Though half comatose, I sat up here and looked hard at the boy. He took one proper look at my face and went into another of his coughing fits. He sat down heavily in the sand and clutched miserably at his knees.
‘Wilfred,’ I said sternly once the boy was back in some kind of order, ‘I am aware that what little you know of my life fills you with horror. There are things you don’t know that would make you sit up and stare. But never – never in all my time, not even for reasons of state – have I shat on those who helped me. If I don’t force myself back up to flog that boy to death, it’s only because he saved me in Cartenna. I could argue that he was only rescuing valuable property that he could try selling again later. But I won’t. At the same time, if I’ve had to put up with worse from others in the snake pit of Greek politics, I’ll not put up with behaviour like that from those under my control.’ I let Wilfred help me to my feet and walk me over to where Edward was stretched out and weeping uncontrollably. Forcing myself not to shake with exhaustion, I stared down at him.
‘Get up,’ I commanded him. ‘Go and wash yourself in the sea. It’ll hurt but do you good. Then get dressed. Now that we are free – now that we hold together solely by free choice – I propose to write off all that has happened to date. It cannot be undone or excused. But it can be put out of mind. If my respect means anything at all, you can start earning it from this moment on.’ I went by myself and sat again in the shadow of the rocks. ‘Now go and clean yourself up,’ I said. ‘You might also look how much water that boat has shipped. We may still have need of it.’
‘Do you think, Master, anything he told us was the truth?’ Wilfred asked once we were alone.
I took another sip of water – oh, for a jug of wine! – and wiggled my toes in the sand. I passed him the cup and watched him drink. His own clothes had long since dried off from his cautious dip in the sea. Now, I was looking to see any sign of a sweat. Except when forcing himself to life to attend to my own needs, he was increasingly listless. If I was hoping he’d improve once off the ship, I hadn’t yet seen any evidence.
‘Yes,’ I answered, turning to his question. ‘I do think he’s mostly been telling the truth. I have a good nose for insincerity. He really does know as little about things as he’s said. It’s at least because of ignorance – fear of those drunken beatings may come into it – that he stitched up Hrothgar. Don’t suppose I really hold that betrayal against him. The man had it coming.’
‘But, Master, do you think he was telling the truth about Brother Joseph?’
I smiled at that one. For myself, I hadn’t the slightest doubt Joseph had been on that warship. I could close my eyes and see him standing there, looking across the narrow space of water that separated him from a man who shouldn’t have survived the dark, towering waves of the open sea, let alone have made it so far into Imperial waters.
‘You saw what Edward saw,’ I answered. ‘Put aside your own wishes and preconceptions. Do you think it was Brother Joseph?’ I didn’t need his answer.
Troubled, he looked away. ‘If it was Brother Joseph,’ he said, ‘what does that mean for our return to England?’
Good question. Ever since I’d taken charge of the ship, I’d been wondering that myself. I shrugged. ‘You are assuming, my dear boy, that we shall return to England,’ I said. ‘We have no ship. If we do put to sea, we have the Imperial Navy combing every mile of water to find us. If we take the road west, we’ll be going through various deserts and dead zones. We’ll end at the Narrow Straits, which are still controlled by the Empire. If we do get across those, we have Spain and France to get through, and then a sea trip to Richborough. If we’d had enough water aboard the ship to get us to Italy, it might have been different-’
‘But you have a plan, Master,’ he interrupted. ‘You always have a plan, even if you don’t at first know it.’
I smiled at the boy’s fierce conviction. It had even brought some life into his cheeks. Here we were, on the beach by a deserted city. There was the ludicrously aged remnant of the Magnificent Alaric. There was a sick child – how sick I’d been trying to avoid having to realise. The only one of us in good health was silly, treacherous Edward. We were hunted by an Empire desperate to lay violent hands on me. If somewhat past its best, that Empire surrounded us in every direction, and had full control of the sea. We had barely enough cash to buy food for twenty days. And I was now trusted to get all of us out of the Empire, across two seas, and through any number of lawless territories to face who could say what on our eventual return to England. If I didn’t give way to laughter, I’d burst into tears.
But Wilfred was right. I did have a plan. It had come to me in little flashes of enlightenment as I set about Edward. That vicious beating which had started in anger had ended as an act of policy. I might be ludicrously old, but I was still the Magnificent Alaric – Hammer of the Persians and barbarians, unyielding anvil of the Saracens, support and survivor of four legitimate and variously useless emperors. As for being old, I had just killed two men, each one of them a third my age and three times my weight. I’d killed them without so much as raising a sweat. So long as I didn’t fall down dead somewhere along the next fifteen hundred miles, I had a plan that might just work.
I got up and allowed Wilfred to dress me. The brown stain that covered the whole front of my robe would never fade. Though washed and washed again, the blond wig was also brown. Since I had no hat, I’d have to make do with it against the sun. At the most charitable, I looked somewhat reduced in circumstances. I leaned against the rock and watched as Edward jumped up and down in the sea, washing the blood and grime from his body.
‘Did you need to do all that, Master?’ Wilfred asked. He looked across at Edward.
I sniffed, and then poked a finger into my nose to remove the clotted blood. I was feeling better by the moment. I wished I could say the same of Wilfred. Much more of that coughing, and it would be a question of who was helping whom along this shore.
‘That boy isn’t fourteen,’ I answered. ‘Already, he has a trail of corpses behind him. I don’t intend either of us to join them. I do nothing without a purpose – something you would do well to remember.’
We watched in silence as Edward finished in the sea. Afterwards, he went and looked a long time into the boat. Then he fished around inside. After more washing in the sea, he walked back holding what I could see from the blurred glitter was the knife that had been meant for my dispatch. In his hands, it seemed more like a short sword than a knife. By the time he’d crossed the expanse of sand that separated us from the sea, he was already dry. I looked at him. Another day, and he’d be covered in bruises. If I hadn’t broken any bones, he’d ache for days after that.
As the boy came within a yard of where I stood, he went down on his knees and, silent and with downcast head, placed the knife at my feet. Still looking down, he reached clasped hands up towards me. I stood a moment in silence, looking down at the small, naked figure. He was rather young for this sort of thing – and I rather old. But, regardless of that or the lack of any relics or anything else holy, there could be no doubt of its meaning. I considered for a moment, then leaned forward and took his hands between my own.
‘I promise on my soul that I will in the future be faithful to My Lord the Senator Alaric,’ he said quietly, ‘and never cause him harm, and will observe my homage to him completely against all persons in good faith and without deceit.’ He stopped and looked up at me.
I stared silently back and kept my own hands about his. So the magical essence – the Hail or Heil, they call it in the Germanic languages – that he’d never less than passionately adored, but never yet felt clean enough to acknowledge, in the Old One, passed from outer to inner hands. I smiled and tightened my hold on his hands. All round us the desolation of the beach and the unkempt land, and the broken, deserted city and the sunken forgotten statue, we stayed silently frozen in the highest – though long since Christianised – ritual of our ancestral, northern forest.