west, and taking your religion with you.’
‘I never thought religion mattered so much to you,’ Meekal replied with icy control. He got up and went to the window. He looked out for a long time, then turned back to face me. ‘If I could persuade you that an age would come when no one even believed in God, you’d jump out of that bed and dance about the room.’ He returned to my bedside and stretched out his hands. ‘Now, stop playing the old fool with me,’ he said. ‘Get out of bed and come over here.’ I took his hands and pulled myself up. He draped a sheet about me and helped me as, with much grunting and creaking, I walked slowly over to the window, and stood in a shaft of the warm afternoon sunshine. He helped fix my dotted visor in place and waved at the skyline of Damascus.
It was like seeing through a mesh grating, and the uneven glass of the window made things more confusing. Everything was broken up into blocks. Some of these were repeated. Most didn’t fit together into a continuous whole. But this was the first time I’d really tried my invention; the brief inspections at dusk the previous day hardly counted. In time, I had no doubt, the ordinary eye could adjust. Even now, though, the invention worked. For the first time, I could see Damascus as other than a vague blur. I stared over the low huddle of mostly flat roofs – with a few splashes of dark red tiles – to the main buildings of the centre. And, through the thin clouds of dust and of wood smoke, I could see the line of the outer wall, and over that to the brown bleakness of the mountains beyond. All could be seen with astonishing, if discontinuous sharpness. But Meekal now had me by the shoulders, and was directing me to the sights in and about the centre.
‘Do you see that squat building over there with the roof of green copper?’ he asked. ‘That is the Spice Market. It was built by Muawiya for the reception and sale of goods brought from the outermost limits of China. Can you see the building just to the left – the one with the blue dome? That is where silk from the Empire is worked into cloth of gold and exported to the Faithful in Scythia. I can show you banks and factories. I can show you mosques and churches and synagogues. I can show you crowded markets and camel trains a mile long. Our empire is one of trade and toleration. No one asks what another man believes. The only question anyone thinks it worth asking is whether a man is solvent. Everything you preached for seventy years in Constantinople about low taxes and toleration is a reality in the domains of the Caliph.’
It was a good speech. Its effect might have been improved had there not been columns of smoke rising above two of the biggest churches in the city. But there was no point in mentioning these. Already, he was clutching at me again and jabbering hard.
‘Alaric – Alaric, turn about and compare yourself with me.’ He stood back and spread his arms. ‘I came here as a renegade Greek. I might have been a baseless criminal on the run. I might have been a spy. Yet, by the repetition of one sentence and the loss of a foreskin, I became the free and equal companion even of those whose fathers had known the Prophet. How long were you in the Empire? What repeated services did you render it? How often did you save it from its own drivelling senility? Was there ever a moment when the very trash in the streets didn’t sneer at your barbarian origins?
‘Yes, I want the secret of that Greek fire so we can try once more to take Constantinople. But we don’t want Constantinople as another Alexandria or Ctesiphon, as yet another provincial city. We want it as the capital of a renewed world empire – an empire combining the discipline and regularity of the Greek mind with the enthusiasm and nobility of our Desert Faith. All is ready for us to step into the shoes of Caesar. And, yes, we do bring a new religion. But hasn’t the Empire changed religion once already? The turn to Christianity was much more of a break than we offer. That was the destruction of polytheism by an Eastern mystery cult. What we offer is a purified worship of the One God, in which Christ continues to be honoured, but not as some quasi-divinity that requires all the resources of Greek philosophy to explain.
‘Join us, Alaric. Renew the Empire. Free the world. You have been pulled out of retirement for one final achievement. Let that achievement be the creation of a free and prosperous world ruled by the caliphs of Constantinople. Surely, you can see how God has sent you here to be our Sword of Damascus?’
I watched Meekal work himself into another frenzy of eloquence. As his voice rose, and he switched between Greek and Latin and Saracen, I shuffled carefully round to where I could flop back on to the sofa beside that discarded chronicle. I looked at Meekal and pulled off my dotted visor. It showed me too many copies, in too great clarity, of the roots of his dyed beard and the increasingly wild look in his eyes.
‘Oh, please, Meekal, please!’ I cried, holding up my hands for silence. ‘You’ve made your speech. Don’t spoil the effect with repetition. You tell me that, if only I join you in shitting on the Empire, we’ll have a better world out of it. If that’s your meaning, I think I’ve heard enough. You might care now to say what I can expect from a refusal to join you in this venture. Does it involve an escort back to my lodgings in Beirut?’
That brought him back to his senses. ‘Refuse my offer,’ he said, his face pushed close to mine, ‘and I’ll kill you with my own hands. I’ll kill you as an apostate.’ He spoke slowly and with controlled fury. ‘And, before you start whining that life is nothing much to lose for a man of your age, just reflect that I know you better than any man alive. And let’s not also forget my pretty young uncle. I might – given proper reason – choose to regard him as my kinsman, and share with him under your will. Or I might spurn him as your last barbarian catamite. I could then find him a place among the Caliph’s dancing boys. Or I could have his looks prolonged with a little nip of the gelding knife, and set him to combing hair in my own harem. I might even have him taught to sing most fetchingly to my wives.
‘So, what is it to be, my darling grandfather? Will you join with the Faithful in spreading light over the world? Or will you die cursing the day my agents found your refuge in the West?’
‘My time is upon me,’ I said. ‘In other words, I need a shit. Will you have the kindness to call some slaves up to attend to me?’ I grinned and rubbed my belly. ‘Or must Meekal the Merciless soil his hands with other than blood?’
Chapter 46
‘You’ll need to push your finger in to get me properly clean,’ I said, still leaning forward. ‘Mind you, be very careful. I didn’t like the look of those fingernails.’
Grunting and now farting himself from the strain, Meekal reached down to open the valve that sent a stream of water to carry my little offering into the downpipe from the Tower of Heavenly Peace. The shitty stain in the channel beneath the ebony seat he’d leave for someone else to clean.
‘Ooh!’ I cried in a voice that echoed about the room, ‘you’ve a way with that oily sponge. What a bath slave the world lost when I rescued your father from outside that church in Constantinople.’ I twisted round to look up into the stony face, and wondered if he was reflecting on the deficiencies of my argument. It was hard to tell if he was thinking anything at all.
Meekal helped me into one of the smaller sitting rooms. This looked over one of the less grand prospects of Damascus. But there was a table set with food. He took off the napkin that covered a dish of bread pulled from the inner part of a loaf, and waved at a dish of pitted olives and soft cheese. He went back along to my bedchamber and returned with the wine and the Saracen chronicle. I pulled my dotted visor down again over my eyes and looked through it. With plenty of sunlight falling on it from above, the chronicle was so clear before me that I could see small strands of papyrus where the copyist’s pen had snagged the sheet. I scrolled idly backwards, looking out for the passage where Meekal had first stood before the Caliph and called out in a great voice his profession of faith. Perhaps, after all, the writer had the makings of an historian. I looked up and smiled into the sweaty, now desperate face.
‘Look at this again,’ I said, holding out the visor. ‘Take it and look at it closely. When you snatched it from the hands of the man who was still finishing its ornamentation, you saw almost at once what its purpose was. And if you couldn’t by yourself reproduce the elegant workmanship that lets it balance so lightly on the face, you could easily make a functioning copy for yourself.
‘With the weapon I invented, it’s an entirely different matter. The combustible mixture itself is made of specific ingredients that must be combined in exactly the right proportions. It must then be matured like wine – use it too early or too late, and it will not ignite. There is then what may be called the delivery system. The bronze kettles that hold the two mixtures – yes, there are two mixtures – must be of a certain hardness. The fire that heats the kettles must do so to a precise temperature: too low, and the mixture will not boil, too high, and it will explode. The spouts through which the mixtures are forced must, for the same reason, be neither too wide nor too
