The Sword of Damascus

by Richard Blake

  Meekal had given me a last doubtful nod, before going off to take his place beside the huge, glowering figure of the Caliph. He sat on his throne, as rigid as in the best Imperial ritual. Before him stood the leaders of his Religious Council, together with both Orthodox and Heretical Patriarchs of Jerusalem. Between them – perhaps to give them someone they could both agree on hating – was one of the Jewish leaders. Because all the Saracens were dressed in plain white, it hadn’t the full magnificence of Constantinople. But, if it might be lacking in the externals, this was – no one present could be in the slightest doubt – an event presided over by the richest and most powerful man in the world. The Saracens, of course, were let off with bows and acclamations. For everyone else, it was the full prostration. Even I was led forward at last, and helped on to hands and knees for the adoration of God’s Chosen One.

  ‘Greetings, O Alaric,’ some eunuch chamberlain whispered in Greek as I finished tapping my forehead on the carpet. ‘Your presence is pleasing to the Commander of the Faithful.’

  I gave a quiet sniff. It didn’t do to look up into the face of His Majestic Holiness. All else aside, it would have been a breach of manners for him to behave as other than a block of wood. I listened hard and counted the soft blows on the gong. In Constantinople, five blows during and after the prostration indicated a person of considerable quality. I thought Meekal had got five. I counted seven for myself.

  ‘If you feel another fainting attack come on,’ I muttered to Edward once I was arranged back in my place, ‘do sit down at once. Your job is to pour the scented water over my hands at the beginning and end of each course. Otherwise, you just need to smile and look pretty. We can get away after the iced fruits have been served. Meekal can’t say when they’ll be served. But it’s all agreed that no one will think the worse of us for leaving. I can then prepare a cup of something soothing. One dip in that of the afflicted member, and you won’t notice the pain.’ I grinned and pushed in my ear trumpet so I could hear more of the herald’s pompous oration. It had been going on an age, and showed no signs of ending. There had been a gigantic slaughter in some place with an unmemorable name. The arms of the Caliph had prevailed after a day of this, and there was a long detailing of the prisoners and property thereby won. I listened hard, but heard no indication that the False Caliph had been killed or taken. Almost certainly, this would mean another campaign in the civil war. Sad, this, for everyone closely involved – but no bad thing for the Empire.

  As if he’d read my thoughts, Edward leaned forward and nodded at the main couch beneath the Caliph’s throne. I adjusted my visor and focused. Eusebius had already been watching me closely. I smiled. He noticed and looked away.

  ‘That, my dear, is the Imperial Ambassador,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t mean that the two empires are officially at peace. But it looks as if at least one side has run out of puff for the time being. I wonder if he’ll be invited to the demonstration the day after tomorrow. You can be sure he’s heard all about it.’ I had another look at His Excellency. You could have fitted out a border fort with the price of that gold and purple robe. Such, however, are the costs of diplomacy. ‘He’s the last known descendant of the Great Constantine – the one, that is, who established Christianity as the Empire’s official faith. One of his uncles was married to my youngest daughter,’ I went on. ‘It wasn’t a happy or a productive union, I regret to say. The moment he’d got himself knocked on the head in a Circus riot, she joined the Sisters of Saint Drusilla and spent the rest of her life stitching head coverings for lepers. She never spoke to me again. Eusebius himself studied with Meekal. They were pretty close for a while. I wonder if efforts will be made to bring back the Prodigal Son.’

  But the Ambassador’s page was now holding up the gold ewer, ready to pour water over those fastidious, if quietly sticky, hands. I held up my own hands for Edward’s attention, and wondered what might be in the covered dishes that were now appearing in the hall.

  ‘The Caliph’s beard is very big,’ Edward whispered in English.

  ‘Well, he is the Caliph,’ I replied. ‘Another thirty years, and yours might be no less grand.’ This being said, I had a look as the Commander of the Faithful was carried past. ‘That heavy gloss only comes from regular eating of arsenic. Having a food taster is a step too far as yet away from the simplicity of the desert. But – it depends how you count them – at least one caliph has been murdered in the past fifty years; and poisoning is endemic throughout the East.’ I stopped as Edward did his business with the ewer and the cloth, then gave myself with modest attention to the jellied goat in honey.

  ‘Will there be dancing girls?’ Edward asked during a break in the eating. Someone was reading in an interminable drone from a book of religious jurisprudence that seemed wholly concerned with table manners. A screen in front of his face, the Caliph was being fed by a dwarf with three arms and a hump.

  ‘Not until much later,’ I said. ‘The Caliph’s Religious Council might find something allegorically pleasing in the display of bare flesh.’ I glanced over at the grim, grey-bearded faces of the leading expounders of the Faith. Their looks could have curdled fresh milk. ‘The patriarchs, on the other hand, would outdo each other all the way to the moon in their displeasure.’ I gave him one of my best toothless grins. ‘Besides, I really don’t recommend the smallest excitement in your present circumstances. I think there might be acrobats before we must leave. If it’s pleasure you want, I’ll add a dab of opium to your dipping cup. Topical applications there can be most interesting.’ It was an inconvenience that Meekal had insisted on the full conversion, and had then sat gloating as the Jewish doctor did his business. It had confined Edward to a carrying chair beside mine on our trips through the desert. Now, the boy stood by my couch, twitching and grimacing at every move.

  The banquet ground on in all its boring magnificence. Just after the acrobats, another of the Caliph’s attendants brought me a dish of dormice mashed into vinegar. A cup of the iced fruit would have been more welcome. But I swung myself into a sitting position on the couch and bowed respectfully. Through my visor, I might have caught the ghost of a smile on the stiff face. Where was Meekal? I looked hard at the couches placed about the throne. One of them was empty. And there was no Meekal. He’d been wolfing down meat as if he’d just come back from the wars. Between courses, he’d been sucking up horribly to the oldest and most forbidding member of the Religious Council. Now, he was off somewhere else.

  ‘At this rate, we’ll be here all bloody night,’ I sighed. Pale in the lamplight, Edward was perched on the couch beside me. He tried not to move his mouth as he crunched on some nuts I’d put beside him. Back in my office, I had a mountain of work still to do. I’d never so far taken much interest in solar observations. But the hours I’d been able to snatch from those inspection trips to the Saint Theodore Monastery had been of surpassing interest. If only I’d been able to apply more of that time to the necessary calculations . . .

  I turned to the man on the neighbouring couch. It was my old friend the Admiral, whose fleet I’d sunk under the walls of Constantinople. Now my sight was artificially improved, I could see that his left arm was black and shrivelled. More work of mine? Hard to say. I smiled at him and asked how things were going in the shipyards of Tyre and Sidon. All things considered, it wasn’t the sort of question someone like me should have been asking of someone like him – especially not with Eusebius just a hundred yards away to remind us, should we forget, who we were or had been. But the poor man was plainly as bored as I was, and we were soon deep in a semi-hidden conversation as we refought the Battle of Cape Mogadonia. That kept me going till the next course: raisins pickled to twice their size in fish sauce. My hands shook as I tried to skewer these on the wooden sticks provided, and more went on the napkin tied to me than down my throat. I was thinking to give up on the effort and pretend to have fallen asleep, when Edward took up the job for me. The raisins were an improvement on the preceding dish of chopped cabbage
sweetened with powdered lead – not that I’d bothered with more than a taste of that. But I’d sooner have been in my bed, cuddling a flask of wine, or knocked out on something more exotic.

  ‘Time, I think, to claim the prerogatives of age,’ I muttered to a now almost comatose Edward. ‘We’ll wait until the potty men come round with their screens, then make a quiet exit.’

  He nodded vaguely, and went back to looking at the shoes of gold and silver thread that Karim had presented on his conversion.

  ‘On the contrary, Brother Aelric,’ someone from behind whispered in Latin, ‘you will stay to the end if you know what is good for you and the boy. No – don’t turn round. It will only spoil things. Bear in mind that I’m not really behind you. I’ve never been anywhere close to you. Just stay to the end. And do try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself. The Caliph spoke highly of you to Eusebius.’

  I waited until there was a noise of unfolding screens to my left, then turned to Edward.

  ‘Have I gone senile?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ came the reassuring answer. ‘He poked me in the back just as he used to in Jarrow when I fell asleep in his class.’

  ‘Then your wish will come true,’ I said. I nodded at the departing patriarchs. They left through the back entrance I’d taken with Karim on my last attendance here. They were barely through when a dozen heavily robed figures entered, with a couple of clean-shaven musicians close behind. As a great shout of relief rang through the hall, I noticed that Eusebius too was missing from his place. ‘Don’t say, though, I didn’t warn you!’ I added with another grin. Edward’s reply was smothered by the opening peal of the drums.

  I adjusted my visor. I’d been told to look as if I was enjoying myself. Tired as I was, I might do better than that.

  Chapter 61

  ‘You can get everything sorted up there come morning,’ I said to the twittering eunuch. ‘Tonight, the boy and I will sleep downstairs in the slave quarters.’ I looked again at the half ton of astrolabe. Its broken remains were distributed across the smashed tiles of the floor. My own bed had been flattened by the impact. Anyone on it, or within a foot of it in any direction, would have been crushed like a grape in the press. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have shared the general horror at this latest violation. As it was, I simply wanted somewhere to sleep for what remained of the night.

  ‘My Lord will be aware,’ came the nervous explanation, ‘that a loud crash was heard shortly before the midnight hour. I have not myself been on to the roof. But I do know that the instruments placed on it were of exceeding heaviness. It is perhaps a surprise the roof did not give way sooner.’

  I ignored the creature’s increasingly shrill piping. I could guess easily enough what had happened. I was no engineer, but my arrangement of boards could have taken a dozen times its actual load. I’d also sited the astrolabe nowhere near above this room. The real questions were how anyone had got up there – and how whoever had got up there could have known that I generally wasn’t in bed between midnight and dawn. I was about to ask a few relevant questions of the slaves when Karim burst into the room. Gibbering in his nightgown, his face like death, he looked about us, then dropped into the one chair that wasn’t broken.

  ‘God be praised!’ he panted. ‘I came at once when I heard the news. It is surely a sign from God you weren’t both killed.’

  I poked with my stick at a brass lever. Search me how much the thing had cost – not that it mattered: Meekal could add it to the overall bill. What did matter was that it had been so very pretty. I doubted there was another like it anywhere in the world. Still, now he was here, I’d have Karim look into the possibility of a replacement.

  ‘My dear Karim,’ I said wearily, ‘since Edward is not in the habit of sharing my bed, I don’t think he was in any danger.’ I frowned. ‘Any chance, by the way, of standing up for an old man?’ He jumped up, now looking guilty. ‘That’s a good lad.’ I flopped into the chair and looked up at the hole where half the ceiling had been. Against a background of utter blackness, hands clutching the broken edges of the roof, Edward stared down at us.

  ‘The boards you told me would spread the weight are all taken up,’ he said in English. ‘Also, there are some cutting tools left here.’

  I turned a disapproving stare on Karim. ‘I don’t like to question your competence, dear boy,’ I said. ‘But you are in charge of my security in the palace. And this is the second time intruders have got in here.’ That might have set Karim straight into a moral collapse. Just as he put his hands up to his face, though, Meekal walked in. That set everyone about me into a round of bowing and scraping. He looked awhile in silence at the smashed astrolabe.

  ‘I did hear that loading up that roof wasn’t a good idea,’ he said. He was keeping himself admirably in check. Meekal looked up at Edward, then again at the mass of detached and broken dials littering the floor. He kicked morosely at a brown stone about the size and shape of a turd. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. He went and leaned by the window, scowling at everyone in sight.

  ‘It’s something I learned from the northerners you hired to abduct me,’ I said with one of my ivory smiles. ‘You put it into a wooden bowl, and float this within a larger bowl of water. It always points north. It cost thirty times its weight in gold,’ I said with heavy emphasis. ‘Don’t worry, though – this can be rescued.’

  Meekal ignored me. ‘I suppose this was an accident?’ he asked of Karim. That nearly sent the boy over the edge.

  Luckily, Edward chose this moment to ignore the stairs leading to the central ramp of the tower, and to drop lightly down the twelve feet that separated him from the one clear patch of floor. He spoiled the effect with a wince of pain just before hitting the floor. He landed on his bottom with a suppressed squeal. He scrambled up and nodded a bow at Meekal, and came and stood beside me. I looked at Karim and shrugged. What point in swimming against the tide?

  ‘I think it best to assume an accident,’ I said. I gave Edward a pre-emptive kick to shut him up. ‘Fortunately, I was so entranced by the Caliph’s hospitality that I broke my normal schedule.’ I stood up. I felt my knees going, and sat down again. ‘Now, my dear friends, I want someone to arrange a bed for me now. I also want this mess all cleared up and made good by this time tomorrow. While you’re at it, you can get me a new astrolabe set up on the roof – and I don’t want any disruption of my living quarters.’ The eunuch began twittering away about the impossibility of my instructions. I clapped my hands in his face. His voice dropped to a whine about nothing relevant to my instructions. I sat back down and fanned myself with my wig. One of the slaves jumped forward and set about me with a proper fan. ‘And will somebody bring me a cup of wine?’ I snarled with recovering energy. ‘Just because the rest of you have forsworn its use doesn’t mean I have to suffer as well.’

  ‘Do you suspect Karim?’ Edward asked. I looked over at a sand dune that was held together with dead weeds and laughed. One of the carrying slaves turned and looked at me. I waited until he’d turned back about his business, and took another swig of beer.

  ‘Where these matters are concerned,’ I answered, ‘long experience tells me to rule out no possible explanation, however weak it may seem.’ I paused and smiled. I looked at a flight of birds overhead, and then at the dull expanse of sand ahead of us. ‘But I don’t suspect Karim of more than incompetence. He may be of my own blood. He may be your own dearest friend. But I do suggest that he is neither particularly bright, nor brave in the slightest.’ Edward shrugged. Of course, he’d seen all that from the first. I didn’t think it worth discussing. But I could see it was these qualities that had drawn Edward to him. When your entire life has been directed for you by men of ruthless and fearless determination, it can be a relief to find company in those who simply like you.

  ‘You can rule out Karim,’ I said firmly. Edward gave me a relieved look. The sun was now rising higher, and I could feel a prickly sweat under my wig. Damascus was far behind us, the monastery
still far ahead. I thought again of the jagged hole we’d inspected together in the first light of dawn. ‘It may have taken several dozen men to get everything up there and placed exactly where I wanted it,’ I said. ‘To cut through those timbers and pull the astrolabe into place might have needed half a dozen men at the most. I’ll grant, however, the noise of the cutting would have sounded like a drum down below.’

  ‘Then it was an inside job?’ Edward asked.

  I allowed myself another laugh, this one cynical. ‘It took my great-grandson three days after the first attempt on me to get round to strengthening the guard,’ I said. ‘The guards he did post are as idle and negligent as he is. His policy of cycling slaves between our suite and the main palace is a sure recipe for breaches of security. Now the palace is filled to bursting with comparative strangers, there can be no security. Yes – dear Karim! If his father and uncles had been of his own sort, the Empire would still be ripping itself apart over the Monophysite heresy in Egypt and Syria . . .’ I trailed off and waited for a couple of the mounted guards to ride slowly past our chairs.

  ‘My dear boy, I would normally leave the matter of gathering information to you. I’d have you question all the slaves. Most obviously, we’d need to know who gave the orders for them to lock the suite and withdraw to their own quarters. We’d also need to know who was in charge of the guards, and whether the guards heard or saw anything before they’d knocked themselves completely out on their hashish. I really don’t think you’d find anything worthwhile. But the effort would need to be made. If you did find anything, though, it would only lead you to dear Eusebius. The Imperial Ambassador may not have been here more than a few days. But trust me – he was conspiring before he could crawl.’

  ‘But if it was the Empire,’ Edward broke in, ‘why did Brother Joseph tip us off? I saw him only briefly in that ship off Cartenna. But I am convinced he was urging the fleet on to kill us all. He’s been around Damascus for months. Now, he gets himself into the presence of the Caliph to warn us against coming back here to bed. It doesn’t make sense.’ I could have told Edward much else about our friend Joseph. But I hadn’t done so yet, and I saw no point in doing so now. ‘And,’ he added, ‘what was he doing in Jarrow?’ The boy sat back in his chair and looked up at the deep blue of the sky. ‘I still don’t know where he fits into all this.’