As I looked about in the candlelight, I saw a man dozing in a chair. A fat, dumpy creature, dressed in the silk brocade of the men in the paintings, he had a book in his lap. It was a book in our own modern style – folded and bound in sections – but surprisingly small. Other books of the same kind were heaped about him on the carpeted floor. Beside him, on a table of polished wood, was a glass bottle containing something dark. There was a glass drinking cup beside this, about a third full.
I climbed to my feet. I saw that I was dressed in the plain white and purple-bordered robe of a senator. The fat man shifted back deeper into his chair and snored. I stood over the fat man. He’d drunk himself into a doze that meant I was quite alone in the room. I took up the drinking cup and raised it to my lips. Its taste was sweet and much more powerful than any wine I knew. I drained the cup and refilled it.
Cup in hand, I moved towards the desk and reached for one of the crumpled balls of what looked like very white parchment. I smoothed it out and squinted at the neat but unknown writing. It made no sense to me. I saw there was ink in a silver pot. There were no pens, though, of the usual reed or wood. For writing, there was a collection of bird feathers, cut and split at the ends into the right shape. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. It didn’t strike me as at all a convenient sort of pen. I looked again at the neat writing. It was all, I supposed, a matter of custom. So too the idea of filling a room with expensive objects, and spoiling it with an open fire.
I was picking up sheet after sheet and still trying to see if I could understand any of it, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round. The fat man was stretching his arms. He grunted and opened his eyes. I looked full at him. He looked back at me and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his drinking cup. He looked round in some confusion before staring at the cup, now empty on his desk.
He said something nasty in a language I’d never heard before and tried to stand. The effort was too much and he fell back into his chair. He reached for a silver bell, but then looked at me again. I smiled nervously back. He raised his voice and spoke again in the unknown language. I shook my head. He spoke once more in a language that sounded different from the first, but that I still couldn’t understand.
‘Do you know Greek?’ I asked in that language.
He smiled, and with an evident collecting of thought, replied in Latin.
‘There are those who stand between us,’ he said in a slow and oddly accented manner, ‘who say you served a higher purpose. We, of course, know otherwise.’
He laughed gently and repeated himself: ‘We both know better than those monks and barbarians.’
With that, his eyes closed again and he drifted back into his doze. As he did so, the room began to darken and its various objects took on a weirdly translucent quality.
I snatched up the book from his lap. It fell straight through my hands as if they didn’t exist. It fell open on the floor. I dropped to my knees and tried to see what was on the pages. Written on the left page in very small and neat characters that looked like a variant on the Greek script, and on the other in something equally small and neat that contained Roman letters and might have been Latin, I wanted to look at it in better light. Particularly interesting was that the words appeared to be separated by spaces between, and there were obvious punctuation marks. But the darkness was spreading around me like a mist.
I grabbed again at the book to try to lift it. Again, my hands went through it. All I could see before the darkness became total was the separated words written in Roman letters at the head of each page:
SANCTI AELRICI DE UITA SUA DECEM LIBRI
As everything around me faded into nothingness, I could hear the faint chiming of a bell in that machine above the fireplace.
Then it was all gone.
I woke with a simultaneous contraction of every muscle. I lay naked on a bed in a room hung with yellow silk. Just out of sight, I could feel the breeze from a window, and hear the calling and fluttering of little birds. A black hand was mopping at my face with a sponge soaked in something that smelled of lemon. I sat up, but fell back again with the sudden effort. I tried to put my thoughts in order.
‘Where’s Martin?’ I cried. I tried to sit up again, but was pushed gently back by the black maidservant. She looked across me and began a twittering call to someone on the far side of the room.
‘I thought you would wake around this time,’ the Mistress said. She was perched on a little table, and had been reading from a book that she was scrolling in both hands with practised elegance. She placed a bone clip in the book to hold her place and rolled it shut. She clapped her hands, and more of the maidservants came into the room, carrying dishes.
I was still trying to get my thoughts working. Questions were pouring into my head, and I couldn’t think which ones to ask at all, and which ones first. I looked down at myself and reached feebly for the sheet that was folded away from me.
‘Dear me, Alaric.’ She laughed so that her veil shook – she was wearing one of the loose but shapely robes that covered her whole body. ‘You may be unusually pretty. But I do assure you that you have nothing I haven’t seen many times before.’ She crossed the room and sat beside me. She motioned to one of the women, who began spooning broth into me. It had a taste of menthol and of fish, over something else I couldn’t even begin to recognise.
‘Do you know what has become of Martin?’ I asked when the feeding was over.
The Mistress sat back a little and stared carefully into my face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You made keeping up with you difficult even for me. By the time I did find you, it was only you who could be rescued.’ She put a hand up to silence me. ‘No, let me be as clear as I can be. I had a search made of the whole area. Martin was not among any of the animals who failed to get away. If your poor secretary is dead, he was not killed where he was taken.’
‘Where is this?’ I now asked. If this was another dream, I was at least with someone who seemed inclined to answer some questions. And if this wasn’t a dream, there were questions that had to be asked.
I now had an increasingly clear recall of my time in the poor district. It seemed she had turned up in time to save me from being torn apart by the mob. But how had she done that? And – I looked again at myself. I had a few superficial bruises on my chest and legs. I could move my left arm without pain. The swelling had gone from my ankle. I moved the foot. There was a slight stiffness, but nothing to stop me from walking and even running. I know that fear can magnify injuries. But the impression I’d had of those last few moments was of a brutal smashing to every part of my body not protected by the chainmail.
I did now sit up. I was weak – no doubt of that – but there was no sense of internal bruising, still less of breakages.
‘What happened back there?’ I asked. ‘How long have I been here?’
‘Taking into account the day you came here, you have been with me five days,’ the Mistress answered. ‘That makes today the festival you celebrate every seven days of Christ your Prophet and Deity.’ She’d answered my second question. The first she was unlikely to have forgotten, but showed no inclination to answer.
‘How have you escaped the rioting?’ I asked. I looked about me. ‘You’ve armed your male slaves?’
She laughed again very softly. ‘Male slaves?’ she said. ‘I have none. They displeased me shortly after my arrival in Alexandria. I had them sold to a Saracen for export to his own country. There, they will be castrated and set to guarding the harems of the great. I have no male slaves – nor desire for any.’
I sat back again and closed my eyes. I was awake. It wasn’t a matter of the surrounding normality – there was precious little of that for the moment. Nor was there much sense of continuity of space and time with what I knew had been real. But self-awareness carried the whole burden of assuring me that, somehow, I was alive and well, and still in Alexandria.
I swung round and sat on the edge of the bed. My feet brushed the cool tiles of th
e floor. What I wanted to ask was how the Mistress had got herself about Alexandria in the middle of a gigantic riot, without male slaves, and had rescued me from a baying mob. And since I didn’t doubt her assurance, how had she also been able to have the area searched for Martin? I’d have to do better than I had.
‘When we first met,’ she went on, ‘I reminded you of the old truth: that those who rescue strays take on further duties for their welfare. I remain firmly convinced of that truth. I only wish I could have helped Martin. To have you both here safe and well would be delightful indeed.’
She got up and motioned to the maidservants. They darted noiselessly around, clearing away various pots and boxes. Two of them went over to a cupboard and pulled out a robe of white silk. I stood carefully up as they brought it to me. Yes, the ankle was a little stiff, but I could walk on it without pain. What I’d looked like when brought here was hard to say. Since then, though, I’d been washed and shaved and anointed. I could feel that my hair would be in need of further attention. Apart from this, I was soon about as respectable to behold as anyone might have wished.
I thanked the Mistress. I’d learn more later, I resolved, about the details of how she’d saved me. The firmer my recollection, the odder it all seemed. For the moment, though, it was enough to give thanks. She acknowledged these with a nod of her veiled head. I went over to the window and looked out. So far as I could tell, we were on the upper floor of one of the palaces overlooking the Harbour. This was no longer the fashionable district it had been when the palaces were built. But it was one of the quieter parts of the centre, and it caught the sea breezes very nicely. My window looked away from the sea – it looked out over the city, or would have but for other buildings that prevented a full view. I could see one public street. It seemed completely untouched by the rioting. Slaves carried messages along it from one palace to another. I saw a fine lady being carried past in her chair – with guards, certainly, but no apparent sense of danger.
Looking up, into the distance, showed a different picture. The smoke rose in an almost continuous haze above the higher buildings. With Priscus dead, and Nicetas possibly still holed up in the Church of the Apostles, I tried to think what might have happened in the past few days. Had the rioting burned itself out? Even urban mobs eventually grow tired of murder and rape. Or had some coalition of interests formed to use what force and persuasion might be available? How much damage was there to the buildings of Alexandria? How many had died?
Above all, had the Palace remained safe throughout? I thought of Maximin. I thought of Sveta. The mob was a beast without conscience and without mercy. It chilled me to think of the baby I’d seen killed. The Palace was easily the strongest point in the city. But Nicetas had gone out with much of its garrison. I wanted to be polite to the Mistress. She had saved me. She had nursed me back to health. There was much I wanted to discuss with her. At the same time, I wanted to be back in the Palace.
I turned back to face the Mistress. She had already moved beside me.
‘You will find that the rioting is at an end,’ she said, pre-empting my question. ‘Much as I am amused by your company, I see no point in seeking to detain you under my roof. You will find you are fully rested and in no further need of my attentions. The streets are safe enough for persons of quality, and I am sure you have duties that require your attention. If you wish to accept any further help from me, please be advised to go back to the Royal Palace and stay there. No harm can attend you there. Nor can you be made a source of harm to others. Stay there and await such time as you can return to the Imperial City.’ She went back to where I’d seen her on first waking. She reached again for her book.
‘You will forgive me if I do not accompany you back to the Royal Palace,’ she said. ‘All else aside, you and I together would be an unreasonable burden to my maidservants, whose job it is for the moment to carry my chair.’
Chapter 47
I was carried back from the western end of the Embankment Road. On my right, the shops and restaurants were opening late because of the Sunday service. There were hardly any customers. Still, the effort was being made. Slaves had set out the tables and chairs. Shopkeepers were gently crying up their goods. Every so often, the few passers-by would stop and watch the oddity of a blonde man carried past on an obviously feminine chair, and by some very young black women. I paid them no attention. I set my gaze eventually to the left, where stretched the immense crescent of acacia trees and the docks beyond. Not much could be seen of these through the heavy boughs. Every so often, though, there was the sight of lifting machinery and of the sea that sparkled far out in the sun. It all looked so normal. But I couldn’t escape the smell, whenever the breeze let up from the north, of death and of burned-out buildings.
I saw the scale of the devastation as we turned right into the wide street that led from the docks to the Central Forum. Buildings – whole blocks of buildings – had been razed to piles of smoking rubble. Banks, exchanges, warehouse buildings, shops, palaces, churches, schools, baths, monasteries: they had gone. Street frontages that had shown a thousand years of continuous development were now swept away. The fires still burned in places. Front elevations still leaned inwards, not yet pulled down or ready by themselves to collapse. But the work of ruin was done. When it came to ruination, Alexandria didn’t compare with Rome – still less with Ephesus or Corinth. But a good third of the centre was gone. And how, in the straitened circumstances of the present, it was ever to be rebuilt as other than a patched-up slum wasn’t something I could say.
The destruction had barely started when I was taken out of things. There could be no doubt, though, that it was over. The impaling stakes removed any doubt that order had been fully restored. A section of the better classes in Alexandria, assisted by the mob, had challenged the might of the Empire. Now, after a struggle that I had largely missed but that gave every appearance of the colossal, the Empire had triumphed, and the impaling stakes were an outward symbol of the restoration of order.
About eight feet high and twenty yards apart along both sides of the street, each of the stakes had been set into one of the stone gratings beneath which the flood waters rushed and gurgled. Each of them carried at least two bodies. The two lower bodies had been impaled through their stomachs. Blackened, already putrefying in the sun, they hung as they’d died, the lower one brushing arms and legs on the pavement. Flies buzzed and swarmed and settled on the dead. Carrion birds perched along the tops of every high place, calling out and fluttering their wings. Some of them – not vultures: I was surprised by how pretty they often were – were braving the crowds of onlookers to fly down and peck at the eyes. Stray dogs licked at the pools of blood, or slaves outside the better class of shops that remained fussed about with brushes and buckets of water.
Where a third body had been added, the impaling was generally, though not universally, done upright – through the anus. Those were a ghastly sight. The faces looked straight back at any onlooker, twisted with agony beyond describing and with eyes pecked out. Flies crawled in and out of the slack mouths. The sun had already brought the faces out in black patches.
I watched one of these executions. My chair had reached a pile of rubble that blocked half the width of the street. There was no way through the crowd, and I had no means of giving precise instructions to the chair carriers. I started at the back of the crowd. One further sign, though, of restored order was that everyone else no sooner saw me seated than they got smartly out of my way, and the women moved me forward right to the front. Bound and already naked, the victim was twisting about and squealing for mercy even before he was pulled from the closed, slave-drawn carriage. I saw the crazed look on his face and the glistening of tears. I saw him clutch and unclutch his hands in supplication. It took three men, all wearing Prefecture uniforms, to heave him up into position, the sharpened tip of the stake between his legs. A fourth stood before him, quietly and rapidly reading something off a sheet of papyrus.
With a sta
rt, I realised that he was the potty man. I hadn’t recognised him at first because he was naked. The pinched, wiry look of the lower classes has little individuality. But the face I’d have recognised anywhere. ‘Me – I don’t never mix with wogs,’ he’d said, which seemed so very long ago, while wiping Martin’s bum. Perhaps he’d broken his rule. More likely, it didn’t really matter what he’d done or not done.
At last, the reading finished. The jabbered supplication didn’t let up. It was a waste of breath, and – so far as it mattered at this late stage – it showed a want of dignity. No one paid attention. The fourth Prefecture man nodded to the others. With a count of ‘One, two, three!’ they let go of him, and then held him again as his weight took the stake deeper into his body. Once he was firmly on, they cut his bonds and stood back. The crowd had let up a great cheer as he was dropped on to the stake. Now, it was fallen silent, and nothing covered the shrill, incredulous screaming as the man took the stake into his body. I had thought it would be a quick slide down and then silence. However, the stake was of a thickness, and was so notched at intervals, that the descent was agonisingly slow. He reached down with his arms, desperately trying to hold himself up. He hugged himself, and covered his eyes. He pressed on his stomach. He waved about like one of the more inebriated dancing girls. It all had no effect on the slow progression of the stake through his body – tearing or displacing organs, snapping bones, making every moment an infinity of pain and horror-stricken fear.
At last, his legs straddled the lower bodies, and the tip of the stake emerged from his mouth. There was another cheer from the crowd, and men held up their little children to see the bloody froth dribble off his chin. No longer jerking about, he twitched for longer than I’d have thought possible. His eyes fluttered in little spasms. Clouds of flies buzzed madly about, waiting for all to be still again.
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