“This man of whom you speak is my enemy and the enemy of all who love the gods,” said Umar the idol-maker, “and I would kill him for you for three copper coins if I did not have a family to support. But the work will involve me in travel, and that is expensive. It cannot be done in Mecca, you know.” And he tapped the nose of Justinianus once again. This time I took his meaning. I laid a second gold piece beside the first one, and the idol-maker smiled.
Twelve days ago Mahmud left Mecca on one of his business trips into the lands to the east. He has not returned. He has met with some accident, I fear, in those sandy wastes, and by now the drifting dunes have probably hidden his body forever.
Umar the idol-maker appears to have disappeared also. The talk around town is that he went out into the desert to collect the black stone that he carves his idols from, and some fellow craftsman with whom he was feuding followed him to the quarry. I think you will agree with me, Horatius, that this was a wise thing to arrange. The disappearance of a well-known man like Mahmud will probably engender some inquiries that could ultimately have led in embarrassing directions, but no one except the wife of Umar will care about the vanishing of Umar the idol-maker.
All of this strikes me as highly regrettable, of course. But it was absolutely necessary.
“He’s almost certainly dead by this time,” Nicomedes said last night. We still dine together frequently. “How very sad, Corbulo. He was an interesting man.”
“A very great one, in his way. If he had lived, I think he would have changed the world.”
“I doubt that very much,” said Nicomedes, in his airy, ever-skeptical Greek way. “But we’ll never know, will we?”
“We’ll never know,” I agreed. I raised my glass. “To Mahmud, poor devil.”
“To Mahmud, yes.”
And there you have the whole sad story. Go to the Emperor, Horatius. Tell him what I’ve done. Place it in its full context, against the grand sweep of Imperial history past and present and especially future. Speak to him of Hannibal, of Vercingetorix, of Attila, of all our great enemies of days gone by, and tell him that I have snuffed out in its earliest stages a threat to Roma far more frightening than any of those. Make him understand, if you can, the significance of my deed.
Tell him, Horatius. Tell him that I have saved all the world from conquest: that I have done for him a thing that was utterly essential to do, something which no one else at all could have achieved on his behalf, for who would have had the foresight to see the shape of things to come as I was able to see them? Tell him that.
Above all else, tell him to bring me home. I have dwelled amidst the sands of Arabia long enough. My work is done; I beg for surcease from the dreariness of the desert, the infernal heat, the loneliness of my life here. This is no place for a hero of the Empire.