Loys was tired too. It wasn’t important this man understood Christ; it was just important he honoured him. The messages of the Bible could be imparted by others with more patience and more time.
‘You must be baptised,’ said Loys. ‘And be sure to tell the emperor it was me who brought you to God. Here, you are free.’ He cut the cord at the boy’s neck and took the pebble.
Snake in the Eye stood tall and stretched out his arms like a man who had been a long time sitting. ‘I feel no different,’ he said.
‘Then go to the cathedral and pray,’ said Loys. ‘Ask for forgiveness for your pagan ways. Seek baptism there.’ Loys went to leave but Snake in the Eye took his arm.
‘What is baptism?’
‘They will wash you of your sins, wash you of all curses. Only then will you know if you are the victim of an enchantment or …’
Snake in the Eye pointed up into the filthy clouds.
‘You should wash the sky,’ he said.
‘I wish I could.’
‘I would wash the streets in blood,’ said Snake in the Eye.
‘Perhaps when you become a man you will feel differently,’ said Loys.
Snake in the Eye stared directly at him. ‘When I become a man, I will do it,’ he said.
Loys was suddenly scared by this odd young man. ‘I have to go back to my friends.’
‘Give me my stone.’
‘You abandon paganism, you abandon this,’ said Loys. ‘Don’t go forward to Christ looking back to Satan.’
Snake in the Eye rocked on his feet for a moment.
‘I would thank you, scholar. If my curse lifts then you may ask a service of me.’
‘I may do that,’ said Loys.
‘Come to the Varangian camp. I am Snake in the Eye. My fame is great there. I will find you your tracker.’
He leaned on the rail of the garden. The boy seemed about to faint.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I am not feeling well,’ said Snake in the Eye, ‘are there birds in the garden?’
‘There are no birds.’
‘Then what are those things floating up there. You’re mistaken, scholar, they are birds. You should look up from your books and see the world sometime.’
‘I’m going to leave you now,’ said Loys, ‘because I have the emperor’s work to do.’
Snake in the Eye seemed not to hear him.
At another time Loys might have laughed at the boy’s odd behaviour and gone back to Beatrice to tell her the emperor was employing lunatics. He was too concerned for Azémar. He headed inside, out of the garden. As he reached the door, the boy called after him.
‘I’ll go to the church!’
‘You do that.’
Loys found the physician gone, Azémar sleeping on the bed and Beatrice sitting on the couch watching him. Loys put the pebble down on his desk. It had a crude etched image of a wolf’s head on it. These people are obsessed with wolves.
‘How is he?’
‘He drank, though he wouldn’t eat.’ Beatrice pursed her lips, deeply troubled. Loys embraced her. He didn’t have to ask her what was wrong – the state of Azémar was enough to disturb anyone.
‘Well, he’s had a terrible ordeal. Maybe he just needs rest.’
‘Yes. And you need a wash. Get out of your clothes.’ Beatrice was talking to Loys but her eyes did not leave Azémar.
‘I only have the one set.’
‘I can send for some more, sir,’ said the servant.
‘That would be kind,’ said Loys.
Something made him look harder at his servant. For some reason he hadn’t quite registered what an odd fellow he was – extraordinarily tall with skin the colour of ivory and bright red hair that stood up in a shock. He had noticed these things before but they had seemed unremarkable. Now the true strangeness of the fellow struck him.
Then the feeling passed; the man was gone from the room, and Beatrice was at his side.
Loys went to his friend. He had certainly suffered badly. The starvation he’d endured in the Numera had shrunk the flesh of his face, leaving it bloodless and lean. His lips were drawn back as he slept and his teeth seemed very white and prominent.
‘He is so much changed,’ said Loys. ‘I hate to see him like this. He is a brother to me. You are the only secret I never shared with him.’
‘Why?’
‘He would have told me not to risk everything on a fancy.’
‘Am I a fancy?’
‘No. You are everything, and besides you the world is a fancy.’
‘I know him,’ said Beatrice.
‘Very likely. He worked the fields around your father’s hall. Though he is a scholar. His toil was a symbol of dedication rather than a full-time occupation.’
‘Fine ladies do not look too long at such men.’ She smiled, trying to keep her manner light. ‘Or so the Frankish maid my father bought to teach me manners told me.’
‘They do in my experience.’
‘Of course they do. That is not where I have seen him.’
‘Where have you seen him?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Beatrice, but she did. From the place where the moon made a silver road of the river, by the edge of the wood where unseen shapes snuffled and blundered, from the little wall that bore tiny lights upon it, lights that seemed so easily blown out, so in need of shielding and protection. He had come from her nightmares.
31 Lord of Slaughter
Snake in the Eye left the palace, picking up his sword at the Room of Nineteen Couches. He walked down the steps and around the Numera towards the towering church of Hagia Sophia.
His debt to Mauger could wait. He felt very odd, half drunk, and had the great desire to test his sword arm. Figures moved through the gloom ahead of him. This was the time to see if the scholar had truly removed his curse. He felt no different. His aggression was still like a lump stuck in his throat, something he needed to vomit forth.
He would try, he thought. An alley curled through some houses at the end of the Middle Way. It seemed a good place to wait for a discreet kill – dark as a cellar. His victim would provide the light. He had no lamp to guide him so he went in trailing one hand on the wall, the other in front of his face in case he walked into something. Nothing. Then a light.
Someone came down the alley carrying a lamp. Two boys, around ten years old, slaves of some sort by their dress.
‘Foul night,’ said one, nodding as he came by.
Snake in the Eye nodded back. When the boys had their backs to him he put his hand to his sword. No, he couldn’t draw it. The light they carried shrank. Snake in the Eye was at the rear of some warehouses which supplied the markets. There were no doors and the place stank of piss, shit and rubbish blown in from the Bull Market. Four paces to his right was an even tighter alley between two buildings – not even an alley. The warehouses leaned and sagged so much even a relatively small person like Snake in the Eye had to wriggle his way in. He did so.
After ten minutes another lamp. This time a soldier. He set the lamp on the ground not six paces from where Snake in the Eye was hiding and took a heavy piss. Snake in the Eye’s hand tightened on the sword. Relax, relax. He remembered what the warriors at Birka had told him when he asked for tips.
He loosened his grip on the weapon and reapplied his hand. He brought the sword free.
‘Who’s there?’
The Greek let down his soldier’s skirt and wheeled around.
This was what Snake in the Eye had dreamed of.
‘Only me.’
He stepped forward, his sword catching the glow of the lamp.
‘You’ve picked the wrong man to rob, kid,’ said the Greek. His speech was slurred and it was clear he was slightly drunk. ‘You’ve—’
Snake in the Eye was on him, swinging his sword high and hard towards the soldier’s head.
The man caught Snake in the Eye’s sword arm at the wrist and drove a kick into his guts. The boy crashed back into a
wall, his sword flying from his hand. The man drew his own sword and smacked Snake in the Eye hard on the head with the flat of his blade.
‘You’re lucky you find me in a good mood, you little shit,’ he said. ‘If you were a man I’d have put this through you by now.’ He sank another heavy kick into Snake in the Eye’s balls. The boy rolled forward into the dirt, coughing and retching. ‘Take that as a lesson,’ the soldier said, ‘and I’ll take your weapon as a forfeit.’ He walked across to pick up Snake in the Eye’s sword.
The boy lay on the ground feeling very peculiar. His agony seemed to take him to a very strange place. He saw himself by a river, walking. He had walked by the river before, he thought, though he could not recall exactly when. A penny moon hung in the branches of the trees and made the water a shining path.
He said a name under his breath.
‘Bifrost.’ Was he there – in front of the shimmering bridge that led the way to Asgard, the home of the gods?
The remains of a wall were by the river, a broken-down overgrown thing, almost hidden by ivy. There was a niche in the wall and inside it something glowed. What was it? A candle or a tiny lamp? A flame of some sort. He couldn’t quite see it clearly. He had a powerful urge to extinguish it. In his vision he spat on his fingers and put his hand forward to snuff it out. He seemed to fall into darkness, his eyes closing, consciousness fading.
Another lamp was by him. He sat upright to inspect it. It was the same lamp the soldier in the alley had carried. Ten paces from Snake in the Eye lay the body of the man, still holding Snake in the Eye’s sword. No one else was nearby, no one at all. Snake in the Eye remembered the flame in the garden of his mind and laughed. The scholar had been as good as his word. Snake in the Eye had accepted Christ and the snake in his heart was free. He went to the body and touched it. It was freezing cold.
Snake in the Eye giggled. He was cured, more than cured. He had killed his opponent without touching him. He took up his sword. It would have been preferable to kill him with a weapon. He hacked at the body a couple of times. Then he had an idea. He rolled the man onto his front and straightened his neck, took a pace back and leaped at him, swinging the sword down at his neck. He missed his aim slightly, catching the back of the skull. He was fascinated to see how the sword stuck. He put his foot on the head and levered the sword free. Then he tried again. Another miss, this time hacking into the flesh of the shoulder. The third time Snake in the Eye was more accurate. He made a good wound in the neck. Two or three more cuts and the head would come away. He hacked and hacked again. Finally the head fell from the shoulders.
Snake in the Eye sheathed his weapon and picked the head up by the hair.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘not so sure of yourself now. Am I still a boy to be laughed at and scorned? Wag your little tongue.’
He put his fingers into the mouth and padded at the tongue. He did not throw the head aside but carried it with him proudly, a trophy that proved his battle prowess. He had done as the scholar said and surrendered the stone and reaped a marvellous reward. He must follow through on the rest of the advice.
He headed up the alley to Hagia Sophia, which rose above him like one of the monsters of the Greeks, gazing down with its many fiery eyes. Around him the people of the city sped with their lamps through the cold wet streets. No one paid him any notice, and even if they had, they could scarcely have seen him in the gloom. He sensed their living souls. He inhabited two realities, one in the black Byzantine night, the other somewhere stranger, where he moved on a river past a broken-down wall, watching lights flicker and gutter in the moonlight, knowing he only had to snuff out a flame to snuff out a life.
He reached the entrance to the church, and ran up under its great arch. The door was open for prayer. Snake in the Eye went within. The night church burned to the light of a thousand tiny candles, hummed to the muttered prayers of worshippers. His thoughts seemed things of light, mingling with light, the candles of the church’s interior and the candles of his mind almost indistinguishable. So many people in the church, so many candles. And he, what was he? A wind to them.
The priest in his great beard sang out a prayer.
‘What night falls on me,
what dark and moonless madness
of wild desire, this lust for sin?
Take my spring of tears
thou who drawest water from the clouds,
bend to me, to the sighing of my heart,
Thou who bendest down the heavens
in thy secret incarnation …’
‘I am a killer,’ said Snake in the Eye. He spoke in his own tongue, in Norse.
No one turned.
‘I am a killer!’
He shouted it as loudly as he could. The priest didn’t pause in his recitation.
‘… dawned the light of knowledge upon the earth.
For by your birth those who adored stars
were taught by a star
to worship you.’
The rhythm of the man’s voice was intoxicating to Snake in the Eye. The light of the candles was like the water of a beautiful sunlit lake on which he floated. A hand was on his arm. A soldier.
‘What in the name of God are you doing with that?’ he said, pointing to the bloody head Snake in the Eye held in his left hand.
Snake in the Eye’s heart pounded, the rhythm exciting him so much he did a little dance. The light was taking shape, or rather shapes. Glittering and shining symbols hung in the air, floated, light suspended by light. He sang out,
‘Alone I sat when the old one sought me,
The terror of gods that gazed in my eyes:
“What have you to ask? Why come you hither?
Odin, I know where your eye is hidden.”’
The soldier put his hand on Snake in the Eye’s shoulder.
‘You’ve got some questions to answer, son.’
‘Am I not battle bold?’ said Snake in the Eye.
Another soldier had him by the other arm but still Snake in the Eye did not let go of the head. He saw the soldiers by his side but he sensed their truer selves too, little lights burning in a garden, an offering to fate. What offering? The same offering fate always demands. Death. They must die so the gods would live. The gods had not given life to humanity. They had given death, to save themselves. The Norns, the strange women who sit weaving out the fates of men by the roots of the world tree, demand death. So the gods had created men to die in their place.
‘Get out!’
‘He’s a Varangian, and he’s killed a Greek! Cut him down here.’
‘Not in the house of God; drag him outside to do it.’
One of the men drew a sword.
‘Is this God’s house?’ said Snake in the Eye in Greek.
‘Yes, barbarian!’
‘Then it is my house.’
They pulled him towards the door but he was somewhere else too – a garden by a river where candles were lodged in niches in the wall, so many that the wall seemed made of fire. In his vision he put forward his hand and snuffed two out – he knew just which ones to choose. The guards at his side fell dead.
‘This is my house!’ shouted Snake in the Eye. ‘And it is a house of the dead!’
His mind was a vortex: he felt the ice winds of the north, the hot breath of the Caspian desert, the summer storms of Birka, their raindrops warm and full.
He released them in the garden of his mind, sending them as a gale against the wall of candles.
In Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, centre of the faith of the great Roman empire, dedicated to Logos – Jesus as the revealer of the invisible God – the song of the priest stopped and the congregation fell as one to the floor. Snake in the Eye stooped and took a beaded cross from around a dead man’s neck. Then he walked forward over the ranks of corpses, towards the altar, under the light of its glowing gold. He put the head of the Greek upon it and spoke to it.
‘How shall I have my baptism now?’ said the boy. Then the light swamped his
thoughts and he collapsed too.
32 A Face From the Past
‘I am fettered, I am pinioned and I am bound. My mouth is propped open with a cruel spar and the voices of my tormentors mock me.’
Azémar felt the thin cords binding him to the rock, heard the keening and wailing of his own voice, writhed with the agony of his mouth. He strained against his bonds but they would not break, would not come free. His mind was full of murder, to tear and kill those who had tricked him, tied him and humiliated him.
‘My friend.’
Azémar opened his eyes. The sensation of being tied was gone, the terrible pain in his mouth too. Above him was a face he recognised. Loys.
He tried to speak but found himself coughing.
‘Relax, my friend, you’ve undergone a terrible ordeal.’
‘You rescued me.’
Loys put his hand on Azémar’s arm. ‘Yes.’
Azémar opened his arms and Loys leaned forward to hug him. ‘You were always my protector, Azémar, and it’s good to repay the favour. Do you need water?’
‘Yes.’
Loys brought a bowl up to his lips and Azémar sipped at it.
‘We have food here.’
A plate of cold meat and bread was on the table next to him.
‘I’m not hungry, Loys.’
‘Well, perhaps you will be later.’
Loys smiled at his friend and then said, ‘I am bound to ask, Azémar. Why are you here?’
‘I …’
As he began to speak Beatrice came into the room. Azémar watched her.
‘You’re up,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Has he been looking after you?’
‘Very well.’
Azémar’s heart kicked. It was her, he knew, the lady he had seen all those years ago, going past on her little grey horse, her hair brighter than the corn in the sunlight.
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