The Blood of Alexandria (2 page)

No problem there, I thought. If he couldn’t see the sandbank now, all he had to do was step off and splash however feebly while the tide washed him back in. If he couldn’t swim, however . . . I turned back to the boys.

‘Well, don’t just stand there, you stupid buggers,’ I said in Northumbrian dialect as I hobbled down to the water line. ‘Get back in there and bring him out.’

I might have shouted in Persian or in one of the Slavonic dialects for all the effect my words had. They just stood there, surly looks on their faces. Some had turned now to face inland.

It was fear, I could see, of the Old Gods. It’s only been a generation or so since the missionaries turned up in this part of England. Before then, the locals had drowned the occasional human offering in the Tyne – something to do with the fishing, or perhaps the harvests. If the boys rattle off their prayers well enough in class, they’ve picked up an older nonsense at home. They were terrified of going back into the water now that one of them was being taken.

I sighed. It struck me once again how ugly most of the boys are in Northumbria. The line put out from Canterbury is that we’re all one people in England. My own experience is that the better sort of barbarians who came here settled the south, the very best, I’m in no doubt, settling my own Kent. The further north you go, I find, the more runtish the people become. Why I’d bothered staggering down to look at those white, knock-kneed bodies I couldn’t now imagine.

Meanwhile, the tide was still coming in. As if he wanted to keep as much of his body from the chill waters, the boy held his arms over his head. I might have heard sobbing from far out. Even by local standards, he was a pathetic specimen. I thought of quoting Lucretius on the evils of religion, and settling back to reflect on how rotten life can be. Then, as I strained to see more clearly, my stomach turned upside down.

It was Bede out there. What the sodding hell had he been doing in the river? With his asthma, it was a miracle he’d even walked out that far. I poked my staff sharply into the stomach of the boy most conveniently in reach. It was an unexpected blow, and it doubled him up.

‘Get in there, you little shitbag bastard,’ I snarled, ‘or I’ll see you won’t sit down for a week. Get in there and pull him out.’

He simply ran up the bank out of further reach. The others huddled together. One of the older boys who’d sprouted a few muscles over his ribs began to puff and look ferocious. I suddenly recalled this was near enough how Brother Paul had got his head bashed in last summer. I looked desperately around. There were no adults in sight. I was in no condition to run off for help. The little churls and semi-churls around me couldn’t be trusted to get any sort of message back to the monastery. It was a matter of standing impotently on the river bank watching as my best student drowned in some stupid accident.

When that toad Croesus grassed me up in Constantinople, it was annoying but manageable. The confiscation of goods, the loss of status, the midnight escape down the Straits, Catania, Rome and all the continued shuffling along the roads good or bad, never more than one step ahead of the Imperial agents – all that and more I’d borne with surprising equanimity. I’d even put up with Jarrow. But the loss of Bede, I knew, would be the end.

Take from me that scrawny little creature who’d been soaking up these past few years all the learning I could give, as a sponge does water, and that would be the end. It would be simply a question of how to bring on the darkness without embarrassment for Benedict.

I looked round again as if there might be any alternative. There was none. I kicked off my sandals. I gritted my teeth and stepped into the river. The water came up to my ankles. It was fucking cold, I can tell you! With so little flesh on my bones, the chill went straight through me. I thought at first I’d faint from the shock. No one could have blamed me if I’d stepped out again. For anyone but Bede, I’d not even have got my ankles wet – not at my age, nor at twenty years younger. I once watched a man put himself into a barrel and float over a waterfall. It did him no good, and isn’t something any reasonable person would have advised. But there are times when you have no choice but to act in ways the whole world would call foolish. So here I was. I took a deep breath and fixed my attention on that terrified boy, then I stepped further into the liquid ice of the Tyne. The only noise I could hear as I waded further and further out was my own gasping breath. My robe was floating up and clinging to me. I pulled it over my head and wound it round my left arm. I’ll swear I could feel the uncomprehending stares of those silent boys from behind me.

The water was now up to Bede’s neck. I’d managed to stay on one of the sandbanks. Though it shelved about an inch every few paces, the sand underfoot was firm enough. The water spread around me in uncountable acres of cold silver. But it came hardly up to my chest even as I got within a dozen feet of the boy. I could see into his terrified eyes. I wanted to call something reassuring. But I had no breath to spare. I smiled and waved my staff. For all the response, I might as well not have been there.

Another few feet to go, and the sandbank seemed to give out on me. I prodded around with the end of my staff. He was standing on something. So was I. Between us, though, was some watery chasm. I pushed the staff at him.

‘Take hold of this,’ I gasped through chattering teeth.

He looked straight through me, as still and unresponsive as one of the carved figures in the monastery chapel. I pulled the staff back and turned it round. The other end had a kink at the top. If I got that into his clothing, I could pull him towards me.

Splash!

I’d leaned forward at just the wrong moment. A stray current had got me from behind and I’d overbalanced. One moment, I was standing a fifth out of the water. The next, I was several feet under. I opened my eyes, and looked up to see the sun-dappled surface of the Tyne rising higher and higher out of reach. From habit, I’d taken a lungful of air before my face hit the water, and I still had the skills of a swimmer. But the Tyne is not the heated swimming pool I used to keep up in my main palace. And age is age, there’s no denying. I couldn’t find the power in my arms to keep from sinking further into those frigid, black depths. Was now the right time for a prayer? I remember thinking as my chest began to hurt.

But the time came and the time passed. I found myself back on one of the sandbanks, pulling a now unconscious Bede by his hair.

There were a couple of the bigger monks waiting for me. Flashing scared looks at something behind me, they waded in to their knees and helped us out. I needed that. Without the water to support me, I’d have fallen straight down. They tried to pick me up and take me back to the monastery. But I had come this far. I wasn’t leaving until I was finished.

Bede was lying still on the river bank beside me. His eyes were closed, his face wizened and a touch blue.

‘The Gods’ – the monk corrected himself and switched to Latin – ‘The Devil has taken him, O Master. The Angel was too late.’ He made the sign of the Cross. ‘Come back to the monastery. Your body is all blue from the cold.’

‘Not taken anywhere yet, I think,’ I snapped back at him in a surprisingly clear voice. ‘Get the boy laid out on his front.’ I knelt over Bede, all sense of how cold and stiff I was banished from my primary attention. I reached out to the fleshless, white skin of his upper body and pressed with both hands. I pressed hard, and hard again, as if I were a servant making bread. Again and again I pressed, until I thought my thudding heart would just stop.

I suppose that was another opportunity for prayer. Again, I passed it up. Then Bede was coughing and spluttering and vomiting water on to the grass. I rolled him over again and looked on my handiwork. The young are marvellous creatures. The colour was already coming back to his body.

I wanted to promise him a sound whipping for what he’d done. But I now really was at the end of my strength, and I flopped helplessly on to the grass. Those monks had me wrapped in warm clothing and back to the monastery before I had time to think what was happening. Then straight to a bed made up beside the bakery oven and Abbot Benedict to watch over me until I was wakeful enough to bear the full weight of his anger.

Bede’s family came by in the evening with a sheep and a whole barrel of salt fish. I heard the little speech Benedict gave on my behalf. He excused my accepting in person on the grounds that I was confined to bed in my cell.

I woke this morning feeling decidedly perky. I don’t think I’ve been so with it in the morning since last Christmas in Canterbury, when old Theodore of Tarsus made sure to keep me off the beer. I glared at the novice monk who fussed around me, arranging food and asking endless questions.

Did I walk on water? Did I restore life by the laying on of hands? Did I expel the old demonic Gods from their last refuge in Northumbria? Did the Angel of the Lord say anything while I was all that time under the water that I might wish to share?

No and four times no!
I wanted to shout at him, my good mood clouding over. But I didn’t. So I’m now a candidate saint. There will be a sermon about me next Sunday. Aldfrith will come over in royal state and look pious. His clerk won’t bluster when I point out his illiteracy. When I’m dead, I don’t doubt they’ll have my body on show till it crumbles to dust.

Basic Greek restored my spirits. I was on excellent form. Wrapped in a double cloak under the thatch roof, my students all sitting obediently before me on the floor of beaten earth, I chalked up one of the more nonsensical passages from Revelation, and demanded an exact Latin translation. That was my excuse to set about flogging the arse off every boy I’d seen by the Tyne. When I ran out of energy, I wheezed and gloated while one of the novices drew blood for me.

Dear me – I said I’d describe the facts before I explained them. But I haven’t even described them properly. What
did
happen out there in the water? How was it I didn’t drown? How was it that Bede still had his head above the water when I went under, and had managed to drown by the time I got him by the hair? What really happened between the moment I fell off that sandbank and when I found myself on another, pulling Bede behind me, back towards a shore thick with boys and monks, all bouncing up and down in some kind of frenzy?

Good questions. Only, the more I think about the answer, the more I realise that yesterday afternoon is not the right place to begin. If I’m to make any sense at all – to me as well as to you – I’ll need to begin much, much further back.

Chapter 1

The story opens on the day when we began to lose Egypt. It was Thursday, 10 August 612, and I’d been just over four months in Alexandria. And at twenty-two, the infirmities of age were things at worst to be read about or imagined.

Martin gave one of his dry coughs as, otherwise noiselessly, he came into the room.

‘They’re gathered and waiting for you,’ he said.

‘Come over and look at this,’ I said, not bothering to turn. I waited a moment for him to cross the floor and join me by the window. ‘Down there,’ I said, pointing over to the left.

We were in one of the inspection rooms high above the Royal Palace. Its glass windows faced out over the city. The Sea Harbour and the Lighthouse were out of sight behind us. You had to be in the other inspection room to see those. This was, though, by far the best place for viewing the city called into being by the Great Alexander nearly a thousand years before – the city that, in age after age, had been the one place where Egypt and the West and the most gorgeous East came together for trade and for mutual enrichment.

Before us, the neat central grid of the city laid out as on some mosaic floor. Along the wider avenues stood the public buildings, their roofs glittering in the early light. In narrower streets leading off, you saw the houses and palaces of the higher classes. Where the main streets intersected were the public squares, some paved, others laid out as little parks with trees and fountains to give relief from the baking heat of the summer. Though, like all other places in my world, somewhat past its best, Alexandria remained a city of three hundred thousand people. If not all were now occupied or working, it still rejoiced in its four thousand palaces and its four thousand baths. Now Rome was a shattered dump, only Constantinople itself was bigger.

Over on the right, clouds of steam were standing up from the vast slums of the Egyptian quarter.

But I was pointing to the left. Yesterday, it had been almost dry. Now, snaking from far beyond and then round the Jewish quarter, the canal shone silver as it brought the flood waters from the westernmost branch of the Nile to flush out and refill the underground cisterns.

‘It’s later than we were told,’ I said. ‘But the Nile has risen. It’s now only a question of how high, and waiting for the harvest estimates to come in.’

‘I saw it twice when I was – er – when I was in Antinoopolis,’ Martin said, turning the sentence to avoid recalling his time there as a slave. ‘Herodotus said it’s all to do with the shifting winds to the south.’