East & West- Catharsis

by David Capel

  Pater noster, qui est in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem: sed libera nos a malo. Amen

  Erkan glared at me for a moment, then turned to the other officer. He had judged his man well. For he was clearly a provincial soldier, who spoke nothing fluently but Greek, with his little Latin half remembered from the odd legal document.

  In truth, aside from me, none of the others present could speak the language either, so I dare say he could have jabbered almost anything and they would have been none the wiser if he had carried it off with sufficient confidence. But I had stolen perhaps the only text he would have known off by heart, and so he garbled some nonsense which even I could make nothing of, and within moments the grey haired buyer was convinced. He placed his hand on my shoulder, and nodded at me to follow him.

  There was an exchange of words between him and the overseer, with Erkan looking on, but no paperwork or money seemed to change hands. My new master took a knife from his belt and my heart leapt into my mouth. But then he tapped his chest and said “Mahmud,” cut the cord that still bound my wrists and led me into the crowd.

  And that was the end of my journey from Manzikert. I would see some of my fellow captives from time to time around the city, including the young slave, who committed suicide shortly after the sale. Others I never saw again, presumably taken by merchants who were passing through on their travels. But it was not the last I saw of Erkan, as I will tell.

  **

  Mahmud led me along the winding alleys of the city until we reached a quiet street that stretched up steeply from the fruit bazaars. It was lined with a rough adobe wall, but fifty paces on he stopped at a narrow archway framed with elaborate tiled designs in the Arab style and knocked hard at the wooden door.

  An answer came from within and Mahmud called something back that I did not catch. The door opened. An older man stood there dressed in a plain grey tunic and beckoned me in. “Come,” he said in heavily accented Greek, and after a brief exchange with my buyer closed the door on the outside world.

  We crossed a narrow courtyard strung with garments drying in the sun, and entered what seemed to be a back door to a substantial house. My new guardian indicated a bare room to one side of the corridor and, with nothing more than a muttered instruction which I did not understand, he left me.

  There was no furniture of any kind, but the room was cool and I sat cross legged in the way that I had become accustomed to on the journey to Damascus. I was not disturbed for an hour or more, save by a crone of an old servant woman who brought me a cup of water.

  She was deaf to my enquiries as to the owner of the house, but I was not unduly disturbed. Life in captivity teaches you the virtue of patience, and to enjoy moments of reflective calm, which are all too rare in daytime. Besides, this was no prison. The room was light and airy, and though the washer woman and the man I surmised to be the butler had closed the door on me, neither had locked it, and I was sure that I could have left the house and probably opened the gate to the street too.

  I toyed with this notion for a while, but not with any earnest plan for escape. I would be alone and penniless in Damascus, with almost no Arabic or Syriac. Even if I left the city walls I could not travel far without assistance, and to ask for help was to draw attention to myself. The odds were that I would quickly be noticed and captured, with a far worse fate then than the one that seemed to await me here.

  Besides I was very curious to know what that fate might be, and why I had been brought to this house. The answer came soon enough in the form of the butler who stepped into the room and muttered something at me, signalling for me to stand.

  With him was another man of about the same age, but there the similarity ended. The newcomer was plainly but expensively dressed in a dark green tunic embroidered with gold trim. He was short of stature but upright, with a long, wispy beard that was greying at the edges. He had a monkish air to him, and you could have placed him in a monastery except for the close fitting cloth cap that he wore. To my surprise he spoke to me in good Greek.

  “I understand that you can read,” he said, in a rather odd accent, and he smiled, his eyes twinkling.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Good, come with me.” And he turned and left the room. I gaped at him for a moment until the butler ushered me forward, and so I followed my new master into his house.

  We walked down a short corridor and through a trellised door into another courtyard, much larger than the first. It had a cool fountain tinkling at its centre, and was surrounded by shady cloisters on every side with a second story of rooms above them. In one corner I noticed a group of ladies sitting at a table under an awning. I felt awkward in my rough attire and as their chatter stopped I felt their gaze upon me. But the man in front ignored them and led the way through the sunshine to the opposite side.

  Here he ushered me into another room which was well furnished with several tables and couches. On the floor were rich carpets in the Persian style, and I saw that the walls were lined with shelves and pigeon holes stacked with books and scrolls.

  The man turned to me and said, “My name is Ibn Khalid. And yours?”

  “John Lascaris.”

  “Well, John Lascaris, I sent Mahmud to the market to find one who could read and write. We will see how well he has done.”

  He smiled thinly. “Please read.”

  He indicated a book that lay open on the nearest table. I stepped over to it and saw to my surprise that it was a Bible, open at the first chapter of the Gospel of St John. I looked at him and he nodded and said again, “Please.”

  So I started to read those familiar verses that I must have heard and uttered myself a thousand times, about the Word made flesh and the fulfilment of the prophesy about the coming of the Messiah. The metaphor seemed rather absurd, reading it out in those alien circumstances. Perhaps sensing my thoughts he interrupted me.

  “And what is the Word made flesh?”

  “Err, well it’s about Christ coming among men to save us, which is what Christians...”

  “Good,” he interrupted, holding up his hand. Taking my elbow he steered me gently over to another table that stood under a latticed window. There, in the dappled sunlight, he unfurled a scroll and weighted it with a couple of smooth pebbles that were to hand.

  “If you please”, he said in his curious way, so I bent over the scroll and immediately recognised part of Thucydides’ account of the ancient war between Athens and Sparta that I was familiar with from my studies in the City. And as I read about the plague afflicting the Athenians it dawned on me what I had been puzzling over since this strange man had first spoken to me. His accent was not from some remote part of the old Empire, but from the past. Ibn Khalid spoke Greek archaically, as if he had learnt it straight from the pages of Thucydides.

  As if reading my thoughts he interrupted me again.

  “John Lascaris, this is my library. I would read the words of the ancient Greeks and Romans. You will speak to me in Greek.”

  And that is how I began my period of slavery in the city of Damascus.

  **

  Ibn Khalid was a scholar and a collector of books. His library would have put those of all but the richest monasteries in the Ecumene to shame, for it consisted not just of the books and scrolls I saw in his day-room on that first morning, but chests and cupboards full of texts in a locked and windowless storeroom in another part of the house.

  From time to time he would extract a number of these and it was one of my duties to sort and catalogue those which were not in Arabic, and he would select a few for the shelves around his day-room.

  He was thrilled to have found someone that could read Latin as well, for some of his material was very old, from the days when the old Roman tongue was the official language of the Empire even here in Syria.
These were often legal texts from the law school in nearby Beirut, or edicts and bureaucratic documents sent from Rome itself before it fell to the barbarians.

  In all perhaps a quarter of his documents were in Greek or Latin or other languages such as Aramaic. The rest were in Arabic. To my surprise these included many translations from the original Greek, particularly works of geography, mathematics and medicine. For the Arabs have a great thirst for knowledge of the way the world works, and are forever speculating on the nature of the stars, or devising new machines to measure distances and solve mechanical problems. In this respect they resemble our forebears more than we do ourselves, and are the wiser for it.

  They have less interest in our theology or historical works, having a great sense of certainty about their own conception of the divine. But for his part Ibn Khalid was intrigued by the history of the Greeks and Romans, and sought my help in understanding the works of everyone from Herodotus to Julian the Apostate

  One of his projects was to compose a new translation of Thucydides into Arabic, and so for my part I studied hard to master the tongue of my new masters, both in the demotic form used in the household and in the street, and the elaborate phrases of their prophet Mohammed.

  I found the work interesting enough, and having few other diversions probably learned more in those weeks and months than in all my studies back home.

  So my life in the household of Ibn Khalid was one of ease, certainly by the standards of slavery. For although I had other tasks aside from library work, these were mainly of a secretarial nature, running errands around the city and dealing with household accounts, or occasionally helping with the household chores. From time to time he would ask me to give lessons in Greek to some of his friends or associates.

  On the third afternoon I was set to work cleaning the floors and sweeping the ornaments around the salons of the building. Instead of feeling the shame and humiliation of slavery, I felt a mild, peaceful elation. The house was shady and cool, and my physical duties were light. My situation was unimaginably preferable to the sweaty, scorching march of the last month, not to speak of the appalling dangers of battle and raid in Anatolia.

  The nature of servitude is to be thankful for small mercies. The idea that slaves spend their time pining for freedom is false, certainly among the great majority. In fact it is like any other dull and monotonous occupation, such as labouring on a farm, or living as a junior monk in a monastery. As soon as you become accustomed to the lack of choice, you seek out and relish the small moments of luxury that come your way.

  I smiled to myself as I remembered Erkan. No doubt he had originally envisaged me hacking away in some salt mine. Yet his greed had got the better of him. What would he think if he saw me here in this peaceful place? For the free, the very idea of slavery is torture. But the reality is more often little different from the condition of most people in this world. Though when I thought of the young man and the fat merchant with the hooded eyes, the smile left my lips.

  Ibn Khalid himself was decent company, if dry in conversation. He would question me about the doings of the Romans, and the history of our people and our wars. As my Arabic improved he would ask me to join the long discussions he held with his scholarly friends, either in his house or theirs.

  But if I lacked nothing for material comfort, I soon began to get bored, and this in the end was the root of my downfall and also my eventual salvation. My master was as cold as a fish in character, and had no interest whatsoever in me as a personality. He never asked me about my life or my background, save to establish me in his mind as a part-educated man from a good enough background. Perhaps to humanise me too much would expose the contradictions of my life as a slave. For a slave I still was, despite the liberality of his education and the gentility of his household.

  And this was at the heart of my growing frustration. I was used simply as a device for Ibn Khalid’s scholarly pursuits. He never included me in his family meals, and I was barely on nodding terms with his wife or daughter. My only discourse, aside from his little intellectual gatherings, was with his domestic servants. Aside from Walid, the elderly butler, and the woman whom I had met on arrival (who was called Fatima and doubled up as a cook), there was a footman named Ahmed who also served as a doorman. Even these three affected to disdain my status as a slave, not that their company would have satisfied my requirements in any case.

  So I was often left to my own devices, particularly when Ibn Khalid was away on business. I took to exploring the ways of the city, which held my interest for a while. Damascus had been a Roman city, and indeed its magnificent mosque was built on the foundations of an old temple of Zeus, and had been decorated in gold mosaic by craftsmen imported from the Empire.

  Yet Arab cities are quite different from their Roman equivalents. The Mahomedans place no emphasis on public ceremony, so the parades and processions familiar to the people of the City of Constantine were absent in Damascus. As a result, except for the walled enclosure around the mosque, the broad streets and squares of the old city had been filled in with a maze of buildings and alleyways, for the most part barely wide enough to drive an ass.

  Even the Street called Straight, mentioned by St Paul in the Gospels, was little more than pathway meandering through an endless crowd of market stalls, eating houses, shops and brothels. Like many alleys in the city it was part-covered with awnings or wooden shelters to provide shade, so that in some places the city was like a maze of tunnels, filled with the extraordinary sounds and scents of the goods on sale there.

  The bazaars of Damascus were a source of wonder even to a Roman brought up in the Queen of Cities. There were whole streets where the stall holders specialised only in the sale of spices from the Orient and herbs from Arabia. There were gold and silver merchants and rows of shops piled high with carpets and rugs from Persia and the far Oxus.

  I returned again and again in morbid fascination to the more open space where the slaves were sold. There were many Romans still on the market, brought from the ongoing raids in Cappadocia and the other provinces of Asia. For I learnt that the Turks were now rampant throughout Anatolia, and almost every day some new rumour filled the streets of the fall of Rome.

  As well as Romans there were Armenians and Georgians for sale, and also pale-skinned Scythians from north of the Pontic Sea, and huge men as black as ink from Nubia and the far corners of Africa.

  Why I was drawn back to the slave market I cannot fully explain. I would lurk in the shadows for as long as an hour on some days, watching the misery and the squalor of the captives, and the endless brutal rota of the auctions. I was far luckier than most, and I pitied in particular the young Anatolian peasant women being pawed by the fat and toothless dealers. Nevertheless the spectacle filled me with a horror almost erotic in its nature, and my thoughts began to turn to how I might encompass my escape and return to my own people.

  I was not unduly perturbed by the rumours of war and Roman defeat. It occurred to me that such stories were bound to be exaggerated by the expectation and glee of the Mahomedans. I also knew for sure that the city of Antioch, not far from Damascus, was still held by our arms. It seemed to me that if this eastern fortress was still secure, then all could not be lost in Asia.

  Given the freedom allowed me, at first I thought it would be a simple matter to abscond and head north to Antioch. Yet I soon realised that my clothing (I wore daily a short tunic that marked me out as a Christian slave, with the scar of my branding clear for all to see on my leg) and my halting speech would attract instant attention beyond the city walls. And even these were guarded closely at the gates, and those who came and went needed special permits to do so, in theory at least. The Arabs knew all this and so saw little need to restrain their household slaves. The chances of travelling abroad undetected were slim, and the penalty for doing so severe. An owner would think nothing of killing a runaway or selling him into mining or agricultural work. Besides, life as a domestic slave was preferred by many to the peasan
t toil they had been captured from. Few tried to flee in practice, therefore.

  So I decided to bide my time. I told myself that there was no urgency for my flight, and that I should plan it carefully. The Ducas plot had been sprung, with defeat its ghastly consequence. I was too late to change that. No clear information about the internal state of the Empire reached us in Damascus. I had no idea if the Ducas faction had triumphed, or if Diogenes had reasserted himself on his release.

  But none of this mattered to me now. My only desire was to return to the life of ease I had before, far from Damascus, and far too from the plots and betrayals of my superiors.

  But at that moment this was wishful thinking. My greatest problem was a lack of money. Even if I escaped the city in disguise I would have no means of acquiring a horse, and would have nothing to sustain me. I concluded that my best disguise would be as a Christian merchant whose native tongue was Syriac or Aramaic to excuse my poor Arabic. There were many Christians still at this time in Syria, and I noticed some of them passing the gates with mules laden with local produce.

  Leaving the city was the first problem that I solved. Even before I started to contemplate escape I yearned for open spaces away from the noisy tunnels of the bazaars. My first attempts to pass the city gates resulted in a clip round the head from a Turkish guard and a gruff instruction to go back to where I belonged.

  But I soon found a more amenable custodian. One of the smaller gates, which allowed only those on foot or with pack animals to pass, was guarded by a unit of Circassian mercenaries. One afternoon I simply approached the two soldiers leaning against their spears there and explained that I had a break from work and asked if I could sit for a while in the sunshine beyond, within sight of the gate. I often find that if you request something slightly unusual politely enough, the natural reaction is for the person with authority to accede. So it proved in this case, and I soon became a regular visitor to the Circassian gate.