‘That is unfortunate,’ came the mocking reply. ‘Our problem, however, was catching up with him. Meekal commissioned a ship that was too fast for our own ships of that weight. Last night, he had Karim to lead him to safety. You, my dear Khadija, had him locked in his own rooms. He still dispatched your best agent – and, if I hear right, with his walking stick!’
The conversation fell apart in mutual recriminations that were enjoyable to hear, but aren’t worth reporting. That Hrothgar had been working for Meekal was old news – I could barely recall when the first suspicion had crawled into my mind. But it was definitely news that Cuthbert had been working for a different interest group among the Saracens. I should have guessed this from what Khadija had already told me. Perhaps, had I gone straight back to bed, it would have come to me. But it was useful to have the information directly, and with no reasonable doubt of its truth. I wondered if Cuthbert had known whom he was serving. If he had, he’d have been shitting on the Faith for a pittance. It really would have been interesting to get that document pouch open. It went to show that you should never pass up the opportunity to read another’s correspondence. But I filed all this away for some future use. It had none at present. More useful was to know it had been Khadija and her friends behind the murder attempt of the night before last. That explained the assassin’s knowledge of all relevant details. It also explained why the real Angels of the Lord had omitted the attempt from their own list of failures.
‘But, unless you managed to poison him earlier this evening,’ Joseph started again, ‘I see you’ve given up on your plan of murder. Does that mean you think you’ve made a deal with him?’ I think Khadija nodded in the resulting silence. Joseph laughed again. ‘You really do think you’ve made a deal with him,’ he said in a tone of mild contempt. ‘I suppose the deal is that he helps Meekal turn that money pit of his into a knock-out weapon against us. He then helps you stitch up Meekal so the weapon belongs to you and your friends. You can then escape this gentle prison among those you despise, and your friends can take back control of this Empire from those who want to provide it with stability and permanency.’ Joseph was no fool. I hadn’t trained him. But I could take pride that I’d probably recruited his trainers.
‘Come, My dear Lady,’ he prompted, ‘isn’t that what you think you’ve done?’
‘And what would be so wrong about that?’ Khadija asked sharply. ‘Would that not also be in Caesar’s interests?’
‘It might,’ said Joseph. ‘But I would remind you of our earlier agreement – so much more welcome to the Emperor – that we should, at the earliest opportunity, help Alaric into the next world. None of us wishes Meekal to have in his own possession the most devastating weapon ever developed. But we do not wish any of the Saracens to have this. We may have little belief in the ability of anyone but Meekal to use it to proper effect. But a weapon of that nature is not to be trusted in any hands but our own. Let me ask, though, what reason you have to suppose Alaric will turn on Meekal.’
‘Because,’ Khadija replied, ‘he has an adopted son whom only we can protect.’
That set Joseph off into another of his sneering laughs. And I had trouble not joining in with laughter of my own. This was glorious stuff. I hadn’t spied with so much enjoyment since – court intrigues, of course, don’t count – since I’d overheard a Lombard king versifying his next siege of Rome. Here was every apparently ill-fitting piece of the puzzle pushed into place. And here were two people subtly lying to each other in the hearing of someone who could recognise every lie and every suppression of the truth. It was better than a play.
‘I do assure you, My Lady,’ Joseph said when he’d given up on laughter, ‘that the boy is of no value. According to my reports, he is a vicious, unintelligent creature. I have seen him myself, masturbating at some public spectacle of the obscene. If you think he can be used as a hostage to force anything out of a man like Alaric, you will be disappointed.’
‘My own reports tell me otherwise,’ Khadija said quietly. ‘Let me assure you that we shall, within the next five years, reorganise your Bureau in Constantinople. Would you like to be its Director?’
More laughter – this time polite. ‘And if he does give you the weapon on which you pin all your hopes of conquest, do you suppose it will be sufficient? Even without Alaric, our own programme has moved on. Greek fire, as he gave it to us, was always a variety of different weapons. We have now developed some of these in directions that would surprise him. What he developed could burn on water. What we have now can be ignited by water. You will not have heard, I am sure, of the victory we gained early last year over a race of yellow men on horseback. They raided deep into Thrace and refused all bribes to withdraw. And so we led them across a field strewn with cloth bags of our latest weapon, and waited for the rain to fall. When it was safe for us to approach, we counted twenty-five thousand charred corpses. Do not imagine that, in the development of weapons, you can ever match the advantage we have gained to compensate for our weakness in numbers.’
Oh, this was glorious stuff indeed! The only meaning of that news was that Leontius had talked his way off Constantine’s rack. I’d been thinking about him on and off ever since setting out for the West. But who else could have picked up on my idea of using quicklime as a primer? I crouched behind that curtain, sweating and trembling, my mind soaring like some enthusiast who thinks he’s heard the voice of God.
‘I must tell you then,’ Khadija said, ‘that our arrangement is at an end. It is now in our interest to keep Alaric alive. There will be no more palace gates left open for your people. If you persist in your own assassination efforts, we will, for the moment, join forces with Meekal to resist you.’
‘It is as you wish, My Lady,’ Joseph replied in a tone of gentle mockery. ‘Even so, that need not mean an end to cooperation with the Emperor in other respects. Your allowance will continue to find its way into your Medina accounts. Though imprisoned here, you need not worry that your voice will fall silent in the nativist councils of His Majestic Holiness.’
I could have sat listening to this all night. But the meeting was now at an end. I heard the scrape of Joseph’s chair, and the beginning of their elaborate partings. Time to get myself out of here. Who could say that Khadija wouldn’t walk straight through the curtain to make her own record of the meeting? That meant I had to get myself out into the antechamber before they did. I heaved myself up as noiselessly as I was able. I opened the door and pulled it to behind me. The slave girl was now sleeping. I hurried past her into the main hall.
Chapter 50
Out in the hall, I bumped straight into the green eunuch. He’d been hovering just beyond the door with a tray in his hands. I cringed before him and made sure to look down at the ground.
‘Why is it that I’m always the last one to bed?’ he snarled. This wasn’t the obsequious creature who’d fawned before the Magnificent Alaric. I was lucky he had a tray in his hand, and not a stick. I bowed lower and mumbled something respectful. ‘If you think I’m here to fetch and carry at all hours of the night, you’re mistaken. Here’ – he thrust the tray towards me – ‘take the Mistress her sleeping draught. If she wants me, you can find me in the kitchens, fixing myself a late supper.’
As he flounced off towards another door, I looked at the tray. It had on it a lead bottle and a tiny glass cup. Was it worth getting the slave girl awake? Should I just put the tray down and shuffle away? As I stood there dithering, the latticed door opened again, and Khadija and Joseph came out into the hall.
‘Oh fuck!’ I thought. Trying not to shake, I held the tray up and bowed low before Khadija. She ignored me and walked right past with Joseph. They spoke softly for a moment beside the gate. Then Joseph was off into the night, and Khadija was coming back towards me. I stepped back into a shadow and bowed as low before her as my aged back allowed.
‘When I’m ready,’ she snapped, ‘you can have that brought to me in my bedchamber.’ With that, she was through the d
oor again and disappearing into her private quarters. So long as the face under it isn’t particularly attractive, there’s so much to be said for the full Saracen veil. It restricts the vision most wonderfully. I don’t suppose, however, it was needed on this occasion. As I’ve said, no one notices a slave – not unless he’s a good deal younger and better looking than I was.
I counted to twenty and went through the door after Khadija. I left the tray beside the now snoring slave girl. Khadija had vanished deep into those parts of this building where even aged male slaves would not be allowed to follow. I’d done a brilliant job for one night. Time to get back to bed.
As I reached for the door handle, I heard Karim’s voice raised in annoyance.
‘Then get her up,’ he snapped in reply to some objection I wasn’t able to hear through the door. ‘I’m hardly an unwelcome guest in this place!’
His voice was getting louder as he approached the other side of the door. The slave girl behind me was stirring at the sudden noise. In a moment, she’d be awake and brushing the creases from her dress. I looked at the door in front of me – no going through that, not with Karim on the other side. I looked at the door to Khadija’s sitting room – no going through that either. I hurried across the floor and back into the spying room. If no one had been here to take a record of what I or Joseph had said, I was safe enough for any meeting with Karim. I flopped down again beside the curtain and controlled my wheezing as I prepared to listen. I’d rather not have been here at all. Since I had no choice, I might as well make the best of things.
I heard Karim let himself into the sitting room. I heard someone – presumably the green eunuch – go off into Khadija’s private quarters. I heard the gentle pulling of a chair as Karim sat and made himself comfortable. After this, there was a longish time of silence. I could hear my heart banging away inside my chest, and the suppressed rasp of my own breath. At last, I could feel a piss coming on. I looked round. The only container in the room was an inkwell. I’d have to contain. So long as it didn’t mean too lengthy a wait, I surely could contain.
As I sat there, my back against the wall, my good ear to the curtain, debating on how long before my bladder muscles went limp on me, I heard the usual door open. It was Khadija. I heard Karim jump up, and what may have been an embrace.
‘I spoke with him at some length,’ she said in answer to an unspoken question. ‘You can be proud of descent from such a man. If our Faith had more men of his quality – even though aged – we could rule the whole world from Medina.’
‘What did he tell you?’ Karim asked eagerly. There was a mumbled reply that I couldn’t catch. Perhaps Khadija was speaking with her face turned away. Sharper ears would have picked up her words. Sadly, I was reduced to straining and trying to guess. But Karim spoke again: ‘You’re saying he will help us?’ he asked.
‘Of course, Alaric will help us,’ she said, now clearly. ‘He has agreed to be our Sword of Damascus against the Greeks and all their friends. He will help us because he hates Meekal. Also, he will help us because I have persuaded him that we have no immediate intention of turning against the Empire. He and the Greeks in general have no faith in our ability to use their weapons against the Empire in the way that Meekal probably can. He believes that we shall only use the unquenchable fire against each other; that it will, in our own hands, be as much a weapon against us as for us. Because of that, he will work with all signs of willingness for Meekal, but ensure that the secret is handed straight over to us.’
‘But we will use it at once against the Greeks!’ Karim cried exultantly. ‘We shall pray in the churches of both Constantinople and Rome, and it will be our language and our ways – and our blood – that triumph in the world.’
‘Yes, O last and dearest son of my late husband,’ came the gloating reply. ‘Our empire will not use Greek money or the Greek language. The Greek party among us – the party that Muawiya led to victory in the civil wars – shall be destroyed.’
There was a long pause while they both doubtless thought of the approaching glories of their people. Yes – ‘their’ people! Was Karim not forgetting the little matter of his own ancestry?
‘And the Old One will be kept safe?’ he asked with a tone of concern gratifying to the Old One’s vanity. ‘We know that Meekal would kill him once the secret was in his hands – him and the boy. But we will spare them, won’t we?’
‘You have my word, my dear Karim, that they will both be spared,’ came the immediate and smooth assurance. ‘You need to accept that, whatever the case, Alaric is old and cannot live that much longer. But he will be left to live out the remainder of his years in honourable retirement. As for the blond boy, we will force Meekal to an oath that even he cannot break. And we will ourselves be fully bound by that oath. After all, so long as we get the weapon of the Greeks, what reason could we have for harming a boy who can do no harm to us?’
They turned to the details of how to tie Meekal to his word until such time as he could be removed from all positions of authority. This done, they moved to another rhapsody about the coming Victory of the Faithful – or of the Faithful born and bred in the Faith. I paid little attention to this. Far more relevant was which account, of the three I’d had this evening from Khadija, was likely to reflect her true wishes. Did she want the Greek fire so she and her friends could settle with Meekal and the Greek Party before – eventually – turning on the Empire? Did she want it so they could make a coexistence deal with the Empire? Did she want it for an attack on the Empire almost as immediate as the one Meekal had in mind? Whether she was telling the truth to anyone about keeping me and Edward alive was a worthless speculation. She didn’t sound the sort who killed for enjoyment. She’d kill or spare strictly on the basis of how well either suited her interests.
You don’t like a woman like Khadija. But you do have to admire her. In her youth, she’d led the Faithful into battle. Now, a gentle prisoner in the Caliph’s palace, she’d do battle for the same cause with bribery and fraud. The only criticism I might have of the woman was her crap security. But wasn’t that really how Muawiya had done over her husband and his boss Ali in the civil wars? Wasn’t that how the Empire was doing the Saracens over in general? My reforms of the Intelligence Bureau had been one of the best uses I’d made of the Imperial taxpayers’ money. No wonder we were always a step ahead of these people. It was a matter of learning their language and its various nuances – and then of waiting for them to sit back and spill the contents of their minds as if they’d been so many drunks with overfilled cups. For all we’d destroyed them utterly, the Persians had never been this careless.
I had no idea what time it was. I hadn’t seen a water clock all evening. I hadn’t seen the sky in ages. Those stimulants had taken away all internal sense of time. It must have been approaching the midnight hour. It might easily have been some while later. The single lamp in the room had long since gone out, and there was no light but a dim reflection of the moon from somewhere beyond the shuttered window. I was too pleased with myself, and still too drugged to feel tired. Still, how long could I be away from my bed before someone raised the alarm?
But Khadija and Karim were prosing on endlessly about matters of no concern to me. It was all a matter of names and of household expenses that were irrelevant. I kept my good ear against the curtain just in case. But there was nothing more for me. I waited patiently for the conversation to run out of force, and for those long internals of silence that you find between close friends or relatives to grow longer still. At last, they slid into the conventional phrases that indicated a farewell. I stretched my arms and legs in the darkness, reasonably sure that the clicking of aged cartilage wouldn’t carry through the curtain. I heard Khadija get up and go – I hoped for the last time – through the door into her private quarters. Shortly after, there was the sound of Karim’s getting up. I heard the gentle click of the door into the antechamber. Another moment, and I could try another getaway of my own. All was silence about m
e. I stretched my arms and legs again and prepared for the effort of climbing to my feet.
Then the door opened, and a pool of lamplight splashed into the room. Framed in the doorway was Karim – one arm clutching the still sleepy slave girl, his outer robe hitched up in his other hand. For what seemed a very long time, we looked at each other. With a whispered command, he dropped the girl behind him, and came fully into the room.
‘What are you doing here?’ he whispered, his voice shaking with the shock of discovery. I smiled back at him, and held out my arms for him to lift me.
‘You should know the answer to that one, my dear,’ I whispered with much firmer voice. ‘You caused me to be brought here. Are you surprised if I chose to stick around to seek what else I might learn?’ I closed and opened my outstretched hands. As if automatically, he bent forward and helped me to my feet.
‘If she finds out you’ve been spying on her, she’ll kill you,’ he moaned. He looked back at the slave girl. So far as I could tell, she was still sprawled on the floor where he’d dropped her.
‘Well, my dearest and only posterity,’ I said with a smile, ‘it’s up to you to make sure she doesn’t find out. Can you help me back to my chair? It should still be waiting outside.’
‘What did you overhear?’ he asked.
‘Oh, everything – yes, everything!’ I said, now with a gentle laugh. ‘And what I didn’t hear I was able to guess. Now, are you going to raise the alarm – and this would not be in anyone’s interest? Or are you going to get me out of here? And are you going to keep your mouth as tightly shut about this as I’ve kept mine about your less than glorious performance of last night?’
The slave girl had vanished from the antechamber, and the main hall was now empty. Finally, the guards had had the sense to shut and bolt the gate. But that was no problem with Karim beside me. He kicked some life into the guards, and I followed him with apparent meekness out into the chilly night air. My carriers were verging on moral collapse when we found them. Ignoring me, they threw themselves down before Karim in the sort of prostration an emperor would have thought flattering, and listened to his instruction to take me straight back to the Tower of Heavenly Peace.
The Sword of Damascus Page 33