The Blood of Alexandria Read online

  CONTENTS

  The Blood of Alexandria

  By the same author

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Epilogue

  The Blood of Alexandria

  Richard Blake

  www.hodder.co.uk

  By the same author

  Conspiracies of Rome

  The Terror of Constantinople

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Richard Blake 2010

  The right of Richard Blake to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

  asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

  transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher,

  nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is

  published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 9781444711530

  ISBN ISBN 9780340951163

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  I dedicate this novel to my dear wife Andrea, without whose support I could never have begun it, and to my little daughter Philippa, despite whose best efforts I was able to finish it.

  Acknowledgements

  The reference to Homer in Chapter 2 is actually from John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I.

  The verses in Chapter 7 are by the author.

  The verses in Chapter 9 are from The Seafarer, an anonymous English poem of the 7th or 8th century. They translate as

  Let us consider where our true home is,

  And then how we may come there again.

  The words ascribed to Euripides in Chapter 19 are an anonymous commonplace.

  The words ascribed to Epicurus in Chapter 20 are from John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690.

  The verses ascribed to Sophocles in Chapter 22 are by the author.

  The verses in Chapter 50 are from Antigone by Sophocles, translated by Francis Storr (1839–1919).

  The verses ascribed to Claudian in Chapter 63 are actually from John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I.

  Prologue

  Jarrow, Tuesday, 21 August 686

  ‘You know, Brother Aelric,’ Benedict told me this morning, ‘you may be up for canonisation.’

  I grunted and carried on looking at the draft manifesto one of King Aldfrith’s clerks had given me to correct. It was dire stuff. Latin has no aorist, and you can’t use participles to supply the lack. And that was probably the most literate error.

  I think the Abbot mistook my silence. He brightened his voice, adding, ‘Of course, I would never dream of wishing you called out of this life. For all your great age, the work you do for us here makes you irreplaceable’ – he repeated the word ‘irreplaceable’, and emphasised it – ‘but the common people are already calling you a saint.’

  I’m now alone in my little cell, and free to think again. Benedict is a good man. I’m grateful for the refuge he gave me in his monastery, no questions asked. I’m particularly grateful at the moment for the stove he’s had brought in to keep the afternoon chill away. If you think I was upset by his reference to the inevitable, you’re as mistaken as he was. At ninety–six, that is something you’ve had plenty of time to consider. And Saint Aelric! It may not make death any less of the darkness it probably is. But it does have a nice sound.

  The truth is, I was cutting off any renewal of the questioning. What did happen yesterday afternoon? Everyone is itching to know. Benedict first asked just after I’d been carried back here, and I lay dripping on to the polished floor of his refectory. All he got for his trouble was a blank stare. The boy who dared ask this morning got a box on the ears. But questioning by others is easily handled. The problem is that I don’t myself know what happened. Oh, the generality is easy: lack of air can do funny things to the mind. The question remains, though, of the attendant circumstances. How to explain those?

  Well, as Epicurus said, facts must be described before they can be explained. Before I go any further, let me here – in the double privacy of this journal and of the Greek in which I keep it – set out the facts as best I have them. Since what I must explain happened yesterday afternoon, I suppose it is with the facts of yesterday afternoon that I must begin.

  Generally, the Northumbrian summer is shite. So it was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. I can’t speak for the year before that, as I still had my summer palace in Nicea, and rain was the least of my worries. Yesterday, though, it was almost warm. And that’s what had me out for a sightseeing tour on the banks of the Tyne.

  Nothing there to see ordinarily, I’ll admit. Even when not hidden in mist, the whole prospect is one dreariness of green with a great expanse of water running through to the sea. But let the sun be out, and it’s here that the boys come to bathe and play. So, fighting off the stupor of beer at lunch, I stepped out of the monastery garden, and in my slow, rickety gait made my way down to the river and settled myself on a convenient stone.

  The stone was too convenient. I was no sooner arranged than the beer won its battle and I nodded off in the sun. I can’t say how long I slept. I don’t know if I dreamed. But I woke to a sound reminding me in a smaller way of the great, collective wail that went up in Ctesiphon when we smashed through the southern gate. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked blear
ily at one of the boys standing nearby. Water ran off him as he hopped terrified from one foot to the other.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I croaked. I was stiff all over. I could feel that my face and hands had caught the sun. Behind, I was cold and itchy from having rolled on to the damp grass. I think I’d pissed myself a little. Certainly, I could feel a sicky burp coming on.

  The boy looked through me and turned away to look into the water.

  ‘Well, come on, lad,’ I said, louder now. I struggled to my knees, and, pushing my walking staff into the soft turf, heaved myself unsteadily up. Yes, I had pissed myself, and it was still dribbling down my legs. ‘What’s all this racket?’

  All the boys, I could now see, were standing still and silent, and looking into the water. I squinted against the glare from the water and waited for my eyes to focus. It wasn’t hard to see what had happened. Being so close to a strong tidal sea, the bed of the Tyne here is rippled with sandbanks. Stay on one of these, and you can walk far out at low tide, paddling in just a few inches of water. A foot or so either side, the water may be bottomless. One of the boys had walked out a few hundred feet. Then the tide had swept back in. The water had suddenly risen from his knees to his chest, and was still rising.

  No problem there, I thought. If he couldn’t see the sandbank now, all he had to do was step off and splash however feebly while the tide washed him back in. If he couldn’t swim, however . . . I turned back to the boys.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there, you stupid buggers,’ I said in Northumbrian dialect as I hobbled down to the water line. ‘Get back in there and bring him out.’

  I might have shouted in Persian or in one of the Slavonic dialects for all the effect my words had. They just stood there, surly looks on their faces. Some had turned now to face inland.

  It was fear, I could see, of the Old Gods. It’s only been a generation or so since the missionaries turned up in this part of England. Before then, the locals had drowned the occasional human offering in the Tyne – something to do with the fishing, or perhaps the harvests. If the boys rattle off their prayers well enough in class, they’ve picked up an older nonsense at home. They were terrified of going back into the water now that one of them was being taken.

  I sighed. It struck me once again how ugly most of the boys are in Northumbria. The line put out from Canterbury is that we’re all one people in England. My own experience is that the better sort of barbarians who came here settled the south, the very best, I’m in no doubt, settling my own Kent. The further north you go, I find, the more runtish the people become. Why I’d bothered staggering down to look at those white, knock-kneed bodies I couldn’t now imagine.

  Meanwhile, the tide was still coming in. As if he wanted to keep as much of his body from the chill waters, the boy held his arms over his head. I might have heard sobbing from far out. Even by local standards, he was a pathetic specimen. I thought of quoting Lucretius on the evils of religion, and settling back to reflect on how rotten life can be. Then, as I strained to see more clearly, my stomach turned upside down.

  It was Bede out there. What the sodding hell had he been doing in the river? With his asthma, it was a miracle he’d even walked out that far. I poked my staff sharply into the stomach of the boy most conveniently in reach. It was an unexpected blow, and it doubled him up.

  ‘Get in there, you little shitbag bastard,’ I snarled, ‘or I’ll see you won’t sit down for a week. Get in there and pull him out.’

  He simply ran up the bank out of further reach. The others huddled together. One of the older boys who’d sprouted a few muscles over his ribs began to puff and look ferocious. I suddenly recalled this was near enough how Brother Paul had got his head bashed in last summer. I looked desperately around. There were no adults in sight. I was in no condition to run off for help. The little churls and semi-churls around me couldn’t be trusted to get any sort of message back to the monastery. It was a matter of standing impotently on the river bank watching as my best student drowned in some stupid accident.

  When that toad Croesus grassed me up in Constantinople, it was annoying but manageable. The confiscation of goods, the loss of status, the midnight escape down the Straits, Catania, Rome and all the continued shuffling along the roads good or bad, never more than one step ahead of the Imperial agents – all that and more I’d borne with surprising equanimity. I’d even put up with Jarrow. But the loss of Bede, I knew, would be the end.

  Take from me that scrawny little creature who’d been soaking up these past few years all the learning I could give, as a sponge does water, and that would be the end. It would be simply a question of how to bring on the darkness without embarrassment for Benedict.

  I looked round again as if there might be any alternative. There was none. I kicked off my sandals. I gritted my teeth and stepped into the river. The water came up to my ankles. It was fucking cold, I can tell you! With so little flesh on my bones, the chill went straight through me. I thought at first I’d faint from the shock. No one could have blamed me if I’d stepped out again. For anyone but Bede, I’d not even have got my ankles wet – not at my age, nor at twenty years younger. I once watched a man put himself into a barrel and float over a waterfall. It did him no good, and isn’t something any reasonable person would have advised. But there are times when you have no choice but to act in ways the whole world would call foolish. So here I was. I took a deep breath and fixed my attention on that terrified boy, then I stepped further into the liquid ice of the Tyne. The only noise I could hear as I waded further and further out was my own gasping breath. My robe was floating up and clinging to me. I pulled it over my head and wound it round my left arm. I’ll swear I could feel the uncomprehending stares of those silent boys from behind me.

  The water was now up to Bede’s neck. I’d managed to stay on one of the sandbanks. Though it shelved about an inch every few paces, the sand underfoot was firm enough. The water spread around me in uncountable acres of cold silver. But it came hardly up to my chest even as I got within a dozen feet of the boy. I could see into his terrified eyes. I wanted to call something reassuring. But I had no breath to spare. I smiled and waved my staff. For all the response, I might as well not have been there.

  Another few feet to go, and the sandbank seemed to give out on me. I prodded around with the end of my staff. He was standing on something. So was I. Between us, though, was some watery chasm. I pushed the staff at him.

  ‘Take hold of this,’ I gasped through chattering teeth.

  He looked straight through me, as still and unresponsive as one of the carved figures in the monastery chapel. I pulled the staff back and turned it round. The other end had a kink at the top. If I got that into his clothing, I could pull him towards me.

  Splash!

  I’d leaned forward at just the wrong moment. A stray current had got me from behind and I’d overbalanced. One moment, I was standing a fifth out of the water. The next, I was several feet under. I opened my eyes, and looked up to see the sun-dappled surface of the Tyne rising higher and higher out of reach. From habit, I’d taken a lungful of air before my face hit the water, and I still had the skills of a swimmer. But the Tyne is not the heated swimming pool I used to keep up in my main palace. And age is age, there’s no denying. I couldn’t find the power in my arms to keep from sinking further into those frigid, black depths. Was now the right time for a prayer? I remember thinking as my chest began to hurt.

  But the time came and the time passed. I found myself back on one of the sandbanks, pulling a now unconscious Bede by his hair.

  There were a couple of the bigger monks waiting for me. Flashing scared looks at something behind me, they waded in to their knees and helped us out. I needed that. Without the water to support me, I’d have fallen straight down. They tried to pick me up and take me back to the monastery. But I had come this far. I wasn’t leaving until I was finished.

  Bede was lying still on the river bank beside me. His eyes were closed, his face
wizened and a touch blue.

  ‘The Gods’ – the monk corrected himself and switched to Latin – ‘The Devil has taken him, O Master. The Angel was too late.’ He made the sign of the Cross. ‘Come back to the monastery. Your body is all blue from the cold.’

  ‘Not taken anywhere yet, I think,’ I snapped back at him in a surprisingly clear voice. ‘Get the boy laid out on his front.’ I knelt over Bede, all sense of how cold and stiff I was banished from my primary attention. I reached out to the fleshless, white skin of his upper body and pressed with both hands. I pressed hard, and hard again, as if I were a servant making bread. Again and again I pressed, until I thought my thudding heart would just stop.

  I suppose that was another opportunity for prayer. Again, I passed it up. Then Bede was coughing and spluttering and vomiting water on to the grass. I rolled him over again and looked on my handiwork. The young are marvellous creatures. The colour was already coming back to his body.

  I wanted to promise him a sound whipping for what he’d done. But I now really was at the end of my strength, and I flopped helplessly on to the grass. Those monks had me wrapped in warm clothing and back to the monastery before I had time to think what was happening. Then straight to a bed made up beside the bakery oven and Abbot Benedict to watch over me until I was wakeful enough to bear the full weight of his anger.

  Bede’s family came by in the evening with a sheep and a whole barrel of salt fish. I heard the little speech Benedict gave on my behalf. He excused my accepting in person on the grounds that I was confined to bed in my cell.

  I woke this morning feeling decidedly perky. I don’t think I’ve been so with it in the morning since last Christmas in Canterbury, when old Theodore of Tarsus made sure to keep me off the beer. I glared at the novice monk who fussed around me, arranging food and asking endless questions.