Chapter 4
There was a time when I’d have heard the voices long before they were directly outside. But age is a terrible thing. There were perhaps four beats of my rather uncertain heart between hearing the voices and hearing the rattle of a hand on the latch. There wasn’t time to squeeze myself under the bed. Even if I could get under there – some doubt to put it mildly – and then not wheeze away like a snuffling hog, getting out would surely be beyond me.
I thought of trying my confused act when the door opened. Looking blank and talking nonsense had got me out of trouble more than once during my escape from the Empire, and again on the roads through France. Or perhaps I should just heave myself up and confront them. More fun to do this later – but now might have its enjoyable side.
But the hand rattled the latch and then pulled back. Cuthbert was standing outside in deep conversation. I turned my good ear towards the door and strained to hear what was said. Gradually, the muffled whispering resolved itself into the jumbling of Latin with English that even the foreign monks have taken to using.
‘You saw it? You saw it with your own eyes?’ he was asking in a hushed but exalted tone. ‘You saw the knife held aloft? You saw the spurting of blood and heard the long, terrified scream? You saw the bright, hopeful manhood severed from the body? You saw it held before terrified, barely comprehending eyes?’
‘No, Master,’ came the mournful reply. It was Edward. His own voice was coming on to break, and I’d have known it anywhere. ‘The Old One got Brother Joseph to put an arrow in his heart before the knife could fall. I heard My Lord Abbot call that a sin,’ he added.
‘Sinful indeed!’ said Cuthbert, now indignant. His hand brushed the latch again. I braced myself for the effort of getting up. But the door remained shut. ‘To every one of us,’ he said, in his lecturing voice, ‘God has appointed a certain end. We must each of us face our end with cheerful faith in the love of Jesus Christ. For anyone to frustrate that end is a damnable sin – utterly damnable. I thank you, boy, for telling me about the sin and its attendant circumstances. The sin I will take up first thing in the morning with Benedict himself. His indulgence of Brother Aelric’s ways grows increasingly scandalous. This must end in any event. But you have now given me a most opportune means of smoothing any scruples in My Lord Abbot’s heart.
‘But let us turn back to the attendant circumstances. You saw the slitting of the belly and the pulling out of intestines. Was there much blood? Did the boy scream? Was there a cloth soaked in vinegar held to his face?’
From the tone of Edward’s answer, I now had no doubt it had been wank on his sleeve. Next time the lazy wretch misconstrued Cicero, I’d have the arse off him so viciously he wouldn’t sit down for a month of Sundays. For the moment, though, he was getting me out of trouble with Cuthbert. That door hadn’t yet opened, and probably wouldn’t.
‘Softly, softly, my son,’ Cuthbert said. ‘This is not the place for such conversations. You can see the light under the door of Brother Aelric’s cell. We both know he never sleeps, but writes and writes in what is surely the catalogue of shame to serve as his last confession. I think again of the quiet place where the wood is kept. Let us continue there in our usual privacy. It will be – ah – spiritually uplifting for us both were you to remove your clothing and show me the spot where the knife was pressed into the unfortunate’s body…’
I could hear the hushed voices grow quieter as they went back the way they had come. I heard much whispering and laughter. Before he turned the corner, I think I heard Edward talking about his need for a whole cup of honey.
I replaced everything as I’d found it and closed the door quietly behind me. I could have gone back to my own cell. But the thrill of that near discovery had perked me up again. On a whim, I turned away from my own cell and went towards the great hall. There was no chance of embarrassment. Cuthbert must already be hurrying the boy through the basements for their rutting session. It would be daylight before Edward was released to wash out his mouth with anything more substantial than water.
All was quiet in the great hall. The only light was from the now dying and quite smoky brazier. The villagers had bedded down in their own corner. The new baby had died the night before, and the mother just after breakfast. The rest of them were now snoring peacefully. The boys would be sleeping in one of the animal sheds. Everyone else was in his cell. Everything was as normal as, given the circumstances, it could possibly be. Above all, the gate was still securely barred and bolted.
‘My Lord is unable to sleep.’ Because he’d been sitting so still in Benedict’s chair, I hadn’t seen Joseph. Now, he stood and bowed to me across the hall. I could see he had his bow and arrows on the table before him. By the side of his chair came the dull gleam of one of the more ferocious knives from the kitchen.
‘I need a penknife,’ I said, as if I’d been looking for him all along. ‘Mine has been taken.’
Joseph turned and rummaged through a small bag. He took out a wooden case and opened it. He handed me a small surgical knife. ‘It is very sharp, My Lord,’ he said. I looked at the black steel. I could see at once it had better uses than sharpening pens. ‘Would you have me bring it back with you to your cell?’
I shook my head. I could still be trusted to carry knives with me, however sharp. Besides, Joseph was doing his best job here in the hall.
On my way back here, I went past my cell and stood by the side gate. I tried to ignore the white flashes my bladder was sending up once again to my eyes. I leaned hard on the table and fought to control the ragged gasps of my breathing. There was a half-inch gap at the bottom of the gate. Through this came the glare of what seemed to be many torches. I listened hard to the urgent and argumentative conversation beyond. I still couldn’t follow a word. But there was a malevolent sound to those guttural exchanges that chilled me.
I’m now back in my cell and feeling better. I have Edward’s charcoal and the remains of Joseph’s drink to keep me warm. The papyrus sits, invitingly blank, before me. My pens are sharp. Time, then, to forget the horror that lurks and crawls outside the walls of the monastery – break in or go away, let me be clear, there’s bugger all I can do about it. Time also to put aside those ‘lovers’ in the basement; though, if we’re all still alive come dawn, I’ll not overlook Cuthbert’s plot against me: I’ll have the whole truth out of him, and then him and his pretty catamite on to penances neither will forget. Yes, put it all out of mind. I have my papyrus. I have my memories. Let us see how many of these and how much of this I can join before death, in one form or another, stills my trembling hands.
Would you like to know about my first visit to Athens? It’s tough titty if you don’t, as that’s what I now propose to write about. But, even after seventy-four years, it’s a story worth telling.
Chapter 5
It was Tuesday, 10 October 612. I was twenty-two and rejoicing in all the health and beauty of my early manhood. Well, perhaps rejoicing is too strong a word. My mission to Egypt hadn’t gone as smoothly as I’d hoped, and I was beginning to worry about the supplementals Heraclius might have for me once he’d read the report I was carrying with me. Oh, I’d made sure to get Priscus to add his name to it, and we’d bullied Nicetas in Alexandria to attach his own seal as Viceroy of Egypt. Before taking ship, I’d thought that report a little masterpiece of evasion and tasteful self-glorification. I’d hugged myself at some of the wording. Martin had looked up several times from putting my final draft into his best clerical hand to compliment me. Now, a day or so off Cyprus, all I could think about was long faces in the Imperial Council, and that slow, moany voice at the head of the table, asking questions that didn’t admit of easy answers.
But the sun shone from skies of cloudless blue, and the smooth waters of the Mediterranean sparkled as far around the ship as I cared to look. I was His Magnificence the Lord Alaric, Legate Extraordinary of the Emperor. And, for the moment at least, I was the youngest member of the Imperial Council in living histo
ry – ‘not since Caligula made a consul of his horse’ Priscus had sneered when the appointment was published. On and off, I’d been brooding on that ever since. Not bad, though, for someone who, just three years before, had been a native clerk helping his boss fake miracles in Canterbury. I was number four or five in the Imperial pecking order, and if I was currently stark naked from my swim, I had the robes to prove it.
‘I fail to see why we couldn’t have taken the land route,’ Priscus groaned as he looked up from another of his vomits over the side. ‘I did tell you more than once that I had work to do in Syria.’
I sat up in my chair and stretched my arms. I took another sip of wine and gave the cup back to the bearer. As another slave rearranged the cushions behind me, and yet another began fanning me a little harder, I smiled for the first time that day.
‘I don’t recall, Priscus dear, insisting that you should accompany us,’ I said smoothly. My one joy of this voyage had been the discovery of his seasickness. In the two years or so I’d known him, this was the first human weakness I’d seen. At first, he’d tried concealing it. Then he’d worked heroically on mixing powders from his box of mood-altering substances. When those failed him, he’d tried praying before an icon of Saint Demetrius. I’d have been quite put out had that worked. Of course, it hadn’t. I looked steadily into his withered face. With all the retching, patches of white lead had come off, revealing the true greenish tinge beneath. ‘I told you I wanted the sea passage for speed and because of all the luggage. Besides, I don’t trust the Persians not to be sniffing round Jerusalem. I’ve had enough of falling into enemy hands.’
‘I can’t recall how often I’ve told you, my lad,’ Priscus said with another queasy look over the side, ‘that hostilities ceased on the eastern front in June, and won’t pick up until spring. I do know what I’m talking about.’
‘All the more reason, My Lord Priscus,’ I said straight back, ‘for the Commander of the East to be inspecting the Syrian defences, and not taking his ease with a purely civilian minister of the Great Augustus.’ As he turned to make yet more of those wonderfully disgusting noises over the side, I got up and walked down the length of the Imperial transport I’d commandeered. I’d made sure to arrange my quarters as far away from Priscus as was consistent with my own exalted status. I was still stuck with him as often as I ventured out and he wasn’t groaning in his bunk. But this latter hadn’t so far been a common occurrence.
‘Something you must bear in mind, Alaric, is that we did save Egypt.’ Priscus was hurrying beside me. There was an urgency in his voice that had nothing to do with the slight pitching of the ship. ‘Even Heraclius accepts in his heart that there was nothing I could do to save Cappadocia. Oh, he’s given me the blame because it’s the only way he can get it off his own useless shoulders. But there’s a limit to what he can say in the Council. There’s no doubt, though, that we saved Egypt. Take that away – rob us of its corn – and the Empire disintegrates.
‘Yes, whatever else can be said, we did save Egypt.’
I stopped and took a hard look at the ravaged face. So he’d also been reflecting on our less than glorious time in Egypt, and how to gloss over its details in Constantinople. He sat down on a handy coil of rope and groaned. But for that, I’d never have noticed the slight gust that was rippling the otherwise loose sails. He clutched at his stomach. I stood back in case there was anything left in there to bring up on deck. But the spasm passed.
‘And don’t forget, dear boy – I did save your life.’
I shifted position to steady myself as the ship moved slightly. Overhead, the sailors were now padding about on the masts. Far below, there was a tightening of the drum beat to keep the slaves rowing in time. I heard the lash used a few times and a muffled scream. I stared down at the shivering wreck that Priscus had become the moment Alexandria dropped below the horizon.
‘My own recollection, dear friend, is that you got me out of one scrape that you wholly engineered, and chose not to murder me in Soteropolis when you’d decided I might be more useful alive than dead. Unless there are facts about our doings in the south that still haven’t come to my attention, saving my life is the last description I could make of your behaviour.’ I stared pitilessly down at Priscus.
Of course, none of this was relevant. We’d feed Heraclius a version of the truth so tarted up, it would amount in places to a pack of lies. But however incredible it might sound in places, none of it could be properly shaken so long as we both swore to its truth and didn’t try bitching behind each other’s back. Because he was the Emperor’s cousin, there was a limit to what we could say openly about him. But we’d left Nicetas behind in Alexandria. It therefore stood to reason that everything was his fault. He was the one who’d let the mob get out of hand. He was the one who’d ensured there had to be twenty thousand bodies rotting in mass graves outside Alexandria, and a heap of burned-out ruins in much of the centre. He was the one who’d abandoned Upper Egypt to the Brotherhood, and who’d failed to stop the Persians from coming close to stealing the whole country from us. Certainly, he was the one who’d blocked the land reform law all the time I’d been there to get it implemented; and it was he who’d cancelled the implementation warrants Priscus had sealed in his own moment of power. We’d get the man recalled in well-merited disgrace – though not before we’d done a thorough job of shuffling our own failures on to his shoulders.
I was searching for something friendly to say when Martin came on deck. Like Priscus, he wasn’t taking the voyage particularly well. He clutched at the doorway that led into the cavernous depths of the ship and, with a look up at what he plainly still thought the blistering sun, adjusted the two-foot brim of his hat.
‘The cook is asking if you’d like boiled chicken for lunch,’ he said. ‘Since we’ll be putting into Cyprus before long, he suggests we might as well finish the Alexandrian supplies.’
I nodded. Now the subject was mentioned, I was feeling rather peckish. Ducking and diving to avoid the motions of fifty heavy oars was all the exercise a man could need. And it had set me up nicely for lunch. Priscus forgotten, I looked round for the cup bearer. Priscus, though, wasn’t to be forgotten. He dragged himself upright and took a tight grip on the rail.
‘Ah, little Martin,’ he cried with an attempt at jollity, ‘I see the bandage is off.’
Martin put up a hand to where his left ear had been before it suited Priscus to have it sliced off. ‘I thank My Lord for his concern,’ he said stiffly. ‘And I am most grateful for the recommendation of the man in Constantinople who can fit a leather prosthesis.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ Priscus said, now almost cheerful. ‘Indeed, you could go for a ginger wig as well. That would hide the baldness as well as the retaining straps.’ He took a step forward. But there was another slight pitch as the wind shifted direction, and he was back with both hands clamped on the rail. ‘How did you manage the sea crossing from Ireland?’ he asked.
I looked at the sorry couple and sniffed at the smell that was drifting up from the kitchens. It was a question I’d thought of asking – but, in deference to Martin’s reluctance to talk about his past, hadn’t. There was a feeble mutter about how he’d been too young to be troubled by the mountainous waves of the ocean that swelled and raged at the ‘edges of the world’. But Priscus wasn’t listening.
‘Is it true,’ he asked, with a change of tone, ‘that the Irish are the Britons who could swim when young Alaric’s ancestors turned up to steal their country? If so, could we describe the remaining Britons as the Irish who couldn’t swim?’
Under the comical brim of his hat, I could see Martin’s face flush so that the freckles all but disappeared. I had the first few words out of a sneer at the modern Greeks, when there was a shout from overhead.
‘Ship on the starboard bow!’
By the time we’d worked out which way to look, it was above our own horizon.
‘A trading ship,’ I ventured.
‘Too sma
ll,’ said Priscus. ‘Pirates more likely.’ He took both hands off the rail for a moment and looked almost cheerful.
Martin sat heavily on the vacated coil of ropes and looked set to cry. But the Captain was now at hand.
‘I think My Lords will find that it is an Imperial dispatch vessel,’ he said.
I squinted and looked hard across the bright waters. How anyone could tell what it was at this distance defeated me. But I was willing to take the Captain’s word.
‘It’s coming our way,’ he added.
Priscus looked again at the seal on the letter – as if the thing weren’t unquestionably genuine.
‘What I’d like to know,’ I said, replying to his own question, ‘is how Heraclius could have known we were travelling together by sea. We must surely have outrun the fastest messenger from Alexandria. And then there’s the matter of getting an intercept from Constantinople to Cyprus.’
Priscus scowled. ‘That’s the fucking least of it,’ he said bitterly. ‘You really should know by now never to ask how an emperor gets his information.’ He dropped his voice and led me away from the stiff Syrian who’d presented the document written all over in purple and gold. It may be one of those irrelevant details that stick in the memory, but I’d noticed how well it went with my official robes. ‘What I can’t handle is the substance of the orders. Where civilians like you get sent is of no importance. No – the further you are from Constantinople, the less alarming are the “reform” laws Heraclius publishes. But I do have a war to fight. I’ve business in Constantinople that can’t wait. It may please you to be sent there – though I do assure you, it’s a shitty little town far below its reputation. But I’ve better uses of my time than inspecting the defences of Ath…’
The Sword of Damascus a-4 Page 3
