from God knows where.
The leather tents were huddled within a ring of high bonfires that hissed and crackled in the gentle rain, the gaps between them filled with piles of shit and rotting carcasses. Outside each tent, a pony was tethered. These at least looked clean and glossy.
Either these people were late sitters or early risers. No one seemed to be asleep. The men clumped around in quilted jackets, stiff and uncomfortable without their ponies. The women fussed over cooking pots. I could smell their food as soon as we were within the ring of fires. As a tenor voice stands out from a choir in church, it added its own texture to the general stink of the place.
Children ran about everywhere, shouting gibberish and throwing what looked like balls of shit at each other. About a dozen of them stood in a circle poking at a cowering figure with sharp sticks. I tried not to look too closely at what had been done to him as he staggered about to avoid the well-aimed blows.
And I thought the Germanics had been hard on us!
I turned from the horrid sight, restraining an urge to vomit. Even so, my legs were beginning to shake at the thought of what might be in store for us.
‘Wait here,’ the Yellow Linguist said as we reached the largest of the tents. ‘When I call you in, you will kiss the dust of the Great One’s floor.’
After seeing what passed for entertainment in his camp, I’d have licked the man’s feet and painted his toenails. I nodded.
‘I’m going to kill myself here and now,’ Martin whispered in Celtic, with the settled composure of one who has lost too much hope to remain afraid. ‘I will thank you, Aelric, for all your efforts to save us. I wish I had been brave enough to tell you certain things you have a right to know. Instead, I will say goodbye, and hope to see you again in a better world.’
‘You’ll do no such fucking thing,’ I hissed back. ‘We haven’t got this far to lose now. Besides,’ I added, ‘we aren’t here to be murdered. Just follow my lead, and we’ll see Constantinople yet.
‘And keep that knife out of sight,’ I finished, with a faint enjoyment of the irony that almost removed my own terror. ‘Captives aren’t supposed to be armed.’
Theophanes must have guessed something of the exchange. He put a hand on my arm. ‘I wish I could give active help in this dealing,’ he whispered in Greek. ‘But I must now rely wholly on your diplomatic skills. For what it may be worth, I suspect you are here to receive orders rather than give information. But how you explain having the pair of us with you I can’t presently think.’
That made two of us. A drink and a brisk walk round the camp-fires, and I was sure I could think of some half-credible story. As it was, the tent flap opened and the Yellow Linguist beckoned us inside.
The tent was about fifteen feet square and about the same height. There were two heavily armed men standing just within, one each side of the flap. On a raised platform at the far end, with curtains on three sides and tended by two rather pert young girls, the Great One reclined amid a mass of stained silk cushions.
He was a mountain of flesh. Because he was shorter, he might only have been the same weight as Theophanes, but he looked half as fat again. Slitty eyes sunk deep into his bloated face, a lank moustache breaking through ritual scars and tattoos, he smiled evilly as we stepped into the light from the smoking tapers placed around what passed as his throne.
A runtish servant dressed in yellow struck once on a little brass gong. As its sound faded, the three of us were face down on the floor and licking its beaten, foul-tasting earth. We grovelled there for what seemed an age, until I felt a discreet kick in my side and got back to my feet.
We stood in silence before the Great One, looking respectfully down. At length, he spoke. The language he used sounded vaguely human – if you can imagine something spoken backwards on an indrawn breath. It was all wheezy trills and spat emphases. Just the sound of it chilled the blood.
‘You are here to receive your instructions for tomorrow,’ the Yellow Linguist interpreted in the basic Latin that is common among mixed groups of barbarians. ‘But where is the usual white dog who comes among us for such purposes?’
I was prepared for this one.
‘I am Aelric, his kinsman,’ I replied, trying hard to think in English and speak as if Latin was an unfamiliar tongue. ‘He sends his respects, but has a flux from drinking sour beer. He is not fit to be received in so Glorious a Presence. He sends me in his place.’
There was more of that sinister trilling back and forth. Then: ‘Why do you presume to bring these captives before the Great One? Your instructions were to keep them together.’
‘O Great One,’ I said, ‘these are objects of considerable value. They escaped our first attack. My brother and I found them wandering lost among the houses as we came before you. I sent my brother back with their gold, but thought it best to keep watch over them myself.’
As this was interpreted, I saw a gentle twitching of the curtain directly behind the Great One. I suddenly noticed a little rend in this at about head level. There was someone else in the tent, and he was watching us.
The Yellow Linguist saw this too. He broke off his interpreting and stepped forward, going respectfully round the Great One.
There was a muttered three-way conversation, the Great One listening intently and replying in monosyllables. I was too far away to hear any of it. But as it finished, the Great One smiled broadly. He leaned forward, beckoning me towards him.
I steeled myself and approached. There was a rancid smell of sweaty, unwashed fat and I could see the filed and blackened teeth as his lips were drawn back in a grin.
For the first time, I noticed a neat pile of about a dozen human heads just out of his reach to the left of the pillows. I hadn’t taken them in straight away because they were a uniform dark brown and had been shrunk somehow into balls about the size of a cabbage.
All considered, it was rather like standing before Satan. The Great One took one of my hands between his paws and brushed it against the roughened, greasy flab of his cheeks.
‘Such smooth and elegant hands for a man of the forests,’ the Yellow Linguist interpreted. ‘You are dressed as the Others. You have their colour and their language. Yet in all the time since we were called together, the Great One has been denied the sight of such beauty and daintiness of manner.’
There is a limit to what three days of roughing it can do to a manicure like mine. As I looked wordlessly back into that fat, grinning face, I wished I’d taken Martin’s hint and put an end to myself outside the tent.
I thought of the shambling wretch at the mercy of those children and wondered if, even now, I’d have time to go for my knife. My sword had been taken as we entered the tent.
Instead, though, I repeated my story, adding something about the number and importance of my kinsmen. As I did so, I looked the Great One straight in the eye, trying desperately to ignore the freezing and unfreezing of my guts.
It got me nothing more than a curiously indulgent smile and a gentle squeeze of my hand.
One of those young girls suddenly looked up at me, an expression of cold mockery on her flat, delicately yellow face. I wondered what she might be like, knife in hand, with a bound prisoner. I put the thought from my mind.
‘Did we not hear’, the Yellow Linguist continued interpreting, ‘how the Others shouted in their own camp after cloud had covered the sky? Was not the one summoned before the Great One to be questioned on the shouting?
‘Yet all we have now is silence among the Others, and so much unexpected perfection of beauty set before us.
‘Do the spirits mislead when they inform the Great One that those you bring with you are companions, not captives? Can it be that the one summoned wanders now beyond the protective fires, unseen by those who breathe?’
I’ve seen tax gatherers take longer to get at the essential point of a matter. But I was, you’ll understand, in no mood for considering the relative balance in his mind of direct revelation and intuitive leaps.
He’d rumbled us good and proper, was the best I could think as I stood there, my hand still in his. All that remained was the question of what would happen next.
As usual, it was a surprise.
