I nodded.
‘I will tell you from the beginning. Many ages ago, after Satan fell from Heaven, he divided the waters of his prison firmament, and raised up earth from beneath the waters to become land. He made himself a throne, and caused his rebel angels to bring forth life: plants and trees and herbs, animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. But still it was not enough. He took clay from the earth and moulded man, and from that man he took more clay and made woman. Then he snared two angels from heaven and made them prisoners in the clay, so that their spirits were clothed in mortal form. In his depravity, he bade them sin, but they were pure and did not know how.
‘So Satan placed them in a garden. From a stream of his spittle he made a serpent; he took its form, and entered the garden. He slithered into the woman’s body and filled her with a longing for sin until her desire was like a glowing oven. He filled the man with a like desire for sin, so that both captive angels were consumed with lust. Together, they spawned the children of the Devil. The spark of the angels is divided and scattered among the people of the Earth, but it is not lost. A fragment of their being remains within us: that is why we must forswear the dark substance of this world, and seek to kindle a flame from the angelic fire within. Only thus will we free ourselves from the vessels which bind our souls, and escape this wicked Earth for the realms of light.’
Sweat had begun to pool on my skin in the close air of the cave, but I barely noticed it. Far hotter was the fire that raged within me, scalding and blistering my soul even to think on what she had said. Her warning had been honest: her words were pure fire. Even if I disbelieved them, even if I longed to tear them from my memory, I would not forget them. They would undermine the walls of my faith with doubt, perhaps to destruction. Even repeating them might be mortal sin. And I feared there was a part of me, an insistent part, which clamoured that she might speak truth.
‘You have opened the first door of our mysteries, Demetrios Askiates. What do you say? Are you afraid to cross the threshold?’
I did not have the strength to lie. ‘Yes.’
‘Good. Only the proud rush in where they do not see clearly. The humble tread fearfully, but journey farther. Yet, in your soul, the truth begins to stir. Have you never felt the empty weight of your sinful clay? Has it never seemed to you that your spirit is snared in a vessel from which it cannot escape? Surely – in the clarity of grief, perhaps – you have ached to shake off the trappings of the flesh and liberate the divine spark within?’
Caution and reason implored me to resist her, but I could not deny the simple accuracy of her words. I remembered running through the labyrinth of streets and alleys after Odard’s death, desperate to lose my guilt. I remembered lying next to Anna on the walls, our bodies touching but our souls sundered by the secret of what I had done. Was it all as Sarah said?
Her soft voice was like balm on my thoughts. ‘You begin to see clearly, Demetrios. All your life you have lived in sin and error – now at last the light of God begins to glow in your heart. Take it. Cup it in your hands and breathe on it, so that the flame grows and the fire takes hold. For now it is the merest ember, but in time it will burn away your sin like sun on a dawn mist.’
‘But how—’
She pressed a sweet finger to my lips. ‘Sleep now.’
I did not sleep. I lay on my bed while questions and arguments roared through my head like storms in the desert. Some whipped up into towering columns of confusion; others eddied and flowed in thick clouds of chaos. At times I thought they were gone, that the grains of thought had settled, but they always returned with renewed ferocity. Pain thumped against the back of my skull and hunger cramped my stomach: my body was failing. I no longer knew if that was a curse or a blessed relief.
Yet even as my senses collapsed, my perception of the cave improved. Light began to filter in through long cracks in the ceiling, and gradually the darkness resolved itself into a palimpsest of grey shadows. Rough-hewn walls emerged around me; dark figures moved in the recesses of the cave. My bed seemed to be in a corner, while at the far end I could make out the vertical lines of a stair or ladder rising through the ceiling. It was often in use, though even when a man came down it no additional light was admitted. How deep was this place, I wondered? Were we in a cave below a cave?
Later, I did not know how long, Sarah returned. Her robe was like a shaft of moonlight before me, though her voice was much troubled.
‘Have you thought on what I told you, Demetrios?’
‘I have.’
‘How does it seem to you?’
‘Difficult.’
‘Truth does not strike us all as it did the holy Saint Paul. For many, it is a long and arduous road.’
‘The ways of the flesh are hard to shake off. Is that why your followers carve themselves with crosses, to mortify their sinful bodies?’
‘As the cuts are made, as the sign of the Lord enters their flesh, they say they hear Satan himself screaming in fury.’
‘Drogo and Rainauld had heard your truth. They marked their bodies. Their faith must have been prodigious.’
‘Do not talk of them,’ said Sarah sharply. ‘The pure novice bows his head and fastens his eyes on his own path. If he looks at his fellow pilgrims, he distracts his thoughts from righteousness.’
‘Drogo and Rainauld are dead. Their companion Odard too. If that is the ultimate end of our road, then I wish to know it.’
‘To know where you travel is not a journey of faith. It is the way itself which matters; you will know the destination when you reach it. But if it will soothe your thoughts, I will tell you that their fate owed nothing to their faith. As I told you once before, they had abandoned my teaching. Another teacher – a false prophet – seduced them.’
Her words cut through my tangled thoughts. ‘Who?’
‘It does not matter.’ Exasperation and suspicion swelled in her voice. ‘I think you do not—’
A shout from the ladder silenced us both. Whatever door or panel covered its mouth had been thrown back, and a column of sunlight poured into the room. All around me white-robed acolytes were staring as if at an angel – and, indeed, the figure who descended the ladder might well have been a messenger of Heaven, for the light ringed him with a shining nimbus, and thick tendrils of smoke curled above him in its beam.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was not an angel of the Lord but a scrawny man with a crooked nose. Nor was there anything ethereal about the screeching panic in his voice.
‘The city,’ he shouted. ‘They are burning the city.’
? ?
The spell of Heaven was broken. Men and women rushed to the ladder, tearing at each other in their frenzy to get out. The messenger himself was pulled down and subsumed in the fray. Cascades of smoke rolled through the trapdoor, darkening the cave once more, while a devouring roar began to sound in the distance.
I was forgotten, but I was not free. I strained at my bonds, but my desperate efforts only seemed to pull them tighter. I reached under the bed and felt for a knot or clasp. My hands scrabbled on the wood; a splinter pierced under my fingernail. Wrenching my arm, I found the loop of cloth that bound me and followed it along, until at last I touched a bulge. It was almost beyond my grasp, and I would never loose it where it was. I tugged on the cloth, sliding it around until the knot rested on my belly.
I did not have the time to look about, but I sensed that I was now alone save for the swelling clouds of smoke. It crept into my eyes and mouth, rasping my throat raw and pricking tears down my cheek. If I did not escape it soon, it would choke the life out of me as surely as any noose. Yet I could not afford to pull the knot tighter in my haste to undo it.
Near panic, I poked my fingers into the knot, prying and teasing at the twisted fabric. My brittle reserve was bent almost to destruction by the effort of keeping my panic in check, but though my mind was in uproar my hands
