‘Come now, boy,’ I snarled. He shrank back before a glare that had terrified emperors. ‘Don’t try denying something when the facts speak for themselves. You sucked Cuthbert off till you puked. Then you cut his throat so you’d be the one who opened the gate. I don’t think anyone is missing a man like that. No doubt Benedict has already found a better teacher of logic among the surviving villagers. But since no one probably gives a shit about poor young Tatfrid, you can take the blame for Cuthbert. I’ll ask you some other time about the two groups who turned up outside the monastery. For the moment, you’re an accomplice to what I consider bloody murder, and penance you’ll do for it.’
‘There will be no trip to Constantinople?’ Wilfred broke in. The shock of my coup on board had forced all thought of dying from his mind, and there now seemed a hint of disappointment in his voice.
I shook my head. Being ambushed in Cartenna was neither here nor there. I could put that down to local causes. The real problem was the change of emperor. Justinian might be friendly for old times’ sake, and I could be sure that any Circus execution was right off the agenda. But I didn’t suppose there would be any plans to kill the fatted calf in the event of my return. The new ministers could be trusted to see to that.
‘Your place is in England,’ I said reassuringly.
Wilfred nodded, now obedient.
‘Besides, we don’t really know what was agreed with Hrothgar. Edward is sure there was talk back in Jarrow of an exchange in Kasos, but has no idea where Kasos is, or when the exchange might be. Is that so, Edward?’
He nodded.
‘Well, Kasos is a little speck that lies between Crete and Karpathos. It has a nice harbour, but is also rather close to the seas where the Saracens may again dominate. We aren’t going there.
‘No,’ I said firmly with a little gloat at Edward, ‘we’re going home. For all the wind may be blowing from the west, it’s back west we’re headed.’
The gloat was too much for Edward. He reared up and shouted, ‘I’m not going back to England! I’m never going back. I’ve got this far into the world. I’d rather die than go back to England.’
‘Be that as it may,’ I sneered, ‘you’re going back. You’re going back to do whatever penance I get you. After that, you can study for the Church, or go off and fight for someone, or, failing that, dig in the fields. And if you try anything naughty between here and Richborough, I’ll have you flogged and then clapped in irons.’
I overate at dinner. Or perhaps I drank too much. Whatever the case, I had what I suppose I should think the most awful dream. I was back on my diverted ship to Athens. The sun shone bright overhead. The waters sparkled all about. I was naked again. I held my arms up and bathed in the glorious warmth. I thought of my own appearance and felt the usual stiffy coming on. It swelled and swelled into a mighty erection. I looked about me. The sailors were all hard at work with their ropes. No one was looking. I thought of my cabin below. But this was an urgency that wouldn’t wait even the brief drop down the ladder into the cool darkness. Again, I looked about. Even if every eye had been turned in my direction, I was too far gone to care. I flopped down against the mast and gently stroked myself. I almost went off at once, but squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on delay. When I was ready, I began again with the lightest strokes. My nipples were stiff with excitement. I could feel the sweat running down my back. I groaned and paused again.
‘Let me help you, Master,’ I heard Edward say in English.
I opened my eyes and looked at him, trying to work out who he was, and then how he could be here with me.
‘You haven’t been born yet,’ I said through dry, trembling lips. As he smiled silently back at me, the clothes melted from his body, and he knelt naked beside me. I put a damp hand on his back and pulled him towards me. I kissed him and breathed in the smell of his body. He took hold of me and pressed very hard. I put my hands on to his shoulders and looked into his eyes. He smiled steadily back. I looked at him until a great ball of white fire went off behind my eyes and bleached out all other visual sensations. All sense of time, of space – even of personal identity – followed, as I passed deep into the blaze of annihilation the more insane mystics try and fail to describe.
At last, it was over, and I lay trembling on the deck. Still looking at me, Edward smiled with a calm tenderness. And rested a hand lightly on my chest.
As I finally relaxed and let my eyelids droop, he said, ‘Ya a’khy, anta ygeb a’n takon alkhalifa.’ I opened my eyes and looked at him. With a strange smile, he repeated himself. He was speaking, I realised, in Saracen. ‘O, my brother, you shall be Caliph,’ he was saying. How could I understand what he was saying? I asked myself. What did it mean? But he smiled again and pointed down at my crotch. I followed his pointed finger. With a cry of terror, I was on my feet and brushing at myself. Writhing in the sticky mess that covered my belly and thighs were thousands and thousands of black maggots. I brushed at them, and they fell on to the deck. I looked at my right hand. They squirmed and wriggled between my fingers. Already, some were crawling on my wrist and forearm.
‘Welcome to Hell!’ I heard Priscus call from behind me. ‘Isn’t this what you’ve always deserved, you corrupt bastard? Yes, welcome to Hell, my shitty young Alaric! This is the beginning of the punishment you’ve long deserved.’
His grating laughter still sounding, I woke with a start and lay sweating in my cot. I tried to sit up, but found I couldn’t move. Gradually, I came back to my waking senses, remembered who and where and when I was. Except for the steady grinding together of new timbers, all was now silent about me. Instinctively, I reached down to my crotch. Certainly, I’d had an orgasm. Still cold with horror, I rubbed the watery-thin liquid between forefinger and thumb. For all the seed I’d cast off, I might have pissed myself. But I was alive and here and very, very old.
I laughed. Was that any improvement on the dream? I laughed again, and now felt the griping in my belly. It was the disgusting food, I told myself – that, or the still more disgusting drink. I lay in the cot, farting softly. That gave some relief, but wasn’t enough to settle me. I carefully relaxed my sphincter muscle and waited. I was right. That sour milk had gone straight through me, and was now sloshing insistently against its final exit. Unlike the dark, semi-cupboard below in which I’d previously been shut at night, Hrothgar’s cabin up here on the deck had no night bucket. I could choose between shitting the bed and going in search of the common bucket on deck.
I pushed back the blanket and sat up. Since old Aelric had never yet fallen into geriatric incontinence, His Magnificence the Senator Alaric would definitely have to go for a walk. I reached out in the darkness for my walking stick and got unsteadily to my feet. The weather had cooled astonishingly since Wilfred and Edward had carried me to bed. I felt about for an old under-tunic that had belonged to Hrothgar, and stepped out on to the deck. I didn’t suppose I’d be all alone out there. As usual with this rather strange ship, we hadn’t put into shore for the night, or even dropped anchor, but were drifting in open waters. That meant there would be someone up on the mast to keep watch. But even if I were to be seen, my helpless doddering old fool act was now superfluous. There was a gentle but increasing motion of the ship, and I’d need to keep hold as I felt my way down to the stern, where the night bucket was placed. But I could and would easily manage that for myself.
Chapter 12
Most of the pleasures that men discuss, and write books to praise or analyse, are best enjoyed when young. Just as satisfying in your nineties, though, as in your twenties, is a good shit. Indeed, my dinner was nicer to evacuate than it had been to swallow. I relaxed and savoured the relieved emptiness in my guts, and, seated on the bucket, looked up at the splashes of light that I saw in place of stars. All things considered, I had no reason to complain. Forget my bizarre dream – I’d just had a wonderful shit. And, if I was hurting all over, I hadn’t broken anything in the escape from Cartenna. I was reasonably clean. If there h
ad been no supplies in the end, I was now master of a crew that had, only that morning, been prepared to butcher me. Above all, I was still alive!
Yes, still alive. None of this abolished the fact that I was so bloody old. And being old, I can tell you, is rather like being ill – except there’s no hope of getting better. Again, though, I had no valid reason to complain. Age had crept slowly up behind me. It was a matter of a white eyebrow here and there, a growing bald patch, a bit of a belly for a while, the gradual wearing out of teeth. Other men around me had sickened and died in various and usually horrid ways, and I’d drifted serenely through middle age with barely diminished vigour. Even when I did finally reach the age that men called ‘half as old as time itself’, I remained too busy to notice the falling off of bodily power.
But age had finally crept up. I leaned back against the mast and thought of my aborted narrative of the Athens trip. I’d been so young and strong, so healthy and so confident about facing the world. In the space of time separating then from now, men had been born and had grown old and died; so, in many cases, had their sons. But it didn’t strike me as such a very long time since I’d stood on the deck of that other ship. Now, I was unambiguously decrepit. I’d seen as much back in Cartenna, when, for the first time in years, I looked into a proper mirror. Apart from the eyes, which were much as they always had been, the face looking back at me had reminded me of nothing so much as the unwrapped mummy I’d seen a few times of the Great Alexander. Little wonder everyone thought me a creature of magical powers. I hadn’t called for the wig and the paint to cover up the truth. Neither, though, had I waved them away. The racing chariot of my life was reaching the end of its final lap.
Even so, the final lap wasn’t ended yet. I’d survived the journey from the Tyne to the Narrow Straits. If only poor Wilfred hadn’t nearly died, I’d have found the journey preferable to another winter in Jarrow, and I’d conceived a grudging respect for whatever race of barbarians had been able to design and build so large and capable a ship, and even for the barbarians who, if beastly in all else, had been so capable in handling it. We’d now be retracing the voyage out in much improved weather and with me in charge. It was worth looking forward to my reception in Canterbury and then in Jarrow. I thought again of the day just past. I thought of that ridiculous Prefect, and then of his secretary’s despair on the jetty. I’d have to ensure that something unpleasant came of the useless lump of meat who’d tried to leave me behind. But the whole thing had been as neat an operation as anyone could have wished. I thought again of that absurd story about the martyrdom of Saint Flatularis. And I thought of the look on Edward’s face. Yes, I was alive, and life still wasn’t so bad that I wanted it over.
I thought again. Yes, I was alive. But let it be assumed that there was a Hell, and that I’d just had some vision of my place there – even that might have its moments. I put my head back and laughed. And I let out a long, gratified fart.
‘You are unable to sleep, Master?’ It was Wilfred behind me on the deck. I finished my laugh and hoped the fart hadn’t been too embarrassingly loud. But he’d announced himself with a coughing fit, and probably hadn’t heard anything.
‘But what keeps you awake so late – or so early?’ I asked. ‘I did tell you to drink all your wine and get a proper night’s sleep.’ From habit I raised my arms each side of me in the gloom. He reached weakly forward and helped me to my feet. He cleaned me with the sponge and pulled my clothes back into order.
‘I was looking at the lights over in the west,’ he said. I followed his pointed finger, but saw nothing. ‘I think there is more than one.’
I sniffed and suggested it might be a fishing boat, or some merchant ship that wasn’t hugging the shore. Even in the Mediterranean, most seaborne trade doesn’t start again until the late spring. But that doesn’t mean the seas are empty. I wondered – now that Hrothgar wasn’t around to keep the ship moving in its vaguely eastward course – if the crew would go back to full-time piracy. Once I’d taken charge of things, I’d spent some time with Wilfred on an inventory. We were running short of everything, including money. If we were to get back all the way to Richborough, we’d need a top-up from somewhere.
‘Something you may not have appreciated, Master,’ Wilfred added, ‘is the danger that Edward took on himself when he went back for you.’
I said nothing, but let him help me over to the side of the ship – rather, we helped each other. Then I kept an arm round him while he finished coughing.
‘Until the man in the green robe stopped them,’ he continued once he was able to speak again, ‘the archers were raining arrows on to the docks. Edward was already in the boat – already holding an oar – when the big northerner dropped you. When he reached you, there was an armed man only six feet away.’
I nodded. I hadn’t been able to take in the whole picture at the time. But it was easy to see it all now. I’d led the main body of guards far into the upper part of the city, then had taken everyone by surprise with the speed of our getaway. Even so, the docks were an easy killing ground. It needed a very cool nerve to go deliberately back there.
‘You were looking forward to Constantinople, weren’t you?’ I asked.
Wilfred shrugged. ‘To pray in the Great Church there, to consult libraries so vast that the catalogues alone fill more books than we have in Jarrow, to walk through the endless streets and squares that you have described so well – who would not wish to see the New Rome built by Constantine as capital for his Christian Empire?’ He paused and looked again into the west. ‘But you are right that there is work to be done in England. It is sinful to wish for a place in the world other than the one appointed by God.’
It wasn’t the answer I’d have given at his age. But it was useful to have only one resentful boy to keep in line. And I did want him in a place of safety as soon as we could get to one. If we could safely put in to Africa, I’d have considered even that for him instead of this ship, where he was slowly dying.
‘And what place,’ I asked with a smile, ‘do you suppose has been appointed for Edward?’
‘He may not be quite so great a sinner as you believe,’ came the reply.
I thought of jumping in here with some questions, but didn’t want to break the flow.
‘Perhaps I should have told you at the time, but Edward did ask many questions back in the monastery about your earlier life. I broke no confidences, but now realise he was gathering background information for his mission. I think, though, he was inspired by the stories told by the other monks of your progress from Kent to Rome and then to Constantinople, and of how you rose from dispossessed orphan to greatest commoner in the Empire.
‘You once told me, Master, of how you were expelled from Rome after your first few days there. You managed to have the decree cancelled, but you surely remember how it felt.’
I sighed and thought back to that meeting in Rome all those years ago, when the Dispensator told me he was throwing me out of Rome. As with all the man’s dealings with me, it was a ruse to get me to do his dirty work. But I’d cried like a child when I thought I was to be pushed out of the glorious new world I’d found on leaving England. However, Wilfred hadn’t finished.
‘We prayed together after you fell asleep over dinner,’ he said. ‘There are things I am not able to repeat. But the plan was for Hrothgar to be present when the northerners first arrived at the monastery. If there had not been some confusion that Edward cannot explain, the capture would have gone as smoothly as it eventually did. There would surely have been no killing outside the monastery.’
‘Very well,’ I said. I’d already worked this out for myself. Whatever the case, Tatfrid was dead, and there was no bringing him back. Edward hadn’t been any kind of principal in the capture. And he had saved my life. ‘Let Edward know that I will send him ashore at our first Spanish port for supplies,’ I continued firmly. ‘If he chooses to make off with the money I give him, I shan’t think any the worse of him.’ There was a w
ind picking up, and the ship swayed just enough to make me clutch harder at Wilfred, and then to steady him. Was the sky clouding over? Hard to say. ‘The Saracens will break into Spain sooner or later. When that happens, there will be opportunities for the man he will surely become.
‘Now, do help me back to my cot. If I sleep late, I don’t suppose my presence will be actively missed.’
Chapter 13
I stood between two of the northerners. A third stood behind, holding up a wooden shield to keep the fine drizzle from soaking me.
‘It’s an Imperial battle fleet,’ I said, looking west across the mile or so of choppy sea that divided us. ‘I can’t say what it’s doing in these waters. And it’s pretty unusual for it to be out of harbour at all this time of year, and on a day like this.’
‘Could it have followed us from Cartenna?’ Edward asked. He was the one who’d got me out of bed at dawn, and had then been darting up and down the mast so he could relay the details of the fleet’s elaborate gyrations. I could see these now for myself as it struggled ever closer while keeping in attack formation.
‘Might have,’ I conceded. But that wasn’t very likely. There had been no warships in Cartenna the day before. I knew of no naval base within easy communicating distance. And if this was what Wilfred had seen in the night, it would have been coming from the west – perhaps the north-west. The fleet might possibly have touched in on Cartenna after we’d left and then set straight out again in pursuit. But it struck me as a very faint possibility.
‘These waters are full of Saracen pirates and other raiders,’ I said, after another long inspection of those small, dark shapes. I couldn’t see the rise and fall of the oars, but the wind was now bringing the faint and ominously rapid beating of drums. Unlike our ship, these were propelled by well-trained – or well-whipped – slaves. ‘But do search your memory, Edward,’ I asked with a change of tone. ‘Did Hrothgar say anything about possible alternative meetings before Kasos?’
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