slaves to be completed.
‘You know we can take no chances,’ Meekal said as he joined me in the shade. ‘Only the day before yesterday, someone tried to lie his way in as a supply carrier. Fortunately, we already knew the man he was impersonating had died in one of the previous attacks. I had tight cords put round his knees and elbows, and then watched while the limbs below were sawn off. You’ll be pleased to hear it was a completely successful experiment. He lived. Indeed, he sobbed most affectingly when he saw his limbs heaped before him. Unless he’s died of thirst in the meantime, I might show him to my dear young uncle.’
‘I didn’t know the boys were allowed inside the walls,’ I said, cutting off the leer.
‘I rejoice in your retention of all your faculties,’ came the reply. I got an ironic bow. ‘As it happens, I have decided to exclude them. They’ll have to wait outside with the guards. Now we’ve tightened the security again, even the Commander of the Faithful will need to prove identity and then right to enter.’ I pricked up my ears at the use of the indicative future. Meekal noticed and smiled. ‘Oh, yes,’ he whispered, ‘Abd al-Malik will be putting in an appearance within, I think, the next ten days.’
‘His Majestic Holiness has, I suppose, been victorious in the civil war?’ I asked with polite irony of my own. I watched as my carrying slaves put their skimpy loincloths back on. In a moment, the gates would swing shut, and the guards would go back to their paranoid inspection of all about the walls.
‘The Caliph is always victorious,’ Meekal answered without irony.
‘But don’t you find it rather hurtful,’ I asked again, ‘that you weren’t beside him? Isn’t it a little odd that you’re thought good enough for smashing up the lesser breeds to the East, but not for turning on other Saracens – on real Saracens, that is?’
I’d got the bastard there. His face went white with anger, and his hands shook as he refastened my cloak. He began some stammered excuse about his duties in Damascus. But now the gates did swing shut, and we were sealed within what had, before the Saracen conquest, been the Monastery of Saint Theodore the Uneating.
The monastery buildings themselves had been mostly demolished, leaving plenty of space within the high surrounding wall. This had now been separated by new walls into four separate zones, each with its own solid gate and its own complement of silent guards. The first of these zones was just inside the main gate. Here were the living quarters of the workmen and the administrative buildings. We were met by Silas, a Syrian with the usual dark beard. He was the site manager, with overall control of the project in my own absence. If he too was kept in the dark about how everything done there fitted together, he was, I suppose, the nearest I had to an assistant. He bowed low before us, and – just to show he was doing his job – spent a longish time looking at our passes and entering our details in the relevant ledger that one of his secretaries had brought forth from his office.
‘I want to begin with the preparation vats,’ I said.
He bowed again, and led us through the huddle of low buildings and piles of material that filled up much of this first zone. As he unlocked the gate, his secretary made another entry in the ledger and presented this for my inspection and Meekal’s, and then our countersignatures. We now had to wait again in the increasingly pitiless sun as my carrying slaves were all blindfolded. Silas himself would guide the head carrier through the next stages of the visit.
We passed through into an almost empty expanse of packed sand. In the middle was a high building, though of one storey, about the size and shape of a steam room in the house of a rich man. Of new brickwork – most of one wall of very new brickwork – this was secured by another stout door. We crossed the thirty yards of open ground and paused at the door.
‘My Lords have their keys ready?’ Silas asked. We nodded. He’d left his secretary on the other side of the gate, and so had carried the ledger himself. He now opened this and made yet another of his entries. Meekal walked round the whole outside of the building, and made a close inspection of the door and its locks. He nodded to me and signed again. I countersigned, and watched as Silas recorded that I had made no inspection of my own. I then reached inside my tunic and pulled out the large iron key that was fastened to a golden chain about my neck. I held this up for the other two men to see. They produced their own keys. With a ‘May it please your Lordship’ from Silas, I climbed from the chair and put my key into the first lock. Silas and Meekal put in their own. I gave the signal, and we pushed in hard and pulled out again. My hands shook slightly from all the beer I’d downed on the journey, and I missed the elaborate mechanism behind the key plates. We all took our keys back out and prepared to repeat ourselves. On the next attempt, we all hit the right spot together, and, with a slithering of bolts, the lock contracted within itself. Silas waved us back. He put a cloth over his nose and mouth, and pulled the door open. I turned away and held my breath as I smelled the noxious fumes. I walked carefully away from the door and listened to the rhythmical fall and rise of the bellows that Silas was working inside to replace all the air. At last, he was done. Now without his protective cloth, he stood in the doorway. He’d already unshuttered the window, and enough light was coming through the narrow iron grille to let us see what was within once our eyes were adjusted.
Chapter 55
‘But it’s moving by itself,’ Meekal said in Greek once Silas had withdrawn to the far wall of the compound and we’d unlocked the wooden cover that hid the vats from inspection by anyone else. ‘It’s as if some invisible spirit were stirring the liquid.’
I looked at the seething mass within the first of the three-hundred-gallon containers. Except for the dark, oily sheen, it looked like nothing so much as beer in its first couple of days after brewing. Taking care not to breathe in while I leaned over it, I cautiously pushed in one of the wooden stirring rods. The disturbance set the mixture into a frenzy of bubbling and plopping. I drew the wooden shaft out, and noted how it smoked as if it had just been inside a furnace.
‘How often must I tell you, my darling little grandson, that there are no invisible beings at work around us?’ I asked in a resigned tone. ‘There are no conscious forces beyond our own. Everything that happens has a natural explanation. It is by understanding the world that we can control it. Oh, you can disagree, but that’s how it is. Denounce me as an atheist if you want – but I know you wouldn’t dare. Whatever the general case, though, be assured the whole process now before you is a natural phenomenon. It’s a matter of breaking down common substances into their constituent atoms, and then recombining these into one new substance that does not of itself exist in nature. The seething shows that the breaking down is complete, but that the recombination has a few days to go yet before the new substance is stable. I have given you a full verbal description of the process. There will also be written instructions when we are sure that this attempt is a success.’
‘And it will be a success this time?’ Meekal asked. His voice had taken on that pleading tone again.
I thought of sneering about his need to impress the Caliph when the man came to see what had been achieved with such horrifying amounts of his cash. Instead, I shrugged.
‘The problem,’ I explained, ‘is that the oil seeping from the ground in Syria is of a different kind from that along the Empire’s Black Sea coast. It’s much thinner and much lighter. This means we can cut out many of the refining processes. At the same time, the results are more volatile. We haven’t lost this batch yet to spontaneous combustion. I don’t think we shall. It remains to be seen, however, whether it can be made to explode in a predictable manner when combined with the combustant.’ I prodded him with my stick as he reached forward to dip a finger into the vat. ‘If you’re willing to give up fourteen days of work, you might get some entertainment from this in one of your public executions. I really wouldn’t let that stuff on my own skin.’ He pulled his hand back and laughed. I climbed carefully down my own stepladder and followed him along the line of other vats. These we didn’t bother unlocking. With my hearing trumpet in my good ear, I simply listened for the sound of what is best described as fermentation. If each had been slightly varied in ways that only I as yet knew, all but one sounded at roughly the same stage of completion.
‘In this one,’ I said as Meekal got the cover open, ‘I more than doubled the amount of resin. It may be that this will start up again in the next few days. But I think I’ve worked out how to damp the process without entirely smothering it.’ I leaned on the rim of the earthenware vat. As I’d expected, it was warm to the touch. The basics of all this could be explained in terms of Epicurean physics. Even so, I still couldn’t reconcile the details. A thousand years before, the Master had obviously found the right path to understanding the nature of things. But he really had taken only the first few steps along what I’d learned for myself was a very long path. A shame he himself had intended his physics as nothing more than a support for his ethical teachings. Where might a whole thousand years
