even.
‘Not these,’ he said. ‘Is there no one here who can call on the old goddess of the city? We are near enough to the walls she blesses.’
There was evidence enough of the worship of Hecate. Her symbol was daubed on walls. At places where three roads — or rather tracks through the debris — met, there were occasional posts, rough things carved with three heads at the top. This too was the goddess’s symbol. But who would own up to carving it? And even if anyone did, they could say it was just a post to mark the junction, the faces representing winds or angels.
He asked about the goddess indirectly, but if people knew anything then no one confessed to it or they missed his hints. After the third day anyone following him would have got bored, made their report and gone to buy wine, he thought. So he became a little bolder.
He had located an old man who claimed to have lived in the shanty all his life. ‘We make our fortunes by copying great men,’ said Loys. ‘Tell me, where was the chamberlain Karas born? I wish to offer a prayer of thanks for his success at the place he grew up.’
The old man said he didn’t know but knew a man who might. The man who might didn’t know either but he said it was possible a neighbour would. The neighbour thought he knew but, when they arrived at the spot, no one there could remember the chamberlain being there at all.
A crowd of children had formed around Loys on his first day in the slum, tugging at his clothes, asking him for money. He shouted at them to go away but they only stood further off, calling to him, offering him women, recommending themselves as excellent and diligent servants. By the third day, they concluded he had no money and was probably a madman. Now they left him largely alone.
Loys stood in the midst of the broken-down shacks, the human stink around him — cooking smells, dirt, urine and worse.
‘You’re lost, sir?’
It was a small boy. The child was thin and his eyes seemed ridiculously big in his head. He wore a loincloth and his body was red with scabies.
‘No.’
‘Then can I help you in any way? A woman is easy to find.’
‘That’s not what I’m looking for.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘Are you a clever lad?’ He had noticed the boy spoke quite well.
‘I don’t know. My mother says I am useful.’
‘Then what will you be when you are older? What will you do?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Will you have a profession? Will you be a soldier or a bureaucrat?’
‘I can’t read, sir. A bureaucrat needs to read.’
‘Do you know anyone who can read?’
‘I would say you can.’
Loys smiled.
‘So you will be a soldier?’
‘If I live so long and am strong enough by the time the army will have me. They eat well, those men.’
‘But they die too.’
‘Here we die but do not eat.’
‘You live on this street?’
‘Yes.’
‘I heard it said the chamberlain of all the empire grew up here.’
‘So it’s said.’
‘So why don’t you follow him? Why don’t you go to the court and become a servant of the emperor. Be diligent and work hard, and you may rise to that splendour.’
The boy laughed. ‘I don’t go because I can stay here and get beaten. The city guards would not even let me in.’
‘And yet the chamberlain went there.’
‘He was blessed by God.’
‘By God?’
‘By God, sir.’ The boy put up his chin, defying Loys to say different.
Loys gave him a coin.
‘And only by God?’
The boy put out his hand. Loys gave him another coin.
‘Will you give me another if I tell you?’ said the boy.
‘You’ve had two; I will not.’
The boy ran away.
Loys shrugged.
Galti laughed. ‘These people live like rats.’
‘They might say the same of you.’
‘I grew up on a farm,’ said Galti. ‘In winter we sat in the hot spring all day. The Greeks are not clean.’
‘No.’ Loys had a thought. ‘Did you never consider another life, Galti, other than that of a warrior?’
Galti looked at him as though he had sprouted troll ears. ‘Not where I come from. The sheep don’t always have enough to eat and you get a good crop only every third year if you’re lucky.’
‘You never thought to come somewhere like here, to study, to be a merchant, to be a bureaucrat?’
‘A what?’
‘A scribe, a writer.’
Galti laughed. ‘The great emperor wants Norsemen for one thing. The same as you do. Our muscle and the swords we carry.’
‘You didn’t have to follow that life.’
Galti seemed genuinely puzzled. Clearly Loys made no sense to him.
It was the same with the people who lived in the slum, Loys thought. Beyond the wall, in the city, opportunity awaited the diligent man. But here that world was almost unreachable. The children didn’t read, they had no manners, and even the cleverest saw no way out beyond the army, were they lucky enough to live long enough to join.
So how had the chamberlain got out? Extraordinary fortune? And why did his younger sister, who he had brought with him and raised out of the mire, despise him so?
‘We should go,’ said Galti. ‘It’s getting dark. Well, darker.’ It was too: a very fine rain made a veil of the air.
Loys heard a noise from behind a tent. He went to investigate. Sheep. Or rather a sheep suckling a single lamb. A single black lamb. Loys remembered the book he had read. Black lambs were sacrificed to Hecate. He walked through a line of tents and lean-tos. At the top of the hill was another black lamb, this time in a rough wooden cage. He ran down into the valley that dipped by the walls before the long climb up into the hills and the distant trees. Another lamb, tethered. Also black. It was very nearly the full moon. Three days before a ceremony to Hecate would be held. He needed to see where those black lambs were taken.
He returned to the Vikings.
‘We need to go,’ said Galti, ‘it will be dark soon.’
‘Yes,’ said Loys, ‘but I have a service to ask of you.’
‘What is it?’
‘I need you to find me some smaller guards,’ he said.
24
