He dozed again and this time he dreamed.
He walked in some strange woods by a river at night. They were beautiful and wet, hung in night colours of silver and grey with a fresh scent of growth and decay that he found intoxicating. He wandered, looking for something. A light shone through the trees and he went towards it. What was it? A little brazier just like the one the lady had thrown the powder onto.
He felt cold so he decided to go to it to warm himself. The lady sat next to the brazier, slumped as she had been slumped in the cellar.
Azemar thought he would go to her, tell her he meant no threat, ask for her protection even.
He put his hand to her shoulder. But when he took it away again, it was covered in blood. He licked at his fingers. The taste was delicious. He put his hand back on her shoulder, smeared on more blood and licked at that too. Then he couldn’t stop himself. He bent to the lady and licked at the wound on her shoulder, drinking in its beautiful and strange aroma.
The lady shoved him away, her face contorted in terror. She said one word. ‘Wolf!’ And then there were other presences about him. Other words. ‘He’s broken his bonds!’
Someone unseen struck him across the face and he fell back. He was half in the forest, half in the cellar, it seemed. Or rather the forest was a cellar, a cellar containing a forest. The strangeness of those thoughts struck him and he giggled. His arms were pulled behind his back and he was tied again.
He heard a voice in Greek: ‘Should I kill him, Lady Styliane?’
The woman panted and coughed. She regained her breath and said, ‘That won’t be possible. Get him to the Numera.’
19
The chamberlain had thought himself safe in his gilded apartment, where he lay — a thing of status on a couch, its hands perfumed with frankincense, its face softened with oil, its body wrapped in a silk robe. But the magic sparked inside him, kindling memories as bright as the fire in his hearth; memories that, like the fire, lived and burned.
In his mind he heard voices and saw people. Two figures in a field of boulders on a hill overlooking the great town below. They began to move, the story began to move in his head, little patters of words coming back to him as a walker in the hills feels the rain of dirt that heralds a rockfall.
‘I’m afraid, mother.’ He saw a young girl peering down into a black space between boulders. He was there, on the hillside, watching — the magic inside him forcing him to see.
‘The fear is part of it. Strengthen yourself, Elai. Nothing is won without effort.’
The taller figure, the mother, held a fish-oil lamp in her hand, though the moon was nearly full and shone bright. She sat on a big boulder at the centre of a wide field of them.
Below, two or three summer hours’ walk away, the lamps and candles of Constantinople twinkled. The city seemed to hang like two shimmering pools of light separated by the deep and encroaching darkness of the invisible sea that surrounded and divided it.
The woman pointed to the huge church of Hagia Sofia. The moon turned its dome to shining metal and the windows that sat beneath it were white in its light. The woman’s thoughts opened to the chamberlain like a flower and he saw how the church reminded her of a squat giant, his helmet pulled low on his forehead, scanning the land for intruders. Well, she thought, it was looking in the wrong place if that’s what it was doing. They would approach by one of the unseen roads that ran for miles through the hills and under the city.
‘That is where we are going,’ she said, ‘under there.’
‘It’s so far,’ said Elai. She was thirteen years old but still a little girl in her fear; the chamberlain sensed as he watched her. He shuddered at the intimacy, the depth to which he knew her heart.
‘I made the journey when I was your age,’ said the mother. ‘Your grandmother made it too, and hers before her. The goddess is in there and will grant you her sight. You just need courage. The tunnels are marked and we have enough lamps and oil. The way is straight enough if you know what you’re doing. The worst we will encounter is a wasps’ nest, and none of those when we’ve gone fifty paces into the dark.’
‘And the dogs of Hecate?’
‘The dogs won’t come for us. We are the goddess’s servants. They wait only for trespassers.’
The girl nodded. ‘Is Karas coming?’
Karas. The chamberlain crossed himself. It was his own name, though no one had called him that in fifteen years. What did he share with the child? A body? Yes, in some ways, but grown and altered. A mind? No, not any more. Then what? The deeds. The actions that now unfolded in his magic-stewed brain. In that way alone, he thought, he was the same person as the boy he now saw in his vision, the boy he had been. He was fettered to the past by memories that refused to fade.
He saw the woman turn her eyes to the boy poking about at the bottom of the rocks. Karas was ten years old, brother to Elai. The chamberlain, restless on his couch, wanted to reach out, to take him by the hand and lead him away to his games in the slum.
‘I have dreams too,’ called Karas. ‘I should complete the ritual.’
‘Go back and look after Styliane, as I’ve asked you to do,’ said his mother.
‘She’s right enough with her aunties. Let me come. I want to know the secret of my dreams.’ He came climbing towards them over the rocks.
‘You’re young, Karas, and haven’t come fully into the world. You have a memory of what you were before, in lives gone, that’s all. When you become a man properly such things will go. Men are made to do and to fight. They can’t hold magic inside them.’
The boy sat down next to his mother. ‘I would hold magic.’
‘Be content with what you have. You have no natural harmony with that — ’ she jabbed a finger at the moon ‘- or the tides that surround us.’
‘What do my dreams mean, then?’
‘What dreams?’ The woman had hitherto paid little attention to Karas. The boy was full of mischief and full of questions about things he did not need to know. Magic was a woman’s gift, given from mother to daughter. Her son’s fascination with it struck her as strange, and not a little effeminate.
‘I’ve told you a thousand times.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘There is a wolf.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s waiting for me.’
‘Yes?’
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s not much of a dream, is it? You’d build no reputation as a seer based on that, would you?’ His mother and his sister glanced at each other and laughed.
‘Well, what does it mean? He’s in a forest of big strange trees and he’s waiting for me.’
‘Perhaps it means a wolf is waiting for you,’ said Elai, ‘in some trees.’
‘Don’t tease me; no one teases you over your dreams.’
‘No.’ The girl turned her eyes to the ground. ‘But you don’t dream as I dream.’
‘How do you know?’
Their mother raised her hand.
‘Stop quarrelling. Karas, look. I’ll interpret your dream if it means so much to you. You know we are descended from the Heruli, who broke the empire in the west. Your know your forefathers were great men of the northern tribes, and one of them, Odoacer, overthrew the emperor Romulus Augustulus.’
‘I know this.’
‘I’m telling you you know it — and that means if you had any insight at all you’d be able to work it out for
