A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  The horses slowed for the climb where the going was loose. Rocks shattered under hoof and the mailed horsemen continued to close, sensing a kill.

  Then Erlan’s heart fell. Because above him, five, six, seven more horsemen were spilling from the ridgeline, howling like wolves and brandishing long curved blades, their black braids flying behind them. He checked the gap to their pursuers but the Arab lancers were now pulling up and turning away.

  He didn’t know what was happening – he couldn’t see Einar or the others up ahead – but there was no escaping this new threat. ‘Erlan,’ called Alexios, his voice cracking. ‘Hold up.’

  With little choice, he did as Alexios said. They came to a halt as the new riders closed on them. ‘Here.’ Alexios reached into the neck of his tunic. ‘Take this.’ He held out the parchment.

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘Take it,’ the Byzantine snarled. ‘Get it to the emperor. Keep it safe.’

  ‘But—’ Erlan took the parchment, wild-eyed. ‘Who are these others?’

  ‘We’re in your hands now, Northman,’ Alexios grimaced as the first of the riders circled round them whooping at the sky. And then, slowly, he toppled over into the dirt.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Drip, drip, drip. . .

  Lilla had lost count of how many days they had held her now. But that drip, drip, drip had never ceased. On it went, day or night, although she could tell the passing of neither. Drip, drip, drip – loud as screaming, each one a needlepoint in her ear.

  She screwed her eyes shut and opened them again. The same darkness, black as death. Shadow deep as the ocean.

  Sight was gone. But her other senses had become sharp as blades. The taste of the air, dank and stale; the reek of something foul, creeping in through a small grate in the door which she had glimpsed when they brought her here. Her wrists rubbed raw with her shackles, sending sharp throbbing pulses to her brain; her naked toes numb with the cold, but smeared with the filth that slicked the damp stones of her cell.

  No one had come for her.

  In the beginning she was outraged – to be treated like a criminal, arrested and marched through the palace with servants and nobles alike staring at her like some common thief. But the sentinels were deaf to her demands. And as they walked her down into hidden depths under the palace deeper than she could ever have imagined, her demands became first pleas, then entreaties. Looking back, she was ashamed how she had demeaned herself, when it was obvious that the sentinels answered to a higher authority than her, and cared not a fig what she wanted. They told her nothing – not even the charge under which she was held. Only that she would be held indefinitely. . . with no assurance even that one day someone would come with an explanation.

  Darkness. Her whole world was darkness. The future, the present, the past.

  At times, she wondered whether she was even conscious, or else trapped in some nightmare of past suffering. She remembered only too well the darkness of Niflagard, the cold, the stirring echoes that haunted her with untold horrors waiting just beyond her ken. . . But, she told herself, the Nefelung were monstrous, their lord a devil of Hel. Here, she had thought, she was amongst civilized men. Or at least men.

  But no. All the while that she had dwelled in the airy halls above, below lurked foul darkness. And she had a sickening, soaring vision: that this Great City, this beating heart of all the world, was diseased, was rotting from its roots. That within even the very best of the world of men, dark wickedness lay hidden.

  Sometimes the shadows were shattered by the shrieks of human voices, from other poor wretches chained in those murky depths whose cries came ringing through her head, waking her from her half-consciousness. And then silence. . . silence for so long that she wondered if those screams, too, were of her own mind’s making.

  Drip, drip, drip. . .

  And still no one came.

  She told herself that they could not leave her there to rot for no reason. Not for ever. And yet, her fears answered, when they do come. . . That thought filled her with an even greater dread.

  The iron clank of the door and the grind of rust-bound hinges was the first she knew of it. The flare of torches blinding her for a second. She screwed her eyes closed. When she opened them again, she saw for the first time the cell they were keeping her in – a gloomy cube of black stones with a smear of green mould across their surface – and the men who held her.

  Four of them – two tall sentinels, their white tunics and green cloaks absurdly clean in this filthy place. Then two other men, shorter, stockier, with close-cropped hair and dirty tunics that fell to their knees, and grimy, hairy feet in slime-fouled sandals. One carried a large bucket of water, the other a small bench. No one said a word. Hanging grimly from her chain, she watched the sentinels take up position either side of the little doorway. And then the fifth man entered.

  Lord Katāros.

  It was odd seeing him. She had not once thought of the eunuch in all the time they had held her here, and yet. . . something in her recognized him. Recognized that all that while, this was his domain.

  He was dressed differently. In place of his brilliant white robes, he wore a long dark cloak with its hood thrown back. His long sweep of hair was pulled into a single tail, bound to its tip with gold rings that caught the light of the flickering torches.

  ‘Far from home, are we not?’ the eunuch said in Norse.

  ‘Why are you keeping me here?’ she replied in Greek, her voice a croak.

  ‘Has no one told you?’ he asked, switching to her choice of tongue.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A terrible oversight.’ Yet he offered no further explanation. His painted lips smiled. ‘Perhaps they were waiting for you to tell them.’

  ‘Tell who?’

  ‘Tell anyone. Tell me. Tell God.’ A sliver of chuckle escaped his pale throat. ‘Confession.’ Slowly he circled around the back of her, passing so close she felt a ripple of dead air in his wake. ‘Confess your sin, my lady. The priests say it is very cleansing. Unburden the shame on your heart. We are listening.’

  ‘What shame?’ she croaked. ‘What sin?’

  ‘The All-Seeing God sees the heart. He sees the truth of a person. There is no hiding. Come now – of what are you guilty?’

  A chill ran through Lilla’s blood. What was this game he wanted to play? Hide-and-seek? Yet was she the one hiding or seeking? And if seeking, what was she supposed to find? ‘I may be guilty of many things. But nothing deserving of this treatment.’

  ‘No? Deserving of what then? Do the guilty choose their own punishment? Does the wrongdoer set the wergeld?’ he said in Norse. ‘The priests say the wages of sin is death. What sin then do you cherish in the depths of that. . . shapely bosom?’

  ‘Name my crime. If I have offended His Majesty – or done some wrong against him, or any person in his realm – tell me. Tell me now!’

  ‘It is not for me to feed you words. A confession must be a pure act. An act of truth. I give you this chance now. Speak freely. Or else –’ he shook his head regretfully, making the little gold rings in his hair jingle softly – ‘we must help you reach the truth by other means.’

  She gazed down at his face. An expressionless mask of beauty, devoid of life, empty of joy or sadness. A blankness, like a slab of granite cut from a mountain quarry, its smooth surface unchangeable by time if left unworked by the stonecutter’s chisel. Yet strangely something in it reminded her of Erlan. There was something unknowable in him, too. Some secret locked away. . .

  Was she guilty? Was she guilty of hate, of lusting for vengeance, of violent thoughts and wounded pride, and boiling anger? Aye. All of those and more. Of deceit and crooked motives. Of untamed passion. Of a yearning for something she could not name, of a dissatisfaction with the world as she found it. Ingratitude. A maddening, unslakable thirst. It was not enough. What she had was not enough. If she had the whole world, it could not satisfy her. But why? Why? She wished she knew. Wished she could mine
the answers that lay hidden in her heart and bring them to the light.

  But she said nothing.

  ‘No?’ The eunuch’s mouth flickered in a sad smile. ‘Oh, dear.’ He turned to the pair of smaller men and nodded. At once they moved in and set about unfastening her and lowering her to the ground. She made no effort to resist, not knowing what they intended. In any case, their grip was too strong, their short, hairy fingers digging hard into her arms and shoulders. They forced her to sit upon the bench and then stretched her out on it on her back, rebinding her arms tight beneath it and her ankles to its legs.

  ‘You should recognize this.’ Katāros was standing behind her now. There was something deeply unnerving about seeing his painted mouth upside down. He was holding something out, something blue and gold. He let it fall over her face. Soft as silk. ‘Proceed,’ he said in Greek.

  The next moment the material was stretched taut over her face and gripped behind her head. At once she struggled to breathe, sucking hard to force the stagnant air of the dungeon through the material. The silk smelled familiar, a scent of cinnamon and amber to it, and something else, something sour. . . Then the water started pouring on her face. Instantly, the material moulded to her skin; she inhaled hard but her lungs found only water now. And again, and her chest contracted in shock, realizing she couldn’t breathe at all. She tried to hold her breath – though she had none to spare in her lungs – and then panic took over, the muscles in her body straining to extract something through the wall of water. But there was nothing to be had. Her back arched, her feet kicked against their bonds, shifting the bench legs with a fearful scrape of wood on stone. The back of her skull cracked against the end of the plank. ‘Hold her steady,’ she heard that strange voice utter, its pitch of neither man nor woman. Stars burst in the darkness of her vision, her chest heaved in vain, the muscles between her ribs burned in desperation.

  And suddenly the silk was relaxed and slipped from her face. She could move her neck, and she gasped down lungfuls of air.

  ‘Interesting,’ Katāros murmured. ‘I’ve never seen this done to a woman. You have surprising strength. The will to live is powerful.’

  ‘You’re a devil,’ she spat, her throat and lungs still burning.

  ‘A devil! Ha! On the contrary, my lady. My kind are beautiful. We are the select. We surround the emperor in his palace as the angels surround the very throne of God. We are not devils. We are perfection, untainted by the foulness of the flesh with which lesser men sully themselves. We are the perfect instruments of the emperor’s will. Like the angels.’ Lilla’s eyes were rolled back in her head. But she sensed him bend down beside her, could smell his overbearing perfume filling her nostrils. ‘We are the ideal,’ he whispered. ‘Do you know why? Because we have no will of our own. We desire nothing. I exist only to serve. Like an angel.’ His soft whisper hardened. ‘And like an angel, I have no pity. . .’

  The silk tightened over her face. Lilla’s limbs locked rigid, her mind filled with the horror of her helplessness, knowing this would not stop until she was broken. And that she refused to break.

  Water poured over her face again, smothering her nose and mouth, and she steeled herself to suffer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Pliska, the capital of the Bulgar khan, was a ride of three hundred miles to the north and west, their escort leader told them in mangled Greek. Ten days in the saddle – which was enough to provoke groans of protest from at least one of the Byzantine party. But they were all resolved to go on.

  They travelled fast and rested little. At first the weather was grim – wet skies, waterlogged ground – although they soon came onto a road, which was solid under hoof and well drained. Davit, who seemed to have developed a grudging respect for Erlan after their close shave with the Arab lancers, told him it had been an old military road of the empire. After four days on it, they crossed into Bulgar territory.

  ‘This was all part of the empire not forty years ago,’ Davit explained. ‘Then the Bulgars crossed the Danubius around the time the first Arab siege was ending. They won a quick victory against Constantine Augustus and instead of prolonging the fighting he cut his losses and made a treaty with them. And here they settled.’

  Erlan was curious where they had come from. They certainly didn’t look like any folk he’d ever seen.

  ‘Best I know of it, they rode in from lands north-east of the Friendly Sea. Out of the steppes beyond the Khazar kingdom that roll on forever to the dawn-lands.’ Davit dropped his voice. ‘Anyhow – they’re as contrary a pack of mongrels as God, in his infinite mystery, saw fit to make. They’d sell their own mothers for a skin of wine.’

  ‘That sounds damn sensible if you ask me,’ observed Einar.

  ‘They’re nomads then?’ asked Erlan, still eager to know what kind of people they were dealing with.

  ‘Hard to say. They were – till they crossed the Danubius and liked what they saw. Since then they’ve been throwing down a few crops, staying put for a while. But I heard even their towns are more like big herding grounds.’

  As they journeyed north, the rain relented and the sun broke through the dreary clouds and touched the land. It was quite serene. The hills were low and rolling, sometimes capped with limestone bluffs, and divided by wide, shallow valleys filled with green pasturelands or birch woods that snagged shards of sunlight making them glitter like silver. Easy country for herding, and coming into a thick crop of grass.

  As for their Bulgar escort, they didn’t talk much, even among themselves. They were another dark people. To a man, they had black hair, lean faces, weather-worn skin, but more ruddy than tanned. Those with armour wore leather breastplates and grieves on their arms. Their leader carried a curved sword, but most of them were armed with lances like the Arabs, except longer and with smaller spearheads. Useless weapons, by Einar’s reckoning, until Davit told him a Bulgar rider could pierce a man through the eye at full gallop. They as good as proved it one day – two of them chasing across the open pasture after a hare, whooping and shrieking like berserkers, trying to shove each other off the line. The wretched hare was ripped in two.

  Nearing their destination, their progress was slowed by herds of cattle on the road heading south, then vast flocks of sheep which seeped around their horses like a white sea, setting Aska off to bark all morning. The mounted shepherd boys stared at the foreigners, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  At last tall wreaths of smoke appeared on the horizon ahead of them. ‘Pliska! Pliska!’ their escort yelled, showing black-toothed smiles. Ahead of them a massive earthen rampart rose out of the pastureland, stretching away east and west. The road drove straight through the huge bank of earth and then another mile ahead approached a high wooden inner stockade.

  The space between was spread with clusters of pit-house dwellings, more grazing land, and several vast livestock enclosures, each filled with herds of horses, cattle and sheep. Erlan noticed workshops and forges, even kilns. The further they rode, the larger the crowd that fell in behind them. Children mostly, laughing and calling out to them. Passing through the inner stockade, Erlan touched his hilt for luck, and a glance at Einar showed his friend looking serious for once.

  More riders fell in around them as they came, at last, to the heart of the settlement which seemed half city, half herder’s camp. At the centre of it stood an enormous hall, big as any in the north. In style, it was more like a wooden palace in imitation of the Byzantines’ stone buildings than the simple grandeur of, say, Sviggar’s Hall. It even had two floors, supported by massive pillars of oak and dressed with scores of skulls of horses and horned oxen.

  To one side of it was a kind of shrine, where pungent oils burned in silver censers before a crude lump of limestone, blood-spattered and buzzing with the first flies of the year. Erlan noticed a cross as well. That, too, was covered in blood. The smell was appalling.

  The leader of their escort halted and told them to dismount.

  ‘Bring the gold,’ Erlan sai
d to Davit and Bringas.

  ‘Who put you in charge?’ growled Davit.

  ‘You think you can represent the emperor? What are you going to say to him?’

  ‘Well,’ Davit blustered, ‘I suppose that the khan has to honour the treaty, that we’ll pay him for it—’

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.’ Erlan snorted. ‘One barbarian to another.’

  Another Bulgar appeared, an important one judging from his attire of expensive furs and silks. Erlan looked around while the newcomer and their escort leader conversed in a rapid patter. He noticed a large pit, perhaps fifty feet across, on the west side of the hall. He wondered what it was for. Seemed a strange place for a midden heap. . .

  ‘You go with him,’ the escort leader declared abruptly, bustling them forward. ‘He is Kavhan. He takes you to Khan. . .’

  Tervel, Khan of the Bulgars, looked like an overfed ox draped in an expensive bearskin cloak. He sat on a large brass throne behind a broad wooden table arrayed with a sea of vittles, which he attacked with an appetite that saw no signs of abating even as the emperor’s representatives stood before him.

  So this was the Bulgar khan, chief of the Dulo, son of the famous Khan Asparukh the Vanquisher. His small eyes still on them, he snapped his fingers. A servant rushed forward and furnished him with the biggest beaker of ale Erlan had ever seen. In the space of five heartbeats, the khan had sunk its contents. He leaned back in his throne as his servants set about clearing the table, and delivered a belch like a war-horn.

  His stomach now settled, he stabbed a fat finger at the saddlebags resting at the guards’ feet. ‘You have something for me, I think,’ he croaked in heavily accented Greek. Erlan gave the two Byzantines a nod and they heaved their loads onto the table, spilling a slew of gold coin and precious objects before the khan.

  ‘You’ve come a long way to deliver a few trinkets of gold,’ he grunted.