The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  ‘No!’ I said, now calm. ‘You’ll never outrun these men, or those who come to help them. Keep your mouth shut and leave this to me.’ There was a sudden blaze of light from one of the wooden huts outside the hall used for keeping food hot in the winter months. With a tremendous effort, I got up and tried to look active.

  ‘God be praised,’ I cried in Syriac – and luck be praised I’d kept my teeth in. ‘This is a blow for truth I never thought I’d live to witness.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ someone snarled back at me. ‘This is a job for the fit.’

  I croaked a variant on ‘Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace according to Thy word,’ and giggled.

  ‘Get the old fool out of here,’ the voice snarled again, now at Karim. Plainly, he was taken in by my words, if not impressed by my presence. ‘We’re holding the eastern gate.’

  That should have been it. We could have sloped off deeper into the palace grounds, and waited for the Palace Guard to get its act together. But as Karim was pulling me back on to his shoulders, we almost fell over about half a dozen other men.

  ‘Get these wankers out of here!’ the voice now commanded. ‘We can’t lose another Elder.’

  And that was it. Pulled and shoved to keep on course, Karim was hurried off to the eastern gate. I thought of pretending a heart attack to slow him down enough to be left alone. But I could feel that Karim was in no state to play along with me. With the panting sobs of a man terrified out of his wits, he had his head down and was keeping pace. Swaying about over his back, I could see the bright mass of torches coming closer as we approached the eastern gate. I could pass as anything I cared to be. What to do, though, about that brown face and his Saracen clothes?

  ‘Let us through,’ I cried as we came level with the gate. I noted the fallen bodies of the guards. ‘Let us through. My servant is wounded.’ The torches parted. No one could see Karim’s face. No one paid attention to his clothes. We hurried through into streets alive with people and more torches.

  ‘Is the palace burned?’ someone asked. ‘Is the tyrant dead?’ There was a ragged cheer at the very thought – though whether Caliph or Governor was in mind no one bothered to make clear. I clapped Karim on the back to keep going. Now staggering under my weight, he carried me into a side street and dropped me hard on the packed earth that served here in place of paving.

  ‘How many Saracens are there in Damascus?’ I asked. He leaned against a wall, wheezing and coughing. There was a blast of trumpets in the main road and the unmistakable tread of military boots. ‘We can’t stay here,’ I added. ‘Soldiers don’t know friend from foe in the dark.’ I repeated myself: ‘Is there a Saracen district nearby where we can get shelter?’

  He shook his head despairingly. Even now, Damascus was overwhelmingly Christian. The Faithful lived in encampments outside the walls or inside the palace. The only converts were local trash – persons of very low degree, he emphasised.

  ‘Then let’s just get away and hide somewhere quiet till morning,’ I said.

  Karim tried to protest. But I wasn’t going back anywhere close to that palace while there was a riot in progress. Whatever his father had been, Karim wasn’t a military Saracen. But if I wasn’t much of a soldier either, I’d seen dozens of riots in Constantinople, and I knew exactly what to expect. Not waiting for him to pick me up again, I started off away from the noise. A sword would have been useful. These fine clothes made us walking targets. But the first rule of street fighting is to get away from it, regardless of what further trouble may lurk round the corner.

  ‘So, where are we?’ I asked after half a mile. ‘You were happy enough the day before yesterday to show me the sights of Damascus. Shall we take this opportunity to see a few of them now?’

  Karim stopped and took my arm off his shoulder. The clouds had parted, showing the nearly full moon. In its light, he guided me towards a bench. There was a heap of rubbish behind it and on both sides. If even I could smell it, there must have been quite a large dead animal rotting somewhere close by. The bench looked clean enough in the moonlight, however. Karim sat down and looked ahead in silence.

  ‘We’re lost,’ he said at last without turning.

  No shock there, I thought. My reply was a sniff. I looked at the high, blank walls of the houses that, here and there, pressed almost together overhead.

  ‘At all times of the day and night,’ he went on, ‘these streets around the palace are crowded with Cross Worshippers of the lowest and most desperate kind. Once order is restored, we shall be lost among them. They will surely tear us apart. I have failed His Highness the Governor in allowing you to sit here, waiting for death. I have failed you, My Lord – and failed so ignobly. May my family curse the day that I was born!’ His voice shook. It was as if I heard the tears rolling down into his beard. The Saracens were maturing fast into their exalted position: some of them weren’t only non-military; they also weren’t particularly brave.

  ‘Then I suggest we get up and keep moving,’ I said firmly. The last thing you want in a coward is a fit of the shakes. We’d never move anywhere with that. I looked along the street in the direction we’d been going. After a dozen yards, it twisted sharp right. Left or right, all the streets had been doing that since we left the palace. According to the moon, we were going west. Just a while earlier, it had been east. I sniffed again. No hint of a nosebleed was my first good news since I’d seen Meekal projected through my lenses. ‘If only you lot might listen,’ I said, ‘you’d learn a lot from the Greeks about town planning. A grid arrangement of at least the central districts of a city can bring so many benefits. So, while we’re on the subject, can a touch of street lighting. We can only hope that continued progress along this dried-up riverbed of a street will bring us somewhere safer than we are now.’

  As I was about to push myself upright, there was a sound of running footsteps from where we’d come. I looked round. The sodding moon was full out – not a cloud in sight. There was nowhere to hide. Even if Karim was up to lifting me again, he’d never outrun whoever was coming our way. I thought of telling Karim to take to his heels. There was no reason for both of us to be butchered. But what I’d feared in his case had come to pass. He was clutching at himself and leaning forward. He began droning some edifying gibberish from his Holy Book. I sighed and tried to make myself comfortable on the bench.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing there?’ a man shouted in Syriac. ‘We’ve got the whole Palace Guard after us, and you just sit there, waiting to be cut down!’

  ‘I told you there was an Elder went off this way,’ someone whined at him. ‘You tell me now I was wrong.’

  Panting from the run, a big man with a bushy beard stood before me. He turned and waved at the three other men with him. ‘Get him up into your arms,’ he said. ‘He’ll never get away by himself.’ He knelt down and kissed the hem of my robe. ‘Forgive me, Father, my profane words, but we cannot afford to lose another Elder to the darkies.’

  I patted his head uncertainly, then uttered a benediction. No one bothered with Karim. If he wanted to get away, now was his moment. But, as I was lifted off the bench and perched between two of the Angels of the Lord, I saw that he was getting ready to tag along beside us. Oh, well, I thought, explaining him as well wouldn’t be much harder than explaining myself.

  As we moved off, I thought I heard the thud of hooves on the packed earth of the streets. It really wasn’t my evening.

  Chapter 42

  If I’d so far thought little of Damascus as a capital, the vast labyrinth of stinking alleys into which we now plunged confirmed my opinion of the place. Except that most of it was newly built, and it had never been other than it was, it reminded me of the Egyptian quarter in Alexandria. But that had been a very long time ago, and I’d always then been able to protect myself from the human trash who lived there, or been able to run away. Here, I might as well have been a sacrificial animal, bound and carried towards the altar. The only consolation was th
at I didn’t have to spoil my nice velvet boots on those now filthy streets.

  We came to a stop at the end of a little street that had snaked round and round on itself. I was set down against the wall that terminated the street, while the men who’d been carrying me put their backs into moving a broken-down cart that seemed to have been left where the wheels had come off it. Beneath was the stone cover of what I could see at once had, before the troubles brought on Damascus by the Persians, been the sewers. Because the city had been rebuilt without regard to the ancient street patterns, these were no longer used for their original purpose. As I was handed down through the narrow entrance, I breathed in cautiously through my nose. It wouldn’t have been hard, but the smell down here was somewhat better than in the streets above. The paved central channel was now dry, and we were able to make better time than we had been above.

  We hurried along the straight tunnels, the torch of the man before us flaring and roaring with the speed of our progress. I could hear the increasingly laboured breath of the men who were carrying me, and the echo of their heavy tread on the stone channels. Here and there, we turned into another tunnel. Here and there, I could just make out signs of frequent use as a thoroughfare: recently dead torches fixed in their brackets, heaps of weapons, even the dismantled parts of an artillery catapult. Of course, I can’t say in which general direction we were heading. It might have been further in to the centre. It might have been away. At length, however, we came to a doorway crudely hacked into the ancient brickwork. Piles of rubble from the work almost blocked the continued way ahead. Some narrow passageway however had been left through the rubble. In the brief glance that I managed down this passageway, I could see that there was a regular junction a few yards ahead of perhaps three other tunnels. No one without a good knowledge of these tunnels would easily seal off all the approaches.

  There were more torches within the doorway, and a man came out to see if we represented danger. He looked briefly at me in my fine, if now soiled, robe, and bowed low before me. I gave him another of my benedictions. Karim walking beside me with palpable terror, I was carried through an arched cellar towards a flight of stairs. These were worn down by age, and I felt them crumble still more beneath our weight. At the top of these was a stout wooden door. With a pattern of knocks that were repeated on the other side and then renewed, the door was unbolted from within, and we passed into a room that seemed as brightly lit as the banqueting hall had been.

  We were in the nave of an old church – no, I could see from its shape and the remaining decoration to the walls that we were in what had once been a temple. From its size, it must have been somewhere close to the ancient centre of Damascus. Before the establishment here of the last Faith but one, the temples of several dozen gods and demi-gods would have jostled for prominence, and been thronged with singing, garlanded worshippers, come to make sacrifice. This must have been one of the larger temples. Given daylight and more time, I might have been able to tell for whose cult it had been built. Then again, I might not. The windows that had been cut into the walls on its conversion to a church were now bricked up again, and I could have no idea whether there was still any direct access to the streets outside. There was a strange kind of service in progress. Over in what served as the chancel, a priest was chanting a Te Deum in Greek. Around him, a few dozen worshippers made their unscripted responses. Here in the nave, perhaps a hundred men lounged about, drinking and looking pleased with themselves. Mostly young, they had the pinched, wiry look of the urban lower classes. They weren’t the mountain fanatics we’d helped organise into the Angels of the Lord. Even so, it was plain they were gathered together to fight and, if need be, die for the Orthodox Faith.

  My carriers put me down beside one of the walls. This was covered with the usual paintings of saints and Gospel happenings. The paint was now chipped and rubbed away in places. Most importantly, all the large, staring eyes of the anciently clothed figures had been scratched out, in some places leaving deep holes in the plaster. Every representation I could see of a cross had also been defaced.

  It might have been interesting to see more of the building, and to speculate on its recent history. But now, every head in that nave was turned in our direction. Whatever assumptions had been made about us in the unlit streets evaporated the moment we were pushed inside the first pool of lamplight. All else aside, Karim’s brown face stood out in that gathering like a rotten tooth. Over in the chancel, the priest let up his chanting. The exultant chatter about him died away. Wherever I cared to look in that church, I saw hard, unsmiling eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ one of the older men asked. ‘And’ – he looked straight at Karim – ‘what is this?’

  ‘Greetings, my dear Brothers in Christ,’ I said, stepping with my best effort at a firm tread away from the wall. I leaned on the back of a chair and looked benignly about. I felt the sudden need of a piss. But I held myself steady and continued speaking in the hesitant, softened Syriac of a Greek.

  ‘I am Seraphinus,’ I said, reusing my assumed name from Caesarea. ‘A Greek from Smyrna, I am travelling in this now benighted realm to bring comfort to my relatives. This boy beside me is my servant. Though dark of face, he is as true in the Orthodox Faith as I am myself.’

  ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet,’ Karim said, breaking the silence that followed my own words.

  I groaned inwardly. What a time the stupid boy had chosen to find an ounce of courage. But I shuffled left and trod hard on one of his feet. He yelped. Given luck, that might be the end of his contribution.

  ‘It was a glorious blow that you all struck this evening against the dark hordes who feed like lice on the fair body of Syria,’ I said in a jolly tone. ‘Let us join together in prayer for our eventual deliverance.’ I wondered if my cock piercing might still be somewhere about me. It was pure gold, and might turn a few heads.

  ‘It is the Old One himself,’ someone squealed. ‘He lives and is among us!’ There was a loud groan all about, and much shuffling and scraping of boots on the unswept floor. I saw the glint of a sword held in the shaking hands of a boy who might have been about the same age as Edward. Not a good beginning, I supposed. On the other hand, it saved the trouble of introductions. Now that standing wouldn’t make much difference to what happened next, I hurried round and sat on the chair. It increased the itching in my bladder, but took the weight off my shaking legs.

  ‘This is surely a sign from God!’ the priest called. He hurried over and raised a hand as if to strike me. I frowned at him until he dropped his hand. I could do nothing, though, about the lunatic glint in his eye. ‘Behold, my sons, how futile are the hands of man. So long as you relied on your own weapons, the Old One escaped your every effort. With Satanic spells, did he not evade you in Beirut? Was not your attack on the road to Damascus a miserable failure? Now it is plain for all to see that your attack on the palace, where he feasted and caroused with the brown filth of the desert, has come to nothing. Yet, here he is – directed hither not by the hands of man, but of God!’

  I did think of reminding him of the previous night’s failure. But he seemed in no mood for interruption. His last sentence he howled in a Syriac that showed long residence in Constantinople. Sure enough, I didn’t have to wait for confirmation.

  ‘It was in the Imperial City itself, where I was but a deacon, that I heard of his speech to the Emperor’s Council. “Let us not take back the Orthodox of Syria into the bosom of the Empire,” he said with poisoned tongue. “Let us rather leave the bounds of Empire to embrace only those whose native language is Greek. Let Orthodoxy become no more than part of the glue that binds Greek to Greek. Let us only trade and fight and stand strong in the world as a nation of Greeks. Let the Orthodox of other tongues be confounded with the Jews and the heretics, to make their peace with the Saracens.” ’

  It all showed how news gets around. Proceedings of the Imperial Council are supposed to be confidential. If this man had been in the Council
Chamber, taking minutes of the session, he’d not have quoted me with greater accuracy. Even before he’d finished his report, there were screams of less well-informed denunciation. ‘Death to the Old One! Damnation be upon him!’ someone bellowed close beside my bad ear. ‘God wills it!’ an old man quavered behind me. Someone too young for a proper beard lurched at me, knife in hand. I waved him back as well. Curled up like one of my roasted bugs, Karim huddled at my feet.

  I sat forward in the chair and looked coldly about the room. I might have been in the audience room of my own palace in Constantinople, looking over the crowds of supplicants I’d usually allowed in after breakfast. And I took the chance to continue racking my brains for some reason why the pair of us shouldn’t be torn limb from limb. In that ship off Cartenna, I’d been faced with one of those times when even I couldn’t think of an excuse without some preparation. This, however, wasn’t quite one of them. Since the priest had set the tone of the proceedings with a speech, I’d surely be given right of reply. If nothing else, I might be expected to plead for mercy before not getting any. I moved my tongue to flip my teeth back into position. I shut my eyes for a moment to gather what remained of my strength. I got up on my feet.

  As I stood, I raised my arms for silence. It was like the killing blow to a wounded animal. At once, the room was still. I could now hear Karim reciting over and over: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.’ And very useful that was to what I had in mind! But I ignored him and hoped everyone else would. I stepped forward and walked with commendable firmness towards the sanctuary. It was mostly very young men in my way, and, if no one actually bowed, the crowd parted before me. Without pausing, I walked through the broken, defaced remains of the iconostasis and stood before the altar table. For just a moment, I raised my arms to the cross that was still visible in outline on the painted wall in front of the altar. Then I turned to face the completely silent crowd. Breathing hard while I felt for my voice, I looked round the church.