We continued our slow progress through the silent, abandoned streets of what had once been a substantial grain port. Here had been the public library. Here had been the baths, a gift of the Great Constantine, that could accommodate five thousand. Here was the shrine where Saint Augustine had witnessed the miracle of the stroke suffered by an heretical preacher. My throat was feeling raw from the continual raising of my voice. While Edward passed me up a cup of water drawn from a fountain, I lapsed into quiet English.
‘We’re approaching the harbour from the western side,’ I said. I’d noticed the stepped incline on my way up to the Prefecture. ‘The moment I take off this ridiculous wig and put it back on the wrong way, I want the oarsman with the broken nose to lift me out of this chair and run with me straight to the docks. It will mean jumping down half a dozen steps each with a four- or five-foot drop. The ship’s boat is still moored where you left it, and may still be unguarded. I must rely on the three of you to use your own initiative as required. But the idea is to get us back to the ship before anyone thinks to ignore the Prefect’s orders and tries to arrest us.
‘Do you understand?’ Edward’s mouth had fallen open. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I whispered with another look round. ‘Stop looking so gormless. If you don’t want to end up like Hrothgar, you’ll do exactly as you’re told. Do you understand?’
His face took on his impassive look while he thought. Whatever he was thinking, it took longer than I fancied. Then he nodded. He took the cup from my hands. I heard him muttering to the oarsmen as he replaced it above the bowl of the fountain. I brushed a speck of dust from my tunic and wondered how well I could trust these people. If they decided to run off and leave me in the chair, it would be sod-all punishment for any of them. On the other hand, if gratitude is rather much to expect of barbarians, they were all three of them in considerable awe of the Old One. Even if not a wizard, I was the one who’d had the Greeks anoint him and clothe him in raiments of shining white, and who’d also sprung them from a prison from where they must have thought they’d only be taken out to be hung. I reached up and patted my wig back into place. I’d find out soon enough how I stood with these people. In the meantime, there was a charade that still had to be played. I peered at an inscription above a bricked-up doorway that we were gradually approaching, and cleared my throat.
‘Here is the place where Saint Flatularis suffered the first part of his martyrdom.’ I turned and made a loudish aside to Edward: ‘He was a youth of exquisite beauty, yet was also solid in the Faith. When the tyrant Diocletian ordered all to sacrifice to the demons of the Old Faith, Flatularis refused. In order to break his will, he was chained naked in this house on a bed of roses while three beautiful courtesans assaulted him with their sinful lips and fingers. What did our Most Holy Saint do? Why, he quelled the rising temptation by biting off his tongue!’
I wanted to follow this with an account of how the young man was then rolled – still naked – in live coals mixed with broken potsherds, and end with a homily on what an example this should be for the youth of today. Sadly, the look on Edward’s face was too much, and I found myself having to cover my laughing fit with coughs. By the time I was able to breathe again, we were halfway along the terrace I’d seen from the harbour. Before us, I could see a handful of armed men. It wasn’t worth looking to see behind. On our left was the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the sea, and, against both, the dark blur of our ship where it rode at anchor. It was now or never. I pulled myself back into order. I took a deep breath and lifted my hands up to the wig.
Before I could even turn the thing round, the oarsman had lifted me clean out of the chair. The next few moments are beyond any ordered description. There was a bone-shuddering crunch as the man landed on the first step of the terrace. It was enough to knock all the air out of my lungs, and I fought again for breath. There was another, and then another. I could hear wild shouting above us, but couldn’t even think of trying to look back. Like a frightened child, I clamped my arms tighter about the oarsman’s neck and pressed my face into rancid, prison-soaked clothing.
Our fast, jerking motion came to a sudden end about ten yards from the jetty. With a scream that reminded me of a pig when the knife goes into its belly, the oarsman went down. We hit the granite slabs together with me on top of him. I rolled off and only just saved my face from striking on the stone. I heard the man, still screaming, as he dragged himself to his feet and staggered the remaining distance to the boat. I struggled up and looked back at the crowd that was racing towards me. Suddenly very calm, I relaxed and looked up at the sky. Going like this hadn’t been the end I’d imagined for myself. Then again, it was a sight better than snuffing it in bed, back in the freezing cold of Jarrow.
‘Give me your arms, Master.’ It was Edward! I’d seen him run ahead of us across the docks. Now he’d come back. He took hold of me and heaved me on to his back. He wasn’t yet fully grown, and I was – as I like to keep saying – still a big man, even if decrepit. But, swaying about like a slave under a grain sack, he ran with me across what now seemed the impossibly long distance to the boat. But we got there, and fell together into its deep centre.
‘Stop that boat!’ I heard someone shout. As I gripped the side of the boat and tried to haul myself up, I heard, just overhead, the whizz of an arrow. Another thudded into the planking not six inches from my right leg. I looked up at the blubbering oarsman who’d dropped me. He was nursing a deep gash an earlier arrow had made in his arm. But, as I looked back to the jetty, I could see the Prefect’s secretary frantically pushing the bows down, and shouting madly as he waved everyone towards the boat that had brought me ashore. It was nice to know, I told myself, that, even now, the price on my head was higher alive than dead. I pulled myself up into a sitting position and patted my wig into place. I smiled and blew a kiss at the secretary, who now stood on the extreme edge of the jetty. I couldn’t make out his face. But it wasn’t hard to guess the mixture of disappointment and boiling anger.
‘Put your backs into it!’ I croaked at Edward and the able-bodied oarsman. ‘If we don’t get a move on, they’ll try to cut us off.’ But the chaos of shouting and running back on the docks hadn’t yet resolved itself into effective action. By the time their boat was setting out, we were already three-quarters back to the ship. I could see the anchor as it was pulled up and hear the beat of the drum as every man raced to take his place at the oars. Four arms of differing strength lifted me up and pushed me against the side of the ship. Two hands from above took hold of my wrists, As I was jerked into the air, someone else grabbed the waistband of my tunic. In an instant, I was back on deck and pushed into the arms of Wilfred, whose only response was to try carrying me back to the daybed from which I’d been plucked so very long ago – or so it now seemed. Needless to say he failed, and it was Edward who finally disentangled the pair of us and placed me with some show of reverence on the stained cushions.
An atrociously ugly but admiring face snarled down at me as I lay, exhausted, back on to the cushions.
‘Have you managed to drink all the wine yet?’ I asked weakly.
The face looked at me a moment longer, then vanished.
Chapter 11
‘So, apart from this exchange off Kasos,’ I asked again, ‘you have no idea what Hrothgar was about?’
Edward looked across the table with tear-swollen, still terrified eyes. He shook his head.
‘Well,’ I said with a hard smile, ‘you can take that as a lesson to have something in writing.’ There had been nothing. There should and could have been nothing. Most likely, Hrothgar had been illiterate even in the runes our people used before the light of Rome broke in to shine so benevolently upon us all. But I’d watched as Wilfred and Edward went through the man’s cabin. Not a scrap of writing. And I believed Edward when he insisted that he’d been kept throughout on a need-to-know basis.