The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  I got up and allowed Wilfred to dress me. The brown stain that covered the whole front of my robe would never fade. Though washed and washed again, the blond wig was also brown. Since I had no hat, I’d have to make do with it against the sun. At the most charitable, I looked somewhat reduced in circumstances. I leaned against the rock and watched as Edward jumped up and down in the sea, washing the blood and grime from his body.

  ‘Did you need to do all that, Master?’ Wilfred asked. He looked across at Edward.

  I sniffed, and then poked a finger into my nose to remove the clotted blood. I was feeling better by the moment. I wished I could say the same of Wilfred. Much more of that coughing, and it would be a question of who was helping whom along this shore.

  ‘That boy isn’t fourteen,’ I answered. ‘Already, he has a trail of corpses behind him. I don’t intend either of us to join them. I do nothing without a purpose – something you would do well to remember.’

  We watched in silence as Edward finished in the sea. Afterwards, he went and looked a long time into the boat. Then he fished around inside. After more washing in the sea, he walked back holding what I could see from the blurred glitter was the knife that had been meant for my dispatch. In his hands, it seemed more like a short sword than a knife. By the time he’d crossed the expanse of sand that separated us from the sea, he was already dry. I looked at him. Another day, and he’d be covered in bruises. If I hadn’t broken any bones, he’d ache for days after that.

  As the boy came within a yard of where I stood, he went down on his knees and, silent and with downcast head, placed the knife at my feet. Still looking down, he reached clasped hands up towards me. I stood a moment in silence, looking down at the small, naked figure. He was rather young for this sort of thing – and I rather old. But, regardless of that or the lack of any relics or anything else holy, there could be no doubt of its meaning. I considered for a moment, then leaned forward and took his hands between my own.

  ‘I promise on my soul that I will in the future be faithful to My Lord the Senator Alaric,’ he said quietly, ‘and never cause him harm, and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit.’ He stopped and looked up at me.

  I stared silently back and kept my own hands about his. So the magical essence – the Hail or Heil, they call it in the Germanic languages – that he’d never less than passionately adored, but never yet felt clean enough to acknowledge, in the Old One, passed from outer to inner hands. I smiled and tightened my hold on his hands. All round us the desolation of the beach and the unkempt land, and the broken, deserted city and the sunken forgotten statue, we stayed silently frozen in the highest – though long since Christianised – ritual of our ancestral, northern forest.

  At last, I let go of the boy’s hands and reached creakily down for the knife. Wiping off the sand, I held it aloft towards the sun, then presented it hilt first. Though I took care with the blade, the thing was more deadly for the chopping force of its weight than by its sharpness. Edward took it, still on his knees. I helped him to his feet.

  ‘Take this, and use it well,’ I commanded.

  He took the knife and went back on his knees. I stood silent again, accepting his long, no longer abject obeisance. The ritual was complete. The boy was a man, and – by the power that was mine by descent from the tribal gods of Kent, and by positions in the Empire that no Emperor could abolish – was a man of some quality. His past was blotted out. If in different ways, he was now the equal in my eyes of Wilfred. Perhaps he was more.

  ‘The boat is full of water,’ he said once dressed. ‘Also, the man you killed has swollen up in his stomach, and the water around him is turning dark. Should we not bury him?’

  I shook my head. ‘Leave the body for the animals – there are always plenty of those,’ I said, looking up at the birds beginning to circle in the clear sky. They’d have the choice bits even if nothing on four legs would go down to the water. ‘He deserves no better resting place than the other one who must float for ever beneath the seas that swallowed him,’ I added. You can be sure I believed no such nonsense: dead is dead. However, though I’d have liked to remove all trace of our arrival, the body was too big for one boy and two invalids to move. And even if we could have emptied it and plugged its leak, the boat was useless for what I now had in mind. I could see that Wilfred was aghast at the idea of just leaving the body to float, face upward, in the juice of its own corruption. But he probably hadn’t liked anything that had happened since Edward’s return. Still, I was in charge, and that was my decision.

  ‘I think we’ll have a proper look round Tipasa,’ I said, now brisk. ‘If there is indeed no one living here, we can dine from whatever wild fruit trees may be in season. Otherwise, I’m sure something small will present itself for killing. As for shelter, we’ll make a fire in one of the smaller churches.’ I scowled Wilfred into silence. Taking up my stick, I tottered slightly as I set out along the beach towards the broken docks.

  Chapter 21

  Taking into account the twisting of the road as it hugs the shore, Tipasa is about twenty miles from Caesarea. A man of reasonable vigour can cover that in a day. With me bumping along in the wheelbarrow Edward had rescued from a church, it should have taken two days. Halfway through the first day, however, Wilfred had his worst attack yet. I’d already decided he wasn’t up to helping Edward with pushing me. But, though I’d insisted on a slow progress along the road, even that, in the unaccustomed heat of Africa, was too much for him. After our first long noonday stop, he couldn’t get up again. This time, what began as coughing turned to a long choking. As I wiped the foul-smelling froth from his lips, I decided it was time for the Magnificent Alaric to show the world he was still up to taking a walk.

  So, for three days, and not two, we journeyed along that baking road, the blue sea sparkling always on our right, drinking much, eating little, with barely another human being to pass or overtake us. Though our most understandable concern was the sea, and what ships there might be upon it, my own private concern was bandits. The days when a citizen might walk the roads of the Empire in reasonable safety – Saint Paul, for example, in Asia – were so long since passed away that it was hardly worth enquiring when. But I knew the African roads were especially dangerous. Professional thieves, escaped slaves, raiders from the south, the occasional band of Saracens – those were the real danger. We had no credible means of defence. We had no chance of running away. As for money to appease anyone who might accost us, those clipped coins would have sent any thief into a frenzy of disappointment.

  But, unaccosted, we came at last within sight of the walls of Caesarea. Unlike Tipasa – unlike even Cartenna – this hadn’t shared in the general emptying out of Africa. Instead, by taking in the remnants of other communities, it had maintained the ancient circuit of its walls. Bearing in mind its evident lack of commerce with the hinterland, it was hardly flourishing. It had, nevertheless, survived.

  ‘State your business, Citizen,’ a guard called out from just inside the gateway.

  I’d seen the wooden bar come down on our approach, and had my story already made up and rehearsed. I shuffled forward and peered into the dark gateway.

  ‘It is surely the mercy of God,’ I opened in an elderly whine, ‘that I should ever again hear the voice of authority.’

  Deep within the gateway, there was a sound of leather scraping on wood. Then the guard emerged. Fifty, fat, shifty, he blinked in the sunlight. The metal strips had come off his breastplate. His sword was broken away near the point. But he was taking no chances. He gave me and the boys a hard, suspicious look, then turned his attention to the road behind us.

  ‘I am Seraphinus,’ I said proudly, ‘a man of some repute in Carthage. I am travelling to Cartenna with my grandsons. Since the last visitation of plague, I am all they have left in this world. You will see that the younger boy is sick. We are advised that his only hope is to roll in the holy dust before the tomb of Saint
Flatularis.’ I did a fair job of laying the mannerisms of the higher classes over an African accent. As I was hoping, it placed me nicely as what I was pretending to be.

  The guard came over to us and leaned hard on the wooden bar. It groaned beneath the weight, and the folds of his belly not contained within the breastplate wobbled with every breath.

  ‘That’s a sick lad you have there,’ he agreed with a look at Wilfred, who, covered with his faded robe against the sun, slept fitfully in the wheelbarrow. Sleep had suppressed the coughing attacks. Now, it was a matter of how long he could keep up the shallow gasps of his breathing. ‘I suppose it was the doctors got him this way. They always do in my experience. You’d better get him to the saint before it’s too late. Hard journey along the road?’ he added with a nod at my clothing.

  I thought of the brown stain and smiled. ‘We fell among thieves,’ I said. ‘They stripped us of our possessions. But my healthy grandson fought like a desert lion, and put the thieves to flight.’ Edward nodded vigorously in agreement and held up the knife. ‘I now beg at the gates of this most opulent and well-protected of cities for entry. We cannot face another night on the road. All else aside, I must have a bed for the sick child.’ The guard continued looking for a while at nothing in particular. I raised my arms in supplication. I began to wonder if it was worth the risk of falling to my knees. Perhaps I could spare a few coins. But the guard eventually heaved himself upright and fiddled with the bronze hoop securing the bar.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said as the bar went up, ‘you’ll get nothing within unless you’ve managed to keep a little money in your own hands. More important, that knife stays with me. City ordinances don’t allow no weapons. This is a peaceful place. No weapons for nobody – just the authorities.’ It took a surreptitious but hard jab with my stick before Edward handed the knife over.

  There was a time – perhaps not that long before – when Caesarea had been one of the most elegant cities on the African shore. Coming through that heavy gateway, you’d have found yourself in a long, wide street that passed right along to the central square, around which the churches and the main public buildings were arranged to avoid the full power of the sun. Each side of the street would have been lined with a colonnade. Behind this, about four feet above street level, the pavements would have allowed pedestrians to move back and forth, safe from the dust or any filth cast up by the wheeled traffic. Running parallel with each colonnade, long granite basins would have splashed and sparkled from a dozen fountains that cooled the hottest day.

  That was before the long tide of African prosperity had finally withdrawn, and Caesarea became the last refuge of a dozen other cities. Now, the colonnades had been closed up with crude brickwork, the pavements behind made into habitations for the poor. The fountains were dry and the basins choked with rubbish. Every ten yards or so, the ancient statues – some dressed in all the opulence of merchants made good, some nude – still held their plinths. Whatever paint and gold leaf had been applied to heighten their semblance to the living was gone. It was replaced by the grime of many open fires and by white streams of shit from the birds. The nudes had been disfigured to accord with modern ideas of propriety. But they all still looked from their sightless eyes on the broken-down jumble their city had become.

  I picked my way carefully across the uneven and impacted dust that now coated the paving stones of the long street. Its smooth line had been broken by a row of makeshift houses that wandered down the centre and forced all traffic into six-foot passageways on either side. By much shoving and bumping, Edward was able to force the wheelbarrow through the crowded ways.

  The central square was an improvement on Cartenna. At least all the buildings were still standing, and there were a few signs of a more organised civic life. Looking at the shabby crowds, though, it was plain that the public baths hadn’t been open for some while past. I rather think that, of all the hundreds there who pushed and shouted as they went about their business, we were the cleanest.

  ‘Don’t look at those young men with your mouth open,’ I whispered at Edward. ‘You’re supposed to be from Carthage. It doesn’t do to behave like some barbarian in a border fort.’ But, since Cartenna didn’t really count, this was the first city he’d ever seen. To me, it was just another disappointing slum, interesting only for a spot of highly selective viewing of ancient sights. There was, for example – or once had been – a column put up by Hadrian with a trilingual inscription that might say something about Punic. If, however, I thought myself behind his eyes, I could see how it appeared to Edward. The largest human settlement he’d probably seen didn’t contain more than a few hundred people or above one brick building, if that. For him, this place was everything Hrothgar had promised him when he’d been forced to hand over all direction of his life for purposes he wasn’t given to understand. He stared round and round at the people in their mean finery, and looked at the huge, solid buildings that had come down to us from better days. And – fair’s fair – clean up both people and buildings, forget the surrounding streets, and the place wouldn’t have looked half bad.

  ‘I think we should try again to force some water into poor Wilfred,’ I suggested.

  Edward nodded and reached for the water skin. He was paying rather less attention to us, though, than to a couple of the local whores who’d drifted over for a look at the newcomers. To me, every bloated wrinkle screamed contagion. But, again, I was a jaded old me. They doubtless appeared otherwise to a boy who hadn’t managed sex with anyone but himself in over two months. I thought of the money hanging from his belt and decided to take charge.

  ‘Come, Edward,’ I said firmly. ‘There’s no good served in dawdling here. If we don’t get him under cover soon, poor Wilfred will dry up in this sun.’ I turned to someone close by who was trying to sell dried fruit from a bag.

  ‘I shall be grateful,’ I said in my assumed accent, ‘to know the whereabouts of the Jewish district.’

  The man scowled and spat. Then he pointed at the largest church in the square.

  Silly me! I thought. Of course, the Jews would be clustered behind the main church. It was the best place for bribing the priests when the mob turned ugly. I peered in the dazzling sun for evidence of an alley or some other exit from the square.

  Chapter 22

  When I began frequenting them as a very young man, I always used to find Jewish districts alien. I suppose that sounds rich coming from someone who was a barbarian until he was nearly twenty, and who never quite fitted into the ways of the Empire. But if I didn’t believe in either, I’d come to regard the Christian Faith and the Old Faith that preceded it as inseparable from civilisation. The churches, the crosses, the statues, the converted temples – they were all part of the furniture of everyday life. It was a shock to find that the Jews had none of these things. More than this, though, it was the dark eyes and the darker beards, the words and gestures that might have one meaning for outsiders and another between the Jews themselves. And even when long familiarity and the joint acquisition of wealth had made them almost normal, I could never forget, as a servant of the Empire, that I was dealing with a people who were in the Empire, but who could never regard themselves entirely – not, at least, since Christianity was established – as of the Empire.

  Stepping into the Jewish district of Caesarea was in one sense a homecoming. In another, the long absence from any Jewish place of residence brought back that early feeling of its being a world parallel to but separate from the one that had been mine.

  If hardly spotless, though, this place was a sight better than the streets we’d now left. There was no longer need to look out for pyramids of dog shit or puddles of congealed saliva, or for the omnipresent cutpurses. The streets here were decidedly quieter. But what had brought me here? I told myself for the dozenth time that I was mad. I hobbled forward, Edward pushing the wheelbarrow and himself behind me. He was a strong boy – no doubt of that. However, even he was now wilting in the powerful noonday sun.


  Then, as we turned a corner, I came upon an old man. He couldn’t have been my age, or anything approaching that. But he was old and shrivelled. Sitting in the middle of the street, surrounded by boys of about Edward’s age, he was scowling into a linen roll he’d arranged on his lap, and droning away at them in one of the Eastern languages. I stopped and leaned against one of the high, blank walls of the houses. I listened hard. I’d thought at first it was Hebrew. But this old Jew wasn’t so learned in his people’s ancient language. It was Aramaic, and he was reading out something nonsensical from one of the more recent prophets. It was no worse than anything you hear in church every Sunday. But even if you aren’t a believer, foreign religions always sound more stupid than your own.

  No one noticed me, and I stood there quite a while, trying to keep a smile off my face as the boys repeated the bottom-wiping instructions one phrase at a time, and copied the gestures that accompanied them. Then, without waking, Wilfred moved slightly in the wheelbarrow and groaned. The old man looked up and glared at us.

  ‘Your sort isn’t allowed in here!’ he cried indignantly in Latin. He stood up and clutched the roll to his chest. ‘Get out now, or we’ll have the magistrates on you.’ He bent slowly down, his hand reaching for a stone.

  ‘I’ll go where I fucking please, you bag of apikoros dirt!’ I replied in Aramaic.

  He shrank back as if I’d thrown lime in his face. I don’t know if it was because I’d spoken in his own language, or because I’d used the worst insult one Jew can give another – as if, mind you, calling someone a follower of the Great and Wondrous Epicurus, Master of All Wisdom, can be other than a compliment. But I’d shut the old man up. He glanced nervously down at his linen roll, and crushed it harder against his chest.