The Sword of Damascus

by Richard Blake

But Zakariya stared again at the three coins I’d set out on the table. He gave me another of his smiles. ‘With all respect, My Lord . . .’ Without asking leave, he sat down opposite me. I looked into my cup and said nothing. ‘With all respect, My Lord, this is the beginning of times. God sent Jesus – peace be upon Him – to be His Prophet. His teachings were immediately corrupted by the Greeks. Now, God has sent Mohammed – peace be upon Him – as His last and greatest Prophet. His teachings cannot be corrupted. And they have wiped the slate of history. Those who accept them are no longer Syrians or Egyptians or Saracens – or even Greeks. They are the Faithful. All that went before is of no value. My sons shall learn the Holy Book by heart, and blend into the Community of the Faithful. I am the last of my blood whose first language must be Syriac, the last who was ever deceived by the muddy reason of the Greeks and of those who argued against the Greeks from within Greek premises. There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet,’ he ended in a Saracen more piously than correctly voiced.

  ‘Then the boy and I must change lodgings,’ I said with mock earnestness, ‘if we are to continue going to church.’ Of course, I had no intention of visiting any place of worship. I’d wasted enough time already in these places, and had reached an age that gave me the perfect excuse for not wasting any more. But I’d hit just the right tone to get the man’s face working.

  ‘“Let there be no compulsion in matters of faith,”’ he said hurriedly with another glance at the coins. ‘Those are the words of the Prophet.’

  And so they are. If he’d said nothing beyond that, I’d have thought better of the Saracen Prophet. However, you don’t push someone too far when he’s taken up a new religion. Those born in the Faith could take a relaxed view of its harder precepts. That didn’t include Zakariya. If he’d gone out and spat on his father’s grave, it wouldn’t be much worse than he was now doing. And you don’t argue with a man in that position – even when you are paying wildly over the going rate for his hospitality.

  ‘Would it offend My Lord if I asked how long these miserable rooms should be reserved?’ he asked. He now gave way to compulsion and picked up one of the coins. He rubbed it hard between forefinger and thumb, and his face took on its first genuinely peaceful look since I’d caught him finishing the holocaust of his father’s library.

  ‘Until further notice,’ I said. I thought of adding some rider to this, but instead repeated myself: ‘Until further notice. I will let you know of any change of plan. In the meantime, please attend on me every Tuesday morning to receive another advance payment of your rent.’

  His mouth nearly fell open. He was on his feet again, bowing and bringing his right hand again and again against his forehead. It would be all as I asked, he assured me. Within that house, I might as well be the King of Beirut.

  As the promises and boasts poured from his lips like water through a clock, I looked up at the ceiling and thought once more of the golden mass locked within the cupboard beside my bed. When Zakariya did finally shut up, I might think it worth ordering tuna fish baked in honey for dinner.

  Chapter 31

  You may often have heard it proclaimed that money doesn’t buy you happiness. I can understand that the rich have generally tried to impose, and the poor have too often taken comfort in, the belief that three meals a day, plus the chance of living past thirty-five, are to be pitied rather then envied. But I see no reason whatever for sharing the belief. Anyone who’d last seen poor, dirty old Brother Aelric brooding over a cup of beer in the cold wastes of Northumbria wouldn’t have recognised the frail but hearty grandee carried about the streets of Beirut. Indeed, so long as the sun wasn’t too close to the vertical, I was perfectly up to walking about the streets.

  It was Friday, 26 April 687. I’d been here a month, and Jarrow was a fading dream. Its only active reminder came when Edward forgot himself and lapsed into English. The following day would be my ninety-seventh birthday – not a day I was planning to celebrate, or even mention to Edward. But the fact that I’d made it this far, in such good shape, and despite several thousand attempts during the better part of a century to keep me from living another day, was beginning no end to cheer me. If I could carry on like this till the full century, I’d have no reason to complain. Indeed, I had bugger all reason right now. The day had started well, and was growing progressively better.

  Cup in hand, I was sitting in the back room of a bookshop just off the main square. The owner brushed more of the congealed papyrus dust from his face and bowed apologetically.

  ‘The problem is, My Lord,’ he said again, ‘that nobody wants any of this stuff nowadays. I think I’m the only one left who sells anything but Syriac and Saracen – and that’s my real business, you know.’

  I ignored him and looked again at the walls, lined, as they were, with row upon row of crumbling leather volumes. I couldn’t see the parchment labels on the spines, which meant I could hope they were other than still more worthless discourses on the Nature of Christ. I breathed in slowly to feed the hope, and savoured a smell that had given me comfort since I was barely older than Edward. It wasn’t a pleasure he seemed inclined to share. Sitting on a low stool before me, he was trying, without much success, to wipe the brown dust from his hands. I breathed out and coughed, and waved at the crate that two sweating assistants had finally carried up from the basement.

  ‘That one,’ I said, pointing at one of the older and more stained rolls. ‘Remember that papyrus rolls aren’t like a modern book. Try not to break this one.’

  Edward fumbled with the protective leather band. Once more, it was perished, and it came apart in his hands. I sniffed, but said nothing. He tugged on the protective outer sheet as if it had been a bale of cotton cloth.

  ‘Oh, give it here,’ I said, now with genuine impatience. ‘Let me show you again how to read in the ancient manner.’ I took the roll from him into my right hand. Holding it lightly in the middle, I pulled gently with my left hand on the outer sheet. As I rolled this neatly around the outer spindle of the book, I slowly let out more of the long papyrus strip with my right hand. ‘Look, Edward, the secret is to keep your arms at a fixed distance from each other and from your body. You then keep up a light tension: too much, and you’ll pull the gummed sheets apart, or break one; too little, and the sheet will buckle, and then you’ll have trouble reading the text.’ I unrolled the book all the way to the end. I then repeated myself in reverse. I gave the reclosed book back to Edward and watched as, clumsily, and with much swearing under his breath, he got it open again to the first two-inch column of text.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I encouraged. ‘You don’t expect me to bugger what’s left of my sight on that worn-out script.’ He screwed up his face into a vision of heroic concentration and read me the opening to the fourth volume of Simonides. I put up with his reading until he’d reached the end of the dedication to Hipparchus, then stopped him. ‘Have I not repeatedly told you,’ I sighed, ‘that proper Greek makes a distinction between long and short syllables? Forget what others may do, especially in Syria. Have you ever heard me fail to mark the distinction? It is exactly the same as in Latin – and perhaps still more important, bearing in mind the probable change of the accent since ancient times. Listen to me recite the piece, and try to follow the text as I go.’ I sat back and began on the long and graceful epigram I’d first read seventy-five years earlier in the University Library in Constantinople.

  ‘But, My Lord, if you already know the piece, why must I read it to you?’ Edward asked. For all he was trying, he couldn’t keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘You remember everything you’ve ever read, and you’ve read everything.’ I thought of explaining myself with a hard poke of my stick in his chest. But it wouldn’t have done in front of the bookseller. Sadly, Edward was in need of more explanation. ‘This Greek is even worse than Latin,’ he said, now with open annoyance. ‘It’s nothing like the language that people speak. Don’t they ever write anything except in a language last spoken thousand
s of years ago?’

  ‘One thousand years ago,’ I corrected him with even menace. ‘The modern language has fallen away from its old perfection. But educated men try to keep both versions balanced yet separate in their minds. We, who come to both as outsiders, have an advantage here. Regardless of that, it is an effort worth making. What the Greeks achieved in their day of glory may not have been repeated. It is certainly not to be forgotten. Now, take up and read again. And do try, this time, to mark the distinctions of length.’

  I was thinking of the great ode on the Panathenaic Festival that followed the one we’d just read, when I heard the first screams out in the street.

  ‘Dear me, what is that?’ I asked. ‘I really thought Beirut was too small for a riot.’

  The bookseller’s face tightened, and he rubbed the papyrus dust from his hands with a dirty cloth. We listened to the rising volume of sound. It was a terrified screaming of women and adolescent boys. Among it all were manly bellows of rage, or perhaps also of fear. The bookseller ran into the front room of the shop and shouted at his assistants to get the stock inside and the shutters down. I pulled a face. This was a bloody nuisance. The day really had been going so well.

  ‘Help me upstairs, Edward,’ I commanded. ‘There’s a balcony from which we can look over the street.’

  When we entered the shop, the street had been empty. The main square, though, had been crowded with Saracens and their local converts, all waiting to get into what had been the Church of Christ the Redeemer for the prayers of their holy day. The street was now a mass of running people.

  ‘Is that blood on those men?’ I asked, peering uncertainly at the rapidly moving blurs beneath where we stood.

  Edward nodded. He took my arm and turned me to the right, in the direction of the mosque. We couldn’t see the entrance. It was plain, though, that the crowds were trying to get away from the place.

  I shut my eyes and rubbed them. I looked harder – and I wondered how thick the shutters were of this shop. ‘Is that not a banner, hanging down,’ I asked now, ‘with a cross painted on it?’

  Edward nodded again. ‘Can you see the men standing on the roof above the banner, waving severed heads?’ he asked.

  Perhaps, if I’d looked harder, now I knew what was there, I’d have seen it all for myself. But the screaming grew suddenly more intense on our left. The crowds that had been running and pushing madly to get away were now jostling their way back towards the square.

  ‘Christ is my Saviour! My Saviour is Christ!’ came the repeated shout in Syriac. I saw the flash of steel about thirty yards along the street. I couldn’t see those who had the swords. But it wasn’t hard to work out what was happening. Soon enough, there would be the soft clatter of hooves on paving stones, as the Saracen guards made their way in to restore order. Any prisoners they took would come smartly enough out of their hashish fit once they felt the hooked gloves dragged through their flesh. In the meantime, it was bloody murder in the streets.

  ‘It’s people from the mountain tribes,’ I said, speaking partly to myself. ‘When there’s a war on, we smuggle weapons to them and small amounts of money. For the outlay involved, you can sometimes get a big return. During the last war, we staged a big attack in Damascus. We took out twelve of the Saracen religious leaders as they were working themselves up to lead the Faithful into battle against us. The Caliph had his ambassadors straight off to Constantinople with offers of a renewed tribute.

  ‘I don’t like this sort of thing myself. But it helps keep these people off the offensive. And, bearing in mind we can’t match the armies they have to throw at us, our entire strategy is one of asymmetric warfare. It’s a matter of sea power and of new weapons, and of terror attacks. You see, they rule over a mass of Christians in these territories – not all of them reconciled to the new order of things. Except for a few merchants we allow under licence, we’ve none of their people to worry about. We win – no, we avoid losing – by doing to them what they can’t do back to us.’

  But I was speaking wholly to myself. An ecstatic look on his face, Edward was staring intently down at the slaughter a few yards beneath our feet. An old man was embracing a boy and trying to divert those slashing blows on to his own body. He might as well have been trying to keep the wind at bay. He gave a final horrified scream as another blow smashed in his rib cage, and he was pulled aside to expose the boy. I shut my eyes and tried not to hear the boy’s final cry. I opened them to look at the answering cry from some people in the balcony just across the narrow street. Even had it been wise to draw attention to ourselves, there was nothing any of us could do. Dressed in dark clothing that covered them head to foot, the killers were pressing forward into the main square. They left behind them piles of the fallen. Blood glistened on the paving stones. The groans of the dying, or just the gravely injured, were a sadness to hear. But to offer active assistance so soon would have risked suicide. Until those maniac, jerking figures were well into the square, no gate in the street would open, nor any shutters go up.

  I looked into the square towards the mosque. There was now a column of black smoke rising up to the sky. A dull yellow in the sunshine, flames were already darting from the upper windows. There was still no sign of the authorities, and it was most likely the nutters themselves had set fire to the place. Oh, the Angels of the Lord had struck hard this day – and, through them, so had the Empire.

  I looked again at Edward, I could see he’d have loved the Circus in Constantinople – though less, perhaps, for the chariot races than for the nastier punishments we inflicted between the races on captured barbarian raiders. As it was, he’d keep those whores busy, come the evening. Soon enough, I’d have another bill on my desk for the inevitable blacked eyes and lacerated flesh.

  ‘I think we’ve seen quite enough up here,’ I said, not hiding my disapproval. ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to keep Simonides waiting downstairs. His evocation of the boys proceeding naked through the streets of Athens has a charm even your reading is unlikely to abolish.’

  Chapter 32

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying, I think you were mad to leave the bookseller’s shop before guards could be found.’ Edward gave me another dark stare and went back to looking nervously about the deserted street.

  ‘I do mind, thank you very much,’ I said primly. Perhaps we should have waited a little longer. The bookseller had objected strongly to letting his best customer leave through the back of his shop into that labyrinth of alleys. Even so, Edward had put me right out by the revelation of his inability to scan, or even hear, the difference between Sapphic and Phalaecean hendecasyllables. It had always struck me as a perfectly clear difference. If it gave him trouble, it was surely a return of the wilfulness for which I’d often flogged him in Jarrow. On the whole, I’d thought it better for my temper if we were away from the sight of books. ‘And do put that knife away,’ I snapped, wondering if we hadn’t passed this broken gate post once already. ‘The only trouble we’re likely to meet will be if the Saracen militia takes against you for it.’

  He ignored me and we pressed on through the centre of Beirut. Of course, my chair had vanished at the first whiff of trouble, and I was now reduced to creeping along with my stick in one hand and Edward’s free arm in the other. Except where they were still holed up in the burning mosque, the Angels of the Lord had finished their business and been chased off by the militia. The massacre outside the bookseller’s shop had been nasty enough. But it had been a localised attack. I was hungry, and I wanted a lie down before the books I’d bought would be sent over. I needed to be rested for those. At least one of them I’d never seen before, and I’d work that secretary late into the night with reading it to me.

  ‘I’d like to know what we’re doing in this city,’ Edward announced in his attempt at a manly voice. He stopped and kicked at a severed hand that lay in the road before us. I poked it with my stick and bent down to see it more clearly. Hacked off at the wrist, it was a man’s right hand.
Most likely, it had been holding a weapon. Its owner and the weapon were nowhere to be seen. I observed that it might have been left by one of the retreating Angels. Edward ignored me and kicked the hand into the gutter that ran down the centre of the street.

  ‘It must be a very recent loss,’ I added. ‘I’m surprised the dogs haven’t found it.’ Still silent, Edward pulled me back into a slow walk. I looked up at the sky. ‘We’re headed in the right direction,’ I said brightly. ‘I’m sure home is just round another corner.’

  Edward stopped and looked at me. ‘Why do you persist in calling that place home?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘It’s a vulgar lodging house. Everyone else who was staying there when we arrived has now moved on. Can’t you see the owner is just waiting for you to die so he can lay hands on your movables?’

  I laughed and struggled free of Edward’s grip. ‘Ha!’ I cried happily. ‘You won’t learn the middle voice in Greek, or the optative. You don’t avoid hanging nominatives. You frequently confuse the two aorists. You’ve still turned into a proper little snob. “Vulgar lodging house” indeed! I’m having a glorious time at Zakariya’s. I even managed to fuck that little dancing girl the other afternoon.’ I smiled into the scowling face. ‘But surely you aren’t worried, my dear boy – worried I’ll get her with child? I know old men can dote on their last sons. But I promise, you’ll still get place of honour in my will!’ I thought he’d start another of his arguments, and how to evade the main issue of what exactly we were doing in Beirut.

  Just then, however, we turned a corner and found ourselves in a wider street. I’d have said it was lined with dwellings of the humbler merchants and craftsmen – single-storey buildings, that is, usually without courtyards. It would normally have bustled with all the usual activity of making and selling. It was now still as the alleys we had just left behind. The whole street, right down to where it terminated against the wall of a church, was littered with corpses. Mostly women and children, there must have been a hundred of the dead – possibly more. They lay among broken furniture and bedding that had been pulled out of the houses. In a few cases, the women were still clutching little cloth bundles that I didn’t care to inspect too closely. So far as I could tell, the policy had been to rape the younger women before slitting their throats. The others had been killed less systematically. The few unslit bellies were already swollen with the gases released by decay, and there was an endless buzzing of the flies who’d come to feast on the rotting flesh.