The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  As we neared Lhasa and the first outposts of civilisation again, Theo scribbled the question: ‘Would you have preferred your sentence to be carried out the other way round?’

  Blinded and saved before the castration? Yes, but you don’t need your sight to make love. I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  It was in Lhasa, in the hotel that had seemed spartan on the way out but now seemed luxurious, that I recalled the prophecy made by Touaris. It’s true that at the time I hadn’t been in any case to appreciate the finer points, even if Tamerlane’s translation could be trusted which was debatable. It’s also true that that hippo-faced old goddess had probably only been trying to steal my thunder, but all the same—

  All the same, prophecies sometimes have an unpleasant way of turning into threats, and threats have more than once erupted into full-blown quarrels.

  After we dined in the hotel’s sparse dining room that first night, and sat sipping Lhasa’s idea of brandy, I suddenly said, ‘Theo, I’ve reached a decision.’

  He looked up, and I smiled for the first time for what seemed a very long time. ‘There’s something we’ve got to do. And we’ve got to do it quickly.’

  He waited, and I said, ‘We’re going to Rome.’ And, as Theo looked startled, I said, ‘We’re going to see the Pope.’

  We didn’t get to the Pope, of course, but we got pretty close.

  We were received by some kind of aide, who treated us with exquisite courtesy, although for all I know he might simply have been a lowly priest with nice manners, kept on tap to deal with freakish people who turn up insisting they’ve had a vision of the Risen Christ, or attention-seekers announcing that the world’s going to end next Tuesday. Theo and I probably came outside both these categories – neither freak nor fowl nor good red herring.

  Father Karyl listened politely to the story of the Tashkara expedition and I gave him a severely pruned version of the events in the palace square, because it seemed a bit tasteless, not to say discourteous, to talk about castration and enforced celibacy in the presence of one who was celibate from choice. So I merely said that Theo had suffered the greater burden of punishment, and that the lepers’ rescue had been timely. Karyl probably knew there was more to it: real religeux have a disconcerting way of looking at you very directly as if they can strip away the verbiage and hear the truth, but his good manners forbade prying. Also it was nothing to do with the Vatican whether I was Casanova and Rabelais and Aretino rolled into one, or whether I was as impotent as a mule. Which I was.

  But when I related, as accurately as I could, the odd prediction that Touaris had made, Father Karyl leaned forward, his face alight with much more than politeness.

  ‘She actually said that, Mr Chance? That one day in the future the Tashkaran Decalogue would speak against Western civilisation?’

  ‘Well, as near as I can remember, she did. It wasn’t exactly a situation where you record every word.’

  ‘No, quite.’ He sat back, frowning, and then said abruptly, ‘I wonder if it would disrupt your plans to stay in Rome for a few days? You see, although it is almost certain that there is nothing in what the lady said, one is inclined to remember the parable of the wheat and the chaff.’

  ‘So one is.’ I gave him the address of our hotel. (Theo indicated afterwards that it would not have been out of place to have suggested that the Vatican footed the bill for the extra few days’ sojourn, but this was only Theo getting back on form, the old miser.)

  ‘I shall report this to the appropriate section of the Curia,’ said Father Karyl, and I waited for him to say, ‘But of course, these things take a very long time to consider.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Father Karyl, ‘A thing like this will be looked at very quickly indeed.’

  It would probably be three months at the most optimistic calculation. Six would be nearer the mark and a year the likeliest.

  Father Karyl said, ‘You will hear from us within two days,’ and ushered us out.

  I spent the next two evenings getting thoroughly drunk on several very palatable bottles of Chianti, and falling into conversation with the mandatory lady-travelling-alone in the hotel (there’s always at least one), who on this occasion was on the shady side of thirty-five, spoke not a word of English, but had polished the art of predatory flirtatiousness to a diamond-hard brilliance. It was a grim reminder of Tamerlane’s butchers, but it gave me a chance to try out my own skills as an illusionist.

  I think they passed muster. I think she believed my excuse of a vow (unspecified) that precluded my accepting her skilfully veiled suggestion. The excuse wouldn’t have done for an Englishwoman (will have to think up something more suitable when I reach London), but they’re very down-to-earth about vows in Rome; it’s the proximity of the Vatican.

  I think, also, that if anyone ever reads my entirely fictional account of our activities in her bedroom, they will find it credible, although on reflection I may have overdone the part with the lighted candles.

  In these very private pages, however, I can admit that when her bedroom door closed it closed with me outside it, and the sound had such a chilling ring of finality that bitter despair closed over my head afresh. This was what it would always be like from now on. There was as yet no indication that the nightmares might be starting to slide back across Sridevi’s silent black waters.

  Of the ushering in of the light there was no sign at all.

  Cardinal Gregory was most apologetic at having detained us on our travels, which he appeared to see as the outside of discourtesy, and seemed to think it necessary to make up for the solecism by giving us a kind of potted tour of some of the private sections of the Vatican before repairing to his own apartments.

  It stretches for miles, of course, this seat of Roman Catholicism, and we only saw a minute part. But it was a remarkable experience. It’s a curious and not-always-pleasant blend: sumptuous grandeur and ancient history, and achingly beautiful statuary and objets d’art, which they refer to in the most casual way imaginable. Gregory didn’t quite say things like, ‘Don’t trip over the Michelangelo,’ or, ‘Those Botticelli frescoes blot out the light a bit,’ but I had the feeling he might.

  There are unexpected little tucked-away chapels and oratories and tabernacles so that you keep falling into sudden pockets of extreme calm where the very walls are soaked with goodness and prayer, and then descending abruptly down odd dark passages where anything might have happened (and probably did). It’s disconcertingly impossible to forget all those frequently greedy and sometimes bloody battles that went on for power, and if the shades of any of the unscrupulous, power-seeking cardinals do walk in the Vatican, I’ll swear they walk in a particular stretch of corridor near the old Borgia apartments. Workmen had just started to restore the marvellous frescoes which Pinturicchio painted for Alexander Borgia and which later generations primly covered up, but even with dust sheets and bottles of linseed oil, and trestle tables tripping you up every few yards, the place had a dark sinister aura.

  But beneath all that there’s an innate and very orderly tranquillity, and more than once during that brief tour I felt as if a huge calming hand had laid itself across my mind (sliding back the nightmares at last, Sridevi . . .?). For some reason I could never explain, I didn’t ask Theo for his reactions; for myself I kept remembering the part in the New Testament where Christ commanded Peter the Fisherman to build a church on a rock and never to permit the gates of hell to prevail against it. They’d struggled to keep the gates locked and at times they’d struggled to keep them merely closed – physically as well as metaphorically – but the rock was still holding firm. So far, anyway.

  We crossed a small, sun-drenched quadrangle, leaving the ghosts behind with the turpentine and irreverently whistling workmen, and Cardinal Gregory led us into a low, ivy-covered wing with small heavily latticed windows. There was the good scent of old leather and even older timbers and a feeling of quiet unassuming scholarship. Our host seated himself at a desk, explained that we were in
a small wing of one of the libraries, and invited me to tell my story again. Theo passed me the notes we had compiled in the hotel the previous evening (before the wine-drinking, you understand, although after the apocryphal episode with the Italian signora), and I plunged in.

  Gregory listened absorbedly, making a few notes, and apparently taking it at face value – presumably the Old Testament had familiarised him with much more bizarre tales of visions and fiery prophecies – although he posed a number of very searching questions afterwards, which I struggled to answer.

  ‘I truly can’t be more specific, Your Eminence,’ I said, at last. ‘And I’m sorry that I can’t remember Touaris’s exact words. But for one thing they were in an unknown tongue, and for another we both thought we were facing death.’ At my side Theo nodded to indicate he should be identified with this.

  ‘Yes, it would concentrate the mind, to be facing execution,’ said the cardinal, without batting an eyelid, and I remembered that the Roman Church was as familiar with violent death and bloody martyrdom as it was with prophets. Gregory said, ‘But Father Karyl who reported to me, thought you had the spirit of the prophecy, if not the letter.’

  ‘I think we have.’

  ‘Then if I have understood correctly, the prophecy was both general and specific. The generality was that the Decalogue was an instrument of ancient vengeance, and that one day it would be revealed to the world.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The specific was that the hands of those who have power over their inferiors would one day wield the knowledge of the Stone Tablets of Tashkara.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I interpreted that to mean that some power-hungry despot might seize on it as a bargaining tool.’

  ‘It is a risky business to interpret prophecies, Mr Chance,’ said Gregory, but he smiled and at my side, Theo scribbled a question: ‘Does the Vatican take prophecies seriously these days?’

  ‘Well, we usually try,’ said Gregory. ‘It’s always tempting to write certain people off as hysterics, of course, but it’s as well to approach these things with an open mind. Neither of you seems to be at all hysterical, by the way.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that your extremely unpleasant experience warped your judgement,’ said His Eminence, showing that even the Church liked to hedge its bets. ‘I’m assuming you know the legend of the Decalogue, do you?’

  ‘About Satan casting it down to earth to rival Moses?’ It sounded entirely natural to say this in Gregory’s quiet room; although I wouldn’t want to put such a sentence to the test in Simpson’s or even – heaven forfend! – somewhere like St Stephen’s Music Hall! ‘The lepers knew something about it,’ I said. ‘And Father Karyl gave us more detail. It’s a – remarkable legend.’

  Theo scribbled a second question: ‘How much credence does the Vatican give the story?’ and for the first time Gregory hesitated.

  ‘You didn’t see them?’ he said. ‘The Stones of Vengeance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah. Well, we have never known how much was legend and how much was truth,’ he said. ‘But it is quite true that in our vaults is a certain extremely ancient document purporting to describe the ancient Stone Tablets brought out of Egypt by the Bubasti tribe nearly three thousand years ago.’

  ‘That part’s true?’

  ‘Oh yes, I should think so,’ said Gregory. ‘There are some unexplained things in the world, of course – I wouldn’t be in God’s service if I didn’t believe that. But there are also a great many explained but extremely ancient and valuable artefacts in the world, and I believe that the Tashkara Decalogue is simply one of them. But,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that would not stop someone making use of the legend and in the process damaging Western religions.’ He looked at me. ‘I think we have to treat this very carefully, Mr Chance.’

  I leaned forward. ‘What are you going to do?’

  It’s an odd feeling to know that you’ve contributed to what the Vatican calls the Secret Apocrypha Writings, but that was what we appeared to have done.

  Gregory was of the opinion that the prophecy made by Touaris must be recorded in what he referred to as the Codex Vaticanus Maleficarum, and that his successors should be made aware of its existence.

  ‘We have our own spy network, Mr Chance,’ he said, as he bade us farewell. ‘It is gentle but efficient. We shall watch Tamerlane’s people, quite unobtrusively, of course, and we shall ensure that the knowledge of the Decalogue does not get out.’

  ‘Well – I’m glad,’ I said.

  Gregory’s eyes rested on me thoughtfully. ‘I will pray for you both,’ he said unexpectedly.

  ‘I – thank you.’

  ‘Whatever was done to you, Mr Chance – to both of you –’ he included Theo in his look – ‘you will finally come to terms with it.’

  ‘Will we?’

  ‘Certainly. God never sends more suffering than His children can bear.’

  ‘It’s sometimes – very difficult to bear it, however.’

  ‘I am sure it is,’ said His Eminence. ‘But who told you that life was intended to be easy?’ He shook hands, and then sketched a minute gesture over us both, which I took to be the Sign of the Cross.

  Allowing for the difference in religion and nationality, it’s the same sentiment that Sridevi and Fenris expressed. I find it remarkable that the only things helping me to cling to life at the moment are the philosophies of a Tibetan leper and a Roman Catholic prelate.

  I suppose I should be hard-bitten and cynical and say I don’t give a damn what happens to a few bits of ancient stone, and that it doesn’t matter to me if Western religion is dealt a deathblow in some unimaginable future.

  But I find I do care. I find myself hoping that Gregory’s successors will take Touaris’s prophecy seriously and that if necessary they’ll take steps to prevent the knowledge getting out – even if it means destroying the Decalogue itself. As I drifted into sleep that night, for the first time I was thinking not of my own miserable mutilations, or Theo’s, but of the Stone Tablets of Tashkara: Satan’s Ten Commandments.

  I wish I’d seen them.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  ‘I wish,’ said Cardinal Fleury rather wistfully, ‘that I had seen the Decalogue.’ He looked at Raffael, and at Elinor and Ginevra as he spoke. ‘Especially since you’re going out there to destroy it.’ He frowned. ‘It’s against all my inclinations, you know,’ he said. ‘The deliberate destruction of one of the world’s oldest legends – I wish there was some way of preserving the Tablets. Safely preserving them.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Raffael, and Elinor glanced uneasily at Ginevra in case she might suggest taking colour photographs, which would be frivolous. Or would it? ‘We’ll do our best,’ said Raffael.

  ‘I should very much like to come with you to Tashkara,’ said His Eminence thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, you could—’ began Ginevra, who was curled into one of the cardinal’s most comfortable chairs, sipping coffee, but Raffael instantly said, ‘No, you could not. The journey will be extremely arduous and we have no idea what we’ll find at the end of it.’

  ‘Lewis Chance? That poor tormented creature, Grendel?’

  ‘Both of them, I hope,’ said Raffael, and glanced at Elinor, who said, a bit diffidently, ‘Grendel tried to save us from the Burning Altar and Timur’s people. He truly did.’

  ‘Yes, but we still don’t know how far he can be trusted,’ objected Ginevra. ‘Whatever he might have done, he’s still roaring mad. I don’t mean that to sound hard.’

  ‘Also, we don’t know how safe Grendel himself is,’ said Raffael. ‘Those savages might have accepted him as their leader, but they might as easily decide to make him pay for the death of Timur and Iwane. Elinor, that weird little catechism ceremony you saw – did it make them accept Grendel?’

  ‘Yes, what’s your opinion of their intentions, Miss Craven?’ said Fleury.

  Elinor said, ‘I wouldn�
�t trust any of them an inch. I certainly wouldn’t give tuppence for Grendel’s life, puppet-leader or no.’

  ‘And Sir Lewis?’ said Fleury. ‘Do you really think he’s been taken to Tashkara, Raffael?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’ said Ginevra. ‘I mean – what would Sir Lewis’s value be to them? They looked on Grendel as some kind of figurehead, but they wouldn’t look on Sir Lewis himself in the same way, would they? Or would they?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he’s Grendel’s father and it appears that their goddess was Grendel’s mother, and— Sorry, Elinor, you were going to say something?’

  ‘Well, it’s probably not of any value, but I wondered if they might have taken Lewis as a – a counter-attraction to the rebellion.’ Elinor said this hesitantly, because she was not very used to putting forward an opinion and having it listened to. But Fleury looked at her with approval.

  ‘That’s a very perceptive suggestion, Miss Craven,’ he said.

  ‘And although we don’t know much about what happened in Tashkara twenty-five years ago, we do know one thing,’ said Raffael. ‘We know that Lewis Chance had – what were Iwane’s words? – that he had splintered a line that had been unbroken for almost three thousand years.’

  There was an abrupt silence. ‘Revenge?’ said Fleury. ‘They’ve taken him for revenge?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s possible?’

  ‘Yes. Dear God, yes. And these people’s idea of vengeance—’ He broke off and Elinor felt the warm safe book room grow momentarily cold. Lewis at the mercy of those people who worshipped at the Burning Altar. Because he had lain with their goddess and fathered a child on her. I don’t care what he did twenty-five years ago. Yes, I do.

  Fleury looked across at her. ‘You’re going into a very dangerous situation. Miss Craven,’ he said gently. ‘Won’t you reconsider your decision? It’ll be no place for ladies.’

  How sweet of him, thought Elinor. How beautifully old-fashioned and chivalrous. He doesn’t know that it’s impossible for me to stay here if Lewis is in danger. She said, ‘It’s kind of you to be concerned. But I must accompany Raffael.’