‘There’s another one coming up on the right,’ said Martin in his depressed tone.
I looked up from the shitty brown water and followed his pointed finger. At first, the reflected glare of the sun was too much for me. But I squinted and looked again. Sure enough, it was another body. Its belly was puffed up like an inflated bladder, and it bobbed about, face just visible beneath the water. I watched as the current from the south and the wind from the north drew us closer and closer together. It passed by about a dozen yards from the prow of our boat. I forced myself not to turn and continue looking at the bloated face and the white, bulging eyes. Not a pretty sight, I said to myself. Still, it affected Martin less than the occasional crocodile.
It was the second day of our journey up the Nile to Letopolis. After a little trouble with the winds of the sea crossing, and then a brief difficulty over further transport, it had been a smooth and uneventful voyage from Bolbitine. I’d somehow imagined the Nile as about the width of the Tiber, and passing between masses of lotus plants and various reeds on either side, with wide expanses of black land beyond. I hadn’t fully appreciated the scale of the annual floods. They’d swollen the river as wide in places as Lake Mareotis, and had covered up the black land almost to where the desert started.
We were now coming out of the Delta – that immense fertile plain watered by the seven branches of the Nile. As its branches came closer together, the river itself was more embanked and no longer so impossibly wide. Even so, it remained wider than I’d expected, and I now understood that the undivided Nile above Letopolis would continue wide. Moreover, since we were leaving the great flood plains behind, the narrower waters had wholly covered up the black land. On each side of us, the desert was increasingly evident – a line of red, its interior hidden by the heat haze.
If I hadn’t conceived the details of their appearance accurately, I knew well enough that the waters would eventually recede, leaving behind them a thick layer of mud. This would be the virgin soil in which the harvest would be sown come October, and from which, come March, the fabulous wealth of Egypt would be reaped. If those who sowed and reaped it had never yet seen much of this wealth, that, I told myself, I was here to change.
Here and there, the tops of the taller palm trees poked above the waters. Every so often, we’d pass little clusters of dwellings crammed on to artificial mounds, looking for all the world like islands in the sea.
‘Boats setting out from the left bank,’ Captain Lucas called out in his flat Greek. I stopped myself before I could look to the left. We were passing up the Nile, I reminded myself. Left and right here were defined by the position of one looking downstream. Over on my right, a flotilla of tiny canoes had set out from one of those artificial mounds. Each one carrying a man and a few runtish children, they rowed close beside us. It didn’t need any grasp of the language to know what was wanted. With piteous wails, the children stretched out their arms towards us, now and again pointing into their unfilled mouths.
Had I seen this a dozen times already? Two dozen? It was hard to tell. On that dreary, unnaturally silent expanse of water, all events of the same class blended eventually into one. I know that the first time we’d come across these desperate wretches, I’d told Lucas to throw our waste into the river. He’d shaken his head. Do that, he’d assured me, and they’d follow us up river until their strength failed. So now, as before and a forgotten number of times before that, I looked steadily down until the cries were out of hearing.
‘I haven’t known the waters to rise this high so quickly,’ Martin said, giving me one more of the rare scraps of experience from his time in Antinoopolis. ‘They might not have had time to gather in all their stocks of food – assuming, that is, the tax gatherers left them anything at all.’
‘So, what happens then?’ I asked. Even as I asked, I knew it was a redundant question. I wondered why the people couldn’t get by on fish when corn was in short supply. The waters might be poisonous from all the stirred-up filth of those African mountains. But if that didn’t kill the fish, why should the fish kill us? Come to think of it, what about all the ducks and other birds I’d seen in those wall paintings done by the natives in ancient times? I hadn’t seen any so far on the journey. But they had to be somewhere. Or had they already all been eaten? I glanced over at the women, who were huddled together on the land. Unlike a few miles back, they hadn’t been sent out in the canoes to offer themselves to us.
‘I’m sure there were many more people when I was last here,’ Martin said.
Imperfect as they were, I knew this already from the census returns. Taxable households were down from three million in the time of Justinian to just under half that now. There was little doubt the numbers would drop still further before the new harvest. It’s one of the marvels of Egypt that you can sow and reap nearly the same amount of corn with whatever the number of hands. But I was beginning to realise what was behind the calls for delay from the dissident landowners. Almost certainly, they couldn’t get the new law cancelled. But if they held out long enough, they’d lose far less in the reallocations of land.
‘You should get out of the sun,’ I said to Martin. ‘Even with your hat, your face is looking red.’
‘I was about to say the same to you,’ he replied, gently stroking my neck. ‘Skin like ours wasn’t made for this climate. Alexandria’s nothing by comparison. And it gets worse.’
We went back to the awning placed above the middle of the deck. Though only about ten feet wide, it was a longish boat. It would never have done for any work at sea, but was built for speed up and down river: sails and a dozen oarsmen in reserve for the journey up, a tiller for the journey back. The accommodation was hardly luxurious, but I’d been more interested in speed than in comfort when arranging the boat.
I sat down on one of the cane chairs and poured two cups of wine. It was the poor, local stuff. Too much, or drunk too fast, and it was sure to give a headache. But the water we’d brought with us didn’t bear considering.
‘We should be in Letopolis early tomorrow morning,’ I said to Martin with a nod at Lucas. I tried to sound reassuring. I failed.
‘I don’t like him one little bit,’ Martin whispered yet again in Celtic. ‘You didn’t see the really nasty look he gave you just now when your back was turned. It’s not my place to say, I know, but I did think you’d book a military ship. If we need to be there just one day, does the journey have to be so fast?’
‘Oh, Martin, Martin,’ I said. I wiped the sweat from my face and poured more wine. ‘You really are like that shepherd boy in the fable. You’ve taken against everyone who’s come your way since we first docked in Alexandria. One of these days, you’ll meet a right villain, and no one will listen.’
It would never have done for Martin’s nerves if I’d admitted that the day might now have come. The requisition I’d ordered back in Alexandria had referred me to one Lucas, Captain in the Nile Postal Service. On the dockside in Bolbitine, I had met someone calling himself Captain Lucas. His documents had been in order. He’d scanned mine and saluted very correctly as he took me for an inspection of the Southern Argos. Like Martin, I’d expected something larger. But I’d also said I wanted speed. There was no doubt this looked a fast vessel.
Lucas had struck me at first as thoroughly professional in his management of the boat and its crew. It was only as we proceeded further up this desert of shining water that any doubts had emerged. The beating he’d given one of his men for pissing on the deck had seemed rather much for the offence. I’d told Martin to look the other way as the hooked strap rose and fell, and had done my best to blot out the screams and the smell of vomit. Afterwards, Lucas had stormed up and down the tiny deck, hissing and muttering away in an Egyptian that chilled the blood. Even the trim beard that had looked so reassuringly Greek at first was managing somehow to appear in a different light.
I glanced over at the right bank of the river. It was slipping by about a half-mile away. And, if I’d laughed at Martin’s fears, there were crocodiles in that filthy water. They broke the surface less often than the corpses. They were out there, even so, and they scared me.
I opened one of the wooden chests I’d brought along. Big, heavy things they were. Lucas had taken one look at them before telling me how the loading of his boat required them or our slaves to be left behind. That’s why I was having to pour my own wine. I took out a sheaf of papyrus. I went through it and put it back, taking out another. From this, I took out three of the larger sheets. I passed them over to Martin.
‘It’s the Devil who puts thoughts in idle minds,’ I said with a stab at piety. I cast around for a definite text from Scripture to reinforce the point, but could think of nothing appropriate. ‘Now,’ I continued, ‘since there’s nothing very scenic to look at in any direction, we might as well get on with some work. You may disagree, but I think we can reconcile these two sets of land measurements if you assume that one of them uses the units abolished by Diocletian. Why anyone should still have been using them two centuries after the event is a question not worth asking…’
And so we worked productively away for the rest of the afternoon. I was vaguely aware of the orders Lucas was shouting in his maniac voice and the rapid movements of the crew as they went about their pulling on ropes and shifting of sailcloth. I ignored the periodic cries from still more of those wretched flotillas. Every so often, Martin would set about himself with his flywhisk. Once or twice, he may have killed something.
At dusk, the flies came down in earnest. It was then that the fine mesh netting was let down around us and the smoky charcoal was set alight in the brazier next to us.
‘It would be most pleasing if you could spare the time to join us,’ I said to Lucas as he watched Martin dishing out our food. ‘I’m not eating anything connected with the river,’ Martin had insisted in Celtic while our stuff was being carried on board. ‘If you don’t want the runs all the way there and back, you’ll take your own food along.’ I’d given way to his urging. After all, he had lived in the country, and might for once be expected to know what he was talking about. And so, while everyone else ate food that, cooked down in the little galley kitchen, smelled divine, we were grimly munching our way through increasingly stale bread with olive paste and dates pickled in honey.
Lucas bowed and touched his forehead. He quickly rearranged the netting once he was under the awning and squatted on the deck in the Egyptian manner. It was one of those alien touches – nothing in itself, but cumulative – that had set Martin off, and was progressively undermining my own composure.
‘With the river as it is,’ he said, leaving the hard bread untasted, ‘we can put straight in at the makeshift dock that Letopolis has outside its walls this time of year. I understand, however, that My Lord has business at the house of Leontius. This is a fortified compound a mile outside the walls. With your leave, I will arrange chairs to carry you there. To be sure, it is sad news you carry to the household.’
‘I assume the news has not preceded us,’ I said, looking steadily at Lucas.
He stared impassively back.
‘It seems to have preceded us along the coast from Alexandria,’ I added.
‘He was a man of note in his own district,’ came the reply. ‘He was famed far beyond for the attention he paid to the boundaries of his estate, and to his collection of rents and customary dues. He was a man of considerable note in other ways – learned in the ways of Egypt, and assiduous in collecting objects from its days of glory. News of his death reached Bolbitine some while before My Lord’s arrival.’
‘But it will not, I think, have reached so far up river yet as Letopolis,’ I prompted.
‘It is sad news for the household that My Lord carries,’ came the reply.
I darted a look at Martin’s scared face. I took another sip of wine, and asked about general conditions in Letopolis.
‘Though I have, in the absence of your slaves,’ Lucas answered, ‘undertaken to interpret for you, I can assure you that Greek remains well enough known in and around the city. I do not suppose that my services will be required for any confidential dealings.’
I nodded and chewed hard on my bread. To keep the conversation going, I asked if it was true that no one had Greek any more as a first language south of Oxyrhynchus.
‘My Lord and his secretary speak the language to each other,’ he answered, ‘but neither of you, I think, is Greek?’
‘A Greek,’ I said firmly, ‘is anyone who speaks the language and follows the ways of the Greeks.’
‘Or whose ancestors began to do so long enough ago for the taint of wogitude to be forgotten,’ Lucas added with a smile.
‘There was a time,’ he went on, ‘when the Greeks came upon Egypt like the Nile flood. Then, they went where they pleased and were irresistible. But their flood has for many generations now been ebbing. And, again as with the Nile, the ebb exposes more and more of the hidden land of Egypt. It is, perhaps, a land enriched by the Grecian flood. The Greeks leave us the Christian Faith, and their alphabetic writing, and the concept they took, I think, from the Latins of a determinate and written law. But it will be Egyptian land.’
He put his hand up to refuse the wine I was offering. Most natives, I’d found, would drink anything offered them that wasn’t actually poisonous. Many, though, were oddly abstemious. Lucas, I realised, was one of these. The evening before, I might have sent Martin to dig out some of my kava beans. I’d brought them along, though hadn’t managed an infusion since leaving Alexandria. But it was the present evening, and I decided to leave them packed away.
‘So, you think the Greeks will eventually lose Egypt?’ I asked, drinking the wine myself.
‘To every nation is appointed one day of glory,’ Lucas said. ‘The Jews and Latins each had theirs. Whoever and wherever they be, your people may, in some future age, have theirs. It is obvious that the day of the Greeks is now coming to its end.
‘To every nation is appointed one day of glory. To some, God allows a second. Such is the case with the Persians. Who can tell if such is not also the case with Egypt?’ He rose, saying there was much to be done if we were to sail through the night for a morning arrival.
Martin clutched at the little silver cross Heraclius had given him as a coronation present. I stirred honey into the wine and drank deep from the jug.