Lord of Slaughter

22

I have died, thought Azemar. I have died and this is hell. He could not bear the heat of the Numera, nor the darkness, nor the smell. His irons afflicted him terribly and skinned his ankles raw.

They’d taken him down to the lowest level, given him no food and left him in that black hole — to die, he was sure.

The stench was obscene, the floor rough and uneven, offering no comfort, and the moans of the sick and the dying really did make him think of the cries of the souls of the damned in their torment.

The darkness was terrible to bear, that and the hatred of the other inmates. Occasionally, perhaps once a day, the guards came to give him water — no food — and those around him who still had the sanity to realise what was happening would scream and beg for a drink or curse him for his luck.

He tried to save some for his fellow prisoners, gulping down as much as he could and taking a big last mouthful. A man lay next to him, and he found his mouth and dribbled the water in. It gave the man strength enough to weep. Azemar sat with him, holding him, trying to bring comfort where there was none.

Rats scuttled about them, tormenting them as they slept. He would feel a movement on his foot and he learned to kick quickly and hard before the animal bit him.

The rats weren’t the only ones on the lookout for food. Hunger and thirst did bad things to men. The darkness of the Numera was a darkness of the soul and they fell on the dead and fed upon them. When the guards with the water came with their lights Azemar saw terrible things, sights like something from a church painting designed to terrify people into belief. Yes, it was like hell, and men had become devils there.

When the woman had said she needed him but that he could rot a while, he had thought he would be left in that horror for a day, a week. How long had he been imprisoned? He lost all track of time. Only the coming of the water and the death of the man in his arms told him he was moving from moment to moment at all.

The hunger became acute and Azemar hallucinated. He was in a pit of wolves who sat watching him with unblinking eyes, some of yellow, some of blue and some of a terrible red. One wolf above all others seemed to watch him. At first Azemar thought it was a pagan idol, a thing like ignorant people set in their fields in autumn to frighten dark spirits away — a construction of straw and wood with turnips for eyes and pine cones for teeth. It stared at him for a long time until it changed to become a mask like travelling players used to tell their tales — stuck together with fur and twine.

‘What do you want from me?’

The thing said nothing, just watched him, its face bobbing at the edge of the liquid dark like that of a drowned man in black water.

‘What do you want from me?’

Terrible hunger consumed Azemar’s mind. He needed to eat. He needed to eat!

‘You are a wolf.’

The voice made him start. The dark was unyielding. The voice had spoken in Norse. This was not an hallucination but something real and near to him.

‘I am a man.’

‘You were a man. The wolf stares through your eyes as I have seen him stare before and hope never to see him stare again.’

‘There is no wolf in me.’

‘Then why do you cleave to that corpse?’

Azemar moved his hands about him. The man he had been lying on was quite cold.

Azemar wept. ‘I will not survive this place.’

‘You will survive, Fenrisulfr. You will outlive the gods.’

‘I feel harm in your voice. You are here to kill me?’

‘No. The destiny you carry would not allow it. I cannot find the waters; I cannot find a way to kill you.’

‘What waters? What destiny do I carry?’

‘To be my killer.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am you.’

There was a shimmering, like the moon reflected on water. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, willing them to work. What was it? Skin. A tall man stood close by, a tall man with pale skin and hair of burning red. There was no light other than the man’s body. Right next to him, crouching and seemingly oblivious to the vision behind him, was someone else, the one who had been talking.

He peered at the crouching figure. His own face looked back at him but more weathered, thinner by far than he had been before the ordeal in the dungeon.

‘You have come looking for her,’ said his double, and it was as if a gateway had opened in Azemar’s mind. He rememberd how even the glimpse of the lord’s daughter riding by had tormented his dreams, how he had struggled with his lust. He recalled other dreams too — a girl with blonde hair by a fire in the snow, a headless body on a beach. The visions seemed so real they were almost memories.

‘Go a long way away from this place,’ said his double, ‘and never come back here, no matter how you are drawn to do so.’

‘Kill me here,’ said Azemar. ‘Kill me here!’

‘I cannot.’

‘Why not?’

The double sprang at Azemar, putting one hand on his chest to locate him before he went for his neck. Immensely strong fingers squeezed Azemar’s windpipe but he had no fear of death. In that place, his body stewing in its own secretions, bitten by rats and fleas, rubbed raw by the rough floor, his mind falling into madness, he welcomed the end. And yet it would not come.

The pale man whose body lit the dark moved his hand in a gesture of calm, and the fingers let go of Azemar’s throat. His attacker fell back and sat down. He looked around him with the hopeless gaze of a blind man. Azemar sensed his double couldn’t see, despite the glowing figure behind him. Then he was gone, swallowed by the gloom.

The pale figure came forward to cradle Azemar in his arms.

‘Who are you? An angel?’

‘No. I am of the older earth.’

‘A devil then?’

‘Men make devils. For what is a devil but an angel of whom men disapprove?’

‘Of whom God disapproves. The father of creation cast out the bad angels and they fell to hell, where they became devils.’

The strange man laughed. ‘Then I am a devil. But what of you? The father of creation shakes to hear your name.’

‘That is blasphemy.’

‘It is the truth, Fenrisulfr.’

Azemar knew that myth. Loki had had a son who was a wolf and grew so powerful that the gods tricked and chained him to a rock, where he waits to the final day when he will break his fetters and consume the gods. His father had told such stories; though he had been sincere in his new Christianity the stories of the old land were still dear to him. Azemar had been close to his father. He would see him in heaven.

‘I would be with my father now,’ he said, ‘my holy father and my earthly one.’

‘I am here.’

‘You are not my father.’

‘I am your father and your mother both.’

The knowledge poured in on him, words and visions whispering and flashing in his mind. He had been a foundling. His brothers were all so blond and big, he skinny and dark. A vision entered his mind — a woman, scarred and gaunt with a baby at her breast. His brother — or the boy he had called his brother — lay sick in a longhouse, more likely to die than make the sea journey to a new life in Neustria. The woman was at the door. She could cure the boy but there was a price to pay — they must take the baby she had and raise it. His mother, who had loved her newest son more than all the others put together, had agreed straight away. The child had recovered and, because Azemar had brought such good fortune, they made the effort to have him accepted by the monastery when they arrived in Neustria.

‘What is to become of me?’ said Azemar.

‘My son, you have great things to do. You must drink of the waters.’

‘What waters?’

‘The waters that the dead god gave his eye to drink. Vision for vision, sight for sight in the waters of wisdom at the centre of the earth.’

‘And what will they tell me?’

‘I cannot know. Only that you must go there if we are to have any chance at all of getting rid of the old hater.’

‘Of who?’

‘Old Grimnir, the gallows god, mad King Glapsvithr, the lord of the corpses, Odin.’

‘I…’ Azemar felt as if his head lay beneath a crushing stone, that enormous pressure was building within him. The name Odin moved him to fury, to hatred that went far beyond that of a holy man for a pagan devil. He had no idea why. He growled and spat, cried out. Around him the dying men of the Numera seemed to answer his calls, howling and cursing and begging to be free.

Azemar looked up into the eyes of the man who held him, the pale, burning beautiful being who had called him son.

‘Father?’

‘Yes.’

‘Save me,’ said Azemar.

‘You are such a prodigy among horrors, you do not need me to save you, Fenrisulfr. Come, before you can drink, you need to eat.’

Blood dripped from the strange fellow’s fingers, and Azemar lapped at it, then bit. The skin ripped and more blood flowed. Still the bright, glowing man cradled Azemar, and as he did so, he sang — a song of lovers caught in a story told by a god to please the fates.

The song intoxicated Azemar, filled him with ecstasy, but was it the song in the blood that seemed to draw him on to drink ever more deeply? His own fingers ran down to the man’s belly, tearing it open and pulling out the bowels, the liver, the slick wet liver, which he chewed and swallowed with delight.

‘Mother. Father. Release me.’

‘You are released.’

The song went on as he ate.

And then it stopped, and Azemar realised that, far from lying in the figure’s arms, he held something in his own. He let go and it fell limp to the floor.

The beautiful burning figure was gone and beside him was the torn corpse of a man who had died of thirst. A weak light filtered in. The door at the top of the stairs had a small space beneath it and a faint lamplight now shone through.

There rises my sun, he thought. How soon before it sinks? The words surprised him. Azemar was a plain man and given to plain speaking. Such thoughts were alien to him.

He moved his feet. The manacles that had restrained him lay empty on the floor. How had that happened? They weren’t bent or buckled but the locks had been smashed.

He lay on the ground weeping for a while, asking God to forgive him for what he had done. But strange thoughts sprouted in him now, thoughts no words could contain.

The cries of the prisoners no longer disturbed him. They were… He searched for a word. Interesting. Intriguing. He had a deep desire to investigate them, to go to the stricken and the dying and… what? He almost laughed as he imagined himself poking the bodies with his nose. He wanted to establish something about them, to discover something. This morbid curiosity was divorced from any moral sense at all and it chilled him.

He crawled forward. He was neither hungry nor thirsty and, after so long with little water and no food, this fact seemed extremely important to him. He remembered the wolfman, the thing that had put its hand around his throat. That fellow had to have some sort of explanation for this — he would know what was what. His mind was not his own. His pompous old abbot had used those phrases — ‘that fellow’, ‘what was what’ — they were echoes of a previous existence. Words jangled in his mind. A beggar is a silent preacher, reproaching us for the corruption of wealth. A lazybones who will not work, a cripple cursed by God. No sense, no reason. Just words.

To his side was a gap where the wall didn’t quite meet the floor, a darkness within the darkness. The wolfman had come from there, he was sure. Could he speak to him? He touched his neck. It was painful where the man had grasped him, but he had no fear of him now. Should he leave this place? He thought he could wait behind the door and slip through when it opened.

He wept. He was himself again. No, no, I cannot escape. Yet in the next instant he felt strong and lithe, fast as the shadow of a bird. Yes, he was a shadow, something defined by what it was not, an expression and a simplification of another, complex thing.

He crawled to the gap at the bottom of the wall. There was something in there, a deepness — he sensed it. He breathed in, drawing a heavy draught of air through his nose. Beneath the prison stink was another smell. Wolf. He was down there, his strange double.

Devils gibbered in his head. What was happening to him? Who was that extraordinary man who had visited him and comforted him? The dark in the crack of the wall held no fear for him. He could smell, he could feel. He rolled into the sightless caves seeking to cool the torment that was raging in his head.