The Sword of Damascus a-4

by Richard Blake

  ‘Not until much later,’ I said. ‘The Caliph’s Religious Council might find something allegorically pleasing in the display of bare flesh.’ I glanced over at the grim, grey-bearded faces of the leading expounders of the Faith. Their looks could have curdled fresh milk. ‘The patriarchs, on the other hand, would outdo each other all the way to the moon in their displeasure.’ I gave him one of my best toothless grins. ‘Besides, I really don’t recommend the smallest excitement in your present circumstances. I think there might be acrobats before we must leave. If it’s pleasure you want, I’ll add a dab of opium to your dipping cup. Topical applications there can be most interesting.’ It was an inconvenience that Meekal had insisted on the full conversion, and had then sat gloating as the Jewish doctor did his business. It had confined Edward to a carrying chair beside mine on our trips through the desert. Now, the boy stood by my couch, twitching and grimacing at every move.

  The banquet ground on in all its boring magnificence. Just after the acrobats, another of the Caliph’s attendants brought me a dish of dormice mashed into vinegar. A cup of the iced fruit would have been more welcome. But I swung myself into a sitting position on the couch and bowed respectfully. Through my visor, I might have caught the ghost of a smile on the stiff face. Where was Meekal? I looked hard at the couches placed about the throne. One of them was empty. And there was no Meekal. He’d been wolfing down meat as if he’d just come back from the wars. Between courses, he’d been sucking up horribly to the oldest and most forbidding member of the Religious Council. Now, he was off somewhere else.

  ‘At this rate, we’ll be here all bloody night,’ I sighed. Pale in the lamplight, Edward was perched on the couch beside me. He tried not to move his mouth as he crunched on some nuts I’d put beside him. Back in my office, I had a mountain of work still to do. I’d never so far taken much interest in solar observations. But the hours I’d been able to snatch from those inspection trips to the Saint Theodore Monastery had been of surpassing interest. If only I’d been able to apply more of that time to the necessary calculations…

  I turned to the man on the neighbouring couch. It was my old friend the Admiral, whose fleet I’d sunk under the walls of Constantinople. Now my sight was artificially improved, I could see that his left arm was black and shrivelled. More work of mine? Hard to say. I smiled at him and asked how things were going in the shipyards of Tyre and Sidon. All things considered, it wasn’t the sort of question someone like me should have been asking of someone like him – especially not with Eusebius just a hundred yards away to remind us, should we forget, who we were or had been. But the poor man was plainly as bored as I was, and we were soon deep in a semi-hidden conversation as we refought the Battle of Cape Mogadonia. That kept me going till the next course: raisins pickled to twice their size in fish sauce. My hands shook as I tried to skewer these on the wooden sticks provided, and more went on the napkin tied to me than down my throat. I was thinking to give up on the effort and pretend to have fallen asleep, when Edward took up the job for me. The raisins were an improvement on the preceding dish of chopped cabbage sweetened with powdered lead – not that I’d bothered with more than a taste of that. But I’d sooner have been in my bed, cuddling a flask of wine, or knocked out on something more exotic.

  ‘Time, I think, to claim the prerogatives of age,’ I muttered to a now almost comatose Edward. ‘We’ll wait until the potty men come round with their screens, then make a quiet exit.’

  He nodded vaguely, and went back to looking at the shoes of gold and silver thread that Karim had presented on his conversion.

  ‘On the contrary, Brother Aelric,’ someone from behind whispered in Latin, ‘you will stay to the end if you know what is good for you and the boy. No – don’t turn round. It will only spoil things. Bear in mind that I’m not really behind you. I’ve never been anywhere close to you. Just stay to the end. And do try to look as if you’re enjoying yourself. The Caliph spoke highly of you to Eusebius.’

  I waited until there was a noise of unfolding screens to my left, then turned to Edward.

  ‘Have I gone senile?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ came the reassuring answer. ‘He poked me in the back just as he used to in Jarrow when I fell asleep in his class.’

  ‘Then your wish will come true,’ I said. I nodded at the departing patriarchs. They left through the back entrance I’d taken with Karim on my last attendance here. They were barely through when a dozen heavily robed figures entered, with a couple of clean-shaven musicians close behind. As a great shout of relief rang through the hall, I noticed that Eusebius too was missing from his place. ‘Don’t say, though, I didn’t warn you!’ I added with another grin. Edward’s reply was smothered by the opening peal of the drums.

  I adjusted my visor. I’d been told to look as if I was enjoying myself. Tired as I was, I might do better than that.

  Chapter 61

  ‘You can get everything sorted up there come morning,’ I said to the twittering eunuch. ‘Tonight, the boy and I will sleep downstairs in the slave quarters.’ I looked again at the half ton of astrolabe. Its broken remains were distributed across the smashed tiles of the floor. My own bed had been flattened by the impact. Anyone on it, or within a foot of it in any direction, would have been crushed like a grape in the press. If I hadn’t been so tired, I might have shared the general horror at this latest violation. As it was, I simply wanted somewhere to sleep for what remained of the night.

  ‘My Lord will be aware,’ came the nervous explanation, ‘that a loud crash was heard shortly before the midnight hour. I have not myself been on to the roof. But I do know that the instruments placed on it were of exceeding heaviness. It is perhaps a surprise the roof did not give way sooner.’

  I ignored the creature’s increasingly shrill piping. I could guess easily enough what had happened. I was no engineer, but my arrangement of boards could have taken a dozen times its actual load. I’d also sited the astrolabe nowhere near above this room. The real questions were how anyone had got up there – and how whoever had got up there could have known that I generally wasn’t in bed between midnight and dawn. I was about to ask a few relevant questions of the slaves when Karim burst into the room. Gibbering in his nightgown, his face like death, he looked about us, then dropped into the one chair that wasn’t broken.

  ‘God be praised!’ he panted. ‘I came at once when I heard the news. It is surely a sign from God you weren’t both killed.’

  I poked with my stick at a brass lever. Search me how much the thing had cost – not that it mattered: Meekal could add it to the overall bill. What did matter was that it had been so very pretty. I doubted there was another like it anywhere in the world. Still, now he was here, I’d have Karim look into the possibility of a replacement.

  ‘My dear Karim,’ I said wearily, ‘since Edward is not in the habit of sharing my bed, I don’t think he was in any danger.’ I frowned. ‘Any chance, by the way, of standing up for an old man?’ He jumped up, now looking guilty. ‘That’s a good lad.’ I flopped into the chair and looked up at the hole where half the ceiling had been. Against a background of utter blackness, hands clutching the broken edges of the roof, Edward stared down at us.

  ‘The boards you told me would spread the weight are all taken up,’ he said in English. ‘Also, there are some cutting tools left here.’

  I turned a disapproving stare on Karim. ‘I don’t like to question your competence, dear boy,’ I said. ‘But you are in charge of my security in the palace. And this is the second time intruders have got in here.’ That might have set Karim straight into a moral collapse. Just as he put his hands up to his face, though, Meekal walked in. That set everyone about me into a round of bowing and scraping. He looked awhile in silence at the smashed astrolabe.

  ‘I did hear that loading up that roof wasn’t a good idea,’ he said. He was keeping himself admirably in check. Meekal looked up at Edward, then again at the mass of detached and broken dials littering the floor. He
kicked morosely at a brown stone about the size and shape of a turd. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. He went and leaned by the window, scowling at everyone in sight.

  ‘It’s something I learned from the northerners you hired to abduct me,’ I said with one of my ivory smiles. ‘You put it into a wooden bowl, and float this within a larger bowl of water. It always points north. It cost thirty times its weight in gold,’ I said with heavy emphasis. ‘Don’t worry, though – this can be rescued.’

  Meekal ignored me. ‘I suppose this was an accident?’ he asked of Karim. That nearly sent the boy over the edge.

  Luckily, Edward chose this moment to ignore the stairs leading to the central ramp of the tower, and to drop lightly down the twelve feet that separated him from the one clear patch of floor. He spoiled the effect with a wince of pain just before hitting the floor. He landed on his bottom with a suppressed squeal. He scrambled up and nodded a bow at Meekal, and came and stood beside me. I looked at Karim and shrugged. What point in swimming against the tide?

  ‘I think it best to assume an accident,’ I said. I gave Edward a pre-emptive kick to shut him up. ‘Fortunately, I was so entranced by the Caliph’s hospitality that I broke my normal schedule.’ I stood up. I felt my knees going, and sat down again. ‘Now, my dear friends, I want someone to arrange a bed for me now. I also want this mess all cleared up and made good by this time tomorrow. While you’re at it, you can get me a new astrolabe set up on the roof – and I don’t want any disruption of my living quarters.’ The eunuch began twittering away about the impossibility of my instructions. I clapped my hands in his face. His voice dropped to a whine about nothing relevant to my instructions. I sat back down and fanned myself with my wig. One of the slaves jumped forward and set about me with a proper fan. ‘And will somebody bring me a cup of wine?’ I snarled with recovering energy. ‘Just because the rest of you have forsworn its use doesn’t mean I have to suffer as well.’

  ‘Do you suspect Karim?’ Edward asked. I looked over at a sand dune that was held together with dead weeds and laughed. One of the carrying slaves turned and looked at me. I waited until he’d turned back about his business, and took another swig of beer.

  ‘Where these matters are concerned,’ I answered, ‘long experience tells me to rule out no possible explanation, however weak it may seem.’ I paused and smiled. I looked at a flight of birds overhead, and then at the dull expanse of sand ahead of us. ‘But I don’t suspect Karim of more than incompetence. He may be of my own blood. He may be your own dearest friend. But I do suggest that he is neither particularly bright, nor brave in the slightest.’ Edward shrugged. Of course, he’d seen all that from the first. I didn’t think it worth discussing. But I could see it was these qualities that had drawn Edward to him. When your entire life has been directed for you by men of ruthless and fearless determination, it can be a relief to find company in those who simply like you.

  ‘You can rule out Karim,’ I said firmly. Edward gave me a relieved look. The sun was now rising higher, and I could feel a prickly sweat under my wig. Damascus was far behind us, the monastery still far ahead. I thought again of the jagged hole we’d inspected together in the first light of dawn. ‘It may have taken several dozen men to get everything up there and placed exactly where I wanted it,’ I said. ‘To cut through those timbers and pull the astrolabe into place might have needed half a dozen men at the most. I’ll grant, however, the noise of the cutting would have sounded like a drum down below.’

  ‘Then it was an inside job?’ Edward asked.

  I allowed myself another laugh, this one cynical. ‘It took my great-grandson three days after the first attempt on me to get round to strengthening the guard,’ I said. ‘The guards he did post are as idle and negligent as he is. His policy of cycling slaves between our suite and the main palace is a sure recipe for breaches of security. Now the palace is filled to bursting with comparative strangers, there can be no security. Yes – dear Karim! If his father and uncles had been of his own sort, the Empire would still be ripping itself apart over the Monophysite heresy in Egypt and Syria…’ I trailed off and waited for a couple of the mounted guards to ride slowly past our chairs.

  ‘My dear boy, I would normally leave the matter of gathering information to you. I’d have you question all the slaves. Most obviously, we’d need to know who gave the orders for them to lock the suite and withdraw to their own quarters. We’d also need to know who was in charge of the guards, and whether the guards heard or saw anything before they’d knocked themselves completely out on their hashish. I really don’t think you’d find anything worthwhile. But the effort would need to be made. If you did find anything, though, it would only lead you to dear Eusebius. The Imperial Ambassador may not have been here more than a few days. But trust me – he was conspiring before he could crawl.’

  ‘But if it was the Empire,’ Edward broke in, ‘why did Brother Joseph tip us off? I saw him only briefly in that ship off Cartenna. But I am convinced he was urging the fleet on to kill us all. He’s been around Damascus for months. Now, he gets himself into the presence of the Caliph to warn us against coming back here to bed. It doesn’t make sense.’ I could have told Edward much else about our friend Joseph. But I hadn’t done so yet, and I saw no point in doing so now. ‘And,’ he added, ‘what was he doing in Jarrow?’ The boy sat back in his chair and looked up at the deep blue of the sky. ‘I still don’t know where he fits into all this.’

  I thought he’d ask more about Joseph. But we were now approaching one of the larger dunes, and I could see Karim waiting there as agreed. I wriggled into a more comfortable upright position and stared at Edward.

  ‘These are all worthless questions,’ I said. ‘There will be no investigation of the murder attempt. There will be no further discussions of Joseph or of Jarrow.’ I shut down the confused objection with a wave of my hand. ‘I want you to know that your usefulness to Meekal will soon be at an end. Don’t try reminding me of the oath he took in front of Karim and all those religious scholars. If he broke his public oath to an emperor, you can forget about any promises he might have made in private. Besides, Karim is also on his list. Meekal spoke to me last month of the statue I commissioned of myself back in my twenties. I had it done in the ancient style – all nudey and tarted-up realistic. He asked if Karim didn’t remind me of the thing. Of course, I passed it all off with a joke. Even so, I’ve seen him staring thoughtfully at Karim. The moment I’ve given him the last secret of that weapon – and it can’t be held back beyond tomorrow – he’ll have me killed. He’ll then kill you. He’ll also kill Karim. He suspects the blood relationship, and he doesn’t want a Saracen blood feud on his hands – not even from someone like Karim. Because he wants the matter to end there, he’ll get Karim sentenced to death in the regular way. But it’s certain death for us all.’

  ‘But he can’t kill Karim,’ Edward broke in. ‘He’s Saracen nobility. He’s too well connected.’

  I laughed again. That wasn’t how Karim had seen things when I’d explained myself earlier. I’d almost had to offer him wine to bring him out of the resulting funk.

  ‘He can and will kill the poor lad,’ I replied. ‘Except for a sort of stepmother who’s little more than a prisoner in the palace, his connections are all far off in Medina. And they are all part of the losing side in the last civil war. It’s a shame you didn’t understand what Meekal was told in that obscene ceremony. But its meaning has always been clear enough to me. My grandson fancies himself as the next caliph. And he thinks he’ll be that before the close of business tomorrow. I didn’t look too closely. But, when I was there the day before yesterday, I saw that the fire kettles had been mounted on a new base that swivels. His first demonstration of the Greek fire will be against the Caliph and anyone sitting beside him. That will probably be the whole Council. He’ll blow the Caliph and all his Council to charcoal. Then he’ll do away with me. Then he’ll finish things for the pair of you. Don’t try telling me otherwise. I’ve known th
e fucker all his life. I know the workings of his mind. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven just about sums up his entire approach to this long and expensive project.’

  We were now almost level with Karim. He smiled uncertainly back at me and bowed. ‘Edward, I want you to get on that horse and bolt for it with Karim. The commander of the guard has been bribed and will look the other way unless he’s forced to notice what’s happening. You have twelve pounds apiece of Meekal’s gold. That should get you to Medina with plenty left over. Meekal can’t last as caliph. He’s not a Saracen. And, again, I know him. He’ll grasp at power like at sand – the harder he grasps, the more it will slip between his fingers. He’ll be gone within a few months – a year at most. You can then come back here if you want. Or you can go anywhere else within this vast but ramshackle empire.’

  There was no point trying to restrain the babble of protests that now broke from Edward’s lips. I let it pour out until the boy was short of breath.

  ‘We haven’t long now,’ I said urgently. ‘So don’t waste my time with talk about taking me with you. One way or the other, my life will soon be over. Even Meekal won’t be up to making the end specially painful. For you, blinding and castration will just be the start of things. I’ll repeat myself. You got me out here using poor Wilfred as your hostage. You then stepped unwittingly straight into his shoes. Now, I’m giving you the chance to get away before it’s too late. Take the chance and go. It’s too late for elaborate farewells. Just go. If you want to thank me, do so by living better than you’d have managed in England. Live long as well – disprove what I sneered at you all those ages ago back in Jarrow. But go now. Take my last command as your lord – and go!’

  Edward grabbed at my hand and kissed it. He wanted to say more, but he was shaking too hard with sobs, and Karim was making desperate clicking noises to keep the horses calm. They mounted together. I heard a long groan of agony from Edward as his own horse darted forward. They scrambled up the high bank to the top of a dune. They looked down a moment on me and on the long caravan of armed might surrounding my chair. I looked away and didn’t watch them disappear over the other side of the dune. Assuming we took the usual time to get to the Saint Theodore Monastery, and assuming I could keep Meekal busy with our joint unlocking and registering, they’d have a thirty-mile start on any pursuit. That was the most they’d have, though. Meekal would eventually realise his hostage was gone, and would certainly lead the pursuit. And he was fast on horseback. But thirty miles, and no surety as to their direction of escape – that should be enough.