grit and stone grinding on his teeth as he chewed. He forced them down. His mouth was full of dirt. He took up the ladle beside his mother and dipped it into the waters. He drank.
He lost all idea of how long he had been listening to the chant. His nose ran, and he blew the snot from it. He couldn’t be sure he had it all out and blew and blew again. He was salivating heavily and became strangely conscious of the muscles of his face. They didn’t quite seem to be under his control. He stretched his mouth and moved his head from side to side.
His mother’s chanting took on a strange quality like the words were physical things that didn’t disappear as they were spoken but came floating out of her mouth to settle like petals on the water. He couldn’t see them, but he had the strong sensation they were there, these word-petals, dropping from her mouth.
He heard voices calling him. The words were in no language he knew, but they rustled in his mind like leaves disturbed by footsteps in a wood.
Then they became clearer and intelligible. This is the place.
‘What place?’
He looked around him to see who spoke. It was a woman’s voice, but none he recognised.
The place where you are lost.
‘I am not lost. I know my way back.’
Can you see what you have drunk?
The waters were no longer red with the light of the rocks but clear and grey. Within them shone symbols — some silver, like quick fish in the pool, some copper and shimmering as if picked out in spangles of sunlight, some solid and hard, barnacled and green like the ribs of a sunken ship.
‘What are these?’
The needful symbols.
‘What need?’
The need of magic.
He knew what these things were — keys, keys to making the world in the image of his will, keys to godhood.
‘What is asked of me?’
You know what is asked.
He fell to giggling. He was convinced there was a hair in his mouth, irritating his palate and tongue. He dipped the ladle in the water again and drank. But there was no hair, or if there was he could not wash it away. His face burned on the right-hand side. He was having difficulty thinking, as if waking from a deep sleep — that moment when the self is forgotten and the apparatus of eyes, brain and ears merely detects the world without interpreting or making sense of it.
Then something like his self returned, though altered. All the ragged, unfinished, deliberately set-aside and overlooked desires in his mind came loping to the fore, and all the tenderness, the love and the kindness shrank back before its advance.
A shape played and wriggled on his sister’s skin, three triangles interlocking. And then there was only one triangle, but, in seeing it, he understood that it was not meant to stand alone. It wanted the other two for company. He saw battles, banners streaming in the sun, red and gold and another, blacker, that was the banner of death — a broad sweep of flies above a field of the slain. A story he had heard came into his mind. The goddess Hecate went to a feast and a rich and spiteful king set out to trick her, to test her powers of insight and knowledge, so he served her up a dismembered child in a stew. The goddess, to punish him, condemned him to turn into a wolf and eat his twenty sons. A man who became a wolf. He was a fellow to fear. The man-wolf’s anger was so deep, his hungers like the sucking tides of the ocean, always there, never sated.
Karas’s thoughts returned to himself and his family’s life outside the walls. What was it? No more than the existence of rats. They lived in a slum with no hope of advancement. Down here, in the well, was hope. Up there, in the living forms of his sisters and his mother, restraint, tradition. No father, three women to care for. He was anchored to poverty. There could be no great school for him, no bureaucrat’s position in the palace, while he was responsible for them. Resentment bubbled inside him.
He drank the waters again and this time felt the symbols enter him — chiming and breathing and filling him with wild visions of battles, of mountains and woods and wide blue seas. They grew in him, as if he were the land and they a tree springing from him, as if he was a tree and they an encircling vine, as if he was the vine and they the land that was nurtured by its fall of leaves and fruit. He felt their power — to control men, to sway them, even to kill them. But then they left him. The symbols would not stay.
‘What is asked of me?’
He knew what.
He stepped into the waters. Here they came up to his chest, though he felt the floor dropping away under his feet. He reached up for his mother’s feet and pulled her in. Entranced, weak and cold, she put up no resistance as he drowned her.
He drank again and the symbols flooded into him. But again they would not stay.
He pulled at his sister’s feet and dragged her in, holding her under. For a second she fought, and then all strength left her and she drowned as easily as her mother had done.
Once more he drank. This time the symbols came into him like a tempest, blowing the everyday and the mundane away, letting him see the true relations of things, driving him mad. He coughed, choked, laughed. Everything was clear to him — the way to the surface, to the light, but more than that, his future — what he needed to do to achieve all the things he had dreamed of.
He turned, disturbed by… by what? Something followed him. What? Nothing but a movement in the shadow cast by the lamp. Was it behind him again. What? Was that the dream wolf, slinking in the dark?
He kissed his sister, lifting her to a shelf of rock in the pool so she sat as if bathing.
‘The symbols are here,’ he said, ‘in me now. They needed to leave this place and you would not take them. They had to leave; there was no choice. If he finds them here, he’ll be born again. We must hide them from him.’
He pulled his mother through the water to the shelf and sat her beside his sister, kissed her too.
‘I have given what you could not,’ he said, ‘and now a great magic dwells within me. But it is only mine for a little time, so I must never be a man. I do this to honour the goddess and you are with her now. I am good and I have acted for good.’
He pulled himself out of the pool up towards the lamp. As he took it the shadows made wolves on the walls which seemed to stretch eager jaws towards him, but he was not afraid. The symbols protected him. But how long would they stay?
He climbed up the tunnel, towards the light, towards the hillside. He would run to Constantinople and go to the administrator of the palace to ask to be apprenticed to him as a eunuch and servant of the emperor. A symbol expressed itself inside him and said its name in a strange language that seemed magical and beautiful to Karas. Fehu. The name brought images of the bountiful baskets of the harvest, of sunshine, of gold, and it brought the thought of good luck. The palace would not refuse him. He would be cut, he would be prosperous and he would never be a man, so he would keep the magic he had earned at the well.
In his bedchamber the chamberlain put his hands to his face and wept.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He recalled the dream that had come to him after the incident at the pool, after he was cut and entered the Office of the Palace. In it, he flew over clouds that stretched out like silver cities in the moonlight, cities that burst into flame with the red dawn. He was pursued. By what? A wolf. He saw it sometimes, no more than a shape made by the rising plumes of storm clouds, white teeth that snapped towards him as the moonbeams split in the sodden air.
A wolf really had come — the wolfman who had been taken to the Numera — like a dream made flesh. The chamberlain had ordered him killed by another inmate — it was dangerous to move against one of the emperor’s prisoners directly — but the man had escaped before that plan had been put into effect. Now he was down in the caves below the prison doing who knew what? Could he find his way to the chamber where the rocks sweated red light and where the hungry waters sparkled like blood? Of course not. It was too far, the route too difficult to find from that side. The spirits that haunted those depths, that kept the curious guards away, that led prisoners to deaths of starvation and thirst in places unseen, would protect him.
