Sinai Tapestry (5 page)

The hour closed to a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, what should have been the beginning of twelve companionable days of nuzzling and scrimmaging. But when the playing field was cleared, precisely when the satin pillow was ceremoniously placed in the middle of the floor and the fun was ready to begin, a dreadful silence swept through the hall.

They turned. In the doorway stood their gaunt nephew, already an inch or two taller than they remembered him. Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.

The boy went directly to the middle of the room, skewered the satin pillow and hurled it into the fireplace, where it burst and blazed briefly. Then in words alternately booming and inaudible, for he hadn’t yet learned to modulate his voice without hearing it, he announced they were all dismissed from his house and lands forever. Any aunt or uncle found on the premises when the clock struck midnight, he shouted, would receive the same punishment as the pillow.

There were shrieks and a rush to the door as the future Duke of Dorset, twenty-ninth in his line, calmly ordered the furniture returned to its place and assumed control of his life.

Young Strongbow’s first act was to make an inventory of the artifacts in the manor. With his botanist’s interest in cataloguing he wanted to know exactly what he had inherited, so with a ledger in one hand and a pen in the other he went from room to room noting everything.

What he found appalled him. The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred thousand separate objects acquired by his family in the course of six hundred and fifty years of doing nothing.

There and then he decided never to encumber his life with material goods, which was the real reason, not vanity, that when the time came for him to disappear into the desert at the age of twenty-one, he did so carrying only his magnifying glass and portable sundial.

But such extreme simplicity was for the future. Now he had to master his profession. Methodically he sealed off the rest of the manor and moved into the central hall, which he equipped as a long botanical laboratory. Here he lived austerely for six years, at the age of sixteen writing to the Rector of Trinity College stating that he was prepared to take up residence at Cambridge to receive a degree in botany.

The letter was brief, attached to it was a summary of his qualifications.

Fluent ability in Early and Middle Persian, hieroglyphics and cuneiform and Aramaic, classical and modern Arabic, the usual knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and Latin and the European tongues, Hindi where relevant and all sciences where necessary for his work.

Lastly, as an example of some research already undertaken, he enclosed a short monograph on the ferns to be found on his estate. The Rector of Trinity had the paper examined by an expert, who declared it the most definitive study on ferns ever written in Britain. The monograph was published by the Royal Society as a special bulletin and thus Strongbow’s name, one day to be synonymous with rank depravity, made its first quiet appearance in print.

Almost at once three sensational incidents made Strong-bow a legend at Cambridge. The first occurred on Halloween, the second over a two-week period prior to the Christmas holiday, the third on the night of the winter solstice.

The Halloween incident was a fistfight with the most vicious brawlers in the university. After drinking quantities of stout these notorious young men had adjourned to an alley to pummel each other in the autumn moonlight. A crowd gathered and bets were taken while the sweating fighters stripped to the waist.

The alley was narrow. Strongbow happened to enter it just as the brawlers went into a crouch. Having spent a long day in the countryside collecting specimens, the wild flowers he now carried in his hand, he was too exhausted to turn back. Politely he asked the mass of fighters to stand aside and let him pass. There was a brief silence in the alley, then a round of raucous laughter. Strongbow’s bouquet of flowers was knocked to the ground.

Wearily he knelt in the moonlight and retrieved his specimens from the chinks in the cobblestones. When he had them all he moved forward, flowers in one hand and the other arm flailing.

Because of his extraordinary reach not a blow fell on him. In seconds a dozen men lay crumpled on the pavement, all with broken bones and several with concussions. The stunned onlookers pressed against the walls as Strongbow carefully dusted off his flowers, rearranged his bouquet and continued down the alley to his rooms.

The second incident involved England’s national fencing tournament, which was to be held at Cambridge that year. Although unknown as a fencer Strongbow applied to enter the preliminaries to the tournament, a kind of exhibition for amateurs, on the basis of letters of recommendation from two Italian masters with international reputations. When asked which event he wished to enter he said all three, foil and épée and sabre as well.

The proposal would have been ridiculous even if he had studied privately under two masters. But in the end he was allowed to enter all three classes because the letters from Italians, as he pointed out, failed to mention which event was his specialty.

Actually none of them was, nor had he ever studied under the two Italians or anyone else. A year earlier, aware that his rapid growth might render him awkward, he had decided to improve his balance. Fencing seemed as useful as any exercise for that, so he read the classical manuals on fencing and dueled with himself in front of a mirror an hour each day.

The time came for him to go up to Cambridge. While passing through London he learned that two famous Italian masters were in the city instructing members of the royal family. Curious about several techniques he was using that didn’t seem to be in any of the manuals, he offered the Italians a large sum of money to pass some judgment on his moves.

An hour was duly arranged. The masters watched him do his exercises in front of a mirror and wrote the letters of praise he carried on to Cambridge.

But secretly the two men were less enthusiastic than alarmed by what they had witnessed. Both realized Strongbow’s unorthodox style of fighting was revolutionary and perhaps unbeatable. Therefore they canceled their engagements and left London that same night to return home in the hope of eventually mastering his techniques themselves.

At Cambridge, meanwhile, the national tournament opened early in December. Refusing to wear a mask because he wasn’t used to one and refusing to reveal his methods, Strongbow won straight matches in the foil and épée and sabre and advanced from the preliminaries into the main competition. There he continued to fight maskless and continued to win with as much ease as ever.

At the end of two busy weeks he had reached the finals in all three events, itself an unprecedented accomplishment. The finals were meant to occupy most of a weekend but Strongbow insisted they be held one after another. All together they took less then fifteen minutes. In that fierce span of time Strongbow consecutively disarmed his three masked opponents while himself receiving only one slight prod in the neck. Furthermore, two of the champions he defeated had dislocated wrists by the end of their matches.

In less than fifteen minutes Strongbow had proved himself the greatest swordsman in English history.

Having done so, he never entered a fencing contest again. The cause for this was assumed to be his extreme arrogance, already unbearable to many. But the truth was simply that Strongbow had stopped growing. He no longer needed a special exercise and had given up the tiresome practice of parrying with himself in front of a mirror.

He never lost his style as a swordsman, however, and decades later it was still distinct enough to betray his true identity, as nearly happened in a tiny oasis in Arabia more than forty years after he left Cambridge.

Strongbow was then over sixty and living as the poorest sort of bedouin. The oasis was on the haj route from Damascus and one day Strongbow had to move quickly to turn aside a murderer’s sword, which he did, causing the murderer to wound himself. Then he squatted on the ground and began to bind the man’s wound.

Traveling in the caravan that year was Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality, who happened to witness the performance and was astounded by it. At once he led his Arab dragoman over to Strongbow.

Who are you really? asked the German, his interpreter repeating the words in Arabic. Strongbow replied meekly in an ignorant bedouin dialect that he was what he appeared to be, a starving man of the desert whose only cloak was the arm of Allah.

Numantius, the leading Latinist of the day and an exceedingly gentle man, said he knew for a fact only two European fencing masters had ever been able to execute that particular technique, both Italians now dead, and that although no one else in the Levant might be able to recognize the wizardry it implied, he certainly was. For emphasis he even gave the maneuver its official Latin designation. The interpreter repeated all this to Strongbow, who merely shrugged and went on binding the wound. Numantius was growing more curious.

But master, whispered the interpreter, how can such a one be expected to answer? Look at his filth and his rags. He’s a wretch and a dog and that was a lucky blow, nothing more. Surely there can be no learning of any kind in such a brute.

But there is, said Numantius. How it can be I don’t know and it’s making me dizzy just to think of it. So please tell him if he swears by his God he has never heard of these two Italians, I’ll give him a Maria Theresa crown.

The words were repeated in Arabic and a large crowd gathered. The money offered was a fortune in the desert and there was no way a poor bedouin could be expected to refuse it. But Strongbow had never sworn falsely in his life. Thus there was a more lengthy exchange between him and the interpreter.

What does he say? asked Numantius in awe. Does he swear?

No, he doesn’t swear. In fact he says he once knew these two men in his youth.

What?

Yes, in a dream. In this dream he went to a large city from a large estate he owned. In that large city he hired these two men to watch him use a sword, and that was when they learned the secret of this particular maneuver as well as others. And he adds that since it was truly his secret in the beginning, what you saw him do here a few minutes ago was original and real, whereas what you saw those two Europeans do years ago was imitation and unreal. And all this he says in a language so barbaric it is almost impossible to understand him.

Numantius staggered.

Original and real? Imitation and unreal? What gibberish is this? What madness?

Just that, whispered the interpreter hurriedly as he and the frightened crowd fell back. Now quickly, master, we must leave. His eyes, don’t you see it?

And indeed Strongbow’s eyes were rolling in his head, his head was swaying on his shoulders and his whole body had begun to shake uncontrollably. He was sending himself into a dervish trance, a trick he had learned long ago when he first came to the desert and the impenetrability of his disguises might have been in danger. As he knew, no Arab would remain close to a dervish suddenly possessed by spirits.

The crowd withdrew muttering charms and a dazed Numantius retreated with them fearing he might be a victim of brain fever, rejoining the caravan and leaving behind the only opportunity there would ever be to discover what had really happened to the young Duke of Dorset after his shockingly obscene disappearance in Cairo on the eve of Queen Victoria’s twenty-first birthday.

But it was the third incident at Cambridge that was most significant to Strongbow in the end because it involved the Secret Seven, or the Immortals as they were also known.

This undergraduate society had been founded in 1327 to mourn the passing of Edward II after a hot poker had been thrust up the king’s anus. Through legacies the society had gradually grown in wealth until its endowments surpassed those of any other private institution in Britain. It supported numerous orphanages and hospitals and commissioned portraits of its members for the National Gallery.

The protection it provided its members was absolute and perpetual. If a member happened to die in a remote corner of the Empire his body was immediately pickled in the finest cognac and brought home at the society’s expense.

Among its alumni were kings and prime ministers, scores of bishops and battalions of admirals and generals, as well as many country gentlemen who had never been known for anything other than certain eccentric dealings with their valets. The alumni of the Secret Seven, in short, constituted the richest and most influential old-boy network in the land.

Of all the masturbation societies in the public schools and universities of England, none could match its enduring prestige.

As indicated by its name, only seven undergraduates were members at any one time, their term running from midnight on a winter solstice to midnight on the following winter solstice, when a new group of seven was chosen. During their year as members the reigning Seven, other than engaging in masturbation, spent their time discussing the merits of their potential successors.

The Christmas holidays began well before election night but all Cambridge undergraduates in Britain, by secret agreement according to tradition, sneaked back to their university rooms by devious routes on the day of the winter solstice. There every gate and door was left unlocked and no one stirred in the wild hope of a miracle. The Seven were known to begin their visits at eleven o’clock at night under cover of darkness and end an hour later, the last man chosen being the most illustrious of the new group and its future leader.

Thus Strongbow, who hadn’t bothered to interrupt his research with the Christmas holidays, was sitting in his rooms one winter night perusing a botanical treatise in Arabic when seven loud knocks struck his door. The handle then turned but nothing happened. Strongbow’s door was locked. He had just emerged from a bath and, still warm, hadn’t bothered to dress yet.

Of course he didn’t hear the knocks but he did notice the handle turning ineffectually. He went over to investigate and immediately seven young men filed into the room and drew themselves up in a row. They didn’t seem surprised by his nakedness but the leader of the group spoke his classical Greek in a confused tone of voice.