‘start with the recitation of titles and promise of redress.’ He broke off and quickly pulled a fold of his robe over the still swollen bulk of his leg. ‘Oh, and do you have the promise of amnesty rehearsed?’
‘Yes, My Lord,’ the herald said softly without turning his eyes. With a muttered prayer and then a great sucking of air into his lungs, he opened his mouth to call the meeting to order. Except it was now in a language I didn’t understand, it followed the same pattern as the meeting in the Hall of Audience. Our clothes billowed or hung loose as the breeze took them. Otherwise, we were still and silent as the custom required. All communication was through the herald, who, now his nerves were under control, was managing the same sonorous rhythms in Egyptian as he had in Greek.
It was as he fell silent – I suppose having asked about the spokesmen – that the pattern took its next variation from the intended. There was a ripple of giggling through the crowd, followed by silence. It was a silence that seemed prolonged beyond the few moments it must have lasted. I heard Priscus breathe in sharply. I darted a look at the now impassive faces at the front of the crowd. What were they waiting for? I asked myself. It was worse than if they’d been shouting and edging forward. At least that wouldn’t have involved this dreadful wait.
‘Ask their spokesmen to come forward,’ Nicetas whispered again. ‘Tell them they can stand before us on the lower steps. But stop them if they come too far up towards me.’
The herald got as far as another intake of breath, when we had our answer. Here and there in what was now the mob, long poles were suddenly pushed upright. On each one of them was a severed head. It isn’t easy to recognise heads – not separated from their bodies, nor at a distance, nor when their features are still contorted with their dying agonies. But I did think I could make out the speaker at the demonstration I’d seen the previous Sunday. There too might well have been that scum landowner. I stared harder, and my stomach did a little jump. Undeniably, that was a priest’s head on the pole nearest the Wall. I could see it clearly against the smooth background of the rendering.
‘I think we can take it as read, my darling,’ Priscus drawled without moving his lips, ‘that the wog lower orders haven’t accepted your settlement. They’ve dismissed the leaders who brought them together and appointed new ones. I don’t suppose my rack nor your concessions will mean much now. I hope that sword so clumsily hidden under your clothes is your favourite one.’
‘I take it you have a plan of escape?’ I muttered back.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A word of advice, though. Don’t try getting into the church. You won’t believe how these places can be made to burn with a little effort. I don’t see any shame in running away.’
‘Flight from this lot?’ I hissed. ‘We’d never outrun them.’ I might also have asked where to run. The wall was in front of us, and the mob between us and it. To the left was the mob. Turn right, and there was a long wedge, bounded by the wall of the church and the Wall of Separation as it joined the back of the church. Behind didn’t seem much better.
Priscus laughed gently. ‘No experience of retreat!’ he said, now obviously enjoying himself. ‘Such a warlike race of barbarians, your people must be. To stay alive, you only need to outrun Nicetas and these toads who advise him.
‘But – oh, for a brigade of cavalry. With these tight-packed masses, it would be like scything corn. And oh, for another of my red powders!’
I ignored him. The herald was now interpreting what I took to be the less chaotic shouts from the mob.
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‘They ask, My Lord,’ he said with a growing tremor, ‘when you are planning to evacuate Egypt.’
There was a long pause while Nicetas digested this question and cast round for some kind of answer. Standing a few steps down from me, the Master of the Works didn’t seem to move so much as a hair, while somehow getting himself visibly ready for a dash inside the church.
‘Tell them that bit about my leg,’ Nicetas finally said. ‘Tell them it’s my birthday. Also, remind them of the bread distribution that was supposed to be today, and still might be. Yes, promise the amnesty if they’ll all go peacefully home.’
The herald did a fine job on the leg. Even without understanding the words, the tragic tone and gestures carried all the meaning anyone could have needed. He paused for a response. The mob looked up at us in stony silence. He might have suppressed the birthday notice. If so, his next comment about the bread was followed by a burst of satiric laughter. Whatever he said next was drowned out in a massive roar of displeasure. It sounded like the Circus protests in Constantinople over the cut in the bread ration. Then, we’d had to face the mob from an Imperial Box thirty feet above anyone else, and with an escape behind straight back into a fortified palace. Here, the screaming and shaking of fists and waving of severed heads began three paces in front of us.
It was a massive roar. As yet, though, it was the overall effect of individual cries. Then, imperceptibly – as gusting breezes give way to a settled wind – the shouting resolved itself into an orderly and repeated chanting. What this was at first I didn’t know, and the herald had given up on interpreting. But I did recognise the Tears of Alexander chant. As ever, it was the mob’s favourite. Again and again, it rolled towards us, like thunder across water. It was deafening. It flattened all intention of reply with its massive loudness. The mob – and it was now worth regarding it as that – rippled forward, pushing its closest members up the first couple of steps towards us. Those shining, hate-contorted faces now almost within touching distance, I reached slowly under my cloak and gripped my sword.
The Blood of Alexandria a-3 Page 30
