was given to all who were hungry.’
With the partial exception of this last, that didn’t sound like the Empire I knew. But I continued probing. Had he ever collaborated with Brother Joseph? Had he been given any indication that Joseph might be part of Hrothgar’s plan?
‘He beat me when I didn’t understand his triangles,’ came the reply. ‘He called me a moron, and said he’d get me thrown out of the monastery.’
Wilfred nodded in support. Brother Joseph, he added, had believed that Euclidian geometry was not only self-evidently true, but also intuitively known – with a little beating – to anyone but the mentally deficient.
I’d get round to asking more about Joseph. I’d often been puzzled how the most reasonable of men could turn, in front of a few dozen schoolboys, into a gloating tyrant. For the moment, it was enough to know that, if there had been more than one conspiracy afoot in Jarrow, they had been entirely separate. I’d already extracted from Edward confirmation of what I’d already guessed – that there had been two separate attacks on the monastery. Hrothgar had turned up with his own men to find others already in place. There had been an argument and then a fight in which the Chieftain had been killed. None of the survivors of the Chieftain’s band had been in the know about what was going on, and those who didn’t go back across the sea in their own boat had joined willingly enough in Hrothgar’s mission. Edward had been told nothing of any timings. His instructions were simply to wait on events. It would never do to call in the crew for questioning. In any event, they too were on a need-to-know basis. If Hrothgar had not set out with any pilot, was that because the other attack had forced him to bring everything forward? If only Edward had been able to answer my questions…
That’s one of the problems of need-to-know conspiracies. The advantage is that they’re much harder to discover. You can catch the agents. Even under torture, they can generally say nothing of the principals. On the other hand, given any space of time or distance such conspiracies can turn very brittle. Here, there had been immense spaces of both, and just about everything had gone wrong.
When the two boys were alone with each other, they might recall or infer something else. For the moment, I’d got out of them all they had to give. There was a burst of wild shouting on the deck outside, and the ship gave a sudden shudder as if it had hit something. But if the shouting continued, the ship resumed its headlong race before the still rising winds. Whatever else was happening outside, we didn’t seem likely to sink. Without thinking to point at it and look helpless, I bent creakily down and took my wine cup from where it had been rolling on the floor. I looked round for something to put in it. No luck there. I sighed, and fought to summarise our present state of knowledge.
‘It seems reasonable to believe,’ I opened, ‘that Hrothgar was engaged at least two years ago to supervise my abduction from the monastery. It is possible that the Master of the Offices in Constantinople was behind this. It’s the sort of coup that got him preferment in the first place. This could have run parallel with a later change of heart by Constantine himself – he did send that delegation the Easter before last with promises of full rehabilitation that I’m not inclined to disbelieve. Now that Constantine is dead – or just out of power – his heir Justinian may have decided against having me back and sent orders to have me killed. That would explain the earlier attack on the monastery that Hrothgar foiled.’
‘So Brother Joseph was working with the first group to have you killed?’ Wilfred asked. He ran trembling fingers through his hair and looked for a moment as if he might start vomiting blood again.
I supposed he was still coming to terms with such enormity from a man of God. I shrugged. In truth, though, I’d had Cuthbert in mind for this. I thought again of that sealed packet of documents he’d had hidden away. I wished I’d opened it when I had the chance. Would they have explained his eagerness to get the gate open? Was he the insider for that failed attack? If so, I didn’t see any evidence for contact with Edward beyond the carnal. Nor could I think of any evidence that suggested cooperation with Joseph.
And Joseph was the hard one to explain. Hrothgar and Cuthbert made sense within the hypothesis. Each was certainly or probably attached to one of the two bands of raiders. I knew one was there to capture me. I guessed the other was there to help get me killed. But what had Joseph been up to? If Edward was right, he’d just now been trying to kill me. Yet if he’d wanted me dead in Jarrow he had only to put something in my drink, or press a folded cloth into my face as I slept.
Of course, if there had been two conspiracies, each with different principals, there might easily have been three. And once these things came in contact, there was no predicting or even explaining their course. But this was the sort of tangled web that I’d seen long before, when Phocas was Emperor, or in the early days of Heraclius. If this was how the Imperial Secret Service worked now, it was evident that my own reforms had gone backwards since my departure.
I took my wig off again and scratched. I noticed both boys still looking expectantly at me – as if they believed I could explain everything to them as neatly and authoritatively as I might in class with some difficulty of word order in Horace. I smiled and dabbed at my nose – thin snot, I was glad to say, not blood.
‘The problem with most hypotheses,’ I wearily said, ‘is the presence of facts that don’t fit within them but can’t be ignored. We could agree that Edward was deceived earlier today. And it was a time when the eye can see much that isn’t there.’ I raised a hand to silence Edward’s objection. ‘But I do think it was Brother Joseph on the deck of that Imperial battle ship. This raises difficulties that I will neither outline nor attempt to resolve. But they indicate that we must either reject our present hypothesis outright, or elaborate it to the point where it breaks down for want of further supporting evidence.’ I stopped and thought. ‘There is another possibility that I do not yet think worth exploring – though it does begin to trouble me.’ I stopped again. Yes, it was troubling. But I would have to think more about that one.
‘One thing is for certain, however,’ I concluded. ‘It’s unwise to continue on our present course. There is nowhere safe for us in these waters. We must find some way of getting back to the west. England remains our most likely place of safety. If, as I suspect, the Narrow Straits are closed to us, we shall need to choose between hoping for a change of wind so we can break through, and travelling overland across France. If this latter, we need to consider how well the crew will take to being abandoned.’
I put my hand on a plate of hardened bread that had risen several inches in the air with another roll of the ship. I was now uncontrollably tired. In a while, I had a meeting here with the man who served as pilot. The only map he had was in his head and didn’t correspond with any recollections I had of the maps I’d seen in Constantinople. And, regardless of how we’d get back to England, there was the increasingly pressing matter of supplies. If there was a renewed price on my head, it might make no difference if I turned pirate. But that might bring difficulties of its own…
‘Go,’ I said, waving the boys out of the cabin. ‘I must rest a while.’
Chapter 15
It was two days later. A mixed blessing, the wind still blew strongly from the west, though the sun now also shone from skies of unbroken blue. I stood unaided, my hands resting on the stern. I looked westward at the setting sun.
‘So they are still back there?’ I asked.
Edward nodded. He’d spent much of the day aloft and kept me informed of the ships that, unable to catch up, had remained on our tail.
‘Well, I’m still servant enough of the Empire to rejoice that the navy is being kept at full efficiency,’ I muttered in Greek. ‘So long as we control the seas, the Saracen fleets must stay in their Syrian and Egyptian ports, and can’t assist the land-based invasion of Africa.
‘But I do assure you, they can’t keep this up much longer,’ I said, louder now and back in Latin. ‘Those ships aren’t built for this sort of pursuit. Their water must be running out even faster than ours. With short rations, and the removal of all unnecessary hands, they might be able to keep going another day – perhaps two…’ I trailed off and thought of our own situation. There was still food of a sort. But much of the water was spoiled. Somewhere, and soon, we’d need to put in for supplies.
I turned and looked at the rowing boat. The moment it was plain we were being followed, I’d had it pulled out of the water. That had given us a slight improvement in speed. Now, it was being used as the container for a mass of inflated water skins. I’d had these tied together and topped with a little mast and sail. I thought again of
