Free The Blood of Alexandria by Richard Blake Page A

believe it, though, sir? Some of them is rolling in gold, and nowadays they just won’t turn Greek. I do some of them now and again when they come over on business. Not a word of Greek. They need interpreters even to get their bums wiped. Can you believe it, sir? They get money, but won’t turn Greek. They don’t believe nothing about the Conjoined Human Nature of Christ. Some of them even says – or so I’ve heard – that Our Lord and Saviour was just some ghost with God looking through the eyes. It ain’t natural, I tell you, sir. It ain’t like the old days.’
    He was right there. The nice thing about orthodoxy is that, however nonsensical, it can be defined by an agreed set of words that have a reasonably agreed meaning. Monophysitism, though, wasn’t a single heresy, but a heading under which any number of heresies took shelter. Some of these were so close to orthodoxy, they barely needed settling. Others were so radical and bizarre, they hardly counted as Christian.
    It was here in Alexandria, while sifting through the rubbish that now clogged the shelving racks in the Library, that I’d fully appreciated the nature of heresy. Sergius and I had taken our sounding among the Syrians, and found that most of them weren’t opposed in principle to a Single Directing Will for Christ. But this wasn’t Syria. Here, we had against us all the ingenuity of Alexandria wedded to the fanaticism of Egypt. Getting these crazies even to discuss a settlement would be like herding cats.
    ‘Oh, sir!’ the potty man said to me, or perhaps to Martin.
    I pulled myself out of a reverie that was branching into the decay of Greek as a common language, and looked back at him. He’d stopped his wiping. He rinsed his sponge again in vinegar and pushed it back inside the framework. Martin winced and groaned. The Potty Man took it back and held it up to me. It was covered in fresh blood.
    ‘Cruel things is piles, sir,’ he said to me. ‘And these ones is hanging down like ripe figs. I’m surprised your man can sit down.’
    ‘Martin,’ I sighed in Latin, ‘I have told you many times. Wiping isn’t enough. You really do need to wash down there. A dirty arse, and in this climate – why, you’re asking for trouble.’ I would have said more. But it was now that the babble of Egyptian voices over by the gate took on an ugly sound. Perhaps the Greeks had given offence. I paid attention as they came to the end of their own chant:
Let us ever recall for whom
This city is the living room,
And know ourselves the master race,
And keep the natives in their place.
     
    ‘Never a truer word,’ the potty man said approvingly. ‘Never a truer word.’ He listened to more of the commotion, then recalled his business. ‘I can recommend some truly good ointment for those piles.’ He looked into his bag again and pulled out a small lead container.
    I took it from his hand and sniffed the contents. So far as I could tell, it was opium in a kind of bird fat. It wouldn’t do Martin any harm, and might lift his mood. I handed it back and nodded.
    ‘Of course, there is some that disagree,’ the potty man said as he set to work again.
    I stared at him and frowned.
    ‘Oh, I mean, sir, about the wogs. Why, it was just this morning that I applied this very cream to someone who told me the wogs too were God’s Children, and we had more to bind than divide us. Right quality he was, I can tell you. He said that, with all the corn being shipped off to Constantinople, we’d soon all be starving together. So we might as well act together.’
    For the first time, I pricked up my ears. Who was sowing concord between Greek and Egyptians? I tried not to sound too interested as I asked the question. I didn’t succeed. But another coin got the man going again.
    ‘A great fat man, it was,’ he said, ‘a fat man with a bald head and a red spot on his nose. Terrible piles, he had. He nearly screamed as I touched them. But he said the government was