They were curiously empty. People were inside, with the shutters drawn. He looked up to the sky. The yellow was deepening and darkening, the sun becoming a blur. Something between light rain and snow wet the street. He shivered, and not just with the cold. The sky was unnatural, he was sure.
He went into the building that housed his rooms, up the gloomy wooden passage and stairs. When he got to the top he had to feel his way, the light was so bad.
‘Beatrice, Bea?’
No reply. He felt for the door and knocked at it, knowing it would be locked from the inside. Silence. He pushed at the door and it fell open.
The light of the gloomy day cast a feeble glow through the open window. The room was freezing. Beatrice was not there, nor any of their possessions. In rising panic Loys ran forward into the separate chamber set aside for his wife. That too was empty.
He came back out into the main bedroom. There was the mattress on the bed, the chamber pot and the small table which bore a blob of red wax. They had not been able to afford wax candles. He went to it. It was marked with a seal. He picked up the table and carried it to the window. The wax bore a crescent and a star and some words he couldn’t make out in Latin.
Loys put his hand on the window ledge. The crescent and the star was the sign of the city and so of the emperor and chamberlain. In one way he was relieved. She’d neither left him nor been taken by her father. But now he knew the master of the Magnaura had spoken truly when he’d said he belonged to the chamberlain.
The sky had darkened even further and great black clouds loomed over the sea, the sun gilding their edges with fire, plumes of inky black backed by burning gold like monstrous cinders. They turned the sea to a field of shining tar and cast a stark blue light on the harbour front.
A dread was inside him. This weather was not natural — it couldn’t be, the stamp of sorcery was all over it. And rather than fleeing, rather than taking Bea and running from it, he was expected to investigate. Looking at that sky, he could believe the demons had come to meet him.
He held his hand out of the window. Dirty snow fell upon it. He put his fingers to his mouth and licked at them. They had a fine grit in them and tasted of ash.
He’d seen a play in the marketplace, the mouth of hell gaping, hungry for sinners to fall into it. Some trickery had allowed smoke to belch out of the gaping maw. Was this it? Were the gates of hell open, smoking and stinking of cinders? Had the day of judgement come?
Words from the Revelation of St John came to him: ‘And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.’
There had been a comet only days before. Was that the censer?
Then his speculation fell in on itself and he thought only of her.
‘Beatrice!’ he said.
He thumped down the stairs and ran back to the palace.
9
Elifr’s eyes became accustomed to the torchlight as they pushed him into the Numera. Four men guarded him, two in front, two behind. They paused at the open door at the end of the corridor. Hot air, stale and fetid, breathed out, but it was scented with incense and he heard music, a pipe with a high nasal sound weaving a sinuous reel, clapping in an alien, unfamiliar rhythm. A man’s voice sang what sounded like a song of joy.
The butt of a spear prodded his back and he stumbled on into a lighter space, a large vaulted room lit by reed torches. People swarmed everywhere, women, children, some men in rich dress. To Elifr’s left a merchant in green and yellow silks was sitting on a fine chair eating a bunch of grapes, while a woman knelt beside him holding a goblet of wine. It could have been a scene from any rich man’s house apart from one detail — the man wore manacles on his feet and his hands were bound together by an iron chain.
The piper sat cross-legged in the corner with others around him clapping out a stuttering beat. Some people even seemed to be trading, and a couple had parchment and styluses with them. This was not what Elifr had imagined. It was more like a marketplace.
The spearman shoved him in the back again and said something to him in Greek. Elifr didn’t understand a word but the meaning was plain enough. This is not where we are taking you. Move on.
They walked across the vaulted chamber to another door, where a guard stood nodding to the music. The spearman took a small black disc from a string at his waist and presented it to the man on the door. The doorman added it to a string of similar counters at his own waist. Then he unlocked the door and they moved through.
A long line of pillars stretched away, leaving a narrow walkway between them and the wall on Elifr’s right. In the dappling light of the reed torches they reminded Elifr of a forest in autumn. The smell was far from that of the fresh woods, though. Here it was rank, a thick human stench.
They walked along the row of columns. Eyes were in the dark and people cried out.
‘Have you come for me, Michael, my son?’
‘Bread. I am hungry.’
Someone sang in a high clear voice. It was a hymn, Elifr realised, like the Christians sang and, though he understood not a word, it carried a feeling of great sadness. He sensed it was a song about death.
Other men just hummed or babbled to themselves. And yet Elifr sniffed food on the air. These were not the worst off here, he felt sure.
They came to stone steps cut into the floor, which dropped away into darkness. Elifr tested his bonds. He had been working at them since the moment they were put on. Now they were loose enough. He muttered to himself under his breath — ancient rhymes that had come to him in his visions on the mountainside.
‘The grey wolf is gazing upon the abodes of the gods.’
One of the guards glanced at him but said nothing. Elifr repeated the phrase again and again in his head, concentrating on the rhythm of the words, the pattern of their contractions and expansions, their grindings and deep sounds that to him began to take on the quality of natural things — rock on rock, wind on water.
The men went on down with their torches fluttering against the darkness. Elifr heard groaning, muttered prayers and terrible wheezing. The stink of shit was overpowering.
The steps turned and dropped again into a large natural cave leading off into black-mouthed tunnels.
The darkness teemed. There must have been a thousand men down there, but room enough for only half that number. No one ate grapes in his fetters here; the prisoners were secured to the floor with short chains. They blinked into the torchlight, some pale as creatures found beneath a stone, some still relatively healthy-looking. Here and there men lay dead in their irons, wasted almost to skeletons, still pressed against the living who lay beside them.
‘A rain of blood is pouring.’ Elifr was drifting away now, his mind freeing itself from the bonds of his humanity. He said the words aloud without thinking.
A guard said something to one of the others. The man glanced at Elifr and shrugged.
‘A loom has been set up, stretching afar and portending slaughter.
Upon it has been stretched a weft of human beings
A warp grey with spears that the valkyries are filling with threads of crimson.’
The words pounded in Elifr’s head like a rising tide of blood. A guard put his hand to his mouth, a gesture that the wolfman should be quiet. He was not.
‘We are weaving the web of the spear
We are weaving the web of the spear
We are weaving the web of the spear.’
Elifr rocked back and forwards where he stood. One of the guards laughed. The man with the bushy beard smiled and held up the manacles and made what sounded like a harsh joke, for the laughter it brought from his colleagues. Elifr was indifferent to it.
