veer aside. What was left of him was eventually carried away from a spot fifty yards from where he’d been alive.
That’s how it seemed to be with Martin. As he emerged into the light, the mob reached us. No longer marching, it was breaking into a stampede. It crashed straight into Martin. He vanished, propelled forward by the unstoppable rush of hundreds of tightly packed bodies.
‘Martin,’ I screamed. I pulled out my sword and hobbled forward. I’d dropped my staff and fell into the mob as it rushed past. For a moment, I was caught up in that surging, cheering mass. Then I’d fallen. Now I was dragged forward on the ground. Feet trampled and kicked at me. I tried to roll out of their way. But now arms reached down and pulled me on to my back and dragged me down the road. I tried to kick on the ground to get myself upright as I was pulled backwards. I was going too fast, and my ankle didn’t allow more than a notional effort. I screamed and screamed again with the pain and the terror.
I was dropped down at one of the junctions of the streets. I lay in the middle of a circle of men. The sun was directly overhead, and I couldn’t see their faces. I tried to sit up. I did begin babbling for mercy. But someone struck hard at me from behind. The blow glanced off the armour, but knocked me over on my side. Someone kicked me hard in the stomach. Again, the harm was limited, but I was winded. Hands reached down and began ripping at my clothes. I was rolled on to my front as someone began pulling at the leather straps holding the armour to my body. Still wearing it, I was rolled on to my back again. Someone struck at my good leg. I heard the dull sound of wood on bone before I felt the pain.
Men were kneeling beside me, pulling at me and striking and jabbering incomprehensibly in an ecstasy of joyous hate. I was pulled into a sitting position. Someone had found the child. He dragged the poor creature from the bag – writhing and crying in the sudden light. He held up my knife – how he’d got it from my belt I didn’t know. He slit the stomach across and pushed his face close to catch the splashing of the blood. He pulled out the little entrails. They came out in tight coils. All round me, there was a great cry of triumph, so I didn’t hear the wailing. But I vomited as the dead or dying body was rubbed hard into my face. I got my hands over my face and tried to turn away. I think someone kicked me in the head. I know someone hit me very hard across the shoulders. As I jerked round to avoid going over on my face, I dropped my hands. I couldn’t see from my left eye. I panicked again and screamed.
I was pulled straight. My arms and legs were stretched out as if I were on the Prefecture rack. I felt a sharp pain and then numbness in my hands as if a vice had closed over my wrists. I felt hands reach under my tunic. I screamed again. I screamed and screamed. The faces all around me pressed in closer and closer. From my good eye, I could see the leering grins. One of the mouths was stopped with a tiny hand and wrist. I could see how it was sucked and chewed as if it had been a child’s comforter. I could smell the garlic and the rotting teeth. I began to black out with the horror.
I heard a sudden roaring, and the breath was stopped in my throat. The ground beneath me began to ripple and convulse as if in an earthquake. I felt a still greater tremor in the air around me. There was wailing from the back of the crowd. I heard one man scream, and then be cut off in mid-flow. The faces twisted again – now into fear and then outright terror. All around me was a pandemonium of screams and wild threshing. Someone collapsed forward on top of me. Then he was lifted off me as if by some vast but invisible force.
No one was pulling on my limbs, and I was able to roll myself into a ball of liberated agony. As the waves of blackness grew shorter and shorter, and sound and vision faded, I had the impression of being absolutely alone in a sunlight that was no longer hot. All pain and all fear slipped away from me. My last feeling that I recall was an immensely serene calm.
Chapter 46
I was in a tunnel lined with glass blocks that shone with some inner light. I was moving rapidly towards one of its ends. I tried to see what was there, but was dazzled by the warm light that flooded in from whatever lay beyond. I looked harder. But whatever I did see was so indefinite, and so changed from moment to moment, that I was no more certain than if I hadn’t looked at all.
I say that I was moving. I wasn’t walking, though. Instead, I floated, as if carried on some invisible chair. I tried to shift position, but seemed to have no control over my body. Indeed, it was hard to tell if I had a body at all.
I felt that I was coming to a moment of understanding. The shapes within the light were beginning to resolve themselves into something definite and perceptible. Even as I focused, however, I was moving back the way I’d come. The light still dazzled, though from a growing distance. The distance stretched and stretched as I flew back at a now incredible speed. The tunnel was miles long – hundreds of miles long – and still I moved back along it, away from a light that may have been more distant, though it shone with undiminished brightness.
My speed was increasing. The glass blocks were merging into a single blur, and still I was going faster. I had no sense of hearing. I couldn’t feel any resistance of the air about me. I felt none of the forward rush you get when a chariot or a fast ship accelerates. It was enough to know that I was moving. I don’t think I was falling – though it was hard to know if concepts of up and down had any meaning here. I was sure I wasn’t falling. That couldn’t have accounted for the speed I was moving. I was like one of the atoms that Epicurus conjectured – small and unimportant by itself, and moving at inconceivable speed through a universe infinite in space and time.
I was no longer moving. I lay still on a soft surface. I opened my eyes and looked round. I was in a strange room. It was crowded with furniture of immense elaboration. There was a window of glazed panes looking out into blackness. The walls were hung with silk and with paintings in a realistic style of men in clothes I’d never seen before. There was an open fire in a grate against the wall. I heard its steady crackling and smelled the clean vapour of the sea coals. On a shelf above this was a machine with a dial set round with numbers in the Roman style. From it I could hear a slow, steady clicking of its works.
As I looked about in the candlelight, I saw a man dozing in a chair. A fat, dumpy creature, dressed in the silk brocade of the men in the paintings, he had a book in his lap. It was a book in our own modern style – folded and bound in sections – but surprisingly small. Other books of the same kind were heaped about him on the carpeted floor. Beside him, on a table of polished wood, was a glass bottle containing something dark. There was a glass drinking cup beside this, about a third full.
I climbed to my feet. I saw that I was dressed in the plain white and purple-bordered robe of a senator. The fat man shifted back deeper into his chair and snored. I stood over the fat man. He’d drunk himself into a doze that meant I was quite alone in the room. I took up the drinking cup and raised it to my lips. Its taste was sweet and much more powerful than any wine I knew. I drained the cup and refilled it.
Cup in hand, I moved towards the desk and reached for one of the crumpled balls of what looked like very white parchment. I smoothed it out and squinted at the neat but unknown writing. It made no sense to me. I saw there was ink in a silver pot. There were no pens, though, of the usual reed or wood. For writing, there was a collection of bird feathers, cut and split at the ends into the right shape. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. It didn’t strike me as at all a convenient sort of pen. I looked again at the neat writing. It was all, I supposed, a matter of custom. So too the idea of filling a room with expensive objects, and spoiling it with an open fire.
I was picking up sheet after sheet and still trying to see if I could understand any of it, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round. The fat man was stretching his arms. He grunted and opened his eyes. I looked full at him. He looked back at me and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his drinking cup. He looked round in some confusion before staring at the cup, now empty on his desk.
He said something nasty in a language I’d never heard before and tried to stand. The effort was too much and he fell back into his chair. He reached for a silver bell, but then looked at me again. I smiled nervously back. He raised his voice and spoke again in the unknown language. I shook my head. He spoke once more in a language that sounded different from the first, but that I still couldn’t understand.
‘Do you know Greek?’ I asked in that language.
He smiled, and with an evident collecting of thought, replied in Latin.
‘There are those who stand between us,’ he said in a slow and oddly accented manner, ‘who say you served a higher purpose. We, of course, know otherwise.’
