The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  It was very quiet and very still inside the palace, with an eerie silence that made me want to keep glancing behind me because nothing, not even a Tibetan monastery, could possibly be this silent. Not that this turned out to be a Tibetan monastery. If only it had.

  Our companion stayed some little distance from us and pointed to the far side of the courtyard, to what looked like a small stone outbuilding with narrow windows. ‘There you may rest until light,’ he said. ‘Then you can leave.’

  Now I admit that neither of us had been expecting deferential servants or a Kettners or Café Royal supper hastily prepared in our honour – ‘Dear me, sirs, of course it’s no trouble, and we always get the theatre crowds in about this time anyway’ – or cans of hot water brought in by acquiescent chambermaids (this last a pity). But it had not occurred to either of us – at least, it had not occurred to me – that we would not even be shown to a room and provided with the means to wash. Theo said later this was natural arrogance and due to my having been spoiled from birth, but this is unfair. Arrogant or not, this off-hand dismissal, to say nothing of banishing us to what looked like the Tibetan equivalent of the cow-shed (yak-shed?), set my teeth on edge. Whatever else people might say about the British no one can say they take kindly to being dismissed to yak-sheds.

  So I said sharply, ‘What is this place? And who are your people?’

  ‘This is the gateway to the city of Tashkara.’

  ‘You said that before. But we still don’t know who you are.’ I waited, and the cloaked figure seemed to flinch for a moment as if an immense weight had been placed across his shoulders and as if he were summoning strength to bear it. Then he seemed to stand up straighter, and turning so that the moonlight fell across him, he pushed back the hood and stood with the cool silver moonlight shining on his face.

  At first I thought it was a huge dog who stood there and wild ideas of some kind of freakish mating ritual skittered across my mind. This was something not wholly human: it was a giant hound that had learned human speech and ways and put on human clothes.

  And then the blurred voice said, ‘The leonine appearance is characteristic of some stages of the disease. The nose flattens as the bone dissolves and the cheeks become pendulous.’ His tone was so dispassionate, yet so edged with defiant bravery, that the grisly visions splintered and formed in a different pattern.

  But neither Theo nor I spoke, and after a moment the man said, ‘I am sorry to subject you to it, but only by seeing would you have believed and understood. And in other circumstances, gentlemen, I should take your hand in the ancient courteous gesture of welcome and I should invite you to join me and my people at our evening meal. But you understand that to touch me is very unsafe for you.’

  Theo made an abrupt movement and then was still. I was staring at the man – I’m ashamed to admit it, but I could not look away – and the dreadful pattern was locking into place, and pity and fear and dawning comprehension were all tumbling chaotically through my mind. Fragments of barely known, half-forgotten knowledge jostled for recognition, and with them memories of terrible superstitions surrounding an old, old disease, disfiguring beyond imagination and fiercely contagious, and progressing relentlessly to an early and agonising death.

  Leprosy. We were about to spend the night inside a leper colony.

  Lewis had taken a train to Bath, partly because he wanted to avoid the M4 commuters, but mostly because he enjoyed railway journeys.

  It was not something you were supposed to do these days. You were supposed to complain bitterly about the rail services, and make jokes about the food and the lateness of the trains. Much better – much more convenient – to go to and fro by road, said people.

  But Lewis, who disliked driving and found motorways tedious, liked trains. He enjoyed the atmosphere of railway stations with all the transience of travellers and the anticipation of dozens of different journeys. He rarely spoke to fellow travellers but he liked the brief propinquity as much as the anonymity. You got the same kind of thing at airport lounges, of course, and ferry terminals.

  He bought a newspaper at Paddington and unfolded it when he reached his seat. All kinds of awfulness in the headlines as usual: wars and famines and plunging economies and recessions. There was another of the half-sensationalist, half-prurient articles about the disappearances of male prostitutes in London’s East End. Lewis read it with only half of his mind. It was the kind of thing the press hyped up these days, and if the disappearances had not taken place close to Jack the Ripper’s old hunting ground, and if most of them had not been rent boys, the national press would never have bothered with the story.

  He folded the paper and sipped his cooling coffee, staring unseeingly through the window. The press would make an even greater hype over Grendel if they knew about him: Raffael had seen that at once. He had not believed Lewis’s story about a kidnapping; Lewis had not expected him to. Because, of course, Grendel had not been kidnapped.

  Grendel.

  Through the modern sounds of the swaying train and of other passengers talking and a faint distorted hum from somebody’s Walkman across the aisle, Lewis felt his mind loop back, and the dark ancient evil that he had fought to bury, begin to uncoil once more.

  He had been thinking of the journalists as he crossed the perilous rope bridge to the ancient stone palace all those years ago. The son of the disgraced Charles Chance had still been strong news in those days, and Lewis had thought with cynical amusement how livid the press would have been at missing such a piece of copy as this and how they would have had a field day with the headlines. ‘Dishonoured banker’s son enters cannibal lair . . . Charles Chance went into the money-lenders’ den and lost his head: now his son goes intrepidly into that of the carnivores . . .’

  Cal, the guide, had not viewed it as intrepid; in fact he had viewed it as suicide. He had fled, shaking his head in horror at the madness of the Englishman who went out in the midday sun to meet the Flesh-Eaters, but before he fled Lewis had persuaded him to return in two days’ time at noon for the journey back to Lhasa.

  ‘Because I shan’t pay you until we’re both safely back.’

  ‘Sir, I would give up all the wealth of my ancestors, ten-fold, not to face the Flesh-Eaters.’

  Lewis was inclined to be extremely sceptical about flesh-eating tribes in the twentieth century – unless you were going to count beefy-jowled gentlemen who dined richly in London clubs – and he was exasperated rather than anything else by Cal’s behaviour. But he let him go with a cursory nod and, without looking to see in which direction Cal went, turned to face the awe-inspiring mountain palace across the gorge.

  Negotiating the rope bridge was awkward and his balance tilted dangerously for the first few feet, but it was not as bad as he had feared. He looked once at the foaming hurling river below and did not look again.

  When he finally reached the other side he was light-headed and dazzled by the pure clear light, but he was safe. He rested for an hour – he was fairly well adjusted to the altitude by this time, but it still took its toll – sipped some Evian water from the bottle in his haversack, and then set off along the narrow cliff path that wound up to the stone gates. Giants’ gates, Patrick had called them: the gates to hell. Why had Patrick seen them as that? Because of the Decalogue? Even the silent acknowledgement of the word sent shivers of apprehension through his mind. But you might as well face it, thought Lewis, this is what this is all about: the ancient Stone Tablets of the lost Tribe of the Bubasti. The Taskhara Decalogue. It’s got a seductively evocative ring to it – I don’t blame Patrick for trying to find them. I don’t suppose he’d blame me either. I shan’t find them, of course, because I don’t believe they exist. But I shan’t be able to forget about them until I’ve disproved Patrick’s story.

  Patrick had called the Stone Tablets Satan’s Decalogue, but it was probably better not to trust entirely a young man who had left that astonishing account of dark romance and ancient allure but who, in modern parlance
, had ducked out in the end. He told a good deal, thought Lewis between exasperation and admiration, but he kept a good deal back as well. From a spirit of mischief, or from fear? For all Lewis knew, Patrick could have been on the payroll of Thomas Cook and the whole legend of the Tashkara Decalogue a nineteenth-century publicity stunt. I don’t know what I’m going into, he thought a bit grimly. But here I go anyway.

  It was faintly disconcerting to find that despite the thin translucent daylight, the twisted bronze wall brackets did indeed hold burning torches. Lewis paused, eyeing them. Lights always left burning for the traveller . . . But how many travellers would come this way in the course of a year? His sense of unreality increased. But I wish Patrick hadn’t written that about the gates of hell. Or, if he had to write it, I wish I hadn’t remembered it.

  The dark-clad figure standing silent and motionless inside the gates sent his heart racing with sudden fear, and he stopped abruptly. The light from the burning torches fell across the figure, and for a disconcerting moment Lewis thought his eyes showed red. And then the man stepped forward, smiling and holding out his hand and after all he was quite ordinary, dressed in unremarkable trousers and cotton shirt, and if he was not European, he was clearly not Eastern either. He had the black silky hair and the soaring cheekbones that Lewis associated with Eurasians, and his hair was worn rather long, although not in the lank Western fashion of the time. His skin was the colour of light clear honey and his eyes were not red but a hard clear green. There was absolutely no reason to be afraid of him.

  The man said, in heavily accented but recognisable English, ‘Welcome, traveller, to the palace of Tashkara.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  If he was a Flesh-Eater, he had very good manners. He took Lewis through the palace into a small cool room with a breathtaking view of the mountain, and slanting light falling in pure luminous swathes across the polished wooden floor. There was a narrow bed and a chair and a tiny deal table with an old-fashioned copper ewer filled with water. A tranquil-faced Buddha figure with a tiny brass burner beneath it looked down from a small alcove, and there was a drifting scent of something that in a Western church Lewis would have identified as incense.

  ‘When you have washed and rested you will join us for supper? We shall eat in a little more than one hour from now. Someone will come to show you the way.’

  ‘I really only intended to ask if I could rest here before going on,’ said Lewis.

  ‘But tonight we hold one of our feasts,’ said the man, and a smile lifted his lips. ‘You will be very welcome to join us.’

  ‘Then thank you very much,’ said Lewis. ‘You speak very good English, by the way.’

  ‘I learned it as a child from an English missionary worker.’

  ‘Whoever he was he did a good job. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name—’

  ‘I am known as Kaspar,’ said the man.

  ‘Then thank you, Kaspar.’ Lewis waited until the man turned to leave, and taking a deep breath, said, ‘Tell me, do you know anything about Touaris?’

  Touaris . . . It was as if he had dropped a stone into a quiet forest pool, or scratched a jagged fingernail across thin silk. The name rasped on the air with jarring dissonance. Kaspar stopped abruptly in the act of opening the door and looked back at Lewis. I’ve rattled him, thought Lewis. I don’t think I’ll mention the Decalogue yet; I’ll see how he copes with this first.

  Kaspar was regarding Lewis unblinkingly and for an instant it was as if a veil had lifted, and there was a brief vivid glimpse of something alien and cruel. Lewis felt an icy finger trace a path down his spine, but he met the man’s regard levelly and at last Kaspar said, ‘Where did you hear of Touaris?’ He pronounced it almost as Lewis had done, but there was a noticeably different emphasis.

  ‘I don’t recall,’ said Lewis untruthfully. ‘Perhaps it was mentioned in Lhasa. What is Touaris?’

  There was another of the pauses, this time as if Kaspar was considering how to answer. Then he said, ‘Touaris was a tribal queen who ruled over her people in the valley beyond this palace for many centuries. Once the palace was one of the gateways to her realm. You have a word – fortress? Meaning a guarding place.’

  ‘Bastion, perhaps. But – the same lady ruling for hundreds of years?’ said Lewis disbelievingly.

  ‘It is a very old legend,’ said Kaspar. ‘But it is possible that as each queen died a selected one took her place.’

  ‘Like a female Dalai Lama?’ Lewis had said it half flippantly, but Kaspar appeared to take it straight.

  ‘Yes, that is a good way to explain it,’ he said. ‘The legend tells how she and her ancient religion were very closely guarded and that a terrible punishment was dealt to those who dared enter her realm.’

  ‘The Forbidden City?’ said Lewis lightly.

  ‘There are many forbidden cities in Tibet,’ said Kaspar dismissively. ‘But the Tribe of Touaris has long since died out. You will join us for our feast?’

  ‘I will.’ Lewis did not say that he did not seem to have much choice.

  ‘I shall send for you in an hour’s time.’

  ‘I shall be here.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kaspar. ‘You will be here.’ He paused and added very softly, ‘We shall enjoy having you at our table.’

  He went out and Lewis sat down on the bed. Only someone monumentally thick-skinned would have missed the menace in Kaspar’s voice, and only an absolute fool would fail to pick up the dark undercurrents. The fact that the setting had most of the elements of the classic horror story could be disregarded: the lone traveller requesting shelter in the remote mountain fortress: the hints of grisly practices from the frightened guide. And that Parthian shot: We shall enjoy having you at our table. It was all so obvious – it seemed so contrived – that you could say it was stagy, in fact you could very nearly say it was farcical. Look chaps, here comes another sucker, set up the atmospheric lighting and slap on the weird make-up. And then let’s just run through the low-pitched I-am-a-sinister-character voice again, shall we . . .?

  Thinking all this made Lewis feel very much better, although none of it altered the fact that there were any number of unpleasant fates that could befall lone travellers: you did not have to enter the fantastical realms of cannibalism or ritual slaughter to visualise them, either. ‘Accidents’ could happen very easily out here where there were no police or embassies or post mortems. A stumble on the hillside, a footing missed crossing the gorge . . . The Englishman has fallen to his death – how very unfortunate. Still, there are a good many valuable things in his knapsack, and there is a large sum of money as well.

  Lewis frowned and got up to rinse away the grime of his travels. The water was soft and pure and it refreshed him physically and mentally. He dried his face and hands and moved to the window.

  Under his room, some thirty or forty feet below, was a large courtyard enclosed on all sides by the palace walls. The smoky eastern twilight was already veiling the vast palace, but more burning torches had been thrust into the wall brackets and in the flickering light Lewis could see forty or fifty people apparently preparing for a banquet. They all bore a strong resemblance to Kaspar himself and to one another, although Lewis, watching unseen, thought this was to be expected in such a remote district where there would be inbreeding. The men all had straight black hair like watered silk, growing low on the forehead. Widow’s peak? Vampire’s brow? No, you can’t have cannibals and vampires both together, that would be really overdoing it. The women were as tall as the men and well-muscled, and there did not seem to be any of the subservience that Lewis, recently come from the bra-burning women’s libbers in England, had found so noticeable in Lhasa and Delhi.

  They were arranging platters of fruit and bread near to what looked like a low stone table, roughly ten feet square, and several of the men were carrying out stone flagons which Lewis supposed contained wine. There was an air of festivity and they were all calling to one another and laughing, and although Lewis had no kn
owledge of their language he could hear the spiralling excitement. A growing fear tugged at his mind again. I think this is the time to beat a retreat. If I go now, while they’re absorbed in their preparations, I might be able to creep through the palace unseen and out into the night. He remembered the dangers of the Tibetan night – wild animals, parties of marauding robbers, never mind hypothermia from the bitter cold – but he would rather face any of them or all of them than Kaspar’s people.

  In the courtyard one of the men began to tap against the sides of a deep-throated skin-drum, producing a steady rhythmic thrumming, so filled with dark throbbing anticipation that Lewis felt his scalp prickle. A death roll: a dirge. Yes, but filled with such potency. It was at this point that the whole thing suddenly ceased to seem stagy and faintly absurd, and became menacing.

  Kaspar’s people were assembling on the edges of the courtyard, several of them holding burning torches aloft. Several more had joined the wine- and fruit-carriers, and it was impossible to avoid the impression of an audience gathering to witness some kind of spectacle. The flickering light poured over the scene, showering the watchers with twisting crimson and orange. Most of them wore only a narrow loin cloth made of some dark soft stuff, and the women had a twist of the same material over their breasts. The feeling that something was about to happen mounted, and Lewis’s heart began to pound with fear and anticipation.

  And then the women who had been setting up the stone table moved back to take their places, and for the first time Lewis had a clear view. A wave of cold sick horror lashed against his mind, and for a moment the small bare room spun around him.