‘We could go back and bring down men with tools,’ the Bishop suggested.
I shook my head. I had no wish to turn back now. Besides, getting anyone else down here might be more trouble than it was worth. If there was any way through this door, it wasn’t to be had by brute force. I leaned against the slab and pushed hard. I took the pressure off, then leaned again. There was no movement.
‘There may be some hidden lever,’ I said. There was any number of concealed openings in the Imperial Palace back in Constantinople. Three centuries of palace intrigue around emperors, sometimes driven mad by fear of being trapped, had left the place riddled with secret tunnels. Most had been forgotten on the death of the commissioning Emperor. Many led to the least likely places. I’d seen enough of these on my exploratory trips with Heraclius to know the ingenuity with which the rocking levers that opened them could be blended into the surroundings. As said, the decorative scheme here tended to the elaborate, and it was a matter of feeling round for a concealed depression.
Whatever we did next, there was no point in hurrying. By unspoken agreement, this was an opportunity for rest and reflection. We sat down on the floor. We chewed slowly and in silence on some bread and dried dates and drank some of the water the Bishop had been carrying on his back.
‘My son,’ he said, now looking for words of greater directness than he’d needed for theological dispute, ‘for what little comfort it may bring, I will say that, if I had influence over any but the unarmed Sheep of Christ, I would never allow what is happening. As it is, I will, if required, excommunicate the renegade Egyptian and write to the Greek Patriarch in Alexandria about the shameful conduct of the Lord Priscus.’
I nodded. Flowery thanks would have been less convincing. So too would a pretended conversion to the Monophysite heresy. Martin had done good work with the man. We might yet have a way out of this mess. The Bishop prayed awhile in Egyptian, interpreting every line into Greek for my benefit. I tried to look solemn as I thought again how stingy Priscus had been in not having any wine packed for us.
‘I am wondering, My Lord’ – Macarius spoke for the first time since we’d left the surface – ‘if these tunnels might not be an elaborate ruse to throw us off the true path. Might not this doorway be nothing more than a carving into the solid rock? I have heard of such in tombs.’
I continued chewing on the rough bread. I’d been thinking the same. If this were a diversion, it might mean retracing our steps all the way to the surface, and examining every inch along the way. There might be another concealed way from the entrance chamber. There might even be another entrance from the surface, and the function of the one through which we’d entered was to draw attention from this.
‘No,’ I said after a long silence. I got up and pointed. ‘Those torch brackets have been used too often to suggest this is just a dead-end. Look at the soot marks on the ceiling. There must be centuries of deposits there.’ I was about to mention the good air: it had to be coming from somewhere. But I found myself staring back along the way we’d come. I was at just the right angle to see. ‘Look at the floor,’ I cried eagerly. I pointed again, now downward. It was so plain, I could hardly understand why we’d not seen it as we came here. The floors nearest the walls were as rough as when first chiselled out of the rock. The central couple of feet, however, were worn smooth, and in places shiny, from the passing and repassing of many feet. This smooth smear on the granite came from as far along the corridor as we could see, but stopped short about six feet from where we were sitting.
‘There’s a hidden door in the wall!’ Macarius hissed. There might be. Or there might have been some hidden entrance in the floor or the ceiling. One thing for certain was that people had come to and gone away from a certain point in that corridor, but then had come no further towards where we were sitting.
It was in the floor. Now that we were looking, the slab in the floor couldn’t have been more obvious. Though of the same granite as everything else, the more finished texture of the stone would have shown its nature even without the tiny shadow made by the gap that ran about it. Running my hands over it, I could feel that this was the source of the draught that had kept the air pure around us. Less obvious was how to lift the thing. I must have fumbled my way over every square inch of wall space several yards either way along the corridor. I ran hands over the grosser or more theatrical tortures shown in the reliefs. I tapped on every carved protrusion from the background of burning cities. I found no hidden lever. I had little doubt there was one. If not on the walls, it would be on the ceiling or on the floor. It was a question of looking.
‘See – it moves!’ the Bishop suddenly cried, stepping back from one of the torch brackets. He’d pulled gently on the ring that was to hold the base of any torch. With a gentle rumble, the slab in the floor had moved upwards a fraction of an inch. This should have been the mostly likely suspect, and I couldn’t understand how I’d not thought of it first.
‘After so long,’ Macarius said as he bent down to look at the slab, ‘the mechanism may have perished. I suggest you pull gently. The moment there is a gap opened, I will push in this water flask to stop it from falling back.’
Good idea, I thought. I took a deep breath, then pulled firmly but slowly on the bracket.
With a sudden rush of air, the slab flew upward on powerful hinges, and flipped over on to its back. The crash was deafening. It echoed up and down the way we’d come as if a hundred other doors had smashed all at the same time on to the granite floor. If it hadn’t been heard right back at the entrance, it would have been a surprise. As it was, I barely noticed at first how the rush of air had blown our lamps straight out.
‘We must go back after all,’ the Bishop said mournfully out of the blackness. ‘We must go back for more light.’
I felt his hand reach out for me. I took it in the darkness and squeezed – as much to receive as to give reassurance. It felt suddenly colder without the light. I was much more aware of how loud our breathing was in the surrounding silence. Everything seemed suddenly so much more open, but also more oppressive. Until I wasn’t able to see them, I hadn’t realised how comforting those ghastly reliefs had become. It would be impossible to get lost on the way back. The single corridor led, with whatever twisting, to only one place. However far it might be, the way back was clear and open. Still, I had to fight with all my courage – and all my pride – against the urge to turn and bolt.
‘Stand where you are and be silent!’ Macarius hissed beside us.
I heard him go through his satchel. He cursed and muttered in Egyptian. I heard things drop on to the floor and then his rummaging among them. Then I heard the striking together of flint and steel, and saw the bright sparks. Four – perhaps five – times, the sparks jumped and went dark again. At last, I saw a comforting glow as the dried weeds caught fire. Another few moments, and he was pushing the horn protector into place on his own relit and now refilled lamp.
Chapter 63
While Macarius refilled the other two, I pushed the lamp that was now lit down as far as I could reach. It flickered in the upward draught and nearly went out again. What it showed was another flight of steps. Though worn, these were of better workmanship than the first. How far they led I couldn’t say. But, four feet wide, they led straight down. On either side of them now were walls of smoothly shaped and mortared stone. As if reading my thoughts, Macarius tugged at the displaced slab. It was enormously heavy. Even with my help, it couldn’t be lifted back into place. Of course, we were all alone down here. No one would follow us in. Anyone who might follow us in had no interest in closing the stone over us. But we strained and shuffled and gasped for breath over that slab before we felt confident enough to give our full attention to this new flight of steps. As ever, I went first.
I counted a hundred and seventy-nine steps, and each one had a regular drop of perhaps ten inches. That made near enough another descent of a hundred and fifty feet. I was beginning to shake again with fear. It d
idn’t matter that the air was as fresh as on the surface, or that granite was the least likely of any rock to collapse upon us. It reminded me of the journeys into the Underworld described by the poets of the Old Faith.
We were now in an immense cavern. Even holding up our lamps and straining to see into the gloom didn’t give us more than a vague idea of its walls and ceiling. From what I could see, there had been a limited effort to reshape its features. The floor had been smoothed, and there were a few courses of stonework. Otherwise, it was much as nature had left it. Now we’d emerged from the narrowness of the steps, the draught was no longer perceptible. Its only evidence was the continued dry smell of nothing in particular. Had we now reached the level of the Nile? I wondered. If so, there had been no seepage of damp into this cavern. I stepped forward.
‘A moment, please, My Lord,’ Macarius said.
I stopped and waited while he got out one of the spare lamps, lit it and set it on the fourth step leading up. He was right. We’d need some reference point for getting back. But now, which way? Should we try to hug the walls and trace the limits of the cavern? Or should we strike out for its centre? I chose the latter. My lamp threw a pool of light that was reliable within a six-foot radius. Beyond that was gloom and then darkness. By looking back at the glow on the steps, we were able to navigate a straight path across the floor. This was far less regular in its finish than in the corridors. It was also more cluttered. There were pieces of smashed furniture and scraps of cloth that might once have been clothing.
Perhaps a hundred feet from the bottom of the stairs, we came across a stone block. Of shaped granite, it was about six feet long and three wide. Its top was about a yard above the floor, and had depressions carved into it that reminded me of a bed that the slaves haven’t yet had time to pat into shape. Even without the ancient stains that showed dark on the darkness of the stone, it was plain what function the block had served. As the Bishop muttered more of his prayers in Egyptian, I stepped back. I felt something crunch and give underfoot. I bent down and picked up some strips of withered leather. Restraining thongs look the same in all times and places. I dropped them again and wiped my hands on my outer tunic.
‘Why bring victims down all this way?’ I asked. ‘Those reliefs don’t indicate any sense of shame about their tastes. Why bother with any secrecy at all?’
The Bishop folded his arms and pushed his head even further onto his chest as he continued praying. Macarius had gone off about twenty feet. He’d set his lamp on the floor and was making scraping sounds nearby. Good idea! I thought. I left the Bishop to his communion with God and joined Macarius in gathering up some of the broken furniture. We arranged it into a tight pile on top of the block. It was so dry that the merest touch from the flame of one of our lamps was enough to set it burning. The ancient wood made almost no sound as the flames consumed it. The slight and pale smoke was carried gently back towards the steps where the lamp still burned. For the first time, we had enough light to see properly round this cavern.
The roof was too high or too dark to be seen. But we could now see the continuation of the reliefs, carved into the stonework that ran in stretches round the walls. At regular spaces, we saw doorways set into the walls. Each of these was flanked by statues of alarming ugliness and ferocity. Our eyes were drawn, though, to what must have been the centre of the cavern. Here, a single statue rose about fifteen feet and glowered down at us from eyeholes cut deep into the stone. It had nothing about it of the smooth serenity the Greeks in their best days gave to their art. Nor had it the dull smoothness of the Egyptians. Instead, the thing radiated an arrogant nastiness that made me want to look away. ‘It’s your business to know who I am,’ it seemed to sneer. ‘Who you are is a matter for you alone.’ Rising diagonally from the waist was a giant erection that much attention had polished to a gleam. The arms, pressed together, were outstretched slightly downward over a stone tub about the size of an Egyptian sarcophagus. A flight of steps led up to a stone platform about five feet below its shoulders. I swallowed, guessing what I’d find, and went over to climb the steps. I looked down into the tub.
‘What do you see?’ Macarius asked.
I stared awhile at the deep layer of white ash and the little scraps of bone that still here and there projected from it. I opened my mouth to speak, but found trouble in arranging words to describe the horrors I could see. Instead of my own words, I found myself quoting one of the Greek poems of Claudian:
First Moloch, horrid King besmear’d with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parents tears,
Though for the noyse of Drums and Timbrels loud
Thir childrens cries unheard, that past through fire
To his grim Idol.
‘God have mercy upon their souls!’ the Bishop cried with a fresh burst of prayer, now in Greek. It was his duty to believe that, since they’d died without the Faith, these unfortunate children were even now writhing in still hotter flames. But the Christian mind, I’ve sometimes found – if not often – is gentler in these things than the more consistent theologians would have it.
Still on the platform, I looked round. It wasn’t hard to imagine this cavern once as a kind of pandemonium. Then, the altar flames would have burned night and day, and the air would have been filled with stinking smoke and the shrill cries of the dying. If the reliefs lining the walls here and above were accurate, there would also have been music and laughter too, and drug-driven orgies. I could easily imagine how the floors in that approach corridor had been worn by the shuffling steps of thousands as they’d queued there – learning from the reliefs what they could expect when it was their turn to be dragged screaming down the steps into the cavern. If I still thought no better of the Egyptians as a race, I could now see that Menes had done the world a favour by taking Soteropolis and shutting this place down.
That had all been thousands and thousands of years ago. Now, the smoke was long since dispersed and the screams fallen silent. The altar fires were cold and the instruments of torture and death perished by age. Whatever draught came through had anciently cleansed this place.
The fire Macarius had lit was dying now, and he was having to gather fresh wood. I strained harder to see what might lie outside the contracting pool of light. I focused on the far side of the cavern. I could see nothing reliably. But perhaps a hundred yards away, there was a faint glint as if of something metallic. It was too far – even with a replenished fire – for me to see what it was.
‘We must go this way,’ I said, pointing. I climbed down, and, lamp in one hand, burning spar in the other, I hurried across the floor. I stopped after a few dozen paces. Even with the lamp alone, I’d not have missed it. But the good light I now had with me showed at once the chasm that ran across the cavern, dividing where we were from where I wanted to be. It could only have been a natural feature, though it might well have been smoothed and tidied in a few places. At the narrowest point, it may have been thirty feet across. About ten yards to my right, there was a bridge of rope and wooden planks.
‘After so long, My Lord,’ Macarius said, ‘I wouldn’t trust this.’
I nodded. The three of us stood together just by the bridge. Thick ropes were tied to high bollards carved directly from the granite of the cavern. It looked solid enough. But he was right. This had been here for millennia. I looked round for something solid to throw. The first thing I saw was a skull, grinning though dark from scorching. There was nothing else suitable that I could see, so I reached down and picked it up. I tossed it lightly so that it fell on to the bridge about six feet from the edge. With a soft crack, the plank where it landed gave way and fell, taking the skull with it, into the depths. I listened and listened, but heard no impact of the fall. I took up a fairly substantial piece of broken wood and threw that into the middle point of the chasm. Again, I listened. Again, I heard nothing. The makeshift torch had burned down three-quarters, but was still bright. I held it over my head and looked straight forward. Still, I could s
ee the glint of something on the far side. Still, I could see nothing that made sense.
‘We’ll find nothing here,’ I eventually said. I strained for a final look across the chasm, then turned with reluctance and led the way across the floor towards those doorways into the wall.
They were tombs – that much was certain. And this made some sense of the torture entertainments so far underground. Even the dead of this perverted race were to be comforted by the agony of others. Each tomb had originally been sealed with courses of mortared stone. All had been broken into and carefully looted, which explained the broken furniture scattered about in the main cavern. The normal arrangement within each ten-foot square was a stone bench for the corpse. A few of these were still in place. Not embalmed in the Egyptian manner, they had been set there and allowed to shrivel naturally in the dry air. They’d dried out to the colour and general appearance of old leather. A few scraps of yellow hair still adhered to the scalps. Except they were much shorter, they might have been people of my own race. Whatever gold and jewellery had been placed beside them was long since gone. But, arranged into circlets closed with bronze rings, there were still a few lengths of that flexible glass sheathing in place around necks and ankles. Because worthless, these had been left in place.
‘So Lucas was right in something,’ I muttered. ‘It is jewellery after all.’ But the corpses of the great hadn’t been the only residents here. Chained together by collars, each a few feet apart, there were other bodies. The more intact tombs showed how the chained ones had been unable to reach the main bench. Their collars were fixed to the wall at a height that allowed only standing. They had been closed in with each lord and left for hunger and thirst or despair to carry them into the greater blackness of death. Most had come apart in the ages following the burial, and, headless, they were fallen into common heaps of desiccated flesh. A few still held together, and gave some idea of final agony.
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