The abbot dropped his gaze. ‘I will not betray you. I only want peace, and for my community to be left to their Christian lives.’
Before we left, I sought out Brother Luke the infirmarian to thank him for his care.
‘You saved me from death.’ I wished I had something to give him but I had nothing.
The infirmarian smiled a gentle rebuke. ‘God saved you; I merely dressed the wound. I pray it is enough. I have little call here to practise on the wounds you brought me.’
‘You could come with us. Your skills would save many lives, especially among the Army of God.’
‘My vocation. .’
‘It would not be betraying your vocation,’ I insisted. ‘It would be serving God — more than sitting comfortably in the desert and tending to men who have blistered their knees with too much prayer. It would be a mercy to many.’
Brother Luke looked down in embarrassment, and I realised I had spoken with too much passion. ‘I’m sorry. I only meant — ’
‘I know what you meant. And what you say has its truth. But God has called me here to withdraw from the world. That is my vocation; whatever small skill I have to heal proceeds from that.’
A bell tolled through the high windows. Brother Luke gave a smile. ‘Now, however, I am called to prayer.’
‘Let me join you,’ I said impulsively. For all the prayers I had hurled at God in recent days, it was an age since I had entered the warm womb of a church, wrapped in candlelight and incense. Suddenly, I longed for it.
But Brother Luke shook his head. Outside, down the hill, I heard the creak of a gate and the tramp of many hooves.
‘I think you are called back to the world.’
Above us, the stern Christ stayed fixed in his firmament. One hand clutched the sealed book, in which were written all things; the other was raised, as if in farewell.
After the strange familiarity of the monastery, it was something of a shock to meet our new escorts: a dozen Saracens dressed all in black, with crooked faces and fearsome swords. They rode on camels, with another two score of the beasts roped together in a train laden with sacks and bundles. Just walking past them brought a feast of exotic scents to my nose: sweet, musky and forbidden. It was like walking up the eastern end of the main avenue in Constantinople, outside the palace gates where the perfume-sellers kept their shops.
‘Who are these men?’ Nikephoros demanded, bristling with suspicion.
The abbot sniffed. ‘Spice traders from Arabia. They are on their way to the coast.’
There was a brief delay while the abbot negotiated with the Saracen leader. We could not understand a word, but the exchange of a purse full of coins seemed to decide the matter. The Saracen leader gestured to a riderless camel, and with much unloading and rebalancing of their burdens, two more were found for the rest of us. I noticed that a couple of the sacks were not reloaded, but remained beside the abbot. Servants filled the caravan’s waterskins from the monastery well; then we mounted our camels and rode out. With only one arm free to cling to the reins, my balance was precarious, but I managed to turn myself enough to see the monastery receding behind us. Looking back, seeing it alone in the empty desert, its mammoth walls and towering gate seemed more folly than ever — defences against an invisible siege. Yet they had not been built against the armies of men, but against the world itself, and for that even those bulwarks were no more than sand before a tide. Perhaps mindful of that fact, the monastery’s builders had sited it artfully in the lee of a low ridge, almost the same colour as the faded mudbricks of the ramparts. It seemed extraordinary that anything so vast as those walls could disappear, yet already it was hard to tell where the walls ended and the ridge began. The next time I looked back, it had vanished completely.
Nikephoros must have seen my glance, for he brought his camel alongside.
‘Fools.’ He jerked his head back towards the monastery. ‘If God was obliged to come into the world and toil as a human, I doubt he intended that abbot and his flock to be spared.’
‘Perhaps.’ I was unsure whether I envied the monks their vocation, or pitied them for it. I tried to change the subject, nodding towards our Saracen guards. ‘Who are these men?’
‘Smugglers.’ Nikephoros’ camel began to drift back, and he swatted it with a short stick to bring it level with me again. ‘No doubt when we reach the coast they’ll find some pirate who will spirit their cargo across the sea.’
‘But they are Ishmaelites. Why should they have to skulk about in their own country?’
‘Because Ishmaelites hate taxes just as much as Christians and Jews. And also because the Saracens of Arabia follow a different sect of Islam, the same as the Turks. They are the Fatimid caliph’s bitterest enemies.’
‘Are they the same as the men who rescued us from over there?’ I pointed to the west, where the outcropping rock was now a small blot on the horizon.
‘No. Those were
It was the third time I had heard that name. ‘Who?’
‘Four years ago, when the old caliph died, his chosen heir was his eldest son, a prince named Nizar. But the vizier al-Afdal, whom we met, preferred the youngest son who had only recently come of age.’
‘He thought the younger son would be more easily governed?’
‘And the boy was married to al-Afdal’s sister. Al-Afdal installed the boy on the throne — the same throne where we saw him; Nizar fled to Alexandria, raised a revolt and proclaimed himself the true caliph.
‘Al-Afdal crushed the revolt easily enough, but it was only half a victory. To the Fatimids, the caliph is not just their king but also their high priest, the
I considered this a moment. ‘What happened to Prince Nizar?’
‘He was captured and disappeared.’ Nikephoros grimaced. ‘No doubt in the same manner, perhaps the same place, as we would have done if we had not escaped. Al-Afdal hoped he would be forgotten; instead, his partisans believed that Prince Nizar had been concealed by their God until he could return in glory and vengeance. Naturally, that only redoubled their determination in their war against the caliph, though they were scattered and weak.’
‘And these partisans: they are the
‘They have a hidden camp on the heights of that rock. When they saw that we had been pursued by the caliph’s troops, and fought against them, they spared us.’ He laughed. ‘They are also the caliph’s bitterest enemies.’
‘There seem to be many.’
‘And more now that he has offended Byzantium. When the
‘And Jorol?’
‘He fell from the cliff. They could not say whether it was the fall or the arrows that killed him. The monks buried him in their cemetery.’
We rode for two days, resting in the hottest hours of each day and the darkest hours of each night. Then, just before dusk on the second day, we came to a rise and saw a sight I had almost forgotten existed. Trees. Olive groves scattered the valley before us, and on the opposite ridge I could see a row of date plams swaying softly in the breeze. The same breeze blew across my face — not a parching desert wind, but a cool, wet wind flavoured with salt and fish.
Even with one arm tied to my side, I would have flogged my camel bare to gallop across that final stretch more quickly. Instead, we had to endure the painstaking pace of the pack animals as they picked their way among the crumbling stone terraces and irrigation channels in the valley. Up the far slope the ground became sandier — not the floury dust that coated the desert, but paler and coarser sand, which ground and crumbled underfoot.
We reached the line of date palms I had seen and looked out, onto a few low sand dunes, a flat beach and the sea beyond. If I had been standing I would have dropped to my knees to thank God; as it was, I stared at the water, unblinking, until my eyes wept from the salt breeze. To our left, I could see a small village of ramshackle huts thatched with palm leaves. Children played in the sand dunes, while women knotted broken nets and men
