The Sword of Damascus

by Richard Blake

  Abbas might have asked more. Just then, however, Meekal sat upright on his couch and looked straight at the pair of us.

  ‘Can you smell fire?’ he asked. I dropped my own proposed question whether the fried river fish now being brought round had the bones left in, and sniffed the air.

  ‘Surely, my dear, it’s the lamps,’ I said, looking vaguely upwards. My sense of smell hadn’t been that good in years. Now he mentioned it, though, there was a faint smell of burning. More to the point, others in the hall had noticed. Several men were off their couches and running over to the door to give instructions to the attendants. Then, far over to the left, there was a panicky shout of ‘Fire!’. There was a mass scraping of couches and a clatter of dishes. Someone came up and whispered in Meekal’s ear. With a roar of anger, he was on his feet.

  ‘Get up!’ he shouted at me. ‘Keep hold of me while we get out. The fucking Empire’s set fire to us.’

  Chapter 41

  Panic abolishes most distinctions of rank, and Meekal had to use his right fist to get us across that shouting mob to the door. As we got there, we were nearly knocked over by a sudden reverse in the tide of escaping humanity. With Meekal to hold me upright, I stood a moment in the doorway and looked out into the darkness of the great garden in the palace. It was only a moment. But that was enough to see a bright ball of fire coming at us through the air. The earthenware jar shattered about three yards from us, sending up splashes of burning liquid to cling to anything it touched. I felt something catch the shoulder of my robe. It spun me round, and I nearly went over. As Meekal caught me and covered me with his own body, I saw a man go down. He landed a foot or so away, writhing and choking, an arrow in his throat.

  Out of the darkness came a cheer of triumph and a shouted ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth!’

  Back inside the hall, Meekal pushed me into the arms of Karim and bawled an order that I was too busy looking about me to follow. It was a desperate, furious stream of instructions. I caught one look of his face. It had about it the cold ghastliness of the dead. Then he turned to put some kind of order into the dinner guests.

  ‘Get that gate shut!’ he shouted above the cries of confusion and of fear. ‘Line up, men, line up,’ he now bellowed. ‘Swords at the ready.’ There was a martial sound from the trumpet, and the familiar commands gradually brought order into the hall.

  ‘I must get you out of here, My Lord,’ Karim shouted into my bad ear. Fighting a sudden fit of the trembles, he clutched at me to stay upright. ‘I am charged on my own life to keep you safe.’ He shivered again, and nearly had me on the floor.

  I shook my head. We were in a building of solid stone. It couldn’t be burned down. If Abbas had been anywhere close in that chaotic hall, I’d have tried for a witticism about the use of fire in battle. But, if Meekal was bringing order out of chaos, it was hard to say that chaos didn’t still have the upper hand. Whatever the case, running away with a jittery Karim didn’t sound at all a wise choice. It would be safest to press against the wall to avoid being knocked over by the crush of men. But even as I thought how to explain this, there was a smash of glass, and more of those burning pots came flying through one of the high windows. These weren’t hand-held projectiles. Somehow or other, the Angels of the Lord had not only got within the palace grounds – they’d also brought in some kind of artillery. There was a regular hail of fire into the hall. Men screamed and ran about as the burning oil stuck to clothes and flesh. Already, I could see that a couple of the men who’d taken direct hits would soon be dead if no one thought to put out the fires all over them. One of the tapestries was already on fire. It or the fuel that had carried the fire was giving off clouds of smoke that would finish someone like me off in no time at all.

  But Karim was recovered from his fit. He had me up on his back and was carrying me through the increasingly orderly crowds towards the little door at the back of the hall used by the serving men. He rattled the door, then shouted a command at the trembling slave to get it open. We passed through into the sudden chill and silence of the darkness, and I heard the bolts drawn hard shut behind me. I felt the crunch of gravel under Karim’s feet as he ran away from the building, and then the softer pad of his feet on grass as he dodged to avoid the men I could hear shouting and rejoicing somewhere close by. He put me down against a wall, and stood gasping smoke out of his lungs. I looked uselessly around. I knew the Tower of Heavenly Peace was on the far side of the palace. But there must be buildings nearby that would be guarded. If only there was a single light burning in the upper windows to let us see where these were. If only I could see anything other than a dark blur. Even the moon was out of sight.

  ‘There’s two over here,’ someone shouted in Syriac. The voice wasn’t above six yards away. Karim clutched at me again, and began the effort of pulling me back to my feet.

  ‘No!’ I said, now calm. ‘You’ll never outrun these men, or those who come to help them. Keep your mouth shut and leave this to me.’ There was a sudden blaze of light from one of the wooden huts outside the hall used for keeping food hot in the winter months. With a tremendous effort, I got up and tried to look active.

  ‘God be praised,’ I cried in Syriac – and luck be praised I’d kept my teeth in. ‘This is a blow for truth I never thought I’d live to witness.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ someone snarled back at me. ‘This is a job for the fit.’

  I croaked a variant on ‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy word,’ and giggled.

  ‘Get the old fool out of here,’ the voice snarled again, now at Karim. Plainly, he was taken in by my words, if not impressed by my presence. ‘We’re holding the eastern gate.’

  That should have been it. We could have sloped off deeper into the palace grounds, and waited for the Palace Guard to get its act together. But as Karim was pulling me back on to his shoulders, we almost fell over about half a dozen other men.

  ‘Get these wankers out of here!’ the voice now commanded. ‘We can’t lose another Elder.’

  And that was it. Pulled and shoved to keep on course, Karim was hurried off to the eastern gate. I thought of pretending a heart attack to slow him down enough to be left alone. But I could feel that Karim was in no state to play along with me. With the panting sobs of a man terrified out of his wits, he had his head down and was keeping pace. Swaying about over his back, I could see the bright mass of torches coming closer as we approached the eastern gate. I could pass as anything I cared to be. What to do, though, about that brown face and his Saracen clothes?

  ‘Let us through,’ I cried as we came level with the gate. I noted the fallen bodies of the guards. ‘Let us through. My servant is wounded.’ The torches parted. No one could see Karim’s face. No one paid attention to his clothes. We hurried through into streets alive with people and more torches.

  ‘Is the palace burned?’ someone asked. ‘Is the tyrant dead?’ There was a ragged cheer at the very thought – though whether Caliph or Governor was in mind no one bothered to make clear. I clapped Karim on the back to keep going. Now staggering under my weight, he carried me into a side street and dropped me hard on the packed earth that served here in place of paving.

  ‘How many Saracens are there in Damascus?’ I asked. He leaned against a wall, wheezing and coughing. There was a blast of trumpets in the main road and the unmistakable tread of military boots. ‘We can’t stay here,’ I added. ‘Soldiers don’t know friend from foe in the dark.’ I repeated myself: ‘Is there a Saracen district nearby where we can get shelter?’

  He shook his head despairingly. Even now, Damascus was overwhelmingly Christian. The Faithful lived in encampments outside the walls or inside the palace. The only converts were local trash – persons of very low degree, he emphasised.

  ‘Then let’s just get away and hide somewhere quiet till morning,’ I said.

  Karim tried to protest. But I wasn’t going back anywhere close to that palace while there was a riot
in progress. Whatever his father had been, Karim wasn’t a military Saracen. But if I wasn’t much of a soldier either, I’d seen dozens of riots in Constantinople, and I knew exactly what to expect. Not waiting for him to pick me up again, I started off away from the noise. A sword would have been useful. These fine clothes made us walking targets. But the first rule of street fighting is to get away from it, regardless of what further trouble may lurk round the corner.

  ‘So, where are we?’ I asked after half a mile. ‘You were happy enough the day before yesterday to show me the sights of Damascus. Shall we take this opportunity to see a few of them now?’

  Karim stopped and took my arm off his shoulder. The clouds had parted, showing the nearly full moon. In its light, he guided me towards a bench. There was a heap of rubbish behind it and on both sides. If even I could smell it, there must have been quite a large dead animal rotting somewhere close by. The bench looked clean enough in the moonlight, however. Karim sat down and looked ahead in silence.

  ‘We’re lost,’ he said at last without turning.

  No shock there, I thought. My reply was a sniff. I looked at the high, blank walls of the houses that, here and there, pressed almost together overhead.

  ‘At all times of the day and night,’ he went on, ‘these streets around the palace are crowded with Cross Worshippers of the lowest and most desperate kind. Once order is restored, we shall be lost among them. They will surely tear us apart. I have failed His Highness the Governor in allowing you to sit here, waiting for death. I have failed you, My Lord – and failed so ignobly. May my family curse the day that I was born!’ His voice shook. It was as if I heard the tears rolling down into his beard. The Saracens were maturing fast into their exalted position: some of them weren’t only non-military; they also weren’t particularly brave.

  ‘Then I suggest we get up and keep moving,’ I said firmly. The last thing you want in a coward is a fit of the shakes. We’d never move anywhere with that. I looked along the street in the direction we’d been going. After a dozen yards, it twisted sharp right. Left or right, all the streets had been doing that since we left the palace. According to the moon, we were going west. Just a while earlier, it had been east. I sniffed again. No hint of a nosebleed was my first good news since I’d seen Meekal projected through my lenses. ‘If only you lot might listen,’ I said, ‘you’d learn a lot from the Greeks about town planning. A grid arrangement of at least the central districts of a city can bring so many benefits. So, while we’re on the subject, can a touch of street lighting. We can only hope that continued progress along this dried-up riverbed of a street will bring us somewhere safer than we are now.’

  As I was about to push myself upright, there was a sound of running footsteps from where we’d come. I looked round. The sodding moon was full out – not a cloud in sight. There was nowhere to hide. Even if Karim was up to lifting me again, he’d never outrun whoever was coming our way. I thought of telling Karim to take to his heels. There was no reason for both of us to be butchered. But what I’d feared in his case had come to pass. He was clutching at himself and leaning forward. He began droning some edifying gibberish from his Holy Book. I sighed and tried to make myself comfortable on the bench.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing there?’ a man shouted in Syriac. ‘We’ve got the whole Palace Guard after us, and you just sit there, waiting to be cut down!’

  ‘I told you there was an Elder went off this way,’ someone whined at him. ‘You tell me now I was wrong.’

  Panting from the run, a big man with a bushy beard stood before me. He turned and waved at the three other men with him. ‘Get him up into your arms,’ he said. ‘He’ll never get away by himself.’ He knelt down and kissed the hem of my robe. ‘Forgive me, Father, my profane words, but we cannot afford to lose another Elder to the darkies.’

  I patted his head uncertainly, then uttered a benediction. No one bothered with Karim. If he wanted to get away, now was his moment. But, as I was lifted off the bench and perched between two of the Angels of the Lord, I saw that he was getting ready to tag along beside us. Oh, well, I thought, explaining him as well wouldn’t be much harder than explaining myself.

  As we moved off, I thought I heard the thud of hooves on the packed earth of the streets. It really wasn’t my evening.

  Chapter 42

  If I’d so far thought little of Damascus as a capital, the vast labyrinth of stinking alleys into which we now plunged confirmed my opinion of the place. Except that most of it was newly built, and it had never been other than it was, it reminded me of the Egyptian quarter in Alexandria. But that had been a very long time ago, and I’d always then been able to protect myself from the human trash who lived there, or been able to run away. Here, I might as well have been a sacrificial animal, bound and carried towards the altar. The only consolation was that I didn’t have to spoil my nice velvet boots on those now filthy streets.

  We came to a stop at the end of a little street that had snaked round and round on itself. I was set down against the wall that terminated the street, while the men who’d been carrying me put their backs into moving a broken-down cart that seemed to have been left where the wheels had come off it. Beneath was the stone cover of what I could see at once had, before the troubles brought on Damascus by the Persians, been the sewers. Because the city had been rebuilt without regard to the ancient street patterns, these were no longer used for their original purpose. As I was handed down through the narrow entrance, I breathed in cautiously through my nose. It wouldn’t have been hard, but the smell down here was somewhat better than in the streets above. The paved central channel was now dry, and we were able to make better time than we had been above.

  We hurried along the straight tunnels, the torch of the man before us flaring and roaring with the speed of our progress. I could hear the increasingly laboured breath of the men who were carrying me, and the echo of their heavy tread on the stone channels. Here and there, we turned into another tunnel. Here and there, I could just make out signs of frequent use as a thoroughfare: recently dead torches fixed in their brackets, heaps of weapons, even the dismantled parts of an artillery catapult. Of course, I can’t say in which general direction we were heading. It might have been further in to the centre. It might have been away. At length, however, we came to a doorway crudely hacked into the ancient brickwork. Piles of rubble from the work almost blocked the continued way ahead. Some narrow passageway however had been left through the rubble. In the brief glance that I managed down this passageway, I could see that there was a regular junction a few yards ahead of perhaps three other tunnels. No one without a good knowledge of these tunnels would easily seal off all the approaches.

  There were more torches within the doorway, and a man came out to see if we represented danger. He looked briefly at me in my fine, if now soiled, robe, and bowed low before me. I gave him another of my benedictions. Karim walking beside me with palpable terror, I was carried through an arched cellar towards a flight of stairs. These were worn down by age, and I felt them crumble still more beneath our weight. At the top of these was a stout wooden door. With a pattern of knocks that were repeated on the other side and then renewed, the door was unbolted from within, and we passed into a room that seemed as brightly lit as the banqueting hall had been.

  We were in the nave of an old church – no, I could see from its shape and the remaining decoration to the walls that we were in what had once been a temple. From its size, it must have been somewhere close to the ancient centre of Damascus. Before the establishment here of the last Faith but one, the temples of several dozen gods and demi-gods would have jostled for prominence, and been thronged with singing, garlanded worshippers, come to make sacrifice. This must have been one of the larger temples. Given daylight and more time, I might have been able to tell for whose cult it had been built. Then again, I might not. The windows that had been cut into the walls on its conversion to a church were now bricked up again, and I could have no idea whether t
here was still any direct access to the streets outside. There was a strange kind of service in progress. Over in what served as the chancel, a priest was chanting a Te Deum in Greek. Around him, a few dozen worshippers made their unscripted responses. Here in the nave, perhaps a hundred men lounged about, drinking and looking pleased with themselves. Mostly young, they had the pinched, wiry look of the urban lower classes. They weren’t the mountain fanatics we’d helped organise into the Angels of the Lord. Even so, it was plain they were gathered together to fight and, if need be, die for the Orthodox Faith.

  My carriers put me down beside one of the walls. This was covered with the usual paintings of saints and Gospel happenings. The paint was now chipped and rubbed away in places. Most importantly, all the large, staring eyes of the anciently clothed figures had been scratched out, in some places leaving deep holes in the plaster. Every representation I could see of a cross had also been defaced.

  It might have been interesting to see more of the building, and to speculate on its recent history. But now, every head in that nave was turned in our direction. Whatever assumptions had been made about us in the unlit streets evaporated the moment we were pushed inside the first pool of lamplight. All else aside, Karim’s brown face stood out in that gathering like a rotten tooth. Over in the chancel, the priest let up his chanting. The exultant chatter about him died away. Wherever I cared to look in that church, I saw hard, unsmiling eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ one of the older men asked. ‘And’ – he looked straight at Karim – ‘what is this?’

  ‘Greetings, my dear Brothers in Christ,’ I said, stepping with my best effort at a firm tread away from the wall. I leaned on the back of a chair and looked benignly about. I felt the sudden need of a piss. But I held myself steady and continued speaking in the hesitant, softened Syriac of a Greek.