So far as transacting the business in hand was concerned, the meeting went well enough. I’ll not go into the details of what we did in my office. But there were seventeen ways of dividing up the taxable land of the Lower Thebaid, so that the tenants got viable plots and the current owners kept enough to maintain some position. I’d commissioned maps and reports showing each one of these. Every one had its merits. It was a question of whether, and if so how hard, we wanted to hit the dissenting landowners. Then, of course, there was the complicating factor of lands willed in perpetuity to the Church.
Back in Constantinople, with officials from half a dozen ministries sitting in and everything on the record, it would have taken days. Here, it was just the two of us at my desk with a couple of clerks, and we were able to get through the complexities with nothing carried over.
‘Do come back a moment, if you please,’ I said to Martin as he was about to follow the clerks from the room. I’d been considering this since bumping into Priscus. Now, there was something important I needed to ask him.
He looked significantly at the quilted leather on the door. He sat down again, just a foot or so from me.
‘Aelric,’ he said, speaking low in Celtic before I could make a start, ‘I don’t know exactly how to say this. But there are things that I believe you ought to know.
‘I spent this last night going over those subsidy payments again. The Undersecretary in the Disbursements Office didn’t want to tell me more than I asked. But he left me with enough documentation for me to work some things out for myself.’
‘So, what was it?’ I asked. ‘Fraud or incompetence or superstition?’ I resisted the urge to smile. Even straight up the arse, the amount of opium he’d taken was derisory. Now, he was gabbling away like a confirmed eater waking from his dream.
‘All of them, and more,’ he said. He pushed a sheet of his own jottings across the desk.
I glanced at it. I then read it properly. I looked up.
‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘The subsidy has been located and cancelled five times in the past seventy years. Each time, it’s been carried into another budget and continued unbroken. It seems we have a heathen conspiracy going on here in the Disbursements Office. It wouldn’t be the first time, of course, this has come to light. Look at that stupid bugger of a Prefect – the one Heraclius burned to death last year for sacrificing to Apollo. If that still goes on in Constantinople, there’s no saying what happens in the provinces.’
Martin leaned forward and dropped his voice still lower. I could smell the garlic sausage on his breath. A locked room, Celtic, whispering: these were natural precautions back in Constantinople; not here, though.
‘Aelric, we’re talking seventy-five pounds of gold here,’ he said, ‘seventy-five pounds of gold every year since the time of the Great Justinian. You don’t need that to keep up a clandestine temple in the back of beyond. With one year of that, Priscus could have another army.
‘And this subsidy isn’t the end of it. Regular fractions of spending have been creamed off whole budget items. This isn’t the usual petty corruption you expect to see anywhere. It’s too consistent, over too long a time.’
I stopped him. ‘This is all very interesting,’ I said. ‘But it’s outside the terms of our commission. We were sent here to get the new land law into force, not reform the finances. We got the subsidy stopped because Leontius had set it in our path. Frauds in themselves on the Disbursements Office don’t concern us.’
I looked again at the notes. There had been some very sticky fingers at work. I looked away and bit my lip. I looked for guidance at the silken hangings on the wall and the electrum water pitcher I’d bought in the antiquities market. I looked back at Martin’s heavy face.
‘I suggest you drop the matter,’ I said firmly. ‘It isn’t our problem.’
‘Aelric,’ Martin said, putting his face back into order, ‘there’s something I don’t like about this. I can’t give you evidence yet. But I know when things aren’t right. We need to be careful.’
‘Agreed,’ I said smoothly. ‘Egypt is a world in itself. Even Alexandria isn’t completely part of the Empire. Augustus took the whole place over as a going concern, and no effort since then at incorporation has been a success. You only need look at the title and functions of the Viceroy to know this.
‘Now, I do appreciate your concerns. But you’ve said yourself you have no evidence beyond this fraud. Your enquiries never took place, and will never be acted upon more than they have been already. After all, it isn’t money that would otherwise find its way to Constantinople. If not for the Old Gods of Egypt, it would only be stolen for some other use.’
Martin stood by the door again. I got up and went over to him. I put my hands on his shoulders and looked into his face.
‘Martin,’ I said, ‘I want you to forget all this. It doesn’t concern us except so far as Leontius made it our concern. From tomorrow, he’ll be closing up that shabby little place he lives in all alone while in Alexandria, and I doubt if our paths will cross again.’
Martin tried to protest, but I led him over to the window. On the fifth floor of the Palace, my office looked out over the Palace Square to the Church of Saint Mark. Down in the square, the Nile Festival was continuing with black belly dancers and a demonstration of fire eating. We stood awhile, listening to the rhythmical thud of the drummers. I waited for the continued breeze off the sea to bring him back to a semblance of rationality.
‘I’ve a favour to ask of you and Sveta,’ I said with an abrupt change of subject that brought the conversation back to where I’d wanted to start it. ‘Maximin has been wandering again at night. Those useless bitches in the nursery won’t do the job I’ve set them, and I don’t see any value in having them whipped a second time. Can I ask the pair of you to take him into your own quarters while Priscus is about?’
All of a sudden, the cloud lifted from Martin’s face. He’d be delighted, he told me. The boy always got on so well with their daughter, and, this time, she could surely be trusted not to pull his hair or stick pins in him.
I thanked him. I’d now have to put up with Sveta twice a day; correction, we’d have to put up with each other. Though the heat and flies remained a sore trial, she still found energy for evil looks and God alone knew what private slanders to Martin. The immense and continuing favours I’d done him didn’t seem to register with her.
‘So you go directly off to Sveta,’ I said, taking him back to the door, ‘and get things arranged. See that Maximin is settled in with you. I want you to spend the rest of the afternoon and all evening not thinking about survey reports or Leontius or anything else connected with them.
‘I want you nice and fresh for tomorrow. The engineers will be coming round to discuss the reconnection of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Apparently, there is a difference of height between the two oceans, and we shall need to discover how the ancients managed the flow of waters.
‘Now, do pass on my regards to Sveta. I will try to visit your quarters before whatever Priscus has arranged for the evening entertainments.’
Down in the Eastern Harbour, the supplemental grain ships were still loading up under armed guard. They would be ready, the senior captain told me, to leave within the next five days. Assuming normal winds, all would be in Constantinople in time for Heraclius to pacify the Circus mob with double rations, and to shell out as bribes to get the Avars to leave Thrace alone.
The Harbour area itself was walled and gated. The streets by which it was approached, though, were dotted with small crowds. So far, protest was muted. So far, it seemed to involve men from the almost respectable classes. The supplemental requisition was little in itself. But it could easily be made an example of how the Empire was bleeding Egypt white. We needed to get those ships under way as soon as possible. Even before then, we had to get Leontius out of Alexandria and keep those landowners on side.
Now I was clear of all the dockyards, I looked over at the Lighthouse. If you walked westerly along the Embankment Road lining the shore, you’d pass some of the oldest and grandest buildings in the city, including the back of the Library. There was the old University Building. There were the old temples, all now converted into churches. There was the Spice Exchange. Then you’d get to the punctuated causeway that led across to the Lighthouse Island. A clever structure, this. It allowed easy access to the island without closing off access for ships to the Western Harbour. When it came to engineers – and, for that matter, to everything else – the Ptolemies had demanded and got the best the ancients had to offer.
But I didn’t fancy crowds got up in their afternoon finery and the babble among them of greetings and pleasantries in a Greek so exaggerated yet so corrupt that I still couldn’t listen to it without wanting to laugh. And Hermogenes and his message about more documents could easily wait another day.
I turned east, going back towards the Palace. It loomed before me, about twice as big as the Great Church in Constantinople. The elaboration of columns and statues and marbles of different colours never once took away from the knowledge that this was a vast, impregnable fortress, complete with access to its own harbour. It was the largest building in the city. For much of its history, it had been the most hated. In every park and square, and in every street in the city not too narrow or too twisting to block the view, it was a looming presence.
The guards at the southern gate pulled themselves presentable and saluted as they saw me approaching. But I looked at it. I thought of those airless corridors and those rooms with their heavy silk hangings. If Priscus wasn’t sleeping off some new exotic drug or teaching his cat to scratch out slave eyes, he might come looking for conversation. Or there was Martin, jumping at shadows while Sveta nagged him viciously about matters that probably involved me. Or there were those clerks, sweating away together over the latest set of price ratios I’d given them to calculate. If not that, there’d be…
I turned and went back to the Embankment Road. I turned east again. Walking briskly, I skirted the Jewish quarter, and made for the Gate of Pompey. Here, I was recognised a few times. My dealings with the Alexandrian Greeks had so far been limited. I wasn’t sorry for that. Except for Hermogenes and a few other scholars, I had little reason to deal with any of them. With the Jews, it had been a little different. One of the clerks in my preferred banking house almost bumped into me as he hurried about some business. Blinking in the sunlight, he stared up at me. With a muttered and vestigial obeisance, he turned and continued on his way. I looked at the rather dumpy buildings that surrounded one of the larger synagogues. But I had no business here today, so kept to the common faith area of the main road to the gate.
Being on foot, I expected I’d be allowed through without formalities. Normally, it was a matter of turning up and showing my face. With an obsequious bow, I’d be escorted round the heavy bar that blocked the gate by day and waved into the lush countryside beyond to continue my walk. Today, however, the guards had been changed, and a couple of unsmiling creatures looked hard at my passport. They didn’t so much as nod acknowledgement of the golden ink on the parchment.
If delayed a little, though, I was lucky. On both sides of the gate, wheeled traffic was stuck in queues a hundred yards long. This was one of the days in the month when the priests had all the death bins outside the city gates opened. They’d been here with the dawn – scented cloths tied to their faces while they turned over the bodies of the unconnected poor and choked out the required words. The priests had long since staggered off to get drunk. However, the public slaves were still fussing with their buckets of quicklime. In the now recovering heat of the mid-afternoon, the smell and the flies were unendurable. I’d try to find out from Nicetas at our next meeting what was the idea of all this delay – not that he’d make much sense even if he knew and even if he were inclined to share the knowledge with me. For the moment, it was enough that I was soon through the gate, and the high, grey walls of the city were fading out of mind behind me.