The Varangians had got into the palace. Its doors had not been built to withstand a siege — if an enemy had got over the Theodosian Wall, then over the remains of the Walls of Constantine inside the city, a reinforced door wouldn’t have held them back. The doors were designed to keep out the common people, not invading armies, and the Varangians had eventually broken them in with their axes and hammers.
Azemar finished feeding and stood. He was torpid, gorged and wanted to sleep. The blood tide that had risen to engulf his thoughts when he had killed the guards began to recede. The realisation came to him that the bodies on the floor, the human wreckage of ripped torsos and flesh-stripped limbs, had belonged to people. He knew he should have wept to see such a mess, but he didn’t. He wasn’t interested in it any more but then he was not hungry.
The Lady Beatrice. He needed to go to her.
He went out of the room. All the lamps had been removed in the passageway as a precaution against the attackers using them to burn down the palace and it was very dark. It didn’t matter to Azemar.
The fighting was somewhere close. He smelled the sweat of fear, the stress leaking out of the men in the smell of their saliva, their piss and their shit. It meant little to him. He had fed.
He breathed in again and he could smell Beatrice, her distinct scent in its many registers, rosewater, sweat, silk. Memories burst in his mind. Beeswax for the candles unlit in the church when he had first met her, mint her mother had showed her how to grind in the kitchen when he had first met her, the smell of the hot wheat as he’d worked his scythe to bring in the harvest when he’d first met her. The ridiculousness of the thought struck him. He couldn’t have first met her three times.
He followed her scent through the corridors of the palace. More shouting ahead.
Two Varangians. They eyed the fine robe Loys had lent him.
‘Hand that over, friend. We don’t want to risk damaging it by killing you.’
‘It’s covered in blood, Kolli.’
‘We can wash that out easy enough.’
Azemar didn’t understand them at all. Or rather he understood them in a new way. He felt their animosity, sensed their complacency. He knew, in a way words could not describe, that the living processes of their bodies had relaxed when they had seen him.
‘I am looking for a lady.’ Azemar found the Norse of his forefathers.
‘We’re all looking for one of those.’
‘I’ve been without her for a very long time.’
‘And we’ve been without one for a very long time.’
‘You were with a whore this afternoon,’ the other Viking spoke to his friend.
‘That’s a long time by my reckoning. The robe. We’re not here to gabble.’
What were they saying?
They didn’t understand the urgency of him seeing Beatrice, that was clearly the problem.
‘I need… I am dizzy.’ Azemar fought to regain control of his thoughts. He remembered a lesson at Rouen given by a great scholar monk from the east.
‘I have been taught understanding by the use of the Porphyrian Tree,’ said Azemar. He had abandoned Norse. It didn’t have the words he needed and he returned to his scholar’s Greek.
‘What are you on about? Speak Norse or I’ll talk to you in a language all men can understand.’
‘The tree by which we organise our logic. The supreme genus is substance, all scholars agree,’ Azemar continued in Greek.
‘Strip it off him. He’s a madman.’
‘The differentiae are material and immaterial. The subordinate genera are body and living. These are the topmost part of the trunk.’
The Varangians strode towards him.
‘You descend the trunk to find the proximate genera of animal. Beneath that we cannot accept this teaching for that is a pagan lie and contrary to holy teaching.’
One of them had hold of him and pulled at his robe.
‘By Sif’s tits, he’s a guard. He’s built like a horse. He must be some sort of berserker. That’s why he’s raving.’
The man backed away.
‘The differentiae below animal are rational and irrational. Below animal, they include the category of man. As a species of thinking beast. I cannot…’
The sounds of battle drifted in from all over the palace. The second Varangian pushed past his comrade.
‘I don’t care if he’s built like Blind Hod; I’m having the robe.’
‘Substance, material and immaterial, body, living and dead, animal, rational and irrational. Man. Below the species is the individual. Where is God? Where is God in this?’
The Varangian wrenched off Azemar’s robe.
Azemar looked down at himself. He wore only a pair of light leggings and was bare-chested.
‘I’ll have those as well,’ said the Varangian. ‘Take them off and I might let you live.’
‘Here is God. Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?’
Something was burning.
Azemar’s head cleared for a moment. He felt ridiculous half-dressed in such a fine palace. He smelled the smoke, saw the axe the Varangian with the red beard bore, the dagger the one who had taken his robe had drawn. There was still something he didn’t quite understand about this situation. He spoke in Norse: ‘I can’t be naked. The tree of knowledge brought us shame. We know. Now we know.’
‘Well know this.’ The man with the dagger lunged.
Azemar only realised what had happened an instant later. The men lay on the floor. He couldn’t make sense of why they were there. He trembled. There was an odd low gurgling noise and he realised it was his own voice. He was snarling, sitting on top of a body with one arm torn from its socket. The other body lay a few paces away. The man had tried to run, he recalled, but now he was bent double, the wrong way.
Men in the corridor, screaming, fighting. A Greek fell with a short spear clean through him. A huge man with a bushy blond beard came howling towards Azemar. He stood. Where is Beatrice? These people were in his way. They weren’t going to help him. Animosity engulfed him like a lava flow.
The big Viking didn’t even get the time to swing his axe as Azemar smashed him down. Azemar stepped past him and into the man who ran in behind. He swung him from his feet and banged his head into the wall. Slaughter beast, god killer, slaverer and slayer. The words went through his mind like comets across a black sky. He had a name, he knew, but what was it?
More men died, torn and ripped, broken and dismembered. They thrust things at him, sharp things, slow things. He was so strong. He tore free of the fight and ran. The night air hit him as he spilled out of the palace door and into the street. His nose and mouth stung and he recognised the taste of the big white flakes in the air. Ash.
Through the clinging fog he heard something. Not a voice, not an animal cry but something resonating deeper within him, an emanation of something older than sound. It called to him. He pictured a sign, a jagged slash with a line through it. His skin rose into bumps as he heard it howl. He understood it, knew what it said.
‘I am here, where are you?’ It was the lady, she was calling to him, or rather something inside her was.
He looked back at the palace but then turned away from the fight with its delicious scents of murder and battle. He was summoned and he could not resist.
Azemar threw back his head and shouted, ‘I am here! Where are you?’ But his voice was the howl of a wolf.
M. D. Lachlan
Lord of Slaughter
45 The Bloody Waters
Air! A hand pulled him out of the water. It was flat dark, no glimpse of light. He lay gasping on cold rock.
‘We are through. Those men were sent by the gods, but they did not serve the gods’ purpose. Who was the white-haired one?’
‘His name is Ragnar.’
‘He followed you?’
‘He was sent to kill me, I think.’
‘I have seen him before.’
‘Where?’
‘In a past life. I have fought him before. He is a powerful enemy. Did he have the sword?’
‘What sword?’
‘The one that is curved. Like a sickle moon.’
‘I saw no such sword.’
‘It will come, along with the stone.’
‘What stone?’
‘A magical stone. The Wolfstone.’
Loys was so shaken he didn’t even think of the stone in his bag.
‘What is happening?’
‘A god is coming. His symbol is the three hanging knots; his presence is in the runes. When twenty-four are in one person, he is here, and the wolf will come to kill him.’
‘You have meddled with devils,’ said Loys.
He longed to see. He took the bag from around his neck and felt inside, pulling out the flint, the lamp and the oil-soaked cloth. Very carefully he tore off a strip of the cloth. He placed it near the flint, which he struck against the iron. Quickly he had a spark, which he blew to a small flame. Now he could light the lamp.
The chamber was almost a sphere, just big enough to stand in. Loys was sitting on a shelf of rock with the wolfman beside him.
‘What now?’ said Loys.
‘This is the world city. It is a flowering of the magical forces of the well. This is where the world tree draws its water. We’re on our way to that well.’
‘And if the god you’re seeking doesn’t come?’
‘He will come. The god is in three forms. He is one of them. The Vala’s vision revealed it. Beneath the comet, at that battle, the god who sleeps with the head at his feet. It was a sign — as Odin drank the waters of the well, next to the headless Mimir so the god would be found. He should have killed me when I asked.’
‘I thought you sought to kill him.’
‘He cannot be killed.’
‘I think Basileios can kill all the world if he so chooses. But he is far away.’
‘He will come.’
‘How can you avoid your fate?’
‘At the well. I will receive insight.’
‘How do you know where it is?’
‘I can hear it.’
‘What can you hear?’
‘The runes. There are runes within it. They are calling to others.’
He stood and climbed to the top of the chamber. A small tunnel led away, scarcely wider than his shoulders. The wolfman wriggled in. Loys had no alternative but to follow, pushing the lamp before him. It was not even a crawl. He went forward like a snake, writhing on his belly, progressing by tiny increments. He had a terrible feeling of claustrophobia, a desire to breathe freely without the tunnel pressing in on his ribcage. He would have lacked the courage to go on if the wolfman had not been before him. Pulling himself through, using only his fingertips at points because his arms were so restricted, he found it very difficult to see, his head forced down by the narrowness of the tunnel. He moved the lamp on, fighting down panic.
He had to go on, for Beatrice. He didn’t accept what the wolfman was telling him but it was clear there was demonic involvement. If Beatrice was caught up in this, he needed to get her out of it. That gave him strength.
His knees were raw, his elbows too. He went on, moving the lamp a little, snaking forward, resting, moving the lamp. The darkness around him seemed so tight, like a great hand that could reach out at any moment and snuff out his little light.
Ahead of him, a light wavered. The lamp was taken from him. The wolfman signalled for Loys to be silent then helped him out. They were in another small cave, but this one was half flooded from a waterfall that tumbled down from a tunnel that entered near the ceiling.
The water poured away down another low tunnel. In there was the light, not quite torchlight but a soft and constant red. The wolfman climbed down through the stream, his movements inaudible beneath the trickling of the water.
Loys strained to listen. There were voices. A mumble of words, a drone.
‘In the sacred waters where the three streams meet,
Goddess who is three in one,
Goddess of the night and of the dark of the night,
Here by the waters
I pay the price of lore.’
He recognised the voice now. It was unquestionably that of the chamberlain.
Suddenly the voice faltered. Above him a skittle-skattle sound of someone bumping down the stream bed, a cough and a curse. Someone else was coming.