The Blood of Alexandria Read Free

been just over four months in Alexandria. And at twenty-two, the infirmities of age were things at worst to be read about or imagined.
    Martin gave one of his dry coughs as, otherwise noiselessly, he came into the room.
    ‘They’re gathered and waiting for you,’ he said.
    ‘Come over and look at this,’ I said, not bothering to turn. I waited a moment for him to cross the floor and join me by the window. ‘Down there,’ I said, pointing over to the left.
    We were in one of the inspection rooms high above the Royal Palace. Its glass windows faced out over the city. The Sea Harbour and the Lighthouse were out of sight behind us. You had to be in the other inspection room to see those. This was, though, by far the best place for viewing the city called into being by the Great Alexander nearly a thousand years before – the city that, in age after age, had been the one place where Egypt and the West and the most gorgeous East came together for trade and for mutual enrichment.
    Before us, the neat central grid of the city laid out as on some mosaic floor. Along the wider avenues stood the public buildings, their roofs glittering in the early light. In narrower streets leading off, you saw the houses and palaces of the higher classes. Where the main streets intersected were the public squares, some paved, others laid out as little parks with trees and fountains to give relief from the baking heat of the summer. Though, like all other places in my world, somewhat past its best, Alexandria remained a city of three hundred thousand people. If not all were now occupied or working, it still rejoiced in its four thousand palaces and its four thousand baths. Now Rome was a shattered dump, only Constantinople itself was bigger.
    Over on the right, clouds of steam were standing up from the vast slums of the Egyptian quarter.
    But I was pointing to the left. Yesterday, it had been almost dry. Now, snaking from far beyond and then round the Jewish quarter, the canal shone silver as it brought the flood waters from the westernmost branch of the Nile to flush out and refill the underground cisterns.
    ‘It’s later than we were told,’ I said. ‘But the Nile has risen. It’s now only a question of how high, and waiting for the harvest estimates to come in.’
    ‘I saw it twice when I was – er – when I was in Antinoopolis,’ Martin said, turning the sentence to avoid recalling his time there as a slave. ‘Herodotus said it’s all to do with the shifting winds to the south.’
    ‘I don’t believe that,’ I said, turning to face him. He’d cut himself shaving. I suppressed the urge to frown at him. ‘According to Colotes,’ I went on instead, ‘it’s the rains that fall every summer on the mountains where the Nile starts – the Mountains of the Moon. These swell the river and carry down the silt that refreshes the land. You’ll surely agree, this is a more credible explanation.’
    Martin smiled faintly at the appeal to the scientific followers of Epicurus. He might have asked who had ever seen these Mountains of the Moon. But we’d been arguing about the Epicureans for so long now, he’d not be rising to this challenge. The sun now full in my eyes, I squinted to see how far into the distance the canal might be visible.
    ‘They are now gathered, Aelric,’ Martin reminded me, a polite urgency in his voice. He would have said more, but he’d seen the burned-out lamp poking from my bag of notes. If this was a place from which the whole city could be seen, it was also a place that could be seen by those able to understand the signs.
    ‘He got in again, past the guards?’ Martin asked, his voice now sharper.
    I nodded. ‘You know these people make an art of going everywhere without ever being noticed,’ I said. I poked the lamp deeper into the bag and pushed the leather flaps together. I turned back to the window, wondering how long it might be before my instructions had their effect.
    Now obviously impatient,