With a very correct bow to me and to the seal, the Keeper of the Archive handed me back the original of my commission from Heraclius.
‘My Lords will forgive the long wait,’ he said apologetically, ‘but this is our second most restricted file. Copies must be taken of all application documents.’
‘It’s beastly hot down here,’ Priscus complained as the man went back into his office to fuss with a box of lead seals. He took up a sheet of papyrus and fanned himself. ‘Do I guess right that the heating is on – at this time of year, and in Alexandria?’
‘The archives don’t just cover the ground floor of the Palace,’ I answered. ‘There’s also a labyrinth of rooms in the basement underneath. I’ve never been down there, but I understand they reach under the whole of the central gardens. There’s special heating all year to keep off any damp from the cisterns.’
Priscus grunted and pulled at the gold threads to loosen his collar. The green wash was beginning to migrate on to his chest. I explained again about the effect of damp on papyrus, and that it was through the records contained here that Egypt had, since the first Ptolemy, been governed often against the settled will of the natives, but always unshakeably – and always could be, despite the best efforts of fools like Nicetas.
‘I must ask My Lord,’ said the Keeper, coming back from his office, this time with the file, ‘not to go to your usual seat in the colonnade. This file can only be taken into the glazed viewing room, and I regret to say that I must observe you at all times. I must also insist on your leaving all writing materials with me.’
‘So how did you discover this?’ asked Priscus as we took our seats in the glass box.
‘I came across references to it while looking up something else,’ I answered. ‘As you know, they fled to Egypt after the birth. Like most Jewish immigrants, they ended up in Alexandria. They were then caught up in the arrests that followed the uncovering of yet another Jewish sedition.’ I positioned the overhead mirror to shine more light on to the table. There was adequate lighting, but only from a row of lamps placed in holders on the outside walls of the box. Beyond these, the Keeper watched us very carefully. ‘I had been intending to have a look at the arrest file. You can see, though, the trouble involved. And I didn’t feel there’d be much here of interest for an idle viewing.
‘The official report of the Trial and Crucifixion, of course, would be interesting. But Constantine was in Italy when he established the Faith, and he was able to lift these records from the Jewish War section of the archives in Rome. I’m told he then destroyed them.’ I untied the boards of the file and spread the pages on to the table.
‘But this is the original document?’ Priscus asked with a catch of his breath.
‘No,’ I said. I pointed to the wording at the head of each page. ‘Constantine got his hands on this one as well. But he wasn’t personally in Alexandria, and the archivists were able to insist on the normal practice of taking a full copy. I suppose the compromise he had to make was restricted access for ever.’ Hands shaking, Priscus lifted one of the pages close to his face and read. For the first time, I noticed that, like me, he read silently and without moving his lips. I followed his rapid scanning of this page, and then of another.
‘Nothing here,’ I said, ‘to shock the most scrupulous orthodoxy. Nothing here, indeed, to shock anyone – except those inclined to doubt whether Christ existed. And there aren’t many of those, now the schools in Athens have all been closed down. Still, I can see why the file is restricted. If the heretics can twist any meaning they like into the Plain Word of Scripture, there’s no telling what they might do with a set of semi-literate police reports.’
Yes, I know, irony on these matters could be unwise, even with Priscus. But the irony was lost on him. In his position, I wouldn’t just doubt if there was a God: I’d be desperately hoping there wasn’t one. With what he’d been up to these past forty-odd years, there’d be a whole section of the Lake of Black Fire cordoned off and waiting. Yet here he was, desperate to lay hands on the smallest contact with the Prince of Peace.
‘It’s not an original,’ he muttered, ‘but I do know the rules. Anything that has touched anything holy becomes holy itself.’
It would have been easy to agree with him. With this in his hands, he might have been persuaded to forget the piss pot and bugger off to Syria. There, he could have tied the file to his lance and ridden straight – I could hope – to his death. But if not the Patriarch himself, there was any number of experts to put him right on this one.
‘Afraid not quite, Priscus,’ I said. ‘If you can prove beyond reasonable doubt that Joseph touched the original statement when signing it, and that the original document was brought into contact with the copy by an authorised person, you’d have one of the most powerful relics there can be in your hand. But, you see, there’s no evidence that Joseph knew any Greek or was able to sign his own name. He’d have made the statement in Aramaic, and then assented to it without touching the written translation. Beyond that, the clerks used for the copy back in the time of Constantine wouldn’t have been Christians, let alone ordained; and the chancery practice, as I’ve seen it here, is for one clerk to read and another to copy. Beyond saying it’s a first copy, this has no more potency as a relic than your own copy of the Scriptures.
‘Oh’ – I pointed at the purple seal at the foot of each page – ‘I think this means that nothing can be taken away except by the Emperor in person, and then with the correct requisition order witnessed by a Patriarch. There’s an autograph letter of Saint Paul,’ I explained, ‘in Constantinople with something very like that seal.’
I moved to a brief commentary on why the document authorising Joseph’s release from custody might have been copied in two hands, each separated in style by about fifty years. When you’ve spent as much time as I already had in libraries and archives, these are points you pick up and use as clues to a fuller understanding. But Priscus wasn’t listening.
‘I can’t find the Inventory of Goods,’ he said. We rearranged all the pages on the table and turned them over one at a time, to see if what we wanted had been copied on the reverse. But Priscus was right – no inventory.
‘Perhaps the Holy Family was too poor to make any inventory worth the effort,’ I suggested. ‘Joseph must have come here with his wife and the three children, and precious little else.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Priscus insisted. ‘When I ran the Treason Police under Phocas, we always took an inventory. If it’s just their clothes, even the poor have something worth confiscating.’ He looked up wistfully as he spoke of his days as Torturer-Judge Extraordinary when his father-in-law was Emperor.
‘Well, fancy that!’ I said, changing the subject. Having been very nearly one of his victims, my own recollection of the dungeons under the Ministry were less rosy. I held up a half sheet of papyrus. It had stuck itself to the underside of one of the denunciation letters, and had stayed there during our first sort through of the pages. Now, it had suddenly dropped free on to the desk. It was dated four years after the closing of the case. The Child should then have been about seven.
‘It’s a request from Joseph for a passport to settle in Soteropolis. There had been a plague there,’ I summarised, squinting at the writing too small for Priscus to follow in the light we had now the windows were beginning to steam up. ‘The Jewish community was in need of skilled craftsmen, and was offering to guarantee his support for the first year. The request was refused, but upheld on appeal.’
‘Is Soteropolis close by the Pyramids?’ Priscus asked. He was all eagerness again. It was obvious what he had in mind.
With a stab of annoyance, I told myself I should have kept my mouth shut.
‘It’s five, maybe ten miles distant,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘Rather, it may have been, as the city no longer exists, and there is some doubt as to its location. The most certain guess I can make is that the place is somewhere between the Pyramids and Letopolis – where Leontius had his estate.’ I hesitated, then explained something of my plans regarding the excavation of the Library’s reserve stock.
‘Come now, Priscus,’ I sighed as he gave me another of his suspicious looks. ‘You must accept that, until our agreement of yesterday evening, I hadn’t the faintest interest in your piss pot. Until you rolled up here, I really hadn’t even heard of the thing.’
‘But Soteropolis is surely where we look,’ he insisted.
‘Perhaps it is,’ I agreed; a denial would only have made him worse. ‘But we still need more information than we have. Look, Soteropolis may not have been very big. But imagine that Alexandria should one day be in ruins. Imagine even that part of it fell into the sea. It would be very hard for anyone in the future to identify any of the main places.
‘Soteropolis was continuously occupied for three hundred years after the Holy Family must have left. It can’t ever have had that many Christians. The Jews would have had no reason to preserve any objects left behind by the family of what they regarded as a renegade and traitor. Going up there now with what little we have, we’d need a miracle before we knew exactly where to dig.’
‘I would remind you, my dear,’ Priscus said with one of his thin smiles, ‘that we have had a miracle – two, if you consider what’s turned up in this file. And you won’t have forgotten the clear directions that slut gave you.’
‘They weren’t that clear,’ I said, emollient again. I fought to suppress that renewed uneasy feeling: you don’t let the contents of your mind be arranged on the basis of coincidences. ‘But if you want to go off looking for Soteropolis, you’re welcome to the workmen I’ve commandeered. I’ll join you there in due course.’
‘No good,’ he said. ‘It’s you who found this file, and you who found the hidden sheet about Soteropolis. You were the one the slut was talking to. You are the one who must go looking, because you are the one chosen to find.’
‘Priscus,’ I said, gathering the pages back into the file, ‘let’s discuss this again when I’ve finished with whatever leads I can find here in Alexandria.’ I did my best to sound as annoyingly neutral as I normally would have been. A little thought was stirring in my mind. Finding that reference to Soteropolis and then blurting it out might not have been such rotten luck after all.
‘For the moment, I’m hungry,’ I added. ‘And I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to melt in this box. It can’t be much cooler than the oven you have in mind for Martin and his family.’
‘One step closer,’ Priscus said defiantly as we were finally signed out of the archives.
‘A quarter step, if that,’ I replied. Perhaps five whole steps, I thought.