The Sword of Damascus

by Richard Blake

  Fat, like most Jewish women, she spoke loudly and at terrible length about the achievements of her sons – of whom I learned there were seven. Jacob was her favourite, and if just some of her cure stories were true, he should have been fished straight off to Carthage, or even Constantinople. Otherwise, there was the youngest, whose musical talents I’d surely be able to judge later in the evening. Once or twice – though it never stopped her from gushing away like a broken water pipe – she fixed a thoughtful eye on Edward. He was still keeping up the diplomatic charm. But I could see those girls were having trouble keeping their hands off him. Oh, I’ve had my own day, I thought. Let him have his. It passes before you know it. But Ezra’s wife was still loudly chattering. She had some faint notion of who I had been, and none whatever that I wasn’t that any more. She thought it only natural that, on visiting Caesarea, the greatest subject in the Empire should also drop in on her husband.

  So the dinner rolled on, through more courses than I could even think of eating. Edward steadily munched everything offered, including the honeyed cabbage in hot sauce that Ezra took care to send him. After the first meat course, I kept myself to bread soaked in wine, with occasional dipping into a large dish of barley pottage. The spices would repeat on me later, I knew, but the olive oil in which the pottage swam was beyond resisting for anyone who’d just spent more years than he should have making do on mutton fat.

  ‘My Lord.’ It was the voice, behind me, of Jacob. ‘My Lord.’ I twisted round. His voice had been enough. But there was one of those coldly professional looks on his face that ripped away all the cheer I’d absorbed from that brightly lit gathering. ‘I must ask you to come with me at once. I think you can manage them, but I will help you with the stairs.’

  My hands shook as I wiped them on the napkin. I made my excuses to Ezra and nodded to Edward to stay in his place.

  ‘I agree that the symptoms listed by Aretaeus shouldn’t be taken as a fixed definition of the illness,’ Jacob replied. I didn’t break in this time. Whatever I might have read on his subject, he was the expert. ‘But, while every patient is different, and while this boy is wholly different from my usual patients, I don’t think this is an ordinary case of consumption.’ He lifted the blanket and, in the barely adequate light of the three lamps beside us, we stared down at the sleeping boy. I hadn’t before seen Wilfred without clothes, and hadn’t paid nearly so much attention to his clothed appearance as I had to Edward’s. Still, the boy looked barely half the size he’d been aboard the ship. It was as if something had been hollowing him out, and what remained had collapsed into the resulting void. Except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest and the subdued gasps from his throat, he might have been dead already. Even I must have looked healthier. I swallowed, but Jacob hadn’t finished.

  ‘I won’t ask you to probe for yourself, but you will see the contours here on his stomach of a tumour that goes right through him. If I were to turn him over, you’d see a blue mottling on his back where the tumour has distended the skin. There are also these lumps on his thighs. This one on the right is the size of a duck’s egg. The others are substantial. These symptoms, with others, and the absence of the delirium that is almost invariable in advanced consumptions, lead me to believe the boy’s to be a different and more rapidly fatal condition.’

  ‘Two months ago, in the northern part of Britain,’ I said, ‘he’d been coughing on and off for about a year. But few of the inhabitants there can be called really healthy. The climate is cold half the year, and damp throughout. Except for the growing discomfort and frequency of his coughing attacks, I’d not have said he was other than a weakling.’

  ‘With respect, My Lord,’ Jacob replied to my unasked question, ‘the size of these growths within his body indicates a terminal decline that began long before the journey you describe from his country. On the one hand, the strain of travel may have accelerated the decline. On the other, the more favourable climate of these regions may have compensated for the earlier hardships.

  ‘Whatever the case, I do assure you that the boy wouldn’t have lived another year – whatever his movements, wherever his location. If I knew the reason, I’d give it. All I can say is that, as others are born to live longer, some are born to live shorter than the three score and ten promised in our common scriptures.’ He fell silent as, carrying a bowl and sponge, an old woman came back into the room. He moved closer to the lamps and fussed with a mixture of opium and mandragora.

  There was no point in asking now anything other than the obvious. I’d seen enough. Groaning from the bodily aches of the past few days, I sat carefully in a chair.

  ‘How long do you think?’ I asked.

  Jacob put down his measuring glass and shrugged. ‘You should forget what I told you earlier. That was before I’d made a full examination. It’s a wonder the boy is still alive. If he makes it through the next couple of days, I shall be surprised.’

  There was a muffled burst of laughter and applause from the dining room. I’d not heard him, but perhaps the youngest son had now begun his performance. It was all ghastly – a boy with so much promise and, until recently, so much quiet joy from his life, so soon to die. And what made it worse was that his death would make things easier for those who survived him. We couldn’t travel with Wilfred. We couldn’t leave him behind. We couldn’t stay too long in Caesarea to wait for him to die or recover. If he died soon, those choices could be forgotten. Edward and I would be free to make our own selfish choices. There’s no point feeling guilty over matters outside your control. Nevertheless, I did feel guilty. I felt guilty that this problem was to be solved. I felt guilty also that I might soon have my answer to the question Wilfred had asked on the beach at Tipasa. If there was no telling what reception we’d have in England, why go back there at all? The longer I’d been back in my old world, the less enthusiastic I’d felt about a return to horrid, cold Jarrow. I’d been so fixed on returning purely because it was Wilfred’s home. Edward had no wish to go back. I had little. Did we need to make our way back west? Did we even need to stay together? I’d be dead soon enough – even another few years was too much reasonably to expect. I could hide myself in some desert monastery that took in the aged. I could do any number of things. So too Edward. I looked at Wilfred. The drugs had suppressed his cough. He slept easily. Since it couldn’t now be avoided, his death might as well be peaceful. That much I could arrange for the boy.

  ‘Jacob, you seem convinced the Saracens will soon be here?’ I asked to change the subject.

  He sat heavily down just opposite me. He opened his mouth to speak, but then got up and went over to a table, where a jug and a couple of cups promised refreshment. He poured out the wine. Into his own, he carefully added twenty drops from his glass measure. He looked at me and held out the measure for me to sniff. I held up three fingers. I’d been so long without the joys of opium, it would be best to go easy on the reunion. He shrugged and added the drops. Turning back to his own cup, he gave up on counting, and just topped it to the brim.

  I sipped at my own cup. Unlike downstairs in the dining hall, this was a poor vintage. Then again, we were drinking it less for its own substance than for the dull under-taste of what had been added to it. Jacob drank about half his cup in one gulp, and settled into his chair.

  ‘You had no news while away of developments in the war?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, the Saracens had another go at Carthage last year. They had to break it off for lack of naval support – the Empire had another big victory off Cyprus, and the Saracens haven’t the ghost of a fleet. But the land forces are building in strength. Being Saracens, they can run supplies from Egypt straight through the desert. No one believes Carthage can hold. Once that goes, this whole shore goes with it. Without you to hunt, the naval base at Syracuse is barely enough to keep down piracy – let alone protect us from siege.’

  ‘And you look forward to this?’ I asked again.

  He laughed bit
terly. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘The moment you weren’t there to keep things in order, the Greek Church went mad. The African Church is now run by Greeks. They’re discouraging the use of Latin. They’ve made up some new heresy to seek out among the Latins.’

  ‘Another heresy?’ I interrupted. ‘We sorted out the dispute over the Double Will of Christ six years ago. Surely not something else?’

  ‘There’s always another heresy,’ Jacob sneered. ‘These priests could find heresy in a bread queue. But don’t ask a Jew about its details. I only know that the Greeks have started making a fuss about the use of pictures. The Latins want their pictures. The Pope in Rome is screaming blue murder. But no one in Constantinople listens to him nowadays.

  ‘More important for us, the Greeks are talking of another forced conversion law. Remember the one you “forgot” to publish in Carthage all those years back? Well, they’ve blown the dust off it, and are talking of setting up brass copies in every African city.

  ‘You ask if we want the Saracens? Of course we do! They lower all the taxes, and they leave us alone.’

  ‘And a thousand years of shared history,’ I asked again, ‘that means nothing?’

  No answer.

  The drug had hit us both at the same time. I leaned back and closed my eyes as, like a tide sweeping over a rocky beach, the velvet of the opium blacked out the physical pains of age and over-exertion and the moral pain that flowed from a belief that everything Wilfred had been suffering was somehow my own fault. For the first time since we’d met, Jacob put on something like a happy smile. He took a little sip extra from his cup and leaned slowly forward.

  ‘A thousand years of history!’ he said with a laugh. ‘Let’s have a think about that, My Lord. The old Greeks would only put up with us if we stuck on artificial foreskins and cavorted nude like them in public. One of the madder Roman emperors nearly made us worship his own statue in the Temple. That only got called off when he was murdered by his guards. Another Emperor burned Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. When it turned Christian, the Empire began telling us how to edit our own scriptures and treating us like lepers. It’s a thousand years of history some of us would like to forget.’

  I sat, looking at Jacob, and wondered at how good a few drops of dried plant sap could make me feel.

  ‘But My Lord knows all this,’ he sighed after a long and appreciative pause. ‘Let’s stop arguing about the Empire. We both know it’s the best common home for the peoples of the civilised world. If only you’d been Emperor these past sixty years – why, we’d have gladly helped kick that upstart rabble back into the desert. The Saracens tolerate us. But they don’t mean us any good. They’re coming here, and we’ll turn out and welcome them. But, if only – if only . . .’ He drifted off into the sort of waking dream only enough opium to kill a dozen of the uninitiated can produce.

  We both sat awhile in silence. For myself, I was reflecting on the many advantages of not being in Jarrow: no cold, no prayers, plenty of water for bathing, all the amenities of the civilised pharmacopoeia. Really, why had I gone there?

  ‘But you will forgive me!’ Jacob cried softly. The great poppy inspired orgasm was passing out of its intense phase, and would soon enter its much longer afterglow of delicious and untroubled comfort. He opened his eyes and sat forward. ‘The reason I asked you to come here was that the boy was asking for you before his sedatives took hold. He was insistent that he had things to say that only you could hear.’

  ‘I imagine the poor boy knows he is dying,’ I said with a serene look at Wilfred. ‘Among my many qualifications is the authority to hear confessions and absolve the dying from their sins. I can’t think what sins Wilfred could have that press on him so. But those who believe very strongly do worry about matters the rest of us might barely notice.’

  As I spoke, Wilfred threw back his covering blanket and sat up. I saw the lamp flames reflected by the sweat on his body as he jumped onto the ceiling. Except it was in the wrong direction, it was like watching a cat jump down from a wall. He paused there on all fours and looked down at me, his eyes glowing an internal red. He grinned triumphantly and showed canines that glittered white far beyond his lower lip. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only smiled again. He got up and, without bothering to look at me, walked rapidly over to the closed door. There, he stopped and stretched vainly down to get at the handle. It was too low for him to reach. He stood back one pace, and then forward again. He slapped one hand hard against the wall, and then the other. Like some lizard on a rock face, he began crawling down to reach the handle.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated. When I opened them again, Wilfred was back under his blanket, still but for the continued rise and fall of his chest. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yes – the boy hadn’t moved an inch. I made a note to ask Jacob, when we were both more with it, how he prepared his opium.

  There was another faint commotion downstairs, then a louder thudding of feet on the stairs. It might have been close within the house. It might, on the other hand, have been back in Tipasa. Had I just heard it? Might I be about to hear it? Interesting questions, these. Give me a day or two to think them over, and I might have some kind of an answer. I was wondering if the upside-down reflection of my own face in one of the lamp flames was somehow connected with the noise, when the door burst open. It was one of the young men who’d been so interested in the difference between the jussive mood in Hebrew and the imperative.

  ‘My Lord,’ he gasped, ‘you must hide at once. There are men in the house. They have orders to take and kill you.’

  Chapter 24

  You may assume, dear Reader, that opium, like wine, tends to incapacitate those who use it to the full. If so, you are wrong. It does stupefy – but only when stupefaction is desired. One sound of that heavy, collective tramping on the stairs, and Jacob was straight out of his chair and running about. I was, you can be sure, a little slower. But, once I’d realised the young man was no part of my hallucination, the blotting out of all the aches and strains of the past few days allowed me to get with surprising speed and resolution into the medical contagion robe and then on to my knees before the sleeping body of Wilfred.

  ‘This is a room for the dying,’ Jacob snarled as the door flew open again. ‘I will not have my patient disturbed.’ He fell silent while perhaps a half dozen pairs of feet tramped in and came to a disciplined halt a couple of yards behind me. Hoping I’d pulled my hood on properly, I kept my hands, palms upward, in the praying position. In a low mutter, I intoned as much as I could recall of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. The silence, and now the stillness, behind me seemed to last an infinity. Then I heard a faint sound of leather soles on the wooden boards. There was another loud scraping as the men already there pulled themselves up to attention.

  ‘What is your patient’s condition?’ a voice asked in Latin.

  I froze. It was all the effort I could manage to keep my upstretched arms from shaking. I’d have needed as much opium as Jacob had downed to keep calm. Even with the few drops I’d taken, I found myself wondering if this was another delusion. But I was fully with it, and that voice – in Latin or Greek or Syriac, or in English – I’d have recognised anywhere. I felt rather than heard Joseph come and stand behind me. He peered over at the shrivelled, sleeping boy. To be sure, Wilfred had changed radically since Jarrow. But the wispy blond hair said anything but Jewish. Even in the gloom of the dying lamps, it would take a miracle for him not to be recognised. But Jacob was now beside him.

  ‘It’s a new contagion that killed both his parents the day before yesterday,’ he said with professional firmness of tone. ‘I doubt he will last beyond tomorrow morning. The medical arts are exhausted on him. Prayer is all that remains.’

  There was another long silence. I heard only the gentle scraping of military boots as the other men in the room removed themselves as far as possible from the vicinity of a sickness that might somehow communicate itself across the few yards that separated
them from the dying boy. Joseph stayed put. I felt his long stare into the uncovered face.

  ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,’ I droned on in Hebrew, trying not to shake; ‘yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ If Joseph was Syrian – correction, since Joseph knew enough Syriac to pass for Syrian, he might understand enough Hebrew to know this wasn’t a valid prayer of the Jews. I dropped my voice lower still.

  ‘You will be aware,’ Joseph said, speaking soft and to no one in particular, ‘of the reason for our visit. The traitor whose name I hardly need mention is said to have landed on the African shore – here to raise disaffection against the God-anointed Augustus. The orders are that he is to be killed on sight. He is to be killed on sight – he or anyone who resembles him. For his head, the reward is its weight in gold. For any mistaken identity, the promise is full civil and criminal impunity. Against those who harbour the traitor the full penalties of treason are threatened.

  ‘There is a report that a man matching the traitor’s description was seen to enter the Jewish district. Have you anything to add in light of this information?’

  It was no longer the relaxed, frequently bored, voice I’d known every day for months and months in Jarrow. The fellow spirit – the refuge from the chattering fools – I’d so often sought out in the monastery was no longer the Joseph who stood behind me, looking down at Wilfred with an incomprehensible lack of recognition. This was a man of obvious power within the Imperial Secret Service. Though terrified by what Jacob had told them, his military support didn’t dare do as nature prompted and flee that room of possible contagion.