The priest leading, the assistants took up a chant in the most archaic Latin I’d ever heard. It was in short sentences, the stress on many words moved unnaturally to the first syllable. Frequently, I could only guess the meaning from compounds in the pure language. Some words I couldn’t understand at all. I wish I had been able shortly after to sit down with a clear head and record this chant. I doubt if it exists in written form, and I’ve now forgotten all of it, except for the reiterated claim: Cume tonas Leucesie prae tet tremonti, which I took to mean: ‘When thou dost thunder, O Lord of Light, men do tremble before thee.’
But there was much more – all about the attributes and goodness and power and genealogy of the various Old Gods. At the end of each stanza, a silver bell would be rung, and the priest turned three times.
At the end of all this, the priest did his trick again with the hidden combustible. I could feel my teeth begin to chatter in the still growing chill of the place. He motioned the rest of us to take our places within circles traced on the ground with white meal. Then he walked firmly over to the locked door. One of his assistants unlocked and unbarred it, before darting back within his own circle.
The priest looked through the door. There was a small light within.
‘Is the victim purified?’ he asked.
From within, the answer came: ‘It is.’
‘Is the victim willing?’
‘It is.’
‘Has the victim been bled sufficiently?’
‘It has.’
The priest stood back and turned to us. ‘The communication is about to be opened,’ he said in a low, sinister voice.
Two other assistants entered through the doorway. With them, they carried what I took at first for a statue – a statue, indeed, of Christ taken down from the cross. It had about it the same twisted, bloodied whiteness as something I’d recently seen in a church.
But this statue was still breathing. Carried into our presence, naked and bound to a wooden post, was one of the slaves who’d failed to stop One-Eye the day before last.
The assistants set the post down a few feet from the brazier, and got within their own circles. The naked flesh shone pale in the dim light. His head hung down on his chest. Blood dripped in a thin trickle from great gashes on the inside of each forearm. The gasp of his breathing came high and shallow.
‘The victim stands between life and death,’ the priest cried triumphantly. ‘He sees us, and he sees the Gods. Through him, we speak to the Gods, and they speak to us. It is all as ancient custom requires.
‘Ask what you will, O Lord Basilius, most noble and most pious.’ He turned back to the brazier and muttered some nonsense that I didn’t fully catch.
I stood rooted to the spot. I hadn’t known what to expect as the culmination of this ceremony. But the last thing I’d expected was a human sacrifice. My own people used to go in for this sort of thing. But they had the excuse of being savages who didn’t know better.
I once read that Julian the Apostate – the emperor, that is, who tried to restore the Old Religion fifty years after Constantine had established Christianity – sacrificed humans before setting out on his disastrous invasion of Persia. His palace in Constantinople, apparently, was found after his death stuffed with decaying bodies.
I don’t believe this. Julian has a bad reputation, and the Christians have made up endless stories about him to drown out the rumours that they had him struck down from behind in his last battle. I know all Julian’s writings, and I don’t believe these stories. He may have been a superstitious pedant. But he wasn’t a murderer.
Equally, though, human sacrifice was one of those things about the Old Religion that its devotees have always been rather coy about. And you can remember this if ever anyone comes at you with a word of that crap about the world of light and reason that the Church is said to have brought to an end. The Church may be a fraud. But it’s never done this.
For a moment, I was torn. Lucius was my only friend in the world. He was doing this for me. But would Maximin have wanted this? Even had there been the slightest chance that this wretched human being was headed anywhere but into the blackness of death, could I have accepted the slightest scrap of information he might relay?
Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus isti, I thought to myself – ‘Not by such means, nor with these defences.’
‘Stop this at once!’ I cried, stepping forward. ‘I’ll have no part in bloody murder.’
I took hold of the slave’s arms and raised them to shut off the remaining flow of blood. He looked up to me, a weak, frightened look on his face. I saw his glassy eyes focus. He licked drily at his withered lips. ‘I haven’t been confessed, sir,’ he whispered. ‘Will God send me to Hell? I was a very bad slave – most inattentive to my duty. Will God punish me, sir?’
‘No,’ I said in a firm and priestly voice – the sort of voice that could banish all doubt by its very tone. ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son, I absolve you of all your sins,’ I continued, improvising. ‘You stand on the verge of eternal bliss. Say with me this final prayer – say with me: Our Father, which art in Heaven.. .’
The slave croaked along with me, looking intently all the while into my eyes. As we finished those words, which for the first time sounded so marvellously sweet, I felt him begin his last rattling breath. He died with the ‘Amen’ upon his lips.
I dropped his arms and turned back to the shocked, silent gathering. The assistants were all on their bellies, knocking their heads against the floor in some scared, rhythmical prostration. Still on his feet, Lucius looked back at me with a white, terrified face.
‘The Gods of the Underworld are loose among us,’ the priest said with shaking voice. ‘They will punish us according to Their Offended Will. This trespass into our holy rites of the Galilean Blasphemy they will never forget, and may never forgive.’
‘There are no Gods – in the Underworld, or anywhere else,’ I shouted at him. ‘You’re just a fucking murderer.’ I glanced about the room. ‘I’m looking for one decent reason not to drag the whole damned pack of you off before the dispensator. He’ll see you punished, right enough.’
Of course, the man wouldn’t look too kindly on me either. And I was in no position to drag half a dozen scared, reasonably strong men so much as an inch in any direction. That was reason enough.
I contented myself with kicking over the brazier. The charcoals flared up briefly and then dimmed again.
‘The barbarian has profaned-’ I cut off the priest’s whine with a massive kick to his balls. He went down spluttering and gagging at the pain.
I walked out of the room, back along the corridor towards the light that came down from the library. As I walked back, every one of the recessed lamps went out exactly as I reached it. I was walking into light with darkness behind me. Draughts can be peculiar things.
41
Lucius was onto his second jug of wine. I walked up and down in front of him, still trying to hold back the full weight of my anger.
‘But Alaric, my love,’ he wailed, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures. We cannot go any further by the unaided light of reason.’
‘Then let us go no further at all,’ I snarled. ‘I’m leaving Rome tomorrow. I’ll take the first ship to Marseilles that I can find from Naples.’
‘But the Gods-’
I put my face very close to his and said slowly: ‘Lucius, there are no Gods. There is nothing but matter and space and time. There is no divine providence. There is no Judgement. Death is one eternal sleep.
‘Certainly, your Gods don’t exist. If they did, do you really suppose they would have given in so easily, that you people have to scurry round like rats in the sewers to worship them according to “ancient custom”? If there is any God at all,’ I added flatly, ‘it is the God of the Church.’
‘That mass of corruption?’ said Lucius, suddenly more effective in his argumentation.
‘Yes, that mass of corruption. The Church may be rotten. But it is triumphant. Unless you look at the purely
