‘His illness was, I am assured, one of excessive internal heat,’ Jacob said firmly. ‘It was brought on by a reaction to the excessive cold and wetness of his native land. That would explain why its like has never been known here in Africa. It also confirms that the illness had its roots in his native land.’
I nodded and gave a non-committal grunt. Jacob sighed and continued walking beside me in silence. I had completed five circuits of the garden, and, now rested from a long pause beside the fountain, had begun a sixth. The sun and the return of everyday normality had failed to lift my spirits. I might as well still have been sitting beside the deathbed.
‘It was the opinion of Aristotle himself, that dry heat-’ Jacob tried again.
I stopped at the mention of the hated name and scowled at him. ‘If he’d confined himself to literary criticism and pure logic chopping,’ I said coldly, ‘Aristotle might be more deserving of our respect. As it is, the man corrupted every natural science he touched. All knowledge of things, as opposed to the manipulation of ideas, begins with a rejection of Aristotle. I don’t believe that story about how the Saracens burned the library in Alexandria. But if they really did heat their baths with the collected works of that man, they surely made the world a more enlightened place.’ I looked at Jacob’s shocked face. For the first time that afternoon, I smiled. I untensed my shoulders and put a hand on his arm. He was trying to help. He was the son of a host who’d saved my life. I stepped forward again on our sixth circuit.
‘But, surely, My Lord Alaric,’ he said, keeping pace, ‘the Philosopher is the common heritage of all civilised men, regardless of origin or faith?’
‘Common curse, more like,’ I replied. Now less wintry, I smiled again. I meant what I’d said about the man’s writings. This being said, the story about Omar and the Alexandrian Library was quite untrue – I knew that much, as I’d been its first author. I smiled once more. Jacob had done his best by the boy. If that hadn’t been enough, it was no fault of Aristotle or of anyone else in particular. It was certainly no fault of Jacob’s. I looked up and breathed in the warm, scented air of an African spring. Since we’d hit on a subject that didn’t lead back to the deathbed, or some other matter we’d tacitly agreed not to discuss, I might as well carry on with the lecture.
‘Both our faiths,’ I said, ‘have incorporated the more acceptable teachings of Plato and Aristotle regarding the natural world. They have both decisively rejected the teachings of Epicurus. Since these teachings tend very strongly to atheism, it is a rejection that I can well understand. The teachings are, however, interesting in themselves.’ I stopped before the fountain again and looked at the splashing waters. Jacob said nothing. So far as I could, and without giving any impression of rudeness, I’d lead him away from the self-recriminations he was plainly seeking to escape.
‘It was a thousand years ago that he taught his doctrines in Athens,’ I went on. ‘He taught that the universe consists entirely of matter and void, and all matter is composed of atoms. These atoms are too small to be seen – they are all nearly infinitely small. Even so, they can be classed according to their differing sizes and shapes. They are all rushing infinitely fast through an infinite void. Because their motions are not uniform – indeed, their motions are in some degree indeterminate – they tend to collide. Because they are all hooked, their collision is able to produce the larger structures of the visible world.
‘Now, while nearly infinitely small, these atoms can be classed according to their different sizes and shapes. These may correspond to the fundamental materials of the visible world. All other materials are compounds of these atoms in differing variations.’
‘And the soul?’ Jacob asked.
I’d got him! Like one of those atomic swerves, I’d knocked him off course. And I’d keep him there.
‘What of God?’
‘The soul is composed of very small and highly indeterminate atoms,’ I explained. ‘Organised in the right structure, they are capable of conscious thought and the exercise of free choice. But, as with all other atomic structures, they eventually break down, and the individual atoms begin their rush over again through the void, until such time as they recombine into some entirely different soul.
‘There is no room in this scheme for any God. The atoms have always existed, and always will exist. No truly legitimate social order requires a divine sanction, but will emerge and be sustained through the enlightened self-interest of individuals. The only legitimate social order is one in which the lives and property of individuals are protected so they can pursue the happiness that is not merely the highest, but also the sole, purpose of life. Any law that constrains the actions of individuals is legitimate so far as it protects the equal rights of other individuals. No other laws are binding on the conscience, and may be disobeyed as individuals think appropriate.’
‘No God? No immortal souls? No Judgement? No obligation to obey beyond personal convenience?’ Jacob wondered. And wonder is all he did. He didn’t look even moderately angry – no denunciations of the satanic Apikorus, no defence of his own faith. It was as I’d expected. For the moment at least, I’d left Wilfred and the guilt we variously felt at his death upstairs with the corpse. I sat wearily on a bench placed before the fountain. Jacob snapped his fingers at a slave who’d put his head out into the garden, and called for wine and cakes.
‘None of those things,’ I answered. ‘Because death is the end of all things for us, we have no need to worry about what follows from it. Because there is no supernatural judgement, our only reasons for respecting the rights of others can be the sanction of our own consciences and fear of the law.’
‘And supposing I have no conscience?’ Jacob broke in, finally argumentative. ‘What is there then to stop me from murdering my elderly patients so I can inherit from them? What if the law is too defective to be feared?’
‘Nothing at all,’ I said with a smile. ‘Can you tell me that all the talk of divine punishment has rid the world of crime? And have there been no crimes prompted by religion itself?
‘But let us come back to how all this differs in its view of the material world from the mainstream opinion. Both our faiths – plus the new Desert Faith of the Saracens – place God at the centre of things. He creates our souls, and endows us with a physical world within which we can seek salvation. This being so, the purpose of knowledge is to understand the mind of God and the nature of the divine substance that underlies the accidental manifestations of the world about us. Therefore, all that happens can be explained in terms of specific acts of the Deity – or, at best, as a working out of secondary causes. Therefore, we populate the world with invisible spirits, sent here to do good or ill. Therefore, we command attention to the good spirits, and make laws against communion with the bad spirits who bring evil promptings and evil events.
‘However, does any of this correspond to the reality that we perceive with our natural senses?’ I continued with illustrations that might appeal to a Jew – of coins worn away by much handling, of bodily increases brought on by overeating, and the like. I ended with an explanation of how happiness can be enlarged by a study of the atoms and their combinations, and the turning of this study to our own advantage.
There – I’d come full circle. Now using his drugs as my example, I was discussing how the right combination of atoms could produce known and desired effects on the human body. And there would be no more of Aristotle of Stagira and his ludicrous talk of heat and cold and wet and dry as the fundamentals of existence. Sickness was a disordering of the bodily atoms. The purpose of drugs was to bring about a collision and mingling of atoms to reorder the body.
Jacob drank heavily of the very heavy wine. I took mine watered, and passed up the offer of more drops from the bottle he carried about with him. He looked steadily forward at the streams of water that shot into the air and cascaded back into the stone basin, each one now an individual, shining drop.
‘I regret that you must soon leave us,’ he said, speaking as if in a dream. ‘If I but close my eyes, I can see your atoms, rushing forward like grains of sand blown up by the desert wind. I really would hear you speak more of them. And I’d hear you speak also of your world without empires to tax and oppress, and without religions to divide us. Are there still writings on all this?’
I shrugged ruefully. In a lifetime of collecting, I’d managed to gather up just over half of the three hundred books the Master had produced. They’d been carefully repaired and arranged in my library in Constantinople. But all my property had been confiscated. Had the books found their way into some other library? Or had the ancient rolls been cut up so accounts could be kept on the blank side of the papyrus? Constantine surely wouldn’t have had them cast into the fire. The only thing he’d ever shown much interest in burning was people.
‘Has my father said that you have two places booked on the first spring sailing?’ Jacob asked. ‘It leaves the day after tomorrow.’
I hadn’t seen old Ezra since the previous evening. Whatever arrangements he’d made were of the present day. But Jacob was drifting into the sort of state where details of time were decreasingly important. I thought again of the boy laid out in the shuttered room upstairs just behind where we sat. I didn’t suppose Ezra had even gone through the motions of reserving a third place.
‘My father negotiated hard,’ he said. ‘You know he got you the best deal.’
I nodded. That was an unstudied ambiguity best not resolved. I should have thought here of the mysterious figure shut away in Ezra’s counting house. I found my thoughts pulled back to Wilfred. Jacob would get him buried in hallowed ground. In this heat, we’d surely have the funeral before the next dawn.
‘The world can be a shitty place,’ I said. I thought of many things, though chiefly my own guilt. Why had I never once in my life grieved for someone I loved without also feeling that I was in some way to blame? If there was an answer to that one, I made sure to drown it with a double mouthful of wine. ‘The world can be a right shitty place,’ I said again.
‘Never a truer word,’ Jacob sighed. He put aside any pretence of wine, and let a few drops from his bottle fall directly on to his tongue.
We might have sat there in the appearance of silent communion until the lengthening shadows had taken all colour from the flowers. But I could now see Edward. Visibly limp with exhaustion, he was creeping through a doorway that didn’t lead to our rooms. Exhausted or not, he could come and help me back inside. It was time for our discussion. I wouldn’t tell him everything I’d now pieced together. But there were still those decisions I’d mentioned. He’d have to make those.