Someone unseen struck him across the face and he fell back. He was half in the forest, half in the cellar, it seemed. Or rather the forest was a cellar, a cellar containing a forest. The strangeness of those thoughts struck him and he giggled. His arms were pulled behind his back and he was tied again.
He heard a voice in Greek: ‘Should I kill him, Lady Styliane?’
The woman panted and coughed. She regained her breath and said, ‘That won’t be possible. Get him to the Numera.’
19 Descent
The chamberlain had thought himself safe in his gilded apartment, where he lay – a thing of status on a couch, its hands perfumed with frankincense, its face softened with oil, its body wrapped in a silk robe. But the magic sparked inside him, kindling memories as bright as the fire in his hearth; memories that, like the fire, lived and burned.
In his mind he heard voices and saw people. Two figures in a field of boulders on a hill overlooking the great town below. They began to move, the story began to move in his head, little patters of words coming back to him as a walker in the hills feels the rain of dirt that heralds a rockfall.
‘I’m afraid, mother.’ He saw a young girl peering down into a black space between boulders. He was there, on the hillside, watching – the magic inside him forcing him to see.
‘The fear is part of it. Strengthen yourself, Elai. Nothing is won without effort.’
The taller figure, the mother, held a fish-oil lamp in her hand, though the moon was nearly full and shone bright. She sat on a big boulder at the centre of a wide field of them.
Below, two or three summer hours’ walk away, the lamps and candles of Constantinople twinkled. The city seemed to hang like two shimmering pools of light separated by the deep and encroaching darkness of the invisible sea that surrounded and divided it.
The woman pointed to the huge church of Hagia Sofia. The moon turned its dome to shining metal and the windows that sat beneath it were white in its light. The woman’s thoughts opened to the chamberlain like a flower and he saw how the church reminded her of a squat giant, his helmet pulled low on his forehead, scanning the land for intruders. Well, she thought, it was looking in the wrong place if that’s what it was doing. They would approach by one of the unseen roads that ran for miles through the hills and under the city.
‘That is where we are going,’ she said, ‘under there.’
‘It’s so far,’ said Elai. She was thirteen years old but still a little girl in her fear; the chamberlain sensed as he watched her. He shuddered at the intimacy, the depth to which he knew her heart.
‘I made the journey when I was your age,’ said the mother. ‘Your grandmother made it too, and hers before her. The goddess is in there and will grant you her sight. You just need courage. The tunnels are marked and we have enough lamps and oil. The way is straight enough if you know what you’re doing. The worst we will encounter is a wasps’ nest, and none of those when we’ve gone fifty paces into the dark.’
‘And the dogs of Hecate?’
‘The dogs won’t come for us. We are the goddess’s servants. They wait only for trespassers.’
The girl nodded. ‘Is Karas coming?’
Karas. The chamberlain crossed himself. It was his own name, though no one had called him that in fifteen years. What did he share with the child? A body? Yes, in some ways, but grown and altered. A mind? No, not any more. Then what? The deeds. The actions that now unfolded in his magic-stewed brain. In that way alone, he thought, he was the same person as the boy he now saw in his vision, the boy he had been. He was fettered to the past by memories that refused to fade.
He saw the woman turn her eyes to the boy poking about at the bottom of the rocks. Karas was ten years old, brother to Elai. The chamberlain, restless on his couch, wanted to reach out, to take him by the hand and lead him away to his games in the slum.
‘I have dreams too,’ called Karas. ‘I should complete the ritual.’
‘Go back and look after Styliane, as I’ve asked you to do,’ said his mother.
‘She’s right enough with her aunties. Let me come. I want to know the secret of my dreams.’ He came climbing towards them over the rocks.
‘You’re young, Karas, and haven’t come fully into the world. You have a memory of what you were before, in lives gone, that’s all. When you become a man properly such things will go. Men are made to do and to fight. They can’t hold magic inside them.’
The boy sat down next to his mother. ‘I would hold magic.’
‘Be content with what you have. You have no natural harmony with that –’ she jabbed a finger at the moon ‘– or the tides that surround us.’
‘What do my dreams mean, then?’
‘What dreams?’ The woman had hitherto paid little attention to Karas. The boy was full of mischief and full of questions about things he did not need to know. Magic was a woman’s gift, given from mother to daughter. Her son’s fascination with it struck her as strange, and not a little effeminate.
‘I’ve told you a thousand times.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘There is a wolf.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s waiting for me.’
‘Yes?’
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s not much of a dream, is it? You’d build no reputation as a seer based on that, would you?’ His mother and his sister glanced at each other and laughed.
‘Well, what does it mean? He’s in a forest of big strange trees and he’s waiting for me.’
‘Perhaps it means a wolf is waiting for you,’ said Elai, ‘in some trees.’
‘Don’t tease me; no one teases you over your dreams.’
‘No.’ The girl turned her eyes to the ground. ‘But you don’t dream as I dream.’
‘How do you know?’
Their mother raised her hand.
‘Stop quarrelling. Karas, look. I’ll interpret your dream if it means so much to you. You know we are descended from the Heruli, who broke the empire in the west. Your know your forefathers were great men of the northern tribes, and one of them, Odoacer, overthrew the emperor Romulus Augustulus.’
‘I know this.’
‘I’m telling you you know it – and that means if you had any insight at all you’d be able to work it out for yourself. You asked for the interpretation, now hear it out. Odoacer took his wolf warriors to the temples of Rome and made the emperor bow down before him. Perhaps you can hear your ancestors calling to you. They worshipped the wolf. They were wolves, some of them, if you listen to the myths. Perhaps it’s you as you were who you see.’
‘Well, if I’m getting messages from ghosts, that shows that men can hold magic. I should be able to go with you.’
‘You have an echo of magic, and you are as near to it as those lights of the town are to the stars.’
‘Please let me come with you.’
The woman pushed her toe into a space between the rocks, almost like a bather testing the water for temperature.
‘It does feel right you should come. You might be of use,’ she said.
‘Come on then, let’s go!’ The enthusiasm of his childish self filled the chamberlain with dread.
‘Listen first. When we reach the appointed place, your sister and I will work a magic to allow us to speak to the goddess. There is normally very little danger but, for a while, we will not be as ourselves and – being in the world of the gods – will not be aware of what happens in this world. You watch over us and make sure neither of us falls into the waters.’
The boy smiled. ‘Right. Shall I go first?’
‘You’ll go last and not yet.’
His mother took some rolled cloth from her pack, along with some twine.
‘Tie this around your knees, both of you, and wrap some around your hands. The way is long and you won’t make it unless you protect yourself.’
The children followed their mother’s example with the cloth. Then they were ready.
The woman
peered into the gap between the rocks. Nothing marked it as special or worthy of exploration, but she lowered her pack into it and wriggled in afterwards, careful with the lamp.
‘Follow.’ She looked out at them, her face a pale mask in the moonlight. She disappeared inside, and the boy and the girl clambered down after her.
‘Is there a wasps’ nest?’ said Elai.
‘No,’ her mother called back to her, ‘so the dangerous part is done. Come on.’
The chamberlain watched in his vision as they crawled down a low tunnel that opened into a little cavern, just tall enough for the woman to stand in if she stooped. It stretched out twenty paces and led into a deeper darkness at its far end. They went towards it, the light of the lamp wobbling on the walls. The rocks were not even and it wasn’t easy to make their way on them, so progress was slow.
The passage dropped quite steeply at first but quickly became a long gently sloping tunnel. The children had to bend double and their mother went on her hands and knees. Karas was at the rear. He glanced behind him. The lamp-light cast shadows that seemed to stretch away at one instant and rush back towards him the next, like grasping hands snatching at him. The chamberlain was the boy again, no longer an observer but lost to the story, back there, Karas once more.
All separation dissolved. He was ten years old, imagining himself already a magician, the shadows an enchanted cloak he could pull about him to disappear in a breath. He remembered a story his mother had told him, ‘The cloak that was cut from the night.’ Perhaps, he thought, he would gain magical insight and take his own shears made of moonbeams to the heavens to bring his mother a fold of darkness to stitch into a cloak of shadows with her needles of starlight. He wasn’t scared; he was excited, but his sister was silent and pale. He couldn’t understand it. If his mother was correct, then Elai was going to be offered a great gift. Why did she seem so nervous?
They bent and crawled, walked and slithered through the passages for hours. The wall bore marks at points along the way – the moon and a star, the symbol of Hecate, goddess of Byzantium, the old name for Constantinople. The city was now under Christ’s sway, but plenty of people still found time for the old gods, particularly in hardship or when in need of insight into the future. These marks, though, had not been made by the common people. Even if they found the entrance to the caves, they would never go within. The marks, in a rough ochre, had been daubed by generations of priestesses who had kept the secrets of the caves and visited them only to find their insight.
‘What are these?’
They had stopped to rest and to eat and Karas had found some more marks on the wall – no more than a few rough scratches but clearly made by humans.
‘Old symbols of our kin,’ said the woman, ‘from years before.’
‘Made by the wolf warriors?’
‘Or people like them.’
‘Did they worship the goddess?’
‘I don’t know, Karas. The goddess has many forms and appears in different ways to different people.’
‘How different?’
‘She is called Isis, and she is called Hecate. In the north they say she is not a woman at all and call her Odin or Wodanaz or Mercury.’
‘How can she be male and female at the same time?’
‘A person looks different when you approach them from the back to the way they look when you see them face on. How many more ways of being seen do gods possess?’
‘She is a god. She can do what she chooses. That is what makes someone a god,’ said Elai. ‘They form the world according to their wishes.’
‘Then the emperor in Constantinople is a god,’ said Karas.
‘Of a sort,’ said his mother.
Karas wanted to talk more on this subject. His mother and sister would never discuss this sort of thing with him normally. Here, he was gaining the knowledge that he so craved. But his mother just put the remains of the bread and olives into her pack and said it was time to go on.
First Karas smelled the damp in the air, then he felt it on the walls. Now the rocks took on a different character. They were more like the roots of trees, or the melted bodies of candles, than anything he had seen before. He imagined himself crawling inside the root of a great tree, seeking the water from which it drank.
They seemed to be in there for days, though he had no real sense of time. His mother had brought little food – she said it was better to starve to prepare for the ritual. Now rest was not pleasant. Their bodies cooled quickly and their wet clothes stuck to them.
‘You have never told me your dreams,’ said Karas to Elai when they stopped again. ‘What are they?’
The girl shook her head.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I cannot tell you.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Mother?’
‘He won’t know what to make of them, so why not?’
Karas had never seen his mother in a mood like this before. She wasn’t exactly scared but there was a resignation to her, as if the things she normally cared about no longer mattered in the face of their task in that place under the ground.
The boy glanced around at the dripping walls. The rocks fell in layers like gigantic mushrooms and twisted faces seemed to leer from the walls through the candlelight.
Elai spoke: ‘Something is looking for me. It has always been looking for me. It hunted me down in lives before because of what I have inside me.’
‘What do you have inside you?’
‘Things that whisper. Signs and symbols that unlock things. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can’t touch them.’
‘So what use are they to you?’
She waved her hand in irritation. Karas caught the implication. He wouldn’t understand.
‘What use are they?’
‘They are part of something.’
‘Of what?’
‘A god.’
‘So you’re a little bit of a god.’
‘We’re all a little bit of a god,’ said his mother.
‘This is rubbish. She’s just a silly girl,’ said Karas.
‘She carries an aspect of the goddess within her. That’s what I believe. Hecate faces three ways. Virgin, mother, crone. Your sister is the virgin.’
‘And what good is it to her?’
‘That is what we’re here to find out.’
‘Well, if she’s a goddess, can she magic us up some food and fine clothes? “I’m part of a god.” Where did you learn to talk like that, Elai?’
‘In my dreams. Anyway I never said that, exactly.’
She was so serious he stopped his mockery. She had something else she wanted to say, he was sure.
‘Is there more?’
‘I don’t know. I hope to find out in the well. It will tell me what to do about what’s following me.’
‘And what follows you?’
‘A wolf,’ said Elai.
‘Ha!’ He pointed at her. ‘I dream of a wolf and it’s nothing; she dreams of a wolf and she’s taken to the earth to be given magical insights!’
‘Not given,’ said her mother.
‘Then what?’
‘She is here to earn them, or pay for them. Nothing is given at the well; things are only exchanged. And not everyone wants to give what is asked of them. I didn’t, nor will I.’
‘But you have a power of prophecy.’
‘A weak one, and the one I was born with. I would not answer the bargain that was put to me.’
‘I would answer any bargain,’ said the boy.
‘Good that you won’t be asked then.’
They ate the last of their bread and olives and pushed further down. When they stopped they froze; when they moved they sweated until they were soaked. Down, down into the lower caves. Finally they came to a stream that dropped in steps into blackness.
Careful with the lamp, they sat and bumped their way forward until Karas, peering ahead, saw something that sent a cold chill through him.
Their lamp wasn�
��t the only light down there. Ahead of them was a chamber and the rock was glowing.
His mother wriggled forward through the stream on her behind. When she reached the chamber, she set the lamp on a rock. Karas and Elai followed her in.
Nearest to the lamp the rocks glowed with an intense red; further away the light shone softer and more diffuse. The glow was like a reflection of the lamplight, thought Karas, not on the surface of the rock but deep within. He was in a sort of crucible, a wide and shallow cave only a man’s height above the water shaped like an open hand. The rocks in the pool stretched up like fingers, the water sitting in the palm as if the earth was offering it. The water glittered in the light of the rocks. Karas thought of the bloody hand of Christ, pierced by the nails of Romans, thought of his mother’s words: ‘Not everyone is prepared to give what is asked.’ What had Christ given on his cross? His life and his agony. And what had he become? A god.
‘Why do the rocks glow, Mother?’ he asked.
‘It’s not magic as I understand it. They only borrow the light of our lamp,’ she said. ‘If we were to put it out, they would die too.’
‘Don’t put out the light,’ said Elai. She had fear in her voice.
‘I have no intention of doing that.’
His mother moved further in, climbing over the huge fingers of rock. Shelves of stone edged the chamber, some bearing the remains of candles. Karas counted. There were eight such level places, two large ones near the water and several smaller ones. He was reminded of when he’d sneaked into the hippodrome to see the chariot racing. It was like that, he thought, a tiny stadium.
His mother found a ledge and gestured for Elai to sit beside her.
‘Come on. The way is easy, and if you fall in, the pool is not deep here. I can fish you out easily.’
‘I thought it was a well,’ said Karas.
‘And so it is, but wells are only deep to reach the water. This is the bottom and it is fed by three good streams.’
Karas only saw one.
Elai made her way around the rocks, climbing carefully, pausing to ask for her mother’s help twice, to be directed to a hold or just encouraged to come on. Finally the girl was beside her.
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