It wouldn’t have been hard, but the Egyptian quarter by day was decidedly less forbidding than by night. It was still a sprawl of mostly falling-down slums. Here and there, though, you could see properties that wouldn’t have been out of place in the smarter parts of the Greek centre. I could see now that the potty man had been right. The Egyptian quarter had a decidedly alien feel about it. Even so, there was a fair bit of money this side of the Wall.
There was a stiff breeze coming in from the south. Though nothing could wholly take off the smell I’d now come across all through the Delta – of Egyptians huddled together without means of washing, or inclination to wash – I didn’t need to be so prodigal with my essence of roses. All round me, there was a sound of banging and shouting as the Egyptians went about their business. As in the centre, the streets were crowded. The guards surrounded my chair, swords drawn as they pushed our way through.
‘Oh, the care is for you, my dear boy,’ Priscus had said the day before as I settled myself for the first time into the armoured chair. ‘I’ve never been one for bodyguards myself. As you know, if there are enemies to be killed, I’ve always believed in doing it myself.’
I hadn’t bothered so far myself with guards. Even in Constantinople, after word had got round that I was the one behind cutting the bread distribution, I’d never done more than go about the streets with my sword on show and one of my larger slaves for support. Now, as I looked down from the chair at the sea of jabbering, slightly yellow faces, I was glad of the dozen guards. I was still more glad that half of them were Slavonic mercenaries. They were roughly my size and colouring. And if I paid close enough attention, I could just understand what they were saying to each other.
‘Sir,’ their officer said in the rough Latin still used in some units of the Army, ‘can I suggest a detour?’ He pointed at the narrowing street ahead. ‘I don’t like the look of those high buildings. They’re ambush territory.’
‘We’ll have to risk it,’ I said. I looked again at the directions Macarius had given me. I agreed those dark, upper windows looked dodgy. A good hail of stones from up there, and we’d be hard put to fight off a determined attack from the ground. But I also knew we’d be lost in a moment once we moved off the path laid down for us. Macarius knew these people and their part of the town. I’d have to trust his judgement of where was and wasn’t safe. I drew my own sword and laid it on the table built into the carrying chair. It had a reassuring look as it glittered in the sunlight that streamed down past the canopy over my head.
‘My Lord is earlier than expected,’ the Deacon said apologetically as the courtyard gate swung shut behind us. With two inches of wood now to muffle the sound, I could barely hear the rush and bustle of the street outside.
I nodded and stepped down from the chair. The Deacon and his secretary bowed low before me. Priests and monks scurried about their business under the colonnade. After the rising uneasiness out in the streets, it was pleasantly quiet and familiar. Except the whispered language around me wasn’t Greek or Latin, I might have been within one of the larger Church buildings anywhere in the Empire.
‘If My Lord would come this way,’ he added, motioning towards a door that led in from the colonnade.
At first, all was dark within. I bowed instinctively to avoid knocking my head on the lintel. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that, after the first two rooms, we were in a longish corridor. It must have run the entire length of the church. Again, it was all much as I’d expected. I really might have been in one of the middling churches in Constantinople. The only difference was that, mingled with the incense was the smell of something foul. It was the sort of thing you came across in hospitals or prisons.
A few yards more and I found out the cause of the smell. About halfway down the corridor, just before an icon of Saint Antony of the Desert, there was a pool of vomit. I could now see quite well in the gloom. Even so, I nearly stepped in it. The Deacon hissed something in Egyptian at one of the church slaves, who was waiting politely for us to pass. The man pulled out a large cloth and fell to his knees by the pool. As he splashed it over himself, the smell drifted up still stronger of stomach juices and rotting fish.
‘His Holiness is guarded this month by the Sisters of Saint Artemisia,’ the Deacon said as if that explained matters.
I gave him a non-committal look.
‘She was the daughter-in-law of an Emperor,’ he went on, guessing I hadn’t understood the significance. ‘It was in the time of darkness before the True Faith was established in the world. She was a beauteous yet abandoned woman, sunk in every vice of the Imperial Court. She put these things behind her when she, with her husband, was converted to the Faith. Thereafter, she grew famous throughout the still forbidden Church for the strictness of her observances. As often as she was compelled to attend the banquets of sinful luxury, she would purge herself out of solidarity with the starving poor of the Empire.
‘To this day, the Sisters of Her Order maintain the custom. They are permitted to eat only enough to maintain their efficiency. If inadvertently, or through weakness of the flesh, one morsel above this is permitted to pass their lips, they are required to purge themselves and eat no more for three days. During this time, they must abase themselves with lack of sleep and piercings of the flesh and other holy penances.’
I paid no attention to the rest of his narrative. I’d known the woman by her Latin name, and it was all coming back. She’d died in some overturning of her chair as it was carried too fast down the street. The event itself was unclear, and several mutually exclusive miracle stories had fastened themselves almost at once to it. It was a happy day for the Empire – if not for the Church, which now had to wait for Constantine to come along and convert – that her father-in-law had outlived her equally if differently insane husband.
I was seated and left alone in a small office that I supposed was near the main body of the church. The neat desk and the racks bulging with correspondence reminded me of the Dispensator’s office in Rome. Joyous times those had been – I didn’t think – when he’d called me in there to charge me with one of his ‘little missions’. They were never small, and they’d usually involved me in escapes from death by the skin of my teeth. As often as Martin could be bullied or tricked into joining me, they’d involved me in some very hard moments with Sveta. It was with one of these that he’d tricked us into the journey to Constantinople. That hadn’t ended, I thought with a smile, entirely as he’d expected. Recollections of that meeting with him on my last visit to the Lateran Place could cheer me at the lowest moments.
Deep inside the church, there was a late service still taking place. I could hear the chanted responses. They weren’t in Greek, but the translation had kept the Greek rhythms well enough for me to follow whereabouts the service had reached. Closer by, there was a Sunday school in progress. In high, clear voices, the boys all together read their lesson from the board. Again, I could just follow what they were reading. The few Greek words placed strategically, and the proper names given at the right intervals, told me it was the trial of Saint Paul from the Acts of the Apostles.
There was no wine on the tray of refreshments left beside me. Most welcome, though – bearing in mind how worn out I was feeling from all that sun – was the very hot, sweetened kava juice. I drank the liquid straight down from the jug. I went back to listening. Yes, the boys had reached what could only be the verse ‘Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.’ I might not believe a word of it. Even so, I knew my Scripture backwards.
I felt a sudden tremor of interest in learning Egyptian. It might come in handy for the journey to and my stay around Soteropolis. It couldn’t be that hard to learn. The hardest language to learn is always the second, and I was now fluent in seven. And if the Egyptian versions of Scripture were as faithful as they seemed, I’d have a wondrously smooth key to the language. I might not even need a tutor.
I drifted into thoughts of how much I could get of the language in private between now and Soteropolis. It might not do to let anyone else know what I was about. If I had to set up a miracle, it would be handy to know something of what the natives were saying to each other under my nose. I could probably get the texts I needed out of Hermogenes. I’d be seeing him anyway in the next day or so.
I twisted round and looked at the icon of Saint Mark hanging above the door. It was in exactly the same style as the one Martin had bought and set up in his office. The only difference was that the text wasn’t in Greek. A new and uneasy thought came into my mind. Back in Constantinople, Sergius and I had worked on the assumption that a settlement of the Monophysite dispute would solve most of our troubles with the non-Greek Churches in the Empire. Sitting here, I wasn’t so sure. This wasn’t like in the West, where orthodox and heretic Churches all worked in Latin, and a switch to orthodoxy meant very little in practice. The native Churches here were in worlds of their own. They didn’t know Constantinople. They didn’t need Constantinople. They were almost like ripe figs dangling from a tree. They could drop off at any moment. If they rotted where they fell, that was their problem. It might even be good for the tree.
Was Egypt a problem for the Empire, I asked myself, because it was heretical? Or was its heresy part of a deeper problem? Suppose we gave in, and accepted the whole Monophysite case: would that be an end of the matter in Egypt? Or would the Egyptians only find another trifling point of difference to justify their steady drift out of the Greek orbit? I thought of my conversations with Lucas. I’d think more about this when I wrote another of my coded reports to Sergius.
I’d just finished crunching on the residue of the smashed-up beans when the door opened.
‘Let the ground be kissed where His Holiness cares to stand,’ the Deacon called in his flat Greek.
I stood up and bowed respectfully as Anastasius, Monophysite and so-called Patriarch of Alexandria, walked in. Still dressed in full canonicals, he’d come, I could see, straight from Sunday service.