The Blood of Alexandria (40 page)

‘I think there are certain formalities to be completed before we take ourselves off to Nicetas,’ I said, now I was sure of a steady voice. I stood upright and took a step back towards the Prefecture entrance. ‘However they were got, you have truths that must be used fast if they are to be useful.’

Chapter 39

‘If you won’t let the doctors in, my poor young fellow,’ Priscus drawled as my own so far unpersuasive flow of reasoning came to another halt, ‘that will soon need to come off.’

Nicetas groaned feebly as he shifted position again. Since our last meeting his leg had swelled up to twice its normal size, and there was no end to the pus now oozing from the sores.

‘The head of Saint Mark is being taken specially from its golden case,’ he said in Latin, the pain having taken his Greek away. ‘Prayers are being ordered in every church for the moment when I feel its healing touch.’

‘All the more reason, then, Nicetas dear,’ Priscus added as he went back to the matter in hand, ‘not to interfere with the arrests. I do assure you that, if we don’t have everyone under lock and key by tonight at the latest, Alexandria will go up in flames, and then we lose Egypt. Even if this latter doesn’t worry you, the former might get in the way of your church services.’

‘Let me repeat,’ I added, ‘we have five hundred men under arms to control a city of five hundred thousand. I’ve taken the liberty of sending for reinforcements to every place within a two-day return journey. Even so, I’m not sure it will be enough to put down an insurrection.’ I looked again at the warrants sealed earlier at the Prefecture. They were scattered loosely on a table Nicetas had beside his daybed. Every one of them had been heavily scored through in purple ink.

Nicetas followed my glance and frowned at me. ‘You had no authority,’ he said with an attempt at sternness. ‘All security matters that touch the higher classes of any community are for me and for me alone.’ He beckoned one of his monks over again. He cried out with pain as the man lifted his leg and dropped it down like a slab of butcher’s meat.

‘With all respect, Nicetas,’ I said, ‘my commission gives me full authority to take such actions as I deem necessary for implementation—’

‘Your commission,’ he snarled back at me, ‘gives you no right to take men from their houses when I’ve spent two years buttering them up. It certainly gives you no right to put their sons on the fucking rack. Can the pair of you begin to understand what you’ve done?’

He winced and his whole body shook as the monk poked a finger into one of the larger sores and clapped on what looked like a shrivelled scalp. Priscus and I fell silent during the prayers and application of holy water.

‘I think you need to understand,’ Priscus opened again, ‘that this is a matter of treason. What you call possible rioting Alaric and I know is planned insurrection. We are to lose Alexandria to a coalition of the possessing classes and the joined mob. At the same time, there is to be a Persian attack on Egypt from across the Red Sea. If we lose Egypt, the Empire starves. Before then, Syria will be attacked on two fronts. Do you want to go down in the history books as the man who wrecked the Empire?’ He held up the two sets of confessions that Martin had neatly copied out. ‘We also have the evidence of your own secretary. He confessed without any pressure. He confirmed—’

He stood back as Nicetas picked up a case of waxed writing tablets. He howled something that wasn’t in Greek or even Latin, but might have been Berber, and swung round viciously with them and caught the monk straight in the face. The man took his hands off the leg and stood calmly back to continue his praying.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do!’ Nicetas cried accusingly. He called the monk forward for an embrace and apologies. He’d do penance, he swore, for this. In the meantime, he’d bear up under the healing ministrations of the Church.

Ignoring the trickle of blood down his cheek, the monk looked pleased with himself and went back to his probing and kneading of the sores.

‘I’ve already had my secretary released,’ Nicetas gasped with a nasty look at Priscus. ‘Do you know how difficult it is to find trilingual secretaries in Alexandria?’

‘I believe the first one you had was poisoned,’ I said. ‘I think that is a matter that bears reopening.’

‘And I suppose you are the expert,’ Nicetas jeered, ‘when it comes to finding an assistant isn’t all you thought he was.’

I fell silent at the reference to Macarius and looked at the icon of Heraclius hung where everyone coming into the office could see it glowering down. It was one of the lush productions we’d ordered for sending out to the provinces. It showed Heraclius in full regalia, Christ and the Virgin standing behind him. I’d wondered for a while which of the two cousins was worse when it came to getting anything done. Nicetas had won the contest within my first month. This was just the presentation of the olive garland.

‘My dear fellow,’ Priscus said, his face turning darker and darker with suppressed rage, ‘I will remind you once again that we have a city of five hundred thousand ready to go off beneath us like a volcano, not to mention a Persian attack by sea. We need those traitors out of circulation, and we need an immediate show of force using the men we have.’

‘But it won’t be five hundred thousand all rioting together,’ Nicetas replied. He covered his eyes as he tried to blot out the pain of the latest ministrations. ‘If it’s five thousand who riot, that will be the limit,’ he said at last. ‘And I won’t remind you that the Greek and Egyptian mobs are just as likely to turn on each other as on us.’

‘We’re looking at mobs, each one five or ten times that size,’ Priscus said. He was breathing heavily as he repeated the obvious for perhaps the third time. ‘The Greek trash is already gathered on our side of the Wall. The Palace approaches are all blocked. Alaric and I pushed our way through on foot with drawn swords. There’s an unverified report that the Master of the Works was torn from his chair and disembowelled as he tried to get in to the Palace.’

‘And the mobs are being directed,’ I said. ‘They are being directed on both sides of the Wall. If they are allowed to come within sight of each other, they will combine.’

‘If you were that concerned about the mob,’ Nicetas asked suddenly, ‘why did you let the grain fleet go? Everything was fine before you bullied me into sealing those orders. Are you trying to tell me that if I don’t seal everything else you push under my nose, things will get worse?’

I thought Priscus might explode. But if I still hadn’t discovered any infallible way of making this bloody Viceroy take action, I did know how to make him not act at all.

‘We have clear proof,’ I said, pointing at the confessions that Priscus was still clutching, ‘that fourteen of the lesser land-owners have been engaged in a treasonable correspondence with the Brotherhood, which is, in turn, allied with the Persians. We know further that the traitors have sent hired agitators to stir up sedition among both main communities in Alexandria. And we know that all the deliberations of your Council have been passed to these people by your own secretary. Where treason is concerned, we have an overriding duty of care to the Emperor. I know that he will be most concerned if Alexandria and Egypt are endangered by any conspiracy that might have been avoided.’

‘And why has everyone turned traitor?’ Nicetas howled. As if he were now being threatened with the rack, his voice echoed about the high room. ‘If you hadn’t come here, demanding what I’m sure Heraclius, given proper advice, would never have intended for Egypt, would there have been this “treasonable correspondence”? If you hadn’t discovered it and insisted on arrests, would there now be paid incitements to rioting? I don’t think so. All my troubles began that day when you showed up here with your schemes of “improvement”.

‘I even think you brought on my bad leg. I was ever so healthy before you began making trouble. I think you’re just jealous because you’re a barbarian and I’m not.’

‘Alaric and I are both members of the Imperial Council,’ Priscus said through gritted teeth. ‘If, in our joint written opinion, you are unfit to perform your duties, it is within our power to—’

‘Don’t you presume to threaten me!’ Nicetas roared.

I shuffled a little to my right so he had his back to me. I tried mouthing warnings to Priscus to drop this line at once. It was too late.

‘Don’t you dare threaten me,’ he went on, his voice cracking into a scream. ‘I don’t like to remind you, Priscus, but, whatever your actual reason for being here, you are out of your area without permission. You have only so much position in Alexandria as I allow you. As for you, Alaric, you may represent the Emperor. But I
am
the Emperor here in every sense that matters. Your power of deposition applies to provincial governors, not the Viceroy of Egypt.’

He shut up and gave us both fierce looks. I glanced at the window. Though shuttered, and though positioned away from the sun, there was that slight change in the colour of the light creeping through that indicated the afternoon was almost over. Nicetas looked down at his leg. As his face had grown redder, this seemed to have taken on a blueish tinge. Managing somehow not to move his leg, he twisted round and thrust his face into a cushion. As the slaves redoubled their fanning, he began to sob bitterly.

‘I won’t seal
anything
more,’ he said indistinctly. ‘You can’t make me do anything against my will. All we have to do is sit quiet, and the conspirators will send round for an amnesty. This is what always happens. If we do nothing, the trouble will go away. As for the Persians, the Red Sea tides won’t let them across. The way you both talk about them, anyone would think they were led by Moses.’

‘In ancient times, the poor understood their place in the order of things,’ some old fool in a cloth wig intoned for the third time. ‘They starved without involving themselves in the affairs of their betters.’ For the third time, there was a burst of appreciative comment about him. Someone else stamped hard and called on the Judgement of Heaven.

‘I hear the perimeter about the Harbour has gone down,’ I said, leaning on the rail that went round the roof of the Palace. ‘We’ll know soon enough if the incense warehouses take fire.’

‘My dearest boy,’ Priscus sniffed, ‘even now, I could stop all this with three hundred men. Give me the right seal on wax, and I could pacify Alexandria for a century to come.’ He went back to looking over the rail. ‘Has Martin turned up my relic?’ he asked with a sudden change of subject.

It was coming towards the midnight hour. The Viceroy’s belief now that doing nothing would help settle things down hadn’t turned out yet to be right. Seen from the Palace roof, Alexandria was beginning to look like the constellation of lights on a fresh grave. As yet, most of them might only have been bonfires in the public squares. But here and there, it was plain that public buildings were being fired. Every so often, as the breeze shifted from the north, snatches of wild shouting and a smell of burning were carried up from the city. The one large exception to the rising tide of chaos was a district bounded by the Library, the Wall and the sea. From here on the Palace roof, it showed up as an oval of unbroken darkness against the scattering of flares all around. I tried to remember what district this was, but I was too fixed on other matters. I looked round again at Priscus.

‘I think we need to speak about your piss pot,’ I began.

I got no further, as it was now that the Master of the Works came on to the roof. Reports of his murder, he assured us, had been exaggerated. Even so, he’d had a close escape. Everyone gathered round as he described how the mob had seized and cut the throats of his carrying slaves. Luckily for him, he’d managed to get into a public toilet, where he’d hidden until a Syrian banker had taken the mob’s fancy. It had been his entrails wrapped about the statue of Julius Caesar.

A crowd now formed round Priscus, who began his lecture about the need for a show of force before the mob ran out of all control. Except our meeting with Nicetas hadn’t gone as hoped, he’d had a wonderful day: crisis management, and torture that had actually worked. The cup in his hand ever refilled, he was sliding into his confident military hero act that had so pissed me off in Constantinople. How he didn’t drop from exhaustion was testimony to a superb constitution – or advertisement for the powders he was alternating with the wine.

‘We are quite safe in here, though, aren’t we?’ Martin asked. We’d moved across the roof and were now looking over the Egyptian quarter. As yet, this was less brightly lit than the centre. I had no doubt, however, things were running out of control there as well.

‘The Palace was built with this sort of thing in mind,’ I said reassuringly. ‘I did read that one of the Ptolemies was torn to pieces by the mob when it broke in. However, he had just raped and murdered his sister, and the guards may have been on strike. I’m not sure of the details, but I believe the Palace defences were strengthened after that. I really doubt if we are in any danger.’