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him a lecture on the virtues of working for a living. But I’d had enough that day of explaining myself.
    He shuffled back to his patch of shade and sat down again with as hard a bump as a starved body could manage.
    His begging cry was soon lost in the noise around me. But soon it wouldn’t just be the beggars who were hungry. There’s a limit even in Egypt on how much grain you can take out before people begin to starve. For the moment, so long as I could keep Nicetas from signing his price control order, there was still bread to be had in the market. But it was hard to say how much longer the poor could afford to buy anything at all.

Chapter 4
     
    I looked again at the tattered sheet.
    ‘I can’t say I’ve heard of a Lake Smegma,’ I said. I looked closer still at the sheet. Why was it, I asked myself, that papyrus always crumbled under the most important words in a document?
    ‘I think you will find this helpful, My Lord,’ Hermogenes quavered. He pointed to another of the sheets stretched out before us on the table. I shifted position, to see if the faded writing might look any better from another angle. How at his age he could read a word of this was beyond me. Then again, as Head Librarian, his job was to read far worse.
    ‘Ah,’ I said at last, ‘a transliteration of an Egyptian name.’ I’d raised my voice only slightly. But it echoed in the cavernous main collection room of the Library. Perhaps thirty yards away, some bearded scholar looked up and scowled at me. ‘It gets us a little closer to what we want,’ I continued. ‘At least we can be sure it did exist. But we still don’t know what it contained – or, indeed, exactly where it is.’
    ‘That may be so, My Lord—’ Hermogenes broke off as one of the lead weights shifted, and the map rolled shut. As he reached with palsied hand to keep it from moving any futher, he knocked it and a whole stack of rolls on to the floor. They fell with a crash that echoed through the room.
    ‘No, My Lord,’ Hermogenes gasped as he went down on all fours. ‘Please allow me.’ The rolls scraped harshly on the pavement as he tried with all the feeble uselessness of age to gather them all together again.
    ‘I must inform you,’ the far away scholar hissed with pompous self-importance, ‘that I am here on work of the highest importance to Holy Mother Church. I do not expect endless disturbance from the prattle of some barbarian child. Show some respect as you breathe in the sacred dust of these four hundred thousand volumes.’
    Hermogenes tried to get up and splutter a protest. But I kicked him gently in the side, and he went back to trying to re-sort his documents. ‘Work of the highest importance’ to the Church, he’d said? Well, he must have been pretty far down the scale of human importance not to have recognised me now I was wearing no hat. And if he had recognised me, a bishop himself would sooner have kissed the dust beneath my boots than call me a barbarian. I could have called for security and had him arrested. A good racking and the loss of his eyes wouldn’t have been thought unreasonable to anyone told the facts of his treason. But I’d grown used to living in a world where my looks made me an object either of lust or of contempt. I turned my back on him and stared again at the racks that housed just part of the biggest collection of books in the known world.
    Oh, how excited I’d been on my first visit here back in April. Here, at last before me, was the greatest research library in the world: the treasure house, begun by the first King Ptolemy, of all the arts and sciences. It was here that the standard text of Homer had been settled, here that the world had been measured, here that the secrets of the human body had first been laid out and classified.
    It hadn’t taken long however, to discover just how ‘sacred’ the dust was of all those books. The shelving racks might still have their ancient labels. Their contents had long