I did think of reminding him of the previous night’s failure. But he seemed in no mood for interruption. His last sentence he howled in a Syriac that showed long residence in Constantinople. Sure enough, I didn’t have to wait for confirmation.
‘It was in the Imperial City itself, where I was but a deacon, that I heard of his speech to the Emperor’s Council. “Let us not take back the Orthodox of Syria into the bosom of the Empire,” he said with poisoned tongue. “Let us rather leave the bounds of Empire to embrace only those whose native language is Greek. Let Orthodoxy become no more than part of the glue that binds Greek to Greek. Let us only trade and fight and stand strong in the world as a nation of Greeks. Let the Orthodox of other tongues be confounded with the Jews and the heretics, to make their peace with the Saracens.” ’
It all showed how news gets around. Proceedings of the Imperial Council are supposed to be confidential. If this man had been in the Council Chamber, taking minutes of the session, he’d not have quoted me with greater accuracy. Even before he’d finished his report, there were screams of less well-informed denunciation. ‘Death to the Old One! Damnation be upon him!’ someone bellowed close beside my bad ear. ‘God wills it!’ an old man quavered behind me. Someone too young for a proper beard lurched at me, knife in hand. I waved him back as well. Curled up like one of my roasted bugs, Karim huddled at my feet.
I sat forward in the chair and looked coldly about the room. I might have been in the audience room of my own palace in Constantinople, looking over the crowds of supplicants I’d usually allowed in after breakfast. And I took the chance to continue racking my brains for some reason why the pair of us shouldn’t be torn limb from limb. In that ship off Cartenna, I’d been faced with one of those times when even I couldn’t think of an excuse without some preparation. This, however, wasn’t quite one of them. Since the priest had set the tone of the proceedings with a speech, I’d surely be given right of reply. If nothing else, I might be expected to plead for mercy before not getting any. I moved my tongue to flip my teeth back into position. I shut my eyes for a moment to gather what remained of my strength. I got up on my feet.
As I stood, I raised my arms for silence. It was like the killing blow to a wounded animal. At once, the room was still. I could now hear Karim reciting over and over: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet.’ And very useful that was to what I had in mind! But I ignored him and hoped everyone else would. I stepped forward and walked with commendable firmness towards the sanctuary. It was mostly very young men in my way, and, if no one actually bowed, the crowd parted before me. Without pausing, I walked through the broken, defaced remains of the iconostasis and stood before the altar table. For just a moment, I raised my arms to the cross that was still visible in outline on the painted wall in front of the altar. Then I turned to face the completely silent crowd. Breathing hard while I felt for my voice, I looked round the church.
It was now, over on the right, that I saw there was a little chapel. Its doorway had obviously been cut into the old temple wall at the time of consecration. I couldn’t see fully in from where I stood. But there was a lamp burning inside, and it all had a pleasingly mysterious look about it. But I stopped the useless effort of trying to focus and looked back over the hushed, expectant crowd.
Chapter 43
‘Great men of Syria, dear brothers,’ I began in Syriac, dropping all pretence of a Greek accent. ‘It is said that God Himself has brought me here tonight. I will not deny the obvious. How else could an old man in my condition bring himself from the Palace of the Tyrant to this ruined but still defiant House of Faith? But was it so you might kill me that I now stand before you? Was it for the sake of some vulgar display that Our Heavenly Father brought your best efforts to nothing, and then – in His own miraculous way – conveyed me here to address you?
‘No – a thousand times, no!’ I cried with raised hand. I paused and let my voice produce some faint echo from the hard walls. ‘I come here not as sacrifice, but as messenger. If I cannot be killed, it is because God watches over me.’ There was a scared murmur from somewhere in the room. I paused again and let it gather strength. Then I lifted both hands for silence and continued. ‘Know you this, dear Brothers in Christ. I am returned from a land on the edge of the world. I come from what was anciently a province of the mighty Empire established by the arms of the Romans and long sustained by the hand of God. I come to a land that is now under the judgement of God. Because of the manifest sins of your countrymen who rejected the Truth laid down at the Council of Chalcedon for the heresy of the Monophysites, the Persians were sent among you – to smite all of Syria with fire and the sword. Did the Syrians repent? No! They waited passively for the Greeks to liberate them and bring them back within the bosom of the Empire. Did the Syrians then show gratitude for the deliverance granted at the hands of the Greeks? They did not! They persisted in the darkness of heresy. Therefore, while the Persians had been suffered to chastise you with whips, the Saracens were raised up to chastise you with scorpions.
‘O men of Syria! I say unto you that the Jews and heretics sinned who welcomed the Saracens as deliverers from the True Faith of Chalcedon. But did the Orthodox themselves do other than bow their heads beneath the new yoke of darkness?’ I stopped to gather breath and to let the babble of sobs and self-pity rise in volume. I glanced briefly at the priest. He wasn’t looking happy. I hadn’t directly answered his point about my wanting to leave his people to shift for themselves. Nor would I. But I was, I could guess, preaching a far better sermon than he’d ever managed. Karim was looking up from the floor. How much of my Syriac he was following was anyone’s guess. It was close enough to his own language. But, if the wooden Greek he spoke was any indication, his linguistic abilities were limited. Fortunately, he wasn’t my audience. I waited again for silence, then continued.
‘But surely all is changed. I stand now not before sheep, but men – and men who have never been other than steady in the love of Christ. Your courage and your resolution have softened the heart of God. By your exertions, you have saved your own souls. By your example, you will save all of Syria. And that is why now I stand before you. With my help, you are to strike a blow against the darkness that shall never be forgotten. I am the Herald of your deliverance. How that deliverance shall be achieved is not yet to be given to you. But be assured – I am the Herald of the One God, the One God manifest in Three Persons.
‘Hear my message, O men of Syria. And let me depart in peace.’
I was rather hoping for a burst of applause, and then to be carried in triumph round the church. However, if I didn’t get that, no one seemed inclined to butcher me at the altar. In dead silence, I stepped down from my place and walked back to my chair. Once more, the crowd parted, and, unmolested, I sat again beside Karim. I was glad he’d now had the sense to shut up about his Allah and Prophet.
After a long silence that I’d faced with the immobility of a statue, someone got up and announced a ‘conference of the Elders’. This was to take place in the chapel. More lamps carried before them, about a dozen of the older men now walked inside, and the nave fell silent again.
It was a long wait, and I heard repeated bursts of shouting – though less the antiphonies of debate than the reading and responses of a liturgy. I couldn’t make out the responses, but they were angry. I thought at one point the discussion was over. But it was only someone come out with a cup and a jug of beer for me. I’d have preferred wine. Beer, after all, was for common people in Syria – and it reminded me too much of Jarrow. But a cup of beer is always preferable to a knife in the guts, and I took the cup with a graceful nod. I drained it and handed it back for a refill. Throughout the nave, there was a slight easing of tension. I leaned back into the chair and thought hard about the movement of light atoms through a pinhole. Perhaps, within that narrow space, the atoms of air were somehow concentrated to make a kind of lens. But that made no sense. Because they had to be unhooked from each other, air atoms were always evenly distributed. Any bunching in one place would be corrected as atoms moved into the relative void around them. I wondered if the effect might somehow be produced within the eye itself. That was a possibility. I might even live long enough to refine the hypothesis and think of an experiment for testing it.