The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘I know it sounds far-fetched, but her name is Touaris and—’

  ‘How old did you say she is?’

  ‘Well, Fenris and the others said nearly three thousand years, but of course that can’t be right—’

  ‘You said a cat goddess,’ said Theo, bristling with hostility. ‘You said a three-thousand-year-old cat goddess who lets the lepers live here and occasionally sends them the scraps from her ceremonial feasts.’

  ‘Yes, the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, or rather the woman’s—’

  ‘With a temple deep inside a forbidden city.’

  ‘Well, yes, there’s supposed to be a temple. Actually it all sounds very interesting. According to Fenris and Sridevi the cult started in ancient Egypt with the Bubasti tribes. A group of them were exiled sometime during the eleventh dynasty, when the princes of Thebes were beginning to spread their power under one of the pharaohs – I forget which one. Anyway, a small group travelled east until they reached a remote part of Tibet.’

  ‘Why were they exiled?’ demanded Theo suspiciously.

  ‘Religious persecution. The Egyptians worshipped the cat goddess Bastet, you see—’

  ‘Yes, I do know that, Patrick.’

  ‘And the original Touaris was the divinity of childbirth and horribly ugly, but the rebels held that that was a distortion, and that the real Touaris was dazzlingly beautiful.’

  Theo muttered something that sounded like, ‘Trust you to come across the legend of a beautiful woman even out here.’

  ‘According to Fenris, some of the tribe had begun to practise a forbidden mixture of the two worships,’ I said, repressively. ‘The cat goddess and the fertility goddess. But it was frowned on by Pharaoh, and if Pharaoh frowned on you in those days, you were destined for a very nasty end indeed. So the Bubasti rebels brought Touaris – their Touaris – and the cult to Tibet.’

  ‘And Touaris is still living – how many years on did you say?’

  ‘Well, three thousand was mentioned, but obviously it isn’t the same Touaris, and if you’d only listen—’

  ‘I don’t want to listen,’ said Theo irritably, punching his thin pillow and hunching the blanket crossly about his shoulders. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it, because if anyone is going to commit the supreme folly of going into the ancient temple of some pseudo-immortal cat goddess it isn’t going to be me!’

  It’s a pity about Theo. Wonder if I had told him that Touaris is believed to be guarded by four score female attendants of outstanding beauty he would have changed his mind? Apparently there’s a ceremonial mating ritual as well, which Fenris, suddenly and surprisingly prim, says is licentious, depraved, orgiastic, and, what’s worse, performed in public.

  ‘Not,’ he says firmly, ‘anything that English gentlemen would care to witness.’

  To hell with witnessing it. If we can find it we’ll take part in it.

  Later. The gut-wrenching pity I felt earlier turns out to be not so much due to what the Bible terms shutting up the ‘bowels of compassion’ as to bowels scoured by unripe wine. I only wish mine had shut up, because I’ve just crawled back from an exceedingly unpleasant half-hour in the rudimentary but mercifully serviceable wooden hut on the edge of the palace compound. To start with I feared the lepers simply dig holes like soldiers in battlefields, but they have a couple of earth closets discreetly situated, and I staggered into the nearest and prayed not to die. Squalid and sordid to die crouching over a wooden box with a hole in the top, retching your guts up at the same time.

  On the second trip I discovered with horror what I had been too far in extremis to notice the first time: namely that the hut and its contraption are wedged precariously on a couple of planks suspended over part of the swirling river. Everything simply drops through! Remembered with fresh nausea all the times Theo and I had drunk from mountain streams (tributaries of this very river, of course), and then had to dash inside again for another bout of vomiting and purging.

  ‘Serve you right for drinking too-young wine,’ said Theo disapprovingly, but at least he put a basin by my bed, and brought me a glass of milk.

  ‘The sanitation here is appalling,’ I said plaintively.

  ‘There isn’t any sanitation. I don’t know about leprosy, we’ll both be lucky if we don’t end up with cholera.’

  At this rate I’ll never get within leering distance of the four score females of outstanding beauty, never mind what somebody once called prick-ing distance. Perhaps it’s as well. After three trips in as many hours to that noisome wooden hut I couldn’t prick so much as a flea.

  The pulsating drumbeats had ceased when Lewis and Kaspar reached the courtyard, and the Flesh-Eaters were clustering around the terrible Altar, eager greed in every curve of them. Their half-naked bodies gleamed in the flaring torchlight and their lips curled back, showing the pronounced canine teeth. The air was rich with the aroma of roasting meat and laden with voracious hungers, and Lewis had the extraordinary sensation that if he reached out he could plunge his hands wrist-deep into the atmosphere and scoop up handfuls of it.

  Kaspar moved to the head of the Burning Altar. He’s their leader, thought Lewis: I ought to have seen it straightaway. I wonder if it was only by chance that he was the one who met me at the palace entrance?

  The burned mound of flesh that had once been Cal was no longer moving, but it was still recognisable as a human being. The hair had gone and the fingers and toes had blurred and melted into twisted lumps. A scatter of small hard chippings lay beneath the hands and feet where toenails and fingernails had fallen out. The face was shrivelled and almost burned away; scorched bones protruded through the cheeks and the jaw had fallen apart, showing cracked teeth. Around the eye sockets was a thin crispness where the eyes had burst and leaked. But the body – the trunk and the upper legs and arms and shoulders – was a huge meaty carcase, juicy and succulent, ready for the carving.

  As Lewis stood silently at the Altar’s foot, Kaspar’s people looked up, but no one moved and they were all plainly waiting for their leader’s signal. But anticipation shivered and thrummed on the air, thick and strong and powerful.

  Lewis said in a voice devoid of all emotion, ‘So that is how a human looks after he has been roasted on the Burning Altar.’ He met Kaspar’s gaze coolly. ‘And now?’

  ‘Now,’ said Kaspar, ‘we eat him.’

  At once the Flesh-Eaters surged forward, and the low groan of anticipation that Lewis had heard earlier on broke from them. The drumming began again, faster and filled with throbbing urgency. Kaspar regarded his people with a thin smile, almost as if he felt faint contempt for them, and then reached for the long glinting knife lying on the Altar’s edge.

  As the knife-blade was driven through the breast of Cal, thick fat spurted, and the watchers moved at once, holding out their hands to catch it and instantly smearing it sensuously into their bodies, their heads thrown back, their eyes half closed. Several more pressed forward eagerly, and Kaspar cut again. The flesh parted and Kaspar began systematically to slice portions away from the trunk and thighs, handing the steaming cooked flesh to his people. They took it avidly, the fat running over their hands and dripping from their fingers. As they crammed it into their mouths, grease ran down over their lips and chins, and several who had not yet been served leaned forward, salivating like animals.

  After the first few mouthfuls, the Flesh-Eaters began to dance at the courtyard’s centre, whirling in a frenzied leaping rhythm, holding up the remains of their food, their fingers running with grease, their lips and chins shiny. Three or four of the older ones sat cross-legged on the ground, holding thin rib bones horizontally to their lips, nibbling at the shreds of meat and then sucking on the bones.

  ‘The heart and entrails and stomach we bum,’ said Kaspar, glancing at Lewis. ‘But almost everything else is consumed. You are ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The dancers were growing more frenzied with every minute, and the men were seizing the
females, flinging them down on the ground and thrusting between their legs. Hands that were slicked with human grease and human fat slid between thighs and across breasts, leaving sticky trails. The burning torches flickered wildy, casting their reddish glow everywhere, and throwing the shadows of the dancers across the palace’s walls, grotesquely enlarged and distorted until they were scarcely human at all. The night sky was suffused with the crimson radiance, and Lewis, looking about him, thought: I was right about being in hell. These are the fire-drenched caverns that Dante wrote about and Milton.

  Kaspar waited with a kind of impersonal courtesy until the jerking coupling was over and the men and women sat up, and then handed Lewis a portion of the cooked flesh. It was warm and unexpectedly smooth to the touch, and as the scent reached Lewis’s nostrils, his mouth flooded with hunger-juice. A great waiting silence had fallen on the courtyard, and then without warning, the drummer began to tap against the skin-drum, not with the pounding sexual rhythm he had used earlier, but lightly and insidiously. At once the Flesh-Eaters began their chant again, and although the words were still unfamiliar, the meaning was unmistakable.

  ‘Eat . . . Eat . . . EAT . . .’

  Lewis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and breaking off a piece of the flesh, put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

  There was a low groan of triumph from the Flesh-Eaters. Lewis looked at them and then, meeting Kaspar’s stare across the Altar, held out his hand for more.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ginevra Craven, arriving in a tumble of untidily packed weekend bags and flying hair at King’s Cross early on Saturday morning, thought she had done rather well to get out of a boring family weekend.

  It had been nice of Elinor to ask her to the peculiar charity centre where she worked, and it was even better that poor old Aunt Nell had finally got some kind of life going for herself. Ginevra, diving into the Underground, which was already filling up with Saturday shoppers, thought it was exactly like her aunt to land herself some dreary charity job in the East End, although Lewis Chance sounded anything but dreary. She had seen a newspaper photograph of him and he had the slightly aloof good looks that you associated with front-bench politicians or captains of industry. He had an unmistakable air of authority as well, and authority was always tremendously sexy.

  Sexy authority was the reason why Ginevra was ducking out of Kensington this weekend. She would probably have to present herself for the family’s disapproval on one of the days, and if the family found out what she had been up to there would be a row the scale of the Hiroshima bomb, which would be ridiculous because screwing your English tutor was not a Hiroshima-level matter; it was only breaking the rules a very little bit. Anyway, Grandmother, with her stable of toy boys, had no room to talk. Grandfather, with his procession of bimbo secretaries had even less.

  Elinor was a different matter, though. She would listen with absorption to the details of Ginevra’s entanglement, and she would be round-eyed with astonishment over the good bits (‘Did he really say that to you, Ginevra? How marvellous!’), and comfortingly furious about the bad bits: ‘How dare the bastard leave you to pay the bill . . . borrow money . . . let you go home alone at 3 a.m. . . .’

  Ginevra had so far managed to don a flippant two-fingers-to-the-world face, but confronted with Elinor’s sympathy it might be difficult to maintain. She might very well find herself confessing that actually it had all been too devasting for words. In fact, if she were honest it had felt as if a knife were gouging her guts out when it ended, and it still sent her dashing into the loo to wail like a banshee at the least provocation. She had so far managed to keep the gut-agony and the banshee-wailing private, because when you were looked on as a bit of a heart-breaker yourself it was humiliating if people found out you had been taken in by the biggest screwer-around on the campus. It was mortifying to find you had been lured into bed with velvet-voiced quotations from John Donne and Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Twenty years ago he would have been called a wolf and a rat, that tutor. He was a rat anyway. He was not even a very good English tutor and he had probably looked up the Shelley and Donne lines in a dictionary of quotations.

  Chance House, when Ginevra reached it, impressed her. It looked as if there was still a good deal of work to be done, but whoever had controlled the renovation – Lewis Chance himself? – had done so tastefully; there did not seem to have been any self-conscious attempts to recreate the original Victorian floridity or to force jarring modernity into the old façade. The Prince of Wales had, in fact, mentioned the centre with approval in a speech to some Worshipful Order of something-or-others, and had called it an honest preservation of the old, blending harmoniously with the functional new. Ginevra, studying the building critically, saw what he meant. This was simply a place where people came to work, or be fed or helped, and where the most important things were not tarting up bulgy-cheeked cherubs or reproducing fleur-de-lis wall-coverings, but providing warmth and food and practical sympathy. She was not in an anti-Royal mood just now, so it was all right to acknowledge that she and the heir to the Throne had similar outlooks on architecture.

  It was a bit disconcerting not to be met by Elinor, but to be approached by a thin shabbily dressed man who came up to her in the large canteen-ish room beyond the main doors. ‘Miss Craven? Ginevra Craven?’

  ‘Yes?’ This was certainly not Lewis Chance, in fact it was more likely one of his down-and-outs. It might be someone they were rehabilitating because he looked a bit like a Pre-Raphaelite painter or writer ploughed under by drink, or a consumptive poet from the days when romance had a capital R. Oh God, not Keats again. Probably if you got to know him, rough trade would be nearer the mark.

  The man said, ‘This is a little difficult, Miss Craven, but I think you should come into Sir Lewis’s office and sit down.’

  He was not, after all, your usual run-of-the-mill down-and-out, in fact now that Ginevra came to study him more closely, he was not a down-and-out at all. There was not the pervasive unwashed-skin, greasy-hair smell. He had a slight unEnglish accent and although his clothes were shabby, he wore them with careless arrogance.

  ‘I am afraid,’ said the man, seating himself behind what was clearly Lewis Chance’s own desk, and looking entirely at home there, ‘that there is some awkward news to explain.’

  ‘What kind of awkward news?’ Wild notions of Elinor kidnapped, Elinor dead or raped, or locked up raving mad in an attic tumbled through Ginevra’s mind. My aunt . . .? Oh, we never talk about her . . . She’s kept chained and handcuffed in the garret . . . Concentrate, girl, this is important and serious. ‘What’s wrong with my aunt?’ said Ginevra.

  ‘I am afraid, Miss Craven, that she has vanished,’ said Raffael. And, as Ginevra stared at him, he added, ‘And up to now I have been unable to reach Sir Lewis Chance.’

  ‘Why not? Elinor said something about a conference in Bath—’

  ‘I have telephoned the hotel,’ said Raffael softly. ‘Lewis Chance was expected on Friday afternoon – yesterday. He had a room reserved and he was to address a seminar later today as well as being one of the after-dinner speakers this evening. But he did not arrive, and no one knows where he is.’

  As Lewis got off the train at Bath and made his way to the exit, he was trying to put the corroding fear for Grendel to the back of his mind.

  He had considered and discounted the possibility that Grendel might have escaped of his own accord and was somewhere at large in London. Mad as Grendel was, he could not have sawn through steel chains and got through two locked doors by himself. The chains had been strong: Lewis had made sure of it, even while his mind was shuddering from what he was doing. I’m chaining my son up in a cellar. It’s a silk-lined cellar and it’s very comfortable, because I’ve made it so, and he’ll barely be aware of the chains. But it’s still a cellar, and these are still chains.

  The only way the chains could have been removed was if someone had taken a blowtorch to them, or hammered free the
lock. And the only way the doors could have been opened was if someone had opened them either with a duplicate key or by force. He frowned. It was beginning to look as if somebody had been very anxious indeed to get hold of Grendel. His mind considered the likelihood of Raffael being implicated, but this was something else that could be instantly discounted. I’d trust him with my life, thought Lewis. It’s got to be Kaspar’s people, although I can’t yet see why. Revenge? Not after so long, surely? But if I’m right, they’ll make their demands and their reasons known fairly soon and then I can decide what to do. But until then I think the safest thing – for Grendel anyway – is to act as if I don’t know anything’s wrong.

  He forced his mind back to the conference, and crossing the platform he wondered if this would be one of those occasions when he would receive a subtle but unmistakable invitation from a lady. It would be flattering, of course, but there was no room in his mind for seduction this time.

  He came out of Bath Station and looked towards the taxi rank. It was almost five o’clock, and the rush hour was pretty well under way. Commuters were either setting out for home or just arriving back, and there was a queue for taxis. He hesitated, trying to remember how near to the station the hotel was, and wondering how much of a nuisance it would be to walk, and he was just making up his mind to stand in the taxi queue after all, when a youngish man wearing a dark jacket and a peaked cap vaguely suggesting a uniform, approached him and sketched a half-salute.

  ‘Sir Lewis Chance? I’m from the Royal, sir. Their car’s just over here.’ He reached for Lewis’s weekend case.

  ‘I didn’t realise I was being met,’ said Lewis.

  ‘Yes, sir. Cars for all the speakers at the conference.’

  ‘How efficient.’

  The young man deposited Lewis’s case into the boot and held the rear door open. Lewis, getting in, said, ‘This is very welcome. I was just cursing the lack of taxis.’