Alexandria mdf-19 Read online

  Alexandria

  ( Marcus Didius Falco - 19 )

  Lindsey Davis

  Lindsey Davis

  Alexandria

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Marcus Didius Falco – fixer, traveller and playwright

  Helena Justina – his well-read wife and tour-planner

  Julia Junilla, Sosia Favonia, Flavia Albia – their well-behaved poppets

  Aulus Camillus Aelianus – Helena's brother, a diligent student

  Fulvius – Falco's enigmatic uncle, a negotiator

  Cassius – his life partner, a wonderful host

  M. D. Favonius, aka Geminus – Falco's father, who was ordered not to come

  Thalia – who will regret bringing him, an artiste

  Jason – her python, a real curiosity

  At the Royal Palace

  The Prefect of Alexandria and Egypt – highly renowned (name not recorded)

  A bunch of dim rich boys – his admin staff, typical high-fliers

  Legionaries

  Gaius Numerius Tenax – a centurion who gets the awkward jobs

  Mammius and Cotius – his back-up, hungry for glory

  Tiberius and Titus – on duty at the Lighthouse, bored (not for long)

  At the Alexandria Museion

  Philetus – the Museion Director, uplifted on merit?

  Theon – Librarian of the Great Library, downcast

  Timosthenes – of the Serapeion Library, hungry for promotion

  Philadelphion – the Zoo Keeper, a ladies' man

  Apollophanes – virtuous Head of Philosophy, a toady

  Zenon – Chief Astronomer and not accountable

  Nicanor – Head of Legal Studies, honest (honestly!)

  Aeacidas – a self-assured tragedian, as good as anyone

  Pastous – a library assistant, closely taking stock

  Chaereas and Chaeteas – zoo and autopsy assistants, good family folk

  Sobek – a Nile crocodile, hungry for action

  Nibytas – an obsessive old reader and book-lover

  Heras, son of Hermias – a Sophist scholar, none too wise

  Students – as you would expect

  Aedemon – an empirical physician (purges and laxatives)

  Heron – a deus ex machina, earthly god of machines

  Colourful Alexandrian characters

  Roxana – an admired young woman, with poor sight

  Psaesis – a litter-bearer (deserves a raise)

  Katutis – in the gutter, gazing at the stars

  Petosiris – an undertaker (knows where the bodies are)

  Itchy and Snuffly – his helpers (stitching people up)

  Diogenes – an ambitious man of commerce

  A box-maker – his sidekick

  Also

  The legendary catoblepas – not appearing, but deserves a mention

  The gnu – pure nostalgia

  EGYPT: SPRING AD77

  I

  They say you can see the Lighthouse from thirty miles away. Not in the day, you can't. Still, it kept the youngsters quiet, precariously balancing on the ship's rail while they looked for it. When travelling with children, always keep a little game in hand for those last troublesome moments at the end of a long journey.

  We adults stood close by, wrapped up in cloaks against the breeze and ready to dive in if little Julia and Favonia accidentally plunged overboard. To add to our anxiety, we could see all the crew making urgent attempts to work out where we were as we approached the long, low, famously featureless coastline of Egypt, with its numerous shoals, currents, rocky outcrops, suddenly shifting winds and difficult lack of landmarks. We were passengers on a large cargo boat that was making its first lumbering trip south this season; indications were that over the winter everyone had forgotten how to do this journey. The dour captain was frantically taking soundings and looking for silt in seawater samples to tell him he was near the Nile. Since the Nile delta was absolutely enormous, I hoped he was not such a poor navigator he had missed it. Our sailing from Rhodes had not filled me with faith. I thought I could hear that salty old sea god Poseidon laughing.

  Some Greek geographer's turgid memoirs had supplied oodles of misinformation to Helena Justina. My sceptical wife and tour-planner reckoned that even from this far out you could not only see the Lighthouse, shining like a big confusing star, but also smell the city wafting across the water. She swore she could. True or not, we two romantics convinced ourselves that exotic scents of lotus oil, rose petals, nard, Arabian balsam, bdellium and frankincense were greeting us over the warm ocean – along with the other memorable odours of Alexandria, sweaty robes and overflowing sewage. Not to mention the occasional dead cow floating down the Nile.

  As a Roman, my handsome nose detected this perfume's darkest under-notes. I knew my heritage. I came fully equipped with the old prejudice that anything to do with Egypt involved corruption and deceit.

  I was right too.

  At last we sailed safely through the treacherous shoals to what could only be the legendary city of Alexandria. The captain seemed relieved to have found it – and perhaps surprised at his skilful steering. We pootled in under the enormous Lighthouse then he tried to find one empty space to moor amongst the thousands of vessels that lined the embankments of the Eastern Harbour. We had a pilot, but pointing out a spare stretch of quay was beneath him. He put himself off into a bumboat and left us to it. For a couple of hours our ship manoeuvred slowly up and down. At last we squeezed in, shaving the paint on two other vessels with the joggle-mooring method.

  Helena and I like to think we are good travellers, but we are human. We were tired and tense. It had taken six days from Athens, via Rhodes, and an interminable time out from Rome before that. We had lodgings; we were to stay with my Uncle Fulvius and his live-in boyfriend – but we did not know them well and were anxious about how we would find their house. In addition, Helena and I were well-read. We knew our history. So, as we faced up to disembarkation, I could not help joking about Pompey the Great: how he was collected from his trireme to go ashore to meet the King of Egypt – and how he was stabbed in the back by a Roman soldier he knew, butchered with his wife and children watching, then beheaded.

  My job involves weighing up risks, then taking them anyway. Despite Pompey, I was all set to lead the way bravely down the gangplank when Helena shoved me out of her way.

  'Oh don't be ridiculous, Falco. Nobody here wants your head – yet. I'll go first!' she said.

  II

  Foreign cities always sound so loud. Rome may be as bad, but it is home and we never notice the racket.

  Groaning on a strange bed as I flexed beneath unusual coverlets made from no fleece I recognised, I awoke from dreams where my body seemed to be still rocking on the ship that brought us, to find unsettling light and noise. At my movement, an extremely unusual insect flew away from just beside my left ear. Agitated voices rose from streets outside, through those wobbly shutters with latches that I could not close last night upon our arrival, too exhausted to solve the incomprehensible riddles of strangers' door- and window-furniture. I had made some joke about us being set a life-or-death test by a winged Greek Sphinx, and my clever partner had pointed out we were now in the territory of the lion-bodied Egyptian Sphinx instead. It had not struck me there was any difference.

  Thundering Jupiter. The inhabitants of this new place conversed at the tops of their voices, as they held harsh, pointlessly long arguments – though when I looked out hoping to see a knife fight, they were all just shrugging casually and strolling off with loaves under their elbows. The level of street sound seemed absurd. Unnecessary bells clanged to no purpose. Even the donkeys were noisier than at home.

  I fell back into bed. Uncle Fu
lvius had said we could sleep in as long as we liked. Well, that got the maids clattering up and down the stone stairs. One even burst in on us to see if we were up yet. Instead of vanishing discreetly, she just stood there in her shapeless shift and sloppy sandals, grinning.

  'Don't say anything!' Helena muttered against my shoulder, though I thought her teeth were gritted.

  When the servant or slave left, I raved for a while about how many loathsome indignities are imposed upon blameless travellers via that filthy phrase, remember, darling, we are guests!

  Never be a guest. Hospitality may be the noblest social tradition of Greece and Rome, possibly of Egypt too, but stick it straight back in the sweaty armpit of whatever helpful relative wants to bore you to death with his army stories, or the very old friend of your father who hopes to interest you in his new invention – whichever menace has invited you to share his inconvenient foreign house. Pay your way in an honest mansio. Preserve your integrity. Keep the right to shout get lost!

  'We are in the East,' Helena soothed me. 'They say the pace of life is different.'

  'Always a good excuse for foreigners' ghastly incompetence.'

  'Don't be bitter.' Helena rolled into my arms and snuggled, becoming once more comfortable and comatose.

  I had a better idea than sleeping. 'We are in the East.' I murmured. 'The beds are soft, the climate balmy; the women are sinuous, the men obsessed with lust -'

  'And don't tell me, Marcus Didius – you want to put a new entry on your list of ''cities where I have made love''?'

  'Lady, you always read my mind.'

  'Easy enough,' suggested Helena cruelly. 'It never changes.'

  This was the life. We were in the East. We had no pressing business and breakfast would go on being served all morning.

  I knew the arrangements for breakfast because Fulvius had told me. As a man with a past he never talked about, who was engaged in trades he kept mysterious, my maternal uncle tended to be terse (unlike the rest of our family), so he imparted vital information with unsparing clarity. His house rules were few and civilised: 'Do what you like but don't attract attention from the military. Turn up for dinner on time. No dogs on the reading couches. Children under seven to be in bed before dinner starts. All fornication to be conducted in silence.' Well, that was a challenge. Helena and I were enthusiastic lovers; I was eager to see if it was feasible.

  We had left my dog in Rome but had two children under seven – Julia, approaching five, and Favonia, two. I had promised they would be exemplary house guests and since they were fast asleep when we arrived, nobody yet knew otherwise. With us too was Albia my foster-daughter, who was probably about seventeen, so sometimes she attended formal meals like a very shy grown-up or sometimes she stormed off to her room with a murderous scowl, taking all the sweetmeats in the house. We had found her in Britain. She would be a poppet one day. So we told ourselves.

  Albia was a fixture, on her second major trip with us. Helena's brother Aulus was an unexpected addition to my party. He could be a trial when he wanted to be; since he was an abrasive character, that was frequent. Aulus Camillus Aelianus, the elder of Helena's two brothers, had worked as my assistant in Rome before he took himself off to learn law at Athens, after (for the fourth or fifth time, to my knowledge) he was blindingly struck by his 'real' vocation. Like all students, immediately his family thought he was finally settling down in a prestigious, extremely expensive university, he heard through some grapevine that there was better teaching at another one. Or better parties and the chance of a better love life, anyway. When we dropped in to visit him last month, he hitched a free ride on our ship, saying he passionately wanted to study at the Alexandria Museion. I said nothing. His father would pay for it. The senator, a diligent, tolerant man, would just be thankful that Aulus had not – so far – expressed a wish to be a gladiator, a master forger or a writer of ten-scroll epic-poetry.

  Fulvius could not have known I would bring my wastrel brother-in-law, but he expected the rest. My mother's brother, the most complicated of a crazy trio, years ago Uncle Fulvius ran away from home to join the cult of Cybele in Asia Minor. After that, he was not seen for a good two decades, during which he was known as 'the one we never talk about' – though of course he always came under avid discussion at family parties, once enough wine had been drunk and people got on to insulting absent members. I grew up with many a dainty auntie chewing on bread rolls toothlessly while speculating whether Fulvius had actually castrated himself with a flint, as devotees supposedly did.

  I had encountered him a year back, in Ostia. I had been fully accompanied on that mission, so he knew I came with a tribe. His reappearance in Italy was a shock at the time. He now engaged in suspicious-sounding overseas activities, which presumably continued in some form now that he lived in Egypt. Being Fulvius, he had not bothered to explain why he moved here. At Ostia he and his crony Cassius took to Helena; at least, it had been to her that the couple addressed an invitation to stay in their Alexandrian house. They knew she wanted to see the Pyramids and the Pharos. Like me, Helena Justina had mental lists; a methodical tourist, she aimed to one day see all the Seven Wonders of the World. She liked numbered aims and ambitions; for a senator's daughter, those ambitions were extravagantly cultural, which – she joked – was why she married me. We had done Olympia and Athens on a trip to Greece last year. En route to Egypt we had added Rhodes.

  'And how was the dear Colossus?' Fulvius asked, when we joined him on the flat roof of his house. There the promised breakfast was indeed still being served, and judging by the crumbs on the tablecloth it had been going on for at least the past three hours.

  'Tumbled down in an earthquake, but the broken pieces are phenomenal.'

  'He's a cutie – don't you adore a man with thirty-foot thighs?'

  'Oh Marcus is muscular enough for me… Fulvius, thank you so much for inviting us – this is heavenly!' Helena knew how to biff aside rude talk.

  Fulvius allowed himself to be diverted. A paunchy figure in pristine Roman dress – ankle-length full whites – he was the kind of tetchy expatriate who did not believe in trying to fit in. Abroad, he wore a toga even on occasions when he would never have dreamed of bothering in Rome. Only his enormous cameo ring hinted at his exotic side.

  Looking north across the ocean, Helena gazed out at the panorama of gorgeous sea views that simmered beneath a hot blue sky. My astute uncle had somehow acquired a house in the Brucheion region, once the royal quarter and still the most magnificent and sought-after place to live. Now that the incestuous royal Ptolemies had been kicked into oblivion by us Romans – deftly cleansing the world of rivals – the district was even more desirable to those with taste. We had glimpsed its atmospheric assets on arriving last night, for Alexandria was home to an enormous lamp-manufacturing industry; the streets here were gloriously lit at night, unlike every other city Helena and I had lived in – Corduba, Londinium, Palmyra, even our own dear Rome, where if lamps were hung up the burglars immediately doused them.

  Our ship had berthed very close to my uncle's house. This good luck was unlikely to last. After more than ten years as an investigating informer, I expected Fortune to allot me kicks, not caresses. But we had even managed to find a trustworthy guide, which suggested the citizens of Alexandria were strangely friendly to foreigners; I doubted it. I was born and bred in a city, the best in the world, and I knew all cities shared the same attitude: the only thing to admire about foreigners is the innocent way they part from their travel money. Still, with the guide's help, we had found the house so fast, all we saw was that Alexandria was expensive, expansive and extremely Greek in style.

  Helena always devised lecture notes. So I knew Alexander the Great had come here towards the end of his conquering adventures, found a clutch of fishermen's huts decaying beside a deep freshwater lake, and spotted the potential. He was going to build a mighty port to dominate the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where safe harbours were few and far between. You don't
spend years beating up the world's famous cities without acquiring a sense of what will impress visitors – and what will last. Alexander had incentives. If you are founding a new place and putting your own nametag on it, you get it right.

  'He laid out everything himself'

  'Well you don't become the greatest general in history unless you know to never trust subordinates!'

  'Apparently' Helena informed me, 'he had brought no chalk – or, since his satchel was full of maps of Mesopotamia, there was not room for enough. So some ingratiating courtier told him to use bean flour instead, to mark out the street plan. He went to endless trouble over the alignments – he wanted the cooling, health-giving winds from the sea to waft in for the inhabitants – they are called Etesian winds, by the way -'

  'Thank you, dearest.'

  'Then when Alexander had finished, a huge dark cloud of birds rose up off Lake Mareotis and devoured all the flour. The books say -' she was frowning – 'Alexander was persuaded by soothsayers that this was a good omen.'

  'You disagree?' I myself was busy devouring – the array of bread, dates, olives and sheep's cheese that Uncle Fulvius had provided.

  'Well, obviously, Marcus. If the birds ate the markings, how did Alexander's nice Greek grid of streets ever get built?'

  'No allowance for myth and magic, Helena?' asked my uncle.

  'I cannot believe Alexander the Great let himself be bamboozled by a bunch of soothsayers.'

  'You chose an extremely pedantic wife,' commented Fulvius.

  'She chose me. Once she made her views known, her noble father handed her over very quickly. This should perhaps have worried me. Still, her attention to detail comes in handy when we work.' I enjoyed alluding to our work. It kept Uncle Fulvius on the alert. The old fraud liked to imply he was involved in undercover dealings for the government. I myself had taken on tasks as an imperial agent but I had never found anyone official who knew about this uncle of mine. 'Informing needs scepticism as well as good boots and a high expenses budget, don't you find, Uncle Fulvius?'