The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘It’s not that you fear you’re trespassing on my hospitality? Because that is not a consideration—’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said Elinor. ‘I could go back to my parents’ house and be perfectly safe.’ Fleury would see this as the logical move; he would not know that Elinor had no intention of going back there, not now, not ever. She said, ‘I do know that those people might try to find me to stop me from talking. I know that it’s why you’re trying to stop me going back to Chance House, and you don’t have to spare my feelings because I’d worked it out for myself.’ It sounded brusque and ungracious but it was better than sounding frightened; and she was covering up the fear fairly well so far.

  She had slept for twelve hours after the astonishing escape from the warehouse, and had eaten a late and delicious breakfast by herself in the dining room of the Bloomsbury house. It had been rather touching to discover that in the meantime Ginevra had sallied forth to buy for her aunt a toothbrush, along with underwear, tights, two pairs of trousers and two sweaters.

  ‘Church benefices,’ Ginevra had said, gleefully tipping the booty on to the bed in their room. ‘The Eminences were insistent so I had a binge on your behalf.’

  ‘I can’t possibly accept these—’ The trousers were the kind that Ginevra herself wore, which was to say extremely modem. The sweaters were loose and soft and fashioned from open-weave, dishcloth-type material, although at least Ginevra, who would undoubtedly have worn them with only the skimpiest of bras, had added a cotton shirt to go underneath. Everything had designer labels; one of the sweaters was a deep vivid emerald, the other the colour of rich bronze autumn leaves. Beautiful. The thought: if Lewis could see me wearing these . . . surfaced, only to be pushed down.

  ‘I can’t accept them and anyway I don’t wear things like that,’ said Elinor. ‘The trousers – for heaven’s sake, I can’t wear those.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. You’ve got absolutely the figure for it. I think you’ll look a knockout,’ said Ginevra. ‘And you can’t go to Tibet in twinsets and pearls.’

  ‘I don’t wear—’

  ‘Metaphoric twinset and pearls. The underwear’s Janet Reger, by the way.’

  ‘So I saw,’ said Elinor caustically, and thought: this is bizarre. In two days’ time I’m going into one of the most remote and desolate parts of the world; I’m going to find Lewis, assuming he isn’t already dead, and I’m going to help destroy an ancient legend which might end in all of us being killed by carnivorously inclined savages. And I’m sitting here discussing clothes!

  ‘The cardinal’s funding the entire Tashkara expedition,’ said Ginevra defensively. ‘Well, not to say the cardinal personally, but the money’s coming from wherever cardinals get money. Plane tickets, visas, hotels, guides, everything. He’s somehow rushed the visas through and some kind of temporary passport for you and me.’

  ‘I’ve got a—’

  ‘Yes, but it’s in Chance House,’ objected Ginevra. ‘I haven’t dared ask how he’s managed that side of things, but I’ll bet he’s put the screws on the Chinese Embassy. He told me to get suitcases and whatever clothes we both need for the trip, and not to stint. He’s a pussycat, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘And what you had on in that warehouse was pretty well shredded to threads.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Elinor, unsure whether it was more irreverent to describe a prince of the Roman Catholic Church as a pussycat than to suggest he might have coerced the Chinese Ambassador.

  ‘Well, you can pay it back when you get hold of a cheque book again,’ said Ginevra, and Elinor remembered that everything she owned was inside Chance House. It was astonishing how vulnerable you felt without money or bank cards or latch keys or your address book, and even without your own familiar bits of make-up and deodorant and aspirin bottle. It was as well she was not on the pill or anything like that.

  Ginevra was saying, ‘Wait till tomorrow, Nell – we’ll have a real splurge then. You can’t go three-quarters across the world with only two sweaters and a spare pair of knickers.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Elinor, who would have gone barefoot across burning hot coals if Lewis were alive and waiting for her on the other side. She managed not to say this, but she stuck to her decision to accompany Raffael to Tibet. If he refused to take her she would go by herself, she said. She would get her own visas and tickets and she would hire a guide to take her into Tibet’s interior, because if Cardinal Fleury could hire guides so could she. In the end they had given in, and since Fleury thought, and Raffael agreed, that it would be unsafe and inappropriate for Elinor to go alone, Ginevra, fizzing like uncorked champagne, was going to accompany them.

  ‘But,’ said Raffael sternly, ‘you will phone your tutor at Durham and explain that you are detained on a private family matter.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course I will.’

  ‘And you will ask for details of assignments and lectures and you will bring whatever notes you can with you.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Well, go and do it now.’

  It struck Elinor that Raffael was speaking to Ginevra rather in the way one would speak to a wayward but much-loved child. There was reprimand in his voice, but it was an indulgent reprimand and there was a look in his eyes that was not a reprimand in the least. And he had agreed to Ginevra’s accompanying them with unexpected acquiescence. As for Ginevra, she was agreeing to everything with guileless obedience, but with such mischievous delight curving her lips that Elinor, glancing from one to the other of them, thought, as she had thought on that first night: but that’s quite unsuitable. And then: or is it?

  Baz and Georgie had returned to their lodgings, on the threefold score that none of the Tashkarans would be looking for them and anyway did not know where they lived; that they had their living to earn (begging pardon for mentioning it), and finally that they would not journey to Tibet if somebody paid them a thousand pounds apiece. Georgie was sick crossing the ferry to the Isle of Wight, for heaven’s sake. Baz said very firmly that it would be better if they bowed out at this stage, and Georgie hoped they could be told what the outcome was, because it had all been so exciting, hadn’t it been exciting?

  ‘A riot,’ said Raffael, deadpan, and the boys grinned and said, Well, they would like to hear what finally happened. Georgie said they were both ever so trustworthy, they would give their absolute word not to talk.

  ‘Of course we’ll tell you,’ said Ginevra. ‘We’ll all go out to dinner somewhere immensely expensive and posh, and we’ll tell you everything. Lewis Chance can foot the bill,’ she added, and hugged them both before they left, which Elinor thought rather pleased them.

  The banter and the acquiring of visas and foreign currency and clothes and a small medicine kit helped to cover the creeping fear. Elinor was beginning to feel that every hour until they could set off was a crawling nightmare that must somehow be lived through, but she thought she was keeping it reasonably well hidden, because you could not just hop on a plane at Gatwick and go to a place like Tibet without the proper arrangements. Cardinal Fleury – or his minions – was being amazingly quick but a tiny pulse was continually beating against Elinor’s mind: we-must-hurry, we-must-hurry . . . Occasionally it changed to: we-may-be-too-late. But I won’t let it be too late. Hold on, Lewis, we’re coming. And I don’t care if you’ve had fifty goddesses and a hundred children.

  ‘Don’t we have to have any inoculations?’ demanded Ginevra.

  ‘Apparently not, there’s no smallpox or malaria or anything like that.’ I’m sounding all right, thought Elinor. I’m having ordinary sensible discussions, and nobody’s guessed what I’m feeling. Except – I wonder why Ginevra bought that expensive silk underwear for me? No, that was only Ginevra’s extravagance.

  She said aloud, ‘Raffael’s getting something called Norfloxacin in case any of us drink impure water, and something else – I forget the name – to help against altitude sickness.’

  ‘Wo
n’t it be cold? Isn’t it their winter?’

  ‘Yes, we’ll have to dress in layers as much as possible,’ said Elinor. ‘Trousers and sweaters and anoraks, and jogging shoes or even boots.’

  ‘I said we’d have a binge.’

  ‘Yes, but not in Knightsbridge. There’s nothing wrong with Marks & Spencer or the Army & Navy Stores.’

  They checked in at the Holiday Inn in Lhasa, showered and changed, and then met for a meal which was late dinner as far as the hotel was concerned, but which felt more like breakfast.

  ‘It’s very lavish,’ said Ginevra, surveying the dining room with pleasure. ‘I thought we’d be in a yak-shack.’

  ‘You may get your wish sooner than you think,’ said Raffael repressively. ‘We’re only here for two nights anyway; Fleury thought we’d need a respite to acclimatise.’

  ‘And didn’t see why it shouldn’t be a comfortable respite,’ nodded Ginevra. ‘I see his point.’

  Elinor took her seat at the table abstractedly. It was difficult to adjust to the time difference and the altitude, but what was far more unbalancing was the feeling that they had stepped across an invisible demarcation line. We’re beyond the point of no return, we’re through a curtain or a watershed. The die’s cast, and we’re across the Rubicon . . . no, I’m all wrong, the Rubicon is really a small river somewhere in Italy. This feels more like the River Jordan.

  She chose something from the unintelligible menu more or less at random, and heard Ginevra and Raffael talking as if from a great distance. I know what this is, thought Elinor suddenly: it’s the Lethe River, the fabled River of Unknowing. We’re going into the labyrinthine waters whereof who drinks forgets his former being . . . I dare say we’ll all forget our former beings before this is over. That’s if we don’t get eaten instead. She sat up a bit straighter. Altitude sickness, Elinor. Or jet lag. In her most pragmatic voice she said, ‘How long will it take to reach Tashkara?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea.’ Raffael grinned suddenly. ‘How long does it take to find Samarkand or even Elysium or Valhalla or the Isle of Avalon?’ He stopped abruptly, and Elinor stared at him, because his thoughts were so exactly in line with hers that it was almost as if he had caught the echoes. She remembered that he had been a priest, and wondered if he had heard confessions. How would it feel to pour out your sins to someone who looked like this? If he hurts Ginevra I’ll kill him.

  Ginevra said, ‘Do you realise that between us we’ve ordered enough to feed the five thousand? I hope we’re having rice wine with it – I’ve never drunk rice wine.’

  The feeling that the past was streaming forward and merging with the present stayed strongly with Lewis as he lay in the small room in the ancient palace, awaiting trial at the hands of Kaspar’s people.

  The feeling that he was not alone persisted as well. Patrick? Are you with me now, just as you’ve been with me all along? And if you are, what’s the end going to be? Will they revive the original punishment? Castration and then that second sentence. Can I remember the words of it? Yes, of course I can, I never stopped remembering them. 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 what he has seen . . .

  I escaped once before, but I don’t think I shall escape this time. I think I’m going to have to face it, because they’re certainly going to pronounce me guilty. Kaspar’s scapegoat.

  He fell into a blurred uneasy slumber in which he was no longer sure who he was. Patrick Chance, impudently setting out on that long-ago journey, but returning so changed, so different that it might have been another person who had written those last journal entries? Or his own younger self – the hounded son of the disgraced banker, fleeing England, following in an ancestor’s footsteps, half motivated by curiosity, half by shame? And, let the fact be faced, by a tinge of greed as well. I wanted to see the Decalogue, and I wanted to see if it could be brought out of Tibet. I didn’t bring the Decalogue out, but I brought out the jewels of a dozen immortal goddesses.

  The sound of people gathering in the square below his window roused him. This is it. They’re assembling to pronounce judgement exactly as they did before. Only that time it was the defiling of their goddess, and this time it’s the murder of their religion. Forgive me, Touaris. I never forgot you, my poor lost love, although I can’t in honesty say I was faithful to your memory. But if you’d lived, you certainly wouldn’t have been faithful to mine, you witch.

  But I saved your son, Touaris. And for what? jeered his mind. For that guarded half-existence, locked away in discreet homes, shut away in cellars. Always fighting Grendel’s taint, always struggling to protect him. Always hoping that one day the slavering maniac would fade, and the bright intelligence so indisputably near the surface would emerge.

  The Tashkarans would revive the original sentence; Kaspar would make sure of it. Lewis had no idea whether he would survive, and if he did, he had no idea how much he would care. All those women – not as many as Patrick had apparently had, but a good number. And he could not bring any one of their faces to mind. Chance House and the people in it were far more vivid. People like that remarkable man he had engaged to guard Grendel – Raffael. People like Elinor Craven. Astonishing that of all the women he had known Elinor should be the one he was thinking about now. He had the unexpected thought that if he should survive Kaspar’s butchery and return to the world, he would not mind Elinor knowing what had been done to him. He could imagine her saying something brusque and unemphatic, and then assuming that they would get on with the work of Chance House. How very sad, and now what about the meeting with the Drugwatch organisers? The longing to hear Elinor say something like that was suddenly extraordinarily fierce.

  The Tashkarans were assembling in the courtyard below his window, and when he looked out, he saw a number of the men lighting the wall torches.

  The trial was about to begin.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  It proved more difficult than Raffael had thought to find a guide to take them into the wild remote valleys beyond Lhasa, but in the end the hotel produced a young, slightly furtive-eyed man.

  ‘He seems to know the area,’ said Raffael to the two girls. ‘But he’s apparently charging us at least double his normal rates.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t find out. But in the absence of anyone else, he’s our best bet.’

  ‘It sounds as if he’s our only bet,’ observed Ginevra. ‘Still, if it comes to a tussle it’s three to one.’

  The guide was silent as he piloted the Jeep across the wild Tibetan landscape, and although he seemed nervous, he was not overly sinister. Raffael relaxed his concentration sufficiently to take in their surroundings, and felt the extraordinary serenity and the unending desolation wrap about his mind like cool silk.

  He vaguely recalled having read somewhere that Tibet’s remote valleys were so soaked in silence and in the numberless centuries of meditation and prayer, that the entire country was like a vast open cathedral. He had always thought this an exaggeration, but even bouncing along in the badly sprung Jeep with the guide hunched broodingly over the wheel, he saw that it was very far from an exaggeration.

  Ginevra and Elinor were standing up to the arduous journey far better than he had dared hope. Ginevra, of course, was seeing it as a huge adventure; she knew about the urgency and the mounting need to get to Tashkara and Lewis Chance and his son, and she shared in it. But Raffael knew that beneath it all a tiny guilty part was revelling in the helter-skelter journey and drinking in the breathtaking sights. She was trying very hard to hide it, but Raffael could feel her mind sizzling with delight. It was not new to him, this awareness of another’s mind, but the intensity and the sudden and complete rapprochement was very new indeed. It’s nothing to do with the physical thing, he thought, and then, with relentless self-honesty – or is it? But he knew it was not. The honourable action – the generous move – would be to bow out now, to leave
her to some boy nearer her own age. Shall I do that in the end? What boring lives honourable men must lead.

  Elinor was far more difficult to read. Raffael studied her covertly during one of their halts for food and rest. She was not his idea of beauty: she was too stern and too defensive. But there was a curious allure, for all that. A challenge. And like this, her hair tousled and the outlines of her cheekbones whipped to vivid colour by the wind, she was almost better than beautiful. Somewhere beneath the brusque exterior and the black-bar brows and wary eyes, was an elusive will-o’-the-wisp light of something very unusual indeed. Ginevra was wilful and mischievous and lovely – she could have sat to one of the dramatic slumberous Pre-Raphaelite painters who would have brought out the reddish glint in her hair and the creamy pallor of her skin – but the only painters who might have wanted Elinor were the heavy brooding Dutch masters. They would have understood and depicted her uncompromising stare and the sudden tantalising glimpse of smouldering emotion behind it. Raffael did not know, not definitely, that Elinor was blind and deaf to every consideration except that of finding Lewis, but he sensed it, and he thought it a pity Chance could not see her now.

  It was not until the second day that the guide pointed out the gorge that Patrick Chance had once likened to Kubla Khan’s fiery Alph, and said, ‘There ahead, is where you wanted to go. Tashkara.’

  ‘You will take us down there?’ said Raffael.

  ‘No.’ He moved back at once, and sent a hunted glance about him. ‘There is a bad place. I take you anywhere else. But not there. No one of us ever goes there.’

  ‘If we were to offer you more money—’ began Raffael, and Ginevra murmured something about Rome’s open-handedness.

  But the guide said vehemently, ‘No, I do not go there. You should not go there, also.’