Lord of Slaughter

19

The chamberlain had thought himself safe in his gilded apartment, where he lay — a thing of status on a couch, its hands perfumed with frankincense, its face softened with oil, its body wrapped in a silk robe. But the magic sparked inside him, kindling memories as bright as the fire in his hearth; memories that, like the fire, lived and burned.

In his mind he heard voices and saw people. Two figures in a field of boulders on a hill overlooking the great town below. They began to move, the story began to move in his head, little patters of words coming back to him as a walker in the hills feels the rain of dirt that heralds a rockfall.

‘I’m afraid, mother.’ He saw a young girl peering down into a black space between boulders. He was there, on the hillside, watching — the magic inside him forcing him to see.

‘The fear is part of it. Strengthen yourself, Elai. Nothing is won without effort.’

The taller figure, the mother, held a fish-oil lamp in her hand, though the moon was nearly full and shone bright. She sat on a big boulder at the centre of a wide field of them.

Below, two or three summer hours’ walk away, the lamps and candles of Constantinople twinkled. The city seemed to hang like two shimmering pools of light separated by the deep and encroaching darkness of the invisible sea that surrounded and divided it.

The woman pointed to the huge church of Hagia Sofia. The moon turned its dome to shining metal and the windows that sat beneath it were white in its light. The woman’s thoughts opened to the chamberlain like a flower and he saw how the church reminded her of a squat giant, his helmet pulled low on his forehead, scanning the land for intruders. Well, she thought, it was looking in the wrong place if that’s what it was doing. They would approach by one of the unseen roads that ran for miles through the hills and under the city.

‘That is where we are going,’ she said, ‘under there.’

‘It’s so far,’ said Elai. She was thirteen years old but still a little girl in her fear; the chamberlain sensed as he watched her. He shuddered at the intimacy, the depth to which he knew her heart.

‘I made the journey when I was your age,’ said the mother. ‘Your grandmother made it too, and hers before her. The goddess is in there and will grant you her sight. You just need courage. The tunnels are marked and we have enough lamps and oil. The way is straight enough if you know what you’re doing. The worst we will encounter is a wasps’ nest, and none of those when we’ve gone fifty paces into the dark.’

‘And the dogs of Hecate?’

‘The dogs won’t come for us. We are the goddess’s servants. They wait only for trespassers.’

The girl nodded. ‘Is Karas coming?’

Karas. The chamberlain crossed himself. It was his own name, though no one had called him that in fifteen years. What did he share with the child? A body? Yes, in some ways, but grown and altered. A mind? No, not any more. Then what? The deeds. The actions that now unfolded in his magic-stewed brain. In that way alone, he thought, he was the same person as the boy he now saw in his vision, the boy he had been. He was fettered to the past by memories that refused to fade.

He saw the woman turn her eyes to the boy poking about at the bottom of the rocks. Karas was ten years old, brother to Elai. The chamberlain, restless on his couch, wanted to reach out, to take him by the hand and lead him away to his games in the slum.

‘I have dreams too,’ called Karas. ‘I should complete the ritual.’

‘Go back and look after Styliane, as I’ve asked you to do,’ said his mother.

‘She’s right enough with her aunties. Let me come. I want to know the secret of my dreams.’ He came climbing towards them over the rocks.

‘You’re young, Karas, and haven’t come fully into the world. You have a memory of what you were before, in lives gone, that’s all. When you become a man properly such things will go. Men are made to do and to fight. They can’t hold magic inside them.’

The boy sat down next to his mother. ‘I would hold magic.’

‘Be content with what you have. You have no natural harmony with that — ’ she jabbed a finger at the moon ‘- or the tides that surround us.’

‘What do my dreams mean, then?’

‘What dreams?’ The woman had hitherto paid little attention to Karas. The boy was full of mischief and full of questions about things he did not need to know. Magic was a woman’s gift, given from mother to daughter. Her son’s fascination with it struck her as strange, and not a little effeminate.

‘I’ve told you a thousand times.’

‘Tell me again.’

‘There is a wolf.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he’s waiting for me.’

‘Yes?’

‘That’s it.’

‘That’s not much of a dream, is it? You’d build no reputation as a seer based on that, would you?’ His mother and his sister glanced at each other and laughed.

‘Well, what does it mean? He’s in a forest of big strange trees and he’s waiting for me.’

‘Perhaps it means a wolf is waiting for you,’ said Elai, ‘in some trees.’

‘Don’t tease me; no one teases you over your dreams.’

‘No.’ The girl turned her eyes to the ground. ‘But you don’t dream as I dream.’

‘How do you know?’

Their mother raised her hand.

‘Stop quarrelling. Karas, look. I’ll interpret your dream if it means so much to you. You know we are descended from the Heruli, who broke the empire in the west. Your know your forefathers were great men of the northern tribes, and one of them, Odoacer, overthrew the emperor Romulus Augustulus.’

‘I know this.’

‘I’m telling you you know it — and that means if you had any insight at all you’d be able to work it out for yourself. You asked for the interpretation, now hear it out. Odoacer took his wolf warriors to the temples of Rome and made the emperor bow down before him. Perhaps you can hear your ancestors calling to you. They worshipped the wolf. They were wolves, some of them, if you listen to the myths. Perhaps it’s you as you were who you see.’

‘Well, if I’m getting messages from ghosts, that shows that men can hold magic. I should be able to go with you.’

‘You have an echo of magic, and you are as near to it as those lights of the town are to the stars.’

‘Please let me come with you.’

The woman pushed her toe into a space between the rocks, almost like a bather testing the water for temperature.

‘It does feel right you should come. You might be of use,’ she said.

‘Come on then, let’s go!’ The enthusiasm of his childish self filled the chamberlain with dread.

‘Listen first. When we reach the appointed place, your sister and I will work a magic to allow us to speak to the goddess. There is normally very little danger but, for a while, we will not be as ourselves and — being in the world of the gods — will not be aware of what happens in this world. You watch over us and make sure neither of us falls into the waters.’

The boy smiled. ‘Right. Shall I go first?’

‘You’ll go last and not yet.’

His mother took some rolled cloth from her pack, along with some twine.

‘Tie this around your knees, both of you, and wrap some around your hands. The way is long and you won’t make it unless you protect yourself.’

The children followed their mother’s example with the cloth. Then they were ready.

The woman peered into the gap between the rocks. Nothing marked it as special or worthy of exploration, but she lowered her pack into it and wriggled in afterwards, careful with the lamp.

‘Follow.’ She looked out at them, her face a pale mask in the moonlight. She disappeared inside, and the boy and the girl clambered down after her.

‘Is there a wasps’ nest?’ said Elai.

‘No,’ her mother called back to her, ‘so the dangerous part is done. Come on.’

The chamberlain watched in his vision as they crawled down a low tunnel that opened into a little cavern, just tall enough for the woman to stand in if she stooped. It stretched out twenty paces and led into a deeper darkness at its far end. They went towards it, the light of the lamp wobbling on the walls. The rocks were not even and it wasn’t easy to make their way on them, so progress was slow.

The passage dropped quite steeply at first but quickly became a long gently sloping tunnel. The children had to bend double and their mother went on her hands and knees. Karas was at the rear. He glanced behind him. The lamp-light cast shadows that seemed to stretch away at one instant and rush back towards him the next, like grasping hands snatching at him. The chamberlain was the boy again, no longer an observer but lost to the story, back there, Karas once more.

All separation dissolved. He was ten years old, imagining himself already a magician, the shadows an enchanted cloak he could pull about him to disappear in a breath. He remembered a story his mother had told him, ‘The cloak that was cut from the night.’ Perhaps, he thought, he would gain magical insight and take his own shears made of moonbeams to the heavens to bring his mother a fold of darkness to stitch into a cloak of shadows with her needles of starlight. He wasn’t scared; he was excited, but his sister was silent and pale. He couldn’t understand it. If his mother was correct, then Elai was going to be offered a great gift. Why did she seem so nervous?

They bent and crawled, walked and slithered through the passages for hours. The wall bore marks at points along the way — the moon and a star, the symbol of Hecate, goddess of Byzantium, the old name for Constantinople. The city was now under Christ’s sway, but plenty of people still found time for the old gods, particularly in hardship or when in need of insight into the future. These marks, though, had not been made by the common people. Even if they found the entrance to the caves, they would never go within. The marks, in a rough ochre, had been daubed by generations of priestesses who had kept the secrets of the caves and visited them only to find their insight.

‘What are these?’

They had stopped to rest and to eat and Karas had found some more marks on the wall — no more than a few rough scratches but clearly made by humans.

‘Old symbols of our kin,’ said the woman, ‘from years before.’

‘Made by the wolf warriors?’

‘Or people like them.’

‘Did they worship the goddess?’

‘I don’t know, Karas. The goddess has many forms and appears in different ways to different people.’

‘How different?’

‘She is called Isis, and she is called Hecate. In the north they say she is not a woman at all and call her Odin or Wodanaz or Mercury.’

‘How can she be male and female at the same time?’

‘A person looks different when you approach them from the back to the way they look when you see them face on. How many more ways of being seen do gods possess?’

‘She is a god. She can do what she chooses. That is what makes someone a god,’ said Elai. ‘They form the world according to their wishes.’

‘Then the emperor in Constantinople is a god,’ said Karas.

‘Of a sort,’ said his mother.

Karas wanted to talk more on this subject. His mother and sister would never discuss this sort of thing with him normally. Here, he was gaining the knowledge that he so craved. But his mother just put the remains of the bread and olives into her pack and said it was time to go on.

First Karas smelled the damp in the air, then he felt it on the walls. Now the rocks took on a different character. They were more like the roots of trees, or the melted bodies of candles, than anything he had seen before. He imagined himself crawling inside the root of a great tree, seeking the water from which it drank.

They seemed to be in there for days, though he had no real sense of time. His mother had brought little food — she said it was better to starve to prepare for the ritual. Now rest was not pleasant. Their bodies cooled quickly and their wet clothes stuck to them.

‘You have never told me your dreams,’ said Karas to Elai when they stopped again. ‘What are they?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘I cannot tell you.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Mother?’

‘He won’t know what to make of them, so why not?’

Karas had never seen his mother in a mood like this before. She wasn’t exactly scared but there was a resignation to her, as if the things she normally cared about no longer mattered in the face of their task in that place under the ground.

The boy glanced around at the dripping walls. The rocks fell in layers like gigantic mushrooms and twisted faces seemed to leer from the walls through the candlelight.

Elai spoke: ‘Something is looking for me. It has always been looking for me. It hunted me down in lives before because of what I have inside me.’

‘What do you have inside you?’

‘Things that whisper. Signs and symbols that unlock things. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can’t touch them.’

‘So what use are they to you?’

She waved her hand in irritation. Karas caught the implication. He wouldn’t understand.

‘What use are they?’

‘They are part of something.’

‘Of what?’

‘A god.’

‘So you’re a little bit of a god.’

‘We’re all a little bit of a god,’ said his mother.

‘This is rubbish. She’s just a silly girl,’ said Karas.

‘She carries an aspect of the goddess within her. That’s what I believe. Hecate faces three ways. Virgin, mother, crone. Your sister is the virgin.’

‘And what good is it to her?’

‘That is what we’re here to find out.’

‘Well, if she’s a goddess, can she magic us up some food and fine clothes? “I’m part of a god.” Where did you learn to talk like that, Elai?’

‘In my dreams. Anyway I never said that, exactly.’

She was so serious he stopped his mockery. She had something else she wanted to say, he was sure.

‘Is there more?’

‘I don’t know. I hope to find out in the well. It will tell me what to do about what’s following me.’

‘And what follows you?’

‘A wolf,’ said Elai.

‘Ha!’ He pointed at her. ‘I dream of a wolf and it’s nothing; she dreams of a wolf and she’s taken to the earth to be given magical insights!’

‘Not given,’ said her mother.

‘Then what?’

‘She is here to earn them, or pay for them. Nothing is given at the well; things are only exchanged. And not everyone wants to give what is asked of them. I didn’t, nor will I.’

‘But you have a power of prophecy.’

‘A weak one, and the one I was born with. I would not answer the bargain that was put to me.’

‘I would answer any bargain,’ said the boy.

‘Good that you won’t be asked then.’

They ate the last of their bread and olives and pushed further down. When they stopped they froze; when they moved they sweated until they were soaked. Down, down into the lower caves. Finally they came to a stream that dropped in steps into blackness.

Careful with the lamp, they sat and bumped their way forward until Karas, peering ahead, saw something that sent a cold chill through him.

Their lamp wasn’t the only light down there. Ahead of them was a chamber and the rock was glowing.

His mother wriggled forward through the stream on her behind. When she reached the chamber, she set the lamp on a rock. Karas and Elai followed her in.

Nearest to the lamp the rocks glowed with an intense red; further away the light shone softer and more diffuse. The glow was like a reflection of the lamplight, thought Karas, not on the surface of the rock but deep within. He was in a sort of crucible, a wide and shallow cave only a man’s height above the water shaped like an open hand. The rocks in the pool stretched up like fingers, the water sitting in the palm as if the earth was offering it. The water glittered in the light of the rocks. Karas thought of the bloody hand of Christ, pierced by the nails of Romans, thought of his mother’s words: ‘Not everyone is prepared to give what is asked.’ What had Christ given on his cross? His life and his agony. And what had he become? A god.

‘Why do the rocks glow, Mother?’ he asked.

‘It’s not magic as I understand it. They only borrow the light of our lamp,’ she said. ‘If we were to put it out, they would die too.’

‘Don’t put out the light,’ said Elai. She had fear in her voice.

‘I have no intention of doing that.’

His mother moved further in, climbing over the huge fingers of rock. Shelves of stone edged the chamber, some bearing the remains of candles. Karas counted. There were eight such level places, two large ones near the water and several smaller ones. He was reminded of when he’d sneaked into the hippodrome to see the chariot racing. It was like that, he thought, a tiny stadium.

His mother found a ledge and gestured for Elai to sit beside her.

‘Come on. The way is easy, and if you fall in, the pool is not deep here. I can fish you out easily.’

‘I thought it was a well,’ said Karas.

‘And so it is, but wells are only deep to reach the water. This is the bottom and it is fed by three good streams.’

Karas only saw one.

Elai made her way around the rocks, climbing carefully, pausing to ask for her mother’s help twice, to be directed to a hold or just encouraged to come on. Finally the girl was beside her.

‘This will take a while, Karas,’ said his mother, ‘but remember it was you who asked to come.’

‘I am in no hurry,’ said Karas. His bravery had left him, though, in the blood-red well, and he had the strong urge to cry.

He waited while his mother prepared Elai for the ritual. She fed her herbs from her pack, then took some herself. She also took out a long ladle and set it beside her. Then she sang:

‘Lady of the moon,

Lady of gateways and leavetakings,

Lady of those who step through and depart,

Lady of the dead and the lands of the dead,

Lady of magic and song,

Here at the meeting of three ways,

Here in the waters where the ways are tied,

Avenging spirit put your eyes upon your daughters.’

The chant went on and on and Karas shivered deeply. He was cold and could not imagine his sister and mother were any warmer. They sat with their feet in the water.

Her mother took the ladle and held it up in both hands. Chanting all the time, she bowed three times in three directions, then dipped the ladle into the water and lifted it to offer to Elai.

Elai drank it down. Karas watched, fascinated. His sister’s eyes had become glazed and she rocked back and forth where she sat.

Still the chant, unceasing. Eventually his mother began to rock on her seat too, her eyes vacant. Both of them mumbled words under their breath.

‘Hecate, goddess, moonblind where the waters meet, lady of the death and the journey of death, she who guards the threshold and the gateway of death, she who admits only the dead, Hecate, goddess, at whose disposal are the starry chambers of the night, the black void of the cold oceans, lady of hidden places, she who guards the threshold and the gateway of death.’

Karas lost focus in the cold. He wanted to go back to the surface for the warmth movement would bring, but the ritual held a fascination for him. It was as if he was an ocean and inside him stirred unseen and depthless tides.

A scream, almost unbearably loud in the tight little cavern. His sister: ‘How will I be free of him? I will not become him, I will not die by those teeth as she died!’ Her eyes were wide and glassy.

‘I will not. That way I cannot go. I will not. No!’

Karas wanted to go to her, to help her, but he did not.

‘I will not give what is asked. It is too much! Too much.’

Karas watched her in the lamplight and the soft glow of the rocks. So she would reject what the waters offered while he would not be even given a chance. Why?

His mother’s chant went on, but Elai cast about her as if blind and searching for the direction of a sound.

Why should she refuse what he would take in a breath? He clambered around the fingers of rock towards where his mother and sister sat. His muscles writhed on his bones with the cold, a deep tremor within him. He squeezed in beside them. Then he ate the herbs. Their taste was bitter and earthy — more than earthy — bits of grit and stone grinding on his teeth as he chewed. He forced them down. His mouth was full of dirt. He took up the ladle beside his mother and dipped it into the waters. He drank.

He lost all idea of how long he had been listening to the chant. His nose ran, and he blew the snot from it. He couldn’t be sure he had it all out and blew and blew again. He was salivating heavily and became strangely conscious of the muscles of his face. They didn’t quite seem to be under his control. He stretched his mouth and moved his head from side to side.

His mother’s chanting took on a strange quality like the words were physical things that didn’t disappear as they were spoken but came floating out of her mouth to settle like petals on the water. He couldn’t see them, but he had the strong sensation they were there, these word-petals, dropping from her mouth.

He heard voices calling him. The words were in no language he knew, but they rustled in his mind like leaves disturbed by footsteps in a wood.

Then they became clearer and intelligible. This is the place.

‘What place?’

He looked around him to see who spoke. It was a woman’s voice, but none he recognised.

The place where you are lost.

‘I am not lost. I know my way back.’

Can you see what you have drunk?

The waters were no longer red with the light of the rocks but clear and grey. Within them shone symbols — some silver, like quick fish in the pool, some copper and shimmering as if picked out in spangles of sunlight, some solid and hard, barnacled and green like the ribs of a sunken ship.

‘What are these?’

The needful symbols.

‘What need?’

The need of magic.

He knew what these things were — keys, keys to making the world in the image of his will, keys to godhood.

‘What is asked of me?’

You know what is asked.

He fell to giggling. He was convinced there was a hair in his mouth, irritating his palate and tongue. He dipped the ladle in the water again and drank. But there was no hair, or if there was he could not wash it away. His face burned on the right-hand side. He was having difficulty thinking, as if waking from a deep sleep — that moment when the self is forgotten and the apparatus of eyes, brain and ears merely detects the world without interpreting or making sense of it.

Then something like his self returned, though altered. All the ragged, unfinished, deliberately set-aside and overlooked desires in his mind came loping to the fore, and all the tenderness, the love and the kindness shrank back before its advance.

A shape played and wriggled on his sister’s skin, three triangles interlocking. And then there was only one triangle, but, in seeing it, he understood that it was not meant to stand alone. It wanted the other two for company. He saw battles, banners streaming in the sun, red and gold and another, blacker, that was the banner of death — a broad sweep of flies above a field of the slain. A story he had heard came into his mind. The goddess Hecate went to a feast and a rich and spiteful king set out to trick her, to test her powers of insight and knowledge, so he served her up a dismembered child in a stew. The goddess, to punish him, condemned him to turn into a wolf and eat his twenty sons. A man who became a wolf. He was a fellow to fear. The man-wolf’s anger was so deep, his hungers like the sucking tides of the ocean, always there, never sated.

Karas’s thoughts returned to himself and his family’s life outside the walls. What was it? No more than the existence of rats. They lived in a slum with no hope of advancement. Down here, in the well, was hope. Up there, in the living forms of his sisters and his mother, restraint, tradition. No father, three women to care for. He was anchored to poverty. There could be no great school for him, no bureaucrat’s position in the palace, while he was responsible for them. Resentment bubbled inside him.

He drank the waters again and this time felt the symbols enter him — chiming and breathing and filling him with wild visions of battles, of mountains and woods and wide blue seas. They grew in him, as if he were the land and they a tree springing from him, as if he was a tree and they an encircling vine, as if he was the vine and they the land that was nurtured by its fall of leaves and fruit. He felt their power — to control men, to sway them, even to kill them. But then they left him. The symbols would not stay.

‘What is asked of me?’

He knew what.

He stepped into the waters. Here they came up to his chest, though he felt the floor dropping away under his feet. He reached up for his mother’s feet and pulled her in. Entranced, weak and cold, she put up no resistance as he drowned her.

He drank again and the symbols flooded into him. But again they would not stay.

He pulled at his sister’s feet and dragged her in, holding her under. For a second she fought, and then all strength left her and she drowned as easily as her mother had done.

Once more he drank. This time the symbols came into him like a tempest, blowing the everyday and the mundane away, letting him see the true relations of things, driving him mad. He coughed, choked, laughed. Everything was clear to him — the way to the surface, to the light, but more than that, his future — what he needed to do to achieve all the things he had dreamed of.

He turned, disturbed by… by what? Something followed him. What? Nothing but a movement in the shadow cast by the lamp. Was it behind him again. What? Was that the dream wolf, slinking in the dark?

He kissed his sister, lifting her to a shelf of rock in the pool so she sat as if bathing.

‘The symbols are here,’ he said, ‘in me now. They needed to leave this place and you would not take them. They had to leave; there was no choice. If he finds them here, he’ll be born again. We must hide them from him.’

He pulled his mother through the water to the shelf and sat her beside his sister, kissed her too.

‘I have given what you could not,’ he said, ‘and now a great magic dwells within me. But it is only mine for a little time, so I must never be a man. I do this to honour the goddess and you are with her now. I am good and I have acted for good.’

He pulled himself out of the pool up towards the lamp. As he took it the shadows made wolves on the walls which seemed to stretch eager jaws towards him, but he was not afraid. The symbols protected him. But how long would they stay?

He climbed up the tunnel, towards the light, towards the hillside. He would run to Constantinople and go to the administrator of the palace to ask to be apprenticed to him as a eunuch and servant of the emperor. A symbol expressed itself inside him and said its name in a strange language that seemed magical and beautiful to Karas. Fehu. The name brought images of the bountiful baskets of the harvest, of sunshine, of gold, and it brought the thought of good luck. The palace would not refuse him. He would be cut, he would be prosperous and he would never be a man, so he would keep the magic he had earned at the well.

In his bedchamber the chamberlain put his hands to his face and wept.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He recalled the dream that had come to him after the incident at the pool, after he was cut and entered the Office of the Palace. In it, he flew over clouds that stretched out like silver cities in the moonlight, cities that burst into flame with the red dawn. He was pursued. By what? A wolf. He saw it sometimes, no more than a shape made by the rising plumes of storm clouds, white teeth that snapped towards him as the moonbeams split in the sodden air.

A wolf really had come — the wolfman who had been taken to the Numera — like a dream made flesh. The chamberlain had ordered him killed by another inmate — it was dangerous to move against one of the emperor’s prisoners directly — but the man had escaped before that plan had been put into effect. Now he was down in the caves below the prison doing who knew what? Could he find his way to the chamber where the rocks sweated red light and where the hungry waters sparkled like blood? Of course not. It was too far, the route too difficult to find from that side. The spirits that haunted those depths, that kept the curious guards away, that led prisoners to deaths of starvation and thirst in places unseen, would protect him.

But the presence of Norsemen at all worried him. He was a learned man and knew what the symbols he’d taken from the well were, or rather how they appeared to him. Runes, the Norsemen’s magic writing. He shared a common ancestry with the Vikings, he thought, through Odoacer who burned the forum. Perhaps that was why the shapes appeared that way to him.

Karas tried to think of a way forwards. He’d resisted an investigation for so long but the emperor, who had taken it he was born to greatness and never thought to question where his remarkable good fortune came from, had now insisted. It seemed wise to employ the Magnaura’s greenest and least qualified student for the task — the master of the university was no fool and had inferred exactly what sort of man he sought for the job — ‘fresh, unencumbered by too much detailed knowledge of the town, able to provide a new perspective, not tied to any faction’. An idiot, in other words. But now the chamberlain almost wanted to confide in Loys, to see if he really could suggest a way forward, a road other than the goddess’ old road — the road of blood, of death, of misery. He would not confide in him, of course. Instead he would wait, pray and hope no further sacrifice would be required.

He wiped the tears from his face, rang his little bell and called for his servant to dress him for bed.