The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  I looked over to my left. I was sure this had once been the patch of grass where the boys would kick a ball about between lessons. But it all seemed so long ago. Again, the curtain came down between me and what I knew had once been a perfect memory. I shouted at everyone to go inside. No one looked round. No one got up from his place. Seated on the damp grass, the boys looked steadily forward. I tried to focus on the teacher. For some reason, this was a regular lesson – but in the open of a Northumbrian spring or autumn or summer. I willed myself to hear their chanted responses to the teacher’s lesson. But my hearing was no longer even what it had once been. It all sounded like a vague mumbling. But I tried harder. Now, I could hear something. Yes – it really was quite clear after all:

  La ilah illa Allah: Mohammed Rasul Allah. Allahu Akbaru. Allahu Akbar.

  This they chanted over and again in their flat northern voices. I thought that I might once have been able to understand the words. But understanding even of words was also long since gone. At every pause in the chanting, however, Meekal – yes, he was there at the head of the class, scowling and pointing at the boys – would repeat his interpretation into English:

  ‘ La, “no”, “not”, “none”, “neither”; ilah, a “god”, “deity”, “object of worship”; illa, “but”, “except” (the word is a contraction of in-la, meaning “if not”); Allah, “Allah”. You, boy – yes, you – come to my office after the lesson…’

  I opened my mouth to shout that a whole storm was coming on, and everyone would get soaked. But, even as I took in the breath, I was interrupted by the call from above. It came from the now white-painted bell tower:

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar Ashadu an la ilaha Allah Ashadu an la ilaha Allah Ashadu anna Mohammedan rasulah

  …

  Where the bell had been, there was now a platform. There, in the highest place of what had, in ancient times, been the monastery, sat Brother Cuthbert. The once shaven face was now covered with a beard of red and grey. The tonsure was hidden beneath a turban. Arms upheld, he summoned the Faithful to prayer in a menacing drone. Twenty feet below him, Wilfred scurried about like a lizard on the wall. I think he was trying to reach the platform. But Cuthbert’s words seemed to present a barrier to further progress up the wall. Despairingly, the boy looked down at me. As in Cartenna, the teeth were long and white. They projected far over the full, dark lips. All this I could somehow see very clearly. I could even see the pattern of the tower’s stonework as it showed through the insubstantial body.

  I could sense that Cuthbert was approaching the end of his call. He looked down at Wilfred. He looked down long and gloatingly in my direction.

  ‘ Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar,’ he called. ‘ La ilah illa Allah. Deus uult! Deus uult! ’ As he ended, and everyone down on the grass got ready for prayer, Wilfred’s whole body began to drift apart like the last mist of the dawn…

  I woke in my bed in Damascus. I was covered in sweat. I looked up at the glazed ceiling panel. No light but distortions of the brighter stars came down. All about me was silence. The main window was shut and the blind pulled down. I tried to move. But Edward had his arms clamped tight around me. His face was pressed hard into my chest. I tried to reach behind to unclamp his hands, but couldn’t make it. Instead, I stretched down to tickle the small of his back. That got him loose. As he groaned and rolled over, I wriggled away and put my feet down to the cool tiles of the floor. I sat silent and very still, waiting for the sweat to evaporate from my body.

  I reached for the water jug and drank, realising for the first time how thirsty I’d become. We were now coming deep into the summer. When there was no cloud or wind coming off the mountains, these nights could only get hotter.

  I got to my feet and peered about for my slippers. Because the slaves hadn’t yet come back in, nothing was where it should be. I walked slowly with bare feet across to the door and let myself out into the circular corridor. I looked uncertainly left and right into the darkness. I decided to go right. I went as far as I could from the bedchamber and into one of the larger audience rooms. It wasn’t a room I’d yet bothered using, and the furniture lay before me in a jumbled, shadowy blur. I felt my way to a sofa and sat down. I looked up to the glazed panel in the ceiling. It was perceptibly lighter than it had been. We must be approaching the dawn. I pulled my feet up and lay on the sofa, looking up at the brightening sky.

  I thought for a while I might nod off. But there was now a cold, dim light all about me in the room, and I could see the outlines of the heavy furniture put there to impress visitors without giving them much comfort. I got up again and drifted over to the window. I realised that this was the window nearest the bronze pipe that brought water up to the roof. It was also the window through which Khadija’s assassin had climbed. There were still no bars on it. Probably, there was no need of any. After all, I was now Khadija’s devoted servant. I smiled weakly and fumbled with the catch. I pulled the window open and breathed in the cool air of the outside and listened to the gentle but gathering roar of a Syrian dawn. I thought of the many descriptions of the dawn in Homer. All very beautiful, they were too cheerful for my present mood. I opened my mouth and recited from the much darker Virgil:

  Postera Phoebea lustrabat lampade terras, umentemque Aurora polo dimoverat umbram…

  Yes, poor stupid Dido had hoped to build her Carthage and reign in peace. She hadn’t considered the somewhat different interests of her Trojan guest. Already, his mind had been taken over by the rival and infinitely grander vision of the Rome he was to build. Virgil had looked back on this from a Rome that was at the zenith of its glory. The Rome where I’d briefly lived, six hundred years later, was a stinking ruin. I remembered how I’d stood one day on the crumbling steps of the Temple of Jupiter, and had looked down from the Capitoline Hill over the bleak ruins of the Forum. But, even if the glory of the merely corporeal Rome was now fallen, the idea of Rome was transferred to what the Saracen chronicler had called the City on the Two Waters. In time, the idea might move from Constantinople. Wherever it might move, it was worth fighting to preserve.

  I looked out at the first rays of the rising sun. If I waited just a little longer, I’d see those first rays as they struck the higher minarets of the city, and then as they moved steadily down this tower to where I stood. Gradually, Damascus would awake. There would be those calls to prayer. The shops would open for business. The streets would fill with those who had money to spend, and with those who had to be up to earn their money. Some while before then, the night would have passed, and I could say that I’d lived to see another day.

  Was that the main door opening, far back along the corridor? This was about the time the slaves came in to attend to their business. They could feed me while I bathed, I decided. Edward, I decided further, could be left to sleep until he woke by himself. I’d have him watched, so I could be with him when his eyes did open. I’d then pack him off to Karim for the day. Sooner or later, after all, Meekal would drop by for another little chat.

  ‘Bugger me!’ I whispered at the bronze pipe. ‘Sod, bugger, damn! I wish I were at home.’

  Through more than ninety years, the sound of my own voice had generally brought comfort. Now, it only brought me to the matter of where home might really be.

  Chapter 54

  There are hotter places and times on earth than a Syrian August. But you try reminding yourself of that after a whole morning of swaying, jingling progress through the desert that stretches eastward from Damascus. I took another sip of beer cooled with ice from the mountains, and – not for the first time that journey – wondered how the black slaves carrying my chair didn’t fall down dead in the sun.

  To be precise about the timing, it was Thursday, 1 August 687, and we were just into the second month of Meekal’s accelerated project. This was my eighth personal inspection. It should have been my ninth, but the Angels of the Lord had intensified their attacks, and the desert road had been judged too dangerous for me
to risk the journey. Meekal, though, had diverted more soldiers from the desultory war with the Empire, and, flanked by a whole brigade of mounted Saracens, we’d made a slow, nervous progress out of Damascus. I handed my beer cup to the slave who walked beside the chair. I adjusted my visor and tried to turn back to the volume of mathematical writings open on my knees.

  ‘We’ll soon be there,’ said Meekal. I’d heard his slow approach on horseback, but didn’t look round at him. ‘I said,’ he repeated in a louder voice, ‘we’ll soon be there.’ I made a fuss with the speaking trumpet I’d recently had made. He now shouted into it, nearly blowing my head off with the power of his voice.

  ‘There’s no need to shout!’ I whined back at him. ‘I can hear perfectly well so long as people don’t mumble.’ I rejoiced at the scared look that came over his face whenever I gave cause to think I was entering some decline. If I was his prisoner, he was just as much mine. If he’d given me no chance of slipping my own leash, I could at least tug on his. He was right about our location. Glancing up through my visor, I’d been able for some time now to see the low, sand-coloured mass of where we were going. I thought of giving further practice to my querulous tone, with a comment about the flies. Just then, though, I caught sight of the cloud of dust ahead of me to the right.

  ‘I was about to wonder if the boys would catch up with us,’ I said, now in my normal voice. ‘I see instead that they’ve overtaken us.’ I looked hard through the pattern of little holes in my visor – a pattern long since corrected out of my notice by some adjustment of the mind – and wondered at the speed that Karim and Edward could get out of those desert mounts. Even in my long prime, I’d never been much of a horseman. If I so much as spoke of climbing on to another saddle, it would only be to confirm Meekal’s worries about the decay of my faculties. But there was no hint of envy, or even regret, as I watched the pair of friends chase each other back and forth across the firm sand. If I worried about their safety, there was no point mentioning it. To be sure, Edward’s guards were even faster on horseback, and were up to seeing off anything but a regular ambush. If they kept modestly behind in the races, and if they joined in the congratulations of the winner, there was no doubt of their purpose.

  ‘Greetings, My Lords,’ Karim called out as he came alongside. ‘We made it from the palace to here in a single gallop.’

  I thought of the poor horses, but smiled my approval.

  ‘And this time,’ Edward broke in, ‘I rode faster!’ I smiled again. He’d spoken Saracen. He spoke that with Karim. He spoke it with all his other friends. If he still sometimes spoke with me in Latin – though more often in English – his Greek was fading like the heat of a kettle removed from its fire. ‘But it’s a despised language,’ he’d explained over dinner the other evening. ‘Nobody wants to learn it any more. Besides, those writers you keep speaking about – they’ve all been dead for centuries. And their language too.’ So he’d turned that formidable, if undisciplined, intellect of his to a study of the East’s rising language. Now, he was well inside its logic. Apart from obvious insufficiencies of vocabulary, his main problem was the limited range of cases compared with English, Greek and Latin, and – of course – the somewhat defective writing system of the Saracens. Even I’d once had trouble with that. Dressed as a Saracen, his beardless face browned by exposure to the sun, he might have been chasing about the desert from his birth.

  ‘All is well with you?’ Meekal asked when the boys had raced back off into the desert.

  I nodded. Playing the old fool is fun only in little bursts. And, if I wanted to scare him, I had no wish to prod Meekal into anything more hostile than he already had in mind.

  ‘Halt and state your business,’ the guard called across the remaining distance between us and the one unblocked gate of the old monastery.

  ‘I am Meekal, Governor of Syria,’ came the obvious answer.

  ‘And I am Alaric, Chief Weapons Adviser to His Majestic Holiness the Caliph,’ I added.

  From twenty feet up, on the parapet of that stone wall, the guard looked coldly at us. We held up our ivory identification passes. He looked down at them. Another guard came briefly forward, then went back to his job of lounging against the new brick wall behind that stopped anyone from looking down into the monastery.

  ‘I want the old man out of his carrying chair and everyone else off horseback,’ he snapped down at us. ‘Before I give orders for the gate to be opened, I want to see you all with your arms in the air. I must warn you of the standing orders for any disobedience of the rules.’

  I groaned and got up. I stepped out from beneath the shelter of the overhead canopy and took my place with everyone else under the baking sun. This was, after all, my eighth visit, and enforcement of the rules never varied. At least I was allowed to step into the shadow of the walls before the modesty screen was placed round me and I had to strip naked for the inspection of my clothes and body.

  ‘What are these?’ the unsmiling official asked, holding up the polished lenses he’d pulled out of their box.

  ‘Those are none of your business,’ I said sharply. ‘They aren’t on the contraband list. Let that be enough. If you drop or so much as scratch one of them, I’ll have you demoted and flogged.’

  The official hurriedly pushed the lenses back inside their protective covering and looked at his superior. He in turn looked at Meekal, who was passing his inner tunic over the modesty screen. Meekal nodded and my inspection was at an end. I waited under the shade of the massive gate for the more thorough strip searching of the carrying slaves to be completed.

  ‘You know we can take no chances,’ Meekal said as he joined me in the shade. ‘Only the day before yesterday, someone tried to lie his way in as a supply carrier. Fortunately, we already knew the man he was impersonating had died in one of the previous attacks. I had tight cords put round his knees and elbows, and then watched while the limbs below were sawn off. You’ll be pleased to hear it was a completely successful experiment. He lived. Indeed, he sobbed most affectingly when he saw his limbs heaped before him. Unless he’s died of thirst in the meantime, I might show him to my dear young uncle.’

  ‘I didn’t know the boys were allowed inside the walls,’ I said, cutting off the leer.

  ‘I rejoice in your retention of all your faculties,’ came the reply. I got an ironic bow. ‘As it happens, I have decided to exclude them. They’ll have to wait outside with the guards. Now we’ve tightened the security again, even the Commander of the Faithful will need to prove identity and then right to enter.’ I pricked up my ears at the use of the indicative future. Meekal noticed and smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he whispered, ‘Abd al-Malik will be putting in an appearance within, I think, the next ten days.’

  ‘His Majestic Holiness has, I suppose, been victorious in the civil war?’ I asked with polite irony of my own. I watched as my carrying slaves put their skimpy loincloths back on. In a moment, the gates would swing shut, and the guards would go back to their paranoid inspection of all about the walls.

  ‘The Caliph is always victorious,’ Meekal answered without irony.

  ‘But don’t you find it rather hurtful,’ I asked again, ‘that you weren’t beside him? Isn’t it a little odd that you’re thought good enough for smashing up the lesser breeds to the East, but not for turning on other Saracens – on real Saracens, that is?’

  I’d got the bastard there. His face went white with anger, and his hands shook as he refastened my cloak. He began some stammered excuse about his duties in Damascus. But now the gates did swing shut, and we were sealed within what had, before the Saracen conquest, been the Monastery of Saint Theodore the Uneating.

  The monastery buildings themselves had been mostly demolished, leaving plenty of space within the high surrounding wall. This had now been separated by new walls into four separate zones, each with its own solid gate and its own complement of silent guards. The first of these zones was just inside the main gate. Here were the living quarters of the workme
n and the administrative buildings. We were met by Silas, a Syrian with the usual dark beard. He was the site manager, with overall control of the project in my own absence. If he too was kept in the dark about how everything done there fitted together, he was, I suppose, the nearest I had to an assistant. He bowed low before us, and – just to show he was doing his job – spent a longish time looking at our passes and entering our details in the relevant ledger that one of his secretaries had brought forth from his office.

  ‘I want to begin with the preparation vats,’ I said.

  He bowed again, and led us through the huddle of low buildings and piles of material that filled up much of this first zone. As he unlocked the gate, his secretary made another entry in the ledger and presented this for my inspection and Meekal’s, and then our countersignatures. We now had to wait again in the increasingly pitiless sun as my carrying slaves were all blindfolded. Silas himself would guide the head carrier through the next stages of the visit.

  We passed through into an almost empty expanse of packed sand. In the middle was a high building, though of one storey, about the size and shape of a steam room in the house of a rich man. Of new brickwork – most of one wall of very new brickwork – this was secured by another stout door. We crossed the thirty yards of open ground and paused at the door.

  ‘My Lords have their keys ready?’ Silas asked. We nodded. He’d left his secretary on the other side of the gate, and so had carried the ledger himself. He now opened this and made yet another of his entries. Meekal walked round the whole outside of the building, and made a close inspection of the door and its locks. He nodded to me and signed again. I countersigned, and watched as Silas recorded that I had made no inspection of my own. I then reached inside my tunic and pulled out the large iron key that was fastened to a golden chain about my neck. I held this up for the other two men to see. They produced their own keys. With a ‘May it please your Lordship’ from Silas, I climbed from the chair and put my key into the first lock. Silas and Meekal put in their own. I gave the signal, and we pushed in hard and pulled out again. My hands shook slightly from all the beer I’d downed on the journey, and I missed the elaborate mechanism behind the key plates. We all took our keys back out and prepared to repeat ourselves. On the next attempt, we all hit the right spot together, and, with a slithering of bolts, the lock contracted within itself. Silas waved us back. He put a cloth over his nose and mouth, and pulled the door open. I turned away and held my breath as I smelled the noxious fumes. I walked carefully away from the door and listened to the rhythmical fall and rise of the bellows that Silas was working inside to replace all the air. At last, he was done. Now without his protective cloth, he stood in the doorway. He’d already unshuttered the window, and enough light was coming through the narrow iron grille to let us see what was within once our eyes were adjusted.