‘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.
20 A Champion for Snake in the Eye
Mauger had killed two of his attackers and now fled through the tight backstreets as quickly as he could. The time for subterfuge was over and he needed to put a good distance between him and the people who had taken Azémar.
The streets were not crowded – only the poor stayed outside now, huddled into porches or doorways, fearful faces watching him as he ran, his naked sword drawing too much attention. All of them were potential informants, he thought. He had to hide before either the men who had been chasing him caught him or the city guard noticed him. The light was dropping, the dim day giving up its struggle with the engulfing black clouds. All he had to do was keep moving until night fell.
He ducked around a corner into a narrow alley. It was deserted, so he took the opportunity to put his sword back into his sleeping roll.
He stood still to listen for a while. No sounds of pursuit, just some voices from the houses, a woman and a man arguing and children shouting as they played.
Then steps. And more steps. He put his hand to the hilt of his sword, ready to pull it from the roll.
His pursuers came to the top of the alley. There were two of them.
One of the men spoke. Mauger couldn’t understand what he said but could tell the words were designed to soothe him. The speaker was a slight man but in his hand he carried a sling. Mauger glanced behind him. Another man, this one with an axe. His way out was blocked, no way of telling how many men stood behind those he could see.
Mauger gestured for the sling man to come forward. The man fitted a lead shot to his weapon. Two swings of the sling and Mauger barged through the door of the house at his side as the bullet whistled past his head.
The room burst into uproar as he crashed in – three families all together, children and animals. Two men grabbed him, a small dog bit at his heels. He threw them off but then others had him – the men from outside and everyone who lived in the house. He kicked and fought but he was hopelessly outnumbered in the tiny space. His legs began to buckle. The dog at his feet would not relent and five men held him, though he would not let them take him down.
‘Hold!’
The voice was in Greek but Mauger recognised it – the boy Snake in the Eye.
No one paid any attention to him whatever.
‘Hold in the name of Basileios, who is king of all the world!’
Snake in the Eye held up something in his hand, a medal of some sort.
The Greeks shouted at the youth. Although Mauger did not understand what they said, he guessed they were unwilling to release such a violent man, fearful of what he might do to them.
‘If I make them let you go will you vouch not to harm them?’ said Snake in the Eye.
‘I swear it,’ said Mauger.
Snake in the Eye spoke again in Greek. Three of the men let him go, one pulling the dog free. The two from the group who had taken Azémar, however, clung on – rough-looking Greeks, one tall and muscular the other short and squat.
Mauger was no oathbreaker but he had sworn not to harm anyone who let him go. He stamped down on the side of the tall man’s knee, snapping it like kindling wood. The man fell screaming and Mauger drove his shoulder into the squat man’s side, shoving him back over a stool and sending him crashing down. The man stood quickly, drawing a knife, but Mauger had picked up a chair and thrust it at his opponent, catching him in the eye with the chair’s foot and putting him down again. Mauger stepped on the man’s throat on his way to the door. The sling man, who had stayed out of the fight in the doorway, bolted away down the alley.
&n
bsp; The combination of Snake in the Eye’s medal and Mauger’s belligerence meant none of the householders tried to intervene and the warrior made the street easily, Snake in the Eye close behind. Mauger looked around. No sign of the sling man.
‘Other men can’t be far away,’ said Mauger. ‘Is there a place I can go that’s beyond their reach?’
‘Come to our camp outside the walls. You are a brother northerner and a mighty man. You will be welcomed there.’
‘Very well,’ said Mauger. For the moment it seemed the wisest option. He was known in the city. He couldn’t hope to stage an attack on Loys at the university or the palace now. So a subterfuge was called for, and the boy who had rescued him could be useful.
‘Take me to the camp,’ said Mauger, ‘and you have my thanks for making those low men release me.’
Snake in the Eye grinned. ‘We may yet perform for each other many services,’ he said. ‘Follow me. These Greeks cannot harm you there.’
Mauger glanced back at the house, where the fearful inhabitants watched them leave. He would remember their faces, though they would also remember his. Should he return and kill the injured men who had attacked him? No time. He had been seen by their companions anyway.
It was night now, and few lights shone from the windows and doors of the alleys. The clouds were a shroud, blanking out the stars and the moon, reducing vision to no more than twenty paces where lamps or candlelight broke through doorways or windows, to nothing where it did not. Some people lingered on the streets – soldiers carrying torches in the main. Here and there a whore sat by a window, nearer or further from its light as her age or beauty made advisable.
Mauger followed Snake in the Eye towards the walls, glad of the dark.
‘You’re worried, friend,’ said Snake in the Eye.
‘It’s not your concern,’ said Mauger, ‘but I think it best if I do not use my true name in this camp. I will be accepted as a Norseman more quickly, and if Azémar gives up my name they will not find me as easily.’