The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  It was now, over on the right, that I saw there was a little chapel. Its doorway had obviously been cut into the old temple wall at the time of consecration. I couldn’t see fully in from where I stood. But there was a lamp burning inside, and it all had a pleasingly mysterious look about it. But I stopped the useless effort of trying to focus and looked back over the hushed, expectant crowd.

  Chapter 43

  ‘Great men of Syria, dear brothers,’ I began in Syriac, dropping all pretence of a Greek accent. ‘It is said that God Himself has brought me here tonight. I will not deny the obvious. How else could an old man in my condition bring himself from the Palace of the Tyrant to this ruined but still defiant House of Faith? But was it so you might kill me that I now stand before you? Was it for the sake of some vulgar display that Our Heavenly Father brought your best efforts to nothing, and then – in His own miraculous way – conveyed me here to address you?

  ‘No – a thousand times, no!’ I cried with raised hand. I paused and let my voice produce some faint echo from the hard walls. ‘I come here not as sacrifice, but as messenger. If I cannot be killed, it is because God watches over me.’ There was a scared murmur from somewhere in the room. I paused again and let it gather strength. Then I lifted both hands for silence and continued. ‘Know you this, dear Brothers in Christ. I am returned from a land on the edge of the world. I come from what was anciently a province of the mighty Empire established by the arms of the Romans and long sustained by the hand of God. I come to a land that is now under the judgement of God. Because of the manifest sins of your countrymen who rejected the Truth laid down at the Council of Chalcedon for the heresy of the Monophysites, the Persians were sent among you – to smite all of Syria with fire and the sword. Did the Syrians repent? No! They waited passively for the Greeks to liberate them and bring them back within the bosom of the Empire. Did the Syrians then show gratitude for the deliverance granted at the hands of the Greeks? They did not! They persisted in the darkness of heresy. Therefore, while the Persians had been suffered to chastise you with whips, the Saracens were raised up to chastise you with scorpions.

  ‘O men of Syria! I say unto you that the Jews and heretics sinned who welcomed the Saracens as deliverers from the True Faith of Chalcedon. But did the Orthodox themselves do other than bow their heads beneath the new yoke of darkness?’ I stopped to gather breath and to let the babble of sobs and self-pity rise in volume. I glanced briefly at the priest. He wasn’t looking happy. I hadn’t directly answered his point about my wanting to leave his people to shift for themselves. Nor would I. But I was, I could guess, preaching a far better sermon than he’d ever managed. Karim was looking up from the floor. How much of my Syriac he was following was anyone’s guess. It was close enough to his own language. But, if the wooden Greek he spoke was any indication, his linguistic abilities were limited. Fortunately, he wasn’t my audience. I waited again for silence, then continued.

  ‘But surely all is changed. I stand now not before sheep, but men – and men who have never been other than steady in the love of Christ. Your courage and your resolution have softened the heart of God. By your exertions, you have saved your own souls. By your example, you will save all of Syria. And that is why now I stand before you. With my help, you are to strike a blow against the darkness that shall never be forgotten. I am the Herald of your deliverance. How that deliverance shall be achieved is not yet to be given to you. But be assured – I am the Herald of the One God, the One God manifest in Three Persons.

  ‘Hear my message, O men of Syria. And let me depart in peace.’

  I was rather hoping for a burst of applause, and then to be carried in triumph round the church. However, if I didn’t get that, no one seemed inclined to butcher me at the altar. In dead silence, I stepped down from my place and walked back to my chair. Once more, the crowd parted, and, unmolested, I sat again beside Karim. I was glad he’d now had the sense to shut up about his Allah and Prophet.

  After a long silence that I’d faced with the immobility of a statue, someone got up and announced a ‘conference of the Elders’. This was to take place in the chapel. More lamps carried before them, about a dozen of the older men now walked inside, and the nave fell silent again.

  It was a long wait, and I heard repeated bursts of shouting – though less the antiphonies of debate than the reading and responses of a liturgy. I couldn’t make out the responses, but they were angry. I thought at one point the discussion was over. But it was only someone come out with a cup and a jug of beer for me. I’d have preferred wine. Beer, after all, was for common people in Syria – and it reminded me too much of Jarrow. But a cup of beer is always preferable to a knife in the guts, and I took the cup with a graceful nod. I drained it and handed it back for a refill. Throughout the nave, there was a slight easing of tension. I leaned back into the chair and thought hard about the movement of light atoms through a pinhole. Perhaps, within that narrow space, the atoms of air were somehow concentrated to make a kind of lens. But that made no sense. Because they had to be unhooked from each other, air atoms were always evenly distributed. Any bunching in one place would be corrected as atoms moved into the relative void around them. I wondered if the effect might somehow be produced within the eye itself. That was a possibility. I might even live long enough to refine the hypothesis and think of an experiment for testing it.

  I smiled at a young man who was gawping at me, and held my cup out expectantly. The beer did bring back memories. Caught between two groups of ruthless, fanatical God-botherers, the quiet calm that had mostly been in order at Jarrow suddenly didn’t seem so very unattractive. But I’d not be left for ever to my own speculations. The Elders were now filing out of their chapel, and I was to know my fate.

  ‘God is with us,’ said the man with the biggest and greyest beard. I gave him a display of my ivory teeth and waved my cup in his direction. That was it for the moment. The Elders were getting into position about the altar. I thought of the relative darkness within the chapel, even if there was a lamp burning, and made a mental note to investigate how colours and light intensities appeared to vary according to the eye’s own expectation. But now the Chief Elder had his arms up for attention.

  ‘With God on our side,’ he opened with grim reluctance, ‘we shall never be defeated. Instead, we shall destroy the followers of the Desert Impostor – sweep them straight into Hell. Then we shall have our reckoning with those who passed by on the other side when confronted with ungodliness. There is a time, soon coming, when Syria shall again be free and Orthodox.’

  ‘Amen to that!’ I cried softly, trying not to look as sceptical as I felt about the means to achieve this impossible and probably undesirable deliverance. But the words had been spoken, and I wasn’t to be killed. There was suddenly a whole crowd of jabbering Syrians about me, all boasting of their past and future service to an empire that had long since given up on them as other than a useful irritant. I’d never have guessed it from the Elder’s brief statement. But I’d swung them round. One of the other Elders pushed his way through the crowd and took my hands in his, holding them for a long and almost respectful kiss.

  ‘You are leaving at once,’ he said. ‘There will be a chair to carry you to the Fountain of Omar. From there, you can make your own way back to the palace.’ As he spoke, two men came round from behind to stand before me. They bowed low and then reached forward. I handed my cup to Karim and spread my arms so I could be lifted out of the chair.

  ‘You go alone,’ the man corrected me. He looked evilly down at Karim. ‘The darkie goes nowhere but Hell.’

  I put my arms down again and ignored the men who were hoping to lift me. ‘We came here together,’ I said with a smile. ‘We leave together.’ There was an embarrassed silence. The Elder who stood before me shifted his position and looked nervously round. I forced myself to lean forward and place my hands over Karim. ‘If you want to kill him,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to kill me first.’

  ‘My Lord,’
the man said with slow desperation, ‘if we allow him to live, he will surely bring men back here. His life is forfeit. He knows the deal.’

  Karim certainly understood that. He whimpered and clamped his arms around my knees.

  ‘The deal is,’ I said with my coldest command, ‘that the boy comes with me. I’ll vouch for his silence.’ I sat back and took no further part in the shouted discussions. I really needed a piss.

  The Fountain of Omar gleamed new and black in the moonlight. It filled the centre of the square that contained what had once been the Church of Saint John the Baptist. As in Beirut, this had now been converted to the use of another religion, and shone an undifferentiated white. From my earlier visit of so long before, I recalled a forest of statues in the square, some of these going back to the early successors of Alexander. All that now remained were the empty plinths, their inscriptions covered by a thick wash of rendering. I might have seen a pile of broken statuary heaped up in one of the side streets. Or I might have seen nothing of the sort. But I was in no mood for looking at the sights of the new Damascus. I’d been set down on a wooden bench to look straight over at the mosque, and left there with no one for company but Karim.

  ‘The Night Watch will be coming past at midnight,’ he said, not looking at me. Though he wasn’t to be killed, the Angels of the Lord had still given him a difficult time. He’d not been kicked about too hard. Even so, he’d been spat on and roundly abused. His response had been less than might have been expected from a son of the fearless Malik al-Ashtar.

  ‘I must say, dear boy, that we’ve had a most lucky escape,’ I said. I reached up and carefully scratched the back of my scalp. Karim was looking hard at the mosque. ‘Did you see if there was anyone watching us from that little side room in the church?’ I asked. In a moment, Karim would surely start playing along. For now, he continued looking stiffly ahead.

  ‘His Highness the Governor told me to guard your life with my own,’ he said at last. ‘Would it be a lot to ask if you were to say nothing of what has happened this evening? I mean – is it possible to replace all that happened after we left the banqueting hall with something different?’ He stammered and squirmed at the unspoken recollection of how, once I’d saved his life, he’d been made to kiss an icon and abjure his Prophet.

  I smiled at him with an audible click of ivory, and placed a hand on his shoulder. I really ought to have been on the edge of collapse from exhaustion and strain. In fact, I felt like a young man of barely seventy.

  ‘Of course,’ I said comfortingly. ‘I can think of many reasons for managing perceptions of our little adventure. I might suggest, however, that Meekal is no fool, and it would be best if the slight deviation from the truth that you mention didn’t include a role too creditable to yourself.’ He nodded vigorously and let out a breath of relief. ‘Excellent!’ I said, now brisk. ‘Then I suggest we incorporate your undeniable ignorance of Damascene geography and be rather vague about our movements. These will include a long shelter in one of the many derelict churches I have noticed, and a long and uncertain progress to where we shall, no doubt, soon be discovered. Of course, since every wall in a palace has ears, I do also suggest that we never refer to any of this even when we think we are alone.’ He nodded again. We lapsed into silence, and I strained to see if the clump of broken whiteness I’d seen earlier really was broken statuary, or something entirely different.

  ‘I hate them!’ Karim suddenly hissed. ‘I hate them all!’ He doubled up and clutched at himself. I began some desultory comment about ‘People of the Book’, and how our captors had been a minority within a minority. But he ignored me, and carried on speaking more to himself than to me. ‘Why must we use Imperial money?’ he spat. ‘Haven’t we gold enough of our own? Why must we use the Empire’s language? Isn’t our own good enough? My people conquered Syria. Why are we now expected to fit ourselves in to Greek ways? I hate them all. I’d see them all put to the sword!’

  ‘My dear Karim,’ I observed mildly, ‘you surely forget that I am a Greek myself.’ He looked at me, a strange confusion in his eyes. I thought quickly, then laughed. I patted him gently on the shoulder and searched for a change of subject. I remembered the jug of beer that had been left with me. I had to threaten my poor joints with actual dislocation to reach down and get it. But it was still half full. I took a long swig and then looked again at Karim.

  ‘I know that wine is not allowed to the Faithful,’ I said pleasantly. ‘Does that include beer?’

  Karim stared at the jug held under his nose. He sighed and took the offered bait. ‘I think it does,’ he said in a tone of firm piety. ‘The prohibition should be taken to mean anything that disturbs the mind. This being so, wine should be taken as a specific instance of the general class.’

  Good lad! I thought. One day, he might have enough Greek to appreciate Aristotle in the original. Or perhaps the old windbag might find himself decked out in Saracen clothing. A shame it wouldn’t be Epicurus instead. Or perhaps not.

  ‘That being so,’ I asked again, ‘where does it leave kava and hashish and opium? These also disturb the mind, but I’ve never known them to be regarded as unlawful among the Faithful. And what of the verses I heard interpolated in this evening’s recitation:

  Joyless in this world is he that lives sober, And he that dies not drunk will miss the path of wisdom?

  At last, Karim laughed. The tension relaxed and he sat properly up. He took the jug and sniffed its contents. Luckily for his morals, it was one of those beers that tastes better than it smells. He handed it back and watched me drink deep.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re missing, my dear boy,’ I said. ‘Plural marriage may have its moments, but doesn’t beat a good piss-up.’ We passed to reminiscences of his father, who might well have pulled things round for Ali in the civil wars, if only Muawiya’s assassins hadn’t got to him when they did. Looking carefully into the young man’s face, I mentioned how, with Ali left in charge, the realms of the Caliph might today be no smaller, but have a very different shape.

  But now there was the heavy tread of military boots on old Greek pavements. It was time for the Old One al-Arik to show once more his legendary management of perception.

  Chapter 44

  I woke in my own bed with a splitting headache. Worse, Meekal was glaring down at me. He grunted and scowled as I opened my eyes and looked at him. I pointed feebly at the jug on the table. He poured a cup of lemon water and carefully raised me up so I could drink.

  ‘So you survived even that!’ he said in Greek, sitting back down. He waved the doctor forward.

  I shut my eyes again and thought of nothing in particular as the man passed his chilly hands over me, checking pulse, poking and prodding, muttering away to himself over what he was finding. I opened my eyes when he was done and tried to sit up.

  ‘No, my beloved grandfather,’ Meekal said, ‘you just stay where you are for the moment.’ He turned to the doctor, who nodded and then shrugged. He was a typical doctor. I might be at death’s door. I might be ready to train for a torch race. His manner was all the same.

  ‘So I really am still alive?’ I croaked. From the shadows the sun was casting in the room, we were already late into the afternoon. I closed my eyes once again and tried to stretch my weary, overstrained limbs. I thought of my reception back into the palace: the hugs and tears from a scared Edward, the loud prayers from Meekal, still reeking of smoke, but now got up in armour and covered in blood, the silent and terrified Karim. I must already have been out cold when I was carried back here. Certainly, I had no recollection of anything once the palace gates had thudded shut and I’d been thrust into a carrying chair. I’d slept the morning through. With a sudden thought, I forced myself into a half-sitting position. The doctor got some pillows behind me, and I was able to lean back.

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked. Meekal got up and paced over to the window. He stood with his back to me. ‘What day is this?’

  ‘If I set a ta
sk for that fool Karim beyond his abilities,’ he said without turning, ‘I am willing to blame myself. But I expected better of you than to get caught up in an Imperial terror attack – especially when this attack party had been sent specifically to murder you. That you survived last night is less down to anything you did than to the fact that God is on our side.’ He stopped and continued looking out of the window. Was that a prayer he was muttering under his breath? I couldn’t tell. If it was, though, this wasn’t the Michael I used to know. I suddenly realised that, but for him, the whole suite seemed absolutely quiet. ‘It’s Thursday,’ he said, now redundantly. ‘You’ve lost only one morning of your remaining time before you must stand before God.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked.

  Meekal turned to face me. His beard had been waxed and pressed into something that resembled a pair of sharpened ox horns. He came back over and sat down again. He pulled his chair closer and stared at me with his freezing, dark eyes.

  ‘Get out,’ he said to the doctor, still in Greek. ‘But I correct myself,’ he added, sliding at once into the ceremonious politeness of the powerful, ‘let me show you out.’ He got up and pushed the man from the room.

  Once alone, I lifted my arms and held them out before me. I bent my knees up and tried to touch them with my chin. With a bit of strain in my upper back, I just about managed. Still tired, and now conscious of aching all over, I settled back, reasonably content. If I really had fatally overstrained myself the night before, it didn’t show up on my own examination. I’d see what I could find on Meekal’s face when he eventually returned from his conversation with the doctor.