by Sarah Rayne
Kaspar had turned to regard Touaris, and when he spoke again, Lewis heard the dislike in his voice. Kaspar said, ‘Touaris has committed the greater offence. And even though it was never believed that the goddess would demean herself in this way, there is a due punishment.’
Lewis felt the faintest tremor of fear from Touaris, and forcing cold boredom into his voice, he said, ‘It’s pushing it a bit to expect me to believe that none of your goddesses has ever broken out. In three thousand years? Come off it, Kaspar! Who’s being naïve now?’
‘Nevertheless, it is true. The tradition is of a virgin goddess.’
‘More likely they didn’t get found out,’ said Lewis caustically. ‘And what if there is a child? What then?’
‘The punishment would be deferred until after it had been born,’ said Kaspar. ‘We do not kill unborn children.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Lewis politely. ‘In Ancient Greece a little feast of new-born baby was considered a delicacy. I would have expected your cannibals to follow that example with enthusiasm.’ He felt Touaris flinch, and thought: yes, that was a savage thing to say! But this is a savage situation.
‘But this would be the child of a goddess,’ said Kaspar. ‘It might be something to revere.’
‘“Might”? What else “might” you do with it?’
‘If Touaris does not survive the Decalogue’s punishment, and if the child is a girl—’
‘You might train her up for the next Touaris?’
‘It is not necessarily as simple as that,’ said Kaspar. ‘But it could be possible.’ He frowned, and for the first time since Kaspar’s entrance, Touaris spoke, turning to Lewis.
‘Each time the reigning Touaris dies,’ she said, her small face intent and serious, ‘a search is made for a girl child, no younger than two, no older than four years, in whom must be recognised the reappearance of the goddess.’
‘And they say religion is never derivative,’ murmured Lewis.
‘The search for the replacement is nearly always long and complex,’ broke in Kaspar. ‘And the tests are very stringent. There must be the recognition of objects belonging to the original goddess; there must be prescribed similarities of face and feature and above all there must be certain race memories,’ he looked at Touaris, ‘as there were with you.’
‘Yes.’ For a moment the mischief flared in the dark eyes. ‘There was no doubt about me, was there, Kaspar? And it kills you to admit it. But there was never any doubt, for all you tried to promote your daughter.’
‘Did he really do that?’ said Lewis promptly. ‘I’m shocked. Intriguing for power? Dear me, Kaspar, I wouldn’t have thought it of you.’ He grinned at Touaris encouragingly, but his mind was shuddering from the implication that she might not survive the Decalogue’s sentence. Looking back at Kaspar, he said, ‘This is a wholly hypothetical discussion, but – if the child were to be a boy? What would happen?’
‘A boy could be put to interesting use.’ The cold cruel smile curved Kaspar’s mouth. ‘There are certain ceremonies involving the Burning Altar, and use of a newly born boy-child,’ he said. ‘As you foresaw.’
Damn! thought Lewis furiously. But surely I didn’t need to put that idea into their evil warped minds! Isn’t there any way out of this?
He glanced to the guards standing behind Kaspar. Was it remotely possible that he could knock them aside and beat it up the stair and out into the night? But there were six or eight of them, and they were all muscular and strong. They were not armed in the way Lewis, with his twentieth-century outlook, thought of as armed, but they carried glinting knives. And the stair was impossibly narrow and as far as he could see there was no other way out of the Decalogue Chamber. Then I’m trapped. And there was Touaris – it was unthinkable that he should leave her to face this alone. He ground his teeth silently, but when two of the men seized him and began to force him back up the stone stair, he went without a struggle. He would save any struggles for later, for when he had formulated some kind of plan. It was inconceivable that he should submit docilely to these people, and it was even more inconceivable that he should let Touaris do so.
But panic was flooding his mind, and he thought: I’ll never escape from these people! I’ll never be able to fool them, or bribe them, or reason with them—
But Patrick escaped, he remembered suddenly. Patrick eluded them all those years ago, and returned to England.
A tiny voice tapped against the surface of his mind like brittle icicle fingers on a freezing cold dawn, and the memory of Patrick’s strange metamorphosis, so clear from the journal, slid coldly into his mind. A treacherous little voice deep within him, said, Did Patrick really escape?
Chapter Twenty-six
Patrick Chance’s Diary
Tashkara
Only a sense of tidiness (uncharacteristic but infuriatingly persistent), and an awareness of a task left uncompleted has forced me to turn to these diaries again.
I made a half-flippant comment in England (in another life and another world), about writing a bawdy account of my travels, and publishing it in the face of my father and everyone else’s displeasure. The more I look back on what has happened, the more this seems less of a flippancy and more of a possibility. Could it be done? Would I do it? I believe I would.
But as for what was done to me in the courtyard, in the grisly shadow of the Burning Altar— No, that’s not for telling to the world. What I write down about that is for no one’s eyes except my own.
I believe that some stage performers insist (with varying degrees of coyness) that they experience something akin to orgasm when they step on to a lighted stage and face their audiences. When I stepped into the torchlit square at Tashkara’s centre and faced my audience, orgasm was the last thing I was about to suffer, although there was a strong possibility that I might disgrace myself with the same part of my body, but in a very different manner. However, it’s yet another duty of Englishmen to control bladder and bowels no matter the situation, and at least that humiliation was spared me. Not much else was.
The scaffold was unspeakably sinister. It was positioned directly in front of the altar and the honours for sheer malevolence were divided pretty much equally.
The scaffold was not the flat platform I had thought, but a rectangle of wood about ten feet long and half as wide, with chains driven into each corner. Manacles. Whatever they were about to do, they were going to chain me down while they did it.
It was being tilted by six of the men, and it was horribly clear that once a prisoner was chained hand and foot to the wood, he would be practically vertical, splayed out on the surface, facing the assembled people. The twisting flames from the flambeaux fell across the grisly oblong, suffusing it with crimson. Like the floor of a coffin, soaked in blood.
Of Theo there was no sign, and I could not decide if this was hopeful or not. On the one hand he might have escaped and be bringing help, but on the other he might be cooped up in some miserable dungeon, about to face all manner of fates.
The people taking their places on the seats surrounding the square were attractive in the way that Tamerlane and his guards were attractive: tall and well-built, all with silky black hair worn rather long, and although they had the high slanting cheekbones of the East they had the wide-open eyes of the West. It was an arresting blend of several cultures and I spent some minutes wondering about their ancestry because anything was better than speculating on the purpose of the coffin floor.
I had just reached the point of remembering Fenris’s story about the renegade Egyptian tribe, when a single plangent note from somewhere inside the palace rang out. It pierced the air and shivered on the night long after it had been sounded, and my skin crawled with absolute and abject terror, because I had never heard anything so implacable and so pitiless as that sound. If I ever get as far as hearing the Last Trump that’s precisely the kind of sound it will make. Imperious and bone-chilling. Marrow-chilling.
The men and women on the seats had been mur
muring to one another – it was impossible to avoid drawing comparisons with a London theatre audience waiting for the curtain to rise! – but at the sound of the note they stopped as if a door had been slammed, and an immense silence closed down. Every head turned to a door at the square’s northern side, and my heart began to beat very fast. Something was coming. Something tremendous and powerful was approaching. Something connected with the silent sinister altar? Or with the coffin-floor rectangle of wood?
By this time, I should not have been surprised to see anything from a hooded Jack Ketch, to a whole battalion of black-robed Inquisition torturers, brandishing white-hot flesh-tearing tongs and dragging a medieval Scavenger’s daughter behind them. All the better to crunch your bones, my dear . . .
The steady drumbeat started up again, and, as if they had received a signal, the audience began the low chanting I had heard earlier. The sound lifted the hairs on the nape of my neck. Cannot even begin to describe how creepingly menacing it was; there was a kind of relentless implacability about it, and a pulsating blood lust and the thought: it’s my blood they’re lusting for! snaked around my brain and tightened. For several seconds it was difficult to breathe and a great weight pressed down on my mind. The rectangular scaffold and the crouching, silk-covered altar swam in a red mist.
Into the square came not hooded Inquisitors or black-masked hangmen, but eight rippling-haired girls – plainly Tashkarans – each wearing a thin white robe with a scarlet silk girdle. The torchflames stirred as they passed them, throwing huge elongated shadows across the wall of the palace directly behind them so that for a moment the square seemed alive with monstrous prowling shadow-beings. They bore, at shoulder height, an immense ornate throne, ivory and silver and jade, slung between two golden poles, and seated on it was a figure dressed in stiff ceremonial brocade: scarlet and gold, with an elaborate headdress of gold and jade that glinted in the flickering light.
Not the Scavenger’s daughter. But from the look of her, very possibly the iron maiden.
Touaris, the ancient cat goddess of the renegade Bubasti of Egypt.
She was older than I had been expecting – probably around forty or fifty – and she was huge. I don’t mean she was fat – fatness is quite different and can be rather jolly. The creature on the chair-throne was a massive-framed, large-boned female with a heavy hippopotamus face and little mean lizard eyes that constantly darted from side to side. Boadicea in avenging mood, or one of the majestic black-browed Furies . . . Tamora feasting on her own sons in that grisly en famille banquet, or the murderous Clytemnestra— I pulled my thoughts up. If I was facing death – or even merely mutilation – and wandering amidst Shakespeare’s villainesses and Greek Tragedy for comparisons, I was nearer insanity than was safe. I stole another glance at the creature. I would allow her the divinity status, but this was not a face men would sack cities for.
It would be wrong to say that after ten minutes of the ceremonies following Touaris’s entrance I was bored – I defy anyone to be bored whilst awaiting torturing and/or execution – but my attention was certainly erratic. Sacred goddesses and pagan ceremonial dances are all very well in their place, but suggest that their place is not as the curtain-raiser to an execution, and especially not when it’s mine. In fact, as the dance spun out and out I started to feel aggrieved. I don’t think I’m any more egocentric than the next man, but if you can’t be the centre of attention at your own execution, when can you?
It’s possible that but for the sense of gathering malignancy, never mind the guards’ presence, I might have derived some small interest from the dance. I certainly might have taken notice when the male dancers donned monstrous masks fashioned like the faces of snarling cats and buckled about their waists huge leather belts with immense jutting phalluses of pale polished leather. They began to dance again, faster now, leaping and prowling around the silent altar, their shadows prancing fantastically across the square, so that it was as if each dancer had a dark giantish alter ego mimicking his every movement. (Have to say, however, that if this was Tashkara’s idea of an orgy it was a bit tame, in fact I had seen bawdier behaviour in St Stephen’s Road Music Hall. I had taken part in bawdier behaviour.)
The dance reached its all-too-obvious conclusion. The men each took one of the dancing girls, and the phalluses were duly driven home between the girls’ thighs. Very predictable. I glanced at Touaris and caught a disdainful, rather pitying smirk on her granite features. I was unclear whether the dancing was intended to be arousing – personally I had never felt less aroused in my life – but my viewpoint was necessarily warped. But if that was the quality (never mind quantity) of sexual attention these Tashkaran women were used to, I might as well not have bothered scraping myself raw last night, because the false phalluses were absolutely huge. I wondered how aroused the men actually were inside the leather prongs and hoped they were all rampant to strangulation point.
The watchers were cheering them on, and a section of the younger people had started up some kind of chant on their own account. I had no idea what they were singing, but it sounded like an old-fashioned round song and it was obviously pretty Rabelaisian in content. Tamerlane, the killjoy, sent a frowning glare at them, and they straggled into abashed silence.
The single plangent note rang out again, and that astonishing abrupt silence fell once more. The dancers stood up, and the lady in the elaborate throne walked regally towards me, Tamerlane at her side.
She was so immense that she did not walk, she waddled. It ought to have been laughable, but there was such an air of menace about her that she was not laughable at all. A fragment of a half-forgotten verse – something about the ground shakes as they walk the world, and the air trembles with the fee-fo-fum wind of their speech – went through my mind.
She appeared neither to speak nor understand English, but I had not been far wrong about the iron maiden part, because if ever a female was getting ready to enjoy a torturing, this one was. She was practically licking her lips over it.
Tamerlane spoke in his halting imprecise English. (Again, will not set down our rather tedious roundaboutations, but will simply convey the essence, and, saving the mark, the flavour.)
‘You have witnessed our ritual of the cats, English traveller,’ he said.
‘And very explicit it was too.’ I was damned if I was going to give this barbarian – or the hatchet-featured female at his side – the satisfaction of seeing how afraid I was.
‘It is in homage to the cat goddess Touaris, and it precedes all of our solemn ceremonies,’ said Tamerlane.
‘I’m glad to know I’m taken solemnly. What happens next?’
The cruel smile curved Tamerlane’s lips. ‘Next,’ he said, ‘we bring out your companion. And to add a little refinement to your own punishment, you will witness his sentence and punishment.’
I felt as if I had been flung, neck-deep, into black, ice-cold water. Theo! Hell and damnation! But I said, very coldly, ‘Sentence? Punishment?’
‘You have defiled Touaris’s handmaidens and for that you will suffer the punishment of the Seventh Tablet of the Tashkara Decalogue handed down and down by our ancestors,’ said Tamerlane. ‘It is a punishment not carried out for many centuries.’
‘I’m glad to provide you with something out of the ordinary. What about my companion?’ Whatever else Theo might have done he would certainly not have done any defiling.
Tamerlane said, ‘He is to suffer the punishment reserved for those who overlook the Secret Domain of Tashkara – you would call it intruding, I think.’
‘Not necessarily. We might call your reception of us discourteous and hostile. But go on.’
‘The punishment reserved for those guilty of overlooking is that of the Sixth Tablet of the Decalogue,’ said Tamerlane. ‘It is a three-fold sentence.’ He paused, and then went on, obviously quoting. ‘The loss of hands so that the guilty one shall not write of what he has seen . . . The loss of feet so that he shall not walk in the world to tell of w
hat he has seen . . .’ He stopped and I stared at him, my mind reeling. ‘But,’ said Tamerlane, softly, ‘we do not extort the full sentence any longer.’
‘How very merciful of you.’
‘But since we believe him to be your servant and therefore under your orders, we shall inflict the third part on him,’ said Tamerlane.
‘And that is?’
Tamerlane exchanged a look with Touaris, who smiled. I had the feeling that she knew precisely what was being said and that she was enjoying it immensely, the bitch.
When Tamerlane spoke again, his tone licked over the words gloatingly. ‘The tearing out of the tongue so that he shall not speak of what he has seen . . .’
There was absolutely nothing I could think of that would save Theo. Wild ideas of breaking away from the guards and creating some kind of diversion so that he could run, tumbled through my mind, but the instant they brought him out I saw that it would be pointless. He was heavily guarded and his ankles and wrists were manacled, so that even if he had understood sufficiently quickly, he would not have got six feet before they caught him.
I knew at once that he was very frightened, but I knew as well that he was determined not to show it. Good for you, Theo. I had the awful feeling that when it was my turn I would struggle like a mad thing.
Whether he knew what was about to be done to him I had no idea, but he knew that it was something extremely nasty. By this time the dreadful waiting silence had descended on the Tashkara people again, and as Theo was taken to the centre of the square they were so still they might have been carved from stone. Only the flickering torch-flames gave an air of life to the terrible scene, and when the soft thrumming of the drumbeat started up again it was so exactly in time with the pounding of my heart that for a moment I did not realise the sound was outside my body. A thrumming tension was building, and the watchers were leaning forward avidly, and murmuring in anticipation. Sweat broke out on my scalp.