‘Well, you’re a fine fellow to be taking a bath down here, my lord,’ said Snake in the Eye in Greek. ‘Let me lend you a scrubbing brush.’ He threw something into the pool. The chamberlain caught a glimpse as it splashed into the water. It was the head of the little Greek who had helped him down. The red-haired man had gone.
‘Help me out!’
Snake in the Eye put his hand to the glowing rock, captivated
‘Oh, I don’t think I shall,’ he said. ‘These waters are singing a song, can’t you hear it?’
‘I hear the runes.’
‘Yes, and do you know what they want?’
The chamberlain swallowed. His teeth chattered with the cold.
‘Death.’
‘Yes, they do,’ said Snake in the Eye, ‘which is lucky, because here I am.’
The runes in the cavern began to hum and shake, and what seemed like a wave of excitement rushed from them like, thought the chamberlain, the roar of a crowd greeting a favourite charioteer.
48
I am on my way to death. Loys, where are you? I cannot die without saying goodbye. Where are you? Come to me. Don’t come to me — these people are killers. Run, Loys. I’ve brought you to this. If I’d never smiled at you I would never have been here and you would be in the monastery, safe and warm.
Beatrice was dragged, bound at the hands, through the dark of the Numera. The effort was excruciating, and she cried out for them to go more slowly, that if she fell and killed her baby it would be her death too. Her legs were so weak, she was so heavy, so ungainly with the burden of her belly among these hateful men. The northerners pressed on. They were grim-faced dirty savages, she thought. She’d seen their like at her father’s court, but there they had been out of place, hesitant, fearful of offending a lord whose customs and ways were unfamiliar to them. Here they were at home, marching through the darkness, torches blazing, swords drawn and spears before them.
So much slaughter, so many dead. Corpses everywhere, from the burned and blackened men at the entrance to the prison, to the prisoners dead in their irons, to butchered and beaten guards. Beatrice had been heavily sick on the way in and even some of the Vikings retched. The street level of the prison held no one alive. Bodies lay torn by ragged wounds, hands severed, heads smashed in. One man had a broken spear through his chest — someone had clearly tried and failed to get it out of his body. Stranger though were the men who sat dead but unmarked in their irons, the dancing girl who clung to a fat old pimp, both wide-eyed, pale and dead, as if killed by fear.
Beatrice did not wonder people died that way here. Her father had said of all the tools he had at his disposal to govern, nothing worked as well as terror — King Fear, he called it. If there was such a ruler, this was his palace.
They came to a door. That too had been burned away — the invaders clearly improvising to make up for their lack of siege equipment. Down, through more silent galleries of the dead, the torchlight bright on harsh faces, the terrible woman who had ordered Beatrice taken at her side. Somehow the men, full of grim purpose, hostile and rough, were easier to bear than her. Beatrice glanced at the scar on the woman’s face — no worse a deformity than on any beggar on the church steps on a Sunday, but something about it frightened her. It seemed like the expression of an internal agony, like a blister that had bubbled to the surface from some heart-deep fire.
‘Where, Vala?’
‘Down, down. He is here. Look around you. He is here.’
Beatrice was pulled on, through doorways, down stairs. She retched and staggered. Against herself, she wept. ‘My baby. My baby!’ Screams and shouts from below. A Viking walked towards them out of the gloom.
‘You’re late to the fight, lads. We’ve had some slaughter here tonight.’
‘How do we get below?’ The big one, the one in the red tunic and trousers, was curt, ill-tempered.
‘Along there and down. They’re all dead. The Greeks must have killed them all rather than let us collect their ransoms, though how I can’t see.’
They pushed on through another doorway and Beatrice saw steps descending into a huge room. As she was pulled down she cried out — the torches of the Vikings revealed a slaughterhouse. Hundreds of men lay dead on the floor, their bodies copper in the torchlight, like the fallen leaves of a hideous autumn.
‘This is hell,’ she said. Clad only in rags, the corpses were in various states of emaciation. Some were little more than skeletons, bones showing through the skin, others were merely thin; some were decomposing, others newly dead. Even the warriors with her murmured at the sight.
‘Down again.’ It was the woman who spoke.
Beatrice now had to be carried by one of the Vikings. Her strength had gone. He picked her up in his arms as if she was a baby herself and walked her across that terrible floor. She tried to blank her mind, closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth to avoid the stench.
‘Here, it is as was revealed.’ The woman’s voice again.
Beatrice felt herself lowered to the floor and opened her eyes. A darkness gaped at the foot of the wall.
‘Not in there. Not in there!’ said Beatrice.
What were they doing with her? Did they plan to entomb her? She was quite convinced they were all mad.
‘Lady!’ The big red Viking shook her and stared into her face, speaking Norse slowly so she understood. ‘I will go first. We will not leave you alone in this place.’
‘Am I to die?’
‘We’re all to die one day.’
He lay flat on the floor and crawled within. One of his men followed him in. Another gestured to her that it was her turn. She had no choice, and whatever was in that hole could not be as bad as the charnel house she was standing in. But how to get in? She had to lie on her side, holding her belly. The man behind her pushed and the one already in the tunnel pulled at her arms. ‘Be careful, be careful!’ It was agony, as if they’d tear her arms from their sockets and crush the child inside her. The woman came in after her, then the other men.
They were in a long tunnel stretching away into darkness.
‘Why am I here?’ Beatrice wanted to weep but she wouldn’t give the savages the satisfaction. Her legs cramped and her vision blurred. She needed to lie down but there was nowhere to lie. She had to go on, so she went on.
No one replied to her question; they just pressed on, sometimes carrying her, sometimes making her walk, sometimes making her crawl. Loys. Loys, where are you? She thought of her happy times with him — the woods near Rouen, kissing him in the wet dawn, the cold of his cheek against hers, watching the sun rise and pull the mist from the grass, the smell of the earth and the feel of his body next to hers as they walked in the morning light.
‘Why am I here?’
‘You have dreams?’ It was the woman.
‘We all have dreams!’ Her anger came bursting out of her but she checked herself. She depended on this woman and the Vikings, if she was ever to get out of this place.
The woman spoke and her voice was soft. ‘The wolf. He is coming for you.’
‘I have seen him, yes.’
‘So we will see if he can be stopped. You are a lure to him.’
‘I would rather have a million nightmares than experience this reality.’
‘You know they are more than nightmares. You see reality. In here — ’ she tapped Beatrice on the head ‘- when you are sleeping. You go to the river and he comes looking for you.’
‘Yes.’
‘He must not find you.’
‘No one will ever find me down here.’
‘He will.’
