The Blood of Alexandria (63 page)

My earlier jitters now behind me, evil spirits were the last thing on my mind as I walked carefully ahead. I’ll not deny, though, I was worried. I was worried about how large this place was, about whether its layout became more complex the deeper we went into it, and – above all – about what, if anything, we’d find to take back and show to Siroes. But I could hear Macarius behind me with his usual firm step, and could hear his steady breathing. Except I’d keep a lookout for shafts or subsidence in the floor ahead of me, I didn’t plan to show the smallest concern.

That was until we reached what may have been a complete circuit on our downward path. Here, the smooth corridor came to an end. In its place was what looked a natural fissure in the rock. On the left side, it had been cut back to about the width of two men. On the right, it had been left as jagged as it must have been when found. From here, a flight of steps led sharply down into the earth. They may not have been that level when first cut. Now, they were much worn. In places, they had been chipped by the carrying of heavy objects into little more than a very steep incline. We paused. The air was still sweet, our lamps still bright. There might have been the smallest hint of a breeze coming up at us. I peered uncertainly down. The steps seemed to deviate to the left in another spiral. Or perhaps the course moved about to take advantage of the natural shape of the fissure.

‘We must press on,’ I said to no one in particular. These were the first words any of us had uttered since leaving the upper chamber. Apart from the scraping of our shoes, it was the first sound anyone had made. My words had a flat, echoless quality. I didn’t feel inclined to utter that many more of them.

‘The Lord Siroes will expect nothing else,’ Macarius said, the natural flatness of his voice emphasised by the surroundings.

He was right. Like it or not, we had to press on. If we came to a dead-end, we’d have to reconsider. But this was simply a matter of going down some steps that may already have been a quarter-mile from the entrance hole.

‘This is a place of ungodliness,’ the Bishop quavered. ‘Can you not feel the evil miasma that reaches up to embrace us?’

It was turning colder, I’d grant, and I didn’t at all like the shut-in feeling that increased with every step. But evil around us hadn’t been something I’d yet noticed. Regardless of the words, though, what I could hear was the voice of a man looking for some reason to put his lamp down and refuse to go a step further.

‘If you dissent from Chalcedon, Your Grace,’ I said in an attempt at the conversational, ‘I suppose direct relics of Christ are still more holy.’ I looked at the bag and pursed my lips. ‘It was, I think, the Patriarch Nestorius who asked: “How can Jesus Christ, being part man, not be partially a sinner as well, as man is by definition a sinner since the Fall?” Now, the answer that your side in the dispute gives is that His Humanity is wholly absorbed within His Divinity. This being so, the relic was possessed by an almost purely Divine Substance. For us, though they “undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation”, the Substance of Christ also partakes of the Human.’ I looked as far as the flickering light showed into the depths before us. If it weren’t for that bloody trio waiting far up in the sunshine for what I’d find down there, I’d have turned back myself. But we had to go further. If that meant rehearsing the debates at and after the Council of Chalcedon, it was a price to be paid.

‘That is, My Lord, a most just observation,’ came the reply in a suddenly firmer voice.

I took a step forward and asked him to explain. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist.

‘Let us begin with a statement from the First Council of Ephesus,’ he said, taking a step to keep up with me, ‘that I think is accepted equally by both sides of the most unfortunate dispute that has sundered the garment of Holy Mother Church.’ He closed his eyes a moment to recall the exact wording, then quoted: ‘?“The Word in an unspeakable, inconceivable manner united to Himself hypostatically Flesh enlivened by a Rational Soul, and so became Man.”?’

I nodded reverently and, bowing to keep my head from knocking against the uncut granite, took another few steps. He followed. I kept going. So did he in both senses.

‘Now, My Lord,’ he said, oblivious to where he was, ‘the important question is the nature of this Union of God and Man. I do so regret the claim of the Greeks that both Natures remain distinct within the Single Personhood of Christ. This surely raises difficulties; in particular, it renders meaningless the title traditionally given to the Virgin of “God-Bearer”. For if Christ has a Double Nature, She can be so described only so far as She gave birth to the Human Nature . . .’ So he droned on and on and we continued down the steps. It was crude stuff. His Patriarch, Anastasius, could only have accepted this line of argument with endless reservations that brought him pretty close to the orthodox position of Chalcedon. Still, it was useful to hear what might be a fair sample of opinion outside Alexandria.

Of course, it kept us moving ever down those steps. And they did seem to go on and on – sometimes winding one way, now another; sometimes going down in a straight line. Once or twice, I slipped where the steps had been worn away, and my lamp nearly went out. More often, it was just a matter of keeping my head from knocking against the unsmoothed granite of the ceiling. At last, though, we stood again on level ground. I couldn’t say how far down we were, or which way we were now pointed. I gave the job up as useless. It was impossible to estimate anything. The air continued good, the breeze now more noticeable. I forced myself not to speculate on another entrance. Those bastards still had Martin.

Chapter 62

We were now in another corridor, much higher and wider than the first. Much greater care had been taken with hollowing out and shaping what may also have been a natural fault in the rock. So far as I could see, this followed a more or less straight course, though there was a continued downward slope that prevented us from seeing even as far ahead as the lamps threw their light. How far from the surface were we? I kept asking myself and asking again. How much deeper must we go? No point in asking, I told myself. It went as far as it went. I held my lamp and took a firm step forward.

As said, this was a higher and wider corridor. Its surfaces were more finely chiselled. If wondering how far it went was pointless, I couldn’t help but wonder
how
this had been carved. Even assuming there had been some original pathway through the rock, this was granite. The work of hollowing and smoothing with such perfection of finish, and of carrying away the rubbish, must have taken whole armies of men, slaving down here for decades. In its own way, this was no less remarkable than the Pyramids. All else aside,
why
had this been done?

Again, I put the questions out of mind. I looked instead at the reliefs. This time, there was no doubt of them. They stretched along this corridor on both sides. Ugly, depressing things they were, too. They had nothing Egyptian about them. They were in a style more realistic than I’d seen from the Egyptians, though also less varied. Whatever race had produced them showed a partiality for violence and pain unusual by any standards. A recurring theme was the siege and capture of towns. Machines of great ingenuity would be employed to break down or undermine defensive walls. Once through the walls, the attackers would go into a frenzy, sparing neither children nor women and the aged. They would kill by stabbing and dismembering and cutting to pieces as if in a slaughterhouse. Their male prisoners they would take pleasure in hanging on low gallows, so that the feet touched the ground. Sometimes, they would pack straw round the feet of their victims, or wrap them entirely in straw, and then light a fire.

For a full quarter-mile the reliefs extended. When their authors tired of siege warfare, they turned to more individual atrocities: pots filled with burning liquid placed on the heads of tied victims; women strapped on to beds of nails and ravished with immense, heated phalluses; children thrown into vats of corrosive fluid. And every few yards, in couples or trios, embracing or delicately reaching out to touch finger to finger, you could see the insanely grinning perpetrators of these horrors. How old the reliefs were I couldn’t say. They must have been thousands of years old. They might – if Lucas and his odd chronology were to be taken seriously – be tens of thousands. The granite from which they were carved was, of course, unweathered and immortal. But the paint that had once covered the whole in a coat of bright colour was long since faded. In the lamplight, it was barely more in places than a uniform brown. But every one of those mad, evil faces, I could easily see, had once been topped with a mass of golden hair.

Onward along that silent corridor we walked. I say these things went on and on. After a while, though, I stopped looking. After what I’d seen done to living flesh in Alexandria, you might think none of this could have much effect on me. But there is a difference between what is done from some shadow of regard for the public good, and is an admitted deviation from the normal course of government, and what is gloatingly celebrated in what may be the best art of a race manifestly superior in the art of war to those attacked and conquered and eradicated for pleasure. Priscus himself might have learned something from all this. Priscus himself might even have been rattled by the immense iteration and reiteration of horrors.

I tried to start a debate with the Bishop about the orthodox claim that ‘at no point was the difference between the Natures taken away from the Union, but rather the property of both Natures is preserved and comes together into a Single Person and a single Subsistent Being.’ He made a faint effort, and the mere sound of our voices, as we went over words traded again and again on the surface, brought some cheer in that place of dry and ever colder silence.

We ran into trouble after perhaps half a mile of our twisting downward course. At first, it seemed we were reaching a dead-end. As we got close enough, though, for our lamps to make sense of the dim shapes outside the immediate pool of light, I could see that it was a door. Better described, it was one of those stone slabs you read about that drop from the ceiling and close off all access beyond. In Egypt – elsewhere in the Empire too in the days of the Old Faith – the rich would try endless elaborations of these things to keep their embalmed corpses and their grave goods safe. Fat lot of good it ever seems to have done: if not because of tomb raiders, why else are the antiquities markets so often glutted?

‘We could go back and bring down men with tools,’ the Bishop suggested.

I shook my head. I had no wish to turn back now. Besides, getting anyone else down here might be more trouble than it was worth. If there was any way through this door, it wasn’t to be had by brute force. I leaned against the slab and pushed hard. I took the pressure off, then leaned again. There was no movement.

‘There may be some hidden lever,’ I said. There was any number of concealed openings in the Imperial Palace back in Constantinople. Three centuries of palace intrigue around emperors, sometimes driven mad by fear of being trapped, had left the place riddled with secret tunnels. Most had been forgotten on the death of the commissioning Emperor. Many led to the least likely places. I’d seen enough of these on my exploratory trips with Heraclius to know the ingenuity with which the rocking levers that opened them could be blended into the surroundings. As said, the decorative scheme here tended to the elaborate, and it was a matter of feeling round for a concealed depression.

Whatever we did next, there was no point in hurrying. By unspoken agreement, this was an opportunity for rest and reflection. We sat down on the floor. We chewed slowly and in silence on some bread and dried dates and drank some of the water the Bishop had been carrying on his back.

‘My son,’ he said, now looking for words of greater directness than he’d needed for theological dispute, ‘for what little comfort it may bring, I will say that, if I had influence over any but the unarmed Sheep of Christ, I would never allow what is happening. As it is, I will, if required, excommunicate the renegade Egyptian and write to the Greek Patriarch in Alexandria about the shameful conduct of the Lord Priscus.’

I nodded. Flowery thanks would have been less convincing. So too would a pretended conversion to the Monophysite heresy. Martin had done good work with the man. We might yet have a way out of this mess. The Bishop prayed awhile in Egyptian, interpreting every line into Greek for my benefit. I tried to look solemn as I thought again how stingy Priscus had been in not having any wine packed for us.

‘I am wondering, My Lord’ – Macarius spoke for the first time since we’d left the surface – ‘if these tunnels might not be an elaborate ruse to throw us off the true path. Might not this doorway be nothing more than a carving into the solid rock? I have heard of such in tombs.’

I continued chewing on the rough bread. I’d been thinking the same. If this were a diversion, it might mean retracing our steps all the way to the surface, and examining every inch along the way. There might be another concealed way from the entrance chamber. There might even be another entrance from the surface, and the function of the one through which we’d entered was to draw attention from this.