The Sword of Damascus (9 page)

Anyone with an ounce of imagination could have raised several other possibilities. But this was a prefect with no imagination at all.

‘You will excuse me a moment, My Lord,’ he said. He got up and bowed and led his secretary over beside the icon. I couldn’t hear any of their whispered conversation. But it was easy to guess its frantic course. Every so often, they’d turn and give me a suspicious or merely frightened look. The wine I’d finished on board to steady my nerves now decided to announce its presence in my bladder. I left the remains of my water cup untouched. I wiggled my toes and wondered how long all this would take.

It wasn’t that much longer. I could see the secretary was still for demanding further and better particulars. The Prefect, though, had decided his best course of action was to get rid of me at the earliest moment. He sat down opposite me again and smiled nervously.

‘You must appreciate that I don’t have responsibility for every detail of the administration,’ he said, speaking fast. ‘I will, of course, order a full enquiry. Even if it will report after your departure, I promise it will spare no one if guilt is to be laid on any individual. If there are lessons to be learned . . .’ He spluttered on more about the
independent
enquiry he’d order and how no one would be spared.

What was the wanker about to tell me? I went cold all over. I set my face into a mask of bureaucratic immobility and stared straight at him.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘your men came ashore yesterday morning. They didn’t come here to give their purpose, but went straight to the market. There was some – there was some altercation. The reports didn’t tell me exactly what happened. But it seems that one of your men was hanged yesterday afternoon. The others are in prison awaiting my justice.’

‘You hanged one of my crew?’ I asked once I was able to trust my voice. Never mind the piss I was increasingly desperate to have – I nearly shat myself. ‘This may be a serious matter. Are you able to tell me which of the four you hanged?’

‘You will appreciate, My Lord,’ he said, now blustering again, ‘that one shouting barbarian is very like another. It required five men to get his neck into the rope. As it was, he nearly tore down the gallows.

‘Would you like to see the body?’ he asked suddenly. ‘It’s still hanging. I think the birds . . .’ He trailed off.

Sixty-odd years of dealing with higher level administrative trash than this had left me in no doubt of how to put the frighteners on. I kept up the look of chilly distaste and thought frantically. If they hadn’t hanged Edward – and, even if he were the most expendable of the four, I was relieved about that – there was a two in three chance that Wilfred would be in the clear back on board the ship. If it were Hrothgar, though . . . I trailed off myself. Wilfred would assure me it was all in the hands of God. As for me, I’d find out soon enough.

‘I will sign an immediate order for your men to be released,’ the Prefect said after another whispered row that I hadn’t been able to follow. ‘Sadly, it may not be until mid-afternoon that they are released. You see, the gaoler is a most devout man. Every morning, he goes off to pray before the shrine of the Blessed Rugosius, and takes the keys with him. Until he returns, you must regard yourself as our guest.’

‘Very well,’ I said briskly. ‘I want them out of prison at the earliest.’ I looked closely at the secretary. There was something unpleasantly thoughtful about his face. ‘In the meantime, I shall be grateful for a bath and a change of clothes. Get me something plain but respectable. Your secretary can take down a list of other items that I want and you may have available here. Oh, and for the avoidance of any doubt, I will be staying for dinner.’

Chapter 10

Even in early February, the sun hadn’t been kind to Hrothgar. His gibbet swung gently in the breeze, flies crawling in and out of the open mouth. I shrugged and looked down again at Edward, who’d taken the hint and was now kissing my slippered feet. There were some nasty bruises on his arms. His tunic was ripped, showing on his back the cuts and bruises that come from being dragged across a rough surface. What wasn’t ripped was still soaked in the foul-smelling mud that I’ve only ever come across in prisons. What I’d caught of his face as he emerged from the gloom was puffy with repeated crying. If you can imagine anything beyond their normal appearance, the two oarsmen looked probably worse. Covered in bruises where they’d been clubbed into submission, wrists chafed from endless struggle with the manacles that had kept them in submission, they’d emerged blinking into the bright sunshine. Credit where due, though, they’d taken the hint even sooner than Edward. Cowed and respectful, they knelt in silence beside him.

‘Their weapons will be returned on your departure,’ the secretary explained in answer to my unvoiced question. ‘As His Excellency said, this is a peaceful place.’ He gave me an openly hostile look, and then bowed ironically. Plainly, he thought the prison traffic he’d been ordered to oversee should have been in the other direction.

I smiled at him and raised my arms. The slaves stood obediently forward and lifted me back into the carrying chair.

‘The Lord Perfect will surely not object if I continue the boy’s education with a tour of your beautiful city,’ I announced. ‘I, for one, shall be grateful of the exercise before dinner.’

The secretary pulled a face that might have curdled milk and muttered something about supervising the gathering of stores. I watched as he went back over to the gaoler and rapped a few quiet instructions. Holding himself steady against the gatepost, eyes bleary from his ‘devotions’, the gaoler bowed at every pause. As the slaves got my chair aloft, and I leaned forward to poke my cane into the back of their leader, I saw the gaoler produce a sheet of what may have been folded parchment – hard to say with my wretched eyes. Without looking at it, the secretary stuffed it into a satchel before disappearing back in the direction of the Prefecture Building.

‘Come, Edward,’ I announced grandly – and sounding grand in any language with most of your teeth missing is quite an achievement. ‘We must inspect the Church of Saint Varicella.’ I leaned forward again and, this time, tapped all the carrying slaves with my cane. The boy and the oarsmen keeping up beside me, we began our slow progress towards the larger of the two semi-ruinous churches.

‘Behold,’ I said after about fifty yards. ‘You see here the most ancient of the monuments of the city.’ We stopped beside a battered arch. ‘Cartenna is a place of measureless antiquity. Its name is derived from the Carthaginian words for “City on the River Tennus”. It is said to have been the birthplace of the mother of the Hannibal who so beset Rome in ancient times. In its present form, however, it is a foundation of the First Augustus, who, after the close of the civil wars, designated it as a colony for soldiers of the Second Legion.’ I pointed up at the pompous inscription. Over time, many of the bronze letters had come away from the stone. But it was still possible to read the words from their context and from the pattern left by the holes.

Edward played along with a question about the roofless temple beside the triumphal arch. While I went into much elaboration about the deification and worship of emperors before the establishment of the Faith, I pushed the blond wig back and mopped at my freshly shaven scalp. Cosmetic paint was beginning to run down my cheeks, but was best left untouched. I looked back at one of the oarsmen, who was picking his nose, and checked to see if we were being followed. Sure enough, there was that bloody secretary. He was lurking behind the pediment of what had been a statue of Septimius Severus. He was stooping forward to get as much as he could of the cover. But if he lacked the colossal obesity of the third sex, it would have taken a larger pediment than this entirely to conceal him.

We continued our slow progress through the silent, abandoned streets of what had once been a substantial grain port. Here had been the public library. Here had been the baths, a gift of the Great Constantine, that could accommodate five thousand. Here was the shrine where Saint Augustine had witnessed the miracle of the stroke suffered by an heretical preacher. My throat was feeling raw from the continual raising of my voice. While Edward passed me up a cup of water drawn from a fountain, I lapsed into quiet English.

‘We’re approaching the harbour from the western side,’ I said. I’d noticed the stepped incline on my way up to the Prefecture. ‘The moment I take off this ridiculous wig and put it back on the wrong way, I want the oarsman with the broken nose to lift me out of this chair and run with me straight to the docks. It will mean jumping down half a dozen steps each with a four- or five-foot drop. The ship’s boat is still moored where you left it, and may still be unguarded. I must rely on the three of you to use your own initiative as required. But the idea is to get us back to the ship before anyone thinks to ignore the Prefect’s orders and tries to arrest us.

‘Do you understand?’ Edward’s mouth had fallen open. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I whispered with another look round. ‘Stop looking so gormless. If you don’t want to end up like Hrothgar, you’ll do exactly as you’re told. Do you understand?’

His face took on his impassive look while he thought. Whatever he was thinking, it took longer than I fancied. Then he nodded. He took the cup from my hands. I heard him muttering to the oarsmen as he replaced it above the bowl of the fountain. I brushed a speck of dust from my tunic and wondered how well I could trust these people. If they decided to run off and leave me in the chair, it would be sod-all punishment for any of them. On the other hand, if gratitude is rather much to expect of barbarians, they were all three of them in considerable awe of the Old One. Even if not a wizard, I was the one who’d had the Greeks anoint him and clothe him in raiments of shining white, and who’d also sprung them from a prison from where they must have thought they’d only be taken out to be hung. I reached up and patted my wig back into place. I’d find out soon enough how I stood with these people. In the meantime, there was a charade that still had to be played. I peered at an inscription above a bricked-up doorway that we were gradually approaching, and cleared my throat.

‘Here is the place where Saint Flatularis suffered the first part of his martyrdom.’ I turned and made a loudish aside to Edward: ‘He was a youth of exquisite beauty, yet was also solid in the Faith. When the tyrant Diocletian ordered all to sacrifice to the demons of the Old Faith, Flatularis refused. In order to break his will, he was chained naked in this house on a bed of roses while three beautiful courtesans assaulted him with their sinful lips and fingers. What did our Most Holy Saint do? Why, he quelled the rising temptation by biting off his tongue!’

I wanted to follow this with an account of how the young man was then rolled – still naked – in live coals mixed with broken potsherds, and end with a homily on what an example this should be for the youth of today. Sadly, the look on Edward’s face was too much, and I found myself having to cover my laughing fit with coughs. By the time I was able to breathe again, we were halfway along the terrace I’d seen from the harbour. Before us, I could see a handful of armed men. It wasn’t worth looking to see behind. On our left was the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the sea, and, against both, the dark blur of our ship where it rode at anchor. It was now or never. I pulled myself back into order. I took a deep breath and lifted my hands up to the wig.

Before I could even turn the thing round, the oarsman had lifted me clean out of the chair. The next few moments are beyond any ordered description. There was a bone-shuddering crunch as the man landed on the first step of the terrace. It was enough to knock all the air out of my lungs, and I fought again for breath. There was another, and then another. I could hear wild shouting above us, but couldn’t even think of trying to look back. Like a frightened child, I clamped my arms tighter about the oarsman’s neck and pressed my face into rancid, prison-soaked clothing.

Our fast, jerking motion came to a sudden end about ten yards from the jetty. With a scream that reminded me of a pig when the knife goes into its belly, the oarsman went down. We hit the granite slabs together with me on top of him. I rolled off and only just saved my face from striking on the stone. I heard the man, still screaming, as he dragged himself to his feet and staggered the remaining distance to the boat. I struggled up and looked back at the crowd that was racing towards me. Suddenly very calm, I relaxed and looked up at the sky. Going like this hadn’t been the end I’d imagined for myself. Then again, it was a sight better than snuffing it in bed, back in the freezing cold of Jarrow.

‘Give me your arms, Master.’ It was Edward! I’d seen him run ahead of us across the docks. Now he’d come back. He took hold of me and heaved me on to his back. He wasn’t yet fully grown, and I was – as I like to keep saying – still a big man, even if decrepit. But, swaying about like a slave under a grain sack, he ran with me across what now seemed the impossibly long distance to the boat. But we got there, and fell together into its deep centre.

‘Stop that boat!’ I heard someone shout. As I gripped the side of the boat and tried to haul myself up, I heard, just overhead, the whizz of an arrow. Another thudded into the planking not six inches from my right leg. I looked up at the blubbering oarsman who’d dropped me. He was nursing a deep gash an earlier arrow had made in his arm. But, as I looked back to the jetty, I could see the Prefect’s secretary frantically pushing the bows down, and shouting madly as he waved everyone towards the boat that had brought me ashore. It was nice to know, I told myself, that, even now, the price on my head was higher alive than dead. I pulled myself up into a sitting position and patted my wig into place. I smiled and blew a kiss at the secretary, who now stood on the extreme edge of the jetty. I couldn’t make out his face. But it wasn’t hard to guess the mixture of disappointment and boiling anger.