I watched Meekal work himself into another frenzy of eloquence. As his voice rose, and he switched between Greek and Latin and Saracen, I shuffled carefully round to where I could flop back on to the sofa beside that discarded chronicle. I looked at Meekal and pulled off my dotted visor. It showed me too many copies, in too great clarity, of the roots of his dyed beard and the increasingly wild look in his eyes.
‘Oh, please, Meekal, please!’ I cried, holding up my hands for silence. ‘You’ve made your speech. Don’t spoil the effect with repetition. You tell me that, if only I join you in shitting on the Empire, we’ll have a better world out of it. If that’s your meaning, I think I’ve heard enough. You might care now to say what I can expect from a refusal to join you in this venture. Does it involve an escort back to my lodgings in Beirut?’
That brought him back to his senses. ‘Refuse my offer,’ he said, his face pushed close to mine, ‘and I’ll kill you with my own hands. I’ll kill you as an apostate.’ He spoke slowly and with controlled fury. ‘And, before you start whining that life is nothing much to lose for a man of your age, just reflect that I know you better than any man alive. And let’s not also forget my pretty young uncle. I might – given proper reason – choose to regard him as my kinsman, and share with him under your will. Or I might spurn him as your last barbarian catamite. I could then find him a place among the Caliph’s dancing boys. Or I could have his looks prolonged with a little nip of the gelding knife, and set him to combing hair in my own harem. I might even have him taught to sing most fetchingly to my wives.
‘So, what is it to be, my darling grandfather? Will you join with the Faithful in spreading light over the world? Or will you die cursing the day my agents found your refuge in the West?’
‘My time is upon me,’ I said. ‘In other words, I need a shit. Will you have the kindness to call some slaves up to attend to me?’ I grinned and rubbed my belly. ‘Or must Meekal the Merciless soil his hands with other than blood?’
Chapter 46
‘You’ll need to push your finger in to get me properly clean,’ I said, still leaning forward. ‘Mind you, be very careful. I didn’t like the look of those fingernails.’
Grunting and now farting himself from the strain, Meekal reached down to open the valve that sent a stream of water to carry my little offering into the downpipe from the Tower of Heavenly Peace. The shitty stain in the channel beneath the ebony seat he’d leave for someone else to clean.
‘Ooh!’ I cried in a voice that echoed about the room, ‘you’ve a way with that oily sponge. What a bath slave the world lost when I rescued your father from outside that church in Constantinople.’ I twisted round to look up into the stony face, and wondered if he was reflecting on the deficiencies of my argument. It was hard to tell if he was thinking anything at all.
Meekal helped me into one of the smaller sitting rooms. This looked over one of the less grand prospects of Damascus. But there was a table set with food. He took off the napkin that covered a dish of bread pulled from the inner part of a loaf, and waved at a dish of pitted olives and soft cheese. He went back along to my bedchamber and returned with the wine and the Saracen chronicle. I pulled my dotted visor down again over my eyes and looked through it. With plenty of sunlight falling on it from above, the chronicle was so clear before me that I could see small strands of papyrus where the copyist’s pen had snagged the sheet. I scrolled idly backwards, looking out for the passage where Meekal had first stood before the Caliph and called out in a great voice his profession of faith. Perhaps, after all, the writer had the makings of an historian. I looked up and smiled into the sweaty, now desperate face.
‘Look at this again,’ I said, holding out the visor. ‘Take it and look at it closely. When you snatched it from the hands of the man who was still finishing its ornamentation, you saw almost at once what its purpose was. And if you couldn’t by yourself reproduce the elegant workmanship that lets it balance so lightly on the face, you could easily make a functioning copy for yourself.
‘With the weapon I invented, it’s an entirely different matter. The combustible mixture itself is made of specific ingredients that must be combined in exactly the right proportions. It must then be matured like wine – use it too early or too late, and it will not ignite. There is then what may be called the delivery system. The bronze kettles that hold the two mixtures – yes, there are two mixtures – must be of a certain hardness. The fire that heats the kettles must do so to a precise temperature: too low, and the mixture will not boil, too high, and it will explode. The spouts through which the mixtures are forced must, for the same reason, be neither too wide nor too narrow; and the steel must be hard enough to survive the repeated variations of temperature. The fire at the end of these spouts has rules for its heat and placement.
‘What I’m saying, dear boy, is that the manufacture and use of Greek fire do not suggest themselves to the casual observer – though you know that already. Moreover, the business of reproducing the secret would need a cluster of skills that are beyond the abilities of any one man. If you want to make people see again, you could turn these things out by the thousand in no time – and do so without my further assistance. Or you could lock me in here and have me turn them out for you. If you want Greek fire, you need skills that I do not myself possess. And it seems that you need skills that are not possessed in Syria. You are asking me to oversee a project that would involve not so much reproduction as reinvention.’
I turned my attention to the food, and made sure to slobber as much down my naked front as I could. All the time, Meekal stood before me breathing hard.
‘So you will do as the Caliph begs?’ he asked during a lull in my noisy, unmannered eating.
‘I thought it was you who was asking, dear boy,’ I said. ‘If it’s the Commander of the Faithful himself who begs my assistance, perhaps I should await his return from whatever war he is fighting.’
Meekal crashed a hairy fist on to the table. There was a splash of cheesy water all over his black outer tunic.
‘Will you do as I ask?’ he now roared. ‘Or must I bring that fucking child in and castrate him under your eyes?’
‘Do that,’ I said, ‘and you can fuck yourself for the secret.’ I took a sip of wine. I raised my arms and looked at Meekal. He looked back awhile, then reached for a fresh napkin and began wiping me clean. How much had this project cost so far? How much had getting me here cost? If you’re a little person looking in, a government has unlimited resources for getting its way. But I’d been an insider too long to know other than the truth. It didn’t matter how much of his subjects’ gold the Caliph could steal from them: it always had more than one possible use. How much of this had Meekal lavished on the project? And how much of his prestige rested on the project’s complete success?
‘Now,’ I said, getting up and walking out of the room. I left my sheet where it had fallen off me. He picked it up and followed me into my office. I pointed him into a chair and leaned on my desk in much the same position as I’d taken with the assassin. He waved the sheet in my direction. I wrinkled my nose at the spoiled silk and looked at him. He’d seen me naked having my shit. He could carry on seeing me naked. ‘My darling Michael – or Meekal, or whatever else I’m supposed to call you nowadays – I have been made an offer I might not be able to refuse. You can bet your life I’ll not accept it, though, until I have some proper guarantees of the boy’s safety. Oh, and when I say “proper guarantees”, I don’t have your personal word in mind. The whole world knows how little that is worth.’ I stopped and pushed my visor back down to see if I could read the titles of the books shelved against the far wall.
‘I could adopt the boy,’ Meekal suggested with a faint smile.