that had really set him off. Until then, he’d taken almost everything since my killing of those northerners for granted. He’d been awed by the superb self-assurance with which I’d brushed aside every difficulty and had got everyone dancing attendance on me. He’d been repeatedly overcome by the glories of the civilised world. Caesarea, Beirut, now Damascus: he’d no sooner got used to one apparently great city, than he’d been shown something greater still. And, like a child at night in the forest, clutching for safety at his father’s hand, he’d been ever beside the Great and Magnificent Alaric. At last, he’d been brought to something near a full realisation of where we stood. He might have sworn obedience to me in all things back on the Tipasa beach. That didn’t abolish his right to ask questions. I avoided the slaves again and struck out for the far side of the pool. In the warm buoyancy of the water, I might have been twenty years younger. With frantic, if silent, concern, the slaves waded after me.
Edward was already there when I arrived. I peered at the buffed gleam of his toenails and at the blur of yellow silk that began at his knees and went up to his neck.
‘You told me it was the Emperor who directed your kidnapping from Jarrow,’ he snapped.
I laughed at the hurt and faintly scared tone he couldn’t keep from his voice. ‘Correction, my dearest and most beautiful adopted son,’ I mocked back at him. ‘Since you were in no position to tell me otherwise, I assumed it was the Master of the Offices in Constantinople. Rather than vex an old man with questions now, you really should have made better enquiries of poor Hrothgar while he was in a position to enlighten you.’
Edward knelt down and looked me steadily in the eye. ‘It must have taken months – perhaps years – to find those teeth,’ he snapped again. He was no fool. He’d seen their implication almost before I’d popped them into my mouth. ‘If it’s the Caliph who employed Hrothgar, what was Brother Joseph doing in Jarrow?’
‘Oh, come now, dear boy,’ I said lightly. I stood up in the pool and raised my arms. Two strong and panting slaves took hold of me and lifted me out. Muttering away in Syriac, they towelled me off and carried me to a little couch. Edward came and stood beside me while someone fussed with an overhead canopy to keep the main force of the sun off my shrivelled, age-spotted body. ‘Come now, my dear. Doesn’t at least Joseph make sense to you now? He was sent out from Constantinople to make sure that this Saracen plot – and you don’t keep much from the Intelligence Bureau – didn’t come to anything. Once you’d ensured his failure by that brilliant pretence of stupidity, his job was changed to making sure I never completed the voyage.
‘The one question I haven’t been able to answer is what our mutual friend Cuthbert was about. We both agree that he was involved in the first siege of the monastery – his eagerness to have the gate opened went beyond any common desire for martyrdom. But that’s all I can presently say. Did you never think, during those sessions of moral uplift he arranged, to take his cock out of your mouth and engage him in a little conversation?’ I’d gone too far with that sally. I had promised him that the past was blotted out. Now, I’d thrown it straight in his face. He looked away, hurt. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said gently. ‘But let me ask in a more reasonable manner – did you learn anything of Cuthbert that might indicate what he was about in the monastery?’
Edward shook his head. ‘If Joseph was there to keep you from falling into Saracen hands,’ he asked, now moving on to the next obvious point, ‘why did he not simply kill you when he had the chance?’ I shrugged. I reached out for my teeth, put them in and flashed him a brilliant smile. I got a black look in return. ‘You might also tell me, My Lord, why the Saracens should devote years of effort to getting you here, and why the Empire should devote nearly the same – plus half its navy – to trying to stop this.’
I rolled over on to my back and stretched out my arms for a good oiling. ‘I might tell you many things,’ I answered, now serious, ‘if I could, or if I wanted to.’
Edward breathed heavily. He began another question, but his breaking voice cut in, and all that came out was a boyish squawk. I smiled again, and got another black look for the effort. I closed my eyes and wriggled pleasurably under the firm hands of the masseur.
‘Will you tell me, at least, why you saved me from the northerners?’ he asked despairingly.
I opened my eyes and focused. I conveyed every pretence of having thought he’d gone away.
‘You can surely answer that for yourself,’ I said. ‘Wilfred and I weren’t up to the job. I needed someone to row that boat once I’d disposed of its oarsmen.’
With a gasp of rage, Edward was up and walking stiffly over to a table that held a jug of spiced honey juice.
‘Edward,’ I called sharply. ‘Edward, come back here.’ I waited, then spoke firmly but patiently. ‘Back on the Tipasa beach, you were at perfect liberty not to offer that oath of fealty. I was certainly at liberty to laugh in your face. We went through with the ceremony because there was already a bond between us. Now, your oath was of unquestioning obedience. For my part, I assumed responsibility for your long-term interests. If I don’t share with you whatever surmises may lurk in the undergrowth of my mind, it really is for your benefit. There really are certain things I cannot share with you. Please try to understand this.
‘Let us, then, leave this conversation where it so far lies, and let us not come back to it. Do you see that black man over there – the one with the beard dyed orange? Well, take a half-solidus from your purse and give it to him. If we understood each other aright this morning, he will have smuggled in a whole skin of Syria’s finest. If you are nice to him, he should give you some of it. You can mix mine with an equal volume of snow from the mountains.’
I woke from my doze just as the light was fading. There was a slip of parchment beside the bed. The messenger who’d delivered it stood wordlessly and bowed. I took it up and peered at the gold writing. Black on the yellow parchment would have taxed me in that light. Gold was quite beyond me. I’d speak to the messenger in due course. I called him over with my stick, and got up with stiff weariness. At my age, there’s a limit to what massage can do. And I had strained myself in that pool. But the smell of charcoal from the glass furnace had reminded me of the works in progress. I hobbled expectantly out of the room and along the corridor.
In the large room beside my office – I noticed the books had now arrived, by the way, and were already out of their crates and arranged in the dark racks – the workmen were still hard at their jobs.
‘Let’s see how far we’ve got,’ I said in Syriac. I picked up the glass discs, each one about five inches in diameter, and held them to my face. I swapped them round, then was about to reverse them, when the bearded craftsman gently took them back and handed them over again in the right order. I held them an inch from my face and looked through them at the golden writing. I moved them closer and focused hard.
‘Excellent,’ I said softly. The man breathed a sigh of relief. I’d not been happy with his colleague’s explanation that glass as clear and hard as I’d directed would need to be specially made, and that I’d need, until then, to put up with a bluish tinge. Nor had I been impressed with the crumbling about the edges of his own first effort with his polishing tools. But they’d worked like maniacs while I slept, and the results were nearly as good as where I’d been forced to leave off in Constantinople.
‘I suggest you polish this left one a little thinner in the centre,’ I added. I raised my voice and spoke generally. ‘I am pleased, my dear friends, with the speed and accuracy of your work. Though what I want you have never before thought to attempt, you have followed my directions nearly to the letter. For tomorrow, I want the work repeated – this time with both discs a sixteenth of an inch thicker all over. We can then polish them down with less enthusiasm. For the moment, I am pleased with this first effort, and I want the discs set immediately in a gold framework with a long handle. I suggest you measure my face, so that the centre of each disc corresponds with the centre of each eye.’
The men bowed, and one reached for his measuring rod.
‘Isn’t civilisation a wonderful thing?’ I asked Edward. I sat down opposite him and reached for his wine cup. When I’d nodded off, he was lost in his game of chasing a ball down the winding ramps to the ground, and then running back up with it. Now, he appeared to have been sitting here for some while by the open window to observe the progress of my works. He gave me a sulky look. I pretended it was all a matter of the stolen cup. I pushed it back across the table, and stretched my still tired limbs. He’d retreated back into blankness. I leaned on clasped hands and looked at him. I’d still not tell him what we were about. But I could at least tell him what I was doing here and now.
‘According to Epicurus and his followers,’ I began slowly in Latin – English being wholly insufficient for the summary I had in mind – ‘every visible object is continually shedding its outermost layer of atoms. When these strike on the eye, they produce an impression of that object in the mind. That is the cause of what we call vision. If the eye is damaged, these impressions are produced imperfectly or not at all. It seems that the conscious focusing of the eye on an object is at best a minor adjustment. The basic perception depends on an unconscious focusing of the atoms from what may be a large or a distant object into the small part of the brain that deals with vision. In the
