At last, it was over, and I lay trembling on the deck. Still looking at me, Edward smiled with a calm tenderness. And rested a hand lightly on my chest.
As I finally relaxed and let my eyelids droop, he said, ‘ Ya a’khy, anta ygeb a’n takon alkhalifa.’ I opened my eyes and looked at him. With a strange smile, he repeated himself. He was speaking, I realised, in Saracen. ‘O, my brother, you shall be Caliph,’ he was saying. How could I understand what he was saying? I asked myself. What did it mean? But he smiled again and pointed down at my crotch. I followed his pointed finger. With a cry of terror, I was on my feet and brushing at myself. Writhing in the sticky mess that covered my belly and thighs were thousands and thousands of black maggots. I brushed at them, and they fell on to the deck. I looked at my right hand. They squirmed and wriggled between my fingers. Already, some were crawling on my wrist and forearm.
‘Welcome to Hell!’ I heard Priscus call from behind me. ‘Isn’t this what you’ve always deserved, you corrupt bastard? Yes, welcome to Hell, my shitty young Alaric! This is the beginning of the punishment you’ve long deserved.’
His grating laughter still sounding, I woke with a start and lay sweating in my cot. I tried to sit up, but found I couldn’t move. Gradually, I came back to my waking senses, remembered who and where and when I was. Except for the steady grinding together of new timbers, all was now silent about me. Instinctively, I reached down to my crotch. Certainly, I’d had an orgasm. Still cold with horror, I rubbed the watery-thin liquid between forefinger and thumb. For all the seed I’d cast off, I might have pissed myself. But I was alive and here and very, very old.
I laughed. Was that any improvement on the dream? I laughed again, and now felt the griping in my belly. It was the disgusting food, I told myself – that, or the still more disgusting drink. I lay in the cot, farting softly. That gave some relief, but wasn’t enough to settle me. I carefully relaxed my sphincter muscle and waited. I was right. That sour milk had gone straight through me, and was now sloshing insistently against its final exit. Unlike the dark, semi-cupboard below in which I’d previously been shut at night, Hrothgar’s cabin up here on the deck had no night bucket. I could choose between shitting the bed and going in search of the common bucket on deck.
I pushed back the blanket and sat up. Since old Aelric had never yet fallen into geriatric incontinence, His Magnificence the Senator Alaric would definitely have to go for a walk. I reached out in the darkness for my walking stick and got unsteadily to my feet. The weather had cooled astonishingly since Wilfred and Edward had carried me to bed. I felt about for an old under-tunic that had belonged to Hrothgar, and stepped out on to the deck. I didn’t suppose I’d be all alone out there. As usual with this rather strange ship, we hadn’t put into shore for the night, or even dropped anchor, but were drifting in open waters. That meant there would be someone up on the mast to keep watch. But even if I were to be seen, my helpless doddering old fool act was now superfluous. There was a gentle but increasing motion of the ship, and I’d need to keep hold as I felt my way down to the stern, where the night bucket was placed. But I could and would easily manage that for myself.
Chapter 12
Most of the pleasures that men discuss, and write books to praise or analyse, are best enjoyed when young. Just as satisfying in your nineties, though, as in your twenties, is a good shit. Indeed, my dinner was nicer to evacuate than it had been to swallow. I relaxed and savoured the relieved emptiness in my guts, and, seated on the bucket, looked up at the splashes of light that I saw in place of stars. All things considered, I had no reason to complain. Forget my bizarre dream – I’d just had a wonderful shit. And, if I was hurting all over, I hadn’t broken anything in the escape from Cartenna. I was reasonably clean. If there had been no supplies in the end, I was now master of a crew that had, only that morning, been prepared to butcher me. Above all, I was still alive!
Yes, still alive. None of this abolished the fact that I was so bloody old. And being old, I can tell you, is rather like being ill – except there’s no hope of getting better. Again, though, I had no valid reason to complain. Age had crept slowly up behind me. It was a matter of a white eyebrow here and there, a growing bald patch, a bit of a belly for a while, the gradual wearing out of teeth. Other men around me had sickened and died in various and usually horrid ways, and I’d drifted serenely through middle age with barely diminished vigour. Even when I did finally reach the age that men called ‘half as old as time itself’, I remained too busy to notice the falling off of bodily power.
But age had finally crept up. I leaned back against the mast and thought of my aborted narrative of the Athens trip. I’d been so young and strong, so healthy and so confident about facing the world. In the space of time separating then from now, men had been born and had grown old and died; so, in many cases, had their sons. But it didn’t strike me as such a very long time since I’d stood on the deck of that other ship. Now, I was unambiguously decrepit. I’d seen as much back in Cartenna, when, for the first time in years, I looked into a proper mirror. Apart from the eyes, which were much as they always had been, the face looking back at me had reminded me of nothing so much as the unwrapped mummy I’d seen a few times of the Great Alexander. Little wonder everyone thought me a creature of magical powers. I hadn’t called for the wig and the paint to cover up the truth. Neither, though, had I waved them away. The racing chariot of my life was reaching the end of its final lap.
Even so, the final lap wasn’t ended yet. I’d survived the journey from the Tyne to the Narrow Straits. If only poor Wilfred hadn’t nearly died, I’d have found the journey preferable to another winter in Jarrow, and I’d conceived a grudging respect for whatever race of barbarians had been able to design and build so large and capable a ship, and even for the barbarians who, if beastly in all else, had been so capable in handling it. We’d now be retracing the voyage out in much improved weather and with me in charge. It was worth looking forward to my reception in Canterbury and then in Jarrow. I thought again of the day just past. I thought of that ridiculous Prefect, and then of his secretary’s despair on the jetty. I’d have to ensure that something unpleasant came of the useless lump of meat who’d tried to leave me behind. But the whole thing had been as neat an operation as anyone could have wished. I thought again of that absurd story about the martyrdom of Saint Flatularis. And I thought of the look on Edward’s face. Yes, I was alive, and life still wasn’t so bad that I wanted it over.
I thought again. Yes, I was alive. But let it be assumed that there was a Hell, and that I’d just had some vision of my place there – even that might have its moments. I put my head back and laughed. And I let out a long, gratified fart.
‘You are unable to sleep, Master?’ It was Wilfred behind me on the deck. I finished my laugh and hoped the fart hadn’t been too embarrassingly loud. But he’d announced himself with a coughing fit, and probably hadn’t heard anything.
‘But what keeps you awake so late – or so early?’ I asked. ‘I did tell you to drink all your wine and get a proper night’s sleep.’ From habit I raised my arms each side of me in the gloom. He reached weakly forward and helped me to my feet. He cleaned me with the sponge and pulled my clothes back into order.
‘I was looking at the lights over in the west,’ he said. I followed his pointed finger, but saw nothing. ‘I think there is more than one.’
I sniffed and suggested it might be a fishing boat, or some merchant ship that wasn’t hugging the shore. Even in the Mediterranean, most seaborne trade doesn’t start again until the late spring. But that doesn’t mean the seas are empty. I wondered – now that Hrothgar wasn’t around to keep the ship moving in its vaguely eastward course – if the crew would go back to full-time piracy. Once I’d taken charge of things, I’d spent some time with Wilfred on an inventory. We were running short of everything, including money. If we were to get back all the way to Richborough, we’d need a top-up from somewhere.