I looked again at the tattered sheet.
‘I can’t say I’ve heard of a Lake Smegma,’ I said. I looked closer still at the sheet. Why was it, I asked myself, that papyrus always crumbled under the most important words in a document?
‘I think you will find this helpful, My Lord,’ Hermogenes quavered. He pointed to another of the sheets stretched out before us on the table. I shifted position, to see if the faded writing might look any better from another angle. How at his age he could read a word of this was beyond me. Then again, as Head Librarian, his job was to read far worse.
‘Ah,’ I said at last, ‘a transliteration of an Egyptian name.’ I’d raised my voice only slightly. But it echoed in the cavernous main collection room of the Library. Perhaps thirty yards away, some bearded scholar looked up and scowled at me. ‘It gets us a little closer to what we want,’ I continued. ‘At least we can be sure it did exist. But we still don’t know what it contained – or, indeed, exactly where it is.’
‘That may be so, My Lord-’ Hermogenes broke off as one of the lead weights shifted, and the map rolled shut. As he reached with palsied hand to keep it from moving any futher, he knocked it and a whole stack of rolls on to the floor. They fell with a crash that echoed through the room.
‘No, My Lord,’ Hermogenes gasped as he went down on all fours. ‘Please allow me.’ The rolls scraped harshly on the pavement as he tried with all the feeble uselessness of age to gather them all together again.
‘I must inform you,’ the far away scholar hissed with pompous self-importance, ‘that I am here on work of the highest importance to Holy Mother Church. I do not expect endless disturbance from the prattle of some barbarian child. Show some respect as you breathe in the sacred dust of these four hundred thousand volumes.’
Hermogenes tried to get up and splutter a protest. But I kicked him gently in the side, and he went back to trying to re-sort his documents. ‘Work of the highest importance’ to the Church, he’d said? Well, he must have been pretty far down the scale of human importance not to have recognised me now I was wearing no hat. And if he had recognised me, a bishop himself would sooner have kissed the dust beneath my boots than call me a barbarian. I could have called for security and had him arrested. A good racking and the loss of his eyes wouldn’t have been thought unreasonable to anyone told the facts of his treason. But I’d grown used to living in a world where my looks made me an object either of lust or of contempt. I turned my back on him and stared again at the racks that housed just part of the biggest collection of books in the known world.
Oh, how excited I’d been on my first visit here back in April. Here, at last before me, was the greatest research library in the world: the treasure house, begun by the first King Ptolemy, of all the arts and sciences. It was here that the standard text of Homer had been settled, here that the world had been measured, here that the secrets of the human body had first been laid out and classified.
It hadn’t taken long however, to discover just how ‘sacred’ the dust was of all those books. The shelving racks might still have their ancient labels. Their contents had long since been replaced with the accumulated mass of the Arian and Monophysite controversies. Riots and civil war, religious fanaticism, fires and the general accidents of time – all had combined to diminish the ancient Library to a ghost of what it had been. As to the replacement volumes, few who mattered had thought them other than an improvement.
That should, officially, have been my position. Back in Constantinople, Sergius and I had decided to settle the Monophysite heresy. It had long seemed impossible to bring the heretics to accept that Christ was both Human and Divine. Every means of persuasion, from discussion to massacre, had been tried – all to no effect. The belief that Christ had only One Nature – or that, if there was any tinge of the Human, it had been subsumed within the Divine as a drop of honey is dissolved in the sea – was ineradicable. Off and on, the dispute had been running for centuries, to the distraction of both state and Church in all the Eastern provinces. It had also periodically made for difficulties with Rome. It was a dispute that, in itself, should have moved a schoolboy to laughter. But it had worked itself into arguments over Greek cultural and political domination that were endangering the Empire. Now, Sergius was Patriarch of Constantinople. I had a certain influence in Rome. Both of us had the full ear of Heraclius. If Sergius had the advantage of actually believing in God, we had an equal facility for discovering new meanings in words that everyone else had thought settled. We knew the orthodox would accept a Single Will for Christ if the heretics would accept a watered down meaning of His Double Nature. I was here to impose a new land settlement on Egypt. But I was also quietly sounding out the clerics of every party.
And that was another reason for not having that beastly old scholar up for treason against the Emperor via rudeness to me. By local standards, he might count as a moderate, and my turning the other cheek might be in every legitimate interest.
But Hermogenes had all his stuff back in place on our table, and it was time to return to the matter in hand. I was there to discuss the old reserve stock. Its whereabouts had been lost in the fire and massacre that had followed the siege by Diocletian. It might have contained a hundred thousand volumes. If so, these might well have survived the shipwreck of the main Library.
Hermogenes unrolled the map again. He put a finger on Alexandria and traced a shaky path across Lake Mareotis. Then, from Apis, he moved more firmly about fifty miles south-east across the desert. He stopped just beyond the maximum flood mark of the Nile.
‘It would have most likely been south enough to benefit from the dry Egyptian climate, but not too far outside the black land,’ he said.
‘That would put it in or around,’ I said, looking at the tiny writing on the parchment map, ‘Soteropolis. I don’t recall that name from the tax records.’
‘It was a place of ill fortune,’ came the reply. Hermogenes closed his eyes and dug visibly into his memory. ‘It was home to a recurrent pestilence not shared in the rest of Egypt. After an outbreak around the time of Diocletian, the citizens were resettled in the neighbouring municipality.
‘It was the subject of a celebrated law case in my youth.’ He screwed his eyes harder in an effort to recall. ‘It was all to do, I think, with maintenance obligations for a road. No decision could be reached, as both road and town had been claimed by the desert sands, and no one could be sure how either had been connected.
‘From the tone of these invoices, the reserve stock would not have been in the town. It would have been perhaps a few hundred yards outside the walls, in a compound of its own. Bearing in mind the pestilential air within the town, an outside location would make sense.’
I looked up. Between the topmost of the book racks and the high circle of windows that let in the continuous and warm glow of light, ran the inscription: Of All Its Ills the Soul Shall Here be Cured. Carved in letters a foot high, this had been put up on orders of the first Ptolemy. It was centred on a niche containing statues of the King together with the Great Alexander, one of whose leading generals he had been and whose successor, by speed and cunning, he’d made himself in Egypt. He stood, just half a head shorter, his eyes turned in adoration to the Great Conqueror.
‘I could arrange five hundred labourers,’ I said, looking back to Hermogenes. ‘The Viceroy has decided to employ people during the flood season in digging out the old canal between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. I could easily borrow a contingent of these for a month.
‘But we still need to assure ourselves that Soteropolis is the right place. And we still need to know at least roughly where outside the town the reserve might have been. There is also the matter of content.’
‘You reassure me, My Lord,’ Hermogenes interrupted, ‘that all the literary and philosophical works listed in the catalogue are still extant in Constantinople?’
I nodded. In Rome, I’d been shocked by the perhaps irreparable losses a century of chaos had made in the Latin classics. But the much larger Greek corpus had survived intact in the great City on the waters between Asia and Europe.
‘If the reserve stock is just from those works,’ I said, ‘it’s a waste of time to go looking for it. What interests me is whether it contains any of the scientific and technical works. From the accounts I’ve read of the University here, certain advances were made that may be of use to the Empire. There are, for example, reports of a powder that, when ignited-’
With a sudden whoosh of air and then crash of timber on stone, the door flew open. Puffing mightily from a brisk two-mile walk along those streets, Martin leaned unsteadily against one of the book racks. His face had turned a still deeper shade of purple. I poured him a cup of water and hurried over to him.
‘Aelric,’ he gasped after a long pause. He looked at the old Librarian and pulled himself together. ‘My Lord Alaric, you are needed urgently. The Caesar Priscus has arrived without warning. He says he needs to see you.’