Empire. We both know it’s the best common home for the peoples of the civilised world. If only you’d been Emperor these past sixty years – why, we’d have gladly helped kick that upstart rabble back into the desert. The Saracens tolerate us. But they don’t mean us any good. They’re coming here, and we’ll turn out and welcome them. But, if only – if only…’ He drifted off into the sort of waking dream only enough opium to kill a dozen of the uninitiated can produce.
We both sat awhile in silence. For myself, I was reflecting on the many advantages of not being in Jarrow: no cold, no prayers, plenty of water for bathing, all the amenities of the civilised pharmacopoeia. Really, why had I gone there?
‘But you will forgive me!’ Jacob cried softly. The great poppy inspired orgasm was passing out of its intense phase, and would soon enter its much longer afterglow of delicious and untroubled comfort. He opened his eyes and sat forward. ‘The reason I asked you to come here was that the boy was asking for you before his sedatives took hold. He was insistent that he had things to say that only you could hear.’
‘I imagine the poor boy knows he is dying,’ I said with a serene look at Wilfred. ‘Among my many qualifications is the authority to hear confessions and absolve the dying from their sins. I can’t think what sins Wilfred could have that press on him so. But those who believe very strongly do worry about matters the rest of us might barely notice.’
As I spoke, Wilfred threw back his covering blanket and sat up. I saw the lamp flames reflected by the sweat on his body as he jumped onto the ceiling. Except it was in the wrong direction, it was like watching a cat jump down from a wall. He paused there on all fours and looked down at me, his eyes glowing an internal red. He grinned triumphantly and showed canines that glittered white far beyond his lower lip. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only smiled again. He got up and, without bothering to look at me, walked rapidly over to the closed door. There, he stopped and stretched vainly down to get at the handle. It was too low for him to reach. He stood back one pace, and then forward again. He slapped one hand hard against the wall, and then the other. Like some lizard on a rock face, he began crawling down to reach the handle.
I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated. When I opened them again, Wilfred was back under his blanket, still but for the continued rise and fall of his chest. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Yes – the boy hadn’t moved an inch. I made a note to ask Jacob, when we were both more with it, how he prepared his opium.
There was another faint commotion downstairs, then a louder thudding of feet on the stairs. It might have been close within the house. It might, on the other hand, have been back in Tipasa. Had I just heard it? Might I be about to hear it? Interesting questions, these. Give me a day or two to think them over, and I might have some kind of an answer. I was wondering if the upside-down reflection of my own face in one of the lamp flames was somehow connected with the noise, when the door burst open. It was one of the young men who’d been so interested in the difference between the jussive mood in Hebrew and the imperative.
‘My Lord,’ he gasped, ‘you must hide at once. There are men in the house. They have orders to take and kill you.’
Chapter 24
You may assume, dear Reader, that opium, like wine, tends to incapacitate those who use it to the full. If so, you are wrong. It does stupefy – but only when stupefaction is desired. One sound of that heavy, collective tramping on the stairs, and Jacob was straight out of his chair and running about. I was, you can be sure, a little slower. But, once I’d realised the young man was no part of my hallucination, the blotting out of all the aches and strains of the past few days allowed me to get with surprising speed and resolution into the medical contagion robe and then on to my knees before the sleeping body of Wilfred.
‘This is a room for the dying,’ Jacob snarled as the door flew open again. ‘I will not have my patient disturbed.’ He fell silent while perhaps a half dozen pairs of feet tramped in and came to a disciplined halt a couple of yards behind me. Hoping I’d pulled my hood on properly, I kept my hands, palms upward, in the praying position. In a low mutter, I intoned as much as I could recall of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. The silence, and now the stillness, behind me seemed to last an infinity. Then I heard a faint sound of leather soles on the wooden boards. There was another loud scraping as the men already there pulled themselves up to attention.
‘What is your patient’s condition?’ a voice asked in Latin.
I froze. It was all the effort I could manage to keep my upstretched arms from shaking. I’d have needed as much opium as Jacob had downed to keep calm. Even with the few drops I’d taken, I found myself wondering if this was another delusion. But I was fully with it, and that voice – in Latin or Greek or Syriac, or in English – I’d have recognised anywhere. I felt rather than heard Joseph come and stand behind me. He peered over at the shrivelled, sleeping boy. To be sure, Wilfred had changed radically since Jarrow. But the wispy blond hair said anything but Jewish. Even in the gloom of the dying lamps, it would take a miracle for him not to be recognised. But Jacob was now beside him.
‘It’s a new contagion that killed both his parents the day before yesterday,’ he said with professional firmness of tone. ‘I doubt he will last beyond tomorrow morning. The medical arts are exhausted on him. Prayer is all that remains.’
There was another long silence. I heard only the gentle scraping of military boots as the other men in the room removed themselves as far as possible from the vicinity of a sickness that might somehow communicate itself across the few yards that separated them from the dying boy. Joseph stayed put. I felt his long stare into the uncovered face.
‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,’ I droned on in Hebrew, trying not to shake; ‘yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ If Joseph was Syrian – correction, since Joseph knew enough Syriac to pass for Syrian, he might understand enough Hebrew to know this wasn’t a valid prayer of the Jews. I dropped my voice lower still.
‘You will be aware,’ Joseph said, speaking soft and to no one in particular, ‘of the reason for our visit. The traitor whose name I hardly need mention is said to have landed on the African shore – here to raise disaffection against the God-anointed Augustus. The orders are that he is to be killed on sight. He is to be killed on sight – he or anyone who resembles him. For his head, the reward is its weight in gold. For any mistaken identity, the promise is full civil and criminal impunity. Against those who harbour the traitor the full penalties of treason are threatened.
‘There is a report that a man matching the traitor’s description was seen to enter the Jewish district. Have you anything to add in light of this information?’
It was no longer the relaxed, frequently bored, voice I’d known every day for months and months in Jarrow. The fellow spirit – the refuge from the chattering fools – I’d so often sought out in the monastery was no longer the Joseph who stood behind me, looking down at Wilfred with an incomprehensible lack of recognition. This was a man of obvious power within the Imperial Secret Service. Though terrified by what Jacob had told them, his military support didn’t dare do as nature prompted and flee that room of possible contagion.
‘I assure you that no traitor is harboured within this house,’ Jacob said quietly. He leaned over me to adjust the blanket. Not realising that the boy had sat every day at the front of Joseph’s class – and in every lesson had earned his grudging praise – Jacob pulled the blanket down, exposing more of the ravaged body to view.
‘Dead?’ Joseph asked. ‘He’ll soon be dead?’
Jacob pointed at the mottling that had now come out all over the boy’s chest like barbarian tattoos.
‘Well, death in one so young is always to be regretted. The Empire makes no war on children.’ It was hard to judge the tone of his voice. But he took a step backwards.
‘Your father tells me that he has an immunity from the Prefect against entry and search,’ he said in a less ambiguous tone. ‘As you know, this means nothing where reason of state is concerned. However, I am satisfied that there is nothing in this house to take up more of my attention. I will only repeat that there is no safety within the Empire for the traitor we seek. Wherever he may fly, we will follow. Wherever he may hide, we will find him. For him, there will be no second trial – no appeal to the uncertain mercy of Caesar. His friends in the Capital are dead or scattered. His technical skills are no longer required. His sentence was pronounced on the first discovery of his treason. All that remains is for sentence to be executed.’ He turned and walked from the room. With a renewed clatter of boots on wood, the soldiers followed.
