The Blood of Alexandria (62 page)

‘May the relic of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ preserve us from harm,’ the Bishop, now beside me, interpreted himself into Greek. Taking care not to remove it from the linen bag that shielded mere humans from its raw holiness, he waved the lead container I’d earlier arranged to be ‘found’, and the men sweating over the circular stone looked a little less troubled.

It was nice, I thought, that someone had believed in my relic. If only that bastard Siroes hadn’t stuck his nose into the matter, we could already have broken out the wine. I looked up at him. He was standing overhead just beyond the edge of the crater, muttering away in Persian.

The stone grated again. This time, it turned free. Round and round, the men pulled and pushed it with their crowbars. At last, they set their crowbars beneath it and flipped it over on to the granite floor. It fell with a heavy thud that dislodged a rush of sand from the crater wall. The upper cone of the thing crunched as it turned on the loose grains of sand. Priscus and I stood looking down at it in the silence that followed. Several of the torches had been dropped and extinguished in the shock of the noise, and the men who’d been holding them looked stupidly down. One of the men we’d brought to supply heavy muscle fainted clean away. Another turned to bolt back up the sandy slope. He was only stopped by Priscus, who set about him with the little cosh he carried in his clothing.

It was a big piece of stone – about a yard and a half across and eighteen inches deep. On its underside was a threaded projection about a yard across. It was this that had fixed it into the opening that it covered. The stone must have weighed several tons. There was a soft and sinister murmuring from the few onlookers who remained. It was one of those sounds that could easily presage real trouble. But the Bishop was praying loudly again in Egyptian and waving the relic. It really was going down a treat with everyone who didn’t matter.

Then it was back to business. We got the torches relit. Lucas had the men threatened back to the job of extending the crater properly so the opening was in its centre, and then of sweeping sand away from the opening. The Bishop now helped no end, with his continual prayers and waving. He even came down and stood beside us. His repeated mentions of Jesus Christ had a perceptibly steadying effect on the men. At last, the work was done. I looked into the round blackness. I’d expected foul or at least stale air from a place sealed for so many thousands of years. Apart from the slight smell that reminded me of dry wood left out in the sun, the air wasn’t bad in the least. I coughed and listened for the echo. I took up a pebble and dropped it in. I hadn’t counted to one before I heard it fall. I threw another in at an angle. I heard it skip sharply along a flat surface. So far as I could tell, we’d broken into an underground chamber. From the drop and echo of the pebble, it must be a very large chamber, or the entrance to something large. This might be the only entrance If so, this was the sort of find tomb raiders in Egypt had been talking about for ever. Very likely, it was the tomb of someone really important. Leontius would have died for this. Then again, he probably had.

‘You are the luckiest man alive, young Alaric,’ Siroes called down with another of his laughs. ‘I no sooner tell you that you will know what we seek than you find it.’

‘God be praised!’ Lucas cried, not to be outdone by some Persian. Perhaps mindful of the look on the Bishop’s face, he’d lapsed back into Christianity for the moment. ‘The twenty-third of Mechir shall be remembered for ever in Egypt as the first day of its liberation. We will rename our capital – in Egyptian, of course – as City of the Twenty-Third Mechir.’ He looked at Siroes, who seemed baffled. ‘Among the Greeks,’ he explained, ‘this day is known as the 11th September.’

‘I don’t think we need lectures on comparative chronology,’ Priscus sneered up at him. ‘And don’t you think we should wait and see what’s down there before we start celebrating?’ He turned to me. ‘But you really are the luckiest,’ he repeated softly. ‘It doesn’t matter how deep the shit you fall into – you still come out smelling of roses. I’ll give you until the third hour of the day to get yourself rested. It goes without saying that Martin is under conditional reprieve.’ He looked at my face.

‘Don’t play stupid, my dear fellow,’ he said, now laughing. ‘Someone has to go down that hole. And you can be perfectly sure it won’t be me.’

In broad daylight, the stone was still more curious than it had appeared in the night. Its top, where it had faced outward, was as weathered as if it had been on show for a thousand years in Rome. Its underside, though, and along its thread – which was, by the way, as perfect a spiral as I’d ever seen – it was polished to a high gleam. The hole it had until just now filled was still a yard width of blackness. While men around me chattered and moaned away, and the Bishop raised his voice beside me in prayer, I gripped the edges of the hole in both hands and cautiously dipped my head inside. I shut my eyes and waited for them to grow used to the darkness. When I opened them, I saw the dull roughness, about ten feet below, of granite. Otherwise, I could see nothing at all.

‘I’ll need lamps and two men to carry them and give general assistance,’ I said to Lucas.

He looked round. Macarius was an obvious choice. I’d have asked for him anyway. I didn’t see how there could be anything actively nasty down there in a place that had been sealed for thousands of years. But he might have his uses in overcoming more passive difficulties. Who else, though? Martin was out of the question. Even if everyone could be sure the place had only one point of entry, we’d never be allowed together out of sight. But I wanted someone else who knew Greek.

As if he could read my thoughts, the Bishop stood forward. He swung his relic in its bag and swallowed.

‘?“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,”?’ he said in Greek, ‘?“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” This holiest relic of Jesus Christ will keep us secure from all demons,’ he added. ‘And I am told that the medallion around My Lord’s neck was blessed by His Holiness the Patriarch of Rome.’ He paused, and then: ‘I have the highest regard for His Holiness, of course. I have long prayed that he might see through the false learning of the Greeks that has blinded him to the Unpolluted Truth of—’

I interrupted him with thanks for his goodness and courage, and racked my brains for what I’d been told about the care of slaves in some mining venture I’d joined the previous year.

In all work involving deep tunnels, you see, air is the limiting problem. Men use up its goodness to nourish their bodies, and lamps sensibly diminish its volume. It is gradually replenished from above, but not fast enough to allow unlimited work. I didn’t know how deep this place went. But I did know that even three men with lamps would need to move quickly. I knew Macarius was good for the job. The Bishop had the wiry look of a native from the middling classes. So long as we stayed together and kept our nerve – and so long, of course, as our luck was in – we could do our business and get out. I only hoped the place did contain something credible. Doubtless, Siroes would continue to be a harsh judge of progress. Even so, he’d boxed himself in to some extent by allowing that what we’d found did represent progress.

‘As I’ve told you, my dear,’ Priscus said to me while good walking shoes were laced to my feet, ‘Martin is under conditional reprieve. You just take whatever time down there you think is needed. But this is always governed by what you call the test of reasonableness. If you’re down there so long that I have reason to suppose you’ve found another way out, I shall not be happy.

‘Other than that, Alaric dearest, I wish you the best of luck. If there are any spirits down there, I really do hope that relic is as holy as your blackbird friend believes it to be.’

With that, and a friendly slap on my back, Priscus stood aside to make room for the twelve-foot ladder that had now been produced. Further and further into the hole it slowly went. The men holding it sweated and trembled. One of them was obviously beseeching the Bishop not to risk himself down there. His Grace dismissed the warnings and stood forward to see how the ladder was doing. For a moment, I thought I might have misjudged the distance, and that we’d need to send for an even longer ladder, or lash two together. But it came to rest with about eighteen inches above the level of the hole.

‘I’ll go down first,’ I said, pushing Macarius aside. Whatever might be down there, I told myself, let no one suppose Aelric of Kent was a coward. I stepped on to the ladder and scurried down.

Chapter 61

The moment I was out of the sun, it turned cold. The sounds of men and animals and of the breeze that had just been all around me now came from a single point overhead. I stepped from the bottom rung of the ladder on to a floor that was, as I’d already seen, of levelled granite. I looked round. Macarius and the Bishop were still fussing beyond the entrance with their lamps. Now light was coming through the hole again without blockage, I could see a little around me. I was in a high, circular chamber several dozen feet across. It might originally have been a natural bubble in the rock. If so, it had been heavily remodelled. With its level floor and its curved walls that tapered upwards to the opening, it had the appearance of a small water cistern. It certainly had nothing about it that suggested a tomb. Other than the rubble that had fallen in from above, it was empty. There was no coffin or funeral goods. The walls looked much the same as the floor. They had no paintings or reliefs of the sort I’d read were to be found in the tombs of the Egyptian great. It might have been a cistern. The doorway, four feet or so wide and seven high, that led into complete blackness might have been an access point for water.

I was still down there alone and without light. But my eyes were now adjusted, and the entrance above me shone with an intense, if not very effectual, brightness. Keeping a careful watch on the floor in front of me, and testing each step as I went, I moved towards the doorway. It had no door that I could see, and another loud cough told me that it went off in some direction without blockage. The cistern possibility was reducing by the moment. This was too obviously a doorway.

Now I was standing close to it, I could see that the wall wasn’t quite the same as the floor. It was painted all over with a kind of pitch. I ran my hands over the smooth surface. I could feel indentations that might have been consistent with reliefs that had, for some reason, been covered over. I turned my attention back to the doorway. But now Macarius and the Bishop were hurrying down the ladder, and faces looking in from above blocked the light.

‘Is all well, My Lord Alaric?’ Siroes called down in a voice that might have been satirical – though it was always hard to tell with him. As he set his hands around the edge of the opening, he managed to knock in some loose pebbles. The sound and echo of their fall was shockingly loud.

‘I’ve just been eaten by fucking monsters,’ I snarled back, ‘and this is my ghost calling out from Hell. What else do you bleeding suppose?’ Like the pebbles, my voice echoed loud in the chamber. No reply. Though perfect in Greek, Siroes hadn’t shown much taste for badinage. The lamps now with me showed more of the chamber, but revealed nothing more than I’d seen already or supposed to be there. If there had been anything on the wall under that coat of pitch, it wasn’t showing in the light from the lamps. Before the smell from the lamps could permeate the room, I breathed in slowly through my nose. Except for that smell of dried wood in the sun, the air about me was sweet though pretty still. I looked at the shaft of light now coming freely again down from the entrance. It was sharp and clear.

‘Unless you can suggest anything else,’ I said to Macarius, ‘we go that way.’ I pointed at the still complete blackness of the doorway. There was nowhere else to go.

He bowed silently and offered me the nicer of the two lamps he was holding.

‘Jesus God!’ the Bishop called softly. ‘Is this not indeed the entrance to Hell?’

Too late to worry about that now, I thought. I took the lamp from Macarius and stepped forward into the doorway. I shivered a little from the deepening cold – and perhaps a little from fear of what lay beyond.

I found myself in a corridor that sloped both downward and to the left with moderate sharpness. It kept about the same dimensions as the doorway, but was finished more roughly than the chamber by which we’d entered. The walls had no pitch covering on them, and I could see the reflection of our lamps on the chisel marks that showed how, with what must have been immense effort, the corridor had been carved through the solid granite. And there was little doubt that this was an artificial work. Without knowing yet how far it went, or if it deviated from what I could see, I had the impression of a spiral leading down into the earth.

‘We must be quick about this,’ I said to the Bishop, who seemed inclined to hang back. I explained about the air.

He nodded. The relic bag was beginning to shake in the tightness of his grip. I put an arm round his shoulder and quoted from Scripture in my reassuring voice. He thanked me in a voice that still shook. But he quickened his pace.