Lord of Slaughter

25

Galti got Loys what he wanted by the second day of waiting — four good Varangians who were not giants and so didn’t stand out among the Greeks. They would never pass for natives of the city close up but, at a distance and in dim light, they’d invite no attention. The deal was done on a promise and an oath in Norse — the Vikings said Loys spoke their tongue so he would know the value of a vow. The Vikings wore their sea cloaks, stained and eaten by salt, and covered their heads against the rain with close-fitting caps or cowls. It was dark and the weather miserable. They would pass well enough, thought Loys.

‘Chance of a scrap?’ said one — a stocky youth, nearly a man, handsome but for his missing teeth. His name was Vandrad.

‘Yes, but we need to be careful,’ said Loys. ‘We’re going to watch one of the Greeks’ rituals. I want to kidnap one of them and we may have to follow him back into his camp to do it.’

He quickly made his way up the hill, the men following him. All the black lambs had gone from the camp. Up on the hillside torches floated in the murk — nine or ten ascending in the distance.

‘There,’ he said.

The men trudged on over the sucking ground. The torches were very faint and Loys had no certainty they belonged to the people he sought. But he recalled what he had read — that the ceremonies of the goddess were often conducted by torchlight. They were planned with strict attention to detail, for fear of invoking the goddess’s anger.

The night was black. All perspective was gone: the fires and lamps of the camp seemed to hang in space, glowing like odd moons. One of the Varangians took a torch as he passed a tent and no one came out to complain that he had. Ahead the lights they followed were will-o’-the-wisps. Loys almost laughed to himself. He’d been worried about being recognised; they would be practically invisible in the gloom.

From ahead he heard a keyless grumble: dogs howling and moaning on the hill — a lot of dogs.

Loys lost sight of the torches and began to think they had taken a wrong turn, but a track was under their feet and they stuck to that. It was impossible to judge how far they had gone. Only the ground beneath his feet told Loys he was not moving through a murky ocean and he almost imagined sea serpents looming from the mist, the blind grey monsters of childish nightmares.

The going became steep. They still saw no lights ahead but, denied another reference, they headed towards the sound of the dogs. Then they crested a ridge. Lights, lots of lights. Other torches joined those they had followed, coming up a track from another side of the city, while others still descended out of the night.

‘On,’ said Loys.

The Varangian nearest smiled at him. ‘Nair,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The world of the dead,’ said a voice at his shoulder.

Now they climbed over rocks — big boulders. It took all Loys’ concentration not to slip and break an ankle. The howling and grumbling of the dogs became louder, and under it they heard a murmur of conversation. People were assembling.

Loys kept going, the Varangians at his back. Something moved by his side. A small dog was leaping from rock to rock and, in doing so, brushed his hand.

‘One torch extinguished. We need twenty-seven; there are twenty-eight,’ said a voice. Loys took the Varangian’s torch and threw it down into a cleft between the rocks.

‘Start!’ Another voice, from Loys’ right.

‘Why are you here?’ The voice was strong and commanding and Loys almost felt inclined to answer it.

‘To stand at the gateway of death,’ forty or fifty unseen speakers replied.

‘Why do you stand at the gateway of death?’

‘To offer homage to the lady of the gateway.’

‘What do you seek for this homage?’

‘Blessing and protection from evil.’

‘She that is Propulaia.’

‘Standing before the gate.’

‘She that is Chthonia.’

‘Lady of the earth, the lower earth and the dark places of the earth.’

‘She that is Apotropaia.’

‘Protector and guardian.’

‘Accept our sacrifice and hear our prayer.’

A lamb’s bleat turned to a shriek. The dogs went wild, barking, baying and howling. Still Loys saw very little beyond the soft glow of the torches.

A chant pulsed through the mist. Loys gripped his knife. The voices surrounded him.

‘Up out of darkness and subvert all things

With aimless plans, I will call and you may hear

My holy words since terrible destiny

Is ever subject to you. Thrice bound goddess,

Set free yourself, come raging

Plunged in darkness with sorrows fresh,

Grim-eyed, shrill-screaming.

Come.’

Loys shivered. The chant broke into many separate choruses, gabbling on all sides.

‘In my power I hold you.’

‘Your thrice-locked door.’

‘Her burning hearth, her shadow.’

‘One morsel of flesh.’

‘Blood of a turtledove.’

‘Hair of a virgin cow.’

‘The bond of all necessity is sundered

And the sun’s light is hidden.’

It was a cacophony. Torches flashed; people stamped and dogs howled.

‘We need to capture one of them,’ said Loys to the Varangian nearest to him. He needed to ask some questions.

‘Our sort of work. Wait until they separate. If one goes off on his own we’ll have him.’

‘And if he doesn’t?’

‘We’ll have him anyway.’

The ceremony continued, with singing and chanting and invocations to the lady of the moon, she that is three, the lady of the cypress, warden of graves, lady of the yew, filler of graves, lady of the mandrake whose birthplace is the grave.

More flames flared. Loys guessed they were burning branches held up high.

Then there was shouting and moaning and a voice cried out loudly, ‘Do not drive these demons on to us, we who have evoked your displeasure. Three black lambs have been sacrificed, as you require, three times nine torches, as you require; the invocations have been observed, the three directions faced and the three names called. Do not abandon us.’

A word came from all around that sounded very much like ‘Amen’ and the torches began to move away.

‘We’ll take the last to leave,’ said Loys.

‘If only to get their light,’ said Vandrad. The fog was truly freakish — Loys could see no more than five paces ahead.

The torches filed away, dark figures passing them clambering over the rocks. As careful to conceal their own identity as to demonstrate their lack of curiosity in that of others, none paused to look at the Varangians.

Only one or two torches remained, up near where the ceremony been conducted.

Loys heard voices through the still air.

‘We need to open the gate again.’

‘Not yet. I stepped through it years ago. That way is a hard one and I will not walk it while there are alternatives.’

‘But the comet, the sky, these deaths. You need to look for an answer.’

‘I can scarcely hold what I have inside me. You don’t know how it costs me — what might be asked.’

‘If you went within you might rid yourself of the magic. It is that which causes these abominations to afflict us.’

‘I do not know. I do not know.’

‘Could the Christians be right? Could this be the end of the world?’

‘Or the Norsemen or the Arabs. They both seem to agree a one-eyed god must emerge, and we haven’t seen him yet.’

‘I’m glad you can joke about it, sir.’

‘I don’t joke. Who knows what is happening?’

‘You have taken from the goddess; now she wants something back.’

‘I don’t know. The wolfman. What about him?’

Loys edged closer with the Norsemen. One of the voices was high-pitched — a eunuch. The chamberlain? He told himself not to be ridiculous. The chamberlain grubbing in the dirt with heathens? Impossible. The other voice was familiar to him, he thought. But who? He stumbled on a rock.

‘Is there someone there?’

Silence.

‘We need to go.’

The torches moved off, but the Varangians had clearly decided they were in striking distance of their prey. They ran forward. Confusion, shouts.

‘Hey! Let me go!’

‘Run!’

A torch fell and someone cried out in pain, but the other torch went bobbing across the rocks, down and away. Loys crawled forward. Someone jumped at the limit of his vision — a shadow across the torchlight, no more. Then, leaping from rock to rock through the mist, came a figure. It crashed straight into Loys, knocking him down.

‘Who the-’

The man had hold of Loys by the tunic. He wore a desert hood but Loys saw clearly who it was.

‘Isias!’

The spymaster said nothing, just drew a knife.

Loys could not say if it was the instant before or the instant after that he thought of the spymaster’s threat to Beatrice, thought of the impossible task he had been set and the creeping anxiety about what would happen if he failed, thought of the peril in which he had been forced to put his soul, of the tensions he had felt even before coming to Constantinople as he cast aside his life as a monk to take up one of poverty with his lover, the lady of Rouen.

His life seemed to revolve around that moment on the rocks. Everything he had ever done divided into before and after he took his little knife from his belt and stabbed Isais in the neck. He did it without thought, but when it was done, thought came in on Loys like a wave into a headland.

The spymaster lost his footing and slipped between the rocks, blood pulsing from a terrible wound. He tried to speak, but his voice was a rasp and he lay back on the jagged boulders, kicked twice and died.

Someone came towards him — crawling quick as a cat, though he carried a torch. A Varangian.

‘The others are gone. Is this one useful to you?’

Loys was breathless, more with shock than exertion. What had he done? He had killed. He was a murderer.

The Varangian went to the body.

‘Dead,’ he said, and immediately started looting the corpse, stripping him of his soldier’s padded jacket, his boots.

Loys crossed himself and tried to gather his thoughts.

‘What now, boss?’

‘Where are the others?’

The Varangian gave a couple of sharp whistles and waved the torch. There was a scurrying on the boulders and the other three appeared.

‘They got away from us. You run in this gloom and you only break an ankle.’

Vandrad examined the corpse. ‘A rich man?’

‘Money enough,’ said the first Varangian.

‘Can you hide him?’ asked Loys.

‘We’ll get him in between these rocks with a bit of effort.’

‘Good. Let’s do that and get back down.’

Isias was a short man, if a stocky one, and it was not too difficult to push him into a cleft.

Loys forced himself to think logically. Would the stolen clothes identify the Varangians? He doubted it. Isias had been dressed as a simple soldier and the Varangians had looted hundreds of such men at Abydos.

‘Let’s go,’ said Loys. ‘Who knows who might come looking up here if we stay too long.’

They made their way off the hill, down to the fires of the Varangian camp. Loys would stay there until dawn and then enter when the city gates opened. They reached Vandrad’s tent and Loys watched while the men built a fire. His heart was racing and his head ached. Murder. The word resonated in his head like a struck gong. Sin begets sin, so his abbot had said. First fornication, now murder. He stared into the Varangians’ fire, trying to anchor his thoughts. He had acted in self-defence, against a heathen too, very likely. But why had Isais been there? He was too prominent, too well known. He ran the spy network; he surely didn’t take part in individual operations.

It had all happened so quickly and reason had given way to animal instinct. But another, darker thought was building. If he had captured Isias, could he have allowed him to live? Would he have told the Varangians to cut his throat? Could he have risked letting Isias know he had been spied on, to return to the palace and move against Loys in whatever terrible way he chose? Loys shivered, though he sat near to the fire. He concluded he had done in anger something that cold reason may have commanded, had he time to think about it.

The more he did think, the more worried he became. Isias was the head of the messenger service. It was he who had spoken through the dark rain, he who had called someone else ‘sir’. The other person had had a reedy voice. The implications terrified Loys. He couldn’t have said for sure it was the chamberlain but he was far from certain it was not.

Could the man who had employed him really be a sorcerer himself? He found the thought very difficult to accept. But Styliane had been plain in her accusations. And what of the wolfman he had mentioned? Who was he?

Loys prayed for forgiveness, promised God he would donate greatly to his churches and slept an uneasy sleep.

It wasn’t until he entered the gatehouse on his return to the city that his thoughts cleared and he remembered the guards had a record of his leaving. Clearly, he and Beatrice had to get out of Constantinople and fast.