Departures

The procession continued. At last it came to an end: almost three hundred monks were trudging west in hope and fear. “Is everyone safely gone?” Isaac asked.

John consulted his list, now black with checks. He frowned. “Have I missed someone?” He shouted to the nearest monk in the column. The monk shook his head. The question ran quickly up the line, and was met everywhere with the same negative response.

John glowered down at the unchecked name and muttered under his breath. “He’s off somewhere devising another hymn,” the prior growled to Isaac. “Well and good-on any day but this. By your leave-” He started back into the now-abandoned monastery.

“Yes, go fetch him,” Isaac said. “Be kind, John. When the divine gift takes him, he forgets all else.”

“I’ve seen.” John nodded. “But even for that we have no time today, not if we hope to stay in this world so God may visit us with His gifts.”

Entering Ir-Ruhaiyeh after the monks had gone out of it was like seeing the corpse of a friend-no, John thought, like the corpse of his mother, for the monastery had nurtured and sheltered him as much as his fleshly parents had. Hearing only the wind whistle through the courtyard, seeing doors flung carelessly open and left so forever made John want to weep.

His head came up. The wind was not quite all he heard. Somewhere among the deserted buildings a monk was singing quietly to himself, as if trying the flavor of words on his tongue.

John found him just outside the empty stables. His back was turned, so even as the prior drew near he caught only snatches of the new hymn. He was not sure he was sorry. This song seemed to be the complement of the one the monk had created in the refectory; instead of praise for the Lord, it told of the pangs of hell in terms so graphic that ice walked John’s back.

“For the unbelievers, for the misbelievers, the scourge. Their hearts shall leap up and choke them. Demons shall seize them by feet and forelocks. Seething water shall be theirs to drink, and-” The monk broke off abruptly, jumping in surprise as John’s hand fell on his shoulder.

“Come, Brother Mouamet,” the prior said gently. “Not even for your songs will the Persians delay. Everyone else has gone now; we wait only on you.”

For a moment, he did not think the monk saw him. Then Mouamet’s face cleared. “Thank you, reverend sir,” he said. “With the Lord giving me this hymn, I’d forgotten the hour.” The abstracted expression that had raised awe in John briefly returned. “I think I shall be able to recover the thread.” “Good,” the prior said, and meant it. “But now-”

“-I’ll come with you,” Mouamet finished for him. Sandals scuffing in the dust, they walked together out of the monastery and set out on the long road to Constantinople.

ISLANDS IN THE SEA

I’ve written a series of stories set in a world where Muhammad, instead of founding Islam, converted to Christianity on a trading mission into Syria and ended his days a monk (the previous tale in this book, “Departures,” shows his monastic life; a later one here will look at that world several hundred years after his conversion). The world of “Islands in the Sea” looks at the other side of the coin and considers what things might have been like had the Byzantine Empire, instead of shielding southeastern Europe from Islam for hundreds of years, collapsed under the weight of an early Arab onslaught. In our history Muslim forces twice besieged Constantinople, in 674-78 and 717-18, but the Byzantine capital held and the Empire survived as Christianity’s eastern bulwark, holding Islam out of Anatolia and the Balkans for centuries to come while converting the Bulgars and Russians to faith in Christ. But what if the Empire had fallen in the eighth century instead of the fifteenth? The still-pagan folk to the north of Constantinople would have had new choices to make

A.H. 152 (A.D. 769)

The Bulgar border guards had arrows nocked and ready as the Arab horsemen rode up from the south. Jalal ad-Din as-Stambuli, the leader of the Arab delegation, raised his right hand to show it was empty. “In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful, I and my men come in peace,” he called in Arabic. To be sure the guards understood, he repeated himself in Greek.

The precaution paid off. The guards lowered their bows. In Greek much worse than Jalal ad-Din’s, one of them asked, ”Why for you come in peace, whitebeard?”

Jalal ad-Din stroked his whiskers. Even without the Bulgar’s mockery, he knew they were white. Not many men who had the right to style themselves as-Stambuli, the Constantinopolitan, still lived. More than fifty years had passed since the army of Suleiman and Maslama had taken Constantinople and put an end to the Roman Empire. Then Jalal ad-Din’s beard had not been white. Then he could hardly raise a beard at all.