‘Why are we going there?’
‘For light,’ said Styliane.
Beatrice was cold and huddled into her cloak. Soon a large tower with a burning beacon loomed from the fog. The tower was a straightforward round structure in stone with an open roof for the fire platform. A large sheet of polished metal had been positioned behind it to improve its effectiveness as a beacon.
The boat bumped against a rough quay. Two men from the shore helped moor the boat but then disappeared back inside the building.
The youth helped Styliane and Beatrice ashore and then passed Styliane the lamp. She took it and went inside the tower, Beatrice close behind.
A crude ladder led up to an internal platform. Again, Styliane led the way. Beatrice was convinced she couldn’t climb the ladder but found a way, turned half sideways. Desperation overcame her exhaustion and caution. From the platform another ladder went up onto the roof. Could she make it? She had to. She climbed.
She reached the top and looked out over the sea. Even with the light of the brazier she could see hardly anything beyond the roof itself. The fog was thick. Beatrice glanced behind her and gasped. An old slave woman, dressed all in black, turned around and it was as if she was appearing from nothing, her dark features shining in the light of the beacon.
‘This is Arrudiya,’ said Styliane. ‘She raised me.’
The woman cast down her eyes but not with deference, Beatrice thought. There was defiance or truculence in her expression.
The brazier was very hot and Beatrice moved away from it.
‘Now?’ said Styliane.
‘When the fire has died a little,’ said Arrudiya. ‘The moon is still climbing.’
‘How does she know that?’ said Beatrice.
‘I can feel it,’ said Arrudiya.
‘Why is she here?’ said Beatrice.
‘Because God sees things in threes,’ said Styliane, ‘and God is three.’
‘Moon, earth and underworld,’ said Arrudiya, ‘past, present, future. Father, son, spirit; virgin, mother, crone.’
Beatrice didn’t want to hear any more. She sat, waiting for the brazier’s light to weaken. It didn’t take long, and soon it was reduced to glowing coals, a tight cluster of light buried in the great darkness.
Eventually the old woman came to her. She poured something from a flask onto her hands and anointed Beatrice’s eyes.
‘Water from a shipwreck,’ she said.
She took out another flask and put it to Beatrice’s lips.
‘Drink,’ she said.
Beatrice did as she was asked. The drink was honey water but with a bitter musty taste behind it.
‘What is this?’
‘Kykeon, as our forebears drank,’ said the woman, ‘made with Syrian rue.’
Then the two other women sat down around the fire, equidistant from each other and Beatrice, and intoned in a low drone:
‘Wherefore they call you Hecate, many-named, air-cleaving, night-shining, triple-sounding, triple-headed, triple-voiced, triple-faced, triple-necked, and goddess of the three ways, who holds untiring flaming fire in baskets three, you who protect the spacious world at night, before whom demons quake in fear and the gods immortal tremble. Subduer and subdued, mankind’s subduer, and force-subduer; chaos, too. Hail, Goddess.’
Beatrice hated the invocation. She concentrated on prayer, on calling Christ to protect her, to save her soul. But she did not move; she wanted revelation.
The old woman threw a handful of something onto the coals and they flared. ‘I burn for you this spice, goddess of harbours, who roams the mountains, goddess of crossroads, nether and nocturnal, and infernal goddess of dark, quiet and frightful one.’
Beatrice found she was repeatedly crossing herself.
‘You who have your meal amid graves, night, darkness, chaos deep and wide, hard to escape are you. You are torment, justice and destroyer. Serpent-girded, who drinks blood, who brings death; destructor, who feasts on hearts.’
Beatrice coughed and fell forward on to her hands. Her nose was streaming and her throat was dry.
‘Flesh eater, who devours those dead untimely, and you who make grief resound and spread madness, come to my sacrifices, and now for me do you fulfil this matter. Shall we speak about the things not to be spoken of? Shall we divulge the things not to be divulged? Shall we pronounce the things not to be pronounced?’
The fire was suddenly bright again and Beatrice tried to get up, but her body seemed fixed to the floor.
‘Grant us revelation,’ continued the chant, ‘open our eyes and chase away the night, wandering lady, bright Selene.’
The moon had come out from behind a cloud, full and bright – much brighter than it had ever been, she thought – as if it resented its long time cloaked in black and was redoubling its light in joy at its release.
When she looked back down again, she was no longer on the rooftop. She was in the place by the river she went to in her dreams but not on the path by the wall; she was in the deep wood beside it. Styliane and Arrudiya sat on the ground next to her, each holding a small candle. Something crashed and bumped in the woods. A creature, she thought. A weird sense between hearing and touch, not quite either, had sprung up in her and the presence of the creature seemed hot and snuffling, as if hot and snuffling were the same thing.
‘How do I find my answer? How do I find his purpose?’
Styliane and Arrudiya gave no reply, just sat staring ahead.
Beatrice had a very strong urge to get out of those woods. The blundering thing wasn’t the only presence in there. She stood. She saw nothing but trees and darkness; the moon was caught in the branches, her own hands glowing pale in its light. She walked forward, pushing away branches and briars. Something was behind her. She turned. Nothing. She wanted to get onto the path, to go to those little candles in the wall and see they still burned. That was unaccountably very important to her.
Ahead the river shone like a silver road. She headed for it, her clothes tearing on the brambles, her skin scratched and cut by thorns.
She heard rustling in the woods behind her. She pulled and tugged her way forward, the baby heavy inside her even in the dreamworld.
You are going to the well. The voice was in her ear, more a whisper of the trees than anything human.
‘I will resist my fate.’
You are fate. Say your name, Verthani.
‘I do not know that name.’
Three wise girls come from the hall beneath the tree.
One is called Urdr, Fated so men call her;
Another Becoming, Verthani is her name;
Skuld – Must Be – is the third. Together
They carve on tablets of wood the fate of men.
Something stirred inside her and it was not the baby. That symbol. It crawled and writhed, gnawed at her like a wolf in her guts.
She made the path. Footsteps were coming the other way. It was a boy, a youth – the one who had visited Loys in their chamber.
He was walking towards the candle wall but he stopped when he saw her.
‘You are here, lady,’ he said, gesturing to the wall. ‘Shall I snuff you out?’
All around the boy, like things glimpsed at the end of a dream, half-seen, coming into existence, fading and returning like sleep spectres, symbols shone and span. She recognised them – Norse runes of the sort some of her father’s men liked to carve though these were things of air and light and fire and darkness, not designs in wood.
‘Who are you?’
‘I don’t know. I know what I do here but I don’t know who I am.’
‘You are the one who came to my husband in our chambers.’
‘Yes, Snake in the Eye. That is certainly one of my names, though I begin to suspect I have others.’
‘How so?’
‘There are things inside me, living things. They woke up when I turned to Christ. I am baptised now. They bathed me in the waters and then I baptised myself again in the priest’s b
lood to be doubly holy. Am I not holy?’
‘I am here to seek answers. Who is the man my husband took from the Numera? What is the meaning of the black sky? And the deaths?’
‘Three questions. A suitable number for a god. I only know one answer.’
‘What is it?’
‘The deaths have no meaning. I find them pleasing, that is all.’
‘You are their cause?’
‘Yes. I come here in my fancies and I blow out the lights. Men die. I see four here, one little one for your child. There are others with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Reveal them to me.’
‘They are in the wood.’
‘Who?’
‘Two women. They brought me here.’
‘I don’t suppose I need to see them to kill them. Here!’ He leaned into the wall and blew out one of the candles. Then he put his hand to his ear. ‘Heard no one fall. I’ll blow out another and you listen. Unless it’s you who falls, of course. I wonder if I kill the baby whether it’ll kill you. Hmmm.’
Beatrice took a pace back. The boy was mad, she was convinced. He shaped his lips to blow out another candle and the thing inside her, the jagged, barbed shape that crawled and slunk, began to howl, a dreadful keening note like a funeral lament.
‘What is that?’ said Snake in the Eye.
Beatrice had always fought it down. She knew now what she had done by that river, what had caused her fever. She had heard the rune howling and gone to the wall, tried to extinguish the candle that represented her life so she would no longer hear the call of the dread symbol. She had not managed it and had succumbed to fever and illness and dementia. Beatrice had tried to die but could not. That was before Loys, before love, and, faced by this awful boy, she wanted to live.
She no longer fought down the rune; she embraced it, opening her mind like a great sluice on a dam to allow what she had kept locked away to come bursting forth. The rune screamed and howled, raging like a cornered wolf. The trees stirred but not with the wind. Something was out there.
Snake in the Eye stared transfixed by the remaining candles in the wall. A low seething growl rumbled from the woods, a pure animal voice of threat that speaks to ancient fears and commands complete attention in a heartbeat.
There from the trees came Azémar, but it was not Azémar. Beatrice saw a man, but the idea in her mind was that of a wolf. Then she saw it, a great grizzled black thing, its eyes a shining green, its voice low with threat.
Snake in the Eye pointed at the wall. ‘There is no light here for the wolf,’ he said. ‘If you have drawn it here, lady, I do bid you send it away or I can snuff out your lamp as easily as any of the others.’
‘I am no one’s to command,’ said the wolf and its voice was like an avalanche.
Snake in the Eye backed away down the path, retreating from the wall.
‘Go,’ said the wolf who was Azémar and – Beatrice had one of those strange ideas that only exist in dreams – several other people too.
‘I could fight you,’ said Snake in the Eye. ‘I—’
The wolf sprang at the boy, knocking him to the ground, roaring into his face, his lips pulled back over his great teeth.
‘I am not free,’ said the wolf, ‘and you are not yet whole.’
‘I am a man as good as any.’
‘You will find the waters. You will find the well. You will pass over the bridge of light to find a place where you will die a meaningful death.’
The wolf released the boy and backed away from Beatrice.
‘Who are you?’ said Beatrice to the wolf.
‘Your killer,’ said the wolf, ‘time and again through many lives.’
‘Am I to die?’
‘I am bound, fettered and bound.’
‘You are free, sir.’
‘I send forth my mind to travel the nine worlds. Release me from the rock where the slaughter gods bound me and release yourself from your eternal suffering.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Ask rather, who are you, lady?’
‘Then who am I?’
‘Of many births
the Norns must be,
Nor one in race they were;
Some to gods, others
to elves are kin,
And Dvalin’s daughters some.’
‘Don’t talk in riddles. Who am I?’
‘A dream of a god. A dream of one greater than the gods. You spin the fates of men and gods.’
‘I am a woman, born of a woman, and I will die a woman.’
‘You lead me to my fate and only you can keep me from it.’
‘How should I help you?’
‘Release me. At the well and from there to beyond the bridge of light.’
‘Lady Beatrice!’
Behind her was Styliane, her eyes wide with fear.
Images rushed in on Beatrice – she saw herself as she had been before, in lives past. She was a country girl by a low hut, drying herbs on its roof in the sun; she was a lady dressed in man’s armour, fleeing beneath spring skies; she was something she did not understand, someone who had once carried the bright chiming symbols she had seen around that murderous boy by the river, a woman walking in a wood holding the hand of a man who she had known in lives before and would know in lives again. Azémar, the wolf, her killer.
‘Lady, come away from this place. We should not have come here.’ Styliane tugged at her, trying to pull her away.
She heard the snarl of the wolf and its voice, low and furious.
‘She is mine in lives past, present and future, and I will never let you take her!’
‘Azémar, no!’ said Beatrice, but it was too late. The wolf rounded on Styliane, Beatrice leaped to protect her, and the world went dark.
On the platform of the lighthouse tower Beatrice came back to herself. Her two companions lay flat; the coals of the fire burned dim. The moon had gone and the night was black again, the only light from the dim beacon.
She stood and had to put a hand to the wall for balance. Her head swam. She retched and stood panting for a while. She went to Arrudiya. The woman was dead, cold already. Styliane was warm and breathing but Beatrice couldn’t rouse her.
She sat down and sobbed. What was happening to her? Then she regained control. Styliane needed help. Beatrice leaned over the parapet of the tower. The boat still bobbed by the quay. She went to the top of the ladder and shouted down, ‘Get up here now. The lady needs your help.’
The slaves hurried up as Beatrice leaned on the wall for support, looking across at the night lights of Constantinople. She had seen enough in the dream to convince her Azémar was a demon. When she got back to the palace, she would cut his throat.
36 Twice Hidden
Guards bearing torches and swords marched under the black sky down the broad avenue. Loys tore ahead of them with his lamp down the Middle Way to warn the soothsayers of the purge. He shook them awake from their places in porches and alleys, screaming at them to get up and run. The wild women and fortune tellers, the casters of bones and the penny wizards cursed him and told him to leave them alone until they saw the soldiers coming. Then they fled for the city gates.
Next Loys ran to the hospital, the chamberlain’s words haunting him: We’re running out of time.
The chamberlain clearly believed the strange happenings had a purpose and, more than that, that they were building towards something. Loys thought too of those words that had come to him when he had spoken to Snake in the Eye. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.
God’s protection had not worked in the church. Loys shivered. What if this was not a visitation from the devil but from God, chiding his flock for their sins? What did the Bible say – the Book of Revelation? First would come a rider on a white horse. He would come as a king and a conqueror. Well, Basileios fitted that description, though so did many warrior kings throughout history. Then would come War on a red horse. There had been plent
y of war. Next Famine on his black horse. Such cold could not be good for the crops. Finally Death would ride in on his pale horse. The souls of the martyrs would cry out for vengeance beneath the altar. The faces of the corpses in Hagia Sophia loomed in his mind.
Loys told himself to calm down. Such imaginings swept the common people occasionally, when a storm or a flood would have them crying that the time of tribulation had started, that Christ was coming back to his kingdom. The abbot had always counselled folk not to read too much into natural things. Every famine, pestilence or drought could not presage the end of the world. Loys had to stick to the task at hand. If Christ was returning, what better way for the Lord to find him than engaged in the pursuit of demons?
The same clear head needed to be applied to his assessment of the chamberlain. Could he really suspect him? Yes, he had seemed flustered, desperate almost but very likely the emperor would want answers as to why his people were collapsing in the aisles of his greatest church, and if the chamberlain couldn’t provide them, he was as vulnerable as anyone. And then there was Styliane. She opposed her brother and she had told Loys quite clearly the chamberlain had employed diabolical forces to secure his position. But could she be trusted?
Loys reached the hospital and went inside. It was busy as a marketplace, full to bursting. The patients had heard what had happened at the church and they wept and wailed. He found a doctor and enquired about the survivor. The man didn’t know what Loys was talking about but directed him to the admissions clerk, who found the doctor he needed.
‘What did he look like?’
‘A Varangian. He was a boy,’ said the doctor.
Loys recalled the boy who had come to see him. Not him, surely? He had told him to go to the church to seek baptism. Hagia Sophia was the nearest church to the palace.
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘Just that he wanted his sword and he wanted to be baptised,’ said the doctor.
That did sound like the youth.
‘Did he speak to anyone else?’
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