Its heat lulled him and he slept. When he woke the fire was dead and a fog lay low on the land, filling up the bowl in the hillside like a milky broth. The sheep had come near and stood beside him, out of the mist. The sky was clear. It wasn’t full dark, but the washed-out light of the northern midnight, and only the moon and the morning star beside it were visible.
He gazed over the fog, up to the mountains of the north, to the mighty cliff of the Troll Wall looming like something too big for the horizon, as if it should be nearer.
The wolf appeared on the other side of the bowl of fog almost exactly at his level. The big black creature sat as if upon a cloud. Elifr picked up his spear and scanned for others, his vision swimming in the floating light.
He shook the spear as if to throw it at the wolf.
‘Go! Go on!’
The wolf didn’t move, just sat watching him.
Elifr put the spear down, picked up his sling and fitted a stone. Still the wolf stayed. The boy raised an arm to take aim at the wolf but didn’t release the stone. There was something odd about the wolf. It didn’t behave like a normal animal. Wolves were not stupid and didn’t sit still while shepherds aimed slings at them.
‘Are you a ghost?’ he said.
Then he heard himself say: ‘You are the ghost of a wolf.’
He spoke again, but not with quite his own voice. It was lower and slower, as if he didn’t fully command his tongue and his lips: ‘You are waiting in a wolf.’ What did he mean by that? Elifr thought he really should know what his own words meant.
A voice seemed to speak in his mind and he mumbled along with the words: ‘You are the rocks and the stream and the rain on the mountain and the light through the rain. You are the movement of the shadow, a shape cut by moonlight, and you are the gold of the sun on the summer grass. You lie still beneath the frosts of winter and are set free by summer’s heat. You are me, as I was.’
The wolf kept watching him across the bowl of mist.
A restless feeling came over Elifr — no, more than restlessness, a feeling of cold torment. The wolf was trying to express something. Elifr mouthed some words: ‘Until the act is done.’
‘What act? What…’
But the voice in his head went quiet and the wolf turned back up the hill. Elifr abandoned his sheep and set out after it, on the journey to magic and misery.
The cart stopped, and Elifr, the wolfman who had been Elifr, was in front of a squat block of a building that sat in the shadow of a great domed cathedral. Elifr peered up. A gold structure sat on top of the dome, a bulbous pillar supporting a crescent moon. It seemed to shimmer in the hazy air. Again, Elifr tasted smoke.
Elifr had no time to sit and wonder. The Hetaereia lifted him from the cart and set him down on the ground. His limbs ached from the age he had spent sitting.
‘Prisoner of the emperor!’ shouted one of the Hetaereia.
‘Stand forward with the emperor’s prisoner!’ shouted a tall Greek guard with a bushy black beard and a short whip at his belt.
They pulled him in front of a doorway which sat like a square of blackness cut out of the bright day.
‘Emperor’s prisoner is forward!’ said the man at the side.
‘We will receive the prisoner!’
The guard with the beard took Elifr by the arm and pushed him through the doorway. Other guards within took him on into the prison. It really was very dark inside, only the weak light of an oil lamp in a niche in the wall to see by. He was in a short corridor that led to another door. The stress and stink of the jail was in his nostrils, blood, piss, shit and vomit and more — subtle secretions undetectable to ordinary men. Only someone who had earned magic from the gods in ritual and privation could have smelled the iron in the sweat, the sour scent of ashes on the breath: the tiny leakings and excretions of human misery.
Elifr couldn’t understand what the men said and it would have given him no comfort if he could have.
‘No torture,’ said a voice behind him.
‘None?’
‘Not by us. This is one for the Office of Barbarians.’ The man put his hand on Elifr’s shoulder.
‘You’re in luck, friend. You’re not going to have to suffer one of our ham-fisted beatings; they’re sending the professionals to deal with you.’
The wolfman caught the threat in the man’s voice and turned to look into the Greek’s eyes. Then he faced forward again.
The men opened the door at the end of the corridor and a waft of incense hit him, though human filth was still powerful beneath it. A meandering pipe and rhythmic clapping sounded from inside.
He couldn’t work out what it was, but he told himself it didn’t matter. His second plan was now under way and he was where he needed to be.
8
Loys strode back to his lodgings, along one of the top streets to avoid the crush caused by the incoming army. The bulge where he’d hidden the gold inside his tunic seemed as conspicuous as if he’d stuffed a live goat up there, but he had no choice other than to take the back way.
With the return of the army the whole city was in ferment, more even than normal, so he didn’t draw particular attention to himself by the briskness of his pace, which broke into a run at points where he felt particularly threatened.
The weather did nothing to settle him. The sky was strange — a curious and delicate shade of yellow had come over it while he had been with the chamberlain and the sun seemed wrapped in gauze. The light was like dusk and it wasn’t yet past noon.
He hurried through the backstreets. There were no tall porches here, no merchants selling gold and silk. Constantinople was shot with bright avenues straight as flower stems that bloomed into rich corollas of forums and squares. Here was the tangled mass of alleys that supported them: narrow, winding and — even on brighter days than this one — dim. The backstreets were the province of street hawkers, gangs of hungry-eyed youths who loitered full of simmering intent, unwashed women and drunken men. They sold leather on the Middle Way. Here, flea-raw children scuttled in the gutters, picking up animal dung or even dead dogs to sell to the tanneries beyond the walls. Better-fed and more pious people crossed themselves and prayed or hurried to chapels and churches. The odd sky, combined with the cold, had set men’s nerves jangling and they went to confess their sins and pray.
He calmed himself. Look at it with other eyes, Loys. There was a man, clearly a doctor in a good saffron gown, walking along. Three priests hurried on through the gloom, children and adults pulling at the holy men’s hands as they walked, asking for blessings to protect them on this strange day. The Numeri — soldiers from the city’s permanent garrison, so called because they were the ones who brought prisoners to the Numera — were a reassuring presence, idling on a corner. Mind you, they seemed more intent on looking up at the sky than guarding the streets.
Normally he would have enjoyed the mild frisson of danger the backstreets offered but, laden with the chamberlain’s gold and frightened by the task he had been set, he felt vulnerable and conspicuous.
Loys forced himself to walk more slowly. His fear was nothing to do with the sky or even with the gold he was carrying. It was fear of what the chamberlain had asked him to do — to create a working and efficacious spell in three months. Was it possible? He had no idea. Was it holy? No.
He would find Beatrice and get out of Constantinople immediately. Ships sailed every day for the north or down to Arabia. The Caliphate was a centre of learning and might welcome a man of his skills. He would not defy God for the chamberlain or for anyone.
He cut up past the huge brick building of the Cistern of Aetios, a source of drinking water for much of the city, skirting its olive gardens — whose trees enjoyed the emperor’s protection — and towards his lodgings.
He dived into the even narrower streets of the lighthouse quarter.
