The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  The guards snaked the chains about Theo’s wrists and ankles, pinning him to the wooden board, and then – this made me shudder in sick horror – they passed two iron circlets about him: one around the upper part of his head like a travesty of a coronet, the other around his neck. The ends were driven into the board and his head was held absolutely immobile, with the neck brace almost choking him, so that I found myself swallowing convulsively. Was it better to half strangle than to have your tongue torn out? Hold on, Theo. I’ll get you out of this somehow. I’ll think of something. But I knew I wouldn’t; there was nothing I could do against so many and even if I could outwit the guards there were easily three hundred people on the wooden seats. Theo would have to endure the torture, and after they had finished with him it would be my turn.

  I looked at Touaris. She was standing with Tamerlane; her eyes were fixed on Theo and the avidity was easy to read, even from where I stood. She was an ogress, an eater of children. The ground shakes as they walk the world, and the air trembles with the fee-fo-fum wind of their speech . . . She protected herself by posting a leper colony at the entrance to her city, and trapped travellers and tore out the tongues of intruders.

  Two men, both wearing plain black garments, approached Theo, and anticipation, very nearly sexual in quality, sizzled across the firelit square. The men moved as if performing the steps of a frequently rehearsed dance; without appearing to consult, one stood behind the board, reaching around it and thrusting his fingers knuckle-deep into Theo’s mouth, dragging it wide. Theo jerked and let out a cry of mingled surprise and pain, and a trickle of blood ran from the torn corner of his mouth. The other man stood in front of him, his lips curving in a smile, a jagged-edged clamp with serrated edges held in his hands. They’re savouring him, I thought, and as the man held the clamps up before Theo’s eyes, black fury rose within me because they could have spared him that, they could have kept the torture instrument hidden until the last moment. If I could have got free for ten seconds I would have torn the smile from the man’s face with my nails.

  The man behind the scaffold had thrust some kind of wedge into Theo’s mouth, forcing it impossibly wide, and I felt the muscles of my own jaw clench with cramping pains in sympathy. Theo’s eyes were straining from his head and sweat was running down his face, gluing his hair to his forehead. In the crimson torchlight his skin had taken on a greyish pallor, and I clenched my fists, digging my nails into my palms, praying for something – anything – to intervene. I would have summoned Satan and his entire hierarchy of demons if I had had the means, and if I had thought they would arrive in time. The drumbeat was increasing and the tension was building up and up, like an elastic thread stretched to breaking point.

  And then the drumbeat quickened perceptibly and as if a signal had been given, the man holding the steel clamp stepped forward and thrust it down into Theo’s mouth.

  I could no longer see what they were doing, because they were bending over him, but I could see that he was struggling against the chains, and I could hear him choking and gagging as well. Dreadful to have those pitiless iron pincers forced to the back of your throat. Unbearable to realise their purpose. Theo was flinging himself against the restraints, but the chains held firm.

  And then there was a cold snapping sound that grated against every nerve-ending in my body, and a low moan of triumph went through the watchers. Theo screamed again, but the sound was different – it was guttural, grunting; the cry of a creature no longer able to form words— I thought: they’ve done it. They’ve torn out his tongue. My mind spun with the agony of it.

  The guards stepped back and triumphantly held aloft the terrible steel clamps. A dripping fragment of dark red flesh, faintly slimy, hung from it, and at once the watchers yelled in delight.

  Theo was flailing weakly against the restraints, and thick blood and great clotted strings of saliva spilled out of his mouth. He began to retch with dreadful unformed grunts, vomiting phlegmy blood that spattered over the upper part of his body, and I felt my mind swing between churning pity and shameful repulsion. His mouth was bruised and swollen, distorting his face, making him a nightmare thing, and as the torch flames flickered and washed over him, he opened his eyes and stared around the square. For a terrible moment I saw only the distortion, so that it was not Theo who was chained there but something monstrous, something out of one of the ancient grisly fables of the world’s dark ages: macabre half-humans with men’s bodies but beasts’ heads: one of those aberrant lumpish blendings of animal and human that occasionally shamble pitiably through freak sideshows . . . How must it feel to be so hideously deformed that you must needs live in a twilit half-existence, seeing the world flinch from you?

  I forced the images away and as Theo was untied, he turned his head and through pain-wracked eyes saw me. Half-coagulated blood still ran from his mutilated mouth and his clothes were wet with vomit and saliva. He tried to lift one hand in acknowledgement of some kind.

  Tamerlane’s soft voice at my side said, ‘And now, Englishman, it is your turn.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Patrick Chance’s Diary continued

  I can vividly remember my emotions as Tamerlane’s guards led me to the scaffold; I can remember how my heart was thumping, and how sweat was trickling between my shoulder blades.

  They had started up the drum-roll again, and it tapped its insidious message against my mind. Yes, yes, you’re going to die . . . My guts began to clench and unclench with agonised panic, and I found myself walking in exact rhythm with it. I was about to face the punishment of the strange ancient Decalogue and I was trying to mark time as I walked!

  Tamerlane walked ahead, Touaris at his side, the sacred cat goddess of Ancient Egypt leading me to my fate. It was so utterly extraordinary as to be almost unbelievable. She turned her head from side to side as she went, the dark basilisk eyes flicking over the watchers. Every gaze was upon me, and I felt as if I was at the heart of a seething bubbling cauldron of lust-filled anticipation.

  I had expected to be chained down as Theo had been and so I was, but I had not expected to feel such abrupt repulsion. The wood was hard and uncompromising, and it was slippery from Theo’s blood and still warm – oh God, his spilled blood was still warm! The thought: I can’t bear this! gripped me, and then I remembered that Theo had had to bear it. I scanned the square trying to see if he was still here, but I could only see the rows of greedy-eyed Tashkarans and the flat smile of Touaris herself. I would have to submit to these barbarians, and if I died in screaming agony the last thing I was going to see on this earth was the hungry-ogre face of this bitch goddess.

  The structure had been lowered once more, and as the guards forced me on to it a tiny night wind blew across the square, stirring the torch flames into life. The stench of stale blood and drying vomit gusted into my face, and my stomach lifted and I swallowed convulsively. Forgive me, Theo. The chains clamped about my wrists, but as the guards bent to secure the leg shackles, Tamerlane said something that appeared to stop them.

  He looked straightly at me. ‘You are ready?’

  ‘No.’ This is it, I thought, my heart racing. ‘I’m not ready at all. But we’ll get on with it, shall we? I find your ancient Decalogue very tedious, Tamerlane, and the sooner I can be out of reach of it and its melodramatic punishments, the better.’ This came out so convincingly that it gave me an unlooked-for edge of courage. I would probably be screaming for mercy in ten minutes, but it need not prevent me from hurling insults now.

  For the first time since Theo had been dragged from the square Touaris spoke, and every head turned to her instantly. I had no means of understanding what she said, but as her harsh voice cut across the listening square I saw a gleam of something very sly and very calculating come into Tamerlane’s expression.

  ‘What does she say? Hell’s teeth, man, if this delay is part of your wretched torture—’

  Tamerlane said, ‘She says you have spoken against the Decalogue.’


  ‘Of course I’ve spoken against it. If I knew where you kept it, I’d smash it to splinters and fuck the entire female population of Tashkara on the pieces! What did she expect!’

  ‘She says you speak against the Decalogue, but that one day in the future the Decalogue will speak against you and against your Western civilisation. The Decalogue is an instrument of deep and ancient vengeance.’

  ‘How interesting,’ I said sardonically. ‘But she’s missing the mark; it’s wreaking its deep and ancient vengeance now.’

  Touaris spoke again and Tamerlane listened with intense concentration, and then, apparently translating for my benefit, said, ‘The hands of those who have power over their inferiors will one day wield the knowledge of the Stone Tablets of Tashkara.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such meaningless bombast in all my— Oh, or is she feeble-minded, poor creature?’ I laced my tone with such heavy sarcasm that even Touaris herself must have understood. The cruel eyes rested on me.

  ‘She occasionally has – I think your word is precognition,’ said Tamerlane. (This was a term I arrived at later.) ‘She has glimpses of the future.’

  ‘How amusing for her. Listen, if you’re not going to do anything to me do you think I might be allowed to get off this thing, because it’s starting to give me appalling cramp—’

  ‘That is to say,’ went on Tamerlane, ignoring the interruption, ‘that the Decalogue and all it stands for will one day be revealed to your world and used by power-hungry people to gain sway over the weak.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure the world will survive. It’s survived the rise of empty dictators before.’

  ‘Would your Western religions survive?’ said Tamerlane. ‘Perhaps you do not know that your Roman Catholic Church fears the Decalogue’s legend so much it has suppressed all knowledge of its existence for twenty centuries?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a damn about anybody’s religion at the moment and I don’t care who knows about your accursed Decalogue and who doesn’t. Will you either unfasten these chains or get on with your punishment and tell your hippopotamus-faced goddess to stop poaching my limelight?’

  He could not have interpreted this very clearly but he undoubtedly got the gist of it. So did the lady. She fixed me with that basilisk stare and lifted an imperious arm to the guards. They moved forward and Touaris rapped out a command.

  Tamerlane looked at her and then said to me, ‘The guards have been told to remove your clothes. The sentence is about to be carried out.’

  ‘Why am I to be undressed?’ But dreadful comprehension was struggling upwards, pushing aside the forced arrogance. The Seventh Tablet of the Decalogue. The punishment for defiling the handmaidens . . . For defiling . . . And according to the laws of the renegade Bubasti, according to the rules of their strange Devil’s Commandments, all punishments had to be strictly in relation to the offence.

  Tamerlane said, ‘Your punishment is twofold, English traveller. Since you lay with the handmaidens of the Temple you will be deprived of the organ that caused the offence. You will be castrated.’

  He paused and then said, ‘After that, because you looked on the forbidden inner Temple of the Goddess, your eyes will be torn out.’

  The firelit courtyard and the avid-faced watchers blurred and fused in a whirling vortex, and I felt myself being sucked down into the spinning heart.

  When my senses cleared the terrible scaffold was being raised to a near-vertical position again, and I was facing the Tashkaran people on their wooden seats.

  I was naked although I had no memory of them undressing me, but that was the least part of anything now. My ankles were chained to the outer edges of the rectangle, stretching my legs wide, and the guards were spreading sawdust directly beneath. The scent of it rose up: grotesquely reminiscent of homely ordinary things: carpenters’ workshops and newly sawn apple branches; stables and freshly laid timber floors. Yes, and the grim operating rooms of the old barber surgeons who had strewn sawdust beneath the table and rendered their victims drunk on cheap rum before subjecting them to the torments of the knife . . .

  Castrated and then my eyes torn out – the words were etched on my brain. I fought to get free and scoured my mind to think of anyone who might rescue me. But the only person who knew where I was was Theo . . . Despair and panic closed about my mind. Theo and I might finally survive and be able to return to England, but it would be a pitiful survival indeed. All of the unthinking aphorisms about the blind leading the blind lashed against my mind, but for us it would be much worse – it would be the blind leading the dumb, and the dumb leading the emasculate . . . I struggled to summon the whirling unconsciousness again. Let me faint, or at least let me drink mandragora, the drowsy sleep juice, or even the cheap rum of the barber surgeons . . . Let me wake up and find it all over!

  Only once it was over I should be blinded – Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now? And once it was over I should be castrated. A gelding.

  I tried to pretend it did not matter which they did first. It could not count whether I was forced to watch while they tore my manhood out by the roots – knowing that once it was done, I would be thrust into eternal darkness – or whether the darkness came first. Darkness . . . I would be sightless. Eyeless. Put out the light and then put out the light. My reason spun crazily out of control, and real madness hovered. If I could be mad – truly mad – if I could embrace uncaring, unfeeling dementia and babble of green fields and childhood ways – at least I should not know and I should not feel . . .

  Chained to that appalling scaffold, all these things tore through my mind, and my reason spun crazily at the end of a spider’s web, so that for several minutes I had no clear idea of where I was. Hysteria, Patrick. Push it away. Hang on to that cold insolence you dredged up earlier. It won’t save you but it might stop you from breaking and it might stop you begging for mercy.

  I don’t think I did beg for mercy, and in any case, no mercy was forthcoming. The two men who had carried out Theo’s sentence came to stand before me, and for a wild moment I thought they were to use the same instrument they had used on Theo. The torches were burning lower in the twisted iron wall brackets now, and the ancient crimson-shadowed square was growing perceptibly darker.

  The instrument was not the same. The flames glinted on it, and I saw with sick dread that it was an elaborately worked clamp – either bronze or gold – adorned with the head of a snarling cat. The two shanks were hinged at one end, and there was an oval ring— I stared at it, mesmerised.

  Tamerlane said, ‘You will see that this is not total castration. The oval ring draws up the phallus, allowing only the removal of—’

  ‘Yes, I see it.’ Sanity was spinning dizzily out of my grasp, but the part of my mind that still retained some hold on logic shied from embarking on another of the involved discourses to establish a precise meaning. They were going to cut off my testicles and leave my prick in place. Sufficient unto the day thereof.

  Tamerlane said, ‘The eyes will be removed afterwards.’ And nodded to the guards.

  The feel of the cold bronze clamp between my thighs almost broke my resolve, but I fought for mastery. I tried to remember that in some lands and in some cultures this was regarded as a mark of distinction; I tried to think of the silver-voiced castrati who submitted willingly to this, and of the Christian martyrs who suffered self-castration to remove carnal temptations. But I did not want carnal temptations removed!

  The clamp was closing about me – I could feel the guards’ hands adjusting it in dreadful intimacy; their fingers brushed against the inside of my thigh, and there was the rasp of a rough hangnail on my skin. It was suddenly intolerable to have to suffer the irritation of someone’s ill-kept nails at such a moment.

  The skies were closing in and closing down, and there was the sensation of breathable air draining slowly from the firelit square. The night wind whipped across the square again, and several of the low-burning torch flames guttered so that dark shadows leape
d forward and there was the acrid tang of smoke. I felt the hinged clamps being adjusted—

  There was the snapping of serrated teeth as the clamp came down, and pain exploded into my body, ferocious scarlet pain, violent agony made up of biting teeth and jagged claws ripping upwards into my stomach . . . I cried out and tried involuntarily to double over but the chains jerked me back and held me vertical. Grinding agony rushed in, swamping me . . . Screaming torment – unbearable . . . There could not be so much pain in the whole world. The lower half of my body was a raw open wound and thick viscous fluids were running down my legs and dripping on to the ground. Waves of sick blackness closed over my head.

  I was dimly aware of voices nearby, but a mist was obscuring my sight and blurring my senses. I thought the guards thrust something between my legs to stanch the blood – soft cool cotton waste or lint – and the thought, at least they don’t intend me to die! skittered crazily across my brain.

  There was the sensation of a huge darkness moving across the square, and from a great distance I heard the low menacing thrum of an approaching storm. Like marching feet coming through the mountains.

  There seemed to be some kind of consultation going on; the guards were saying something to Tamerlane, and Tamerlane was indicating impatiently to them to continue and holding out a thin long-handled, long-bladed knife. For a moment the pain and the sick unconsciousness receded. The knife’s end was honed to glittering razor sharpness, but it was formed in a curious spoon shape. This was what they were going to use to scoop out my eyes. They were going to hold me down and dig out my eyes. Put out the light and then put out the light . . . And afterwards I should truly be an outcast: blind and impotent, forced to sniff my way through the world . . .

  Only four of the flambeaux burned now, and the night skies were heavy and lowering as if the storm were pressing them down on to the valley. The sense that something was creeping towards Tashkara from the purple-smudged mountains increased, and I caught again the soft low-pitched sound from the east. Thunder rolling forward across the valley. Like the low murmuring of dozens of people. People.