The Sword of Damascus (30 page)

‘I cannot begin to express the joy that His Majestic Holiness has brought me,’ I declaimed. ‘I cannot begin to express the love that your own goodness of heart has kindled within me.’ The Grand Eunuch simpered and looked at his fingernails. His main assistant went into a fit of polite giggles that he hid behind both hands. ‘One thing only I ask to make this the most perfect day of my entire life.’ I paused. He leaned forward, ready to anticipate my smallest wish. ‘I beseech you to send into my presence – tomorrow morning, if possible – three of the finest glassmakers in Damascus, together with three of the finest shapers and polishers of precious stones.’

The Grand Eunuch now looked puzzled. But after all that bleating about hospitality, it wouldn’t have done even to ask a question. He turned to the smallest of his assistants, who took out a waxed tablet and scratched importantly away.

‘Do ask them to bring their tools,’ I added, ‘and do ensure that they are men of good general intelligence.’

Chapter 35

I splashed happily in the sun-heated pool. Once again, I wriggled free of the anxious slaves, who’d doubtless been charged, on loss of their lives, not to let an old man drown his silly self. I came up coughing and spluttering a few feet from the edge where Edward glowered down at me. I’d avoided him the night before by ordering him off to an early bed, and then withdrawing into my office with a clerk and a technical draughtsman to take my various dictations. Now, unless I wanted to spend all morning swimming up and down or playing water ball with the slaves, there was no avoiding him.

‘Don’t bother me with questions,’ I said firmly in English. ‘Either I can’t answer them, or I won’t.’ He hadn’t liked being shut into a gilded birdcage. But it was those teeth of mine – white and glittering in the afternoon sun – that had really set him off. Until then, he’d taken almost everything since my killing of those northerners for granted. He’d been awed by the superb self-assurance with which I’d brushed aside every difficulty and had got everyone dancing attendance on me. He’d been repeatedly overcome by the glories of the civilised world. Caesarea, Beirut, now Damascus: he’d no sooner got used to one apparently great city, than he’d been shown something greater still. And, like a child at night in the forest, clutching for safety at his father’s hand, he’d been ever beside the Great and Magnificent Alaric. At last, he’d been brought to something near a full realisation of where we stood. He might have sworn obedience to me in all things back on the Tipasa beach. That didn’t abolish his right to ask questions. I avoided the slaves again and struck out for the far side of the pool. In the warm buoyancy of the water, I might have been twenty years younger. With frantic, if silent, concern, the slaves waded after me.

Edward was already there when I arrived. I peered at the buffed gleam of his toenails and at the blur of yellow silk that began at his knees and went up to his neck.

‘You told me it was the Emperor who directed your kidnapping from Jarrow,’ he snapped.

I laughed at the hurt and faintly scared tone he couldn’t keep from his voice. ‘Correction, my dearest and most beautiful adopted son,’ I mocked back at him. ‘Since you were in no position to tell me otherwise, I assumed it was the Master of the Offices in Constantinople. Rather than vex an old man with questions now, you really should have made better enquiries of poor Hrothgar while he was in a position to enlighten you.’

Edward knelt down and looked me steadily in the eye. ‘It must have taken months – perhaps years – to find those teeth,’ he snapped again. He was no fool. He’d seen their implication almost before I’d popped them into my mouth. ‘If it’s the Caliph who employed Hrothgar, what was Brother Joseph doing in Jarrow?’

‘Oh, come now, dear boy,’ I said lightly. I stood up in the pool and raised my arms. Two strong and panting slaves took hold of me and lifted me out. Muttering away in Syriac, they towelled me off and carried me to a little couch. Edward came and stood beside me while someone fussed with an overhead canopy to keep the main force of the sun off my shrivelled, age-spotted body. ‘Come now, my dear. Doesn’t at least Joseph make sense to you now? He was sent out from Constantinople to make sure that this Saracen plot – and you don’t keep much from the Intelligence Bureau – didn’t come to anything. Once you’d ensured his failure by that brilliant pretence of stupidity, his job was changed to making sure I never completed the voyage.

‘The one question I haven’t been able to answer is what our mutual friend Cuthbert was about. We both agree that he was involved in the first siege of the monastery – his eagerness to have the gate opened went beyond any common desire for martyrdom. But that’s all I can presently say. Did you never think, during those sessions of moral uplift he arranged, to take his cock out of your mouth and engage him in a little conversation?’ I’d gone too far with that sally. I had promised him that the past was blotted out. Now, I’d thrown it straight in his face. He looked away, hurt. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said gently. ‘But let me ask in a more reasonable manner – did you learn
anything
of Cuthbert that might indicate what he was about in the monastery?’

Edward shook his head. ‘If Joseph was there to keep you from falling into Saracen hands,’ he asked, now moving on to the next obvious point, ‘why did he not simply kill you when he had the chance?’ I shrugged. I reached out for my teeth, put them in and flashed him a brilliant smile. I got a black look in return. ‘You might also tell me, My Lord,
why
the Saracens should devote years of effort to getting you here, and
why
the Empire should devote nearly the same – plus half its navy – to trying to stop this.’

I rolled over on to my back and stretched out my arms for a good oiling. ‘I might tell you many things,’ I answered, now serious, ‘if I could, or if I wanted to.’

Edward breathed heavily. He began another question, but his breaking voice cut in, and all that came out was a boyish squawk. I smiled again, and got another black look for the effort. I closed my eyes and wriggled pleasurably under the firm hands of the masseur.

‘Will you tell me, at least, why you saved me from the northerners?’ he asked despairingly.

I opened my eyes and focused. I conveyed every pretence of having thought he’d gone away.

‘You can surely answer that for yourself,’ I said. ‘Wilfred and I weren’t up to the job. I needed someone to row that boat once I’d disposed of its oarsmen.’

With a gasp of rage, Edward was up and walking stiffly over to a table that held a jug of spiced honey juice.

‘Edward,’ I called sharply. ‘Edward, come back here.’ I waited, then spoke firmly but patiently. ‘Back on the Tipasa beach, you were at perfect liberty not to offer that oath of fealty. I was certainly at liberty to laugh in your face. We went through with the ceremony because there was already a bond between us. Now, your oath was of unquestioning obedience. For my part, I assumed responsibility for your long-term interests. If I don’t share with you whatever surmises may lurk in the undergrowth of my mind, it really is for your benefit. There really are certain things I cannot share with you. Please try to understand this.

‘Let us, then, leave this conversation where it so far lies, and let us not come back to it. Do you see that black man over there – the one with the beard dyed orange? Well, take a half-solidus from your purse and give it to him. If we understood each other aright this morning, he will have smuggled in a whole skin of Syria’s finest. If you are nice to him, he should give you some of it. You can mix mine with an equal volume of snow from the mountains.’

I woke from my doze just as the light was fading. There was a slip of parchment beside the bed. The messenger who’d delivered it stood wordlessly and bowed. I took it up and peered at the gold writing. Black on the yellow parchment would have taxed me in that light. Gold was quite beyond me. I’d speak to the messenger in due course. I called him over with my stick, and got up with stiff weariness. At my age, there’s a limit to what massage can do. And I had strained myself in that pool. But the smell of charcoal from the glass furnace had reminded me of the works in progress. I hobbled expectantly out of the room and along the corridor.

In the large room beside my office – I noticed the books had now arrived, by the way, and were already out of their crates and arranged in the dark racks – the workmen were still hard at their jobs.

‘Let’s see how far we’ve got,’ I said in Syriac. I picked up the glass discs, each one about five inches in diameter, and held them to my face. I swapped them round, then was about to reverse them, when the bearded craftsman gently took them back and handed them over again in the right order. I held them an inch from my face and looked through them at the golden writing. I moved them closer and focused hard.

‘Excellent,’ I said softly. The man breathed a sigh of relief. I’d not been happy with his colleague’s explanation that glass as clear and hard as I’d directed would need to be specially made, and that I’d need, until then, to put up with a bluish tinge. Nor had I been impressed with the crumbling about the edges of his own first effort with his polishing tools. But they’d worked like maniacs while I slept, and the results were nearly as good as where I’d been forced to leave off in Constantinople.

‘I suggest you polish this left one a little thinner in the centre,’ I added. I raised my voice and spoke generally. ‘I am pleased, my dear friends, with the speed and accuracy of your work. Though what I want you have never before thought to attempt, you have followed my directions nearly to the letter. For tomorrow, I want the work repeated – this time with both discs a sixteenth of an inch thicker all over. We can then polish them down with less enthusiasm. For the moment, I am pleased with this first effort, and I want the discs set immediately in a gold framework with a long handle. I suggest you measure my face, so that the centre of each disc corresponds with the centre of each eye.’

The men bowed, and one reached for his measuring rod.

‘Isn’t civilisation a wonderful thing?’ I asked Edward. I sat down opposite him and reached for his wine cup. When I’d nodded off, he was lost in his game of chasing a ball down the winding ramps to the ground, and then running back up with it. Now, he appeared to have been sitting here for some while by the open window to observe the progress of my works. He gave me a sulky look. I pretended it was all a matter of the stolen cup. I pushed it back across the table, and stretched my still tired limbs. He’d retreated back into blankness. I leaned on clasped hands and looked at him. I’d still not tell him what we were about. But I could at least tell him what I was doing here and now.

‘According to Epicurus and his followers,’ I began slowly in Latin – English being wholly insufficient for the summary I had in mind – ‘every visible object is continually shedding its outermost layer of atoms. When these strike on the eye, they produce an impression of that object in the mind. That is the cause of what we call vision. If the eye is damaged, these impressions are produced imperfectly or not at all. It seems that the conscious focusing of the eye on an object is at best a minor adjustment. The basic perception depends on an unconscious focusing of the atoms from what may be a large or a distant object into the small part of the brain that deals with vision. In the case of the aged, the eyes lose some of that unconscious focusing ability. It has long been known that water or glass can distort objects viewed through them. This may be because the atoms cast off by objects are diverted from their straight course by the dense packing of atoms in the medium through which they pass.’ I was speaking as simply as I could, and I was glad to see that Edward understood this lesson.

‘All this being so, I have decided that these accidental distortions can be refined to the point where they offset the lost ability of the eyes to do their job. I have been thinking for some years of a set of mathematical formulae that could be applied to the shape of lenses so that every defect of vision could be exactly offset. These formulae have so far eluded my understanding – on account, I am sure, of a lack of precise empirical knowledge. However, I found, shortly before leaving Constantinople, that some degree of offset can be achieved by trial and error. I am now taking advantage of the Caliph’s hospitality to push these efforts further. Perhaps, it is by such trial and error that the knowledge will grow on which some abstract, all-explaining theory can be based. But it is enough for me at the moment that I shall, before evening, be able to read for myself again.’

I snapped my fingers and called to the workman who was holding my lenses. I took them back and held them up to see out of the window. ‘No,’ I went on, ‘I’m not able to see Damascus at all through these. The shape of the city is more blurred than with nothing at all. To see distant objects, we shall need to work on some other convexity of the glass. But if I hold these lenses in the right position, I can easily read the lettering on this letter from His Highness the Governor of Syria.

‘It says, by the way, that His Majestic Holiness the Caliph has been called away by the needs of war with the Empire. In his place, the Governor of Syria invites us to a banquet to be held in my honour tomorrow evening.’ As I spoke, one of the slaves wandered in and gave me a despairing look. Keeping the door shut had confined the dust of all that I’d commanded. But I could see the charcoal smoke had caused some resentment. I wrinkled my nose at his dustpan and brush and waved him from the room. He slammed the door as he went. I turned back to Edward.

‘So, made young again by artificial hair and artificial teeth – and now, I hope, by artificial eyes,’ I said, ‘I plan to see how closely we are held prisoner in this most glorious of palaces. If possible, we shall tour the shops of Damascus tomorrow morning, and spend more of my gold on silken robes finer than the tailors of Beirut can imagine.’ Edward nodded. I could see he was still upset with me. But that would have to be. I handed the lenses back, and wondered if my demand for ‘immediate’ work would allow me to spend all evening among my books. I’d picked up a Saracen chronicle of the last big war with the Empire that might repay my attention.