The Sword of Damascus (17 page)

Though half comatose, I sat up here and looked hard at the boy. He took one proper look at my face and went into another of his coughing fits. He sat down heavily in the sand and clutched miserably at his knees.

‘Wilfred,’ I said sternly once the boy was back in some kind of order, ‘I am aware that what little you know of my life fills you with horror. There are things you don’t know that would make you sit up and stare. But never – never in all my time, not even for reasons of state – have I shat on those who helped me. If I don’t force myself back up to flog that boy to death, it’s only because he saved me in Cartenna. I could argue that he was only rescuing valuable property that he could try selling again later. But I won’t. At the same time, if I’ve had to put up with worse from others in the snake pit of Greek politics, I’ll not put up with behaviour like that from those under my control.’ I let Wilfred help me to my feet and walk me over to where Edward was stretched out and weeping uncontrollably. Forcing myself not to shake with exhaustion, I stared down at him.

‘Get up,’ I commanded him. ‘Go and wash yourself in the sea. It’ll hurt but do you good. Then get dressed. Now that we are free – now that we hold together solely by free choice – I propose to write off all that has happened to date. It cannot be undone or excused. But it can be put out of mind. If my respect means anything at all, you can start earning it from this moment on.’ I went by myself and sat again in the shadow of the rocks. ‘Now go and clean yourself up,’ I said. ‘You might also look how much water that boat has shipped. We may still have need of it.’

‘Do you think, Master,
anything
he told us was the truth?’ Wilfred asked once we were alone.

I took another sip of water – oh, for a jug of wine! – and wiggled my toes in the sand. I passed him the cup and watched him drink. His own clothes had long since dried off from his cautious dip in the sea. Now, I was looking to see any sign of a sweat. Except when forcing himself to life to attend to my own needs, he was increasingly listless. If I was hoping he’d improve once off the ship, I hadn’t yet seen any evidence.

‘Yes,’ I answered, turning to his question. ‘I do think he’s mostly been telling the truth. I have a good nose for insincerity. He really does know as little about things as he’s said. It’s at least because of ignorance – fear of those drunken beatings may come into it – that he stitched up Hrothgar. Don’t suppose I really hold that betrayal against him. The man had it coming.’

‘But, Master, do you think he was telling the truth about Brother Joseph?’

I smiled at that one. For myself, I hadn’t the slightest doubt Joseph had been on that warship. I could close my eyes and see him standing there, looking across the narrow space of water that separated him from a man who shouldn’t have survived the dark, towering waves of the open sea, let alone have made it so far into Imperial waters.

‘You saw what Edward saw,’ I answered. ‘Put aside your own wishes and preconceptions. Do you think it was Brother Joseph?’ I didn’t need his answer.

Troubled, he looked away. ‘If it
was
Brother Joseph,’ he said, ‘what does that mean for our return to England?’

Good question. Ever since I’d taken charge of the ship, I’d been wondering that myself. I shrugged. ‘You are assuming, my dear boy, that we shall return to England,’ I said. ‘We have no ship. If we do put to sea, we have the Imperial Navy combing every mile of water to find us. If we take the road west, we’ll be going through various deserts and dead zones. We’ll end at the Narrow Straits, which are still controlled by the Empire. If we do get across those, we have Spain and France to get through, and then a sea trip to Richborough. If we’d had enough water aboard the ship to get us to Italy, it might have been different—’

‘But you have a plan, Master,’ he interrupted. ‘You always have a plan, even if you don’t at first know it.’

I smiled at the boy’s fierce conviction. It had even brought some life into his cheeks. Here we were, on the beach by a deserted city. There was the ludicrously aged remnant of the Magnificent Alaric. There was a sick child – how sick I’d been trying to avoid having to realise. The only one of us in good health was silly, treacherous Edward. We were hunted by an Empire desperate to lay violent hands on me. If somewhat past its best, that Empire surrounded us in every direction, and had full control of the sea. We had barely enough cash to buy food for twenty days. And I was now trusted to get all of us out of the Empire, across two seas, and through any number of lawless territories to face who could say what on our eventual return to England. If I didn’t give way to laughter, I’d burst into tears.

But Wilfred was right. I did have a plan. It had come to me in little flashes of enlightenment as I set about Edward. That vicious beating which had started in anger had ended as an act of policy. I might be ludicrously old, but I was still the Magnificent Alaric – Hammer of the Persians and barbarians, unyielding anvil of the Saracens, support and survivor of four legitimate and variously useless emperors. As for being old, I had just killed two men, each one of them a third my age and three times my weight. I’d killed them without so much as raising a sweat. So long as I didn’t fall down dead somewhere along the next fifteen hundred miles, I had a plan that might just work.

I got up and allowed Wilfred to dress me. The brown stain that covered the whole front of my robe would never fade. Though washed and washed again, the blond wig was also brown. Since I had no hat, I’d have to make do with it against the sun. At the most charitable, I looked somewhat reduced in circumstances. I leaned against the rock and watched as Edward jumped up and down in the sea, washing the blood and grime from his body.

‘Did you need to do all that, Master?’ Wilfred asked. He looked across at Edward.

I sniffed, and then poked a finger into my nose to remove the clotted blood. I was feeling better by the moment. I wished I could say the same of Wilfred. Much more of that coughing, and it would be a question of who was helping whom along this shore.

‘That boy isn’t fourteen,’ I answered. ‘Already, he has a trail of corpses behind him. I don’t intend either of us to join them. I do nothing without a purpose – something you would do well to remember.’

We watched in silence as Edward finished in the sea. Afterwards, he went and looked a long time into the boat. Then he fished around inside. After more washing in the sea, he walked back holding what I could see from the blurred glitter was the knife that had been meant for my dispatch. In his hands, it seemed more like a short sword than a knife. By the time he’d crossed the expanse of sand that separated us from the sea, he was already dry. I looked at him. Another day, and he’d be covered in bruises. If I hadn’t broken any bones, he’d ache for days after that.

As the boy came within a yard of where I stood, he went down on his knees and, silent and with downcast head, placed the knife at my feet. Still looking down, he reached clasped hands up towards me. I stood a moment in silence, looking down at the small, naked figure. He was rather young for this sort of thing – and I rather old. But, regardless of that or the lack of any relics or anything else holy, there could be no doubt of its meaning. I considered for a moment, then leaned forward and took his hands between my own.

‘I promise on my soul that I will in the future be faithful to My Lord the Senator Alaric,’ he said quietly, ‘and never cause him harm, and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit.’ He stopped and looked up at me.

I stared silently back and kept my own hands about his. So the magical essence – the
Hail
or
Heil
, they call it in the Germanic languages – that he’d never less than passionately adored, but never yet felt clean enough to acknowledge, in the Old One, passed from outer to inner hands. I smiled and tightened my hold on his hands. All round us the desolation of the beach and the unkempt land, and the broken, deserted city and the sunken forgotten statue, we stayed silently frozen in the highest – though long since Christianised – ritual of our ancestral, northern forest.

At last, I let go of the boy’s hands and reached creakily down for the knife. Wiping off the sand, I held it aloft towards the sun, then presented it hilt first. Though I took care with the blade, the thing was more deadly for the chopping force of its weight than by its sharpness. Edward took it, still on his knees. I helped him to his feet.

‘Take this, and use it well,’ I commanded.

He took the knife and went back on his knees. I stood silent again, accepting his long, no longer abject obeisance. The ritual was complete. The boy was a man, and – by the power that was mine by descent from the tribal gods of Kent, and by positions in the Empire that no Emperor could abolish – was a man of some quality. His past was blotted out. If in different ways, he was now the equal in my eyes of Wilfred. Perhaps he was more.

‘The boat is full of water,’ he said once dressed. ‘Also, the man you killed has swollen up in his stomach, and the water around him is turning dark. Should we not bury him?’

I shook my head. ‘Leave the body for the animals – there are always plenty of those,’ I said, looking up at the birds beginning to circle in the clear sky. They’d have the choice bits even if nothing on four legs would go down to the water. ‘He deserves no better resting place than the other one who must float for ever beneath the seas that swallowed him,’ I added. You can be sure I believed no such nonsense: dead is dead. However, though I’d have liked to remove all trace of our arrival, the body was too big for one boy and two invalids to move. And even if we could have emptied it and plugged its leak, the boat was useless for what I now had in mind. I could see that Wilfred was aghast at the idea of just leaving the body to float, face upward, in the juice of its own corruption. But he probably hadn’t liked anything that had happened since Edward’s return. Still, I was in charge, and that was my decision.

‘I think we’ll have a proper look round Tipasa,’ I said, now brisk. ‘If there is indeed no one living here, we can dine from whatever wild fruit trees may be in season. Otherwise, I’m sure something small will present itself for killing. As for shelter, we’ll make a fire in one of the smaller churches.’ I scowled Wilfred into silence. Taking up my stick, I tottered slightly as I set out along the beach towards the broken docks.

Chapter 21

Taking into account the twisting of the road as it hugs the shore, Tipasa is about twenty miles from Caesarea. A man of reasonable vigour can cover that in a day. With me bumping along in the wheelbarrow Edward had rescued from a church, it should have taken two days. Halfway through the first day, however, Wilfred had his worst attack yet. I’d already decided he wasn’t up to helping Edward with pushing me. But, though I’d insisted on a slow progress along the road, even that, in the unaccustomed heat of Africa, was too much for him. After our first long noonday stop, he couldn’t get up again. This time, what began as coughing turned to a long choking. As I wiped the foul-smelling froth from his lips, I decided it was time for the Magnificent Alaric to show the world he was still up to taking a walk.

So, for three days, and not two, we journeyed along that baking road, the blue sea sparkling always on our right, drinking much, eating little, with barely another human being to pass or overtake us. Though our most understandable concern was the sea, and what ships there might be upon it, my own private concern was bandits. The days when a citizen might walk the roads of the Empire in reasonable safety – Saint Paul, for example, in Asia – were so long since passed away that it was hardly worth enquiring when. But I knew the African roads were especially dangerous. Professional thieves, escaped slaves, raiders from the south, the occasional band of Saracens – those were the real danger. We had no credible means of defence. We had no chance of running away. As for money to appease anyone who might accost us, those clipped coins would have sent any thief into a frenzy of disappointment.

But, unaccosted, we came at last within sight of the walls of Caesarea. Unlike Tipasa – unlike even Cartenna – this hadn’t shared in the general emptying out of Africa. Instead, by taking in the remnants of other communities, it had maintained the ancient circuit of its walls. Bearing in mind its evident lack of commerce with the hinterland, it was hardly flourishing. It had, nevertheless, survived.

‘State your business, Citizen,’ a guard called out from just inside the gateway.

I’d seen the wooden bar come down on our approach, and had my story already made up and rehearsed. I shuffled forward and peered into the dark gateway.

‘It is surely the mercy of God,’ I opened in an elderly whine, ‘that I should ever again hear the voice of authority.’

Deep within the gateway, there was a sound of leather scraping on wood. Then the guard emerged. Fifty, fat, shifty, he blinked in the sunlight. The metal strips had come off his breastplate. His sword was broken away near the point. But he was taking no chances. He gave me and the boys a hard, suspicious look, then turned his attention to the road behind us.

‘I am Seraphinus,’ I said proudly, ‘a man of some repute in Carthage. I am travelling to Cartenna with my grandsons. Since the last visitation of plague, I am all they have left in this world. You will see that the younger boy is sick. We are advised that his only hope is to roll in the holy dust before the tomb of Saint Flatularis.’ I did a fair job of laying the mannerisms of the higher classes over an African accent. As I was hoping, it placed me nicely as what I was pretending to be.