Happy I & I day, everyone!
We have got quite the chunk of words, so if you have been holding out and want to catch up, go here for where I’m compiling them every week.
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Chapter Six
The Library of Constantinople was one of the best that the world had produced. There was a main reading room in the Augustaion, a smaller theological library attached to the Patriarchate, and the old imperial collection in the Magnaura, which had never quite recovered from the fire of 475.
It had scattered rooms in the palace itself where manuscripts had been moved and forgotten, and the catacomb library beneath the Basilica Cistern, which was the one Alexis had come to visit especially.
“The library was my idea originally,” Alexis told Arslan as they sipped their wine on deck. “It was built to my design in the spring of 538 AD and stocked over the course of four decades. Justinian gave the order, but only because Theodora made him.”
Alexis smiled, remembering the force of nature in a woman’s body. He enjoyed that about her.
“I had been at court two years. Justinian had been the kind of admirer of mine that emperors usually are, which is to say, he was glad I was useful and kept a close, paranoid eye on me at all times. I proposed a secondary hidden library where objects that the main libraries couldn’t be trusted with would be safe. I’d learned that lesson the hard way in Alexandria. Theodora had heard me out and said, in the dry voice she used when she had made up her mind, ‘I want it to be done.'”
“I can only imagine how many men jumped when she commanded,” Arslan chuckled softly.
“All of them. The chief librarian of the Patriarchate holds the key,” Alexis continued. “The current one is a man called Andronikos. He’s sixty and has held the post for twenty years. He has never used the key, because no one taught him the phrase. The knowledge was supposed to pass from librarian to librarian. At some point in the last century, the chain broke. Andronikos believes the key opens a cabinet of Pascha decorations in the east wing.”
“And you know this right phrase because?” Arslan prompted.
“Because I wrote it.”
“Of course you did, how foolish of me to presume otherwise.” Arslan gave him a long look. “So you were an advisor to Theodora and Justinian.”
“He was an able emperor,” Alexis said diplomatically. After a pause, he added, “But a difficult friend.”
Arslan made a sound of agreement. “So were most of the emperors I met.”
“Like when you were in Saladin’s court?” Alexis guessed, and Arlsan nodded. “Did you meet Baldwin?”
“No, but he wasn’t well. I did send him medicine recipes at Saladin’s urgings, but nothing seemed to work permanently,” Arslan replied, sadness in his eyes.
“Baldwin was a good man. Or at least tried to be.”
“He was. Saladin always saw him as a worthy adversary and respected him for it.”
Alexis smiled into his wine. It was a rare pleasure, this easy camaraderie of two men of absurd age exchanging the stories of their lives.
The people they had spoken of in the last two minutes would have been the center of any historian’s career. They dropped them lightly, in passing, because they had been there, and knew that these titans had been men with their flaws like any other.
“I designed the Eos’s hold to be able to contain the catacomb library,” Alexis said, getting the subject back to the library. “I’ve been working on the design in the back of my head ever since the Franks first began to lose their heads over Jerusalem. It became urgent when Innocent called the crusade. I laid the keel months ago and had the mast stepped in January. I told Nereus about it only when I was leaving, so she knew she couldn’t talk me out of it. “
“Did anyone else in Venice know what you were actually going to do with this ship?” Arslan asked.
Alexis considered it for a while. “I think they all suspected what I was thinking, but only Nereus came poking about. She told me I would find something I didn’t expect. The other magicians understand why I need to do some things, so they didn’t waste their breath arguing with me.”
Arslan laughed again. “They love you enough to let you go even though you are a madman to try and carry out such a thing over books?”
“I have been a madman over worse things,” Alexis admitted with a smirk.
“I have no doubt. Despite the foolishness of it, I love the audacity.” Arslan rubbed his hands together. “Now, tell me how we get the books out. You can’t carry a thousand manuscripts up through the Basilica Cistern in one night.”
“It’s one thousand six hundred and forty-three, by my count, but I’ll verify as we pack,” Alexis replied. Arslan gave him an impatient look. “Don’t worry, we won’t carry them. I’ll teach you another Atlantean trick. You won’t be able to do it without me, because it requires an anchor. Together, we can move the entire contents of the library with a single spell.”
“In one go, and we won’t lose anything?” Arslan demanded in disbelief. “It must be a brilliant trick, magician.”
“We won’t lose anything, I swear. The cedar shelves have an older magic in them than you might think. Each shelf knows what it contains and has its own small appetite to stay with its contents. We’ll move the shelves, not the books. The books will come because they are on the shelves, and they will all settle into my hold because I’ve prepared a space for them that is a kinder home than any they have ever known.”
Arslan looked at him for a long moment. “You, my friend, have the capacity for incredible trouble.”
“So, I’ve been told,” Alexis replied and drained his wine. “We do it tonight because the cistern won’t be patrolled. If we wait longer, it will be locked down because news should start flooding into the city that the fleet is getting closer.”
“I take it Andronikos and the key are first,” Arslan said, and put down his empty cup.
“Just before midnight, when Andronikos will be at home with his cats.”
Arslan cocked a brow at him. “And how do you know that?”
“He’s sixty and a librarian,” Alexis replied with a wide grin. “Of course, he has cats.”
They stood on the deck, drinking wine as the sun rose, and watched Galata wake up. The bakers had begun the morning bread, and the smell of yeast and woodsmoke wafted down over the quay.
“Alexis, did you really only come for the Library and a few extra trinkets?” Arslan said.
“Why would you ask that?”
Arslan tapped the side of his temple. “I can see the balance in your soul.”
“Dear gods, please don’t tell me what state it is. A man’s soul is his own business,” Alexis complained. “Especially one as old as mine.”
Arslan shook his head. “You misunderstand me. I only meant that your soul is troubled. There’s something else here, isn’t there?”
Alexis ran a hand over his face in annoyance. He should have expected another immortal to be nosy. They all were to a fault because the only way to tolerate immortality was to dig into the secrets of the world, all in search of something new.
“It’s in the Church of the Holy Apostles,” he began, because Arslan had the patience, if not the attitude, of a saint.
“It was walled up in the sixth century during a renovation that Justinian’s chief architect oversaw. It is a chest that arrived in the city from Egypt via Rhodes. Before that, from a sea-chest recovered from the wreck of a ship that sank off Crete in the century after Atlantis sank.”
When Arslan showed no concern or surprise, Alexis continued.
“The chest originally contained three objects. Two of them were lost to different buyers over the following two hundred years. The third was bought by an emperor and passed into the imperial treasury without identification. From there, it went into the catacombs of the Apostles during a housekeeping purge and has been walled up there ever since. I’ve been searching for it since the seventh century. I last had reliable word of its location in 1120, from a priest who had been given a vision of it by what he believed was the Virgin, but what I suspect, from his description, was a much older goddess wearing a new face.”
“Visions are always tricky when the old gods decide to play.” Arslan clicked his tongue thoughtfully. “What is in the casket, Alexis?”
“A fragment of the orichalcum altar-stone from the Temple of Poseidon, at the heart of Atlantis.”
Arslan didn’t ask whether Alexis was certain. He didn’t make any of the small polite noises a man made when he was being told something that needed a moment to be absorbed. He looked at Alexis with understanding in his eyes, and he waited.
“The orichalcum was cut from the seabed,” Alexis explained, gesturing with his hands. “It wasn’t created or forged. It was…living, I suppose, is the best word. The priests of Poseidon had the whole of the temple’s magic keyed to it.”
Alexis paced the deck, unable to stay still. “Every ritual, every blessing, every offering at the high festivals across thousands of years of temple history passed through that stone. When the island sank, the altar was still in its chamber. The water came up, and the stone went down with everything else. I had assumed that the whole of it was beneath the Aegean and would stay there, but I was mistaken. It washed up on the rocks in Crete with the tides. Whoever found it didn’t know what they had. It changed hands a number of times, as I’ve said, until it came here.”
“How do you know that the vision was real? And if it was, how do you know it’s definitely the altar piece?” Arslan asked, watching Alexis pace without judgment.
“I don’t, and that is the problem. I have an amphora-mark, a shipping manifest, a priest’s vision, and a bone-deep certainty that it is a piece of home.” Alexis ran his hands through his hair, pulling out the leather tie and shaking his curls loose. “I was still debating whether or not to come and investigate the claim, but the crusade tipped the balance. If it is there, I can’t let them find it. They won’t know what it is, and in their ignorance, they will most likely destroy the last physical fragment of the temple of a god I once swore myself to.”
“You swore yourself to Poseidon?”
“In a manner. Everyone on Atlantis paid homage to him,” Alexis replied. “I thought about being a priest, but I was an artisan’s son. I created a stone tablet as a gift for the temple when I was a young man, in the hope that they would either accept me because of how beautiful it was, or at least commission me to work for them.”
“And I take it that didn’t happen? Did the priests not want you?” Arslan asked.
Alexis shook his head, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “No, they did, but Nereus was also there and saw the magic I had worked into the stone. She and the high priest got into a fight over me. Nereus won, but Poseidon was the god the magicians worshiped too because he founded the Citadel. I don’t regret the trade. I did love the god, and I still love him, even though he never did save Atlantis.”
Arslan placed a hand on Alexis’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “If it’s real, we will find it. If it isn’t, well, we will have a chance to talk some more, and your mind can rest easy that it wasn’t there. Go on, add it to the list.”
Alexis took it from his pocket and, with a stub of pencil, wrote in Atlantean, ‘the fragment of the altar of the Lord of the Sea.’
Arlsan patted his shoulder once more before letting it go. “You didn’t mention this artifact to the other magicians?”
“Not to anyone, but Nereus knows I’m always looking for pieces of home.”
“Why not tell them?”
“Because I don’t want them to get their hopes up if I’m wrong, and every time I do find something from Atlantis, they can get…melancholy.” It was putting it mildly. The last time he had, Zo had stopped talking for a full month, Phaidros got blind drunk and started a revolt in Sparta, and Aelia had sent Alexander the Great into Persia. After that, Alexis was more careful about telling them of his finds.
“We will get it, Alexis,” Arslan said at last. “If it is there, we will get it. You will take it home and put it safely into your Archive. You will touch it on the hard days, and find comfort in the fact that you didn’t drown with the rest of your homeland.”
Alexis really hoped that Arslan was right about that, but there was only one way to find out.
***
Thanks so much for reading this weeks instalment!
Ames xx
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