Robert Silverberg - A Hero of the Empire

I was put in mind of Nicomedes’s mocking words of the week before: Consorting with madmen, are you, now, Corbulo?

This sudden outburst of Mahmud’s as we sat quietly together at my table did indeed have the pure ring of madness about it. That an obscure merchant of this desert land should also be a mystic and a dreamer was unusual enough; but now, as though drawing back a veil, he had revealed to me the tumultuous presence of a warrior-king within his breast as well. It was too much. Neither Alexander of Macedon nor Julius Caesar nor the Emperor Constantinus the Great had laid claim to holding so many selves within a single soul, and how could Mahmud the son of Abdallah?

A moment later he had subsided again, and all was as calm as it had been just minutes before.

There was a flask of wine on the table near my elbow, a good thick Tunisian that I had bought in the marketplace the day before. I poured myself some now to ease the thunder that Mahmud’s wild speech had engendered in my forehead. He smiled and tapped the flask and said, “I have never understood the point of that stuff, do you know? It seems a waste of good grapes to make it into wine.”

“Well, opinions differ on that,” said I. “But who’s to say who’s right? Let those who like wine drink it, and the rest can leave it alone.” I raised my glass to him. “This is really excellent, though. Are you sure you won’t try even a sip?”

He looked at me as though I had offered him a cup of venom. He will never be a drinker, I guess, will Mahmud son of Abdallah, and so be it. Yea and verily, Horatius, it leaves that much more for the likes of thee and me.

“And how is your friend Mahmud?” asked Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, the next time he and I dined together. “Does he have you bowing down to Allah yet?”

“I am not made for bowing before gods, I think,” I told him. And then, warily: “He seems a little troubled about the presence of you people down here.”

“Thinks we’re going to attempt a takeover, does he? He should know better than that. If Augustus and Trajan couldn’t manage to invade this place successfully, why does he think a sensible monarch like Maurice Tiberius would try it?”

“Not a military invasion, Nicomedes. Commercial infiltration is what he fears.”

Nicomedes looked unperturbed. “He shouldn’t. I’d never try to deny to anybody, Corbulo, that we’re looking to increase the quantity of business we do here. But why should that matter to the likes of Mahmud? We won’t cut into his slice of the pie. We’ll just make the pie bigger for everybody. You know the thing the Phoenicians say—‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’”

“Don’t they teach rhetoric in Greek schools any more?” I asked. “Pies? Boats? You’re mixing your metaphors there, I’d say. And Arabia doesn’t have any boats for the tide to raise, or any tides either, for that matter.”

“You know what I mean. Tell Mahmud not to worry. Our plans for expansion of trade with Arabia will only be good for everyone involved, and that includes the merchants of Mecca.—Maybe I should have a little talk with him myself, eh? He’s an excitable sort. I might be able to calm him down.”

“Perhaps it would be best to leave him to me,” I said.

It was in that moment, Horatius, that I saw where the true crux of the situation lay, and who the true enemy of the Empire is.

The Emperor Julianus need not fret over anything that the Greeks might plan to do here. The Greek incursion into Arabia Deserta was only to be expected. Greeks are businessmen by second nature; Arabia, though it is outside the Empire, lies within the natural Eastern sphere of influence; they would have come down here sooner or later, and, well, here they are. If they intend to try to build stronger trade connections with these desert folk, we have no reason to get upset about that, nor is there the slightest thing that the West can do about it. As Nicomedes has said, the East already controls Aegyptus and Syria and Libya and a lot of other such places that produce goods we need, and we don’t suffer thereby. It really is a single empire, in that sense. The Greeks won’t push up prices on Eastern commodities to us for fear that we’ll do the same thing to them with the tin and copper and iron and timber that flow to them out of the West.

No. The soft and citified Greeks are no menace to us. The real peril here comes from the desert prince, Mahmud son of Abdallah.

One god , he says. One Arabian people under one king . And he says, concerning the Greeks, I will destroy them before they can ruin us.

He means it. And perhaps he can do it. Nobody has ever unified these Saracens under a single man’s rule before, but I think they have never had anyone like Mahmud among them before, either. I had a sudden vision of him, dear Horatius, as I sat there at Nicomedes’s nicely laden table: Mahmud with eyes of fire and a gleaming sword held high, leading Saracen warriors northward out of Arabia into Syria Palaestina and Mesopotamia, spreading the message of the One God as he comes and driving the panicky Greeks before his oncoming hordes. The eager peasantry embracing the new creed everywhere: who can resist Mahmud’s persuasive tongue, especially when it is backed by the blades of his ever more numerous followers? Onward, then, into Armenia and Cappadocia and Persia, and then there will come a swing westward as well into Aegyptus and Libya. The warriors of Allah everywhere, inflaming the souls of men with the new belief, the new love of virtue and honor. The old, stale, tired religions of the region melting away before it like springtime snowflakes. The wealth of the temples of the false gods divided among the people. Whole legions of idle parasitic priests butchered like cattle as the superstitions are put to rout. The golden statues of the nonexistent gods melted down. A new commonwealth proclaimed in the world, founded on prayer and sacred law.

Mahmud can say that he has the true god behind him. His eloquence makes you believe it. We of the Empire have only the statues of our gods, and no one of any intelligence has taken those gods seriously for hundreds of years. How can we withstand the fiery onslaught of the new faith? It will roll down upon us like the lava of Vesuvius.

“You take this much too seriously,” said Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, when, much later in the evening and after too many more flasks of wine, I confided my fears to him. “Perhaps you should cover your head when you go out of doors at midday, Corbulo. The sun of Arabia is very strong, and it can do great injury to the mind.”

No, Horatius. I am right and he is wrong. Once they are launched, the legions of Allah will not be checked until they have marched on through Italia and Gallia and Britannia to the far shores of the Ocean Sea, and all the world is Mahmud’s.

It shall not be.

I will save the world from him, Horatius, and perhaps in so doing I will save myself.

Mecca is, of course, a sanctuary city. No man may lift his hand against another within its precincts, under pain of the most awful penalties.

Umar the idol-maker, who served in the temple of the goddess Uzza, understood that. I came to Umar in his workshop, where he sat turning out big-breasted figurines of Uzza, who is the Venus of the Saracens, and bought from him for a handful of coppers a fine little statuette carved from black stone that I hope to show you one of these days, and then I put a gold piece of Justinianus’s time before him and told him what I wanted done; and his only response was to tap his finger two times against Justinianus’s nose. Not understanding his meaning, I merely frowned.

“This man of whom you speak is my enemy and the enemy of all who love the gods,” said Umar the idol-maker, “and I would kill him for you for three copper coins if I did not have a family to support. But the work will involve me in travel, and that is expensive. It cannot be done in Mecca, you know.” And he tapped the nose of Justinianus once again. This time I took his meaning. I laid a second gold piece beside the first one, and the idol-maker smiled.