‘With that he whistled and there came not a black horse and not a white one but a dappled grey stallion. Such a horse, a horse of dreams, that one! Almost I wanted to go with Death at that very moment just to feel that horse under me. With a whoop he leapt to the stallion’s back and galloped away like a thunderbolt, what a man! It struck me suddenly, there’s no one more alive than Death; how could there be, he’ll outlive us all!
‘From that moment I called myself Bembel Rudzuk so that I should never forget the bembelish and rudzukal nature of the universe and whose child I was.
‘When I came down from the rocks I found the robbers’ horses tied to a thornbush and with them was the one I had ridden to the rocks. She was one of those clever little mares that can go all day and never miss her footing anywhere, I had her for years after that, she always reminded me of that ride. What a day that was!
‘I found the camels all grazing where the robbers had attacked us and grazing with them were the other horses, both the robbers’ and ours. Two of the horses had been killed but that still left me with four horses more than we had started the day with, and of course the six robber horses were all first-class, much better than ours; robbers can’t afford to ride rubbish.
‘Even better than the horses was what I found in the robbers’ saddlebags: two thousand and forty-two dinars! I couldn’t believe it — all that gold and still they went on trying for more! I suppose they were for ever unsatisfied and that’s why they had to be robbers.
‘I rode back to the rocks and collected the four dead robbers there then I loaded all six robbers and my dead colleagues and the camel-drivers on to the horses and continued on my way to Tripoli with the carpets we had bought in Tabriz. On my return all the dead were buried with the proper observances. We did well in the market and altogether my employers were well pleased with me. As I had been travelling for them when I acquired the robbers’ treasure I offered to share it equally with them but they refused to take so much as a single dinar. They wanted to make me a partner but I preferred to set up in business for myself under my new name and I came to Antioch to do it. I had always liked the look of the place, particularly the look of Mount Silpius in the dawn, and I had heard that long ago there was a statue of the Goddess of Luck here. I’ve never found the place where the statue used to be but I’ve always been as lucky as I needed to be.
‘I have had a good life, I have spent my time as I wanted to spend it, and although I have never grown wise I have through trial and error come closer and closer to Thing-in-Itself, so that when my time comes I expect I shan’t have too much of a jump to make from this state to the next one. I can understand your present bitterness and your regret that you have stayed so long in Antioch but for me what we have done with Hidden Lion was time as well spent as time ever is. To me it seems that the best we can hope for in life is honesty of error; more than that is not to be expected. Sometimes we can see what is wrong action but that doesn’t make everything other than that right action. I have said enough; I have lived enough. I do not forget whose child I am and I am ready to go when called.’
‘You say that Bruder Pförtner has spoken to you,’ I said. ‘Have you also seen your young death?’
‘I have seen only Pförtner,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘on his dappled stallion: that for me is the sign. I have seen him and spoken with him many times since that first time forty years ago but never until this morning has he ridden that particular horse again; it has been understood between us that the horse would be the sign.’
‘I wonder how it is that you also have travelled to the fall of Jerusalem and seen Sophia and my son,’ I said.
‘You have a woman and a child to love,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘I have only you and I have been eating the scraps from your table.’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Whenever I think that I have seen the boundaries of my stupidity there suddenly open up new territories before me.’
We both looked across the tiles to where Bruder Pförtner and his generals were. He was now strutting back and forth and making some kind of oration. The sky had become dull and grey. Silpius was intensified in the greyness, became the mountain wholly strange and never to be known, the mountain showing the traveller from afar how far he had come to find that nothing whatever could be known about anything at all. The nakedness of dead Sophia was as if printed on my eyes; I looked through it at the mountain as one looks through a transparent figured curtain. The watchful face of our son was as big as the world.
‘We must do what we can,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. We looked at each other and the images printed on my eyes seemed to double in intensity.
‘Are they in your eyes also, Sophia and my son?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, I can’t help it.’
‘We’ll try together then to leave Antioch?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we must at least try.’
‘Ought we to warn anyone before we go?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Those who had in mind to leave have already gone and I don’t think that the others will be moved to act on what we have seen in our night journey. What is more likely is that we shall be taken for spies.’
We went back to the house and armed and provisioned ourselves. We were going to make the attempt on foot — in the present circumstances it was our best chance of going unseen and unheard and acting as the moment required. With a bag and a bow slung on my shoulder, with a quiver of arrows on one side and Firouz’s sword on the other I paused to look at the fountain in the courtyard and to listen to the plashing of the silvery water, thirsting for it with my eyes.
When we came out into the street the very air seemed strange, apocalyptic. I doubted my own reality, I was surprised to hear footfalls and voices around me, surprised to smell the hot and pungent smells of every day. I waited for the earth to shake but it did not, I expected everyone to stare open-mouthed at us but they did not, then I thought that perhaps we might be invisible to them and I wanted to shout but I did not.
The walls were manned as fully as possible now night and day and there were always sentries at all of the gates. We dared not wait for the darkness and the chance of going over the wall with a rope — not only were there our own sentries to avoid but we both had no doubt whatever that the Franks would also be waiting for the darkness of this night to come over those same walls into Antioch. We had no plan beyond getting out of Antioch; if we were able to do that we should consider what to do next.
We headed for the Iron Gate east of the Citadel where in the winter Onopniktes entered its channel. It was by way of that cleft in the mountain that many people now went to forage and we hoped not to be noticed there. This day, however, was not like other days: on this day Firouz was at the Iron Gate with the soldiers of the guard.
Only a few moments ago I had felt as if we might be invisible but now suddenly it was as if all the crowded space around us became blank and empty and in the whole world only we were to be seen. Firouz was pacing back and forth with his turning walk. The sky had gone grey and the shadow that turned and twisted with him was dull and blurred. He had seen us approaching, and for us to turn away now would invite more trouble than to continue towards the gate.
There swept over me a wave of irritation: I was annoyed with everything and everybody, even with Sophia and my little son that they had come thus at the eleventh hour to interfere with the smooth and orderly winding-up of my affairs. My being was grating on this day as the teeth grate on a stone in the bread. In my heart and soul I knew it to be my last day; I knew that the stones of my little history and the world’s great one were fitted together so precisely by cause and held in place so firmly by effect that the feeble knifeblade of my too-late good intention could not even find a crack between them let alone pry them apart. And it was in this state of mind that I stood before Firouz on the morning of the first of Tammuz in the Christian year of 1098.