other seaman I’ve encountered, he’d never bothered with swimming lessons. For all it could help him, six feet out might as well have been sixty yards out. And the smooth African sea might as well have been the northern sea in a storm. He surfaced with a frightened gasp. He splashed ineffectually about. He sank again. He came up a few more times before he finally disappeared. But I’d already seen enough. Without bothering to wait for his end, I leaned forward and picked up my fallen wig.
‘Don’t just sit there,’ I said to the confused, silent boys. ‘This boat won’t row itself ashore.’ I looked over at the ship. Though not yet to much purpose, figures were already running about on deck and shouting. We needed to get inside the safety of the little harbour. If, by the time of Constans, gradual silting really had reduced the draught to about a yard, the ship could never follow us in. With no boat for a pursuit, I doubted anyone would want the risk of wading ashore. Until we were within the harbour, though, it was just a matter of turning the ship about and getting the oars in time with each other. Even scared barbarians were good for that. ‘Come forward, turn about and take an oar each,’ I urged the boys. To emphasise my words, I shook my wig at them.
An idiot expression on his face, Edward looked away from the dying but still occasionally surfacing oarsman, and stared down at the bloody streaks I’d splashed all over his tunic.
It was now that I actively noticed the inch or so of bloody sea water that was sloshing round my feet. All boats let in water. Perhaps the timbers of this one really had shrunk. But even without the pint after pint of lifeblood that had dyed it bright red, this wasn’t the sort of leakage you’d expect in a boat so small – nor after so short a journey in calm water.
Chapter 18
I dumped the wig with a dull splash into the filthy waters and leaned back. I could now see that I was myself covered in blood. It was all over my hands, and soaked into my robe. It must have covered my face. I could feel it dribbling down the back of my neck. So much for wanting to look my best for whoever still scratched a living in Tipasa! I laughed weakly and pointed again at the ship. It was all panic on deck now. Men were pulling frantically on ropes and tripping over each other. I could see the uncoordinated swirl of oars. The sound of almost insane shouting drifted across the several hundred yards of water that separated us.
‘Look, my dear boys,’ I said, now very feeble after the excitement of the kill, ‘I really can’t row this thing by myself. I’ve done what I can for our common salvation. I really do urge you to consider taking up these oars and putting your scared little backs into getting us inside the harbour.’ I was looking for words to describe what would happen to us if we were overtaken by the ship that would provoke a response other than scared paralysis. But Wilfred had twisted round to his left and was silently pointing.
I peered dubiously into the horizon. No point asking if that was a sail perhaps five miles off. Now I look the trouble to look at the ship without the obvious preconception, it was clear that we weren’t the object of the panic. If the northerners were getting ready for a pursuit, it was with them as the pursued.
‘What is the ratio of the sail height to the perceived length of the ship?’ I asked in my best classroom voice. That brought Wilfred at least to order. From his answer, I could guess that we had a scout ship in sight. It was just the one ship, so far as he could see. This would never be up to taking on something as large and well-manned as our ship. Its function was to dart quickly back and forth across the seas, to pick up and to relay information to a main fleet that might be half a day or even more over the horizon. Ignorant of Imperial battle tactics, the northerners were behaving as if already under attack. We were forgotten in the panic to get out of the calm. Our own oars trailing loose in the water, held only by their leather retaining straps, we drifted in the calm waters and watched the chaotic movement of the ship outwards to where the breeze blew strongly from the west.
‘Can you please take up those fucking oars?’ I tried again with the boys. There was no danger now of being overtaken and recaptured. If we ever saw that departing ship again, it would be a matter of bad luck. All we needed now was to be out of sight. Anyone looking in our direction from the scout ship would have the sun almost directly in his face. It would be unusual if we’d been spotted from that far off. And that was how it had to be left. We had to get out of all possible sight. So long as they kept up some basic standard of seamanship, and so long as the wind held, those northerners could outrun almost anything sent against them. If the Imperial authorities could keep believing I was in it, and so long as there was water taken on from somewhere, the ship could disappear right off to the coast of Egypt or even of Syria. That would give me time to consider what to do next. And I’d need plenty of time to think my way out of this one.
I looked down at my feet. They, plus ankles – plus calves halfway to my knees – were now hidden by the warmth of the bloodied sea water. There was no doubt we were sinking. I could see one of the arms of the dead oarsman moving slightly as each heavy motion of the boat lifted it in the water.
But Edward was now stretching into the water on his side of the boat to try to pull the oar into his hands. After some pained looking about, Wilfred was making less determined efforts of his own. Setting two jittery boys of uneven weakness to a job that really needed two big men didn’t make for a fast or even a direct journey to the shore. But foot by foot, and with much drift towards the more ruined end, we did at last make our way into the harbour. My last view of the open sea, as we disappeared behind a rock, showed our ship, now quickly disappearing into the east, and the scout ship in cautious pursuit.
‘Anyone waiting for us on the docks?’ I asked, feeling the need with ever greater urgency for a long doze. I believed Edward’s impression, and my own memory of its circumstances, that Tipasa was pretty well abandoned. Still, it would never have done to put in with a fresh corpse at our feet, and me looking like something from one of the flagellation ceremonies we used to put on when another province fell to the Saracens, and no reasonably convincing excuse for these facts.
No answer. Edward’s face was straining like some overburdened athlete as he tried to pull effectively on his oar. Wilfred was far advanced into a dry coughing attack. The boys weren’t ignoring me. They just hadn’t heard me. I might have been sad Tithonus, whose lover, the Dawn, asked Zeus for him to be immortal without asking also for him to keep young and beautiful. At last, when loathsome age had leaned full upon him, the goddess locked him away in a cupboard. There, the ancient poets sang, he was left for ever, sounding like a cicada, to babble his senile nonsense. So I might have been as I leaned back against the prow and looked up into the bright sky. The sun was beating down on me with full strength. Tired out by the excitement of the kill, I closed my eyes. The muttering away in English of two incompetent, frightened boys, and the gentle lapping of the sea against the sides of the boat blended together and became more and more distant.
In my dream, I was back in Constantinople. It must have been just after our triumphant return from the Persian War. I was looking down over the Circus from my seat in the Imperial Box. We were in one of the intervals between races. Certainly, the racetrack was deserted. Behind me, the Great and Ever-Incompetent Heraclius was seated on his throne. If I glanced left, I could see one of his jewelled slippers where he sprawled, characteristically bored by anything that wasn’t a church service. Far below, on the great oval that surrounded the racetrack, an impossibly large number of human faces looked expectantly up at us. Nothing unusual in that, I suppose. In a moment, the chanted request would start – for a free bread distribution, perhaps, or for one of the finance ministers to be put to death. If I had any say in the matter, the answer would be a firm no to either. But my gaze was drawn to the Senatorial Balcony, about twenty feet below my own level. I could see the bare heads of the hundred and fifty leading men of the city. I could see the backs of their gorgeously embroidered white and purple robes. All would have been as it should have been – only there was an empty place. It was about the middle of the front row. I tried to remember who was missing and why. And I struggled to tell myself why it was so desperately important to me that the ivory stool was vacant.
As I began to dift back into the present. I suddenly realised it wasn’t Heraclius behind me, but his grandson, Constantine. And it wasn’t after the Persian war, but some other more recent conflict. Yet, if times and persons were altered, that ivory stool remained solidly vacant…
‘We thought you had died, Master,’ Wilfred said, his head just blocking the sun.
Edward had put his arms behind me and was trying to raise me. There was a smell of heat and dust and of all the other things you never miss until you’ve been long at sea. Wilfred bent down closer and set a cup of dark, brackish water to my lips.
‘Die, my dear young boys?’ I said at last in a surprisingly firm voice. ‘Dying is not something for those who still have work to do.’ Clutching at Edward’s shoulder, I pulled myself to my feet. We’d by now shipped so much
