You may assume, dear Reader, that opium, like wine, tends to incapacitate those who use it to the full. If so, you are wrong. It does stupefy – but only when stupefaction is desired. One sound of that heavy, collective tramping on the stairs, and Jacob was straight out of his chair and running about. I was, you can be sure, a little slower. But, once I’d realised the young man was no part of my hallucination, the blotting out of all the aches and strains of the past few days allowed me to get with surprising speed and resolution into the medical contagion robe and then on to my knees before the sleeping body of Wilfred.
‘This is a room for the dying,’ Jacob snarled as the door flew open again. ‘I will not have my patient disturbed.’ He fell silent while perhaps a half dozen pairs of feet tramped in and came to a disciplined halt a couple of yards behind me. Hoping I’d pulled my hood on properly, I kept my hands, palms upward, in the praying position. In a low mutter, I intoned as much as I could recall of the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. The silence, and now the stillness, behind me seemed to last an infinity. Then I heard a faint sound of leather soles on the wooden boards. There was another loud scraping as the men already there pulled themselves up to attention.
‘What is your patient’s condition?’ a voice asked in Latin.
I froze. It was all the effort I could manage to keep my upstretched arms from shaking. I’d have needed as much opium as Jacob had downed to keep calm. Even with the few drops I’d taken, I found myself wondering if this was another delusion. But I was fully with it, and that voice – in Latin or Greek or Syriac, or in English – I’d have recognised anywhere. I felt rather than heard Joseph come and stand behind me. He peered over at the shrivelled, sleeping boy. To be sure, Wilfred had changed radically since Jarrow. But the wispy blond hair said anything but Jewish. Even in the gloom of the dying lamps, it would take a miracle for him not to be recognised. But Jacob was now beside him.
‘It’s a new contagion that killed both his parents the day before yesterday,’ he said with professional firmness of tone. ‘I doubt he will last beyond tomorrow morning. The medical arts are exhausted on him. Prayer is all that remains.’
There was another long silence. I heard only the gentle scraping of military boots as the other men in the room removed themselves as far as possible from the vicinity of a sickness that might somehow communicate itself across the few yards that separated them from the dying boy. Joseph stayed put. I felt his long stare into the uncovered face.
‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,’ I droned on in Hebrew, trying not to shake; ‘yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ If Joseph was Syrian – correction, since Joseph knew enough Syriac to pass for Syrian, he might understand enough Hebrew to know this wasn’t a valid prayer of the Jews. I dropped my voice lower still.
‘You will be aware,’ Joseph said, speaking soft and to no one in particular, ‘of the reason for our visit. The traitor whose name I hardly need mention is said to have landed on the African shore – here to raise disaffection against the God-anointed Augustus. The orders are that he is to be killed on sight. He is to be killed on sight – he or anyone who resembles him. For his head, the reward is its weight in gold. For any mistaken identity, the promise is full civil and criminal impunity. Against those who harbour the traitor the full penalties of treason are threatened.
‘There is a report that a man matching the traitor’s description was seen to enter the Jewish district. Have you anything to add in light of this information?’
It was no longer the relaxed, frequently bored, voice I’d known every day for months and months in Jarrow. The fellow spirit – the refuge from the chattering fools – I’d so often sought out in the monastery was no longer the Joseph who stood behind me, looking down at Wilfred with an incomprehensible lack of recognition. This was a man of obvious power within the Imperial Secret Service. Though terrified by what Jacob had told them, his military support didn’t dare do as nature prompted and flee that room of possible contagion.
‘I assure you that no traitor is harboured within this house,’ Jacob said quietly. He leaned over me to adjust the blanket. Not realising that the boy had sat every day at the front of Joseph’s class – and in every lesson had earned his grudging praise – Jacob pulled the blanket down, exposing more of the ravaged body to view.
‘Dead?’ Joseph asked. ‘He’ll soon be dead?’
Jacob pointed at the mottling that had now come out all over the boy’s chest like barbarian tattoos.
‘Well, death in one so young is always to be regretted. The Empire makes no war on children.’ It was hard to judge the tone of his voice. But he took a step backwards.
‘Your father tells me that he has an immunity from the Prefect against entry and search,’ he said in a less ambiguous tone. ‘As you know, this means nothing where reason of state is concerned. However, I am satisfied that there is nothing in this house to take up more of my attention. I will only repeat that there is no safety within the Empire for the traitor we seek. Wherever he may fly, we will follow. Wherever he may hide, we will find him. For him, there will be no second trial – no appeal to the uncertain mercy of Caesar. His friends in the Capital are dead or scattered. His technical skills are no longer required. His sentence was pronounced on the first discovery of his treason. All that remains is for sentence to be executed.’ He turned and walked from the room. With a renewed clatter of boots on wood, the soldiers followed.
I continued in my place, hands upstretched to Heaven, listening to the increasingly faint tramp of boots and the shouting of orders. Only when the outer gate slammed shut, and the house fell into a deep silence, did I let myself drop forward to rest on the little cot. I felt Jacob’s hands close around my chest. He pulled me to my feet and guided me back to the chair. He refilled the cup and held it to my lips. Nothing in it now but wine, I drained the contents with a single, chattering gulp.
‘That was a close one,’ Jacob said with a ghastly smile. ‘Still, I think we managed to deceive a pretty senior Greek.’ He relaxed and sat heavily in his own chair.
I didn’t feel up to explaining what had happened. I didn’t know what had happened. My hands and wrists on full view – Wilfred stretched out before him – and Joseph had contented himself with an oddly helpful warning before going off again into the night. I’d need to think a good deal harder than I’d yet managed before I could tell even myself what was happening. If only I’d been able to tell myself this was another product of the opium. But it wasn’t. Joseph really had stood behind me.
‘Tell me, Jacob,’ I asked once my voice was reliably in order. ‘Tell me what was that Greek official wearing?’
Black with a hat that may have had a purple trimming, came the answer – the light made colours hard to tell. I nodded. I knew it was purple. I’d helped choose the design when, after the death of the tyrant Phocas, Heraclius had put me in charge of reordering the Intelligence Bureau. Over the three generations that followed, abuses had crept into my original scheme. One of the most annoying of these had been the custom for everyone to put on the uniform of the grade immediately above. But, even assuming he’d been dressed two or three grades above his own position, there was no doubting that Joseph was at least – to use the Latin title – a Magister Scholarum. He was, that is, one of the departmental heads of the External Ministry. No wonder he’d been close enough to see my every move on the walls of Constantinople as I’d unleashed that irresistible tide of destruction on the Saracen fleets. Not for him to risk it in the killing zones I’d created.
And he’d been sent all the way to Jarrow to watch me. Every day for months, he’d been my chosen companion. And I’d never once suspected he could be other than just another refugee from the world of civilisation. Perhaps age had caught up with me. Alaric in his prime would never have been taken in as old Brother Aelric had been.
‘Moses and all the prophets!’ Ezra cried as he bustled into the room. He looked at Wilfred and dropped his voice. ‘We certainly deceived the Empire then. The tax collectors were nothing compared with this!’ Beneath his tone of relieved cheerfulness, there was something more complex. I looked closely at him. He turned away.
‘Where is Edward?’ I asked to change the subject. If Joseph had, for his own reasons, overlooked me and Wilfred, his men would have spotted those northern looks in less than a single heartbeat. Even if, after a few centuries, the remaining Vandal blood in Africa hadn’t been darkened by local mixture, there would still have been the obvious question of what he was doing in a company of Jews. But he’d been spirited straight off, Ezra assured me, into the women’s quarters. He’d be safe enough there. I nodded, trying to ignore the obvious further question about his safety there. It was enough for the moment that the Empire, in a majesty that no one else had been able to notice, had come into the house, and had gone out again.
‘It would be for the best if we left this house as soon as possible,’ I said. As one, all three of us turned and looked at Wilfred. His lips had now drawn back in a snarl that it required no doctor to interpret. Sooner than I’d expected, the shock of the search was wearing away the delicious yet conscious oblivion of the opium, and I could feel the return of guilt. The more I speculated on the meaning of this approaching death, the more crushing the burden of guilt became.
‘We’re safe enough for the moment,’ Jacob assured me.
And, if what judgement I’d so far been able to make was correct, he was right to a degree he’d never understand. Yes, we were safe for the moment.
Jacob took up his half-empty measure. ‘No one will disturb us more this evening. And I do assure you, the boy will continue at least till morning. If there is any change, I will wake you. For now, I will, as your physician for the day, prescribe for a peaceful night.’