‘Now, my brothers, here are your orders. You will divide these notes among yourselves, and distribute them to trusty and godly Catholics in your districts. Wait one hour, till the city be quiet; and then start, and raise the church. I must have thirty thousand men by sunrise.’
‘What for, your holiness?’ asked a dozen voices.
‘Read your notes. Whosoever will fight to-morrow under the banner of the Lord, shall have free plunder of the Jews’ quarter, outrage and murder only forbidden. As I have said it, God do so to me, and more also, if there be a Jew left in Alexandria by to-morrow at noon. Go.’
And the staff of orderlies filed out, thanking Heaven that they had a leader so prompt and valiant, and spent the next hour over the hall fire, eating millet cakes, drinking bad beer, likening Cyril to Barak, Gideon, Samson, Jephtha, Judas Maccabeus, and all the worthies of the Old Testament, and then started on their pacific errand.
Philammon was about to follow them, when Cyril stopped him.
‘Stay, my son; you are young and rash, and do not know the city. Lie down here and sleep in the anteroom. Three hours hence the sun rises, and we go forth against the enemies of the Lord.’
Philammon threw himself on the floor in a corner, and slumbered like a child, till he was awakened in the gray dawn by one of the parabolani.
‘Up, boy! and see what we can do. Cyril goes down greater than Barak the son of Abinoam, not with ten, but with thirty thousand men at his feet!’
‘Ay, my brothers!’ said Cyril, as he passed proudly out in full pontificals, with a gorgeous retinue of priests and deacons--‘the Catholic Church has her organisation, her unity, her common cause, her watchwords, such as the tyrants of the earth, in their weakness and their divisions, may envy and tremble at, but cannot imitate. Could Orestes raise, in three hours, thirty thousand men, who would die for him?’
‘As we will for you!’ shouted many voices.
‘Say for the kingdom of God.’ And he passed out.
And so ended Philammon’s first day in Alexandria.
About five o’clock the next morning, Raphael Aben-Ezra was lying in bed, alternately yawning over a manuscript of Philo Judaeus, pulling the ears of his huge British mastiff, watching the sparkle of the fountain in the court outside, wondering when that lazy boy would come to tell him that the bath was warmed, and meditating, half aloud....