A Burning Sea Page 13

  He sat up and turned to the wall. For a long time, he considered the bolt that fastened his chain. It was driven deep into the stone. If somehow he could loosen it or dig it out of the wall. . . But how? And then what? He imagined Kai picking his way through the rafters and tiling, out into the night, along the roof-ridge and down and down, squirrelling through the maze of the household until somehow he won clear of the perimeter walls. Out into the city and away? But what Erlan wanted was here, inside the walls of Byzantium.

  What he had come for. . .

  A noise interrupted his thoughts. Footsteps on the gritty staircase that led up to the landing. He heard soft murmuring followed by laughter and then the creak of the grille gate opening.

  The footsteps drew closer. They were light, unhurried yet deliberate. Then they stopped. There was a faint scrape of wood. A glimmer of moonlight fell through his tiny window in a silver splash on the door. By its pale light, he saw the spy-shutter slide open and a pair of eyes twinkle in the shadow beyond.

  He threw off his blanket and swung his legs to the floor. ‘Who’s there?’ No reply, only another sound. A giggle, maybe? He got to his feet, his joints stiff as rusted iron, and shuffled towards the door. The chain shrieked obscenely, shattering the quiet, followed by a deadening jolt as it reached its limit. The eyes had vanished, perhaps scared away. But no other sound followed from down the corridor. No one came.

  He waited, his curiosity pricked, and soon enough his patience was rewarded. The eyes returned, furtively, like a fox slinking from its hole. This time he was close enough to see them. Large and luminous. Kohl-rimmed lashes, shifting pools of dark light. Trouble.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Another titter. The woman’s eyes were levelled at his. ‘Ágrios.’

  Savage. Ramedios had called him the word many times, but never in the way that soft, silken voice spoke it, more breath in it than sound. He heard the smooth grind of the key in the lock. The door swung open and with it came a waft of scent. It touched his brain like a needle, startling with its sweet-spice perfume. As out of place in this cell as a summer rose.

  She was small and slim with a long river of black hair, slightly tousled and woven through with golden thread. Her eyes were sloped and full of mischief, her robe rippled like moonbeams over water as she moved into the room.

  Erlan stood at the limit of his chain. She came closer. He didn’t see the point in asking her who she was a third time. What was a name anyway?

  ‘Arbasdos hates you,’ she murmured, her perfumed breath swirling into his mouth. Was this one of Silanos’s tricks? Or worse, the general’s? Her voice was low and husky. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘What’s he to you?’

  ‘My master. Like you.’

  ‘Not like me.’

  ‘He says you are dangerous. A wild man.’ She spoke with an accent, different to the other Greek he’d heard. ‘He says you’re an animal.’

  Without warning, something sharp and cold pricked the cord of muscle under his chin. He saw the glint of a long dagger in her small hands. He swore but the pressure increased, piercing his skin.

  ‘You crazy bitch,’ he snarled, forced to his tiptoes.

  ‘Back, savage,’ she said, laying her other hand on his chest and pushing with arched fingers. He retreated till his spine butted against the wall. ‘I want to look at you.’

  Even in the gloom, he saw her pupils were gaping holes of shadow. He wondered whether she’d been drinking but there was no wine on her breath. He considered snatching the knife but she must have seen the intent in his eyes because her hand dropped and the razor-edge with it to a place on his body infinitely more delicate. He sucked a sharp breath.

  ‘Are you an animal, Northman?’ she sighed. What was he supposed to say to that with six inches of steel tickling his balls? ‘A wild beast. . .? But I think I know how to tame you.’ He peered down at his elfin tormentor. She was wrapped in a bolt of silk which shimmered in the dim light, clinging to the tight curves of her body. Despite the absurdity of his situation, a pulse of excitement raced through him, seeing the hard buds of her nipples under the flimsy silk. She was good at this, damn her, there was no mistaking that.

  ‘I know why you’re here,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’re Arbasdos’s whore.’

  The blade rose half an inch; Erlan recoiled against the wall. ‘I’m no one’s whore,’ she corrected him.

  ‘Woman, then.’ Probably better to mind his manners under the circumstances.

  Her sneer softened to a smile. ‘Like no other.’

  ‘Until tonight.’ The smile fell. ‘He no longer needs you, does he? Surplus to requirements.’ He took strange satisfaction seeing her bright eyes darken with anger.

  ‘Bah! Let him find what pleasure he can in the bed of that – that child. She will not keep him for long. Until then. . . I shall tend to his animals.’

  She leaned closer, but instead of the brush of her lips or her fingertips, he felt the knife-point circle around him. This was madness with the deadly steel there, yet he felt the nearness of her and the blood flooding to his loins. She didn’t look down. Didn’t need to. She knew exactly where the knife ended and he began. Even so, he pressed back against the wall. The chain clanked.

  ‘The guard,’ he whispered, his voice suddenly hoarse.

  She clicked her tongue. ‘Coward.’ Her tiny nostrils flared with disdain. ‘Anyway, Marcellos will not disturb us.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Because I drugged him. He won’t wake till morning. And then they’ll whip him for it.’ Her white teeth flashed beneath him. ‘There are no others in these cells. Only you.’ Another infuriating giggle. ‘They make spears long in the northlands, hmm?’ She was toying with him. But he no longer cared. He felt a thirst long dormant in him reawakening.

  ‘Here.’ She reached up and popped something into his mouth. A small wad of leaves. It tasted bitter. ‘Swallow.’ He demurred; the blade insisted. ‘Swallow,’ she purred. He swallowed.

  She smiled at this, and then her expression changed, her amusement replaced with a flash of shameless desire. She pressed her body against his. The blade was gone. Instead her hand cupped him, he tasted her lips, her tongue darting in his mouth.

  The chain rattled as he took hold of her. Her body felt thrillingly warm and smooth under the silk. His fingers followed the curve of her buttocks up her spine to her perfumed neck, down her arms to her hand and over the dagger haft in it. With a jerk, he spun her round, his fist clamped over her tiny knuckles. Her body went taut with the sudden violence between them.

  ‘He told you I was dangerous, did he?’ Erlan hissed in her ear. ‘Did he tell you how easily I will kill what belongs to him?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ she moaned, then tipped back her head, exposing the full length of her dusky throat to the blade’s edge, moving against it as if it were a lover’s lips. Perfume rose from her mane of hair, intoxicating. He felt her tongue-tip trace along his jaw, probing among the bloody bristles where her dagger had broken his skin. She moaned again. He tried to focus but whatever substance he had swallowed was clouding his head. One slice of the blade and she would fall. She wouldn’t even cry out. The door lay open. The guard drugged. . .

  Except now her buttocks ground against him, soft but insistent, her hand reached down between them, freeing him from under his tunic. The dagger dropped to the floor with a thud. His hand slipped around her breast, pinching the swollen buds of flesh between his knuckles under the silk as she hitched her robe over her hips.

  She sank back onto him with a gasp, her fingers reaching up to pull at his hair, dragging his mouth down onto hers. He tasted his own blood on her tongue. It went through him like wildfire, burning his throat with a white heat as darkness flooded his mind. . .

  Later, much later, they lay sated on the shelf where he slept, beads of sweat growing cold on their skin. The air was warm and musky. His head throbbed gently but his mind was c
alm, as the intensity of what had happened ebbed slowly from his limbs.

  She stirred beside him. ‘My ágrios,’ she purred. ‘Tamed, I think.’

  ‘Sweet revenge on Arbasdos, I suppose.’

  ‘Revenge? Hah! Revenge is for fools like you. And him. No. This is only a little game I like to play. One I never lose,’ she added slyly.

  ‘I can well believe it.’

  ‘Still, it was sweet enough.’ She smiled and cupped his cheek. ‘But now I go.’

  ‘Will you come again?’

  She leaned forward and planted a lingering kiss on his lips, as if sealing the memory of them on hers. ‘You know I cannot.’ She picked up the knife from the floor. ‘Hold still.’ Before he knew what she was doing, she had pulled his wrists into her lap and set to work on his manacles. A few moments later the hinges popped and fell with a clunk to the floor. He looked at her, astonished.

  She shrugged prettily. ‘A trick I learned in the east. Or did you think I only knew the tricks of a whore?’

  There was no good answer to that question so he said nothing.

  ‘Take this.’ She handed him the knife. ‘You haven’t much time. Dawn is close.’ She stooped and swept up her discarded girdle from the floor. ‘And this.’ He only noticed now how long the thing was, far longer than it needed to be to hold her robe in place. ‘There is a walkway high on the north-west wall of the palace. No watchmen go there at night. Use this to let yourself down.’ While she dressed herself, she explained how he could find his way there from his cell, through the warren of courtyards and colonnades to the city outside and freedom. ‘When you reach the street, the Golden Horn lies straight down the hill. The gates open at sunrise. Be ready. After that you’re on your own.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked, buckling his belt and shoving the blade inside.

  ‘I told you. Because Arbasdos hates you. Tonight, that is enough. Good luck, ágrios.’ She turned to go but he caught her arm.

  ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Lucia,’ she smiled and shook him loose, and in another eye-blink she was gone.

  Erlan sprang from his cell after her, but as she disappeared down the corridor he turned aside into the grille door opposite, just as she’d told him. Inside, he flung himself into the corner, sweeping aside a heap of soiled straw. He felt a thrill of triumph as his fingers closed on the metal ring she had described. He pulled it and a trapdoor flew open and he found himself staring down into shadow. Just visible was the first rung of a ladder.

  He shot down it like a fleeing spirit, then onwards, down staircases, along colonnades, through courtyards, slavishly following the instructions of his unexpected ally. Most of the household were lost in happy oblivion after the excesses of the night’s revelry. Now and then, a laugh echoed out of the corner of some deserted courtyard but the few watchmen still on duty had no more notion of the fugitive shadow than they would a ghost. At last he came to the stairs that led up to the walkway on the outer wall. Gaining the parapet, he limped to the edge, leaned over and looked down at the drop on the other side. Thirty feet at least. He had rope enough for perhaps fifteen.

  Then he looked out over the rooftops. The setting moon’s light was glinting silver off the waters of the Horn. Freedom lay that way. He was about to tie off the rope and chance his luck when a whisper sounded in his ear. ‘Turn around.’

  He spun around. There was no one there, though he would have sworn he had heard a voice. Instead what he saw transfixed him. A huge, monstrous shadow rising up over the city on the summit of the hill above him. It was bigger than the mightiest hall, taller than a mountain, the vast black dome soaring as high as Ymir’s skull. He froze, gawping like a man who’d lost his wits.

  A shout from the courtyard below jolted him to his senses. ‘You up there! What’s your business?’ Erlan cursed; his outline atop the wall must have stood out clear as a beacon-fire against the greying sky. ‘Stay where you are!’ But Erlan was already securing a knot in the girdle and flinging the tail of it over the wall. He followed it over the edge just as a javelin looped over his head and clattered against the wall of a facing building. Erlan could already hear the outcry behind him, scuffled footsteps multiplying in the courtyard below as more watchmen arrived on the scene. ‘Thief!’ someone yelled. But he was already slipping down the rope so fast his fingers burned. The end came fast though there was another fifteen feet to the cobbled street below. Reaching the knot, he hesitated. There was a shout above him. He glanced up and was shocked to recognize the face of the second spatharios – whose friend he’d killed in front of Arbasdos.

  He let go, losing his stomach for a dizzy second before he hit the ground hard. Fire shot up his right leg and exploded out of his knee. He yowled in frustration and pain. With a crippled ankle and a twisted knee, he wasn’t going to be winning any foot races.

  ‘Northman!’ the spatharios bellowed into the predawn gloom. ‘You can’t run!’

  That might be true enough. Nevertheless he forced himself to all fours and was about to get up when something across the street stopped him. Something watching him from the alleyway opposite, one eye glinting bright and solemn in the moonlight.

  ‘Aska?’ he murmured, sure he must be dreaming. But the darkness shifted, a scrap of chain rattled, and for a second he saw the outline of a dog.

  A spear clattered on the cobbles beside him. A torch appeared at the corner of the street. He dragged himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain, as more projectiles rained about him. ‘Aska!’ he called, but the wolfhound was gone, and Erlan could only blunder after him into the dark alley, while behind him the cries of pursuit rang across the city.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mist covered the water as the ferry set out from the port of Chalcedon and nudged around the headland. Lilla stared ahead. Sunbeams were making strange shifting patterns through the mist. Under the hull, the stream flowing south through the straits felt strong. She listened to the dip and gnaw of the oars. She smelled the boatman’s sour sweat and her own hair blowing about her face unwashed, mingling with the salty sea air.

  ‘You can’t see it yet, but up that way there’s a long inlet,’ said the Greek, pointing across the straits to the north-west. ‘Chrysokeras. The Golden Horn. The entire imperial fleet is crammed in there, safe as bugs behind a huge chain they pull across the mouth of the bay. Each link as fat as that one’s belly.’ He jabbed a thumb at Einar who was sitting astride a thwart in the bows. Girthy Einar might be, but Lilla thought he had never looked better. His ruddy jowls had leaned out, his forehead was brown as leather and his bushy eyebrows were dyed blonde with the sun.

  Gerutha suddenly leaped to her feet. ‘Sweet lies of Loki! Would you look at that?’

  Lilla peered into the thinning mist. She saw first colours, then shapes. A slope daubed red and white and green, slanting away towards a distant ridge. Then all at once sunlight exploded over everything, bathing the red and white city in a coral dawn. She saw bands of pink-grey blocks and red brick, and above them bank after bank of rust-red tiles climbing away, punctuated with fans of dark cedar trees.

  ‘What in the Nine Worlds is that?’ cried Einar, pointing at a hall seated on the eastern shoulder of the promontory, whose massive buttresses of red ochre dominated every other building.

  ‘The Church of the Holy Wisdom,’ said Demetrios the Greek. ‘There’s no finer building in all the wide world.’ Lilla could well believe it.

  ‘And there?’ asked Gerutha, pointing further south.

  ‘They call it the hippodrome.’

  ‘Hippo—what?’ said Einar.

  The Greek laughed. ‘They race horses there, you damned barbarian.’

  ‘You don’t need a stone hall to race horses,’ said Gerutha.

  ‘Apparently you do in this city,’ replied Einar.

  They had picked up the Greek in Constanta, a port further up the Black Sea coast. Or Einar had, when he’d knocked over the man’s wine pitcher in a tavern there an
d bought him another to make amends. He soon discovered this Demetrios had three useful qualities: he spoke a northern dialect which Einar could understand; he was a helmsman by trade; and he knew the way to Miklagard. Or Byzantium as he insisted they call the city.

  ‘Vy zánt io,’ muttered Lilla.

  ‘Excellent!’ Demetrios cried. ‘I’ll make a Byzantine of you yet.’

  That felt a distance off. Lilla had made only a little progress learning the Greek tongue. For some days after awaking from her fever she had been too weak to do anything but rest and, at Gerutha’s insistence, eat. Eventually she started to feel stronger, and as soon as the Greek joined them, she was determined to make use of him.

  Poor Gerutha struggled to make any headway with the new tongue, but to Lilla’s surprise, Einar took to it like a moorhen to water. No one, least of all himself, could fathom how. When she asked him his secret, he only shrugged and said he could hear the music of it, that was all.

  Just as well: Lilla had decided to send Demetrios back with the ferry to oversee Fasolt until their return. It was her ship now. Her ship, her gold, her men – at least the few left of them. She had judged it best to leave them in the smaller port of Chalcedon to guard the ship and to stay out of trouble, and Demetrios could make himself useful staving off any nosy officials who turned up to pester them.

  Meanwhile, she and Grusha and Einar would cross the straits to the city, and then. . . then they would find him. She wished it were that simple.

  Gerutha glanced back at her from the bows. ‘Are you all right?’ Lilla was too nervous to do more than smile and nod in reply.

  All the way south from Constanta they had heard rumours of war. And then they were rumours no longer but reports. The largest army ever assembled was marching north out of Syria, leaving in its wake devastation, vast tracts of land desolated and abandoned, left to be reclaimed by wild beasts. They called them Arabs, and other names. ‘Muslims’ – followers of a new god, so she had heard, or a new idea. It wasn’t clear to her. But in the imperial hinterlands their armies had swept all before them, and now they were only days away from closing an iron fist around the city.