stood.
Edward nodded. He took my arm and turned me to the right, in the direction of the mosque. We couldn’t see the entrance. It was plain, though, that the crowds were trying to get away from the place.
I shut my eyes and rubbed them. I looked harder – and I wondered how thick the shutters were of this shop. ‘Is that not a banner, hanging down,’ I asked now, ‘with a cross painted on it?’
Edward nodded again. ‘Can you see the men standing on the roof above the banner, waving severed heads?’ he asked.
Perhaps, if I’d looked harder, now I knew what was there, I’d have seen it all for myself. But the screaming grew suddenly more intense on our left. The crowds that had been running and pushing madly to get away were now jostling their way back towards the square.
‘Christ is my Saviour! My Saviour is Christ!’ came the repeated shout in Syriac. I saw the flash of steel about thirty yards along the street. I couldn’t see those who had the swords. But it wasn’t hard to work out what was happening. Soon enough, there would be the soft clatter of hooves on paving stones, as the Saracen guards made their way in to restore order. Any prisoners they took would come smartly enough out of their hashish fit once they felt the hooked gloves dragged through their flesh. In the meantime, it was bloody murder in the streets.
‘It’s people from the mountain tribes,’ I said, speaking partly to myself. ‘When there’s a war on, we smuggle weapons to them and small amounts of money. For the outlay involved, you can sometimes get a big return. During the last war, we staged a big attack in Damascus. We took out twelve of the Saracen religious leaders as they were working themselves up to lead the Faithful into battle against us. The Caliph had his ambassadors straight off to Constantinople with offers of a renewed tribute.
‘I don’t like this sort of thing myself. But it helps keep these people off the offensive. And, bearing in mind we can’t match the armies they have to throw at us, our entire strategy is one of asymmetric warfare. It’s a matter of sea power and of new weapons, and of terror attacks. You see, they rule over a mass of Christians in these territories – not all of them reconciled to the new order of things. Except for a few merchants we allow under licence, we’ve none of their people to worry about. We win – no, we avoid losing – by doing to them what they can’t do back to us.’
But I was speaking wholly to myself. An ecstatic look on his face, Edward was staring intently down at the slaughter a few yards beneath our feet. An old man was embracing a boy and trying to divert those slashing blows on to his own body. He might as well have been trying to keep the wind at bay. He gave a final horrified scream as another blow smashed in his rib cage, and he was pulled aside to expose the boy. I shut my eyes and tried not to hear the boy’s final cry. I opened them to look at the answering cry from some people in the balcony just across the narrow street. Even had it been wise to draw attention to ourselves, there was nothing any of us could do. Dressed in dark clothing that covered them head to foot, the killers were pressing forward into the main square. They left behind them piles of the fallen. Blood glistened on the paving stones. The groans of the dying, or just the gravely injured, were a sadness to hear. But to offer active assistance so soon would have risked suicide. Until those maniac, jerking figures were well into the square, no gate in the street would open, nor any shutters go up.
I looked into the square towards the mosque. There was now a column of black smoke rising up to the sky. A dull yellow in the sunshine, flames were already darting from the upper windows. There was still no sign of the authorities, and it was most likely the nutters themselves had set fire to the place. Oh, the Angels of the Lord had struck hard this day – and, through them, so had the Empire.
I looked again at Edward, I could see he’d have loved the Circus in Constantinople – though less, perhaps, for the chariot races than for the nastier punishments we inflicted between the races on captured barbarian raiders. As it was, he’d keep those whores busy, come the evening. Soon enough, I’d have another bill on my desk for the inevitable blacked eyes and lacerated flesh.
‘I think we’ve seen quite enough up here,’ I said, not hiding my disapproval. ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to keep Simonides waiting downstairs. His evocation of the boys proceeding naked through the streets of Athens has a charm even your reading is unlikely to abolish.’
Chapter 32
‘If you don’t mind my saying, I think you were mad to leave the bookseller’s shop before guards could be found.’ Edward gave me another dark stare and went back to looking nervously about the deserted street.
‘I do mind, thank you very much,’ I said primly. Perhaps we should have waited a little longer. The bookseller had objected strongly to letting his best customer leave through the back of his shop into that labyrinth of alleys. Even so, Edward had put me right out by the revelation of his inability to scan, or even hear, the difference between Sapphic and Phalaecean hendecasyllables. It had always struck me as a perfectly clear difference. If it gave him trouble, it was surely a return of the wilfulness for which I’d often flogged him in Jarrow. On the whole, I’d thought it better for my temper if we were away from the sight of books. ‘And do put that knife away,’ I snapped, wondering if we hadn’t passed this broken gate post once already. ‘The only trouble we’re likely to meet will be if the Saracen militia takes against you for it.’
He ignored me and we pressed on through the centre of Beirut. Of course, my chair had vanished at the first whiff of trouble, and I was now reduced to creeping along with my stick in one hand and Edward’s free arm in the other. Except where they were still holed up in the burning mosque, the Angels of the Lord had finished their business and been chased off by the militia. The massacre outside the bookseller’s shop had been nasty enough. But it had been a localised attack. I was hungry, and I wanted a lie down before the books I’d bought would be sent over. I needed to be rested for those. At least one of them I’d never seen before, and I’d work that secretary late into the night with reading it to me.
‘I’d like to know what we’re doing in this city,’ Edward announced in his attempt at a manly voice. He stopped and kicked at a severed hand that lay in the road before us. I poked it with my stick and bent down to see it more clearly. Hacked off at the wrist, it was a man’s right hand. Most likely, it had been holding a weapon. Its owner and the weapon were nowhere to be seen. I observed that it might have been left by one of the retreating Angels. Edward ignored me and kicked the hand into the gutter that ran down the centre of the street.
‘It must be a very recent loss,’ I added. ‘I’m surprised the dogs haven’t found it.’ Still silent, Edward pulled me back into a slow walk. I looked up at the sky. ‘We’re headed in the right direction,’ I said brightly. ‘I’m sure home is just round another corner.’
Edward stopped and looked at me. ‘Why do you persist in calling that place home?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘It’s a vulgar lodging house. Everyone else who was staying there when we arrived has now moved on. Can’t you see the owner is just waiting for you to die so he can lay hands on your movables?’
I laughed and struggled free of Edward’s grip. ‘Ha!’ I cried happily. ‘You won’t learn the middle voice in Greek, or the optative. You don’t avoid hanging nominatives. You frequently confuse the two aorists. You’ve still turned into a proper little snob. “Vulgar lodging house” indeed! I’m having a glorious time at Zakariya’s. I even managed to fuck that little dancing girl the other afternoon.’ I smiled into the scowling face. ‘But surely you aren’t worried, my dear boy – worried I’ll get her with child? I know old men can dote on their last sons. But I promise, you’ll still get place of honour in my will!’ I thought he’d start another of his arguments, and how to evade the main issue of what exactly we were doing in Beirut.
Just then, however, we turned a corner and found ourselves in a wider street. I’d have said it was lined with dwellings of the humbler merchants and craftsmen – single-storey buildings, that is, usually without courtyards. It would normally have bustled with all the usual activity of making and selling. It was now still as the alleys we had just left behind. The whole street, right down to where it terminated against the wall of a church, was littered with corpses. Mostly women and children, there must have been a hundred of the dead – possibly more. They lay among broken furniture and bedding that had been pulled out of the houses. In a few cases, the women were still clutching little cloth bundles that I didn’t care to inspect too closely. So far as I could tell, the policy had been to rape the younger women before slitting their throats. The others had been killed less systematically. The few unslit bellies were already swollen with the gases released by decay, and there was an endless buzzing of the flies who’d come to feast on the rotting flesh.
‘I’ve told you, Edward,’ I said wearily. ‘Do put that knife away.’ I waved my stick towards the men dressed in loose black robes who were silently flitting from corpse to corpse. ‘The killers are long since moved on. Those are
