‘Now, whatever the case with how he chooses, do go and see about that spare tunic of Edward’s. You really would stick to the wall in what you’re wearing. Keep your outer robe with you in case we need to stay ashore into the evening. You may need it against the chill. Otherwise, I want you in something light that will let you have what goodness you can get of the sun.’
Once the door was closed, I settled down to some hard racking of my memory for that letter I’d been given so many years before in Carthage by the citizens of Tipasa. I’d been in no position then to reduce their tax assessment in light of its contents. If I could recall its precise details now, it might help me.
Down below, the chanting had started up again.
Back on deck, I smiled benignly at the assembled company. Most of the northerners bowed. A few sank to their knees. I waited for someone to take my arm and hobbled slowly over to the side. Wearing a grubby tunic that showed flesh the colour of aged parchment everywhere it didn’t cover, Wilfred sat calmly at the stern of the rowing boat. A look of sulky ill-humour spread over his face, Edward sat beside him. He’d combed his hair very nicely, and the sparkling reflection from the sea sent little flashes of silver across his face. If he hadn’t looked so dejected – and so nervous too – he’d have been almost as beautiful as I was at his age.
‘I still have a bruise from my last entry into that boat,’ I quavered at the northerner who’d taken my arm. ‘I trust you will show more care on this transfer.’
He bowed and pointed to an elaborate harness of ropes that had been put together for that purpose. I smiled again and stepped back into the outstretched arms that were already waiting to put me into the thing.
‘So we have the same oarsmen as in Cartenna,’ I said as I was placed with great gentleness on to the arrangement of rather damp cushions at the prow. The men grinned back at me and took up the oars. ‘I will think more of our escape than of your problems there,’ I continued happily, ‘and regard this as a good omen. Edward, have you brought all the money with you?’
He looked up and nodded blankly, then went back to a close inspection of the dirty planks at his feet. How they were already wet was an oddity. Perhaps the boat’s long spell out of the water had caused some of the planks to shrivel. Well, they’d surely soon expand again. Edward misunderstood my stare and nodded again.
‘Then let us be away,’ I said. I looked up at the ship’s deck. Two dozen nasty faces grinned down at me. ‘Do please remember my instructions,’ I called up at them. ‘Stay out of sight, and don’t think of approaching the docks until we’ve all assured you that it’s safe to do so.’ I might have spoken Latin for all the effect my words had. But I smiled again and waved at the oarsmen. With a few heavy grunts and a splash of oars, we were under way.
‘You know, my dear boys,’ I said, speaking past the silent oarsmen to the boys huddled at the far end of the boat, ‘that the African sea is always a delight.’ I stretched down with my right hand and patted the broken smoothness of the water. It was as warm as any noon-day bath. Of shimmering green, the sea bottom was refracted to look no deeper than six feet – though it must have been thirty. ‘I won’t remind you of how Jarrow must be at the moment. But can you believe that Rome is probably now so cold that people have to smash through the ice to get water from the Tiber? In Constantinople, I have no doubt there is a foot of snow in all the side streets. Indeed, it was at this time of year once that we had to put up wooden partitions along the Colonnade of Maurice so the beggars could huddle there and not freeze to death in the February cold.’ That was true enough, though the ‘we’ was more collective than personal. It was that worthless toad Croesus who’d bent the ear of the Imperial Council for that waste of timber – less, I might add, out of charity than to curry favour with the mob. My own view had been that, with the Saracens at the gate, the fewer idle mouths we had to stuff with bread, the better it would be for the rest of us. But no matter that. It was a lovely day. The ship lay perhaps fifty yards behind us. In a moment, I’d twist round for a look at the silent, ruined docks of Tipasa.
‘Mind you,’ I went on, ‘the sun can be a terrible trial come July. It’s then that, in the old days, persons of quality would pack up and move for a few months to the more temperate climate of Sicily.’ The boys seemed as if they were shrivelling into themselves. Edward’s mood had communicated itself to Wilfred, who looked ready to start coughing again. I glanced back at the ship. The chanting had resumed almost the moment we were off. Now, I could hear a regular beating of cooking pots. If I strained, I could make out the blurred figures on deck as they danced about to the rhythm. I smiled again and patted my wig. ‘I was in Sicily for about a month, when Constans had his court there,’ I said, pointedly ignoring the breach of my orders. ‘I’ll grant that Syracuse can be as hot as Carthage on a bad day. But if you go up into the mountains, you can easily imagine yourself much further north. In a single day, given the proper relays of carrying slaves, you can pass from the palm trees of Syracuse and Catania to the chilly cover of the pine forests that fringe the craters of Mount Etna.’
As I spoke, all noise and movement back on the ship ceased. One moment, I was raising my voice to compete with the din that drifted across the widening distance from the ship. Another, and we were alone but for the regular splashing of oars on the warm African sea.
And then the oarsmen stopped rowing. One of them slithered round in his seat to face me.
Chapter 17
‘Is it to be thus?’ I asked of the oarsman who’d dropped me in Cartenna. Already, Wilfred had started another of his calm prayers. Edward was clutching himself and beginning to rock backward and forward. I paid them no attention. ‘You’re scared of my ghost if you do the work on board the ship. Isn’t that it? And you don’t believe that I can be killed at all on land.’
No reply from that sweating, yellow-bearded face. His colleague sat still, his back to me. Of course, I didn’t need any answer. When you’ve spent as much of your life as I have dissecting the various modes of superstition that complicate the politics of mankind, nothing is a mystery, nothing a surprise.
‘So how is it to be done?’ I asked again. ‘Will it be the cutting off of my head? Is that to be thrown into the sea, and my body left on land for the wild animals to devour? Or is it to be drowning?
‘Oh – and which one of you gets first crack at Edward’s arse?’ The boy looked up at that. His face was pleasingly scared and miserable. I grinned and went on. ‘I don’t know about you, but a pretty face doesn’t mean much when you’re at the back of the queue for a gang rape. You get more friction if you cut a hole in a dead pig and try fucking that.’
The oarsman who’d dropped me in Cartenna got unsteadily to his feet. Then he braced himself against the rocking of the boat and reached down for me. He carefully avoided looking into my eyes. The knife he held at the end of his outstretched arm was as much an iron charm to protect against anything I might do to him as the weapon with which he was to dispatch me. I uncrossed my legs and looked up at him.
‘You do realise,’ I said, with an easy wave over the sea, ‘that, without me as your leader, you’ll be stuck in this sea. You’ll move about at random until the Imperial battle fleet catches up with you. I imagine you’ve seen men flayed alive. But I’ll bet you haven’t seen the finesse that the Imperial Government can bring to the operation. Heavens, my dear fellow, I’ve seen a man kept alive for days, quite screaming mad from the pain as blood oozed slowly from every inch of his peeled body. Lay hands on me, and that’s what you’ll get – though only if you’re lucky. You won’t believe what torments have been perfected over the centuries for those who try crossing the Empire, or its servants.
‘But enough of unpleasantness. Come, come, my fine young fellow – if you’ll only proceed on our supply gathering mission and return me safe to the ship, I can promise you gold as big as your fist once we’re back in England. It really is an offer you’d be silly to refuse.’
Of course, it
wasn’t an offer he or any of the other dear fellows would dream of accepting. Their god Yadina wanted my blood. Nothing I could offer in its place would do for getting them back home. But I thought it worth going through the motions. The man reached down and took hold of me by the stiff brocade of my Cartenna robe. With a single hand, he pulled me to my feet and kept hold as, with an expectant look back at the ship, he held his knife about a foot in front of me. All at once, the pots began their clatter again, and – now as triumphant as the psalm at a victory celebration in church – the chanting rolled at us in swelling waves of sound across the water.
The man opened his mouth for some gibberish of his own, and held up the knife for what I guessed would be a downward stroke between my collar bones.
Now, my dear Reader, do you recall that vicious little knife that Joseph had given me far back in Jarrow to sharpen my pens? When Benedict had finally got me to my feet the next day to go and face whatever grim fact awaited me in the hall, I’d stuffed the thing out of habit into a fold of my clothing. No one had thought it worth bothering to search a poor old creature like me, and I’d ever since then been carrying the knife in its leather sheath next to my skin. To be sure, I hadn’t known how or when it might come in handy. But no one with any pretensions to calling himself a free man should go out – not even in the most civilised place – without some means of defending his life, liberty and property.
There was a time when, no matter how small the blade, I’d have carved the fucker’s head off. But ninety-six is ninety-six. Even so, if age had withered my muscles, it hadn’t dulled my wits. That two-inch gash, in just the right place on his neck, and he was down like something slaughtered in a butcher’s market. I fell on top of him and gasped in the joy of looking close into those horrified, fast-dulling eyes. I felt the warm blood splashing in diminishing bursts on to my chest and face.
It was all very quick, and I was back on my cushions before the other oarsman had so much as turned to see what could have gone wrong. I held up the dripping blade and smiled at him. Over on the ship, the clattering and chanting had given way to a wail of most gratifying terror. If there hadn’t been the other oarsman to deal with, I’d have staggered up and blown them a kiss. But there was outstanding business on the boat that was unlikely to wait.
‘You want some of this?’ I snarled, holding up the little blade. ‘Just you come and get it, you piece of barbarian trash! Come on, then, shit for brains – don’t just sit there with your mouth open.’ With the first oarsman, I’d had the advantage of complete surprise. It really had been as if a sheep had turned and savaged the wolf that was about to eat it. This one couldn’t so easily be tricked. That didn’t mean I proposed to sit there, waiting for the beast to fall on me and complete the work of freeing his band from the evil fortune or whatever that had brought them all into the enclosed sea. Shouting with rage and fear, he was on his feet and screaming at me. He pulled out his own knife, and stepping carefully to avoid the still twitching corpse that lay between us, took a step forward.
You can be sure it was his last step. I’d been sitting with my back against the prow of the boat. I now reached both arms behind me and clamped myself as best I could to the one place where even I could make a difference. I threw my weight to the left. As the boat returned to balance, I threw myself to the right. It was a feeble rocking. The difference between my own effort and its results might have been comical had it not been so depressing a reminder of the obvious. But it was enough. The oarsman tried to drop to his hands and knees. He tried too late. With a heavy splash, he was straight over the side. He surfaced about six feet from us. Like every other seaman I’ve encountered, he’d never bothered with swimming lessons. For all it could help him, six feet out might as well have been sixty yards out. And the smooth African sea might as well have been the northern sea in a storm. He surfaced with a frightened gasp. He splashed ineffectually about. He sank again. He came up a few more times before he finally disappeared. But I’d already seen enough. Without bothering to wait for his end, I leaned forward and picked up my fallen wig.
‘Don’t just sit there,’ I said to the confused, silent boys. ‘This boat won’t row itself ashore.’ I looked over at the ship. Though not yet to much purpose, figures were already running about on deck and shouting. We needed to get inside the safety of the little harbour. If, by the time of Constans, gradual silting really had reduced the draught to about a yard, the ship could never follow us in. With no boat for a pursuit, I doubted anyone would want the risk of wading ashore. Until we were within the harbour, though, it was just a matter of turning the ship about and getting the oars in time with each other. Even scared barbarians were good for that. ‘Come forward, turn about and take an oar each,’ I urged the boys. To emphasise my words, I shook my wig at them.
An idiot expression on his face, Edward looked away from the dying but still occasionally surfacing oarsman, and stared down at the bloody streaks I’d splashed all over his tunic.
It was now that I actively noticed the inch or so of bloody sea water that was sloshing round my feet. All boats let in water. Perhaps the timbers of this one really had shrunk. But even without the pint after pint of lifeblood that had dyed it bright red, this wasn’t the sort of leakage you’d expect in a boat so small – nor after so short a journey in calm water.
Chapter 18
I dumped the wig with a dull splash into the filthy waters and leaned back. I could now see that I was myself covered in blood. It was all over my hands, and soaked into my robe. It must have covered my face. I could feel it dribbling down the back of my neck. So much for wanting to look my best for whoever still scratched a living in Tipasa! I laughed weakly and pointed again at the ship. It was all panic on deck now. Men were pulling frantically on ropes and tripping over each other. I could see the uncoordinated swirl of oars. The sound of almost insane shouting drifted across the several hundred yards of water that separated us.
‘Look, my dear boys,’ I said, now very feeble after the excitement of the kill, ‘I really can’t row this thing by myself. I’ve done what I can for our common salvation. I really do urge you to consider taking up these oars and putting your scared little backs into getting us inside the harbour.’ I was looking for words to describe what would happen to us if we were overtaken by the ship that would provoke a response other than scared paralysis. But Wilfred had twisted round to his left and was silently pointing.
I peered dubiously into the horizon. No point asking if that was a sail perhaps five miles off. Now I look the trouble to look at the ship without the obvious preconception, it was clear that we weren’t the object of the panic. If the northerners were getting ready for a pursuit, it was with them as the pursued.
‘What is the ratio of the sail height to the perceived length of the ship?’ I asked in my best classroom voice. That brought Wilfred at least to order. From his answer, I could guess that we had a scout ship in sight. It was just the one ship, so far as he could see. This would never be up to taking on something as large and well-manned as our ship. Its function was to dart quickly back and forth across the seas, to pick up and to relay information to a main fleet that might be half a day or even more over the horizon. Ignorant of Imperial battle tactics, the northerners were behaving as if already under attack. We were forgotten in the panic to get out of the calm. Our own oars trailing loose in the water, held only by their leather retaining straps, we drifted in the calm waters and watched the chaotic movement of the ship outwards to where the breeze blew strongly from the west.
‘Can you please take up those fucking oars?’ I tried again with the boys. There was no danger now of being overtaken and recaptured. If we ever saw that departing ship again, it would be a matter of bad luck. All we needed now was to be out of sight. Anyone looking in our direction from the scout ship would have the sun almost directly in his face. It would be unusual if we’d been spotted from that far off. And that was how it had to be left. We had to get out of all possible sight. So lo
ng as they kept up some basic standard of seamanship, and so long as the wind held, those northerners could outrun almost anything sent against them. If the Imperial authorities could keep believing I was in it, and so long as there was water taken on from somewhere, the ship could disappear right off to the coast of Egypt or even of Syria. That would give me time to consider what to do next. And I’d need plenty of time to think my way out of this one.
I looked down at my feet. They, plus ankles – plus calves halfway to my knees – were now hidden by the warmth of the bloodied sea water. There was no doubt we were sinking. I could see one of the arms of the dead oarsman moving slightly as each heavy motion of the boat lifted it in the water.
But Edward was now stretching into the water on his side of the boat to try to pull the oar into his hands. After some pained looking about, Wilfred was making less determined efforts of his own. Setting two jittery boys of uneven weakness to a job that really needed two big men didn’t make for a fast or even a direct journey to the shore. But foot by foot, and with much drift towards the more ruined end, we did at last make our way into the harbour. My last view of the open sea, as we disappeared behind a rock, showed our ship, now quickly disappearing into the east, and the scout ship in cautious pursuit.
‘Anyone waiting for us on the docks?’ I asked, feeling the need with ever greater urgency for a long doze. I believed Edward’s impression, and my own memory of its circumstances, that Tipasa was pretty well abandoned. Still, it would never have done to put in with a fresh corpse at our feet, and me looking like something from one of the flagellation ceremonies we used to put on when another province fell to the Saracens, and no reasonably convincing excuse for these facts.
No answer. Edward’s face was straining like some overburdened athlete as he tried to pull effectively on his oar. Wilfred was far advanced into a dry coughing attack. The boys weren’t ignoring me. They just hadn’t heard me. I might have been sad Tithonus, whose lover, the Dawn, asked Zeus for him to be immortal without asking also for him to keep young and beautiful. At last, when loathsome age had leaned full upon him, the goddess locked him away in a cupboard. There, the ancient poets sang, he was left for ever, sounding like a cicada, to babble his senile nonsense. So I might have been as I leaned back against the prow and looked up into the bright sky. The sun was beating down on me with full strength. Tired out by the excitement of the kill, I closed my eyes. The muttering away in English of two incompetent, frightened boys, and the gentle lapping of the sea against the sides of the boat blended together and became more and more distant.
The Sword of Damascus Page 11