“What are you after?”
“The Jews are in Delta now, aren’t they?”
The man looked at him askance, ran his eye up and down, and shook his head.
“You’re the Roman Jew,” he surmised. “Philo’s favorite. Am I right?”
“Yes, I am a Jew from Rome.”
A second man, older and more stubborn-looking, stepped up alongside the first.
“What does the alabarch have in mind?” he asked.
Uri bridled. “Why don’t you ask him?” he retorted.
“That’s enough of your sauce!” the stubborn-looking man roared.
“I’m not too fond of being manhandled,” Uri declared. “My staff was also taken away!”
The two men looked at each other in puzzlement.
“I want my staff back!” Uri cried.
There was silence as everyone in the room looked at him.
“Give it back to him!” the younger man ordered.
One of them offered the staff. Uri took it back and turned away.
“Get them out of here, please.”
The younger man gave a nod; there was dignity in the movement.
The escort left the room.
“What do you want?” the younger of the men asked.
“I don’t want anything,” Uri answered. “They hauled me here. My apologies for disturbing.”
He bowed and set off to leave.
“Wait!” the stubborn-looking man exclaimed.
Uri stopped and turned around.
“Where’s the alabarch?” came the question from the slit-eyed man with the low forehead.
“How would I know? When I wanted to get back into the palace they were no longer there. I spent two nights in the necropolis, then I came here to Delta. Of my own accord. To my way of thinking it was safer.”
They looked at him dumbfounded.
“Do you think that money will smooth over everything?” hissed the narrow-eyed man.
Uri snorted a laugh.
“I haven’t got a drachma on me!”
“You buried it!”
“Are you kidding? What use is money here? Tomorrow you won’t be able to get even a loaf of bread for one hundred drachmas!”
There was another silence before the younger man said:
“Come over here! Take a seat among us.”
Uri looked at him and broke into a smile.
A stool was pushed under him at the table. He sat down.
And they asked him what he thought was to be done.
What ran through Uri’s head were all the things he had read in the scrolls Tija had recommended, about the tactics that a town under siege ought to follow. But there wasn’t much among the good advice offered by Philon and Aeneas Tacitus that could be applied here: the Greeks intended not so much to besiege as to starve and humiliate the Jews. Food and water were needed, and those could only be obtained from outside Delta; nothing at all could be grown in this densely inhabited quarter.
“The Greeks need to be prevailed upon to supply us with food,” he said, “though I’m aware that will be very costly. All the same, they need to be paid off not to stand guard gratuitously.”
“There will be no negotiating with murderers!”
“But there is no choice,” Uri countered.
“Let the alabarch negotiate!”
“It may well be that he is doing just that somewhere,” said Uri. “But here and now that is what we have to do — even with murderers.”
They resumed their argument, red in the face as they began screaming at each other. Uri suddenly realized that they had been discussing this very issue just beforehand. He was fueled by a new hope that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be seen as being the alabarch’s man; it might even be handy to get them to give him something to eat.
“Your alabarch is a gutless worm,” said one of the councilors, whom Uri thought he had seen before: why yes! It was Euodus; one of the guests who had dined at the alabarch’s palace. “Why doesn’t he come with his army? He would be able to rescue us! It’s only riffraff guarding us!”
“I can’t imagine why he doesn’t come,” said Uri. It was all very awkward; the proper thing for him to say would have been that the alabarch was obviously moving Heaven and Earth, but he could not find it in his heart to say so.
A few hours later he was able to eat together with the elders. Looking out of the window he could dimly see figures prowling on the far side of the wall, still equipped only with cudgels.
Uri figured the guards here were staying out of the major pillaging, otherwise they would have been pickled to the gills by now. It was possible, then, that they would be satisfied with a bit of money. It was not their aim that we should die quickly, he reasoned: they’d rather kill us off slowly because that way they would make a tidy profit. The bartering should start low, and we should be grudging in giving any ground; it would be no loss to break off talks at any point, because the Greeks would come hammering on the door for money soon enough.
“They won’t deliver anything! It’s waste of money! They’ll sling their hook straightaway!”
“They will deliver,” said Uri. “They’ve got that much sense.”
“Surely you’re not counting on this lasting for any length of time?” asked the stubborn-looking man.
“Yes, I am,” Uri responded.
That did not go down well with anybody — the elders and the smarter ones really wanted to hear their longings confirmed.
“Flaccus will come to his senses,” said one elderly man sitting in a wobbly chair. “He’s drunk himself stupid but he’ll come to. He’s been good to us up till now, partial to us, but he’s been led up the garden path, drunk under the table…”
They looked at Uri as if he was the one who knew it all. After all, he lived in the alabarch’s palace, knew Flaccus personally, was a student at the Gymnasium…
Uri shook his head.
“Flaccus hasn’t taken leave of his senses,” he said. “He’s very much in command of them, in fact. He’s a man who has fallen out of favor. He made a deal beforehand with the Greeks; in my view he took a payment in advance, and he’s taking a share of the booty right now. He’s amassed a mountain of money so he’ll be able to hide out in the Sudan or somewhere… That’s his only chance.”
“But why at our expense?”
“That’s the only way that was open to him! Do you think he would have joined forces with the Jews when he knows that they support whoever is emperor at the moment?”
A protracted and unproductive argument broke out, with the elders getting bogged down in grand politics and history, while Uri sat quietly and thanked the Eternal One that he had been recognized on the bank of the Taurus.
All the members of the council spent the night at the house; the owner, a silk merchant, did well out of it: there was no need for him to accept others in his house, and the freshly organized forces of law and order protected his property along with the councilors. He had a splendid house, with a pool on the ground floor; the two floors above that had eight big rooms, including three with cubicles. There were ten elders, two of them without families, so somehow there was room for them all.
Uri lay on the floor near the pool, along with many others: the noise just would not die down outside, nor would it die down inside, and he turned over in his mind why it had not immediately occurred to him to paint himself as the alabarch’s man. It had come down to pure chance that he had ended up here and had been given board and lodging. Am I so helpless? He reflected before coming to the conclusion that he wasn’t.
Do I despise the alabarch that much? He was surprised to conclude that he did — as much as he did Agrippa.
Nicolaeus, the most intelligent-looking member of the council, took Uri aside late that evening.
“Where do you think the greatest risk lies?” he asked.