Lord of Slaughter

39

The odours that woke him were the odours of death. Corpses lay all around, very near. There was a smell of burning too. Azemar sat up in his bed and touched his chest. It was wet with drool. His sleep had been troubled. She had been in his dreams again, Beatrice, the lady. He had committed two treacheries while he slept — one against the Church and his vows of celibacy and one against his friend.

The dream felt so real. He had been in a forest in autumn, the ground thick with leaves of red, russet and gold. They seemed so brilliant that he imagined some dwarf in his cave cutting each leaf from fine metal before puffing it into the sky to be caught by the wind and blown to the forest floor. The trees were far from bare, though, and the dying sun turned their leaves to cold fire. She was next to him and he was naked on the ground.

‘Wake up,’ she said. ‘I have washed the wolf away.’

Azemar sat up, embraced her and lay with her on the leafy ground.

‘Who are these fellows?’ he asked her. Around him, ragged men lay dead as the leaves.

‘Their light is gone,’ she said. ‘I took it so they would not harm us.’

Awake and in the palace, Azemar told himself he had dreamed, though it did not seem like a dream but a memory — because it didn’t stop when he woke. He remembered the forest, the little house where they had prepared for the winter. He remembered how his appetite had driven him from his bed to go snuffling through the moonlight to the bodies of the ragged men.

Azemar was sure he had been deranged by his stay in the Numera. He had seen demons there — the pale fellow, the wolfman. Had one crawled into his mind to drive him mad?

She came into the room, unchaperoned, not even the servant beside her. Beatrice tried not to stare at him but couldn’t stop herself. There was no friendliness in her eyes.

‘Good morning, lady.’

‘It is afternoon by the bells.’

‘Then good afternoon.’

Her wariness seemed almost enticing, like bread cooking in the monastery’s ovens.

Beatrice stood very still for a while. Then she lowered herself onto a couch and said, ‘Sir, you trouble me.’

‘Why so?’

‘I trouble you too, I can see it.’

‘I am unused to the presence of lone women. I…’

‘It is more than that.’

Again a silence.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

Could he tell her? He would sound mad. Yet he had a powerful urge to do so. The palace seemed alive to him, so many smells — cooking, sweat, the mould of clothes, the make-up of the courtiers, the leather of the soldiers’ tunics — and beyond those a scent like he smelled on Beatrice but sharper, with a tinge of smoke, a bitter undercurrent that set his tongue tingling as if he had licked a lemon.

‘Lady, you must forgive me. I have undergone a terrible ordeal. I have been kept in a foul dungeon, denied light, denied food, given only water. It may be some time before I am myself again.’

‘Say what you have to say.’

‘I cannot.’

‘Then I will say it for you. I know you, sir. It is only because you are my husband’s friend and you have helped him in the past that I sit here now. My soul longs to run from you, and I tell you plainly I am afraid of you.’

Azemar bowed his head. ‘Why fear me, lady?’

‘You know, I sense it. In my dreams, since I was a girl, I have walked in a strange place. A riverbank under the moon. I have never been there, but I visit it so regularly when I am sleeping that it’s almost as familiar as my home. In my dream I am looking for something and something is looking for me. There is a man and he follows me.’

Azemar crossed himself. ‘In my dream there is a lady and I follow her.’

Beatrice stood up. ‘You mean me harm!’

‘No, lady, no.’

‘You will harm me. When I turn to confront the man, to ask him why he follows me, then he is no longer a man.’

‘What is he?’

‘He is a wolf. I have seen what he does with his nails and his teeth. A lady of this palace lies unwaking on her bed because of him.’

‘How so?’

‘She came with me to that place, that riverbank, and the wolf attacked her.’

‘Came with you? How could she come with you in your dreams?’

‘The women of this city have arts you cannot guess at, Azemar.’

‘Sorcery?’

‘I don’t know what to call it. I just know I have seen you and I have seen what you are capable of.’

‘I am a gentle man and I would never harm anyone.’

‘But you have been to the river?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘The devil sends many things to test us.’

‘This is not the work of the devil,’ said Beatrice. Her voice was low, though she felt like screaming.

‘Then what?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I saw you in the fields,’ said Azemar. ‘I am a man and you are a beautiful woman. I thought you had just entered my dreams in the way women do. It’s a sin to think of you so deeply that you appear to me when I am sleeping, but no more.’

‘And then?’

‘In the Numera, far from God’s eyes. A man came to me and I saw you again. This time it was not a dream. It was real.’

‘Were you in the forest, where the dead men lay?’

‘I was.’

‘You went to them, and I asked you to come away, to leave them and be free of your hungers.’

‘Yes. I looked for you in many places. Below the earth, in caves and tunnels. I have hunted you through my dreams.’

‘A wolf hunts me.’

‘In that prison a man came to me, or more than a man, a demon, and called me wolf.’

Their eyes met. Azemar had the powerful urge to embrace her, to tell her he loved her and that he had come so far to find her. But he did not. She was married to his friend. He was a monk.

‘So what are we to make of this?’

‘We are to make nothing,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s clearly an affliction of demons, of which this city seems to have many.’

Again the cold night air drifting beneath the doorway, a smell of the newly dead. If Beatrice noticed these things, she showed no sign. Azemar had to swallow. He wiped drool from his chin. His stomach grumbled, empty.

‘My abbot told me not to put too much store in natural phenomena. These skies may be sent by God, by the devil, or they may be simply some rare weather.’

‘And the dead?’

‘What dead?’

Beatrice told him of the reports of deaths in the churches, of deaths in the streets, people cold to the touch almost as they hit the floor. ‘Loys is supposed to find what is causing this. He has to provide a spell to stop it.’

‘A rare sort of heresy for the state to demand.’

‘This state is full of heretics, and worse, I suspect.’

‘Lay the case before me,’ said Azemar. ‘I am Loys’ equal in study and two men may make clear what remains obscure to one.’

So Beatrice told him everything she knew — from the coming of the comet to the death of the rebel, the darkening of the sky, the weakness of the emperor and now the many sudden deaths that were afflicting the city.

‘A wildman came to the emperor on the night of the victory, predicting death and calamity. Loys seeks to find him,’ said Beatrice.

‘In the city?’

‘Below the Numera. He was there but he escaped to the lower tunnels.’

‘I have seen him,’ said Azemar.

Her fear was something he could taste, pungent and harsh but pleasing for all that, like a hot spice. All his life his instinct would have been to offer her words of reassurance, to calm her; now her fear seemed almost beautiful. Once the world had been shrouded in night. Now it had come to glorious day and he saw clearly for the first time in his life. He heard the beating of her heart, smelled the sweetness of the sweat of stress upon her, noticed the tenseness of her muscles as if she was ready to run. There was a palpable hostility to her.

‘What did he say?’

Azemar remembered the wolfman, his strange double, the pale fellow and the smothering dark.

‘He told me to go far away from here,’ he said.

Beatrice put her hand to her throat. ‘He thinks you have something to do with this!’

‘I don’t know. Lady, I was in the dark a long time. I was…’

Azemar couldn’t finish his sentence. The smell on the breeze was becoming too much for him. It reminded him of salt beef but with many more colours to its flavour. Words no longer seemed to fit into his mind.

Someone knocked hard at the door and Beatrice started and involuntarily crossed herself.

‘I…’

‘What?’

‘War and death. Here…’ The monk stumbled over his words.

‘Speak clearly, Azemar.’

He took her hand. ‘The city is under attack,’ he said. ‘The Varangians are through the gates. I smell their sweat. I smell their fires. The palace will be locked down.’

Beatrice pulled free of him. ‘I will not stay here with you!’

‘Lady,’ said Azemar, ‘I will defend you.’

‘When I look at you my heart is full of dread.’

‘Do not fear me, do not…’

He held up his hand. It felt strange to him — his fingers longer and more powerful, a power that wanted using. He itched to test those fingers, to feel them crush and tear. He ran his tongue along his teeth and tasted blood. The taste made him clamp shut his jaw and suck at his teeth. Something nagged between two of them. Without minding the presence of the lady he pushed a fingernail into the space and pulled the thing out and examined it. It had the texture of chicken skin. He couldn’t tell what it was but he had the urge to pop it back into his mouth and swallow it down.

He stretched out his neck. Even in the dim light, the colours seemed to burst upon him. Outside he heard cries in the distance; so enticing — the screams of men, curses, prayers, the names of women, mothers, wives and daughters said on dying breaths. He didn’t care. The lady was there and his only desire was to be near her.

Then he saw the knife. She had taken it from beneath her robe.

‘What is that for, lady?’

‘I took it from the woman you attacked on the riverbank. She has no need of it now she cannot open her eyes.’

‘Lady, be careful what you do.’

‘I would kill you. I know what we have been to each other. I remember it as if it happened this morning. You have followed me from beyond the veil of death but I do not want you, Azemar — Jehan — Vali. I do not want you.’

She didn’t know where she got the names from but they came naturally to her lips.

She raised the knife but couldn’t make herself attack him.

‘Leave,’ said Beatrice. ‘Go from here.’

Tears poured down her face.

‘Why?’

‘Because you come from my nightmares, but you have taken flesh and revealed all my dreams as much more than fancies or the terrors of the dark. I remember you and I know what I did to escape you. I called down fevers and tried to die. I immersed myself in the love of a man to spite the will of fate. I have something in my heart and it is calling out for you, but I do not want you.’ She hardly knew what she said; she seemed to be speaking from a place deep within herself, as if she had kept all this knowledge locked inside a dungeon and now its gates were burst open, her prisoner thoughts coming blinking into the day.

‘Can you not hear? Death is in the streets here. Let me protect you.’

‘Go or I will kill you.’

Azemar stood up. ‘My soul feels as though it is on the edge of an abyss,’ he said, ‘and you are a darkness into which I will fall.’

Footsteps hammered down the corridor and voices shouted out:

‘They’re already at the palace!’

‘How did they get inside the city walls?’

‘The emperor has betrayed us.’

A voice was clearly audible through the door. ‘This is it, boys. They’re not coming here to plunder; they’re here to stay. They mean to take our ancient right as protectors of this place. The emperor’s cut us adrift because of all these deaths. There’s no half-measures. We kill them and live, or we die. We won’t be thrown aside by the emperor to live as vagabonds!’

‘We’re outnumbered, we’ll never beat them.’

‘We won’t with that attitude.’

‘We’re going to die. Well, I’ll die happy.’

The door flew open and three of the Hetaereian guard burst into the room. They didn’t pause to say a word; one went straight for Beatrice, grabbing her by the hair, the other was already freeing his cock from his beneath his military skirt. Another charged for Azemar, his sword high to hack the monk down.

Beatrice stabbed at her attacker, but he caught her wrist and punched her hard in the face, knocking her to the ground and the knife out of her grip. Hands mauled her, ripping away her robes, pawing at her body. She only thought of the baby — to defend it, to keep it from harm.

Azemar didn’t think, just responded to the threat as an animal responds. He saw his hand strike the sword from the Greek’s grip, sending it clattering to the floor. The itch he’d had in his fingers was satisfied as he drove them into the man’s eyes and cheeks. He was surprised, intrigued even, by how easy it was to tear off his attacker’s face.

He ripped and bit, sating his curiosity. What would happen if he bit through a neck; what would it feel like to plunge his fingers into a belly and rip out the guts? When the men stopped moving, how easy would it be to reach in and tear out a tongue, to bite into it as if it were a blood-gorged lamprey?

He saw Beatrice pulling her blood-wet robes about her. The fight had disordered his mind. A lady was with him. Should he offer her something from his table to eat? An eye? Some sweet liver?

The lady took up a sword and at first he thought she would strike him. But she ran from the room in great wide strides, weighed down by the baby inside her. Azemar breathed in, the odour of the blood filling his mind. He should follow her. He would follow her later; her trail would be clear. First, he would eat.