Richard Blake - The Blood of Alexandria

‘Well,’ he said, breaking the silence, ‘I can tell you there is money on the other side of the Wall. The wogs ain’t all low-grade scum. Some of them have big money. Can you believe it, though, sir? Some of them is rolling in gold, and nowadays they just won’t turn Greek. I do some of them now and again when they come over on business. Not a word of Greek. They need interpreters even to get their bums wiped. Can you believe it, sir? They get money, but won’t turn Greek. They don’t believe nothing about the Conjoined Human Nature of Christ. Some of them even says – or so I’ve heard – that Our Lord and Saviour was just some ghost with God looking through the eyes. It ain’t natural, I tell you, sir. It ain’t like the old days.’

He was right there. The nice thing about orthodoxy is that, however nonsensical, it can be defined by an agreed set of words that have a reasonably agreed meaning. Monophysitism, though, wasn’t a single heresy, but a heading under which any number of heresies took shelter. Some of these were so close to orthodoxy, they barely needed settling. Others were so radical and bizarre, they hardly counted as Christian.

It was here in Alexandria, while sifting through the rubbish that now clogged the shelving racks in the Library, that I’d fully appreciated the nature of heresy. Sergius and I had taken our sounding among the Syrians, and found that most of them weren’t opposed in principle to a Single Directing Will for Christ. But this wasn’t Syria. Here, we had against us all the ingenuity of Alexandria wedded to the fanaticism of Egypt. Getting these crazies even to discuss a settlement would be like herding cats.

‘Oh, sir!’ the potty man said to me, or perhaps to Martin.

I pulled myself out of a reverie that was branching into the decay of Greek as a common language, and looked back at him. He’d stopped his wiping. He rinsed his sponge again in vinegar and pushed it back inside the framework. Martin winced and groaned. The Potty Man took it back and held it up to me. It was covered in fresh blood.

‘Cruel things is piles, sir,’ he said to me. ‘And these ones is hanging down like ripe figs. I’m surprised your man can sit down.’

‘Martin,’ I sighed in Latin, ‘I have told you many times. Wiping isn’t enough. You really do need to wash down there. A dirty arse, and in this climate – why, you’re asking for trouble.’ I would have said more. But it was now that the babble of Egyptian voices over by the gate took on an ugly sound. Perhaps the Greeks had given offence. I paid attention as they came to the end of their own chant:

Let us ever recall for whom

This city is the living room,

And know ourselves the master race,

And keep the natives in their place.

‘Never a truer word,’ the potty man said approvingly. ‘Never a truer word.’ He listened to more of the commotion, then recalled his business. ‘I can recommend some truly good ointment for those piles.’ He looked into his bag again and pulled out a small lead container.

I took it from his hand and sniffed the contents. So far as I could tell, it was opium in a kind of bird fat. It wouldn’t do Martin any harm, and might lift his mood. I handed it back and nodded.

‘Of course, there is some that disagree,’ the potty man said as he set to work again.

I stared at him and frowned.

‘Oh, I mean, sir, about the wogs. Why, it was just this morning that I applied this very cream to someone who told me the wogs too were God’s Children, and we had more to bind than divide us. Right quality he was, I can tell you. He said that, with all the corn being shipped off to Constantinople, we’d soon all be starving together. So we might as well act together.’

For the first time, I pricked up my ears. Who was sowing concord between Greek and Egyptians? I tried not to sound too interested as I asked the question. I didn’t succeed. But another coin got the man going again.

‘A great fat man, it was,’ he said, ‘a fat man with a bald head and a red spot on his nose. Terrible piles, he had. He nearly screamed as I touched them. But he said the government was trying to fuck us all over – pardon the expression, but those were his very words. He promised me a reward if I’d spread the word of unity. ‘‘There’s success in unity,’’ he said, ‘‘success in unity.’’

‘Me – I don’t never mix with wogs. Nasty, dirty people, I say they are. Shit in the street: can you believe it? He was a generous tipper, though, sir. He even took a whole pot of my ointment. He said he was on his way to a journey along the Canopus Road. He thought it would help with the pain.’

I looked again over at the gate. About fifty of the Egyptians were getting up more of their chant about Alexandria. Even as they gathered, though, reinforcements were pouring out of the guard house, their swords already drawn.

‘Of course it was Leontius,’ I said. ‘Who else is there to fit that description? Who else is likely to be going about preaching unity against us from both sides of the Wall?’ I’d finished with my meeting in the Food Control Office, and we were now heading back to the Palace. I’d said I wanted the new land survey reports on my desk after lunch at the latest. It was now surely pushing towards the sixth hour of the day.

‘But what can you do about him?’ Martin asked. He tagged along beside me, sometimes cheerful, sometimes quiet, as the opium worked its magic on his fairly virgin body. I stopped. We were about to come from a side street we’d taken to avoid the public executions into the square containing the obelisk and the statues of all the Ptolemies. From here, it was a short walk along the Processional Way into the Palace square itself. I looked at a pair of yellow shoes in the glazed window of a shop. They were pretty enough, but I preferred something cut a little lower to show off my ankles.

‘Among other matters Nicetas hasn’t decided to share with me are security and public order,’ I said. ‘That means I can’t just have the man taken up for suspected treason. But we had a threat of this yesterday – and Nicetas was watching. We now have some evidence that he’s going through with the threat. Stirring up the mob, especially both sections of it, is something that even His Highness will accept requires action.

‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow. At the least, I can have Leontius kicked out of Alexandria. And unless we’ve pushed them over the edge of desperation, I don’t think the dissident landowners will stand a moment by his side if they think he’s actually planning to raise the mob against us.’

As we passed into the square, we bumped into the front of a long procession. There wasn’t time to get past it. The best we could do was jump backwards out of its way. We stood in front of what had once been the Department of Medicine at the University, and was now a training college for missionaries, and watched it go by. It was soon obvious this would take some time. Led by three bishops I hadn’t seen before, its centrepiece was a great wooden image of Saint Mark. It was smeared over in elaborate patterns of mud, its feet kept ever wet from pitchers of clear water. The patterns were repeated on the bodies of the humbler celebrants. Waving papyrus imitations of corn sheaves, they sang their thanks for plenty in the year to come.

If anyone there knew what I’d just learned about the black mould on the remaining stores of grain, he didn’t seem inclined to spoil the party.

Still, there could be no doubt the Nile was rising nicely. The silver stream I’d seen the day before in the canal was become a dark flood. It gurgled loudly through the cisterns that ran under every street. Already, Lake Mareotis was seven inches up on the day.