The Devil's Piper

by Sarah Rayne

  It was much darker beyond the doors and there was the abrupt, unpleasant sensation of burrowing into a subterranean underworld. Fear scudded across Moira’s skin and her heart began to pound.

  Ahasuerus set Moira down and stood back to watch her, his head tilted as if trying to hear her thoughts. In the thick shadows it was impossible to do more than make out the remarkable eyes deep within the hood.

  From somewhere outside, Moira could hear the sounds of angry shouts and running feet, and the abrupt shocking explosion of gunshots, but it was like hearing it from a huge distance, or from under water. She could not take her eyes from Ahasuerus, and she felt as if she was falling down fathoms into a shadowy underworld, where there were strange eddies and currents, and where Time’s walls could tear, and where there was no one and nothing in the world save the creature in here with her.

  ‘Susannah—’ It came again, filled with such love and such aching desolation that Moira forgot about this being the ancient creature of the legends: the fearsome undead High Priest, and reached up with both her hands to push back the hood. There was a moment when she felt the silky spill of black hair, and then he gave a low groan, as if he had been pushed beyond the last barrier of endurance, and cupped her face in his hands – pitiful burned hands! thought Moira, helplessly – and drew her to him.

  There was the confused jumble of sensations again: there was the sudden surge of longing and aching bitter-sweet regret – I was born too late or he too early! – and his arms went around her, and he was warm and masculine and there was the faint drift of something that reminded her of lavender or dried rose petals, or—Oh, how stupid of me, thought Moira, hazily; it’s the scent of memories unfolding. Yes, but are they his memories, or mine . . .? Time’s walls tearing . . . I believe I can almost hear it happening. Like old, old silk fraying, like cobwebs dissolving, like slicing through thin pure Spring water . . . But we missed each other in Time, my dear lost love . . .

  Her heart was racing and her senses were spinning dizzily but her hands were perfectly steady as she reached for the concealing mask.

  The first bullet missed Isarel by several feet and buried itself in the wall, but as he reached the top of the stair, Vogel fired again, this time only missing him by inches.

  He went through the old castle by a blend of instinct and race-memory. Jude’s castle . . . Ahasuerus had come in this direction, and although Isarel had no idea of whether he was on Ahasuerus’s heels, he ran unerringly through the dark intersecting corridors and the galleried landings that Jude would certainly have known, several times dodging into the shelter of a shadowy stair or a deep alcove to miss Vogel and his followers as they pounded after him. I’m shaking them off, he thought with sudden hope. But I’ve no idea where I am really. Unless I’ve fallen through into Jude’s time.

  He half fell down a narrow winding side stair that debouched on to a small inner courtyard. Was this the western boundary of the castle? And some kind of half-hidden gate half buried in the wall where the ivy had been pulled aside? Is that the way they came? Isarel glanced about him, but there was no sign of Ahasuerus. Yet the ivy looked as if it had only just been torn back. Into the wall, then.

  The green shadows closed about him at once, and he went forward cautiously, forcing his eyes to adjust to the dimness. The thought that he might be going into a trap was strongly in his mind, but it looked as if Ahasuerus might have come this way, and Ahasuerus had Moira. Isarel set his teeth and plunged forward. There was barely four feet of width between the two walls, and if Vogel followed and fired again, it would be impossible to dodge the bullets.

  He reached the immense iron doors, and stopped short, eyeing them warily. Half-open doors. And unless he had completely lost his sense of direction they went straight into the hill on the castle’s western side. Why would anyone cut doors into a hill, for heaven’s sake? Isarel glanced helplessly behind him, and then took a deep breath and plunged forward. He was still fearful of a trap, but he would far rather pit his strength and whatever wits he had left against an undead High Priest from the past, than face a loaded revolver. Especially when the undead High Priest had got Moira.

  Once through the doors, he caught a glimpse of light up ahead, and the sound of voices. As he moved towards them, there came from outside the pounding of feet in the walled passage and a scuffling. Isarel swung round – Vogel? – and heard with cold horror a huge hollow clanging reverberating through the tunnel, shaking the ground and dislodging little flurries of earth from the sides and the ceiling.

  He stood very still, his eyes raking the darkness. That’s it then. Vogel and his minions have shut me in. Then it’s onwards and upwards. No it isn’t, it’s onwards and downwards. I’ll just hope that one of those voices is Moira and that the other is Ciaran. I don’t want it to be Ciaran, because I’d rather think of him somewhere outside, still free. But he’d be an ally.

  He went towards the voices, and the feeling that he had had earlier of walking farther and farther outside of Time returned. I’m leaving Time behind, he thought. I’m entering into something so drenched in agony and despair and desolate torment that it’s scarcely bearable. If Eisenach has any ghosts, they don’t walk in the castle: they’re down here. God, this is a terrible place.

  His eyes were still adjusting to the dimness, but he could see a door ahead, half open into a long brick-lined room. There was the glint of red hair, and Isarel felt the relief wash over him. Moira. Yes, but where’s Ahasuerus? Isarel walked into the room, and stood for a moment, blinking.

  He saw Ciaran with huge thankfulness mixed with bitterness – so Vogel got him, did he? – and he saw that with Ciaran was a young woman with straight black hair and smudges of exhaustion under her eyes. Kate Kendal, thought Isarel. Ciaran’s lady, the one we’ve come half across Europe to find. She’s not quite what I thought she’d be. But there’s no sign of Ahasuerus. Then it’s the four of us and the ghosts.

  The ghosts . . .

  Standing at the centre of the room, watching Isarel, was a thin-faced man with the translucent pallor of extreme age and smouldering dark eyes and long sensitive hands. As Isarel stared at him, the present began to dislocate again and to fuse with the past; the room started spinning so that he had to put out a hand to the wall to stop himself from falling. Outside of Time . . .

  ‘Isarel,’ said the old man, and his voice was like deep soft velvet. There was a pause, and then, ‘Come inside and join our captivity,’ said Jude.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The room had stopped spinning at last, and Isarel was sitting on the floor along with the other three, his back against the brick wall. Jude was still standing at the centre. Position of authority, thought Isarel. I bet it’s deliberate, as well. Good for him; I don’t think I could stand up if my life depended on it.

  There was still a strong feeling of distortion and he could not get a proper grasp on reality. He could pin down individual thoughts: important things like escaping and Moira and Ahasuerus – God yes, where is Ahasuerus? – but he could not make them link up in his mind.

  He could only think that here in front of him was the legend. He didn’t die, thought Isarel. All those years, all those stories . . . I can’t take my eyes off him; I don’t think any of us can. He glanced at Moira and saw that she was curled up in one corner, her chin resting on her bent knees, her hair tumbling about her shoulders. But she was not looking at Jude, she was looking at Isarel and this brought a faint, far-off comfort. In a minute his thoughts would start to mesh properly again.

  For what seemed to be a very long time no one spoke, and when the silence was finally broken, Isarel heard with a shock that it was his own voice.

  ‘You’re alive,’ he said. ‘You didn’t die at Nuremberg.’ And thought, Well, at least I can string a cogent sentence together.

  ‘The Nuremberg Trial was a fake,’ said Jude. ‘I was never there.’

  ‘You’ve been here all along? All these years—’

  ‘Yes.’

>   ‘Vogel’s prisoner,’ said Isarel, and there was a long pause before Jude answered.

  But he said, ‘Yes. I have been Vogel’s prisoner – the first Vogel, Karl, then later his son and now his grandson, Conrad. I have been their prisoner ever since the Nazis found out what I was doing.’ He stopped, and Isarel thought: his voice is like no voice I ever heard. It’s like deep blue midnight. Like vintage red wine or a cat’s fur.

  He asked, ‘What you were doing . . .?’ and Jude said,

  ‘I wasn’t working for the Nazis. I was working against them.’

  It was as vivid as if it had been yesterday. All those years, all the decades inside Eisenach, a solitary castle prisoner, rather as Rudolf Hess had been a solitary prisoner inside Spandau. Karl Vogel and his family had allowed Jude to work and to compose, because they had never ceased to covet the Chant, and although the captivity had been absolute, it had been a silken one.

  But it was still too easy to look back across the loop of time, to see the years melt and blur, until he might have been in Auschwitz with the sounds of mass murder echoing about the bare wooden concert hut.

  When he had stopped being sick in the washbasin in the corner of his room in the officers’ quarters, he lay on the narrow bed, drinking neat whiskey from the bottle. The fiery spirit burned his throat and scalded his stomach but it did not erase the nightmare images printed on his brain.

  It was nearly midnight when Otto Burkhardt knocked on the door and by then Jude was so drunk that he could hardly stand up.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Burkhardt opened the door and stood just inside the door, looking down. Jude’s hair was tumbling over his forehead, he had discarded his evening tie and his shirt was unbuttoned at the neck. He stayed where he was, supine on the bed, the whiskey bottle held loosely in one hand. It was the height of discourtesy, but he was too drunk to care about being courteous to this animal.

  Burkhardt regarded him with the insinuating smile that Jude found so repulsive. ‘I have come to convey to you the thanks of my masters, Herr Weissman,’ he said. ‘Your music made for a smoother operation than usual. A total of eight hundred—’

  Eight hundred lambs to the slaughter. Suffocated and then shovelled into ovens and burned to charred anonymity.

  ‘I have brought for you a gesture of our appreciation,’ said Burkhardt and stepped back, so that Jude could see the young female Nazi officer who stood at his side. ‘A token of gratitude from my masters for your performance.’

  ‘Performance?’ The word came out slurred but not as slurred as it might have been.

  The smile deepened. ‘The music,’ said Burkhardt softly. ‘We are immensely grateful to you, Herr Weissman.’ He glanced at the girl. ‘I find,’ he said in a different tone, ‘that executions often have an aphrodisiacal effect. And so—’

  Jude looked at the girl and felt a sudden crude lust, born not of desire or simple sexual hunger, but of anger and hatred. He set down the half-empty whiskey bottle, and sat up, looking at the girl. A Nazi. It would be a small revenge, but—

  He nodded dismissal to Burkhardt and pulled the girl inside, locking the door. She was thin and blonde, and she had cold, greedy eyes. She stood before him, her eyes raking his body, and then said softly, ‘Anything you wish, Herr Weissman. I will do anything you wish.’

  Jude, his lips set in a hard cold line, said, ‘Will you indeed, my dear?’

  A thin grey dawn was breaking outside when the girl finally stumbled from his bed. Jude, torn between fierce exultation and bitter self-disgust, waited until she had gone and then slid from under the sheets, and pulled on trousers and a thick dark sweater. He dashed cold water on to his face, and padded cautiously outside, scanning the camp for sentries.

  A sprinkling of coarse ash covered the roof of the death houses, and a heavy, fat-laden scent clung to the air. Jude glanced at the narrow brick chimneys.

  It was easier than he had expected to dodge the guards, and at this hour there were only a couple of token patrols. They marched exactly in step, and Jude, keeping in the shadows of the serried rows of barracks, timed the steps absently. If you were writing music to reflect this, it would be thin and metallic. Lots of tympani, maybe even one of those small hand drums called a timbrel. Very, very staccato. Concentrate, Jude. He crossed the deserted compound to the nearest of the prisoners’ huts.

  He had not dared to hope he would be able to get inside, but he saw at once that several of the huts had doors that rolled down from the roof and secured into the ground with bolts, rather like a huge roll-top desk. He crossed swiftly to the nearest, and bent to lift the bolts, cautiously pushing the steel shutter up until a band of blackness showed at the bottom. Enough to squeeze through but not enough to be noticed.

  He crawled underneath, making as little sound as possible, and once on the other side, stood up, trying to get his bearings. The first thing to assail his senses was the smell: human sweat and unwashed human flesh and hair, and above it all, so strong that it was like a solid wall, the warm, fetid stench of human excrement. He stayed absolutely still, aware that there were dozens of people in here, but unable to see them and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the light.

  And then out of the blackness in front of him, a voice said, ‘There’s somebody in here with us.’

  It was unexpectedly eerie to hear that whispery voice coming out of the dark, but Jude stayed where he was, waiting and listening, trying to assess what was in here. After a moment, a second voice said, ‘You’re right. Somebody’s crept in. Somebody’s crept in from outside and is hiding in here listening to us.’

  ‘A spy,’ said another voice. ‘A spy standing inside the door listening to us.’

  Jude, trying to make out the direction of the voices, still trying to penetrate the dimness, said clearly, ‘I’m not a spy. I want to talk to you. If you have any way of making a light, please will you do so.’ There was a pause, and then the scrape of a tinder box. Three or four tiny candle flames burned up. Half a dozen or so faces swam through the darkness, lit from below to hollow disembodied life.

  ‘It’s the composer,’ hissed the voice who had spoken first of all. ‘The one who played earlier today.’

  ‘The one who helped to send a batch of prisoners to the chambers.’

  ‘He’s one of Burkhardt’s jackals.’

  ‘Or one of Vogel’s.’

  ‘I’m not a spy,’ said Jude again. ‘Won’t you believe that?’

  ‘You’re with the Gestapo.’

  ‘We know all about you.’

  Their voices were harsh with anger and bitterness and Jude took a grip on his senses. Speaking clearly and firmly, he said, ‘Listen to me, please. I’m a Jew, like all of you.’

  ‘If you’re a Jew, you’re a traitor,’ said the one who had called for the candle to be lit. ‘You’re a renegade.’

  ‘Here to spy out our secrets and go running to the Gestapo.’

  ‘We know about spies and traitors in here.’

  Jude said very clearly, ‘Shema Y’Isroel, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echod—’

  There was an abrupt silence, and then, the one who seemed to be the leader said, ‘Traitors have quoted the Holy Word before. It means nothing.’

  ‘I’m not a traitor,’ said Jude. ‘And I’m not here to spy on you. I’m here to help you escape.’

  The flickering candlelight burned up more brightly then, showing the inside of the long hut, and Jude felt his senses reel because this was the worst thing yet.

  Directly in front of him, perhaps two feet away from the roll-down corrugated doors, was a wall of steel and mesh extending out of the concrete floor and stretching up into the iron roof above. Thick bars were interleaved with spiked wire, and at the centre a tiny door had been cut, barely three feet in height, barely two feet across. It was impossible to avoid the impression of a cage with a hinged flap for a door.

  But it’s a cage for humans, thought Jude, appalled. The flap is for them to crawl in and out.

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nbsp; The prisoners were clustered at the bars, watching him, and at first sight there seemed to be dozens: thin, ravaged-eyed creatures, scantily clad in tattered shirts and trousers. There were no seats although a few bundles of rags had been arranged near the wall.

  At the far end was a circular, wooden-sided barrel, about three feet high. A lid had been drawn across it, but even at this distance the stench of urine and faeces was overwhelming, and even in the wavering light of the thin dripping candles, it was possible to see where runnels of fluid trickled out between the seams.

  At the other side of the hut, as far from the dreadful wooden barrel as possible, was a squat iron stove: a metal cup stood on it as if some liquid was being warmed, and several of the prisoners were huddled round it, their skeletal hands held out to it. Jude, trying to take everything in, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organised grouping, as if turns were taken to stand at the stove for a few minutes of warmth or a sip of the fluid.

  A slow, deep anger began to burn, and he went as near to the terrible cage as he could, and said, ‘I’m going to free you.’

  ‘All of us?’ said the leader jeeringly.

  ‘No. But as many of you as I can.’

  They stared at him, and without warning, the painful light of hope began to dawn in their eyes.

  The spark of anger that had been lit in the makeshift concert hall at Auschwitz – the anger that was to stay with him through the years ahead – burned up into a steady strong flame.

  He thought, afterwards, that at times it was only that pure clear flame of anger that kept him going. Certainly it spurred him on.

  He had traded on the reputation he had already earned with the Piper suite, and it had stood him in good stead in those early days in Poland and Eastern Germany.

  He maintained a cold arrogance towards Vogel and Burkhardt, and at intervals he made imperious demands. My orchestra has lost two violinists, a cellist; if you want me to go on playing for you, you must let me replace them with people of my choosing. I know of a very good violinist incarcerated inside Dachau . . . or Buchenwald . . . Once brought out, the musicians could be provided with papers and sent to safety in Switzerland or England and Canada. It was not a ploy that could be used many times, but it worked for a while.