The Temple of the Muses(26)

“Here are the things you asked for,” Hermes said. I took my dagger and caestus and tucked them inside my tunic. My sightseeing idyll was over and I was ready for serious business.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To the Museum,” I said.

He looked around. “Where’s the litter?”

“We are going to walk.”

“Walk? Here? You’ll cause a scandal!”

“I can’t set my mind to serious work if I’m being carried around like a sack of meal. It’s all right for decadent, inert foreigners, but a Roman should have more gravitas.”

“If I could be carried about, I’d never wear out another pair of sandals,” Hermes said.

Actually, I wanted a closer look at the city. Prowling the streets and alleys of Rome had always been one of my choicest amusements, but I had as yet had no opportunity to do the same in Alexandria. The attendants and guards at the Palace gate stared in amazement to see me walking out attended only by a single slave. I half expected them to come chasing after me, begging to carry me wherever I wanted to go.

It was a strange, disorienting experience to walk in a city made up of straight lines and right-angled intersections. Merely crossing one of the wide streets gave me an odd sensation of exposure and vulnerability.

“It must be hard to elude the nightwatch in a city like this,” Hermes observed.

“They might have been thinking something of the sort when they designed it. A bad place for a riot, too. See, you could line up troops at one end of the city and sweep through the whole town. You could herd rioters down the side streets, separate them into little groups or crowd them into one place, wherever you want.”

“It’s unnatural,” Hermes said.

“I agree. I can see the advantages, though.”

“All made of stone, too,” Hermes said.

“Timber is scarce in Egypt. It’s comforting, knowing you aren’t likely to be incinerated while you sleep.”

The people who thronged the streets were of all nations, but the bulk of them were native Egyptians. The rest were Greeks, Syrians, Jews, Sabaeans, Arabs, Galatians and people whose features and dress I did not recognize. There were Nubians and Ethiopians in every shade of black, most of them slaves but some traders. Everyone spoke Greek, but other languages formed a subcurrent beneath the predominant Greek tide, especially Egyptian. The Egyptian language actually sounds the way those hieroglyphs look. At every street corner there were mountebanks to be seen, dancing, tumbling and performing magic tricks. Trained animals went through their paces, and jugglers kept unlikely objects in the air with uncanny skill. Hermes wanted to gawk at all of these, but I tugged him past them, my mind set on greater matters.

We could have entered the rear of the Museum complex from the Palace itself, but I preferred to get a feel of the city. One raised in a great city has a feel for cities, as a peasant has a feel for arable land and a sailor for the sea. I had grown up in Rome and had urban bones. These people were foreigners, but they were city-dwellers, and all such have certain things in common.

My bones told me that this was a fat, happy, complacent populace. Whatever discontent there might be was minor. Had there been a riot or insurrection brewing, I would have known it. Alexandrians were known to riot from time to time, even killing or expelling a king or two, but these people were too busy making money or otherwise enjoying themselves to represent a threat. Civil discontent is always a menace in polyglot cities like Alexandria, where tribal antipathies sometimes override respect for law and authority. Not that Rome has place of pride in that respect. Our civil disorders tend to involve class rather than national divisions.

“Don’t even think it, Hermes,” I said.

“How do you know what I’m thinking?” he said, all wounded innocence. I knew when he said it that I was right.

“You’re thinking: ‘Here’s a place where a presentable lad can fade into the population, and who’s to notice? Here I can pass myself off as a free man, and no one will know I was ever a slave.’ Isn’t that what you were thinking?”

“Never!” he said vehemently.

“Well, that is good to hear, Hermes, because there are many cruel, brutal men in this city who do nothing but look for runaways to haul back to their masters for the reward, or to sell off to new masters. Should you disappear some morning, I would only have to pass the word and you would be back before nightfall. This is a large city, but the accents and inflections of the Roman streets aren’t at all common here. So forget such fantasies and apply yourself to my service. I’ll free you one of these days.”