You may often have heard it proclaimed that money doesn’t buy you happiness. I can understand that the rich have generally tried to impose, and the poor have too often taken comfort in, the belief that three meals a day, plus the chance of living past thirty-five, are to be pitied rather then envied. But I see no reason whatever for sharing the belief. Anyone who’d last seen poor, dirty old Brother Aelric brooding over a cup of beer in the cold wastes of Northumbria wouldn’t have recognised the frail but hearty grandee carried about the streets of Beirut. Indeed, so long as the sun wasn’t too close to the vertical, I was perfectly up to walking about the streets.
It was Friday, 26 April 687. I’d been here a month, and Jarrow was a fading dream. Its only active reminder came when Edward forgot himself and lapsed into English. The following day would be my ninety-seventh birthday – not a day I was planning to celebrate, or even mention to Edward. But the fact that I’d made it this far, in such good shape, and despite several thousand attempts during the better part of a century to keep me from living another day, was beginning no end to cheer me. If I could carry on like this till the full century, I’d have no reason to complain. Indeed, I had bugger all reason right now. The day had started well, and was growing progressively better.
Cup in hand, I was sitting in the back room of a bookshop just off the main square. The owner brushed more of the congealed papyrus dust from his face and bowed apologetically.
‘The problem is, My Lord,’ he said again, ‘that nobody wants any of this stuff nowadays. I think I’m the only one left who sells anything but Syriac and Saracen – and that’s my real business, you know.’
I ignored him and looked again at the walls, lined, as they were, with row upon row of crumbling leather volumes. I couldn’t see the parchment labels on the spines, which meant I could hope they were other than still more worthless discourses on the Nature of Christ. I breathed in slowly to feed the hope, and savoured a smell that had given me comfort since I was barely older than Edward. It wasn’t a pleasure he seemed inclined to share. Sitting on a low stool before me, he was trying, without much success, to wipe the brown dust from his hands. I breathed out and coughed, and waved at the crate that two sweating assistants had finally carried up from the basement.
‘That one,’ I said, pointing at one of the older and more stained rolls. ‘Remember that papyrus rolls aren’t like a modern book. Try not to break this one.’
Edward fumbled with the protective leather band. Once more, it was perished, and it came apart in his hands. I sniffed, but said nothing. He tugged on the protective outer sheet as if it had been a bale of cotton cloth.
‘Oh, give it here,’ I said, now with genuine impatience. ‘Let me show you again how to read in the ancient manner.’ I took the roll from him into my right hand. Holding it lightly in the middle, I pulled gently with my left hand on the outer sheet. As I rolled this neatly around the outer spindle of the book, I slowly let out more of the long papyrus strip with my right hand. ‘Look, Edward, the secret is to keep your arms at a fixed distance from each other and from your body. You then keep up a light tension: too much, and you’ll pull the gummed sheets apart, or break one; too little, and the sheet will buckle, and then you’ll have trouble reading the text.’ I unrolled the book all the way to the end. I then repeated myself in reverse. I gave the reclosed book back to Edward and watched as, clumsily, and with much swearing under his breath, he got it open again to the first two-inch column of text.
‘Come on, then,’ I encouraged. ‘You don’t expect me to bugger what’s left of my sight on that worn-out script.’ He screwed up his face into a vision of heroic concentration and read me the opening to the fourth volume of Simonides. I put up with his reading until he’d reached the end of the dedication to Hipparchus, then stopped him. ‘Have I not repeatedly told you,’ I sighed, ‘that proper Greek makes a distinction between long and short syllables? Forget what others may do, especially in Syria. Have you ever heard me fail to mark the distinction? It is exactly the same as in Latin – and perhaps still more important, bearing in mind the probable change of the accent since ancient times. Listen to me recite the piece, and try to follow the text as I go.’ I sat back and began on the long and graceful epigram I’d first read seventy-five years earlier in the University Library in Constantinople.
‘But, My Lord, if you already know the piece, why must I read it to you?’ Edward asked. For all he was trying, he couldn’t keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘You remember everything you’ve ever read, and you’ve read everything.’ I thought of explaining myself with a hard poke of my stick in his chest. But it wouldn’t have done in front of the bookseller. Sadly, Edward was in need of more explanation. ‘This Greek is even worse than Latin,’ he said, now with open annoyance. ‘It’s nothing like the language that people speak. Don’t they ever write anything except in a language last spoken thousands of years ago?’
‘ One thousand years ago,’ I corrected him with even menace. ‘The modern language has fallen away from its old perfection. But educated men try to keep both versions balanced yet separate in their minds. We, who come to both as outsiders, have an advantage here. Regardless of that, it is an effort worth making. What the Greeks achieved in their day of glory may not have been repeated. It is certainly not to be forgotten. Now, take up and read again. And do try, this time, to mark the distinctions of length.’
I was thinking of the great ode on the Panathenaic Festival that followed the one we’d just read, when I heard the first screams out in the street.
‘Dear me, what is that?’ I asked. ‘I really thought Beirut was too small for a riot.’
The bookseller’s face tightened, and he rubbed the papyrus dust from his hands with a dirty cloth. We listened to the rising volume of sound. It was a terrified screaming of women and adolescent boys. Among it all were manly bellows of rage, or perhaps also of fear. The bookseller ran into the front room of the shop and shouted at his assistants to get the stock inside and the shutters down. I pulled a face. This was a bloody nuisance. The day really had been going so well.
‘Help me upstairs, Edward,’ I commanded. ‘There’s a balcony from which we can look over the street.’
When we entered the shop, the street had been empty. The main square, though, had been crowded with Saracens and their local converts, all waiting to get into what had been the Church of Christ the Redeemer for the prayers of their holy day. The street was now a mass of running people.
‘Is that blood on those men?’ I asked, peering uncertainly at the rapidly moving blurs beneath where we stood.
Edward nodded. He took my arm and turned me to the right, in the direction of the mosque. We couldn’t see the entrance. It was plain, though, that the crowds were trying to get away from the place.
I shut my eyes and rubbed them. I looked harder – and I wondered how thick the shutters were of this shop. ‘Is that not a banner, hanging down,’ I asked now, ‘with a cross painted on it?’
Edward nodded again. ‘Can you see the men standing on the roof above the banner, waving severed heads?’ he asked.
Perhaps, if I’d looked harder, now I knew what was there, I’d have seen it all for myself. But the screaming grew suddenly more intense on our left. The crowds that had been running and pushing madly to get away were now jostling their way back towards the square.
‘Christ is my Saviour! My Saviour is Christ!’ came the repeated shout in Syriac. I saw the flash of steel about thirty yards along the street. I couldn’t see those who had the swords. But it wasn’t hard to work out what was happening. Soon enough, there would be the soft clatter of hooves on paving stones, as the Saracen guards made their way in to restore order. Any prisoners they took would come smartly enough out of their hashish fit once they felt the hooked gloves dragged through their flesh. In the meantime, it was bloody murder in the streets.
‘It’s people from the mountain tribes,’ I said, speaking partly to myself. ‘When there’s a war on, we smuggle weapons to them and small amounts of money. For the outlay involved, you can sometimes get a big return. During the last war, we staged a big attack in Damascus. We took out twelve of the Saracen religious leaders as they were working themselves up to lead the Faithful into battle against us. The Caliph had his ambassadors straight off to Constantinople with offers of a renewed tribute.
‘I don’t like this sort of thing myself. But it helps keep these people off the offensive. And, bearing in mind we can’t match the armies they have to throw at us, our entire strategy is one of asymmetric warfare. It’s a matter of sea power and of new weapons, and of terror attacks. You see, they rule over a mass of Christians in these territories – not all of them reconciled to the new order of things. Except for a few merchants we allow under licence, we’ve none of their people to worry about. We win – no, we avoid losing – by doing to them what they can’t do back to us.’
But I was speaking wholly to myself. An ecstatic look on his face, Edward was staring intently down at the slaughter a few yards beneath our feet. An old man was embracing a boy and trying to divert those slashing blows on to his own body. He might as well have been trying to keep the wind at bay. He gave a final horrified scream as another blow smashed in his rib cage, and he was pulled aside to expose the boy. I shut my eyes and tried not to hear the boy’s final cry. I opened them to look at the answering cry from some people in the balcony just across the narrow street. Even had it been wise to draw attention to ourselves, there was nothing any of us could do. Dressed in dark clothing that covered them head to foot, the killers were pressing forward into the main square. They left behind them piles of the fallen. Blood glistened on the paving stones. The groans of the dying, or just the gravely injured, were a sadness to hear. But to offer active assistance so soon would have risked suicide. Until those maniac, jerking figures were well into the square, no gate in the street would open, nor any shutters go up.
I looked into the square towards the mosque. There was now a column of black smoke rising up to the sky. A dull yellow in the sunshine, flames were already darting from the upper windows. There was still no sign of the authorities, and it was most likely the nutters themselves had set fire to the place. Oh, the Angels of the Lord had struck hard this day – and, through them, so had the Empire.
I looked again at Edward, I could see he’d have loved the Circus in Constantinople – though less, perhaps, for the chariot races than for the nastier punishments we inflicted between the races on captured barbarian raiders. As it was, he’d keep those whores busy, come the evening. Soon enough, I’d have another bill on my desk for the inevitable blacked eyes and lacerated flesh.
‘I think we’ve seen quite enough up here,’ I said, not hiding my disapproval. ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to keep Simonides waiting downstairs. His evocation of the boys proceeding naked through the streets of Athens has a charm even your reading is unlikely to abolish.’