White and solid in the sunshine, the walls of Damascus loomed before us. I leaned forward and tapped the shoulders of the head bearer. When he turned, I motioned him to line up my chair beside Edward’s. His mouth slightly open, he was already taking in the scale of the wealth and power of this new Imperial capital. And it was an impressive sight. Apart from the obvious defence, one of the things you buy from fortification architects is that sense of awe that is in itself a form of defence. I wondered if Edward had even seen the three plumes of smoke drifting upwards from a hundred yards or so inside the gate we were approaching. Probably, he hadn’t.
‘I was last here just after the Persian collapse,’ I said, breaking a long silence that had followed a protracted round of questions about what magnificence might lie within those walls. ‘It was a sorry place back then. The Persians had thrown down its walls. They’d even carried off all the able-bodied inhabitants to repopulate their capital Ctesiphon. The only undamaged buildings amid the silent ruins of what had been an immense metropolis was the big Church of Saint John the Baptist. I spent a day here. Even without the summons to Jerusalem, that was quite sufficient for me.’
‘What happened to the Persians?’ Edward asked. ‘Where did they go?’
‘The short answer, my dear, is nowhere,’ I said. This was the end of our three-day journey from Beirut – and most interesting it had been for anyone seeking a general view of how Syria had fared under the caliphs. But I pulled myself properly back into the past. ‘On and off, we’d been at war with the Persians for centuries. Usually, we were stronger – sometimes they. But the quiet understanding was that neither side would push too hard. We both had our barbarian problems. Then, about ninety years ago, we drifted into a big war. Internal weakness – plus incompetence at the top – brought on a collapse of our defences. Before we could regroup, they’d taken Syria and Egypt and Asia Minor, and were even knocking on the gates of Constantinople.
‘At last, I got together with Sergius – he was the Greek Patriarch at the time – and we forced that useless slob Heraclius off his arse and into the field. While I handled the politics and money, and his generals did the fighting, he jogged along in front of some ridiculously small armies that shattered the Persians. We ignored trying to retake anything we’d lost. Instead, we struck deep into Persia. Everything sent against us we annihilated. We took Ctesiphon, and then stood back while the Persians fell apart in civil war. The peace we made with the winners of that civil war was quite generous, so far as we made no new territorial demands. Though we could have demanded more, all I specified was the old borders. But it was the end of our only serious threat.’ I broke off and pulled myself back into the present as Karim’s chair came suddenly alongside.
‘Am I right to assume,’ he asked in Greek, ‘that you have been telling your young companion in the Latin tongue of the glories the Caliph has directed within these walls?’ I smiled and nodded. ‘Then let it be known,’ he said, raising his voice and sitting up to look straight at Edward, ‘that this queen of cities now holds four hundred thousand people. It has twelve thousand baths. The churches of the Cross Worshippers that His Majestic Holiness, Commander of the Faithful, has allowed to be repaired are without number. The Great Mosque he has commanded to be built is already grander than anything outside the two holy cities of our homeland.’ He prosed on about what struck me – a man of the one truly great City of the world – as the decidedly provincial glories of Damascus.
Before he could run out of superlatives, though, some runtish creature in an expensive robe hurried out of the gate and over the last hundred yards of the road that led from Damascus. There was a whispered conversation. Then Karim’s brown face turned several shades darker. He opened and shut his mouth, and looked desperately round for guidance. The runtish creature whispered again, now pointing at the paved road that led round the outside of the whole city.
‘I am advised that the minor gate through which we were supposed to proceed has been deemed unfitting for My Lord’s first view of our capital,’ Karim said hurriedly. He called to the officers of the small army that had accompanied us all the way from Beirut – a most useful small army, it had turned out, bearing in mind how we’d been harried by a mostly unseen enemy – and directed them to stop their continued tramp towards the Beirut gate. With a few shouts of command and one trumpet blast, the hundred men once again formed about us, as we began our brisk journey towards some more fitting point of entrance.
‘What I was going from Damascus to attend in Jerusalem,’ I continued once we were properly on our new course, ‘was our Great Day of Triumph. There was Heraclius, seated on a golden throne within the Holy Sepulchre Church. Before him stood four of the five patriarchs – and Rome had sent out a senior bishop to stand in for the Pope. There were the leaders of various heretical Churches: even Heraclius didn’t object to a spot of tolerance on that day. There was a Persian ambassador, and representatives of Christian communities from outside the Empire. There must have been forty thousand people in the church or lining the streets. During a service that I thought would never end, Heraclius himself stood and lifted a long case covered all over in gold and set with precious stones. This contained what everyone agreed to be the remains of the True Cross. It had been found in Jerusalem three hundred years earlier by the mother of the Great Constantine. Here it had been venerated as the most holy relic of the Faith. Then, the Persians had carried it off. Now, we’d regained it, and Heraclius was formally putting it back in its rightful place. As he set hands on that golden case, and the veins in his face bulged with its weight until I thought he’d have another seizure, all four patriarchs went down on their bellies to adore its contents. They were joined by the other dignitaries. Even the Pope’s man went on his knees. It was all unbelievably grand and triumphant. You should have seen the coins we struck to commemorate the event.’
You should have seen them, indeed. Big, heavy things, they’d been; our purpose had been to show the whole world who was back in charge. But Edward was now more interested again in looking at the walls. They ran seemingly for miles in the hot sun. If they didn’t match the vast and impregnable defences with which Constantinople had anciently been endowed, they still showed what a fight it would take for a besieging army to break through. There was a time when I’d have made more than a casual note of this last fact.
I was about to drift into an explanation of how Sergius and I had used the prestige of our victory to settle the Monophysite dispute with every appearance of finality. I’d already reached into my memory and pulled out the main arguments – about the Single as opposed to the Dual Nature of Christ, and our compromise of His Single Directing Will – when we came all of a sudden on one of the capital’s external places of execution. We’d missed the morning action, but it was plain that the authorities had laid on quite a show for the onlookers. Men had been roasted alive, hanged upside down over smoking straw till they were smothered; castrated, broken with stones and scourged. There was a cluster of crosses, where the victims still feebly moved in the sun. Behind these, I could just make out the corpses of impaled men and children, their flesh being torn at by packs of yapping dogs.
I looked at Edward, wondering if he’d be cheered by a spectacle that only the civilised can manage. He swallowed and stared down at the unspoiled silk of his shoes. I shrugged. Perhaps the heat was getting to him.
At last, we came to the other gate that Karim had mentioned. This led from the desert. I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised by the volume of traffic on that road: heavy-laden camels and other beasts of burden, wagons piled high with produce, slaves and merchants of every colour bringing goods to market. By comparison, the Beirut road had been empty. In the old days, it had been the roads up from the sea ports that carried most trade with inland cities. Roads into a desert had military uses only. But the Saracen familiarity with the desert, plus our own hold on the sea, had worked another revolution in the conditions of everyday life.
We were now passing through the main gateway into the city. Above us, in gold letters set into the granite, the one inscription anywhere to be seen said in Saracen: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.’ Inside the gateway was one of the remnants of much older work that had survived the Persians. This had recesses set into it and was covered with plaques. But the statues had all been removed. So far as I could tell, the inscriptions had been cemented over or otherwise obliterated. All that was left and that I could read was a partially obscured notice of a tax remission granted by some emperor whose name was now missing. We passed into a large courtyard, surrounded by very high walls. At the far end of this was another gate that led into the city. Here, the little people who’d been going in or out had been lined up to bow down before the three chairs and all their army of guards as they went by.
I had assumed a very short pause in this holding courtyard before we went through the other gateway into the city. People of our quality are not to be delayed by local guards. But the far gate was shut, and no one seemed inclined to get it open. Now, some other commander of the gates – this one of normal size, but with a false beard – crept out through a side door into the city, and began a whispered conversation with Karim. The brown face tightened again. He gave me a long and thoughtful look. Above the gate into the city, I could see what had been three plumes of smoke now as a single rising cloud.
‘Your Magnificence will forgive us,’ said Karim with false jollity, ‘if we await the restoration of order on the city streets.’ He got down from his chair and clapped his hands. Attendants hurried out of a low building, in their hands cups of honeyed ginger cooled with snow from the mountains. I took and drank, and ignored the smell of burning that drifted from behind the far gate as often as the breeze lined up. I uttered some non-committal politeness to Karim. But he was listening again to a low and urgent commentary from the man with the false beard. It was too fast and low for me to follow. So I sipped again and dug round in the front pouch of the carrying chair for my fan. Before I could find the thing, Edward was flapping his own at me. I smiled graciously and settled back. Someone behind me arranged the cushions into a more convenient softness. Karim went over to the doorway of the building to continue his conversation.
‘So what went wrong, My Lord?’ Edward asked.
I sniffed at the thin smoke that was now about us like a mist, then realised the boy hadn’t got his tenses wrong. He was still asking about the past. I tried to think of a neutral answer. But if Karim could just about make himself understood in Greek, neither he nor anyone else within hearing distance could be supposed to know a word of Latin. Though I’d keep my voice low, we were safe enough. We could discuss the Victories of the Just from whatever point of view we pleased.
‘Two days later after that triumphant celebration of world empire restored,’ I said, ‘we got a letter in comically bad Greek. It was brought to us by someone who was passing by Jerusalem with a train of camels. While we were otherwise occupied, some merchant who claimed an acquaintance with the Archangel Gabriel had unified all the Saracens under his own rule. He’d ever since been preaching them out of their less constructively barbarian ways. Now, he was inviting Heraclius, Lord of the Earth, to bow down before him. Of course, the letter went unanswered. Shortly after, the merchant died. That should have been the end of the matter. But this new faith didn’t die with its founder. His followers waited a couple of years, then burst out of their desert homes.
‘At first, we thought it was just an opportunistic raid. The Saracens had been an occasional pest for centuries. Then, after our efforts at reinforcement failed, we found that what had been taken back from the Persians was lost again for good.’
I laughed bleakly. ‘When he gave his victory speech in the Circus in Constantinople, Heraclius departed from the text I’d written for him and referred to some prophecy a monk had jabbered down from atop a column: that before his reign ended, the Euphrates would no longer be the frontier between two empires. The man was spot-on, it turned out. Sadly, that river does now run through a single empire – it just isn’t now our Empire! Still, it might have been worse.’ I thought of those desperate holding battles we’d fought along the southern borders of our Asian Provinces. In Syria, and then Egypt, we’d lost our two richest provinces to these people. But we’d kept the rest. It might have been worse. And worse it might still be.
But the inner gate was now opening, and fingers of black smoke drifted through. I stared a question at Karim, who looked back, trying to keep the embarrassment from his face. He got back into his chair, and the carrying slaves took hold again of the long poles to front and back.
‘You might ask,’ I added quickly, ‘why we didn’t put up a better fight. But, you see, the all-conquering armies of Heraclius had been paid off, and we had no money to raise more. It didn’t help that Heraclius had flooded the regained provinces with tax gatherers – though worse than that were the priests he sent in to bully everyone into the Monothelite Compromise.’ Yes, the Monothelite Compromise. Sergius and I had been very proud of that. Properly sold, that could have ended two centuries of dispute over the Nature of Christ. Trust Heraclius to try imposing it at sword point. We’d simply got three verbal farts for the theologians to cry at each other, instead of two. But I put the sad recollection from mind and carried on with the matter in hand. ‘The Saracens caught us off balance. If Heraclius had died of a seizure in that Jerusalem ceremony, I’d certainly have got young Constans to take the right action.
‘On the other hand, Heraclius may for once have been right when he buggered up what little resistance we could offer. When they were attacked, the Persians didn’t have our choice in the matter. For prestige reasons, they had to stand and fight. They threw everything we’d left to them at the Saracens when they invaded. They were utterly defeated, and their whole empire was swallowed up. We at least were left with the Asian Provinces, where even the common people are Greeks. It may – it really may – have been for the best.’
The lesson was over – rather, my part of the lesson was over. The inner gate swung fully open, and we were carried swiftly forward into the capital of an empire five times larger than the one now ruled from Constantinople.
‘We cannot proceed along the Avenue of the Righteous War,’ Karim said hurriedly. Directly before us, the street had been blocked with large cloth screens. These were held steady by men whose bearded faces my tired eyes weren’t up to seeing in detail, but whose posture indicated nothing happy. I didn’t for a moment doubt that all this was for my benefit. I gave a friendly wave. ‘I am informed that the street has been closed for essential repairs,’ Karim went on. ‘But the Baths of Omar will surely impress My Lord. They can accommodate more people than all the public baths of Constantinople combined. If we go this way, we shall approach them from behind.’
‘Let it be as you wish, my dear young friend,’ I cried happily. If I cocked my good ear in the right position, I could just make out bursts of wild shouting, and perhaps a clash of arms, far behind those fluttering cloth screens. If Edward could hear anything out of the ordinary, his face said nothing. I directed his attention to the remains of a triumphal column put up in ancient times. The statue that had once topped it was long gone – perhaps it hadn’t survived the Persian occupation. The column itself was now surrounded by scaffolding, and was coming down a section at a time.