The Sword of Damascus

by Richard Blake

  ‘That being said,’ I mused, ‘while you really can fuck anything once, twice indicates a disturbing partiality.’ I thought briefly how, just that afternoon, one of Meekal’s fingers had been pushed up my bum. I shuddered. I’d not be repeating that experience in a hurry. But it was time to draw Edward’s attention from horror back to simple mystery. ‘I wonder,’ I continued, ‘what Meekal could have been doing with Joseph – in full view, and inside the palace. That is worth considering, don’t you think? I’ll bet you thought you’d seen the last of him when he was trussed up back in Jarrow. You never thought he’d follow us all over the world.’ I tried for a laugh. Just then, though, as if some invisible attendant had withdrawn his supporting arms, the stimulants suddenly wore off. I sat down heavily in my chair and fought off a fainting attack. I put up a hand to my nose, and looked at the dark stickiness on my fingers.

  ‘Whatever the case,’ I said with much labour, ‘we are where we are. If you find everything over your head, that’s just too bad. All else aside, your life now hangs on my cooperation.’ Edward looked up. I did now manage a laugh, even if it wasn’t a very pleasant one. ‘Oh, it’s all wickedly ironic,’ I said with a tired wave. ‘You forced me out of that monastery by threatening to slice up poor Wilfred. Now he’s dead, you’ve taken his place with Meekal. One day, I’ll get round to reciting the whole of one of those sicko plays Seneca wrote as entertainments for the court of Nero. I can think of one passage in particular that fits our situation. For the moment, we pretend none of this happened. We must simply hope that no one saw either of us.’

  I got up and tried to stretch. It wasn’t my most successful move of the day. I let my arms fall limp. Was that more blood I could feel running down my chin? I pulled myself together. I leaned hard on my stick and moved towards the door.

  ‘I’ll see you to bed,’ I told the boy. I picked up the key to the main door as I passed the table on which I’d dropped it. ‘Yes, I’ll unlock,’ I said firmly. ‘If Meekal wants to send men in to throttle us while we sleep, some silly lock won’t keep them out. It will simply mean no one can get in to serve breakfast. Just as if nothing had happened, I’ll leave the door unlocked and the key in the outside lock. That’s what Karim bribed the slaves into accepting.’

  ‘Then, please, Master – don’t make me sleep alone,’ Edward asked. He jumped off the sofa and almost knocked me over with his scared embrace. I felt his warm body next to mine. I was so knocked out, it might have been a bag of warmed bricks. I put a hand on one of the unmarked areas of his back.

  ‘I suppose it has been a difficult couple of days,’ I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. ‘Oh, come with me,’ I said, dropping all pretence of emotion. ‘It’s not as if there was a shortage of space in the bed.’

  Chapter 53

  I woke in Jarrow from another of my dozes. I looked up into the leaden greyness of the sky. It was coming on to rain again. I’d have to drag myself back inside if I were to avoid getting wet as well as cold. I looked over at the gate that led back into the monastery. While I slept, a layer of oak planks had been nailed over it, hiding the weathered cross. I tried to think and to remember. But there was nothing clear in my head. It was as if I’d finally had the stroke people had been warning me against for years. I stopped and began counting slowly backwards in Greek, trying desperately to remember anything at all. I managed the counting. But each time I thought I’d grasped something solid among the contents of my mind, it seemed to shrivel then vanish in my hand.

  I said I’d have to drag myself inside. But was I up to doing anything for myself? More jumbled fragments of memories. I gave up on thinking and looked down. I was sitting on a wooden chair with arms each side. Hadn’t this once been Abbot Benedict’s chair? If so, all the biblical imagery that had once covered the arms was now cut away or rubbed smooth. My legs were buried under a loose packing of blankets against the chill. I tried to move my right foot. There was a slight tingling, I thought. Perhaps there was a slight movement. It was hard to say.

  I looked over to my left. I was sure this had once been the patch of grass where the boys would kick a ball about between lessons. But it all seemed so long ago. Again, the curtain came down between me and what I knew had once been a perfect memory. I shouted at everyone to go inside. No one looked round. No one got up from his place. Seated on the damp grass, the boys looked steadily forward. I tried to focus on the teacher. For some reason, this was a regular lesson – but in the open of a Northumbrian spring or autumn or summer. I willed myself to hear their chanted responses to the teacher’s lesson. But my hearing was no longer even what it had once been. It all sounded like a vague mumbling. But I tried harder. Now, I could hear something. Yes – it really was quite clear after all:

  La ilah illa Allah: Mohammed Rasul Allah.

  Allahu Akbaru. Allahu Akbar.

  This they chanted over and again in their flat northern voices. I thought that I might once have been able to understand the words. But understanding even of words was also long since gone. At every pause in the chanting, however, Meekal – yes, he was there at the head of the class, scowling and pointing at the boys – would repeat his interpretation into English:

  ‘La, “no”, “not”, “none”, “neither”; ilah, a “god”, “deity”, “object of worship”; illa, “but”, “except” (the word is a contraction of in-la, meaning “if not”); Allah, “Allah”. You, boy – yes, you – come to my office after the lesson . . .’

  I opened my mouth to shout that a whole storm was coming on, and everyone would get soaked. But, even as I took in the breath, I was interrupted by the call from above. It came from the now white-painted bell tower:

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar

  Ashadu an la ilaha Allah

  Ashadu an la ilaha Allah

  Ashadu anna Mohammedan rasulah . . .

  Where the bell had been, there was now a platform. There, in the highest place of what had, in ancient times, been the monastery, sat Brother Cuthbert. The once shaven face was now covered with a beard of red and grey. The tonsure was hidden beneath a turban. Arms upheld, he summoned the Faithful to prayer in a menacing drone. Twenty feet below him, Wilfred scurried about like a lizard on the wall. I think he was trying to reach the platform. But Cuthbert’s words seemed to present a barrier to further progress up the wall. Despairingly, the boy looked down at me. As in Cartenna, the teeth were long and white. They projected far over the full, dark lips. All this I could somehow see very clearly. I could even see the pattern of the tower’s stonework as it showed through the insubstantial body.

  I could sense that Cuthbert was approaching the end of his call. He looked down at Wilfred. He looked down long and gloatingly in my direction.

  ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,’ he called. ‘La ilah illa Allah. Deus uult! Deus uult!’ As he ended, and everyone down on the grass got ready for prayer, Wilfred’s whole body began to drift apart like the last mist of the dawn . . .

  I woke in my bed in Damascus. I was covered in sweat. I looked up at the glazed ceiling panel. No light but distortions of the brighter stars came down. All about me was silence. The main window was shut and the blind pulled down. I tried to move. But Edward had his arms clamped tight around me. His face was pressed hard into my chest. I tried to reach behind to unclamp his hands, but couldn’t make it. Instead, I stretched down to tickle the small of his back. That got him loose. As he groaned and rolled over, I wriggled away and put my feet down to the cool tiles of the floor. I sat silent and very still, waiting for the sweat to evaporate from my body.

  I reached for the water jug and drank, realising for the first time how thirsty I’d become. We were now coming deep into the summer. When there was no cloud or wind coming off the mountains, these nights could only get hotter.

  I got to my feet and peered about for my slippers. Because the slaves hadn’t yet come back in, nothing was where it should be. I walked slowly with bare feet across to the d
oor and let myself out into the circular corridor. I looked uncertainly left and right into the darkness. I decided to go right. I went as far as I could from the bedchamber and into one of the larger audience rooms. It wasn’t a room I’d yet bothered using, and the furniture lay before me in a jumbled, shadowy blur. I felt my way to a sofa and sat down. I looked up to the glazed panel in the ceiling. It was perceptibly lighter than it had been. We must be approaching the dawn. I pulled my feet up and lay on the sofa, looking up at the brightening sky.

  I thought for a while I might nod off. But there was now a cold, dim light all about me in the room, and I could see the outlines of the heavy furniture put there to impress visitors without giving them much comfort. I got up again and drifted over to the window. I realised that this was the window nearest the bronze pipe that brought water up to the roof. It was also the window through which Khadija’s assassin had climbed. There were still no bars on it. Probably, there was no need of any. After all, I was now Khadija’s devoted servant. I smiled weakly and fumbled with the catch. I pulled the window open and breathed in the cool air of the outside and listened to the gentle but gathering roar of a Syrian dawn. I thought of the many descriptions of the dawn in Homer. All very beautiful, they were too cheerful for my present mood. I opened my mouth and recited from the much darker Virgil:

  Postera Phoebea lustrabat lampade terras,

  umentemque Aurora polo dimoverat umbram . . .

  Yes, poor stupid Dido had hoped to build her Carthage and reign in peace. She hadn’t considered the somewhat different interests of her Trojan guest. Already, his mind had been taken over by the rival and infinitely grander vision of the Rome he was to build. Virgil had looked back on this from a Rome that was at the zenith of its glory. The Rome where I’d briefly lived, six hundred years later, was a stinking ruin. I remembered how I’d stood one day on the crumbling steps of the Temple of Jupiter, and had looked down from the Capitoline Hill over the bleak ruins of the Forum. But, even if the glory of the merely corporeal Rome was now fallen, the idea of Rome was transferred to what the Saracen chronicler had called the City on the Two Waters. In time, the idea might move from Constantinople. Wherever it might move, it was worth fighting to preserve.

  I looked out at the first rays of the rising sun. If I waited just a little longer, I’d see those first rays as they struck the higher minarets of the city, and then as they moved steadily down this tower to where I stood. Gradually, Damascus would awake. There would be those calls to prayer. The shops would open for business. The streets would fill with those who had money to spend, and with those who had to be up to earn their money. Some while before then, the night would have passed, and I could say that I’d lived to see another day.

  Was that the main door opening, far back along the corridor? This was about the time the slaves came in to attend to their business. They could feed me while I bathed, I decided. Edward, I decided further, could be left to sleep until he woke by himself. I’d have him watched, so I could be with him when his eyes did open. I’d then pack him off to Karim for the day. Sooner or later, after all, Meekal would drop by for another little chat.

  ‘Bugger me!’ I whispered at the bronze pipe. ‘Sod, bugger, damn! I wish I were at home.’

  Through more than ninety years, the sound of my own voice had generally brought comfort. Now, it only brought me to the matter of where home might really be.

  Chapter 54

  There are hotter places and times on earth than a Syrian August. But you try reminding yourself of that after a whole morning of swaying, jingling progress through the desert that stretches eastward from Damascus. I took another sip of beer cooled with ice from the mountains, and – not for the first time that journey – wondered how the black slaves carrying my chair didn’t fall down dead in the sun.

  To be precise about the timing, it was Thursday, 1 August 687, and we were just into the second month of Meekal’s accelerated project. This was my eighth personal inspection. It should have been my ninth, but the Angels of the Lord had intensified their attacks, and the desert road had been judged too dangerous for me to risk the journey. Meekal, though, had diverted more soldiers from the desultory war with the Empire, and, flanked by a whole brigade of mounted Saracens, we’d made a slow, nervous progress out of Damascus. I handed my beer cup to the slave who walked beside the chair. I adjusted my visor and tried to turn back to the volume of mathematical writings open on my knees.

  ‘We’ll soon be there,’ said Meekal. I’d heard his slow approach on horseback, but didn’t look round at him. ‘I said,’ he repeated in a louder voice, ‘we’ll soon be there.’ I made a fuss with the speaking trumpet I’d recently had made. He now shouted into it, nearly blowing my head off with the power of his voice.

  ‘There’s no need to shout!’ I whined back at him. ‘I can hear perfectly well so long as people don’t mumble.’ I rejoiced at the scared look that came over his face whenever I gave cause to think I was entering some decline. If I was his prisoner, he was just as much mine. If he’d given me no chance of slipping my own leash, I could at least tug on his. He was right about our location. Glancing up through my visor, I’d been able for some time now to see the low, sand-coloured mass of where we were going. I thought of giving further practice to my querulous tone, with a comment about the flies. Just then, though, I caught sight of the cloud of dust ahead of me to the right.

  ‘I was about to wonder if the boys would catch up with us,’ I said, now in my normal voice. ‘I see instead that they’ve overtaken us.’ I looked hard through the pattern of little holes in my visor – a pattern long since corrected out of my notice by some adjustment of the mind – and wondered at the speed that Karim and Edward could get out of those desert mounts. Even in my long prime, I’d never been much of a horseman. If I so much as spoke of climbing on to another saddle, it would only be to confirm Meekal’s worries about the decay of my faculties. But there was no hint of envy, or even regret, as I watched the pair of friends chase each other back and forth across the firm sand. If I worried about their safety, there was no point mentioning it. To be sure, Edward’s guards were even faster on horseback, and were up to seeing off anything but a regular ambush. If they kept modestly behind in the races, and if they joined in the congratulations of the winner, there was no doubt of their purpose.

  ‘Greetings, My Lords,’ Karim called out as he came alongside. ‘We made it from the palace to here in a single gallop.’

  I thought of the poor horses, but smiled my approval.

  ‘And this time,’ Edward broke in, ‘I rode faster!’ I smiled again. He’d spoken Saracen. He spoke that with Karim. He spoke it with all his other friends. If he still sometimes spoke with me in Latin – though more often in English – his Greek was fading like the heat of a kettle removed from its fire. ‘But it’s a despised language,’ he’d explained over dinner the other evening. ‘Nobody wants to learn it any more. Besides, those writers you keep speaking about – they’ve all been dead for centuries. And their language too.’ So he’d turned that formidable, if undisciplined, intellect of his to a study of the East’s rising language. Now, he was well inside its logic. Apart from obvious insufficiencies of vocabulary, his main problem was the limited range of cases compared with English, Greek and Latin, and – of course – the somewhat defective writing system of the Saracens. Even I’d once had trouble with that. Dressed as a Saracen, his beardless face browned by exposure to the sun, he might have been chasing about the desert from his birth.

  ‘All is well with you?’ Meekal asked when the boys had raced back off into the desert.

  I nodded. Playing the old fool is fun only in little bursts. And, if I wanted to scare him, I had no wish to prod Meekal into anything more hostile than he already had in mind.

  ‘Halt and state your business,’ the guard called across the remaining distance between us and the one unblocked gate of the old monastery.

  ‘I am Meekal, Governor of Syria,’ came the obvious answer
.

  ‘And I am Alaric, Chief Weapons Adviser to His Majestic Holiness the Caliph,’ I added.

  From twenty feet up, on the parapet of that stone wall, the guard looked coldly at us. We held up our ivory identification passes. He looked down at them. Another guard came briefly forward, then went back to his job of lounging against the new brick wall behind that stopped anyone from looking down into the monastery.

  ‘I want the old man out of his carrying chair and everyone else off horseback,’ he snapped down at us. ‘Before I give orders for the gate to be opened, I want to see you all with your arms in the air. I must warn you of the standing orders for any disobedience of the rules.’

  I groaned and got up. I stepped out from beneath the shelter of the overhead canopy and took my place with everyone else under the baking sun. This was, after all, my eighth visit, and enforcement of the rules never varied. At least I was allowed to step into the shadow of the walls before the modesty screen was placed round me and I had to strip naked for the inspection of my clothes and body.