‘I cannot begin to express the joy that His Majestic Holiness has brought me,’ I declaimed. ‘I cannot begin to express the love that your own goodness of heart has kindled within me.’ The Grand Eunuch simpered and looked at his fingernails. His main assistant went into a fit of polite giggles that he hid behind both hands. ‘One thing only I ask to make this the most perfect day of my entire life.’ I paused. He leaned forward, ready to anticipate my smallest wish. ‘I beseech you to send into my presence – tomorrow morning, if possible – three of the finest glassmakers in Damascus, together with three of the finest shapers and polishers of precious stones.’
The Grand Eunuch now looked puzzled. But after all that bleating about hospitality, it wouldn’t have done even to ask a question. He turned to the smallest of his assistants, who took out a waxed tablet and scratched importantly away.
‘Do ask them to bring their tools,’ I added, ‘and do ensure that they are men of good general intelligence.’
Chapter 35
I splashed happily in the sun-heated pool. Once again, I wriggled free of the anxious slaves, who’d doubtless been charged, on loss of their lives, not to let an old man drown his silly self. I came up coughing and spluttering a few feet from the edge where Edward glowered down at me. I’d avoided him the night before by ordering him off to an early bed, and then withdrawing into my office with a clerk and a technical draughtsman to take my various dictations. Now, unless I wanted to spend all morning swimming up and down or playing water ball with the slaves, there was no avoiding him.
‘Don’t bother me with questions,’ I said firmly in English. ‘Either I can’t answer them, or I won’t.’ He hadn’t liked being shut into a gilded birdcage. But it was those teeth of mine – white and glittering in the afternoon sun – 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.’