Lord of Slaughter (24 page)

A tall man called Galti took up his offer and brought his brothers. Loys was pleased with them – giants with impressive tattoos and scars. They might be overwhelmed by a mob, but it would be a brave man who attacked first. The Norsemen had no idea what he was doing, had no curiosity and did not speak Greek. They were ideal. He would be conspicuous with his guards but not obviously associated with authority. In his Norman clothes he even passed for another Norseman to anyone who wasn’t familiar with the difference between Normans and Vikings.

Loys began by asking for a charm to help him gain promotion. He made it clear he had no money with him but would return should he find such a thing. Loys wore his poverty ostentatiously and visibly, pulling a tear in his trousers, muddying his cloak and – despite the fact it numbed his toes – wearing only his monk’s sandals. Plenty of people offered him things, but some were no more than pebbles scratched quickly from the earth, pieces of twig, even.

‘Not these,’ he said. ‘Is there no one here who can call on the old goddess of the city? We are near enough to the walls she blesses.’

There was evidence enough of the worship of Hecate. Her symbol was daubed on walls. At places where three roads – or rather tracks through the debris – met, there were occasional posts, rough things carved with three heads at the top. This too was the goddess’s symbol. But who would own up to carving it? And even if anyone did, they could say it was just a post to mark the junction, the faces representing winds or angels.

He asked about the goddess indirectly, but if people knew anything then no one confessed to it or they missed his hints. After the third day anyone following him would have got bored, made their report and gone to buy wine, he thought. So he became a little bolder.

He had located an old man who claimed to have lived in the shanty all his life. ‘We make our fortunes by copying great men,’ said Loys. ‘Tell me, where was the chamberlain Karas born? I wish to offer a prayer of thanks for his success at the place he grew up.’

The old man said he didn’t know but knew a man who might. The man who might didn’t know either but he said it was possible a neighbour would. The neighbour thought he knew but, when they arrived at the spot, no one there could remember the chamberlain being there at all.

A crowd of children had formed around Loys on his first day in the slum, tugging at his clothes, asking him for money. He shouted at them to go away but they only stood further off, calling to him, offering him women, recommending themselves as excellent and diligent servants. By the third day, they concluded he had no money and was probably a madman. Now they left him largely alone.

Loys stood in the midst of the broken-down shacks, the human stink around him – cooking smells, dirt, urine and worse.

‘You’re lost, sir?’

It was a small boy. The child was thin and his eyes seemed ridiculously big in his head. He wore a loincloth and his body was red with scabies.

‘No.’

‘Then can I help you in any way? A woman is easy to find.’

‘That’s not what I’m looking for.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘Are you a clever lad?’ He had noticed the boy spoke quite well.

‘I don’t know. My mother says I am useful.’

‘Then what will you be when you are older? What will you do?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Will you have a profession? Will you be a soldier or a bureaucrat?’

‘I can’t read, sir. A bureaucrat needs to read.’

‘Do you know anyone who can read?’

‘I would say you can.’

Loys smiled.

‘So you will be a soldier?’

‘If I live so long and am strong enough by the time the army will have me. They eat well, those men.’

‘But they die too.’

‘Here we die but do not eat.’

‘You live on this street?’

‘Yes.’

‘I heard it said the chamberlain of all the empire grew up here.’

‘So it’s said.’

‘So why don’t you follow him? Why don’t you go to the court and become a servant of the emperor. Be diligent and work hard, and you may rise to that splendour.’

The boy laughed. ‘I don’t go because I can stay here and get beaten. The city guards would not even let me in.’

‘And yet the chamberlain went there.’

‘He was blessed by God.’

‘By God?’

‘By God, sir.’ The boy put up his chin, defying Loys to say different.

Loys gave him a coin.

‘And only by God?’

The boy put out his hand. Loys gave him another coin.

‘Will you give me another if I tell you?’ said the boy.

‘You’ve had two; I will not.’

The boy ran away.

Loys shrugged.

Galti laughed. ‘These people live like rats.’

‘They might say the same of you.’

‘I grew up on a farm,’ said Galti. ‘In winter we sat in the hot spring all day. The Greeks are not clean.’

‘No.’ Loys had a thought. ‘Did you never consider another life, Galti, other than that of a warrior?’

Galti looked at him as though he had sprouted troll ears. ‘Not where I come from. The sheep don’t always have enough to eat and you get a good crop only every third year if you’re lucky.’

‘You never thought to come somewhere like here, to study, to be a merchant, to be a bureaucrat?’

‘A what?’

‘A scribe, a writer.’

Galti laughed. ‘The great emperor wants Norsemen for one thing. The same as you do. Our muscle and the swords we carry.’

‘You didn’t have to follow that life.’

Galti seemed genuinely puzzled. Clearly Loys made no sense to him.

It was the same with the people who lived in the slum, Loys thought. Beyond the wall, in the city, opportunity awaited the diligent man. But here that world was almost unreachable. The children didn’t read, they had no manners, and even the cleverest saw no way out beyond the army, were they lucky enough to live long enough to join.

So how had the chamberlain got out? Extraordinary fortune? And why did his younger sister, who he had brought with him and raised out of the mire, despise him so?

‘We should go,’ said Galti. ‘It’s getting dark. Well, darker.’ It was too: a very fine rain made a veil of the air.

Loys heard a noise from behind a tent. He went to investigate. Sheep. Or rather a sheep suckling a single lamb. A single black lamb. Loys remembered the book he had read. Black lambs were sacrificed to Hecate. He walked through a line of tents and lean-tos. At the top of the hill was another black lamb, this time in a rough wooden cage. He ran down into the valley that dipped by the walls before the long climb up into the hills and the distant trees. Another lamb, tethered. Also black. It was very nearly the full moon. Three days before a ceremony to Hecate would be held. He needed to see where those black lambs were taken.

He returned to the Vikings.

‘We need to go,’ said Galti, ‘it will be dark soon.’

‘Yes,’ said Loys, ‘but I have a service to ask of you.’

‘What is it?’

‘I need you to find me some smaller guards,’ he said.

24
The Price of Power

The shadows were wolves again, their long jaws stretching towards him as he slept. He heard their snuffling and grunting as he lay dream-bound in his bed.

And now the voices, the shrieking and the howling, the sensation of falling, the helpless descent into the blackness that the runes had hollowed in his mind. The bright symbols floated away from him leaving trails of silver as he plunged after them through the shadow world of his sleep.

Where are they, those needful symbols? Where are they?
The voice sounded in his head.

‘They are in my heart. They are growing here.’

Whose are they, those needful symbols? Whose are they?

‘They are mine, for I paid the price for them.’

Who are you?

‘I am Karas, who gave the waters what they asked. Who are you?’

Your sister, dead by your treacherous hand
.

Her face emerged from the darkness, bloated and bleached by madness, her eyes swollen and puffed like fungal growths, her hair lank and wet as seaweed.

The chamberlain seemed to fall forwards and there was light. The runes were there again, symbols growing inside him, the eight, feeding off him and sustaining him, clasping their tendrils around his heart like a tree curls its roots around a rock.

‘I took your life. I took your symbols. They are mine.’

You but borrowed them a little while. Come away to the waters from where they came
.

‘They are mine, for I paid the price for them.’

Come away, descend as the spirits of the dead descend, travel through the great galleries of darkness
.

‘I will not give what I paid so dearly to own.’

I am wet with the blood of gods
. The vision put forward its hands, red and bloody.

‘Why are you here?’

This is the time. This is the needful time. The time of endings. She is calling the wolf. She is calling the wolf to you
.

‘The goddess will reward me, not punish me. It cannot end, not while these things are mine.’

Listen, the black dogs are barking. The wolf is near. Can you not hear her call?

‘Lady of the crossroads, lady of moonlight.’ The chamberlain crossed himself, though he uttered a pagan charm.

The moon has been eaten
.

‘I call on the sun.’

The sun chased away
.

‘Lady who is three. The snake, the dog and the horse. Protect me here. Jesus, who is three, the father the son and the holy ghost, protect me here.’

Walk to the lower dark and never look back, though you hear the sound of footsteps and the barking of dogs
.

‘Lady of walls.’

You have broken the walls
.

‘Lady of gateways.’

You have passed through the gate
.

‘Lady who returned from death. Christ who returned from death, help me here.’

She is clothed in her funeral jewels and waiting with her dogs, those guardians of the threshold
.

‘Lady who protects from demons. Christ who cast the demons out.’

You have called the demons in. They that despise the light. You know where they dwell
.

‘I will not come to you.’

The wolf will follow her. She is near you now
.

‘Who is she?’

She who is three. The storm, the trap and the wolf maker
.

‘No!’

The chamberlain sat upright in bed. The lamps in his room were lit, as they were always lit, but they only served to deepen the sense of encroaching darkness all around him.

From a walnut wood box at the side of his bed he took a pierced golden sphere, the size of skull, on a chain. He walked to the centre of the room and swung the ball around his head. The holes in the sphere caught the air and a howl like that of a miserable dog sounded, sour and low. The chamberlain muttered incantations into the night – psalms and spells.

‘The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide; neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.’

He tried to believe it was true, he would be forgiven, his grave sins would be absolved. But still he could not stop the prayer to the goddess coming.

‘Hecate, who triumphed over death, who rose in the black jewels of burial, I invoke you. Hecate, lady of the moon and of the shadows of the moon … I …’

He broke down, let the chain slacken and sank to his knees.

‘You lifted me up. You raised me high. Maintain me so.’

He stood and put the sphere back in the box, went to the window and looked out into the night. Flat black. No moon, no stars. All eaten by the enveloping cloud that sat over the city.

The chamberlain came back from the window, took up a cloth and dipped it into water in a copper basin to wipe his face. He felt sick. The magic sat uneasily in him. It was moon magic, he thought, Hecate’s magic, woman’s magic – magic that expressed itself in symbols that shone in his mind, that creaked and groaned like a hangman’s rope, that sucked and whispered like the sea, that smelled of spring and rebirth or of autumn and death. He rarely dared to use it but kept it damped down inside him with wine and herbs he got from his doctor. But still the symbols asked things of him. They wanted out. He was sure they had attacked the emperor. They fed on Karas’ distress, on his discomfort. The operation that had stopped Karas becoming a man had not made him a woman.

What if the scholar discovered the truth? His men told him Loys was not as incompetent as he had hoped. The chamberlain had concealed even the presence of the wolfman from him. But he would find out. Styliane, who he had brought with him from the slum, who he had protected and favoured with his magic and lifted up as a lady, had a sliver of her family’s magic inside her – she was working against him, all the reports said so.