Felix approved. ‘Good. My craftsman reckons that it will take him five days to do the inlays and change the edgings so, assuming that I can get it to him tomorrow, we should aim for the night of six days hence.’
‘How much will he charge this time?’
‘Double; plus the value of the gold for the inlays, which he calculates to be about ten aurii.’
Vespasian did some quick mental arithmetic and blanched. ‘Six hundred and fifty denarii! That’s robbery.’
‘He’s not stupid; he knows exactly what he’s making and wants to be paid for his discretion in the matter.’
Vespasian could not argue; the craftsman was entitled to a premium for not asking questions, and besides, since withdrawing the money from Thales, he had plenty stored in a large chest on the ship waiting to take them home. He was just not very good at parting with it, he reflected. ‘Very well, I’ll pick up the cash on the way back to the palace.’
‘Thank you. So, gentlemen, I have enough rope and a boat and I’ve worked out how to get onto the roof of the temple without the guards outside seeing; that just leaves us with one outstanding problem: the geese.’
‘I thought that you knew how to solve that.’
‘I do; the only way to stop them from raising the alarm is to keep them occupied and the only way to do that is to feed them; so, as I said, we need Ziri already inside the temple to scatter grain for them before we come down the rope. The question is where can he hide? I went back there yesterday and there’s nowhere within the temple itself; so that just leaves the burial chamber. Now, there is a small gap between the two uprights supporting the slab that the sarcophagus rests upon that a small man like Ziri could fit into but…’
‘How do we get him past the guard who’s at the top of the steps during the day,’ Vespasian said, seeing the problem.
‘We need a diversion,’ Magnus suggested.
Felix nodded. ‘Yes, but what? The priests know us so they’ll be suspicious if we go in there and start fighting or arguing or whatever.’
‘I could fall down pretending to be ill.’
‘You could, but what kind of guard would leave his post for long enough for Ziri to slip behind him for the likes of you?’
‘He’s right, Magnus,’ Vespasian said with a grin, ‘a battered ex-boxer like you isn’t going to elicit a great deal of concern no matter how much you writhe and wail; a beautiful woman on the other hand?’
‘A diversion? You think of me as a mere diversion?’
‘No, Flavia, I want you to be a diversion.’
‘For you?’
‘No, for somebody else.’
‘You want me to whore myself to somebody else?’
Vespasian closed his eyes and took a deep breath; the conversation had not got off to the best of starts. ‘Listen to me, will you? We…I need you to distract a guard for long enough to get Ziri past him.’
‘What guard?’
‘A guard in the Temple of Alexander.’
‘Why?’
‘So that he can get down to the burial chamber.’
Flavia looked at him suspiciously and sat up in the bed; sunlight filtering through the half-closed shutters dappled her fair skin and glistened on her ruffled, loose hair. ‘What are you planning?’
Vespasian realised that he would have to be totally honest with her to stand any chance of getting her co-operation.
‘Caligula wants you to act as his thief?’ Flavia said once he had explained the situation. ‘He really is mad.’
‘Yes, but unfortunately he’s also the Emperor.’
‘And if you don’t steal this thing for him?’
‘He’ll never forgive me; or worse.’
‘Why don’t you just take him the replica that you’re having made?’
‘I’ve thought about that but Caligula saw the real one close up when he visited Alexandria with his father; I daren’t take the risk that there’s a mark on it or something that we haven’t seen and he can remember.’
‘If there is then the priests will discover the fake.’
Vespasian shrugged. ‘That’s a risk I have to take; anyway we’ll be back in Rome by then.’
‘We?’
‘If you want to come back with me, then yes, we.’
Flavia looked down at him and smiled. ‘Does that mean that you want me to be your mistress or your wife?’
Vespasian swallowed, realising that for the second time in the conversation honesty would be best. ‘I already have a mistress in Rome whom I will never give up.’
Flavia looked at him warily. ‘Then what do you want from me?’
‘I want sons, so I was thinking more of the second option.’
‘And what if you get your mistress pregnant? Divorce me and marry her?’
‘I could never do that, she’s a freedwoman.’
‘So she’s no threat to my position, then?’
‘No, Flavia.’
‘What I want from you is security.’
‘You will always be my wife and the mother of my children.’
Flavia fell on him and kissed him passionately. ‘In that case I’d be happy to, Vespasian,’ she said between kisses. ‘I’ve been so worried recently.’
‘About me leaving you here?’
‘No; about me always being a mistress and never having the children that I pray for every day to Mother Isis.’
Vespasian’s footsteps echoed in the grand stairwell as he made his way down from his suite to the ground floor of the Royal Palace. He had made no attempt to conceal his progress through the well-lit corridors of the upper storey; any slaves whom he had met in passing he had ignored as they bowed their respects to him. He paid no heed to the two legionaries on guard at the foot of the stairs who snapped to attention as he passed, choosing instead to act as if he had every right to be walking around the palace in the dead of night, which, indeed, he did. Acting with the confidence expected of his rank in society, he had reasoned, would be the best way to avoid any suspicion.
Turning left past the guards he walked down a wide corridor punctuated on either side by niches in which were housed the busts of previous prefects, set upon pedestals; the flickering glow of torches played on the features of the carved stone faces and reflected off the polished marble floor. Drifting in with the moonlight through a window at the far end of the corridor, overlooking the Royal Harbour below, came the shouts and cries of many voices and the unmistakeable rasping of oars being shipped as if a large vessel were in the process of docking. Turning right at the window, Vespasian glanced down to the palace’s private port in the eastern corner of the Great Harbour, and glimpsed a trireme in the pale light being made fast to the quay as a small group of people waited at the top of the gangplank to disembark. He briefly wondered why a ship should arrive in port in the middle of the night, and then realised that that was the advantage of the Pharos: its light could guide a ship into harbour at any time.
After a couple more turns, and meeting no one else, he arrived at the unlit corridor where the statues of the Ptolemys stood like a long line of silent sentinels, still and strangely forbidding in the gloom. Putting all ghostly thoughts to the back of his mind, he quickly pulled back Ptolemy Soter’s heavy cloak and started working on unbuckling the breastplate, which proved to be a fiddly task owing to the lack of light and the stiffness of the buckles and leather straps. After an agonising few moments, while his heartbeat gradually quickened, the stiff leather straps finally came through the buckles and the plate was free; Vespasian placed it on the ground and removed the replica from under his cloak and began to attach it to the statue. As he secured the last strap a flicker of orange light glinted in the corner of his eye; he turned and, looking back up the corridor, saw a torch appear at the far end accompanied by the sharp sound of hardened leather soles striking marble. In the dim light he could make out three people, two men and a woman, walking directly towards him. He quickly slipped the statue’s cloak around him, picked up the cuirass and stood pressing his body hard up against the stone Pharaoh and prayed that the approaching party would not notice in the dark that Ptolemy Soter had sprouted an extra pair of legs and a hunched back.