Lord of Slaughter

9

Elifr’s eyes became accustomed to the torchlight as they pushed him into the Numera. Four men guarded him, two in front, two behind. They paused at the open door at the end of the corridor. Hot air, stale and fetid, breathed out, but it was scented with incense and he heard music, a pipe with a high nasal sound weaving a sinuous reel, clapping in an alien, unfamiliar rhythm. A man’s voice sang what sounded like a song of joy.

The butt of a spear prodded his back and he stumbled on into a lighter space, a large vaulted room lit by reed torches. People swarmed everywhere, women, children, some men in rich dress. To Elifr’s left a merchant in green and yellow silks was sitting on a fine chair eating a bunch of grapes, while a woman knelt beside him holding a goblet of wine. It could have been a scene from any rich man’s house apart from one detail — the man wore manacles on his feet and his hands were bound together by an iron chain.

The piper sat cross-legged in the corner with others around him clapping out a stuttering beat. Some people even seemed to be trading, and a couple had parchment and styluses with them. This was not what Elifr had imagined. It was more like a marketplace.

The spearman shoved him in the back again and said something to him in Greek. Elifr didn’t understand a word but the meaning was plain enough. This is not where we are taking you. Move on.

They walked across the vaulted chamber to another door, where a guard stood nodding to the music. The spearman took a small black disc from a string at his waist and presented it to the man on the door. The doorman added it to a string of similar counters at his own waist. Then he unlocked the door and they moved through.

A long line of pillars stretched away, leaving a narrow walkway between them and the wall on Elifr’s right. In the dappling light of the reed torches they reminded Elifr of a forest in autumn. The smell was far from that of the fresh woods, though. Here it was rank, a thick human stench.

They walked along the row of columns. Eyes were in the dark and people cried out.

‘Have you come for me, Michael, my son?’

‘Bread. I am hungry.’

Someone sang in a high clear voice. It was a hymn, Elifr realised, like the Christians sang and, though he understood not a word, it carried a feeling of great sadness. He sensed it was a song about death.

Other men just hummed or babbled to themselves. And yet Elifr sniffed food on the air. These were not the worst off here, he felt sure.

They came to stone steps cut into the floor, which dropped away into darkness. Elifr tested his bonds. He had been working at them since the moment they were put on. Now they were loose enough. He muttered to himself under his breath — ancient rhymes that had come to him in his visions on the mountainside.

‘The grey wolf is gazing upon the abodes of the gods.’

One of the guards glanced at him but said nothing. Elifr repeated the phrase again and again in his head, concentrating on the rhythm of the words, the pattern of their contractions and expansions, their grindings and deep sounds that to him began to take on the quality of natural things — rock on rock, wind on water.

The men went on down with their torches fluttering against the darkness. Elifr heard groaning, muttered prayers and terrible wheezing. The stink of shit was overpowering.

The steps turned and dropped again into a large natural cave leading off into black-mouthed tunnels.

The darkness teemed. There must have been a thousand men down there, but room enough for only half that number. No one ate grapes in his fetters here; the prisoners were secured to the floor with short chains. They blinked into the torchlight, some pale as creatures found beneath a stone, some still relatively healthy-looking. Here and there men lay dead in their irons, wasted almost to skeletons, still pressed against the living who lay beside them.

‘A rain of blood is pouring.’ Elifr was drifting away now, his mind freeing itself from the bonds of his humanity. He said the words aloud without thinking.

A guard said something to one of the others. The man glanced at Elifr and shrugged.

‘A loom has been set up, stretching afar and portending slaughter.

Upon it has been stretched a weft of human beings

A warp grey with spears that the valkyries are filling with threads of crimson.’

The words pounded in Elifr’s head like a rising tide of blood. A guard put his hand to his mouth, a gesture that the wolfman should be quiet. He was not.

‘We are weaving the web of the spear

We are weaving the web of the spear

We are weaving the web of the spear.’

Elifr rocked back and forwards where he stood. One of the guards laughed. The man with the bushy beard smiled and held up the manacles and made what sounded like a harsh joke, for the laughter it brought from his colleagues. Elifr was indifferent to it.

The song went on.

‘Blood-red clouds are gathering in the sky

And the maidens of death are singing.’

Elifr’s limbs felt loose and lithe, his joints supple. The chant seeped into his mind, raising the wolf, numbing the human until all that was left of the man were the words.

A guard reached towards him to put his hand over Elifr’s mouth but there was no need. The words stopped and his humanity fell away from him like a flower into a river in flood. He split the guard’s nose with a vicious headbutt, a thump like a cleaver hitting a butcher’s block. The man’s knees went from under him. He collapsed, grasping at the wolfman for support, receiving only a knee driven at force into his face. The man fell back, his head hitting the ground with a wet smack. The other guards drew their swords, but the torch had fallen to the floor, where it guttered, its light failing.

Elifr’s hands came free of the bonds and he was on a guard, past the sword before the man had time to raise it. He drove his thumbs into his opponent’s eyes, and his teeth ripped into his neck, biting away a hunk of flesh and sending a spray of black blood across the torchlight. The guard dropped as the other two came on, but Elifr had the fallen man’s sword and punched it backhand straight through the bushy-bearded man’s chest. Howling, he leaped towards the only standing guard, who fell back over the bodies of the screaming and groaning prisoners, struggling to get away. Elifr leaped again and choked the life from his remaining opponent.

Prisoners shouted out, some protesting at the men falling on them, others just shrieking and gibbering in the madness of despair.

Elifr sat on his haunches. The rhyme had come back to him now and he used it to anchor his human thoughts. He controlled his breathing.

‘The maidens of death are singing.’ He withdrew from his battle frenzy. Men sobbed in the dark, calling out the names of wives, friends or children.

He could do nothing for them. Even if he released them they would be butchered by the guards above.

He said a name under his breath: ‘Adisla.’ The name of a girl he had never seen outside a trance-induced vision. He pictured her face on the mountainside and offered a prayer to the gods of the stream and the snows that he would never see her in real life. He had loved her before, in lives before, died for her before. He would die again but this time for ever. She, he and others had been toys of the gods — their deaths, their misery offered as a sacrifice to the fates to forestall the day when the gods themselves would go to their final slaughter.

No more.

He said another word: ‘Ragnarok.’ The twilight of the gods, when the old mad gods would die, the slaughter-fond lords of blood and battle would fall and the world would be returned to peace. It is coming, he thought, it is coming. His visions had led him to this place and they had so far proved true. The end of the gods was near. He had seen it in the comet that had lit up the sky, the yellow haze that hung on the dome of the cathedral, smelled it in the sooty rain of the battle. He had work to do. The end depended on him. Odin, the chief of the gods, master of sorcery, of poetry, of death, war and madness, had given him a part to play in averting the death of the gods and the wolfman would need to struggle if he was not to play it.

He remembered the hills, the Troll Wall and its caves, how the echoing earth had called to him and how he travelled down into the deep dark, losing himself as he descended, following the ghost wolf. The caves were empty and sightless but he had felt his way down as an animal feels its way. He found cold pools where it seemed right to sit and to freeze, found sharp rocks which had invited him as if they were a bed. In starvation, in freezing and in agonies, the god’s plan for him had been revealed.

When he had crawled from those tunnels where the air seemed to move and whisper as if through the lungs of a sleeping giant, he was half an animal. He hunted as an animal, stalking his prey without spear or sling to take it by stealth and surprise; he fought as an animal, coming down to rob travellers of food and clothing, disdaining their gold and their jewels. But the man who remained in him would not surrender to his fate like an animal. He had seen her, in his dreams, the girl by the water with the light in her hair, and he was linked to her for ever, a link of pain, misery and death that stretched back over lifetimes.

He saw himself in those visions too, or rather not himself, but his brother who looked like him. His brother was a wolf, a true wolf, not a man who had sought for the wolf inside him by listening to the singing spirits of the mountain, by following them through the agonies of ritual. His brother was a hunter too and he hunted Elifr and the girl and he brought them to death again and again over many lives. Odin had found his way to earth as a man and died at the teeth of the wolf to please the fates and put off the day when he would die for real. But as he did so, he sucked others down with him to death and dejection again and again. The god was a river whirlpool and mortals were leaves caught in its pull.

The girl’s face troubled his dreams and he knew his bond was one of love but stronger than love, one of destiny and fate. He would deny it. He would frustrate the gods, run from her and from his brother, take up the strands of his own fate and weave a skein himself.

Elifr had gone to the mountain for a year, chilled by the cold and baked by the sun, starving and thirsting to find out what to do. He had seen his destiny was to die at the teeth of his brother, the wolf. If he avoided that destiny, if the god himself killed Elifr, then the pattern might be broken, and he, his brother and the girl would be reborn free of each other, free of the god.

But his dreams had led him to that tent on the field of the slain, and the god had put down the sword and refused to kill him. So now he would go to the earth to find what he sensed was down there — Mimir’s Well, the wisdom-imparting waters that the god Odin had drunk in exchange for his eye. The god came from the east, it was known, and now Elifr believed he had seen the location of the well. It lay, below the Numera, somewhere in the old tunnels that led from the lowest part of the prison. In there he would gain the wisdom and insight to bring about the death of the gods.

In the shifting light of the torch he searched the guards. The one who had carried the torch had flint and tinder. He took them. Then he stubbed the torch onto the ground to extinguish it and returned the prison to blackness. Men groaned and cursed as the light disappeared, but he did not resore it. A wolf needs the light much less than those who pursue it.

He moved forward through the dark, guided by senses enhanced by his rituals and his trances, by smell, by the echo of the cries of the prisoners on the walls, by the lightest of touches.

When the Hetaereia finally missed their guards and came running down with lights and shouts to find the bodies of their comrades, Elifr was gone, down into the tunnels to face his destiny, like Odin, seeking death.