by Sarah Rayne
‘I do not forget it.’
Kaspar said, ‘She suffered the extreme penalty for what she – and you – did.’
‘I don’t forget that either,’ said Lewis very quietly.
The rituals inside the stone palace had gone on for a very long time and the images had printed themselves sickeningly on Lewis’s mind.
After the macabre feast on what had been the guide Cal, there had been dances performed in the flaring torchlight, and songs and chants in the unfathomable language of Kaspar’s people. Flagons of strong spiced wine had been passed round: Lewis drank several times, and watched the dances and listened to the chants. Nausea had been churning inside him, but he forced it back. His head was spinning and the scene before him was taking on the air of a surreal painting come to life: the mad whirling of the half-naked dancers, the glowing embers of the Burning Altar itself. A rich greasy aroma of roasted meat lay thickly on the air.
But the thrumming beat of the skin-drum pounded against his senses and underneath the repulsion he was aware that a dark fierce lust was stirring.
The dancers were pairing off as they had done during the feasting, sinking to the ground, unashamedly naked, and coupling with uninhibited openness. Lewis watched them, torn between self-disgust and the beginnings of helpless arousal, and when two of the women left the dancing and came over to him, caressing him sensuously, he pulled them to the ground beside him. Their thighs were taut and satiny, and beneath the triangular-shaped cloths about their waists they were naked. They reached between his legs with greedy delight and as their hands closed about him his body reacted strongly. It was like being caressed by the velvet paws of cats – like being stroked by little silk-mittened claws. They bent over him, and as their long hair brushed against his naked thighs, he felt their tongues, wet and slightly rough like cats’. He gasped and control spun away from him. Reaching for the nearest of the two girls, he forced her on to the ground and threw himself on top of her, driving between her sleek muscular thighs with hard violence. Beyond his own frenzied arousal and the women’s delighted cries, he was aware of Kaspar’s dark enigmatic eyes watching through the firelight, but by this time he was beyond caring. When the first girl shuddered and cried out in climax, he pushed her to one side and pulled the second one against him, taking her as crudely and as uncaringly as the first.
When he was finally spent, the women wandered back into the dance, as casually as they had left it, and Lewis lay where he was, his mind clearing slowly.
The smouldering carcase on the Burning Altar was a charred mass, blackened beyond recognition, and several of the older men were grouped about it, leaning over and plainly testing its heat. After several minutes they exchanged nods, and reached into the cooling remains, poking this way and that, causing a flurry of black crisp flakes to blow across the courtyard. Two of them lifted out a handful of small bones and, carrying them into a corner, squatted down and began to suck avidly on them, stripping them clean of the tiny shreds of meat that clung to them. Even through the thick smoky atmosphere, Lewis could see that they were finger bones, and the sickness he had been forcing back suddenly welled up. He staggered to his feet and stumbled blindly away from the circle of light, into the shadows. In a dark corner, he stopped and leaned over, retching and vomiting helplessly on to the ground, shuddering in self-disgust at the rich sweet taste of the regurgitated human flesh filling his mouth.
Chapter Twenty-two
The terrible Burning Altar was cooling and smeary as Lewis left the courtyard, and dawn was streaking the skies. A pall of greasy smoke hung on the air.
He returned unnoticed to the small room overlooking the courtyard; it was hot and fetid and it reeked of the dreadful feast but it was a temporary haven, and he leaned gratefully against the closed door, his mind in a tumult. His insides were still scoured with sickness and he felt tainted from the women’s bodies. He thought he would never be able to forget the sights and the sounds and the scents of any of it. But he had escaped the Burning Altar, and somehow he would escape from the palace. Could he do it now, when Kaspar’s people were exhausted from their feasting? He thought he had played his part sufficiently well to deceive them and no one had prevented him leaving the courtyard. But he dared not take any chances and so he moved quietly about the room, gathering up his things, and then, pausing to listen, inched open the door.
As he crept through the cool silent passages and galleries he expected every minute to be challenged; he certainly expected to be caught and taken into some wretched dungeon and confronted with the Burning Altar as soon as night fell once more – this time as the dinner rather than the diner. But nothing moved and no one came, and presently he was passing under the palace’s inner gates and standing on the northern boundary.
With every step he took away from the palace, his spirits rose. It was still possible that Kaspar’s people would hunt him down, but the farther he went, the less likely this seemed. The sun was high overhead and he was just thinking that he would pause and forage in his haversack for a drink, when he rounded a rocky crag, and there, in the light-washed valley below him, was the place that Patrick Chance had called the forbidden city of Touaris.
He started the walk down the slopes into the valley in brilliant sunshine, but by the time he neared the city, dusk was drenching it in twisting crimson and violet shadows and the immense gates were wreathed in darkness.
It gave him an unexpected frisson to know that this was the way Patrick must have come, in company with the cousin who had been his travelling companion. Had Patrick looked down on the shimmering city and felt, as Lewis was feeling, the absolute silence and the secret remoteness? But the lure for Patrick had been Touaris – that was clear from the early part of the journal – while for Lewis it was something very different.
He had no idea what had finally happened to Patrick, for Patrick, towards the end of his journal, had either been deliberately evasive or had simply expurgated his later travels. The affairs with women were still catalogued – some in astonishing detail – but the light-hearted insouciance that Lewis had found so attractive had vanished as abruptly as if a door had been slammed on it. Reading the brief, very nearly curt entries in the later pages, Lewis had been conscious of disappointment. Something had happened to Patrick that had changed him and it had been something so overwhelming that the irrepressible spirit had been completely quenched. The account of the journey back to England had almost been like reading a Baedeker.
If Patrick’s ghost walked it did not walk here. Lewis had no sense of Patrick’s presence, only a faint unease at trespassing on forbidden ground. He dredged up the few words of the Tibetan tongue he had managed to glean in Lhasa, and thought he was ready to meet any confrontation with polite explanations and a request to walk unobtrusively through the city and observe. He thought that no reasonable people could refuse this, and he steadfastly ignored the jeering little voice of conscience that said: and is that all you want to do? What about the Decalogue, what about those Stone Tablets that you’ve coveted ever since you first read about them? I would only look at them, rejoined Lewis, angrily. I only want to see if the story is true. Like hell you do! said his conscience derisively.
But as he approached the jade and ivory palace he found that he was not thinking of the Decalogue, but of Touaris herself. Immortality was a myth, it was a fairy tale for gullible romantics – he knew that it was! – but faced with this remarkable place it was difficult to cling to practicality. Lewis, staring at the soaring beautiful domes and the painted stupa, the golden-roofed pavilions, and shadowy courtyards with their aqua-tinted mosaics, felt as if he was entering a secret world where anything might be possible. He did not believe in immortal goddesses, but if immortality ever existed at all, it might well exist here. And if ever an eternal goddess’s stronghold was built . . .
He had been wrong about Patrick’s ghost as well, for as he entered the palace compound through a narrow roofed-in alley, he had a strong sense that someone walked with him. Someone who
knew this place, and who was drawing him on and pulling him in, and guiding him to the centre. Patrick? Patrick’s mischievous restless spirit pointing out the way, just as it pointed out the way to Tashkara?
The great hall at the palace’s heart was so huge that it took his breath away. Lewis had stood in St Peter’s in Rome and in the Basilica at Ravenna and felt the overpowering sense of immense space and antiquity in both those places, and as he went warily down the short flight of steps to a partly sunken chamber, he felt it again. Marble pillars, each one easily six feet in diameter, rested on great square granite bases and soared up and up, away from the vast lightless vault into the remote roof. The floor was set with more of the dim mosaic, depicting leaping cats, their eyes glittering with greenstones.
It was as he stood in the lee of one of the pillars that he caught a flash of something golden, as if something within the shadows had moved, and he turned to face it instantly, his heart leaping with fear. Something there? Something standing behind one of the columns, watching him? The feeling of dozens of pairs of eyes peering from the cool dimness clutched his mind and he spun around, scanning the darkness, his heart pounding. But nothing moved and if anything the silence was even more complete: it was a great oppressive weight pressing down on his lungs.
At one end of the hall was what in a Western cathedral might have been called an apse or a lady chapel, and Lewis saw now that it went far back into the shadows, and that within those shadows were rows upon rows of elaborate high-backed chairs, each one swathed in vivid scarlet and sapphire brocades and silks. Thrones. He moved nearer, his mind spinning with disbelief. Each throne was occupied. Each throne bore, seated upright, the life-size figure of a woman, clothed in an elaborate robe, with a rearing headdress bearing the snarling mask of a cat at the centre.
Statues: life-size statues – carved with the exquisite attention to detail and the remarkable jewel-like embellishments that Eastern craftsmen employed. Disturbingly lifelike, but nothing more than inanimate pieces of wood and stone and gilt. But even as the logical side of his mind was arguing this, a dark grisly knowledge was churning upwards.
Very deliberately and very calmly he stood still and counted the figures, taking his time. Get this right, Lewis. Don’t lose track halfway through and have to go back and start at the beginning. People are driven mad doing things like that, counting the flowers on wallpaper, counting the tiles on bathroom walls . . . And if ever there was a place to be driven mad in, this is it.
There were sixty-two figures. All were female and all were subtly different in the way that all people were subtly different. It was reasonable to assume that each figure represented a female who had ascended the throne of Touaris since Kaspar’s people had brought the original goddess out of Egypt. If you allowed an average of fifty years for each life span, you had around three thousand years. Which took you to the very beginning of the cult that had come out of Egypt – Out of the house of bondage, into the land of freedom . . . Egypt. The Egyptians had followed the practice of embalming.
I’m looking at the embalmed bodies of every earthly incarnation of the cat goddess, thought Lewis. I’m down here with the preserved corpses of three thousand years of a pre-Christian religion. He was seeing other things as well now: how some of the earlier figures were visibly deteriorating, how there were tiny, unpleasant indications that the embalming process was beginning to break down. They’re regressing, he thought with horror. Dust to dust . . . No, that’s the Christian belief! He forced himself to examine the figures with detachment, seeing that several of the faces showed signs of inner decay: lips were drawing back from teeth, skin was shrivelling. Some of the features had fallen in where the nose and cheekbones had crumbled, and here and there the elaborate golden gowns were discoloured where corruption had evaded the embalming liquids and leaked through and dried, leaving dark stains. Loathsome masses of liquefying putrescence . . . It was macabre and terrifying, but it was awesome as well.
As he stood looking at the figures, caught between revulsion and fascination, the glint of gold that had caught his eye earlier did so again. Something moving? He looked around and fear washed over him in a great breath-snatching gust.
The female seated on the newest of the thrones had turned her head and was watching him out of open living eyes.
Touaris had not originally intended to steal down into the Hall of the Goddess at all, because it would be easier to lie in wait outside and ambush the traveller running away from Kaspar’s people. It would certainly be a whole lot safer, because to lure a traveller in front of the watchful eyes of all the long-ago goddesses would be regarded as sacrilege, and strictly speaking anyone found guilty of sacrilege was punishable by the fate graven into the Second Stone Tablet of the Decalogue, which was an especially nasty fate.
But sacrilege was only punishable if you were found out, and the Decalogue had not been invoked for centuries, well eighty years anyway, which sounded like centuries, and even then it had been for some kind of violation of the Sacred Temple.
Kaspar, that boring old adherent to custom, had sent the usual running boy to tell them about the latest traveller – an Englishman it was – who had appeared willing to join in the disgusting feasting of the Burning Altar, and then had skulked out of the stone palace at dawn, exactly as so many of them did. Touaris did not blame Kaspar’s captives for skulking out at dawn, because anyone who had to witness the barbaric rituals in the stone palace, never mind join in, would want to skulk out at the first opportunity. The Burning Altar was a truly dreadful custom. It was all very well for Kaspar to say that these were the ways their ancestors had trodden and it brought them nearer to the goddess: cooking and eating human flesh was the most repulsive thing in the world. As soon as Touaris had coaxed more of the younger people into her way of thinking she was going to stage a revolt and have what the West called a coup.
Quite a few of her people had come out to the square below the palace to hear about Kaspar’s escaped traveller, and they had all nodded in a serious-minded and responsible way, and said yes of course they would be on the watch for the fugitive, and of course they would send him back to Kaspar without delay. And then they had gone back to their houses to finish the preparations for tomorrow’s procession, which everyone was looking forward to, and they had forgotten all about it.
Several of the older members of the community had viewed this with disapproval and said that in their day such casual behaviour would not have been permitted: Kaspar’s miscreant would have been caught and dealt with, in fact it was not so very long since the Decalogue itself would have been consulted. There were people in the city today who knew from their fathers how the Decalogue had been invoked for two young Englishmen, a mere eighty years before. Ah, they had known how to deal with heretics and betrayers then, said the ancients, shaking their heads and looking doomful. They took themselves off to the wine shop in the square to disinter a few of the more stringent customs that had once pertained in Tashkara and discuss whether they might not resurrect one or two, although, as one of their number pointed out, what could you expect when the present incumbent of the sacred throne cut her hair short and used modern expressions, and wanted to bring in Western ways, never mind acting so flippantly that she might almost be suspected of indiscriminate relationships with travellers! Well, said the elders, torn between prim disapproval and prurient curiosity, they all knew the punishment that had once been extorted for that kind of misbehaviour!
Touaris, who had one or two relatively reliable spies, considered this very funny. She had had relationships with quite a large number of travellers, although to call her indiscriminate was unfair because she was very discriminating indeed, having a distinct preference for European men and Americans in particular. Western men treated you exactly as an equal, which Eastern men did not, and the Americans had taught her all kinds of colloquial expressions, never mind highly entertaining variations on love-making. Most of them asked afterwards, with a kind of anxious courtesy, whether
you had been satisfied, which Touaris thought extremely polite. But none of it could be called indiscriminating, never mind what the boring old farts of elders might say. It would serve them right if she started to carve notches on her bedpost, or took to flinging discarded lovers out of her window into a fast-rushing river the morning after a night of passion as a queen of Ancient Greece was supposed to have done. But her bedposts were all solid silver, which was difficult even to dent, and you did not get many fast-flowing rivers at the bottom of a valley, well, you did not get any.
Touaris had not, so far, actually had an Englishman, which made the news about Kaspar’s newest escapee particularly interesting. Englishmen were supposed to be very good lovers indeed if you could get beneath their surface reserve.
She sneaked down to the Hall of the Goddess as dusk was falling, and donned her ceremonial robes, which were amazingly uncomfortable but effective for dazzling a potential lover. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast, because this was absolutely the most dangerous thing she had ever done. Even putting on the robes was a great risk, because they were only supposed to be used on formal occasions, such as the procession tomorrow night, which everybody except Touaris herself was looking forward to. Once you had seen one ceremonial dance you had seen them all, and also, Kaspar’s tribe had had to be invited, which meant no shred of pomp could be omitted on account of Kaspar’s people being stupidly sensitive and apt to think themselves slighted if you forgot the tiniest ritual. Touaris sighed to think of the hours of ceremonies that would have to be got through, and thought she deserved a small treat by way of the English traveller beforehand. If you could not squeeze the occasional treat from being a goddess, you might as well go and live on the hillsides among the nomadic tribes.
It was a reasonable assumption that unless the English traveller was confronted at the city gates – which was not very likely – or spotted crossing one of the courtyards – which was even less likely since most people were either in the wine shop or their own homes by now – he would find his way to the Hall of the Goddess. This was one of the slightly eerie things about Tashkara that Touaris had never been able to explain. It was as if the Hall held some kind of magnet for travellers, and it was as if they were compelled towards it. She had occasionally even entertained the fancy that Touaris – the real undying Touaris – sometimes walked in the shadowy hall and drew the travellers in, and to someone bred in the reverence of the goddess, this was rather an uncomfortable idea.