Lord of Slaughter (43 page)

‘What’s that ahead?’ The Greek spoke.

The chamberlain lifted the lamp and peered through the darkness.

‘It’s where we’re going,’ he said. ‘Where everything is won or lost.’

Ahead of him, away down the tunnel, was a blood-red glow.

43
A Necessary Rage

Mauger drew his sword as he stood up from the water.

‘No need for that,’ said Loys. ‘We have spoken.’

Vandrad’s head popped up from the flooded passage behind Mauger. The first northerner didn’t pause in his advance, just strode towards Loys. Only at the last instant did Loys realise Mauger wasn’t coming for the wolfman but for him.

‘Ragnar! What? Have I offended you?’ He leaped back.

Mauger was in no hurry, walking after him slowly but determinedly.

‘There is no way out of here,’ he said. ‘Bow down, thief. Bow down, oathbreaker, and accept the justice of your lord.’

‘What are you on about? Get away from me.’

‘Ragnar, the scholar’s paying our wages, have you forgotten?’ said Vandrad, now climbing out of the water.

Loys ducked behind the wolfman and Mauger paused, assessing the situation.

‘I have no fight with you, friend,’ he said. ‘It’s the man behind you I seek.’

‘What’s got into you, Ragnar?’ said Loys.

‘I am not Ragnar and you are not Michael. I am Mauger, sworn vassal of Duke Richard, who was Bengeirr, of the lands of Neustria called Norman. You are the scholar Loys who has stolen away the lord’s daughter and whose head I am charged to fetch.’

‘Can’t let you do that, old chum,’ said Vandrad. He had his sword free. The head of another Viking emerged from the pool. ‘This man owes me money, money I’ll never get if you give him a trim.’

‘I’ll give you double what he pays.’

‘No. I swore.’ He pointed with his sword to the Viking emerging from the pool. ‘He swore. There can be no debate.’

The third Viking came up in the water.

Mauger said nothing, just leaped at Vandrad. The Viking got his sword up to block but it snapped clean in two.

‘Shit,’ said Vandrad and went for his knife, but Mauger brought his sword around again and cut deep into his neck. Vandrad dropped, his fingers clutching at a big wound.

‘Whoa!’ The other Viking had his seax free – a big, long sturdy knife. The next one, emerging from the water, pulled out an axe.

The man with the seax aimed a cut at Mauger but was too slow. Mauger took a step back, the swipe missed and he smashed a backhanded blow into the side of his opponent’s head, caving in the skull at the temple with a noise like an axe chopping wood and dropping him flat.

Loys drew his knife. He was determined to defend himself but he was a scholar not a warrior. He felt as if his legs had turned to stalagmites like those coming up from the floor. He could not make himself move. The wolfman, however, could.

It was all so quick.

Mauger hit the floor, the wolfman on top of him. The axeman hacked at them both, swiping at the men as they writhed and rolled. Once he connected with Mauger’s back, but the axehead bounced off the mail and a sword flashed out of the melee to cut him down at the knee.

The two men broke and stood facing each other. Mauger’s arm was wet with blood and his cheek was torn half away.

‘Give me the scholar,’ said Mauger. ‘In fact, I don’t even want all of him, just give me his head.’

Loys backed towards the pool. The wolfman raved, hissed and spat, his lips wet with blood, his hands too.

He gave an terrible scream and jumped – not towards Mauger but at Loys, driving him into the water, pushing him down into the freezing darkness.

Loys was helpless against the wolfman’s strength, pulled through the water like a frog taken by a pike. He tried to cry out, but his mouth filled with water. The wolfman forced him down – down and forward. He was being pushed under a great bulge in the rock, shoved on into darkness. Loys heard nothing, could see nothing. He tried not to breathe in, but he was choking.

Mauger advanced into the water up to his neck. The Norseman was not an impetuous man and he knew it was time for cold thinking. He couldn’t risk going any further. It was one thing to negotiate a short waterlogged passage in mail, sure someone had been through before you, quite another to plunge headlong into unknown darkness. He would need to take a flint, dry tinder, a lamp and a rope to pull himself back. He’d also need to be prepared for instant attack, should he make it through to the other side. It was not the work of a moment to prepare for all that. He considered the situation. Had the wolfman drowned the scholar? Had they gone through to another chamber? The wolfman and the scholar had seemed to be talking as reasonable men when he’d come through. He had to assume they had become allies.

The axeman screamed and writhed on the shore, his leg nearly severed at the knee.

Mauger waded back. He killed the Viking with the man’s own axe. He didn’t want to risk damage to his sword if he didn’t have to and he didn’t want to kill an honest warrior but the last man had to die. It would have brought a blood feud if he’d survived to tell the tale of what had happened. Down in the caves he was just one more victim of the dark. Mauger touched his cheek. The wound was bad but he’d had worse. He could feel the cut was only to the skin, the muscle beneath was intact. It was bleeding badly so he took the lamp and poured some hot oil over it. It was agony but the bleeding stopped. He sat and recovered for a little while. Then he climbed out of his mail. He glanced at the black water. He was going in to find them.

44
A Thinking Beast

The Varangians had got into the palace. Its doors had not been built to withstand a siege – if an enemy had got over the Theodosian Wall, then over the remains of the Walls of Constantine inside the city, a reinforced door wouldn’t have held them back. The doors were designed to keep out the common people, not invading armies, and the Varangians had eventually broken them in with their axes and hammers.

Azémar finished feeding and stood. He was torpid, gorged and wanted to sleep. The blood tide that had risen to engulf his thoughts when he had killed the guards began to recede. The realisation came to him that the bodies on the floor, the human wreckage of ripped torsos and flesh-stripped limbs, had belonged to people. He knew he should have wept to see such a mess, but he didn’t. He wasn’t interested in it any more but then he was not hungry.

The Lady Beatrice. He needed to go to her.

He went out of the room. All the lamps had been removed in the passageway as a precaution against the attackers using them to burn down the palace and it was very dark. It didn’t matter to Azémar.

The fighting was somewhere close. He smelled the sweat of fear, the stress leaking out of the men in the smell of their saliva, their piss and their shit. It meant little to him. He had fed.

He breathed in again and he could smell Beatrice, her distinct scent in its many registers, rosewater, sweat, silk. Memories burst in his mind. Beeswax for the candles unlit in the church when he had first met her, mint her mother had showed her how to grind in the kitchen when he had first met her, the smell of the hot wheat as he’d worked his scythe to bring in the harvest when he’d first met her. The ridiculousness of the thought struck him. He couldn’t have first met her three times.

He followed her scent through the corridors of the palace. More shouting ahead.

Two Varangians. They eyed the fine robe Loys had lent him.

‘Hand that over, friend. We don’t want to risk damaging it by killing you.’

‘It’s covered in blood, Kolli.’

‘We can wash that out easy enough.’

Azémar didn’t understand them at all. Or rather he understood them in a new way. He felt their animosity, sensed their complacency. He knew, in a way words could not describe, that the living processes of their bodies had relaxed when they had seen him.

‘I am looking for a lady.’ Azémar found the Norse of his forefathers.

‘We’re all looking for one of those.’

‘I’ve been without her for a very long time.’

‘And we’ve been without one for a very long time.’

‘You were with a whore this afternoon,’ the other Viking spoke to his friend.

‘That’s a long time by my reckoning. The robe. We’re not here to gabble.’

What were they saying?

They didn’t understand the urgency of him seeing Beatrice, that was clearly the problem.

‘I need … I am dizzy.’ Azémar fought to regain control of his thoughts. He remembered a lesson at Rouen given by a great scholar monk from the east.

‘I have been taught understanding by the use of the Porphyrian Tree,’ said Azémar. He had abandoned Norse. It didn’t have the words he needed and he returned to his scholar’s Greek.

‘What are you on about? Speak Norse or I’ll talk to you in a language all men can understand.’

‘The tree by which we organise our logic. The supreme genus is substance, all scholars agree,’ Azémar continued in Greek.

‘Strip it off him. He’s a madman.’

‘The differentiae are material and immaterial. The subordinate genera are body and living. These are the topmost part of the trunk.’

The Varangians strode towards him.

‘You descend the trunk to find the proximate genera of animal. Beneath that we cannot accept this teaching for that is a pagan lie and contrary to holy teaching.’

One of them had hold of him and pulled at his robe.

‘By Sif’s tits, he’s a guard. He’s built like a horse. He must be some sort of berserker. That’s why he’s raving.’

The man backed away.

‘The differentiae below animal are rational and irrational. Below animal, they include the category of man. As a species of thinking beast. I cannot …’

The sounds of battle drifted in from all over the palace. The second Varangian pushed past his comrade.

‘I don’t care if he’s built like Blind Hod; I’m having the robe.’

‘Substance, material and immaterial, body, living and dead, animal, rational and irrational. Man. Below the species is the individual. Where is God? Where is God in this?’

The Varangian wrenched off Azémar’s robe.

Azémar looked down at himself. He wore only a pair of light leggings and was bare-chested.

‘I’ll have those as well,’ said the Varangian. ‘Take them off and I might let you live.’

‘Here is God. Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?’

Something was burning.

Azémar’s head cleared for a moment. He felt ridiculous half-dressed in such a fine palace. He smelled the smoke, saw the axe the Varangian with the red beard bore, the dagger the one who had taken his robe had drawn. There was still something he didn’t quite understand about this situation. He spoke in Norse: ‘I can’t be naked. The tree of knowledge brought us shame. We know. Now we know.’

‘Well know this.’ The man with the dagger lunged.

Azémar only realised what had happened an instant later. The men lay on the floor. He couldn’t make sense of why they were there. He trembled. There was an odd low gurgling noise and he realised it was his own voice. He was snarling, sitting on top of a body with one arm torn from its socket. The other body lay a few paces away. The man had tried to run, he recalled, but now he was bent double, the wrong way.

Men in the corridor, screaming, fighting. A Greek fell with a short spear clean through him. A huge man with a bushy blond beard came howling towards Azémar. He stood.
Where is Beatrice?
These people were in his way. They weren’t going to help him. Animosity engulfed him like a lava flow.

The big Viking didn’t even get the time to swing his axe as Azémar smashed him down. Azémar stepped past him and into the man who ran in behind. He swung him from his feet and banged his head into the wall.
Slaughter beast, god killer, slaverer and slayer
. The words went through his mind like comets across a black sky. He had a name, he knew, but what was it?

More men died, torn and ripped, broken and dismembered. They thrust things at him, sharp things, slow things. He was so strong. He tore free of the fight and ran. The night air hit him as he spilled out of the palace door and into the street. His nose and mouth stung and he recognised the taste of the big white flakes in the air. Ash.

Through the clinging fog he heard something. Not a voice, not an animal cry but something resonating deeper within him, an emanation of something older than sound. It called to him. He pictured a sign, a jagged slash with a line through it. His skin rose into bumps as he heard it howl. He understood it, knew what it said.

‘I am here, where are you?’ It was the lady, she was calling to him, or rather something inside her was.

He looked back at the palace but then turned away from the fight with its delicious scents of murder and battle. He was summoned and he could not resist.

Azémar threw back his head and shouted, ‘I am here! Where are you?’ But his voice was the howl of a wolf.