Byzantium

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  Farouk continued for a short while, then he rose, bowed to the east, and returned to where I was sitting. “The night is growing cool,” he announced, “and I do not think it wise for you to become chilled. I shall return you to your room now.”

  He helped me to rise from the cushion, and we began shuffling back to the stairs, and had just reached them when the chanting began again. This time, however, the cry did not come from the finger-thin towers, but from the streets below, and it was not one person only, but many voices. I looked to Farouk for an explanation. He simply smiled, and lifted a hand to the raised edge of the roof.

  I turned and we made our way to look down into the street where a huge crowd, a veritable multitude, thronged the narrow streets, and they were all chanting and crying out in attitudes of imprecation, as if beseeching the amir for recognition or a favour. I watched them, but could form no opinion of their actions. “What do they want Farouk?”

  “They want your health, my friend,” he answered.

  He chuckled at the expression of incredulity that appeared on my face. “Who are they?” I wondered. “What can they know of my health?”

  “It has become known in the city that the amir’s new slave is ill,” Farouk said, spreading his hands wide. “The people have come to pray for your recovery.”

  “Why tonight?”

  “This night is no different from any other since you came,” he told me.

  “They come every night to pray?” I wondered. “For me?”

  The physician nodded and cupped a hand to his ear. After a moment he said, “They ask God to raise up the amir’s servant. They entreat Allah, All Wise and Compassionate, to restore your health, and bring you once more to happiness and prosperity. They ask the Holy Angels to stand over you and protect you so that the Evil One may no longer ravage your body and spirit. They ask God’s peace and blessing on you this night.”

  The chanting prayers continued for a time, weaving a curious, ululating music in an unknown tongue. A sharp crescent moon had risen low and now gathered radiance in the night-dark sky. I felt the soft warmth fading in the air, and smelled the evening’s sweet perfume. The strangeness of the place swirled around me like currents in a pool of hidden depths; I shivered to think of plunging myself in those exotic waters. Oh, but I was already immersed to the neck.

  Their prayers finished, the people began creeping away. In a few moments, the streets were empty once more and silent. I gazed down into the now-quiet darkness with a feeling of curious astonishment. That all those people, unknown to me as I to them, should intercede for me—a mere slave in the amir’s house—was more than I could credit.

  Sure, I could not help thinking that it would not have happened in Constantinople, or anywhere else in the Christian world that I knew. Indeed, I had stood before the emperor, Christ’s own Vice-Regent on Earth, the very Head of the Church Universal, and had received not so much as a cup of cold water, or a kindly word—and I a fellow Christian! But here, a stranger in a foreign land, I had received a continual outpouring of prayer from the moment I had arrived. All this time, they had prayed for me, a stranger unseen and unknown.

  Such care and compassion, such blind faith, both astounded and shamed me. That night I lay long awake thinking about what I had seen, and fell asleep wondering what it could mean.

  49

  We walked to the rooftop garden again the next day, and lingered there a little longer before shuffling slowly back to my room. Exhaustion dogged my last few steps and Farouk helped me undress, whereupon I collapsed onto my bed with a groan, feeling as if I had worked the entire day heaving heavy boulders over a wall. I slumped back onto the cushions and Farouk drew the covering over me. I was asleep before he left the room.

  He returned the next morning as I awoke. A tray of fruit, bread, and a steaming hot drink lay on a wooden tripod beside the bed. When he saw that I was awake, he sat down and took my hand in the peculiar wrist grip he had used before. He looked at me thoughtfully for a long moment, then replaced my hand, and said, “You are making a good recovery, my friend. As it happens, Amir Sadiq would like to see you today. Shall I tell him you are feeling well enough to sit with him?”

  “Yes, of course, Farouk. I would be happy to speak with him whenever he wishes.”

  The physician smiled. “Then I will suggest that you speak together this morning while you are feeling strong. You can rest again, and then we will walk a little. Yes?”

  “Certainly,” I replied. “Whatever you think best. I owe my life to you, I think. If not for you, I would have died.”

  The white-robed physician held up his hands in protest, and shook his head. “No, no, no. It is Allah, All Wise and Merciful, who alone heals. I merely made you comfortable so that this healing might take place.” He regarded me with his gentle, dark eyes for a moment. “For myself, I am only glad you are feeling better.”

  “Thank you, Farouk,” I said.

  He rose to his feet and said, “I will leave you now and return when I have spoken to the amir. It would be best if you would eat everything I have brought for you. We must begin rebuilding your strength.”

  Upon receiving my promise, he left me to myself. After a time, Kazimain appeared as I was finishing a bunch of blue-black grapes—the only fruit on the tray which I recognized. She smiled when she saw me, and came to the bedside, knelt, and selected a spherical fruit with a red skin; it looked a little like an apple, but had a tufted knot at one end, and the skin was very tough. She showed me how to break it open, speaking a word as she did so, but I could not make out what it was. Farouk returned just then, bearing a bundle of clothes, and said, “She is telling you that the name of this fruit is narra. The Greeks call it by another name, but the word escapes me.”

  Kazimain pushed her thumbs into the leathery red skin, gave a twist of her wrists, and the fruit split in two, revealing an interior of hundreds of tightly packed seeds, glistening like rubies. She broke off a small section, loosened a few of the little jewels into her palm, and offered them to me.

  I took a gemlike seed and put it in my mouth. The tiny juice-filled pip burst on my tongue with a tart sweetness.

  “You must take the whole handful at once,” advised Farouk with a laugh. “It will take you all day otherwise.”

  By the handful, the narra was too astringent for my taste, so I went back to the grapes and ate them with a little of the bread. When I finished, Kazimain departed to allow Farouk to dress me in the clothes he had brought: a robe and cloak of green-and-blue striped silk, finer than those I had worn before, and a red silk belt. “You must be suitably arrayed for your audience,” he explained, and showed me how to arrange the robe and tie the belt properly.

  “Ah, you look a man of elegance and purpose,” he declared, acclaiming the result. “Now, the amir is waiting. I will lead you to him. And if you will allow me, I will instruct you in how to conduct yourself in his company.”

  “I would be grateful,” I replied, even though I already had a fair notion of what he expected, which I had learned through observations of the few meetings I had attended when the eparch met with the Arabs in Trebizond.

  “It is easily told,” said Farouk, leading me from the room. “I will explain as we go.”

  We started down the long corridor, passing the stairs leading to the roof garden. Instead of going up, this time we turned and descended to the lower level, and into a great hall. “This is the receiving room,” explained Farouk, “but, as this is not a formal audience, the amir will see you in his private apartments. It is customary in these circumstances for you to bow upon greeting him. Simply do as you see me do,” he told me. “You may invoke Allah’s blessing upon him, or you may simply remind the amir that you are his servant awaiting his pleasure.”

  We made our way across the long reception room, and Farouk explained several other things he thought I might like to know about the ordering of the household. A high, narrow door stood at the end of the room, and Farouk indicated that we wer
e to go through; he pushed open the door and we entered a vestibule with but a single low door at the end of it; the door was rosewood and its surface studded with gold-topped nails arranged in flowing design. Before this door stood a guard with a curved axe on the end of a long pole. Farouk spoke a few words and the guard turned, pulled on a leather strap and the door swung open; the warrior stepped aside, touching his hand to his heart as Farouk passed.

  Bending our heads, we passed under the low lintel. “Remember,” whispered Farouk, “your life is in his hands now.”

  With that, we entered a chamber more akin to one of the amir’s tents than a palace: tall slender pillars, like tent poles, held up a high roof, peaked in the centre; both ceiling and walls were covered with red cloth that billowed gently in the breeze from four vast windholes which made up a large curved alcove wherein Amir Sadiq and three women sat on cushions, a huge brass tray of food before them. The windholes were covered by enormous pierced wooden screens which allowed both air and light into the room. Through the intricately carved screens, I could see the shimmer of water in a small pond, and I could hear the splash of a waterfall.

  At our appearance, the women rose and departed without a word. Farouk bowed from the waist and greeted the amir; I imitated the gesture, but stiffly.

  “Enter! Enter!” cried Sadiq. “In the name of Allah and his Holy Prophet, I welcome you, my friends. May peace and serenity attend you while you are my guests. Sit and break fast with me. I insist.”

  I made to protest that I had eaten already, but Farouk gave me a warning glance and replied for both of us. “To share bread with you, my Lord Sadiq, would be a pleasure most profound.”

  The amir did not rise, but spread his arms wide in welcome. “Please sit beside me, Aidan,” he said, indicating the cushion at his right hand. “Farouk,” he said, nodding to his left, “please allow me to come between you and your estimable charge.”

  “Very soon he will be no longer in my care,” replied the physician genially. “In no time at all I shall be on my way home to Baghdat.”

  “There is no hurry, my friend,” said Sadiq. “You are welcome to stay as long as you like.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” answered Farouk, inclining his head slightly. “My affairs are not so pressing that I must rush away all at once. With your permission I will stay until my services are no longer required.”

  Turning to me, Sadiq said, “It is good to see you standing on your own two feet. You are feeling better, I think.”

  “I am most grateful to you,” I said. “Without your intervention I would have died. My life is yours, Lord Sadiq.”

  “Allah makes some men of iron, others of grass,” the amir replied lightly. “You, I think, are the first material. Now, if you will excuse me, I have exhausted my small supply of Greek. Farouk will convey your words to me, if you agree.”

  I conceded readily, and remembered that Sadiq had deprecated his Greek-speaking abilities upon meeting the eparch. I watched as he began heaping food into small brass bowls, and thought that perhaps the subtle amir spoke Greek much more fluently and skilfully than he let on. Certainly, he understood more than he allowed. I wondered why he should pretend otherwise.

  He placed his hand on my arm, and spoke to me a long burst of their tongue-twisting speech. Farouk, dipping a square of flat bread into a bowl containing a creamy white mixture, listened for a moment, and then said, “The amir says that he is sincerely glad you have survived your ordeal. He knows that you will be concerned about your position in his household, but wishes you to remain at ease in this regard. Later, when you are feeling stronger, there will be time to give this important matter the consideration it deserves. Until then, however, you are considered merely a guest under his roof.”

  “I thank you,” I replied, speaking through Farouk. “Your thoughtfulness is laudable. Again, I am in your debt, Lord Sadiq.”

  The amir seemed happy with this reply—or with the one which Farouk relayed to him; I suppose it amounted to the same thing. Sadiq regarded me with a directness and an intensity of interest, eating olives and spitting the pits discreetly into his curled fist, nodding to himself from time to time. I ate from the bowl before me, too much aware of his scrutiny to taste much of what I was eating.

  “When last we met it was in the company of the eparch,” he said, speaking through Farouk. “I have been told that he is dead. If this is true, I am sorry.”

  “It is true,” I answered, my voice going flat; I felt the heat of hatred stirring within. “We were ambushed on the road. Eparch Nicephorus died in the attack, and two hundred or more were slaughtered with him.”

  “It is a shameful thing which has befallen you,” replied the amir gravely; Farouk gave me his words: “As I believe you to be a trustworthy man, I ask you to trust me when I tell you that I had nothing to do with the contemptible ambush. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did any other Sarazen tribe. This I believe, for I have made it my affair to discover the truth of this incident from the moment I learned of it. Nevertheless, the truth is ever elusive, and I have yet to obtain it in full.”

  He watched me while Farouk spoke, measuring my response. When I made no reply, he said, “What can you tell us about the ambush?”

  “We were travelling to Sebastea and were attacked by Sarazens,” I told him bluntly. “We were more than two hundred—including merchants and the eparch’s bodyguard. The enemy came upon us as we slept. Only a handful survived.”

  Sadiq nodded gravely, and Farouk conveyed his next question to me, “Why do you think they were Sarazens?”

  “They were dressed in Arab clothing,” I replied, casting my mind back to that hateful day. “Though it is true they spoke a tongue I had not heard before, I saw no reason to believe they were not what they appeared.”

  “Now, if I may ask, why were you going to Sebastea?”

  “The eparch had received a letter from Governor Honorius claiming that the caliph practised treachery upon us and would not honour the peace which Amir Sadiq and the eparch had agreed.”

  Sadiq made a lengthy reply, which Farouk translated: “This letter was certainly a lie. For reasons you cannot know, the khalifa is most desirous of honouring the peace agreement. Even now he looks with great anticipation to the day when he and the emperor meet face to face to exchange bonds of good faith.” He stared at me intently, almost willing me to believe him. “But that need not concern us at this moment.”

  “Eparch Nicephorus did not believe the letter;” I told him as the memory came back to me, “he thought it a ruse.”

  “Yet, he proceeded to Sebastea regardless. Why do you think he did that if he believed the letter a deception?”

  “I cannot say,” I replied. “It may be that he felt he could not risk taking a chance. Or, it may be that he thought that going to Sebastea was the best way to prove the letter false and, perhaps, catch the real traitor. Whatever the reason, I know he suspected treachery—not from the caliph, perhaps, but certainly from some other. He knew the governor as a friend; and he could tell from the letter that, though it was in Honorius’s hand, the information it contained was false.”

  After Farouk had relayed my words, the amir mused upon them for a little time, then asked, “Did Eparch Nicephorus tell you who he suspected of fomenting this treachery?”

  “No, lord; he never did,” I answered. “But I have reason to believe that it was Komes Nikos. You might remember him as the eparch’s aide.”

  Sadiq’s eyes narrowed at the name. “I remember him. This would be a most serious breach of trust for such a man,” he cautioned through Farouk, “and a most serious accusation for one to make against another.”

  “I do not make it lightly, or without just cause,” I answered. “Two hundred or more people were slaughtered in the ambush, and the few who survived are slaves now; Nikos alone escaped—indeed, he fled the camp on horseback before the attack commenced. And, if that alone were not cause enough, the eparch’s expedition was not the first organized by
Nikos to end in catastrophe.”

  The amir wondered at this, so I explained briefly about the pilgrimage, and how my brother monks had come to grief acting on Nikos’s counsel and following his guidance. When I had finished, Sadiq conceded, “This puts the matter in a most revealing light. But please tell me,” he continued, “do your brother priests yet live?”

  “Three only are left alive,” I answered. “They are slaves in the same silver mine to which we were sold.”

  “That is also highly suggestive,” the amir remarked through his interpreter. “I discern the shape of a single hand in this disastrous series of events. And I believe you have correctly identified the owner of that hand.” His smile was quick and sly. “We, too, have our spies, my friend,” he explained. “And what you have told me confirms much of what I have discovered since learning of the ambush and the eparch’s death.”

  He then stood up and clapped his hands twice, quickly and loud. Instantly, a young man appeared, bowed, and approached. The amir spoke to him very rapidly for a moment, whereupon the young man bowed again and departed, his face impassive. “The amir is sending a messenger to the khalifa,” Farouk told me.

  Amir Sadiq sat down once more, and took up a brass pitcher which sat on a tripod over a candle flame; he poured three tiny cups of steaming liquid, and passed one each to Farouk and me. Raising his cup, he threw back his head and drank it down in a single swallow. I did likewise, and found it a sweet, yet refreshing brew. He then selected a small seeded bread loaf, which he broke in three parts, giving a portion to each of us. We ate for a time, listening to the play of the water outside. When the amir addressed me once more, Farouk translated his words thus:

  “I am mindful that you have suffered much on account of affairs that were not of your making,” he said. “Still, peace is every man’s concern, just as war is every man’s curse. You have acquitted yourself with admirable courage through the ill that has befallen you. For this, I commend you highly.