‘Go home at once,’ I said again. ‘Take this with you and don’t linger on the streets. Come back here if you must in the morning. But go home now.’ I pressed one of my purses into her hand and hurried past. I tried to put her sense of total helplessness out of mind. On a night like this, it wasn’t hard.
Before we’d gone back inside the Palace earlier, Priscus had stood on the highest step and reached out his arms to the dead.
If I perceive some mischievous design
To sap the State, I will not hold my tongue, he’d intoned, quoting Creon from the Antigone of Sophocles. Then he’d filled his lungs, and to the accompaniment of flapping wings and that endless buzzing of the feasting flies, he’d continued:
But for the miscreant exile who returned
Minded in flames and ashes to blot out
His father’s city and his father’s gods,
And glut his vengeance with his kinsmen’s blood,
Or drag them captive at his chariot wheels For Polyneices ’tis ordained that none
Shall give him burial or make mourn for him,
But leave his corpse unburied, to be meat
For dogs and carrion crows, a ghastly sight.
So am I purposed; never by my will
Shall miscreants take precedence of true men,
But all good patriots, alive or dead,
Shall be by me preferred and honoured.
Some of the police officers had looked up at him, unable to follow the complexities of the ancient grammar. The Slavs, for whom any Greek was a trial, had continued about their business of keeping the death lanes clear of sightseers and relatives.
‘I think I’ll publish an amnesty tomorrow,’ he’d giggled once we were back inside. ‘And I’ll levy a charge for the return of bodies. After all, if I don’t charge, the police certainly will!’ He’d tripped off, saying it was time for his cat to be fed.
I’d tried not to look back. It was impossible not to.
Now it was over. All were dead. Tomorrow, the bodies would have been cleared away and the stakes would be taken back into storage, ready for the next time they’d be required. Alexandria could go back to such business as might still continue. We’d even go ahead with the promised bread distribution. So would the Empire temper Justice with Mercy.
The streets too were unlit this night. But the Prefecture slaves were working day and night to clear away the bodies; and their torches flared in every central street. Evidently high on something powerful, they shouted cheerfully to each other as they worked deeper and deeper into the heaps of putrid, rat-infested flesh. Their voices bounced oddly from the walls of the buildings that still stood undamaged. The smell was now overpowering, and it was not just to avoid being recognised that I hurried past with my face buried in my cloak.
The embanked road took the breeze straight off the sea, and it blew without shifting. It was a blessing to breathe clean air again. Though the street, so far as I could tell in the unlit gloom, was empty, I kept to the shade of the acacia trees. The curfew was mostly unpoliced, but it would never do to be stopped. Every so often, I stopped and looked back the way I’d come. I made all the usual checks, and unless there was a really skilled agent on my tail, I was unfollowed. I could hear the lapping of the sea over on my right. Far ahead of me, I heard the barking and howling of what might have been a pack of wolves, for all the noise the dogs were making.
The little palace was in darkness; and though the gates were open and unguarded, I thought at first I’d misremembered the location, or got lost in the dark. But the starlight shone down bright enough in the central courtyard to which the gate opened for me to know I was in the right place. I crossed the courtyard, passing the little statue of Niobe that adorned the fountain. I walked in through the open door to the main wing of the palace. At first, it was all in darkness. There was a glazed window near the top of the entrance hall, but only enough light came through to show where it was and to reflect on the polished stone of the floor. I stopped and looked up. If I went left, I remembered, there was another doorway. Beyond this lay a staircase leading up.
There was a little sound a few yards to my right. I reached for my sword, but never got there. I heard the nonsensical twittering before the maidservant emerged from behind a screen. She’d been waiting there with a covered lamp. Balancing the now uncovered lamp in her hand, she bowed and set up a regular stream of greetings in her own language. I didn’t understand what she was saying. But I did understand the outstretched arm. It motioned me towards a double column on the other side of the hall. Behind this, I could just see the glint of what seemed a silver door handle.
Still reading, the Mistress was in her library now. She sat within a ring of lamps that made the room, by comparison with where I’d been, as bright as day. She put her book down as I was ushered in and stood up. She’d changed her clothes since I’d parted from her in the late morning. Otherwise, she was still veiled and wrapped up as if for a visit. The maidservant bowed and left. I stood looking at the Mistress.
‘Do you want to go through the motions of asking what brings me here so late at night?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Shall I bother asking why you think I will help you – or why you should trust me, of all people, to help you? Did I not make it sufficiently clear that you should remain in the Palace?’
I shrugged.
She got up and moved to a table by the wall. ‘Am I right in believing your favourite wine is red?’ she asked. She poured me a cup and turned back to face me.
‘Do you think I’m a sorceress?’ she asked.
I took a second and then a third mouthful of the good Syrian wine. I thought of that bizarre evening in the Egyptian quarter. I thought of the knuckles on my left hand. Forget anything else that might have happened that day. I clearly recalled how I’d scraped them to the bone when sliding down from the church roof. That had been five days earlier. They weren’t now even scabbed. I thought of many things between these events. But there was no doubt of my answer.
‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘if by magic you mean possession of knowledge that is not yet, or is no longer, generally available, you are perhaps a sorceress. If you ask if I believe you to be in contact with powerful but invisible spirits that can divert the normal courses of nature, my answer is no.’
She smiled.
I put my cup down and moved to the other side of the large central table in the room. I took up the leather sheath for the book she’d been reading and looked at its tag.
‘You are familiar with Zosimus?’ she asked.
‘As an historian,’ I said, ‘he’s highly derivative. He’s often obscure. His judgements of character verge on the extreme. But if you want a narrative in one place of Imperial history from Augustus to Anastasius, you’ll not do better. How far back do you need to start in order to bring yourself up to date?’
She laughed and sat down again in front of the book. I stood hastily back from her place. I looked at the book racks lining the walls. Every niche contained its leather sheath, each one containing its tightly rolled book. I stepped towards one of the racks and scanned the book tags. There was a certain amount of history and geography. Most of it, though, was poetry and romances – all from the modern period. Not having read much of this stuff, I was in no position to judge it individually. But the Mistress would need to be very lonely wherever it was she lived to be collecting this as reading material.
‘Sit down, Alaric,’ she said. ‘Before I have you put to bed, there are several questions I need to ask you about the things I have read. I do not welcome comments on the nature of my questions, nor on whatever their tendency may seem to show. We shall speak for a while in this bright room. Then you will be put to bed. In the morning, we will leave Alexandria. Do you understand?’
I nodded.
‘Good,’ she went on. ‘Let us begin with this concept of the Trinity.’
Chapter 51
The gates of Alexandria had been open all night f
or the passing and repassing of the burial carts. The dogs, the rats, the flies, the carrion birds – these were annoyances. The real enemy was a sun that could turn the twenty thousand corpses stacked up in the side streets into mountains of pestilential slime. I’d sealed the order myself to override all the normal security measures. Everything had to be in burial pits outside the walls by noon. There was a shortage of quicklime, but officials from the Cleansing Department had assured me that three feet of packed earth should keep the miasma from seeping out. If it rained, they added, we were stuffed. Otherwise, we could find a little comfort in having reduced the number of idle mouths to be filled.
We arrived at the Southern Gate shortly after dawn. As I’d guessed, it was crowded with carts. There were also hundreds of women and the old, come out to see if there would be one last chance of identifying loved ones. They clustered round the gate, annoying the guards, who puffed and shouted to keep hands off those cloth-covered carts.
‘Passport, if you please,’ someone snapped from just outside the curtains on the chair.
I groaned inwardly. I’d hoped that going out through the busiest gate would avoid this. If this carried on, it would put a block on the other movements I’d arranged.
‘Get down,’ the Mistress whispered. She pulled a silk shawl over me and opened the curtains fully.
‘The rule is, My Lady, that passports are needed for all but walking out and without luggage,’ the guard explained. ‘Passport – and you’ll need to step down so we can search the chair.’
‘I need no passport,’ the Mistress said softly. ‘I need no passport, and you will soon forget that I was ever here.’
‘She needs no passport,’ the guard repeated to one of his juniors. He spoke in a strange tone.
I heard the creak of the wooden bar placed across the gate to stop all but pedestrians. It lifted and guards stood back, dreamy looks clouding their faces. Soon, the maidservants were clipping along the road at a surprising speed, bearing in mind their double burden. The smell of death still followed us on the breeze from the sea. But the cracking of whips over the slaves of the digging parties and the disorganised shouting of the overseers and guards was fading quickly away. The Mistress had hung her bells along the chair again, and their merry jingle was soon the only sound I could easily hear.
‘How did you do that?’ I asked. I knew I shouldn’t have asked, but it was one of those questions that pops out from pure astonishment. I’d pulled off my covering. Now, the curtains were open wide, and I was glad of the cooling breeze to take the sweat off my face.
The Mistress arranged her clothes to keep them from fluttering too much in the breeze. She reached under the seat and took out a small book. ‘Yours is the empire of the sword and the tax gatherer,’ she explained. ‘My empire is of the imagination.’ She fell silent and began reading from what looked like a tale of dazzling stupidity.
I wanted to ask how we were expected to make any time at all in this chair. It made sense that taking the road to Canopus, or going directly by barge along the canal, would have invited Brotherhood spies. But a chair, carried by women, along even a good road would take us days and days to get anywhere close to where we needed to be. This time, though, I didn’t ask. I’d agreed not to plague the Mistress with questions over her methods, and it was too soon to start bending the agreement.
It goes without saying that I would bend it. Martin and Nicetas and Priscus – indeed, everyone I knew – would have accepted the Mistress as a sorceress. Even if they had sought her help, they’d never have dared to question, considering how she achieved her effects. But I’d told her the truth the previous night. I didn’t think there was anything in the least supernatural about her. There comes a time when the accumulation of evidence is such that you have to change some opinions. The odd message given to me in the Egyptian quarter I’d firmly dismissed as nothing at all. Coming then upon the Mistress ‘between the dead palms and the monument to human folly’, I’d also dismissed as coincidence. But if the pursuit of knowledge requires a certain blinkering, wilful blindness is another matter.
No – things had been happening during the past twenty-five days that couldn’t be explained in everyday terms. But I had no doubt that they could be explained. And if I’d not made it obvious what I was about, I’d have my explanatory hypotheses formed and tested long before I saw the walls of Alexandria again.
Alexandria lies on the far western tip of the Nile Delta, and the floods had turned the land either side of the road to marsh. We were on higher ground than further into the Delta, and the land wouldn’t disappear. And I knew from my survey maps that the road going due south was embanked. It would be passable at all times of the year, even if the floods were catastrophic. The Mistress, though, had other ideas. We weren’t going south. Instead, we were taking the western road into the desert. This began about five miles further along. At our present speed, we might be there come nightfall. I say ‘at our present speed’. But if those women didn’t seem particularly tired yet as they carried us briskly along the paved road, I didn’t see how they could keep this speed up once the sun rose higher in the sky.
I looked right over the dreary expanse of marsh to the sea that shone in the distance. Large birds of various kinds flew overhead, or burrowed into the clumps of reeds that rose out of the mud. Every so often, I heard the splash of something in the larger puddles. The road itself was absolutely empty. It was entirely a military road, and all our mobile forces had been sucked into Alexandria. There was no cause for any but the occasional group of pilgrims to use it otherwise.
‘What does this word mean?’ the Mistress asked suddenly.
I looked away from the increasingly distant line of the sea and pulled my thoughts into order. I focused on the narrow column of text in the place where her finger pointed.
‘That’s a corruption of the Latin word hospitium,’ I said. ‘It is used by the more careless modern writers to mean a house.’ She sniffed – and well she might. From what I saw of the surrounding text, the whole style was atrocious. ‘I suppose you are familiar with Latin?’ I added, trying to keep too much of a questioning tone from my voice.
‘Even where not of collapse,’ she replied, ‘most ages are times of decadence and stagnation. I did wonder, even so, if the Greeks had avoided the common lot of humanity.’
There was no answer to that. I reached between my feet and pulled up a flask of wine. No point offering any to the Mistress. I tried, nevertheless, not to drink it all.
The sun was growing hotter. There was nothing to see and nothing to do. The Mistress continued reading with evident – and, in my view, embarrassing – enjoyment. The bells that jingled with every swaying of the chair seemed to sound louder and louder in the surrounding silence. I leaned back and pulled my hat over my eyes. I drifted off into a world of luxurious warmth.
The sun told me it was around noon when the Mistress prodded me awake.
‘Come along, Alaric,’ she said. ‘It’s time for you to make a contribution to the journey.’
I blinked in the brightness and looked ahead. We were approaching the first post station outside Alexandria. It was of standard design: two storeys of mud brick around a central courtyard. With only slits for windows – and these on the upper floor – the outer wall doubled as fortification. We must have been seen from a long way out. By the time we were approaching the station, the bar had been lowered across the road, and a single guard was lounging wearily in the shade.
‘You can show your passport here,’ the Mistress said. ‘This far out of Alexandria, I don’t think we need worry about leaving some footprint in the records.’
I looked at her. While I was asleep, she’d changed out of the elegant dress in which she’d started the journey. Now, she was dressed in the black riding clothes of the desert nomads. With a scarf wound about her head, it was hard to tell that she was a woman.
‘You can change once our business is complete,’ she said. ‘If these people have camels to
give us, so much the better. If not, we’ll settle for their best horses.’
I took out the passport I’d prepared for myself back in the Palace. I’d done my best to copy out not just the words of the sample I’d found in Martin’s files, but also the smooth penmanship. It still appeared rather crude. Then again, it carried the Lesser Seal. That would have covered up many worse defects in its form.
Lips moving, the guard squinted over the passport. He handed it back with a stiff salute, and then a bow. He went back inside, and came out with his commanding officer. They’d both made an effort to brush themselves down, and we were ushered straight through the gate into the colourless, dusty courtyard.
After wine and dates and a brief account from me of the rioting, we were led back out from the coolest room in the building for an inspection of the stables. The pair of camels on the far side of the block seemed decidedly inferior to the horses. They were big, surly-looking creatures. They were mangy. Their smell brought back unpleasant memories of my last ride through the desert. But the Mistress pointed straight at them, ignoring the horses, and watched closely as they were saddled and provided with the usuals.
‘Would His Magnificence care to state destination and reason for his journey?’ the senior officer asked with another bow. He sat back down at his desk and scratched with his reed pen on a blank page in his ledger. Nothing came out. He squeezed the spongy length of the pen and scratched again. He muttered an apology and looked at the congealing mass at the bottom of his ink well.
‘There is no need for any record to be kept,’ the Mistress said. She stretched nonchalantly back in her chair. Except for the two slight bumps on her chest, she might have been a younger male companion of the Lord Senator.
‘There is no need for any record,’ the man repeated in the low pitch of one who talks in his sleep. He dropped his pen on the desk, and went right back to commenting on the account I’d long since finished of the rioting.
Back out on the road, the Mistress looked at me in my own nomad clothes.
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