As I’d expected, I caught up with Priscus in the nursery attached to my own quarters. I walked in on the beginnings of chaos. The moment he saw me, Maximin broke loose from where Priscus had cornered him, and, wailing with fear, ran towards me. Over against the far wall, the nursery maids huddled quietly in each other’s arms.
‘My dear Alaric,’ said Priscus, with a flash of his riddled teeth, ‘how delightful to see you again.’ He dropped the puppy – so far as I could tell, unharmed – on to the floor. It scuttled straight under a low table and stayed there.
I took Maximin into my arms and held him tight. I controlled my voice.
‘Priscus,’ I said, speaking slowly and deliberately in Latin, ‘if you ever come near this child again, I’ll kill you.’
‘And what will Our Lord Augustus say when he has to find another Commander of the East?’ he replied very smoothly, still in Greek.
‘If he replaced you with a committee of his softer palace eunuchs,’ I said, ‘I doubt things could go worse than they have under you. I seem to remember you promised a shattering victory over the Persians in Cappadocia. The latest newsletters report a loss of the whole province.’ I glanced at the low table. I could just hear the whimpering. ‘But I see you can be brave enough when it comes to small animals.’
Priscus scowled, but put his knife away. ‘My son is a Roman,’ he said. ‘He must learn to be strong.’
With an extreme effort, I remained calm, though I continued now in Greek; the nursery maids could hear what they heard and make of it what they would.
‘Priscus,’ I said, ‘you stopped being this child’s father when you had him dumped as a newborn outside that church. By law and by the teachings of every faith, I am now his father. If I see you so much as near him again, I swear I’ll kill you, and I’ll take my chances with Heraclius.’
I handed Maximin, his arms no longer locked about my neck, to one of the nursery maids. ‘Put him to bed,’ I told her. ‘Try to get the dog to lie with him.’
In silence, I led Priscus along the endless and stuffy plush corridors of the Palace. Finding my bearings in the seven floors of the place, each one covering about an acre, had taken me days. Why the Ptolemies had built and put up with this gigantic oven was obvious: they were the richest men in the world, and they had to show this off to their fellow Greeks and to the Egyptians they and their Fellow Greeks lorded it over. The Imperial governors had no such need. They could easily have built something more convenient to the climate and to the needs of administration. For much of the time, there’d been no shortage of money. But it was too late now.
Martin was dictating some letters as we walked in to the outer office. He jumped up at the sight of Priscus and made a polite bow. The secretaries fawned low on the floor.
‘Ah – Martin!’ Priscus opened with smooth courtesy. ‘How delightful to see another friend so far from home. You will surely let me compliment you on how well you are looking on all that Alexandrian food. But for the red hair, I’d barely have recognised you. Such a glorious thing, I’ve always thought, to have red hair. A shame it goes so quickly – don’t you think?’
Martin’s face reddened, and I noticed the little movement as he stopped his hand from its instinctive move upward. I glared at Priscus. He stepped forward and took Martin’s hand.
‘But we have no need to stand on outmoded ceremony, have we, Martin? In our new Empire of Love and Justice, we are all equal servants of the common good and of the Great Augustus!’
Martin swallowed and managed the appropriate form of words. But Priscus was moving again.
He crossed the floor and pulled open the door to my own office. Martin had ordered the blinds to be sprayed with rose water. This, plus the very light breeze coming off the sea, made my office almost endurable. I looked at Priscus as I sipped at my date wine and he fussed, as ever, with his pouch of drugs. I’d last seen him at Christmas in Constantinople. Then he’d been pressing every ounce of glory from his successes against the Persians, and predicting final victory once he’d finished tying them up in Cappadocia.
Just eight months later, and he was looking a decade older. The bounce had gone out of him. Oh, there was the same slimy gloss on his manners. Everything about him still screamed Powerful and Nasty Piece of Work. The cosmetics kept his face unlined and the same colour it had always been of fresh papyrus. But, while I hadn’t bothered once to look back as I led him from the nursery, I’d almost felt the shuffling gait of an old man as he hurried to keep up with me.
I waited for the seizure from whatever he’d shoved up his nose to clear. One day, I’d often hoped, he’d find some mood-altering substance that would kill him instead of just slowly rotting his mind. As his shoulders sagged from the release of tension, and he reached for his own cup, I stared back into the tiny dots of his eyes, and passed from outraged father to senior official of the Empire.
‘So, My Lord Priscus,’ I said, ‘what brings you to Alexandria, and with so little notice?’
He reached into his bag – had the man no slaves with him? – and pulled out a letter. He passed it across the little table that separated our chairs.
‘I need you to provide me urgently with these,’ he said.
I unrolled the document and scanned it. I rolled it up again and replaced the leather band before pushing it back across the table.
‘You’ll need to speak to Nicetas about this,’ I said. ‘He’s the man with authority over Egypt.’
Priscus smiled weakly. He left the roll beside the wine jug. ‘My information was that you were the effective power in Egypt,’ he said.
‘Your informants are misinformed,’ I said curtly. ‘However, if I did have any authority here, I’d have you put on the road straight back to Pelusium, and then pushed across the border into Syria, which I think is within your area of command.
‘We haven’t money at the moment to pay our own frontier guards. As for the corn, we already have riots brewing over a shortage here. If you can force an interview with His Imperial Highness the Viceroy, good luck. But you’ll only get a longer and more formal version of the answer I’ve just given.’
Priscus looked awhile into his cup. For a moment, I even thought he’d cry. But the moment passed, and he was looking at me again.
‘How much do you know about Cappadocia?’ he asked.
‘Only what you said during that supper with Heraclius,’ I said, ‘and the reports that have drifted here on the posts. You said you’d have the entire Persian Army holed up in Caesarea, where you’d starve them into surrender. Instead, I understand the Persians broke out and annihilated half the Army of the East while you lay in your tent, knocked out on those shitty drugs.
‘I’m told it’s now only a matter of time before siege armies turn up outside Damascus and even Antioch.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Priscus in quiet despair. ‘You still won’t or can’t understand the scale of what I achieved last summer and autumn. With armies a third of their official strength, I harried the Persians. I pushed their smaller forces back across the Euphrates. The main forces I drew further and further from their supply routes. I bribed. I spread dissension. I fed false reports via double agents.
‘I don’t think any other general – not even Belisarius himself – could have done more with less. I had effectively the whole Persian invasion force and their Commander-in-Chief squeezed into the last place military logic suggested they should be. It should have been a question of waiting for the invasion to collapse, and then ending the war on favourable terms.’
‘So what went wrong?’ I jeered. All other involvements with the man aside, I had grown thoroughly sick of his strategic playacting at Christmas.
‘Fucking Heraclius went wrong!’ he cried with an involuntary look at the door. It was faced with padded leather. ‘He turned up in person to take the credit for the surrender of eight Persian generals. I told him to wait. But the fool wanted a battle. He insisted it was “unseemly” to gain such a victory without a blow.
‘And so challenge was laid and accepted, and the Persians marched out to discover that what they thought was an army of forty thousand men was instead a half-starved rabble of five thousand.
‘Even then, I might have managed a draw. But our New Alexander confined me to quarters while he strutted round in a golden breastplate that must have weighed ninety pounds.
‘We were lucky the Persians showed more interest in breaking free than staying to enjoy the fruits of victory. We’d all by now be on display to the rabble in Ctesiphon – we or our heads.
‘And you are right about Damascus. I haven’t a single fighting unit anywhere in Syria. With Constantinople itself in danger, all forces have been drawn to the north.’
There was no need for cross-examining about any of this. I knew Priscus was telling the truth. I could almost hear that voice – half sulky, half dreamy – as the Emperor laid down his childish notions of war craft. Sergius and I had managed to get a free hand in religious controversy by showing that letter I’d squeezed out of the Pope. Keeping him from military affairs would have defeated anyone, let alone Priscus.
Oh, if only Emperor Phocas hadn’t been a complete duffer, he’d still be boiling his victims alive in the Circus, and I’d be back in Rome, playing the markets and sending books to Canterbury. As it was, we had Heraclius; and if his personal body count was much lower, he was proving still less effective at holding the Empire together.
I unrolled the letter again. We both served Heraclius. That brought certain duties – even to Priscus.
‘I’ll put in a word to Nicetas about the money,’ I said. ‘Gold can always be found if the need is pressing. I stand by what I said about the corn, though. Until the next harvest comes in, there’s a shortage we daren’t risk adding to.’
‘Thank you, Alaric,’ he said. Unlikely words, these, from Priscus – and they even sounded genuine. He finished the cup and refilled it.
‘There is one other thing not on my list,’ he said, starting over with an echo of his old bounce. ‘The Patriarch of Jerusalem turned nasty when I asked for a loan of the True Cross. You see, soldiers won’t gather unless you pay or feed them or both. They won’t fight – and certainly won’t die – unless you give them something more. Have you heard about the first piss pot of Jesus Christ?’ he asked.
‘Er – no,’ I said.
‘Well’ – Priscus smiled weakly and reached again for the jug – ‘you know that when Herod had all those boys killed, the Holy Family came to Egypt and remained some years in safety?’
I nodded. I was already beginning to guess what would come next.
‘The child Christ,’ he went on, ‘had a piss pot. After He returned to Palestine, this remained in Egypt. It is, I’m told, a relic of the highest power. You see, it received His excrements while His Human Nature was still undeveloped, but His Divine Nature was already perfect. The True Cross, by comparison, was in contact with a body that was fully half human.’
‘My dear Priscus,’ I said, trying hard not to burst out laughing, ‘I don’t think this heresy’s been advanced even in Alexandria. What you are saying is that had Christ died as a baby, the Monophysites would be broadly correct. If, on the other hand, he’d made it to fifty, the true orthodoxy would be Nestorian. How lucky for the majority at the Council of Chalcedon that he died at thirty-three, when His Nature was a perfect balance of God and man conjoined in one substance!’
Priscus shrugged. ‘How the priests sort these things out is their business,’ he said. ‘My business is to raise another army and lead it into battle with a relic beside me the men would run through fire not to lose.’
‘I’ve not heard of this relic,’ I said, ‘and I’ve been here for months now, and spoken to hundreds of people. Where do you suppose it might be kept?’
‘I believe it’s secreted in the base of the Great Pyramid,’ came the reply. ‘I looked around for this as I entered the city. Perhaps it’s smaller than I was told.’
I did laugh now. I really couldn’t keep it back. I laughed until tears began to run down my cheeks. The thought of Priscus, wandering round Alexandria like a barbarian pilgrim in Rome, no guidebook in hand, looking for the Pyramids!
I got up and moved to the north window. I pulled back the blind and looked out past the Lighthouse to the calm, sparkling waters of the Mediterranean. I turned back to Priscus, whose face, I could see, had gone puce under the make-up.
‘You must forgive me, Priscus,’ I said, ‘but the Pyramids are three days up river – five if the winds are against you. And you need to add a day for the sea voyage from here to Bolbitine, or half that if you’re willing to take the Nile from Canopus. And though I haven’t seen them, it’s my understanding that the Great Pyramid was last opened three thousand years ago. No entrance has ever been found since then, assuming, that is, the thing isn’t just solid stone. Christ lived here about six hundred years ago. You’d need a miracle to get the poor man’s piss pot inside the Pyramid, another to let anyone know it was there, and another for no one in Alexandria to know what your doubtless very holy informant in – in Syria? – has told you.
‘If you want relics, I’ll get you an appointment with the local Patriarch. He might be more accommodating than His Holiness of Jerusalem. I believe Alexandria has the head of Saint Mark, both feet of John the Baptist, and three right hands of Saint John the Divine. But there’s no holy piss pot that I know about – not of Jesus Christ, nor of anyone else likely to inspire your men.’
‘My sources are confidential,’ Priscus snapped, ‘but I have it on good authority the relic is where I’ve said.’
I changed the subject. ‘Have you any soldiers with you?’ I asked. An interesting thought had come into my mind. I’d rather Priscus had been stuck in a tent somewhere close by Armenia. Since he wasn’t, I might as well find some use in him.
But he shook his head. He’d come alone and in secrecy.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You are Commander of the East, and I doubt if any of the notables here have been introduced to a military dignitary close to your exalted status. You must allow yourself to be guest of honour at tonight’s dinner. All the big men of Egypt will be there. And I think I can promise the Viceroy for you to sit beside.’
I took up the little bell from my desk and rang it.
‘Ah, Martin,’ I said as the door opened. ‘The Lord Caesar Priscus will be in Alexandria for at least the next few days. Please ask Macarius to make all necessary preparations in the Palace.’
Martin bowed. He let his fingers rasp ever so lightly on the papyrus sheet he was carrying.
‘A productive afternoon with our friend?’ I asked.
Martin nodded.
I ignored Priscus and his unspoken query. ‘That is excellent. My compliments to the pair of you.’
Again to Priscus: ‘When my steward arrives, you will surely do me the honour of letting me accompany you to your suite. If I’m not mistaken, one of your rooms will be the office where Cleopatra killed herself.’