Lord of Slaughter (20 page)

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.