me.’
‘Why so?’
‘I trouble you too, I can see it.’
‘I am unused to the presence of lone women. I…’
‘It is more than that.’
Again a silence.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said.
‘Then what?’
Could he tell her? He would sound mad. Yet he had a powerful urge to do so. The palace seemed alive to him, so many smells — cooking, sweat, the mould of clothes, the make-up of the courtiers, the leather of the soldiers’ tunics — and beyond those a scent like he smelled on Beatrice but sharper, with a tinge of smoke, a bitter undercurrent that set his tongue tingling as if he had licked a lemon.
‘Lady, you must forgive me. I have undergone a terrible ordeal. I have been kept in a foul dungeon, denied light, denied food, given only water. It may be some time before I am myself again.’
‘Say what you have to say.’
‘I cannot.’
‘Then I will say it for you. I know you, sir. It is only because you are my husband’s friend and you have helped him in the past that I sit here now. My soul longs to run from you, and I tell you plainly I am afraid of you.’
Azemar bowed his head. ‘Why fear me, lady?’
‘You know, I sense it. In my dreams, since I was a girl, I have walked in a strange place. A riverbank under the moon. I have never been there, but I visit it so regularly when I am sleeping that it’s almost as familiar as my home. In my dream I am looking for something and something is looking for me. There is a man and he follows me.’
Azemar crossed himself. ‘In my dream there is a lady and I follow her.’
Beatrice stood up. ‘You mean me harm!’
‘No, lady, no.’
‘You will harm me. When I turn to confront the man, to ask him why he follows me, then he is no longer a man.’
‘What is he?’
‘He is a wolf. I have seen what he does with his nails and his teeth. A lady of this palace lies unwaking on her bed because of him.’
‘How so?’
‘She came with me to that place, that riverbank, and the wolf attacked her.’
‘Came with you? How could she come with you in your dreams?’
‘The women of this city have arts you cannot guess at, Azemar.’
‘Sorcery?’
‘I don’t know what to call it. I just know I have seen you and I have seen what you are capable of.’
‘I am a gentle man and I would never harm anyone.’
‘But you have been to the river?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what does it mean?’
‘The devil sends many things to test us.’
‘This is not the work of the devil,’ said Beatrice. Her voice was low, though she felt like screaming.
‘Then what?’
‘Tell me.’
‘I saw you in the fields,’ said Azemar. ‘I am a man and you are a beautiful woman. I thought you had just entered my dreams in the way women do. It’s a sin to think of you so deeply that you appear to me when I am sleeping, but no more.’
‘And then?’
‘In the Numera, far from God’s eyes. A man came to me and I saw you again. This time it was not a dream. It was real.’
‘Were you in the forest, where the dead men lay?’
‘I was.’
‘You went to them, and I asked you to come away, to leave them and be free of your hungers.’
‘Yes. I looked for you in many places. Below the earth, in caves and tunnels. I have hunted you through my dreams.’
‘A wolf hunts me.’
‘In that prison a man came to me, or more than a man, a demon, and called me wolf.’
Their eyes met. Azemar had the powerful urge to embrace her, to tell her he loved her and that he had come so far to find her. But he did not. She was married to his friend. He was a monk.
‘So what are we to make of this?’
‘We are to make nothing,’ said Beatrice. ‘It’s clearly an affliction of demons, of which this city seems to have many.’
Again the cold night air drifting beneath the doorway, a smell of the newly dead. If Beatrice noticed these things, she showed no sign. Azemar had to swallow. He wiped drool from his chin. His stomach grumbled, empty.
‘My abbot told me not to put too much store in natural phenomena. These skies may be sent by God, by the devil, or they may be simply some rare weather.’
‘And the dead?’
‘What dead?’
Beatrice told him of the reports of deaths in the churches, of deaths in the streets, people cold to the touch almost as they hit the floor. ‘Loys is supposed to find what is causing this. He has to provide a spell to stop it.’
‘A rare sort of heresy for the state to demand.’
‘This state is full of heretics, and worse, I suspect.’
‘Lay the case before me,’ said Azemar. ‘I am Loys’ equal in study and two men may make clear what remains obscure to one.’
So Beatrice told him everything she knew — from the coming of the comet to the death of the rebel, the darkening of the sky, the weakness of the emperor and now the many sudden deaths that were afflicting the city.
‘A wildman came to the emperor on the night of the victory, predicting death and calamity. Loys seeks to find him,’ said Beatrice.
‘In the city?’
‘Below the Numera. He was there but he escaped to the lower tunnels.’
‘I have seen him,’ said Azemar.
Her fear was something he could taste, pungent and harsh but pleasing for all that, like a hot spice. All his life his instinct would have been to offer her words of reassurance, to calm her; now her fear seemed almost beautiful. Once the world had been shrouded in night. Now it had come to glorious day and he saw clearly for the first time in his life. He heard the beating of her heart, smelled the sweetness of the sweat of stress upon her, noticed the tenseness of her muscles as if she was ready to run. There was a palpable hostility to her.
‘What did he say?’
Azemar remembered the wolfman, his strange double, the pale fellow and the smothering dark.
‘He told me to go far away from here,’ he said.
Beatrice put her hand to her throat. ‘He thinks you have something to do with this!’
‘I don’t know. Lady, I was in the dark a long time. I was…’
Azemar couldn’t finish his sentence. The smell on the breeze was becoming too much for him. It reminded him of salt beef but with many more colours to its flavour. Words no longer seemed to fit into his mind.
Someone knocked hard at the door and Beatrice started and involuntarily crossed herself.
‘I…’
‘What?’
