The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  It wasn’t before time. Even as I looked up again, I could see the bright streak of flame against the grey of the sky. As the burning pitch bag came closer, I could hear its fluttering buzz through the air. It fell short – though only by a few dozen yards. But then I felt the shudder as one of the six-foot iron-tipped arrows crashed into our side. Had I left it too late with my dithering? If we didn’t pick up speed soon enough, or if the wind dropped down, there was every chance of a lucky hit. One hole in that bulging sailcloth, and the whole would split from top to bottom. With everything wagered on the sail and its already damaged mast, we couldn’t afford a lucky hit.

  But if the ships on the arms of that pincer came closer and closer, the distance did eventually widen. Other huge arrows flew overhead or smashed into the side. More of those fiery bundles landed behind us – and I could hear the hiss as they struck the grey water. But now the great sail was filled with air as if it were an inflated bladder, and the mast held. It held for all the dubious upward looks, and for all the continued distribution of arms about the deck. One moment, the battle ships were so close that even I could see the little figures darting about on the upper decks, and the archers watching us from the rigging. Another moment, and the whole battle fleet was a receding blur.

  The crew let up a ferocious cheer. Perhaps the largest man on board sucked his moustaches in as he took a great lungful of air for shouting something long and obscene back towards the failing pursuit. Someone sat me roughly forward and patted my back until I coughed. Someone else pressed a wine cup into my hands. Whatever might be said against the notion, I was their wizard. For the second time in two days, they somehow believed I’d got them out of trouble. Whatever lay in wait at the end of this dash to the east would need more than the magic I’d shown them so far. I’d have to think of something. But that huge, articulated pincer was half a mile behind us. It could open and shut as it pleased. We were beyond its reach.

  ‘Take me to my cabin,’ I called weakly in Latin. No one came to help me to my feet. I looked over to the stern of the ship. Just beside the tiller, Edward and Wilfred were locked in what looked like a tremendous row. I strained to hear them, but the flapping of the sail overhead drowned out the snatches of shouted argument that blew towards me. I waved at them, but neither paid any attention. Wilfred suddenly gripped his chest, and I saw his body shake with coughs. But he never let up his own side of the shouted argument. I turned to the man who’d given me the wine. ‘Take me inside,’ I ordered. ‘Also, do have the pilot attend on me before the celebratory beer is handed round.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘What the fuck do you suppose you were doing?’ I snarled at the two boys. Holding on to each other against the continuous pitching of the ship, they stood before me in my cabin. Outside, the wind was raging, and great belts of spray crashed against the walls. ‘What little control I have over these animals depends on my pretence of calm assurance. Can you imagine the effect on this pretence when the two of you start a public shouting match and nearly come to blows?’ More for warmth than any hope of a youthful appearance, I clapped the wig on my head and glared at the boys.

  A defiant look on his face, Edward stared back at me. Legs shaking from the effort of holding his place, Wilfred looked intently at a spot on the floor.

  ‘I tell you, it was him,’ Edward repeated.

  I raised a hand to silence him. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I discount that you’re lying to put me off any return to England. If you think you saw him, that’s good reason in itself. I won’t question the sharpness of your eyes, or your ability to recognise faces when they aren’t where they ought to be.’ And I didn’t think it worth questioning either in Edward. I looked at Wilfred. He was pale and still trembling after his attack, but otherwise holding steady. ‘You tell me, boy, why you don’t believe it was Brother Joseph.’

  His answer, if reasonable, was wholly unsatisfactory. He couldn’t deny that the man who’d stood on the prow of the battle ship, at one point not fifty yards from us, had looked like Brother Joseph. All he could say against Edward was that it couldn’t have been Brother Joseph. If we’d been discussing alleged miracles, the argument from common sense would have been decisive. But there was no need of any miracle for Joseph to have been looking at us from across the water and urging on a battle fleet that had been ordered to sink us. If we’d got this far from Jarrow, why not he also?

  Of course, I was at one with Wilfred in hoping it hadn’t been him. It wasn’t that I shared any of his sense of scandal that a man of the Church could be urging on our destruction. Rather, it was the endless range of possibilities – all equally disturbing – that would be raised from admitting that Edward might not have been mistaken.

  ‘Very well,’ I said, trying to look unrattled, ‘let us allow that it might have been Brother Joseph. I know more of his background than you do, and he would not have been out of place where Edward believes he saw him.’ I was now thinking aloud. An audience even of boys made for more connected thought than if I’d withdrawn to my cot with a flask of heated wine. I motioned them into their now usual places at the table, and closed my eyes to fight off the returning tiredness.

  ‘Edward,’ I asked, trying to sound in control of things, ‘I will ask you again if your kinsman Hrothgar told you anything about the details of my abduction. I want you to think hard and tell me anything you know. Anything – no matter how trivial you may think it – may be of use in our present circumstances.’

  ‘He wasn’t really my kinsman,’ Edward replied slowly. ‘He took me on after my parents died of the sweating pestilence.’

  I thought back. England is a wretchedly unhealthy place, and there isn’t a year without something nasty to thin the population. But the epidemic he mentioned had touched Jarrow two years earlier. That might in itself have been interesting. I sat forward. ‘Did you know him before he took over your care?’ I asked.

  The boy shook his head. Hrothgar had arrived in the village a few days after most of the people there had died. He’d carefully inspected all the surviving boys before giving food and drink to Edward alone. He’d then paid for some kind of education from a drunken hermit before pushing him in the direction of our monastery.

  ‘Would it shock you,’ I asked again, ‘if I supposed Hrothgar had chosen you for a scheme he already had in mind?’

  Again, he shook his head. Between beatings, there had been some regard between them, but no real affection. He accepted that his childhood had ended with that visit of the pestilence. From that moment, he’d been simply the instrument of a stranger’s will.

  ‘He promised me that I’d see the world,’ Edward told me. I let my face soften for a moment before pulling it back into my pitiless stare. ‘He said I’d see cities paved with gold and silver, where no rain ever fell, and where food was given to all who were hungry.’

  With the partial exception of this last, that didn’t sound like the Empire I knew. But I continued probing. Had he ever collaborated with Brother Joseph? Had he been given any indication that Joseph might be part of Hrothgar’s plan?

  ‘He beat me when I didn’t understand his triangles,’ came the reply. ‘He called me a moron, and said he’d get me thrown out of the monastery.’

  Wilfred nodded in support. Brother Joseph, he added, had believed that Euclidian geometry was not only self-evidently true, but also intuitively known – with a little beating – to anyone but the mentally deficient.

  I’d get round to asking more about Joseph. I’d often been puzzled how the most reasonable of men could turn, in front of a few dozen schoolboys, into a gloating tyrant. For the moment, it was enough to know that, if there had been more than one conspiracy afoot in Jarrow, they had been entirely separate. I’d already extracted from Edward confirmation of what I’d already guessed – that there had been two separate attacks on the monastery. Hrothgar had turned up with his own men to find others already in place. There had been an argument and then a fight in which the Chieftain had been
killed. None of the survivors of the Chieftain’s band had been in the know about what was going on, and those who didn’t go back across the sea in their own boat had joined willingly enough in Hrothgar’s mission. Edward had been told nothing of any timings. His instructions were simply to wait on events. It would never do to call in the crew for questioning. In any event, they too were on a need-to-know basis. If Hrothgar had not set out with any pilot, was that because the other attack had forced him to bring everything forward? If only Edward had been able to answer my questions…

  That’s one of the problems of need-to-know conspiracies. The advantage is that they’re much harder to discover. You can catch the agents. Even under torture, they can generally say nothing of the principals. On the other hand, given any space of time or distance such conspiracies can turn very brittle. Here, there had been immense spaces of both, and just about everything had gone wrong.

  When the two boys were alone with each other, they might recall or infer something else. For the moment, I’d got out of them all they had to give. There was a burst of wild shouting on the deck outside, and the ship gave a sudden shudder as if it had hit something. But if the shouting continued, the ship resumed its headlong race before the still rising winds. Whatever else was happening outside, we didn’t seem likely to sink. Without thinking to point at it and look helpless, I bent creakily down and took my wine cup from where it had been rolling on the floor. I looked round for something to put in it. No luck there. I sighed, and fought to summarise our present state of knowledge.

  ‘It seems reasonable to believe,’ I opened, ‘that Hrothgar was engaged at least two years ago to supervise my abduction from the monastery. It is possible that the Master of the Offices in Constantinople was behind this. It’s the sort of coup that got him preferment in the first place. This could have run parallel with a later change of heart by Constantine himself – he did send that delegation the Easter before last with promises of full rehabilitation that I’m not inclined to disbelieve. Now that Constantine is dead – or just out of power – his heir Justinian may have decided against having me back and sent orders to have me killed. That would explain the earlier attack on the monastery that Hrothgar foiled.’

  ‘So Brother Joseph was working with the first group to have you killed?’ Wilfred asked. He ran trembling fingers through his hair and looked for a moment as if he might start vomiting blood again.

  I supposed he was still coming to terms with such enormity from a man of God. I shrugged. In truth, though, I’d had Cuthbert in mind for this. I thought again of that sealed packet of documents he’d had hidden away. I wished I’d opened it when I had the chance. Would they have explained his eagerness to get the gate open? Was he the insider for that failed attack? If so, I didn’t see any evidence for contact with Edward beyond the carnal. Nor could I think of any evidence that suggested cooperation with Joseph.

  And Joseph was the hard one to explain. Hrothgar and Cuthbert made sense within the hypothesis. Each was certainly or probably attached to one of the two bands of raiders. I knew one was there to capture me. I guessed the other was there to help get me killed. But what had Joseph been up to? If Edward was right, he’d just now been trying to kill me. Yet if he’d wanted me dead in Jarrow he had only to put something in my drink, or press a folded cloth into my face as I slept.

  Of course, if there had been two conspiracies, each with different principals, there might easily have been three. And once these things came in contact, there was no predicting or even explaining their course. But this was the sort of tangled web that I’d seen long before, when Phocas was Emperor, or in the early days of Heraclius. If this was how the Imperial Secret Service worked now, it was evident that my own reforms had gone backwards since my departure.

  I took my wig off again and scratched. I noticed both boys still looking expectantly at me – as if they believed I could explain everything to them as neatly and authoritatively as I might in class with some difficulty of word order in Horace. I smiled and dabbed at my nose – thin snot, I was glad to say, not blood.

  ‘The problem with most hypotheses,’ I wearily said, ‘is the presence of facts that don’t fit within them but can’t be ignored. We could agree that Edward was deceived earlier today. And it was a time when the eye can see much that isn’t there.’ I raised a hand to silence Edward’s objection. ‘But I do think it was Brother Joseph on the deck of that Imperial battle ship. This raises difficulties that I will neither outline nor attempt to resolve. But they indicate that we must either reject our present hypothesis outright, or elaborate it to the point where it breaks down for want of further supporting evidence.’ I stopped and thought. ‘There is another possibility that I do not yet think worth exploring – though it does begin to trouble me.’ I stopped again. Yes, it was troubling. But I would have to think more about that one.

  ‘One thing is for certain, however,’ I concluded. ‘It’s unwise to continue on our present course. There is nowhere safe for us in these waters. We must find some way of getting back to the west. England remains our most likely place of safety. If, as I suspect, the Narrow Straits are closed to us, we shall need to choose between hoping for a change of wind so we can break through, and travelling overland across France. If this latter, we need to consider how well the crew will take to being abandoned.’

  I put my hand on a plate of hardened bread that had risen several inches in the air with another roll of the ship. I was now uncontrollably tired. In a while, I had a meeting here with the man who served as pilot. The only map he had was in his head and didn’t correspond with any recollections I had of the maps I’d seen in Constantinople. And, regardless of how we’d get back to England, there was the increasingly pressing matter of supplies. If there was a renewed price on my head, it might make no difference if I turned pirate. But that might bring difficulties of its own…

  ‘Go,’ I said, waving the boys out of the cabin. ‘I must rest a while.’

  Chapter 15

  It was two days later. A mixed blessing, the wind still blew strongly from the west, though the sun now also shone from skies of unbroken blue. I stood unaided, my hands resting on the stern. I looked westward at the setting sun.

  ‘So they are still back there?’ I asked.

  Edward nodded. He’d spent much of the day aloft and kept me informed of the ships that, unable to catch up, had remained on our tail.

  ‘Well, I’m still servant enough of the Empire to rejoice that the navy is being kept at full efficiency,’ I muttered in Greek. ‘So long as we control the seas, the Saracen fleets must stay in their Syrian and Egyptian ports, and can’t assist the land-based invasion of Africa.

  ‘But I do assure you, they can’t keep this up much longer,’ I said, louder now and back in Latin. ‘Those ships aren’t built for this sort of pursuit. Their water must be running out even faster than ours. With short rations, and the removal of all unnecessary hands, they might be able to keep going another day – perhaps two…’ I trailed off and thought of our own situation. There was still food of a sort. But much of the water was spoiled. Somewhere, and soon, we’d need to put in for supplies.

  I turned and looked at the rowing boat. The moment it was plain we were being followed, I’d had it pulled out of the water. That had given us a slight improvement in speed. Now, it was being used as the container for a mass of inflated water skins. I’d had these tied together and topped with a little mast and sail. I thought again of the angle the sail needed to be to the line of the bladders. Would the tiller I’d designed be enough to keep the line straight? Hard to say. None of the crew, I was annoyed to learn, had been of the slightest use. The pilot plucked anxiously at my sleeve. According to his calculations, he whispered, we’d be approaching Carthage in the next day. I smiled encouragingly at the man. It was plain that, whatever his abilities in the northern seas, he was now out of area. Even I could tell that, on our present course, the most likely land we’d see was Italy – and that would be days of fas
t sailing yet to go. I thanked him for the news and looked back at the setting sun.

  ‘We’ll do it once the light is about to go completely,’ I said loudly. ‘Until then, I will lie on my daybed.’ Without looking round, I lifted my arms and held them out. Unknown hands lifted me from behind and laid me down with reasonable gentleness. Wilfred stood forward from nowhere and pulled my blanket into place.

  ‘What is that noise?’ I asked Edward. The chanting had started down in the hold shortly after lunch. I’d so far decided to ignore it. However, it had now been going on and on, and the volume of sound might, if prolonged, get in the way of my cunning plan.

  ‘It’s something to do with their religion,’ came the pretty near worthless answer.

  I’d hardly supposed they were rehearsing an entertainment for the Exarch of Carthage. I scowled at the boy and pointed to the patch of deck just before my daybed.

  A troubled look on his face, he gave up on his latest trip aloft and stood where directed. ‘I spent a summer in their land with Hrothgar,’ he said after a little prompting. So that was where he’d picked up their language. ‘I don’t understand the words of what they’re singing – I think it’s very old. But they did this for days at a time when they thought a sorcerer had spoiled their crops. Eventually, I saw them grab the eldest son of a chieftain and burn him in a wicker cage.’ He brightened at this recollection. ‘It was a slow fire, and he screamed until his lungs melted.’