The Blood of Alexandria (35 page)

‘O Cousin of Our Lord Augustus,’ he began woodenly in an accent that wasn’t local, but might have been Cretan or even Cypriotic, ‘Most Noble Viceroy, I come before you holding the body of my only child, who has been taken from me by want of bread.’ As he spoke, he held out the bundle, and an arm with about the thickness of a broomstick hung suddenly loose. It was a dramatic effect, and gasps of horror and pity rippled backward through the crowd. Assuming it wasn’t accidental, it showed the man had been well rehearsed.

‘Oh, my dear,’ Priscus had whispered as they were all allowed in to see us, ‘if only they might have one throat!’ I’d not have put it so uncharitably myself. For all I knew, some child had died. The price of bread had risen again, and the free distribution was only enough for a whole family if the parents didn’t scoff it all themselves. Looking at this man, he could have eaten his whole family to death, plus his neighbours. But children were always dying. It didn’t need to be starvation. There was accident. There was pestilence. There was murder. There was rape and murder. The death bins hadn’t been emptied for a while, and suitable bodies could be pulled straight off the top. If this little bundle was from a bin, we’d never have noticed. The smell of the living would have masked the rotting of the dead. Priscus had made sure to deaden his nose before coming in. I almost wished I’d accepted a pinch of the blue powder.

But the allegedly grieving father had made his speech, and was now awaiting a reply. You expect a certain pause after someone of his quality has spoken. Immediate replies are demeaning. But this long silence was pushing things. There was a rising chatter towards the back of the Hall. Someone laughed. The herald looked nervously round again. The white paint somehow transferring itself to the lower strands of his wig, Nicetas might have been turned to stone. I could feel the nerves of the slaves behind us, as the ostrich feathers shook in their hands.

There was a sudden commotion far over to my left. I moved my eyes to see what it was. A woman was pushing her way through the crowd.

‘Bread,’ she cried, ‘in the Name of God, give us bread!’ Someone behind her joined in. Over to my right, some utterly disgusting creature with one eye now pushed his way to the front and began howling about the grain fleet. There it still was in the docks, he shrilled, stuffed with food that could keep Alexandria from going without right up to the next harvest. Other voices joined in. The grain fleet! The grain fleet! No one wanted it to leave. No one would settle for less than its immediate unloading.

This was all unscripted, and the directing agents did their best to jolly the proles back into line. But I could see from the confused looks they were darting at the platform that they’d counted on our playing along. The crowd was fast becoming a shouting, rippling thing beyond control. The line of guards that stood between it and us was more for display than use; and the doorway back into the Palace was twenty yards behind us, with stairs down from the platform. And still Nicetas sat, silent and unmoving. If we’d been sitting instead before some vast bonfire, ready to collapse and spill super-heated ashes right over us, it would have been less scary.

‘I hope you will one day find it possible, my love, to forgive me,’ Priscus said softly without moving his lips. He’d taken advantage of a relative lull the directing agents had managed, though I still had to listen hard to follow him. ‘But I seem to have forgotten to say that it wasn’t just to show off your pretty face that you were called down here. Since you’ve made yourself the expert on food supplies, Nicetas thought you might care to speak for him.’

Oh, fuck!
I froze with horror. For the first time, I realised that every pair of eyes on the platform was swivelled in my direction. If this was how Priscus wanted his revenge for that birthday sneer, he was excelling himself. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was allowing one of his nostrils to twitch. If he’d been splitting his sides with laughter, it wouldn’t have shown his mood to better effect.

I swallowed and forced all thought of the Leontius documents out of my head. There was no point, though, even trying to loosen the knots in my stomach. I kept my face rigid and thought quickly. In Constantinople, I’d sat any number of times below Heraclius in the Circus, and watched him debate with the people. It could while away much of a dull afternoon to hear his whispered instructions to the herald, and see how close he was sticking to the line agreed in advance. However, if I’d done as much as anyone alive to set these lines, I’d never yet been called on to whisper the instructions myself. I looked again over the expectant mob, trying desperately to pull together the main facts of a report that hadn’t got half my attention as I drowsed by the swimming pool.

‘Tell them,’ I muttered uncertainly to the herald, ‘there is grain aplenty in storage. So long as no one demands extravagance, there is no reason why anyone should starve.’ I don’t know how the man heard me, but he did. I swallowed again and waited for him to finish. At least I didn’t need to get up and speak. The resulting stammer would have brought on disaster straight away.

‘Tell them,’ I added at last, ‘we’ll pay for the child’s funeral as an act of grace.’

And so we were in business. As often as the herald translated my words into the appropriately slow and ceremonious phrases, and the gong sounded to confirm the reply was ended, so another of the two-legged vermin before us would be put up to a reply or further demand. This was the main difference with Constantinople. There, the Circus Factions had their ritual chants to mix and match as their leaders found appropriate. Here, it was individual voices. But there was, I soon discovered, a limiting etiquette. If it was obvious a prole was using his own initiative to call out a protest or question, no one would make a fuss if it was ignored.

‘It is the Will of Caesar,’ the herald explained as we got to the matter uppermost in the thoughts of every mob, Greek or Egyptian, ‘that the grain be transported to the Imperial City that sits on the waves between Europe and Asia. As the Great King Xerxes had those waves scourged for the destruction of his boats, so equally in vain shall we contest the decision of the Lord’s Anointed. The grain ships must go. They will go.’

‘And how, then, shall the finest seed of Alexander be fed?’ someone called out from about twenty feet into the crowd. He stumbled over the unfamiliar words he’d had whispered into his ear. And ‘finest seed of Alexander’! Even now, that shrivelled husk in the Library basement could have fathered better semblances of the human race than this gathering of lice. But I’d finally got my facts and figures straight. By doubling every number in that report, and counting as already present what could be moved in from the smaller cities, I was able to create an impression of plenty in the public granaries. I’d rather have stuck to the more likely bare adequacy – more likely, that was, assuming the black fungus didn’t spread too much further. But with those ships on show to anyone who could get through the cordon into the Harbour, we needed more than claims of adequacy.

Someone came back with a detailed question about grain requisitions in the Eastern Delta. It was the sort of question that required inside knowledge. But what could surprise anyone about that? I had an answer to this that was almost the truth. Certainly, no one had the means to doubt it. We moved to another detailed question, and then to another. They came in almost logical order. My impression was that very little was said in this debate. That’s an impression, though, that every public speaker seems to have. Even taking into account how everything went through the herald, we did cover a lot. Every so often, there was a tremor in the lighting as the sun moved from one mirror to another. And a mood that had started out as at least belligerent had moved through the sceptical to the barely discontented.

‘His Highness the Viceroy will be thirty this coming Wednesday,’ I whispered. I lowered my voice still further in the new silence of the Hall. ‘Be vague about quantities, but announce a free distribution of flour – no, of fresh bread – for that day.’

That got us our first cheer of the afternoon. With every pause in the herald’s ritualised description of the grinding and kneading and baking of the corn, the acclamations rang out. I breathed an involuntary prayer that no one would ask what was on offer once the Christmas distribution had been eaten up.

No one quite did – but the meeting wasn’t yet ended. Someone over by the statue of Alexander asked if the natives were to get the same. A tricky question, this. If I said yes, there’d certainly be nothing left for later distribution. And this might lead to the question I wanted to avoid. If I said no – I thought of what I’d seen earlier in the Egyptian quarter. It felt as if every pair of eyes in the Hall that could see past the herald was focused on me.

‘Tell them the natives get whatever is theirs by custom,’ I breathed so softly, the herald had to sway back a little to catch the words. The exact meaning of what I’d said could depend on circumstances. ‘But announce a three-seventh subsidy on the price of beer to go with the free bread.

‘Oh’ – I thought quickly about another of the reports I’d had read out to me: we needed something to focus attention on the absolute present – ‘and announce a distribution of one pitcher of oil to every man who presents himself today at dusk before the Church of the Virgin.’ If I worked the warehouse slaves through the night, the natives could have theirs first thing in the morning. For the moment, though, it could be made to seem a Greek privilege.

And that swung them round. As the cheers died away and the gates at the far end of the Hall were pulled open, the herald was crying out in a voice of bright cheerfulness that everyone should go and get ready for the Evening Service, where he could give thanks for the ever-flowing bounty of the Imperial government.

‘Well,’ said Nicetas, stretching his arms as he moved for the first time that afternoon, ‘I think that went rather better than expected.’

The Master of the Works agreed. Another Council member praised my mastery of the relevant facts. Another began some turgid paean to my ‘matchless eloquence’. No one bothered asking what might have happened if the landowners had really wanted a riot. Without turning, I could hear Priscus sniffing up one of his milder powders.

We were alone in the Hall. The herald had jollied nearly everyone out, and the guards had pushed the few lingerers into the street. It had been a fine sound as they locked and barred the gates. I loosened my sweaty clothes and allowed what passed for fresh air to get at my body.

‘Oh, Alaric,’ Nicetas continued with a look away from me, ‘you will be pleased to know that I am minded to seal the orders for the grain fleet to depart. His Holiness the Patriarch has finally decided that the day after tomorrow will be our time of greatest blessing. It will be the day of Saint Lupus. He was very good to Heraclius and me when we set out from Carthage. I still have the relic with me that we used to calm the storm on our second day.’

He stretched out his right leg and groaned. As if from nowhere, one of his monks appeared with a box of something I doubted was medicinal by any reasonable definition. Was it worth raising the matter of the redistribution warrants? I asked myself. Best not, I answered. With Nicetas, it was one thing at a time at best, or nothing. I sipped at the wine cup someone had put into my hand.

‘No point, I suggest,’ Nicetas said again, ‘getting out of these fine clothes. I invite everyone to attend Evening Service in my own chapel, and then dinner afterwards. No dancing girls, in view of what day it is. But the new priest who’ll read from Saint Basil between the courses has a most beautiful voice.

‘What is that still doing here?’ he asked, breaking off and looking down the Hall.

It was the child’s body. It had served its purpose, and, in the rush to get out, had been dumped. There was other debris left behind. But that little bundle in the stained cloth, its blue-spotted arm still poking out, must have been contributing most to the smell that lingered in the air.

‘Get this place cleaned up,’ the Master of the Works said to one of the senior slaves. ‘We’ve a presentation here from the schoolchildren of Naucratis.’

As he spoke, the light from overhead suddenly gave out. I looked up at the mirrors. Every one of them was now dull. I looked back down and blinked in the gloom. There was a peal of distant thunder. I felt a draught on my bare chest.

‘Ah, that was our reserve plan,’ said Nicetas, still jolly though his monk was massaging relic oil into the raw flesh of his leg. ‘I did ask His Holiness the Patriarch to pray for rain. If you couldn’t persuade the mob to go away, the weather would disperse it. I think you’ll agree the storm is right on time.’

Chapter 35

I followed Hermogenes into the inner parts of the Library. In these corridors, narrowed in places to just a few feet by jumbled racks and cupboards, his predecessors had arranged what fragments were suffered to remain of the old stock. There was no access here for the public. Few visitors to the public areas could have known this place existed. Only those who knew their way by heart through the often unlit galleries and seams of this book mine would venture alone through the little door set into the wall a few yards down from the statues of Ptolemy and his friend Alexander.