‘What are these?’ the unsmiling official asked, holding up the polished lenses he’d pulled out of their box.
‘Those are none of your business,’ I said sharply. ‘They aren’t on the contraband list. Let that be enough. If you drop or so much as scratch one of them, I’ll have you demoted and flogged.’
The official hurriedly pushed the lenses back inside their protective covering and looked at his superior. He in turn looked at Meekal, who was passing his inner tunic over the modesty screen. Meekal nodded and my inspection was at an end. I waited under the shade of the massive gate for the more thorough strip searching of the carrying slaves to be completed.
‘You know we can take no chances,’ Meekal said as he joined me in the shade. ‘Only the day before yesterday, someone tried to lie his way in as a supply carrier. Fortunately, we already knew the man he was impersonating had died in one of the previous attacks. I had tight cords put round his knees and elbows, and then watched while the limbs below were sawn off. You’ll be pleased to hear it was a completely successful experiment. He lived. Indeed, he sobbed most affectingly when he saw his limbs heaped before him. Unless he’s died of thirst in the meantime, I might show him to my dear young uncle.’
‘I didn’t know the boys were allowed inside the walls,’ I said, cutting off the leer.
‘I rejoice in your retention of all your faculties,’ came the reply. I got an ironic bow. ‘As it happens, I have decided to exclude them. They’ll have to wait outside with the guards. Now we’ve tightened the security again, even the Commander of the Faithful will need to prove identity and then right to enter.’ I pricked up my ears at the use of the indicative future. Meekal noticed and smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he whispered, ‘Abd al-Malik will be putting in an appearance within, I think, the next ten days.’
‘His Majestic Holiness has, I suppose, been victorious in the civil war?’ I asked with polite irony of my own. I watched as my carrying slaves put their skimpy loincloths back on. In a moment, the gates would swing shut, and the guards would go back to their paranoid inspection of all about the walls.
‘The Caliph is always victorious,’ Meekal answered without irony.
‘But don’t you find it rather hurtful,’ I asked again, ‘that you weren’t beside him? Isn’t it a little odd that you’re thought good enough for smashing up the lesser breeds to the East, but not for turning on other Saracens – on real Saracens, that is?’
I’d got the bastard there. His face went white with anger, and his hands shook as he refastened my cloak. He began some stammered excuse about his duties in Damascus. But now the gates did swing shut, and we were sealed within what had, before the Saracen conquest, been the Monastery of Saint Theodore the Uneating.
The monastery buildings themselves had been mostly demolished, leaving plenty of space within the high surrounding wall. This had now been separated by new walls into four separate zones, each with its own solid gate and its own complement of silent guards. The first of these zones was just inside the main gate. Here were the living quarters of the workmen and the administrative buildings. We were met by Silas, a Syrian with the usual dark beard. He was the site manager, with overall control of the project in my own absence. If he too was kept in the dark about how everything done there fitted together, he was, I suppose, the nearest I had to an assistant. He bowed low before us, and – just to show he was doing his job – spent a longish time looking at our passes and entering our details in the relevant ledger that one of his secretaries had brought forth from his office.
‘I want to begin with the preparation vats,’ I said.
He bowed again, and led us through the huddle of low buildings and piles of material that filled up much of this first zone. As he unlocked the gate, his secretary made another entry in the ledger and presented this for my inspection and Meekal’s, and then our countersignatures. We now had to wait again in the increasingly pitiless sun as my carrying slaves were all blindfolded. Silas himself would guide the head carrier through the next stages of the visit.
We passed through into an almost empty expanse of packed sand. In the middle was a high building, though of one storey, about the size and shape of a steam room in the house of a rich man. Of new brickwork – most of one wall of very new brickwork – this was secured by another stout door. We crossed the thirty yards of open ground and paused at the door.
‘My Lords have their keys ready?’ Silas asked. We nodded. He’d left his secretary on the other side of the gate, and so had carried the ledger himself. He now opened this and made yet another of his entries. Meekal walked round the whole outside of the building, and made a close inspection of the door and its locks. He nodded to me and signed again. I countersigned, and watched as Silas recorded that I had made no inspection of my own. I then reached inside my tunic and pulled out the large iron key that was fastened to a golden chain about my neck. I held this up for the other two men to see. They produced their own keys. With a ‘May it please your Lordship’ from Silas, I climbed from the chair and put my key into the first lock. Silas and Meekal put in their own. I gave the signal, and we pushed in hard and pulled out again. My hands shook slightly from all the beer I’d downed on the journey, and I missed the elaborate mechanism behind the key plates. We all took our keys back out and prepared to repeat ourselves. On the next attempt, we all hit the right spot together, and, with a slithering of bolts, the lock contracted within itself. Silas waved us back. He put a cloth over his nose and mouth, and pulled the door open. I turned away and held my breath as I smelled the noxious fumes. I walked carefully away from the door and listened to the rhythmical fall and rise of the bellows that Silas was working inside to replace all the air. At last, he was done. Now without his protective cloth, he stood in the doorway. He’d already unshuttered the window, and enough light was coming through the narrow iron grille to let us see what was within once our eyes were adjusted.
Chapter 55
‘But it’s moving by itself,’ Meekal said in Greek once Silas had withdrawn to the far wall of the compound and we’d unlocked the wooden cover that hid the vats from inspection by anyone else. ‘It’s as if some invisible spirit were stirring the liquid.’
I looked at the seething mass within the first of the three-hundred-gallon containers. Except for the dark, oily sheen, it looked like nothing so much as beer in its first couple of days after brewing. Taking care not to breathe in while I leaned over it, I cautiously pushed in one of the wooden stirring rods. The disturbance set the mixture into a frenzy of bubbling and plopping. I drew the wooden shaft out, and noted how it smoked as if it had just been inside a furnace.
‘How often must I tell you, my darling little grandson, that there are no invisible beings at work around us?’ I asked in a resigned tone. ‘There are no conscious forces beyond our own. Everything that happens has a natural explanation. It is by understanding the world that we can control it. Oh, you can disagree, but that’s how it is. Denounce me as an atheist if you want – but I know you wouldn’t dare. Whatever the general case, though, be assured the whole process now before you is a natural phenomenon. It’s a matter of breaking down common substances into their constituent atoms, and then recombining these into one new substance that does not of itself exist in nature. The seething shows that the breaking down is complete, but that the recombination has a few days to go yet before the new substance is stable. I have given you a full verbal description of the process. There will also be written instructions when we are sure that this attempt is a success.’
‘And it will be a success this time?’ Meekal asked. His voice had taken on that pleading tone again.
I thought of sneering about his need to impress the Caliph when the man came to see what had been achieved with such horrifying amounts of his cash. Instead, I shrugged.
‘The problem,’ I explained, ‘is that the oil seeping from the ground in Syria is of a different kind from that along the Empire’s Black Sea coast. It’s much thinner and much lighter.
This means we can cut out many of the refining processes. At the same time, the results are more volatile. We haven’t lost this batch yet to spontaneous combustion. I don’t think we shall. It remains to be seen, however, whether it can be made to explode in a predictable manner when combined with the combustant.’ I prodded him with my stick as he reached forward to dip a finger into the vat. ‘If you’re willing to give up fourteen days of work, you might get some entertainment from this in one of your public executions. I really wouldn’t let that stuff on my own skin.’ He pulled his hand back and laughed. I climbed carefully down my own stepladder and followed him along the line of other vats. These we didn’t bother unlocking. With my hearing trumpet in my good ear, I simply listened for the sound of what is best described as fermentation. If each had been slightly varied in ways that only I as yet knew, all but one sounded at roughly the same stage of completion.
‘In this one,’ I said as Meekal got the cover open, ‘I more than doubled the amount of resin. It may be that this will start up again in the next few days. But I think I’ve worked out how to damp the process without entirely smothering it.’ I leaned on the rim of the earthenware vat. As I’d expected, it was warm to the touch. The basics of all this could be explained in terms of Epicurean physics. Even so, I still couldn’t reconcile the details. A thousand years before, the Master had obviously found the right path to understanding the nature of things. But he really had taken only the first few steps along what I’d learned for myself was a very long path. A shame he himself had intended his physics as nothing more than a support for his ethical teachings. Where might a whole thousand years of conjecture and experiment have taken humanity? No point in trying to answer that one. None either in thinking what might have happened, even granting the ethical bias of his teachings, if he rather than Plato and Aristotle had won the battle of the books for the human mind.
‘Quickly – come out with me!’ Meekal gasped. He clutched at my arm and hurried me into the bright, fresh air. I blinked in the sun and breathed in and out as the clouds that had, so insidiously, gathered about, drifted from my head.
‘Thank you, my dearest,’ I said, leaning against the side of my carrying chair. ‘You do have to be careful about those fumes. And they will be gathering faster before the process stabilises. Now, do be a love and fish out some more of that beer. As Silas is standing with his face to the wall, and these slaves can’t see a thing and don’t know Greek, I suppose you might care to join me in some refreshments.’
We drank. I rested. I watched the vultures overhead; doubtless Meekal’s latest victim had parched or suppurated to death. I thought about his reference to ‘supplies’. Did this mean he’d found another place where oil oozed from the ground? If so, the cellars that stretched far beneath us would be filling up with more of the basic materials. I turned and explained again to Meekal the need to filter the oil twice before it was finally sealed into the large earthenware containers to settle. He nodded impatiently. That much, at least, I had impressed on him.
The sun was now at its highest point, and I cast barely a shadow on the ground. Even with half a pint of coolish beer to keep me going, I didn’t fancy hanging about too long in the open. I nodded to Meekal. He pushed the door shut and called Silas over. We locked. We signed. We countersigned. Meekal now applied his Governor’s seal. We passed back through the gate into the first zone.
I’ll not bother with describing my inspection of the combustant. There never had been any problems with making this. It was simply a matter of unstopping one of the big jars and sniffing to make sure all remained well. The attendant security measures took far longer than the inspection. At last, we were back into the first zone, where Silas had ordered a most welcome lunch for me of bread in milk and olive paste. While I ate, Meekal gnawed at a crust and went with Silas through all the many ledger entries made since our last visit. All was in order. Still, he sniffed about – questioning bread consumption, asking about the burial of the workmen who’d not survived the last explosion, testing to make sure he knew the names and faces of every single guard.
Now, the break was over, and it was time to inspect the fourth zone, this entered through a gate at the far end of the third zone.
‘If not in writing, I gave precise instructions about the size of these openings,’ I said with rising impatience. I had my visor up and was looking through my lenses at the double valve that the straining workmen held before me. ‘It must fit exactly over the two spouts of the joined kettles, and the opening of each valve must allow the correct quantities of vapour into the mixing chamber. Again, the single exit spout must be of a certain diameter. It needs to fit precisely over the final bronze projection pipe. I’ll not fault the hardness of the steel – after all, this is Damascus. But this thing as it stands will simply produce another explosion.’ I replaced my visor and stood back to see the abortion that had emerged from fourteen days of labour in another of the sealed zones. It was a ball with about the same volume as a large cooking pot. The two feeding spouts were probably the right size and distance apart – we’d see about that in a moment. But it was plain, even without a measuring rod, that they weren’t long enough to fit safely within threaded sleeves on to the kettles. The exit spout was also too short. And it was too narrow. The bronze projection pipe really would pop straight off – that, if we didn’t have an explosion from the backed-up mixture. It really would all have to be redone.
‘Oh, never mind!’ I said with a sly look at Meekal’s face. No doubt, once my back was turned, there’d be an explosion of his own all over those useless buggers in the valve workshop. For the moment, the valve wasn’t critical. ‘I suppose you’ve fixed up a demonstration already for His Majestic Holiness when he rolls in,’ I added. ‘This being so, you’ll need to work those Syrians double shifts to get the job done properly in time.’
I turned my attention now to the big double kettle. This was a huge contraption. It would have filled one of the larger rooms in the Tower of Heavenly Peace. At least this time – and I was looking at a third attempt – my instructions did seem to have been followed to the smallest detail.
‘There’s no gap,’ Meekal said hurriedly, ‘between the inner bronze chambers and the outer casings of iron.’
I looked again and grunted. We’d see very shortly how well they’d been fitted together. I held up my lenses again and looked closely at the welded joints where the cylinders had been sealed at each end with five-inch thicknesses of iron. Those were the real weak points. We’d see what extra strength the brass retaining bands would give. I looked at the repaired and now reinforced wall that would protect us during the experiment. It was a miracle we were both still alive after the fiasco of our July experiment. Now, I was glad of the sandbags that would spread the force if there were another disaster.
While the valve was fitted to the double spout – yes, there wasn’t quite enough thread for the sleeves to get a proper hold – I tapped both kettles with the silver head of my walking stick. They sounded as if they’d do. Once it was fixed in place, I tapped the steel mixing valve. The ratio of wall thickness to volume didn’t let me tell much at all from the sound. Nevertheless, I did test the basic security of its fitting to the kettles.
I took my seat beside the kettles and nodded at Meekal. He gave an order to the workmen, who then lit the fire. With air from the bellows, the charcoal was soon an intense white even in that scorching sunshine.
‘I didn’t think to ask you,’ I said with sudden alarm, ‘if both kettles are filled half with water. It needs to be neither more nor less than half.’ Meekal nodded. Relieved, I sat back and waited. I had another headache coming on. It might have been the fumes. Just as likely, it was all the beer. Meekal stood beside me. Neither of us spoke as we watched the nervous pumping of the workmen on the bellows. I put up my ear trumpet and leaned forward again. ‘I think it’s boiling,’ I said in Syriac. One of the workmen nodded. ‘Then do please screw on the lids.’ He bowed and began fumbling with the eigh
t-inch brass discs that would seal both kettles. I got up and let Meekal carry my chair behind the protective wall. As the workmen hurried round to stand behind us, Meekal bent down and pulled out the stopper on the water clock.
‘But tell me again, my dearest kinsman,’ he asked, now speaking Latin for added security, ‘why the kettles are only to be filled halfway.’
I sniffed and looked at the dribble of water from the clock. It had already reached the first marker in the collecting bowl. I’d decided we had to wait until it reached the fifth.
‘Your lack of attention to these matters disturbs me,’ I replied. ‘The purpose of dividing the work as we have is to ensure that no one person – indeed, no group of persons working together – shall be able to reproduce the Greek fire. The plan is that you, and only you, will have the overall knowledge needed to make everything work. Now, that really does mean you need to understand what is happening.’ I held up a hand for my cup, and waited while it was filled with iced lemon juice. ‘The idea that Greek fire is a burning liquid is an error that I have deliberately cultivated. In fact, if these kettles were to discharge their contents as a liquid, I don’t see how the flame jet would be longer than a few dozen yards, and it would all be used up in a single burst. The truth is that all materials exist in three forms: as solids, as liquids, and as vapours. Each state depends on the amount of heat applied to the atoms. The greater the heat, the looser the atomic structure.’
‘So you’ve said,’ Meekal sneered. ‘But this does conflict with what I’ve read in Aristotle.’ He smiled at the involuntary tightening of my face. ‘He says that fire is heat and dryness. Water is cold and wetness. Steam is made by combining the heat of fire and the wetness of water. The product is air and earth. All my teachers in Constantinople were of that opinion. And I have read the same in that book you so kindly gave me.’
The Sword of Damascus Page 36