The Blood of Alexandria (49 page)

Priscus refilled my cup and pulled over a candle to heat his powder. ‘Resting,’ he said after another long pause.

I’d not expected any other answer from the moment I saw Priscus sitting so firmly at his desk. ‘Once I found the mob couldn’t get in,’ he went on, ‘and wasn’t doing much to cut through the lead on the roof, I decided to leave him for a day and a half in the Church of the Apostles. When I did eventually have him let out, he was more dead than alive. All that had kept him going, I am told, was repeated cups of communion wine. He had the priest bless every mouthful.’ He paused again, and breathed in the fumes of his evaporated powder. He pitched forward, banging his head up and down on the desk.

Nothing could kill Priscus. Nothing could harm Priscus. I’d known him too long now even to hope otherwise. I refilled my cup and drank deeply.

Getting sense out of the clerks in my office had taken an age. In the end, though, I’d heard how Priscus had somehow made his way back to the Palace and taken charge of affairs. No one could accuse him of irresolution. He hadn’t waited for the reinforcements. Instead, he’d lined up all that remained of the Palace garrison and led it out in person to a massacre of everyone who didn’t run for cover. He’d cut his way to the Prefecture and recruited every one of the quaking officers to his little army. With them puffing up his numbers, he’d slaughtered until the streets ran with blood and until every one of the rioters lucky enough to survive had burrowed his way back into the filthy slums from which he had issued. Now, order was fully restored, and it was time to punish all those who’d called the mobs into being before losing control of them.

‘Have you ever seen a man eaten to death by maggots?’ Priscus asked heavily. He looked up at me, tears carrying the mascara down his face in green rivulets.

I shook my head.

‘Then remind me in six days’ time, and I’ll take you back under the Prefecture. You’ll find the Viceroy’s secretary in a cell of his own. He came the high and mighty official when I staggered in here more dead than alive. Of course, I beat him to pulp when he tried to stop me from laying hands on the Great Seal. His death sentence was for treason. The manner of his death is for pissing me off.’

He sat up again, his mood brightening. He reached into a drawer and pulled out the Great Seal. Every one of my own intrigues since arriving here had been connected with getting Nicetas to use this as I desired. I’d never thought of just taking it. So long as Nicetas lay sobbing in his bed, surrounded by priests, Priscus was the supreme power in Alexandria and for as deep into Egypt as Imperial rule might still reach.

‘My darling Alaric,’ he said with one of his more charming smiles, ‘if I seemed less than overjoyed when you walked in, that is because I already knew that you were still alive.’ He reached into another drawer and took out a leather packet. From this he took out a folded sheet of papyrus. ‘This was waiting for you two evenings ago, when I got back from burning the poorer half of the Egyptian quarter. I hope you’ll not mind that I opened it in your absence. It does answer a question I know has been hanging on your lips ever since you walked in here.’ He pushed the folded sheet across the desk.

I took it up and unfolded it.

‘From the second and greater Pharaoh Meriamen Usermaatre Setepenre,’ it began, ‘to Alaric, Legate of the Greek Emperor – greetings and congratulations.’

‘I assume he’s the wog fucker who took Alexander’s head,’ Priscus broke in.

I nodded. He scowled and went back to scanning his death lists. I looked closely at the sheet. It had a few crossings-out and changes that made it pretty clear Lucas had written this by himself. It was good Greek and in a good hand. He must once have had the choice to be Greek or Egyptian. Why he’d not chosen the Greeks continued to astonish me.

Anyway, the congratulations were on my escape from his people. Apparently, they’d exceeded their instructions, and those ‘still in need of punishment’, would receive it from his own hands. He explained how the purpose of the attack had merely been to take me prisoner, ‘so that we might continue the business you cut so painfully short last month’. After much elaborations on his admiration for me, and his personal desire to continue ‘our most interesting discussions’, – I shuddered at that one – he got to the point:

You have, or are in a position to obtain, a relic of the Faith that we regard as of the highest value to the freedom of the Egyptian people. You will hand this to us – together with attestation from the appropriate religious authorities – at the midnight hour on the twenty-seventh day of the month of Mechir. For this purpose, you will attend on us in the market square of the town that sits in the shadow of the Great Pyramid.

You may bring armed men sufficient for your protection, and these will guarantee your safety when you meet with us. Do not presume to think your forces will be sufficient to overwhelm us. You will be on our territory. Do not presume to think we shall not observe your every move from the moment you leave the Royal Palace in Alexandria.

If you fail to attend on us in the place and at the time specified, I regret that we shall need to kill your servant Martin in a most unpleasant and prolonged manner. I have no doubt – bearing in mind your opinion of Martin and of the Faith – that you will do your utmost to comply with our wishes. The relic is as worthless to you as it is valuable to us. My only doubt is that you will believe Martin still to be alive. Since he has refused to write in his own hand to confirm this, I enclose evidence that you will surely regard as final.

The letter continued in a recitation of his praises for me, and of repeated promises for my own safety. I looked across the desk to Priscus, who’d gone back to chewing his pen.

‘Quite mad,’ he said. ‘Quite mad in all respects. By the way, dear boy, I’ve had the Egyptian date explained to me. Their calendar, I’m told, has no leap year, and so their dates and ours never line up in the same way. But this year, the date given is the 15th September.’

‘That’s twelve days from now,’ I said. ‘What is this “evidence” that Martin is still alive?’ I kept my voice neutral. I didn’t want it seen how my heart had leapt at the mere claim that Martin was still alive. Of course, I’d get him back. But it wouldn’t do to have this out with anyone – certainly not with present company.

Priscus smiled again, and reached back into the leather packet. He took out something rolled into a linen cloth, and passed it across to me.

‘You can trust me without hesitation, Alaric, that this was cut from a living body. You should know that I’m an expert in these matters.’

I unrolled the cloth. Within it, still reddened by exposure of northern flesh to the sun, was a left ear.

Chapter 49

The sun was fully up. The wind had fallen. The smell of death in the Palace square was omnipresent and oppressive. Priscus breathed in with an appreciative sigh and held the breath.

‘How many do you think you’ve killed?’ I asked with a change of subject. Priscus had pressed me to an early and liquid lunch. Now, we were outside, and free to take our conversation up again.

‘I’ll have the full report once all the bodies have been cleared away,’ he said. ‘My experience tells me, though, that it won’t be under twenty thousand. That will include the three thousand executions I’ve warranted. I think on our side we lost thirty men. If I could be left to manage that sort of proportionality against the Persians, I’d have Chosroes under siege in Ctesiphon.’ He breathed in again, and smacked his lips.

We fell silent as we made our way through the elaborately spaced avenues of the dead. They spread out before and around us. Wherever I looked was the blank look of death on faces still twisted in their final agonies. Like the sighing of winds in a forest was the soft groaning of the nearly dead. It sounded clear when the flies weren’t rising up in great buzzing swarms. You need a lot of opium and a bad night for dreams to produce the same horrors as Priscus had managed here. I resisted the urge to run back inside the Palace. I forced myself not to shudder.

‘There was no other way of settling the riots,’ he said, starting again. He must have seen something on my face of what I felt. ‘If Nicetas had taken my advice
before
the rioting began in earnest, the body count would have been closer to a thousand. But when you’ve lost control of a city as totally as he did, and when you have limited forces, promiscuous massacre becomes the only option. If you’re as disgusted as you seem to be trying not to show, I’ll tell you bluntly that you are partly to blame for the whole thing.’

I looked at him. Had the scale of killing embarrassed even Priscus?

‘Until you rolled into town with your notions of reform and improvement,’ he said, warming to his argument, ‘Nicetas was doing a good job – given the circumstances he’d allowed to come into being – of keeping Alexandria quiet. It’s a question of keeping the national groupings within the mob more at odds with each other than with us, and of neutralising dissent within the higher classes. What you did was to drive the higher classes to an alliance with this wog Brotherhood, and then into a desperate attempt to use the combined mob to put pressure on Nicetas. Even when they heard the Persians were sniffing about, they were so scared of what you were trying that they weren’t willing to back out until it was too late. Your “compromise” with the bastards came just a few days late. By the time you got that deal brokered in your office, the Brotherhood was already here in force, and had taken control of the Egyptian mob.

‘Oh, he could have handled things better than he did – and I look to you to countersign the letter of protest I’m drafting to Heraclius. But if you hadn’t presented Nicetas with a situation beyond his abilities to manage, he’d not have failed so completely.’

‘The land reforms have already been a success in Asia Minor,’ I said firmly. I thought round for a better argument to get me off the hook. You can’t argue with success, and Priscus had regained control in Alexandria with minimal forces. But if I could put up with accusations from fools like Nicetas, I didn’t like to hear them repeated and fleshed out by Priscus. Before I could find the words I wanted, Priscus stopped to admire one of the more inventive impalings. Here, the victim had been driven on to the stake through his collarbone. All vital organs had been avoided, and there were still remnants of life in the twisted body. The lips moved in some silent prayer. Priscus called to one of the police officers.

‘Wine for the malefactor,’ he ordered curtly. ‘Bring him back so that he knows he is dying.’ He turned back to me. ‘I’ll grant your scheme has been working out better in the Asian provinces than I expected,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I’m convinced enough by it to have had the law implemented in the areas I recovered from Persian control. But Egypt is different – as you’d have quickly noticed had you paid more attention to people than to ideas. The wogs are slaves by nature. They are slaves for us or for someone else. Between enslavements, they are dangerous animals. You don’t get the same system of control, replicated century after century, with every variant of foreign and domestic rule, without a very good cause.

‘I want to tell you, however, that we both deserve a better master than Heraclius. I represent order. You represent hope. Within the space that we together create, there can be civilisation. Let us somehow work together, and we can save this Empire.’

‘You can try all you will for a soldierly ring to your argument,’ I said, looking at the dying face while trying not to see it. ‘But you came here already knowing that the Persians were in the plot. I’ll grant you got names and details from that racking that you didn’t already have. But you’d been lecturing Nicetas for ages on the need to guard the Red Sea ports. You were doing that two mornings after you first announced your arrival to me. I’m not sure how long before then you’d been lurking out of sight. So why wait for the rising? Did you come here to keep Egypt from the Persians? Or was it to win a battle in Alexandria that you couldn’t win outside Caesarea?’

‘The answer to your question, dear boy,’ Priscus said, ‘is Nicetas. If he’d taken my advice, I’d have had half a dozen landowners into the Prefecture dungeons. A day later, none of this killing would have been necessary. As it is, however, Alexandria is pacified, and Egypt cannot be taken from us.’

We watched awhile in silence as a sponge soaked in wine was applied to the victim’s lips. The eyes fell open for a moment. Then life faded rapidly away. The police officer stood back apologetically, waiting further orders.

‘Dear me,’ said Priscus, poking at the now still body. ‘I could have sworn the creature had more capacity to bear pain.’ He sniffed and looked up at the burning sun. ‘Carry on about your business,’ he said to the police officer. We moved into another avenue of stakes. A few yards further down this one, and we’d bumped into a group of relatives weeping and praying over someone they’d eventually found.