by Clive Barker
Just as suddenly: gone. All of them. Darkness again, as relentless as ever, pressed on her from every side. For a moment she had the sensation of being smothered; she grabbed for breath, panicking.
“Carys?”
“I’m all right,” she whispered to the distant inquirer. He was a world away, but he cared for her, or so she dimly remembered.
“Where are you?” he wanted to know.
She didn’t have a clue, so she shook her head. Which way should she advance, if at all? She waited in the darkness, readying herself for whatever might happen next.
Suddenly the lights began again, at the horizon. This time—for their second performance—pattern had become form. Instead of spirals she saw rising columns of burning smoke. In place of seas of light, a landscape, with intermittent sunshine stabbing distant hillsides. Birds rose up on burning wings then turned into leaves of books, fluttering up from conflagrations that were even now flaring on every side.
“Where are you?” he asked her again. Her eyes roved maniacally behind her closed lids, taking in this burgeoning province. He could share none of it, except through her words, and she was dumb with admiration or terror, he couldn’t tell which.
There was sound here too. Not much; the promontory she walked on had suffered too many ravages to shout. Its life was almost out. Bodies sprawled underfoot, so badly disfigured they might have been dropped out of the sky. Weapons; horses; wheels. She saw all of this as if by a show of lurid fireworks, with no sight glimpsed more than once. In the instant of darkness between one light-burst and the next the entire scene would change. One moment she was standing on an open road with a naked girl running toward her, bawling. The next, on a hillside looking down on a razed valley, snatched through a pall of smoke. Now a silver birch copse, now not. Now a ruin, with a headless man at her feet; again, not. But always the fires somewhere near; the smuts and the shrieks dirtying the air; the sense of relentless pursuit. She felt it could go on forever, these scenes changing before her—one moment a landscape, the next an atrocity—without her having time to correlate the disparate images.
Then, as abruptly as the first patterns had ceased, the fires did also, and the darkness was everywhere about her again.
“Where?”
Marty’s voice found her. He was so agitated in his confusion, she answered him.
“I’m almost dead,” she said, quite calmly.
“Carys?” He was terrified that naming her would alert Mamoulian, but he had to know if she spoke for herself, or for him.
“Not Carys,” she replied. Her mouth seemed to lose its fullness; the lips thinning. It was Mamoulian’s mouth, not hers.
She raised her hand a little way from her lap as if making to touch her face.
“Almost dead,” she said again. “Lost the battle, you see. Lost the whole bloody war …”
“Which war?”
“Lost from the beginning. Not that it matters, eh? Find myself another war. There’s always one around.”
“Who are you?”
She frowned. “What’s it to you?” she snapped at him. “None of your business.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Marty returned. He feared pushing the interrogation too hard. As it was, his question was answered in the next breath.
“My name’s Mamoulian. I’m a sergeant in the Third Fusiliers. Correction: was a sergeant.”
“Not now?”
“No, not now. I’m nobody now. It’s safer to be nobody these days, don’t you think?”
The tone was eerily conversational, as though the European knew exactly what was happening, and had chosen to talk with Marty through Carys. Another game, perhaps?
“When I think of the things I’ve done,” he said, “to stay out of trouble. I’m such a coward, you see? Always have been. Loathe the sight of blood.” He began to laugh in her, a solid, unfeminine laugh.
“You’re just a man?” Marty said. He could scarcely credit what he was being told. There was no Devil hiding in the European’s cortex, just this half-mad sergeant, lost on some battlefield. “Just a man?” he said again.
“What did you want me to be?” the sergeant replied, quick as a flash, “I’m happy to oblige. Anything to get me out of this shit.”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?”
The sergeant frowned with Carys’s face, puzzling this one out.
“I’m losing my mind,” he said dolefully. “I’ve been talking to myself for days now on and off. There’s no-one left, you see? The Third’s been wiped out. And the Fourth. And the Fifth. All blown to Hell!” He stopped, and pulled a wry face. “Got no one to play cards with, damn it. Can’t play with dead men, can I? They’ve got nothing I want …” The voice trailed away.
“What date is it?”
“Sometime in October, isn’t it?” the sergeant came back. “I’ve lost track of time. Still, it’s fucking cold at night, I tell you that much. Yes, must be October at least. There was snow in the wind yesterday. Or was it the day before?”
“What year is it?”
The sergeant laughed. “I’m not that far gone,” he said. “It’s 1811. That’s right. I’m thirty-two on the ninth of November. And I don’t look a day over forty.”
If the sergeant was answering truthfully Mamoulian was two centuries old.
“Are you sure?” Marty asked. “The year is 1811; you’re certain?”
“Shut your mouth!” the answer came.
“What?”
“Trouble.”
Carys had drawn her arms up against her chest, as though constricted. She felt enclosed—but by what she wasn’t certain. The open road she’d been standing on had abruptly disappeared, and now she sensed herself lying down, in darkness. It was warmer here than it had been on the road, but not a pleasant heat. It smelled putrid. She spat, not once but three or four times, to rid herself of a mouthful of muck. Where was she, for God’s sake?
Close by she could hear the approach of horses. The sound was muffled, but it made her, or rather the man she occupied, panic. Off to her right, somebody moaned.
“Ssh …” she hissed. Didn’t the moaner hear the horses too? They’d be discovered; and though she didn’t know why, she was certain discovery would prove fatal.
“What’s happening?” Marty asked.
She didn’t dare to reply. The horsemen were too close to dare a word. She could hear them dismounting, and approaching her hiding place. She repeated a prayer, soundlessly. The riders were talking now; they were soldiers, she guessed. An argument had erupted among them as to who would tackle some distasteful duty. Maybe, she prayed, they’d give up their search before they started. But no. The debate was over, and they were grunting and complaining as several set about their labors. She heard them moving sacks, and flinging them down. A dozen; two dozen. Light seeped through to where she lay, scarcely breathing. More sacks were moved; more light fell on her. She opened her eyes, and finally recognized what refuge the sergeant had chosen.
“God Almighty,” she said.
They weren’t sacks she lay among, but bodies. He had hidden himself in a mound of corpses. It was the heat of putrefaction that made her sweat.
Now the hillock was being taken apart by the horsemen, who were pricking each of the bodies as they were hauled from the heap, in order to distinguish living from dead. The few who still breathed were pointed out to the officer. He dismissed them all as past the point of no return; they were swiftly dispatched. Before a bayonet could pierce his hide, the sergeant rolled over and showed himself.
“I surrender,” he said. They jabbed him through the shoulder anyway. He yelled. Carys too.
Marty reached to touch her; her face was scrawled with pain. But he thought better of interfering at what was clearly a vital juncture: it might do more harm than good.
“Well, well,” said the officer, high on the horse. “You don’t look very dead to me.”
“I was practicing,” the sergeant replied. His wit earned him a second jab.
To judge by the looks of the men who surrounded him, he’d be lucky to avoid a disemboweling. They were ready for some sport.
“You’re not going to die,” the officer said, patting his mount’s gleaming neck. The presence of so much decay made the thoroughbred uneasy. “We need answers to some questions first. Then you can have your place in the pit.”
Behind the officer’s plumed head the sky had darkened. Even as he spoke the scene began to lose coherence, as though Mamoulian had forgotten how it went from here.
Under her lids Carys’s eyes began to twitch back and forth again. Another welter of impressions had overtaken her, each moment delineated with absolute precision, but all coming too fast for her to make any sense of.
“Carys? Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” she said breathlessly. “Just moments … living moments.”
She saw a room, a chair. Felt a kiss, a slap. Pain; relief; pain again. Questions; laughter. She couldn’t be certain, but she guessed that under pressure the sergeant was telling the enemy everything they wanted to know and more. Days passed in a heartbeat. She let them run through her fingers, sensing that the European’s dreaming head was moving with mounting velocity toward some critical event. It was best to let him lead the way; he knew better than she the significance of this descent.
The journey finished with shocking suddenness.
A sky the color of cold iron opened above her head. Snow drifted from it, a lazy fall of goose down which instead of warming her made her bones ache. In the claustrophobic bed-sitting room, with Marty sitting bare-chested and sweating opposite her, Carys’s teeth began to chatter.
The sergeant’s captors were done with their interrogation, it seemed. They had led him and five other ragged prisoners out into a small quadrangle. He looked around. This was a monastery, or had been until its occupation. One or two monks stood in the shelter of the cloister walkway and watched events in the yard unfold with philosophical gaze.
The six prisoners waited in a line while the snow fell. They were not bound. There was nowhere in this square for them to run to. The sergeant, on the end of the line, chewed his nails and tried to keep his thoughts light. They were going to die here, that was an unavoidable fact. They were not the first to be executed this afternoon. Along one wall, arranged neatly for posthumous inspection, lay five dead men. Their lopped heads had been placed, the ultimate defamation, at their groins. Open-eyed, as if startled by the killing stroke, they stared at the snow as it descended, at the windows, at the one tree that was planted in a square of soil among the stones. In summer, it surely bore fruit; birds made idiot song in it. Now, it was leafless.
“They’re going to kill us,” she said matter-of-factly.
It was all very informal. The presiding officer, a fur coat pulled around his shoulders, was standing with his hands at a blazing brazier, his back to the prisoners. The executioner was with him, his bloody sword leaned jauntily on his shoulder. A fat, lumbering man, he laughed at some joke the officer made, and downed a cup of something warming before turning back to his business.
Cans smiled.
“What’s happening now?”
She said nothing; her eves were on the man who was going to kill them; she smiled on.
“Cans. What’s happening?”
The soldiers had come along the line, and pushed them to the ground in the middle of the square. Cans had bowed her head, to expose the nape of her neck. “We’re going to die,” she whispered to her distant confidant.
At the far end of the line the executioner raised his sword and brought it down with one professional stroke. The prisoner’s head seemed to leap from the neck, pushed forward by a geyser of blood. It was lurid against the gray walls, the white snow. The head fell face-forward, rolled a little way and stopped. The body curled to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye Mamoulian watched the proceedings, trying to stop his teeth from chattering. He wasn’t afraid, and didn’t want them to think he was. The next man in line had started to scream. Two soldiers stepped forward at the officer’s barked command, and seized the man. Suddenly, after a calm in which you could hear the snow pat the ground, the line erupted with pleas and prayers; the man’s terror had opened a floodgate. The sergeant said nothing. They were lucky to be dying in such style, he thought: the sword was for aristocrats and officers. But the tree was not yet tall enough to hang a man from. He watched the sword fall a second time, wondering if the tongue still wagged after death, sitting in the draining palate of the dead man’s head.
“I’m not afraid,” he said. “What’s the use of fear? You can’t buy it or sell it, you can’t make love to it. You can’t even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you’re cold.”
A third prisoner’s head rolled in the snow; and a fourth. A soldier laughed. The blood steamed. Its meaty smell was appetizing to a man who hadn’t been fed for a week.
“I’m not losing anything,” he said in lieu of prayer. “I’ve had a useless life. If it ends here, so what?”
The prisoner at his left was young: no more than fifteen. A drummer boy, the sergeant guessed. He was quietly crying.
“Look over there,” Mamoulian said. “Desertion if ever I saw it.”
He nodded toward the sprawled bodies, which were already being vacated by their various parasites. Fleas and nits, aware that their host had ceased, crawled and leaped from head and hem, eager to find new residence before the cold caught them.
The boy looked and smiled. The spectacle diverted him in the moment it took for the executioner to position himself and deliver the killing stroke. The head sprang; heat escaped on to the sergeant’s chest.
Idly, Mamoulian looked round at the executioner. He was slightly blood-spattered; otherwise his profession was not written upon him. It was a gormless face, with a shabby beard that needed trimming, and round, parboiled eyes. Shall I be murdered by this? the sergeant thought; well, I’m not ashamed. He spread his arms to either side of his body, the universal gesture of submission, and bowed his head. Somebody pulled at his shirt to expose his neck.
He waited. A noise like a shot sounded in his head. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the snow approaching as his head leaped from his neck; but no. In the middle of the square one of the soldiers was falling to his knees, his chest blown open by a shot from one of the upper cloister windows. Mamoulian glanced behind him. Soldiers were swarming from every side of the quadrangle; shots sliced the snow. The presiding officer, wounded, fell clumsily against the brazier, and his fur coat caught fire. Trapped beneath the tree, two soldiers were mown down, slumping together like lovers under the branches.
“Away.” Can’s whispered the imperative with his voice, “Quickly. Away.”
He belly-crawled across the frozen stone as the factions fought above his head, scarcely able to believe that he’d been spared. Nobody gave him a second glance. Unarmed and skeletal-thin, he was no danger to anyone. Once out of the square, and into the backwaters of the monastery, he took a breath. Smoke had started to drift along the icy corridors. Inevitably, the place was being put to the torch by one side or the other: perhaps both. They were all imbeciles: he loved none of them. He began his way through the maze of the building, hoping to find his way out without encountering any stray fusiliers.
In a passageway far from the skirmishes he heard footsteps—sandaled, not booted—coming after him. He turned to face his pursuer. It was a monk, his scrawny features every inch the ascetic’s. He arrested the sergeant by the tattered collar of his shirt.
“You’re God-given,” he said. He was breathless, but his grip was fierce.
“Let me alone. I want to get out.”
“The fighting’s spreading through the building; it’s not safe anywhere.”
“I’ll take the risk,” the sergeant grinned.
“You were chosen, soldier,” the monk replied, still holding on. “Chance stepped in on your behalf. The innocent boy at your side died, but you survived. Don’t you see? Ask yourself why
.”
He tried to push the shaveling away; the mixture of incense and stale sweat was vile. But the man held fast, speaking hurriedly: “There are secret tunnels beneath the cells. We can slip away without being slaughtered.”
“Yes?”
“Certainly. If you’ll help me.”
“How?”
“I’ve got writings to salvage; a life’s work. I need your muscle, soldier. Don’t fret yourself, you’ll get something in return.”
“What have you got that I’d want?” the sergeant said. What could this wild-eyed flagellant possibly possess?
“I need an acolyte,” the monk said, “Someone to give my learning to.”
“Spare me your spiritual guidance.”
“I can teach you so much. How to live forever, if that’s what you want.” Mamoulian had started to laugh, but the monk went on with his dream-talk. “How to take life from other people, and have it for yourself. Or if you like, give it to the dead to resurrect them.”
“Never.”
“It’s old wisdom,” the monk said. “But I’ve found it again, written out in plain Greek. Secrets that were ancient when the hills were young. Such secrets.”
“If you can do all that, why aren’t you Tsar of All the Russias?” Mamoulian replied.
The monk let go of his shirt, and looked at the soldier with contempt freshly squeezed from his eyes. “What man,” he said slowly, “what man with true ambition in his soul would want to be merely Tsar?”
The reply wiped the soldier’s smile away. Strange words, whose significance—had he been asked—he would have had difficulty explaining. But there was a promise in them which his confusion couldn’t rob them of. Well, he thought, maybe this is the way wisdom comes; and the sword didn’t fall on me, did it?