‘I must stay for few moments to perform the short cleansing ritual that is prescribed every time we visit,’ the priest said, acknowledging their thanks with an inclination of his head. He stepped aside to allow them to mount the two flights of stone steps leading back up to the temple.
Coming out of the dark staircase, past the armed guard in Macedonian uniform at its top, Vespasian’s eyes took a short while to get used to the bright light; once they had done so he looked around the cavernous, circular chamber that he had only briefly glimpsed earlier as they had been ushered through its main doors and straight down to the tomb. It was dominated by a huge equestrian statue of Alexander, helmetless with his hair flowing behind him, mounted on Bucephalus and with a lance couched under his arm as if in mid-thrust. Next to it, rather incongruously, stood the now obligatory statue of Caligula.
In the absolute centre of the floor was a circular balustrade, waist high, surrounding the opening of the narrow shaft down which the public could gaze at Alexander’s preserved corpse. Directly above this was a similar sized hole cut in the ceiling, fifty feet above.
‘At noon on the tenth of June, the anniversary of Alexander’s death according to the Roman calendar,’ the priest informed Vespasian as he appeared at the top of the steps, his ritual complete, ‘the sun is directly aligned to shine down onto his face. I’m afraid that you’ve missed that by a month.’
‘That is a pity,’ Vespasian said gazing up at the hole. ‘What happens when it rains?’
‘It rarely does here, but there is a hatch up there that we can close.’
Vespasian nodded thoughtfully. ‘Thank you, you’ve been most accommodating.’ As he turned to leave, his foot slipped and he would have stumbled had Magnus not caught his arm; he looked down at a smear of greenish slime on the floor.
‘Please accept my apologies, senator,’ the priest said hastily, ‘I will have the slaves who clean the floor punished for their slackness.’
‘What is it?’
‘We keep geese in the temple at night as a security; should anyone overpower the guards outside and gain access their noise would raise the alarm. I’m afraid that is their residue.’
‘You’re right, the windows are out of the question; the best way in and out is through the roof, if the hatch is strong enough to attach a rope to,’ Magnus agreed as they sat in some shade in the long and wide central courtyard of the Soma surrounded by the individual mausoleums of the Ptolemaic dynasty and with Alexander’s temple at its northern end. At its centre stood an altar at which a priest waited to accept the offerings brought by the people of the city in the hope that their semi-divine dead rulers would intercede for them with the gods on matters close to their heart, be they financial, legal or personal.
‘But first we’ve got to get into the Soma,’ Vespasian pointed out, looking at the only gate through the high walls of the complex through which a group of Greeks walked leading a lamb.
‘That should be fairly straightforward,’ Felix assured them. ‘The main gate is guarded but never closed so that the people have access to the altar day and night.’
‘So we just pretend to be supplicants?’
‘Exactly.’
‘All right,’ Magnus said sceptically, ‘say that we do get in and manage to sneak off unnoticed to the temple, get up onto the roof and then down through that hole, how the fuck do we deal with the geese?’ He indicated across to a small enclosure to the left of the temple in which were housed two dozen of the nocturnal guards.
Vespasian shrugged and looked at Felix.
‘The problem of the geese I can solve,’ Felix assured them, ‘we just need to get a man on the inside the evening before we go in — Ziri could do that. The big dilemma is the replica breastplate.’
‘What’s so hard about that?’ Vespasian asked. ‘You said the pattern is easy to replicate.’
‘It’s not the pattern that worries me. You said that the switch must never be noticed, which would be fine if the priests were just looking at it through the crystal. The trouble is that once a year they take the lid off and would then see that the leather isn’t old. No matter how much we try to age it it’ll never match the original if they inspect it closely.’
‘So we need to find a leather breastplate that’s three hundred years old or so?’ Vespasian questioned, raising his eyebrows.
‘Exactly,’ Felix replied, looking beaten.
‘That won’t be a problem; I saw more than a dozen of them last night.’
CHAPTER XVIIII
‘That’s very good, Felix, very good indeed,’ Vespasian said, admiring the leather cuirass on the table in Felix’s study.
‘It looks old to me,’ Magnus affirmed, nodding his head appreciatively.
‘It’s good enough,’ Felix agreed, ‘but it won’t stand up to close scrutiny.’
‘I can’t imagine that anyone stops and takes a very close look at Ptolemy Soter’s statue, and even if someone did it would be to examine it for the first time, in which case they wouldn’t have seen the original and will accept this one as real.’ Vespasian picked up the breastplate and examined the bronze edgings around the neck, shoulders and waist; they were not identical to Alexander’s but looked exactly like the workmanship on the original that they would replace: that of the first Ptolemy. Vespasian had chosen Ptolemy Soter’s breastplate because it was the plainest as compared to his descendants, whose armour became more and more ornate as their martial prowess diminished. As one of Alexander’s generals he had emulated his leader’s habit of wearing plain but functional Macedonian armour, so that there was no gaudy protuberance for a spear point to catch and gain purchase on to pierce the hardened leather. All that needed to be done to this breastplate was to replace the edgings and then inlay the rearing horses.
‘What about Flaccus?’ Magnus asked.
‘He walks down that corridor every day and probably never even looks at the statues,’ Vespasian replied, feeling the hardened leather of the cuirass and admiring how the craftsman had made it feel slightly supple, as if it were very old. ‘And anyway, if he did notice that the breastplate had been swapped and then realise that I had done it and why, do you think that he would announce to the Greek population of this city that the Emperor of Rome, the man he represents, has had one of their most venerated artefacts stolen? Bollocks he would. He’d have an uprising on his hands before you could say “Caligula’s mad”.’
‘He seems to have one on his hands already,’ Magnus commented, ‘which appears to be getting worse, judging by the smoke coming from various parts of the city this morning.’
‘Yes, the civil unrest is escalating,’ Felix agreed. ‘Now that the Greeks see the Jewish demands for equal status as a threat to their dominant position, they’re taking matters into their own hands; but that may work in our favour by acting as a diversion.’
In the ten days that they had been waiting for the breastplate to be made, interracial violence in the city had been on the increase. The Jews had retaliated for the man murdered on the Canopic Way, but when Flaccus had merely had his murderers flogged, not crucified, the Greeks had felt emboldened to escalate their violence and began burning Jewish houses that were not in the Jewish Quarter and attacking any Jew who ventured into another part of the city. For their part the Jews had started sending out sorties and attacking, sometimes killing, anyone not of their race. Flaccus had brought in more troops in an effort to keep the Jews confined to their quarter, but it had not been successful; the legionaries had become targets for both factions.
‘So all we’ve got to do now is swap them over,’ Magnus said. ‘Who’s going to do that?’
‘I will, I’ll do it late tonight,’ Vespasian replied, fitting the breastplate to his chest. ‘It should be simple enough; I’ll wear this under a cloak, then swap it with the original from the statue and wear that as I go back to my suite. No one would dare stop and ask me, on the way there and back, what I’m doing and the corridor is in an area of the palace not used at night.’