‘I won’t ask you to probe for yourself, but you will see the contours here on his stomach of a tumour that goes right through him. If I were to turn him over, you’d see a blue mottling on his back where the tumour has distended the skin. There are also these lumps on his thighs. This one on the right is the size of a duck’s egg. The others are substantial. These symptoms, with others, and the absence of the delirium that is almost invariable in advanced consumptions, lead me to believe the boy’s to be a different and more rapidly fatal condition.’
‘Two months ago, in the northern part of Britain,’ I said, ‘he’d been coughing on and off for about a year. But few of the inhabitants there can be called really healthy. The climate is cold half the year, and damp throughout. Except for the growing discomfort and frequency of his coughing attacks, I’d not have said he was other than a weakling.’
‘With respect, My Lord,’ Jacob replied to my unasked question, ‘the size of these growths within his body indicates a terminal decline that began long before the journey you describe from his country. On the one hand, the strain of travel may have accelerated the decline. On the other, the more favourable climate of these regions may have compensated for the earlier hardships.
‘Whatever the case, I do assure you that the boy wouldn’t have lived another year – whatever his movements, wherever his location. If I knew the reason, I’d give it. All I can say is that, as others are born to live longer, some are born to live shorter than the three score and ten promised in our common scriptures.’ He fell silent as, carrying a bowl and sponge, an old woman came back into the room. He moved closer to the lamps and fussed with a mixture of opium and mandragora.
There was no point in asking now anything other than the obvious. I’d seen enough. Groaning from the bodily aches of the past few days, I sat carefully in a chair.
‘How long do you think?’ I asked.
Jacob put down his measuring glass and shrugged. ‘You should forget what I told you earlier. That was before I’d made a full examination. It’s a wonder the boy is still alive. If he makes it through the next couple of days, I shall be surprised.’
There was a muffled burst of laughter and applause from the dining room. I’d not heard him, but perhaps the youngest son had now begun his performance. It was all ghastly – a boy with so much promise and, until recently, so much quiet joy from his life, so soon to die. And what made it worse was that his death would make things easier for those who survived him. We couldn’t travel with Wilfred. We couldn’t leave him behind. We couldn’t stay too long in Caesarea to wait for him to die or recover. If he died soon, those choices could be forgotten. Edward and I would be free to make our own selfish choices. There’s no point feeling guilty over matters outside your control. Nevertheless, I did feel guilty. I felt guilty that this problem was to be solved. I felt guilty also that I might soon have my answer to the question Wilfred had asked on the beach at Tipasa. If there was no telling what reception we’d have in England, why go back there at all? The longer I’d been back in my old world, the less enthusiastic I’d felt about a return to horrid, cold Jarrow. I’d been so fixed on returning purely because it was Wilfred’s home. Edward had no wish to go back. I had little. Did we need to make our way back west? Did we even need to stay together? I’d be dead soon enough – even another few years was too much reasonably to expect. I could hide myself in some desert monastery that took in the aged. I could do any number of things. So too Edward. I looked at Wilfred. The drugs had suppressed his cough. He slept easily. Since it couldn’t now be avoided, his death might as well be peaceful. That much I could arrange for the boy.
‘Jacob, you seem convinced the Saracens will soon be here?’ I asked to change the subject.
He sat heavily down just opposite me. He opened his mouth to speak, but then got up and went over to a table, where a jug and a couple of cups promised refreshment. He poured out the wine. Into his own, he carefully added twenty drops from his glass measure. He looked at me and held out the measure for me to sniff. I held up three fingers. I’d been so long without the joys of opium, it would be best to go easy on the reunion. He shrugged and added the drops. Turning back to his own cup, he gave up on counting, and just topped it to the brim.
I sipped at my own cup. Unlike downstairs in the dining hall, this was a poor vintage. Then again, we were drinking it less for its own substance than for the dull under-taste of what had been added to it. Jacob drank about half his cup in one gulp, and settled into his chair.
‘You had no news while away of developments in the war?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Well, the Saracens had another go at Carthage last year. They had to break it off for lack of naval support – the Empire had another big victory off Cyprus, and the Saracens haven’t the ghost of a fleet. But the land forces are building in strength. Being Saracens, they can run supplies from Egypt straight through the desert. No one believes Carthage can hold. Once that goes, this whole shore goes with it. Without you to hunt, the naval base at Syracuse is barely enough to keep down piracy – let alone protect us from siege.’
‘And you look forward to this?’ I asked again.
He laughed bitterly. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘The moment you weren’t there to keep things in order, the Greek Church went mad. The African Church is now run by Greeks. They’re discouraging the use of Latin. They’ve made up some new heresy to seek out among the Latins.’
‘ Another heresy?’ I interrupted. ‘We sorted out the dispute over the Double Will of Christ six years ago. Surely not something else?’
‘There’s always another heresy,’ Jacob sneered. ‘These priests could find heresy in a bread queue. But don’t ask a Jew about its details. I only know that the Greeks have started making a fuss about the use of pictures. The Latins want their pictures. The Pope in Rome is screaming blue murder. But no one in Constantinople listens to him nowadays.
‘More important for us, the Greeks are talking of another forced conversion law. Remember the one you “forgot” to publish in Carthage all those years back? Well, they’ve blown the dust off it, and are talking of setting up brass copies in every African city.
‘You ask if we want the Saracens? Of course we do! They lower all the taxes, and they leave us alone.’
‘And a thousand years of shared history,’ I asked again, ‘that means nothing?’
No answer.
The drug had hit us both at the same time. I leaned back and closed my eyes as, like a tide sweeping over a rocky beach, the velvet of the opium blacked out the physical pains of age and over-exertion and the moral pain that flowed from a belief that everything Wilfred had been suffering was somehow my own fault. For the first time since we’d met, Jacob put on something like a happy smile. He took a little sip extra from his cup and leaned slowly forward.
‘A thousand years of history!’ he said with a laugh. ‘Let’s have a think about that, My Lord. The old Greeks would only put up with us if we stuck on artificial foreskins and cavorted nude like them in public. One of the madder Roman emperors nearly made us worship his own statue in the Temple. That only got called off when he was murdered by his guards. Another Emperor burned Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. When it turned Christian, the Empire began telling us how to edit our own scriptures and treating us like lepers. It’s a thousand years of history some of us would like to forget.’