Secrets of the Dead

IV

Constantinople – April 337

EVERY TIME I open a door in this city it’s like entering a forgotten storeroom in a vast mansion. Everything’s covered in dust. Every footstep leaves a print, every touch leaves a smear. You’d think the city had been lost for centuries. But this isn’t the hallowed dust of antiquity – it’s the dust of a craftsman’s workshop, the dust of creation. And it’s still settling. Every day it casts a haze over the city. I can taste it on my tongue as I walk to the library: the brittle flavour of cut stone, the sweetness of sawn timber, the tartness of the quicklime they mix into the cement. Much longer and I’ll become a connoisseur, able to recognise every note of Athenian marble or Egyptian porphyry or Italian granite in the atmosphere.

But dust never settles on memories. The longer I live, the cleaner they become: each one buffed and scraped and chiselled into glossy, hard perfection. Extraneous details are ground out and smoothed over. All that remains is my story.

* * *

I know the library by the Academy, though I’ve never been inside. Two black sphinxes crouch either side of the door, riddling passers-by: people call it the Egyptian Library. The sphinxes aren’t new, even Constantine can’t manufacture his new city from whole cloth. When you’re in a hurry, you have to work with what you’ve got. He’s ransacked the empire to fill his city with antique treasures: statues, columns, stones, even roof tiles.

And books. As I push through the door, past the crowd who’ve gathered on the stairs, I can see hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts, neat scrolls tied and stacked in their criss-crossed shelving like bones in an ossuary. The unfamiliar smell hits me a second later: the must of old parchment and the rotting-grass scent of papyrus, distilled by the heat into something so ripe it makes me gag.

The room is round and wide, with overhanging balconies under a domed ceiling painted with cyclamen and roses. It was designed to be a garden of knowledge, ordered architecture to grow cultivated thoughts. But already, the shelves around the rotunda have grown wild like thorns, tangled and dark, sometimes even spilling their fruit on the ground. All the windows are glazed shut, trapping the smell in the room and magnifying the sun’s heat. The whole room seems to sweat out its poisons.

A dozen anxious conversations fall silent as I step through the door. I can tell the men who recognise me by the way their faces fall. I don’t take it personally. In my pomp, I used to enjoy it.

A man’s waiting for me. He looks older than me, though he’s probably younger. He squints, leaning his head forward like a quail pecking grain. He’s wearing a calf-length tunic in grey cloth, and unlike the others he doesn’t have ink splashed on his hands or sleeves. I guess he makes his living carrying books, not copying them.

‘Are you the librarian?’

He just about manages a nod. His face looks crushed, like a balled-up scrap of cloth. He’s lived his life among his scrolls, neatly rolled and stored. He didn’t expect this in his library.

‘Is the body still here?’

He looks horrified. ‘The undertakers came an hour ago.’

A murder with no body. ‘Can you show me where you found him?’

He leads me down a narrow aisle between shelves, twisting and turning until suddenly we come out by a wall and a window. Yellow light leaches in and falls on the desk below, which is littered with papers and scrolls. The stool’s pushed back – it’s easy to imagine the reader has just gone to relieve himself, might come back any moment to find us leafing through his things.

‘Do you know who did it?’

It’s an obvious question, but it has to be asked. The librarian shakes his head vigorously, affronted. He gestures at the walls of manuscripts hemming us in.

‘No one saw anything.’

‘Who found him?’

‘His assistant – a deacon called Simeon. The Bishop was lying face down on the table. The deacon thought he was asleep.’

‘Is the deacon here?’

Without answering – or perhaps by way of an answer – the librarian scuttles away. He holds out his arm like a stunted wing, trailing it along the shelves as he moves. A lifetime staring at books must have left him almost blind. No use as a witness.

And what can I see? An inkpot and a reed pen on the table, with an ivory-handled knife and a small jar beside them. Thin shavings litter the table where the Bishop sharpened his pen.

Why didn’t you use the knife to defend yourself? I wonder.

I uncork the jar and sniff the white paste inside. It smells like glue. I put it back down and examine the pile of papers beside it. Bishop Alexander was a voracious reader: half the table is filled with scrolls, some untouched, others left open half-read. A few seem to have shaken off the spindles that held them down and rolled themselves up, perhaps when the dead man hit the table.

In the centre sits a different sort of volume. A codex, individual vellum pages bound together to make a book. It seems an awkward and fragmented way of reading, but I know the Christians like it. I peer down to see what he was reading when he died.

It’s impossible to tell. His broken face fell straight on to the book, drowning the words in blood. The left page is illegible, the right unwritten. His past obliterated, the future empty. I try to wipe off the written page, but the blood’s congealed. All I do is smear it. Shadows of words swim beneath the stain like fish under ice – unreachable.

‘Do you think you’ll find answers in there?’

I look up. The librarian’s returned with a young man – tall, with a handsome face and tousled black hair. He’s dressed in a plain black robe and sandals, his hands are stained so dark at first I think he must be wearing gloves. Then I realise it’s ink. Then I wonder if there’s anything else with it.

I gesture to the empty desk. ‘You found the body?’

The youth nods. I scan his face for guilt, but it’s such a mess of emotions I can’t tell. There’s sadness, but also anger; anxiety, but touched with defiance. If he didn’t know who I was before, the librarian’s probably told him. He’s determined not to let my reputation cow him.

‘Your name’s Simeon?’

‘I’m – I was – Bishop Alexander’s secretary.’

His dark eyes watch me, wondering what I’m thinking. Does he really want to know? You’ll do. If Constantine needs a quick answer, then the young servant with ink or blood on his hands – who found the body, who had who-knows-what grudge against his master – he’ll do. If he’s a priest, Constantine won’t torture him or execute him. He’ll pack him off to some rock in the sea and justice will be done.

But that’s not what Constantine wants. Not yet.

‘How did he die?’

‘His face was smashed in.’ The deacon says it viciously: he wants to shock me. He’ll have to try harder than that.

‘How?’

He doesn’t understand. ‘Smashed in,’ he repeats. ‘He had blood all over him.’

‘On his face.’

Simeon touches his forehead. ‘The wound was here.’

‘A clean wound, like a knife would make?’

He thinks I’m being obtuse. ‘I told you it was smashed in. Broken open.’

It doesn’t make sense. If the Bishop was sitting facing the window, back to the room, the back of his head would have been the obvious target. But the blood on the book supports the deacon’s story.

I pull out the monogrammed necklace Constantine gave me.

‘You found this?’

‘On the floor, next to the body.’

‘Did you recognise it?’

‘It wasn’t Alexander’s.’

‘And do you know who killed him?’

The question surprises him. It’s so obvious, he thinks it must be a trick. He stares at me, looking for the trap, then realises that silence doesn’t make him look good either.

‘He was dead when I found him.’

I let my impatience show, playing on his nerves. ‘I know he was dead. But whoever did this didn’t walk away spotless. He must have had blood on his clothes, or his hands.’ I let my gaze drop to Simeon’s ink-stained hands. He clenches his fists.

‘I didn’t see anyone.’

‘Did you hear anything?’ This as much to the librarian – perhaps his ears compensate for his struggling eyes. But he’s already shaking his head.

‘They’re building a new church next door. Every day, all we hear is noise and workmen. It’s almost too loud to read. “Eripient somnum Druso vitulisque marinis,” as Juvenal says.’

I’m not interested in his erudition. Constantine once said that men show off their learning when they have nothing else to say for themselves. My eyes drift away.

And catch something. A spray of blood on the shelved scrolls, well away from where the body was. I push past the librarian, almost knocking him into his beloved manuscripts.

My foot kicks against something in the shadows on the floor. It rolls away, deeper into shadow. Simeon moves to pick it up, but I wave him back and kneel down myself. The floor’s dusty, littered with broken fragments of wax and fine threads of papyrus. As my hand searches the darkness, I feel something cool and smooth under my fingers. When I pick it up, I see a small bust carved in black marble, about the size of a man’s fist. The face has wise features and sightless eyes, though both are obscured by the blood matted onto it. I guess this was the last face Alexander saw before it smashed his brains in.

‘Who is this?’

‘The name is inscribed on the base,’ says the librarian. He can’t bring himself to look.

I turn it over. ‘Hierocles.’

I don’t recognise the name – or perhaps I’ve heard it and paid no notice. But the others know him. Simeon especially.

‘Hierocles was a great hater of the Christians,’ he says, though I can see he’s thinking much more.

‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘From the library,’ says the librarian. ‘We have dozens of them.’

And as soon as I look, I see. Midway up each shelf, about shoulder height, stone heads sit on wooden plinths guarding the manuscripts. Except on the shelf where blood has spattered the books. There, the plinth is empty.

The story unravels like a scroll.

Item: Alexander was standing by the shelf, looking for a document.

Item: The killer arrived. Did Alexander suspect what he was going to do? Probably not – he would have made a noise, and even with the building works next door someone would have heard it. Perhaps they even talked for a few moments.

Item: The killer snatched the bust off the shelf and killed Alexander by smashing in his forehead.

And as my mind reads all this, the final line emerges.

Item: He dragged the corpse to the table and propped it up, so that anyone who glimpsed it would think the man was sleeping. Then he escaped.

Or went to announce that he’d found the body. I look back at Simeon. He can tell what I’m thinking. His face is hard and blank, the anger drawn inside. He’s waiting for me to accuse him.

Casually, I turn back to the librarian.

‘How many men were here this afternoon?’

‘Perhaps twenty.’

‘Can you give me their names?’

‘The porter on the door will have seen them.’

‘Have him make a list.’

‘Aurelius Symmachus was here.’

Simeon blurts it out so fast I hardly catch the name. Simeon’s lost his battle with his anger: his eyes are fixed on me in defiance. Perhaps he thinks it’s the only chance he’ll get to speak.

‘Aurelius Symmachus is one of the most eminent men in the city,’ I point out. Aurelius Symmachus is old Rome, patrician to the core, still a man to be reckoned with, though he’s out of date in this city of new buildings and new men. Not that I’m one to talk.

‘He was here,’ Simeon insists. ‘I saw him talking to Bishop Alexander earlier this afternoon. He left just before I found the body.’

I check the librarian for confirmation. He’s fiddling with the stylus he wears on a chain around his wrist and won’t meet my eye.

Simeon points to the bust, still in my hand. ‘Hierocles was a philosopher known for his hatred of Christians. So is Symmachus.’

An old Roman with the old gods – it doesn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t make him a murderer.

‘Perhaps he wanted to send a message,’ Simeon persists.

Perhaps he did. I remember what Constantine said: Others will say the murder of Alexander was an attack on all Christians by those who hate them.

‘I’ll look into it.’ I turn to go, but there’s still something else Simeon wants to say.

‘When we came here this morning, Alexander had a document case. A leather box with brass bindings. He wouldn’t let me see it – wouldn’t even let me carry it.’

‘And?’

‘It’s missing.’