The Damnation Game (48 page)

“They’re going to kill us,” she said matter-of-factly.

It was all very informal. The presiding officer, a fur coat pulled around his shoulders, was standing with his hands at a blazing brazier, his back to the prisoners. The executioner was with him, his bloody sword jauntily leaned on his shoulder. A fat, lumbering man, he laughed at some joke the officer made and downed a cup of something warming before turning back to his business.

Carys smiled.

“What’s happening now?”

She said nothing; her eyes were on the man who was going to kill them; she smiled on.

“Carys. What’s happening?”

The soldiers had come along the line, and pushed them to the ground in the middle of the square. Carys had bowed her head, to expose the nape of her neck. “We’re going to die,” she whispered to her distant confidant.

At the far end of the line the executioner raised his sword and brought it down with one professional stroke. The prisoner’s head seemed to leap from the neck, pushed forward by a geyser of blood. It was lurid against the gray walls, the white snow. The head fell face-forward, rolled a little way and stopped. The body curled to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye Mamoulian watched the proceedings, trying to stop his teeth, from chattering. He wasn’t afraid, and didn’t want them to think he was. The next man in line had started to scream. Two soldiers stepped forward at the officer’s barked command and seized the man. Suddenly, after a calm in which you could hear the snow pat the ground, the line erupted with pleas and prayers; the man’s terror had opened a floodgate. The sergeant said nothing. They were lucky to be dying in such style, he thought: the sword was for aristocrats and officers. But the tree was not yet tall enough to hang a man from. He watched the sword fall a second time, wondering if the tongue still wagged after death, sitting in the draining palate of the dead man’s head.

“I’m not afraid,” he said. “What’s the use of fear? You can’t buy it or sell it, you can’t make love to it. You can’t even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you’re cold.”

A third prisoner’s head rolled in the snow; and a fourth. A soldier laughed. The blood steamed. Its meaty smell was appetizing to a man who hadn’t been fed for a week.

“I’m not losing anything,” he said in lieu of prayer. “I’ve had a useless life. If it ends here, so what?”

The prisoner at his left was young: no more than fifteen. A drummer-boy, the sergeant guessed. He was quietly crying.

“Look over there,” Mamoulian said. “Desertion if ever I saw it.”

He nodded toward the sprawled bodies, which were already being vacated by their various parasites. Fleas and nits, aware that their host had ceased, crawled and leaped from head and hem, eager to find new residence before the cold caught them.

The boy looked and smiled. The spectacle diverted him in the moment it took for the executioner to position himself and deliver the killing stroke. The head sprang; heat escaped onto the sergeant’s chest.

Idly, Mamoulian looked around at the executioner. He was slightly blood-spattered; otherwise his profession was not written upon him. It was a stupid face, with a shabby beard that needed trimming, and round, parboiled eyes.
Shall I be murdered by this?
the sergeant thought;
well, I’m not ashamed
. He spread his arms to either side of his body, the universal gesture of submission, and bowed his head. Somebody pulled at his shirt to expose his neck.

He waited. A noise like a shot sounded in his head. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the snow approaching as his head leaped from his neck; but no. In the middle of the square one of the soldiers was falling to his knees, his chest blown open by a shot from one of the upper cloister windows. Mamoulian glanced behind him. Soldiers were swarming from every side of the quadrangle; shots sliced the snow. The presiding officer, wounded, fell clumsily against the brazier, and his fur coat caught fire. Trapped beneath the tree, two soldiers were mowed down, slumping together like lovers under the branches.

“Away.” Carys whispered the imperative with his voice: “Quickly. Away.”

He belly-crawled across the frozen stone as the factions fought above his head, scarcely able to believe that he’d been spared. Nobody gave him a second glance. Unarmed and skeletal-thin, he was no danger to anyone.

Once out of the square, and into the backwaters of the monastery, he took a breath. Smoke had started to drift along the icy corridors. Inevitably, the place was being put to the torch by one side or the other: perhaps both. They were all imbeciles: he loved none of them. He began his way through the maze of the building, hoping to find his way out without encountering any stray fusiliers.

In a passageway far from the skirmishes he heard footsteps—sandaled, not booted—coming after him. He turned to face his pursuer. It was a monk, his scrawny features every inch the ascetic’s. He arrested the sergeant by the tattered collar of his shirt.

“You’re God-given,” he said. He was breathless, but his grip was fierce.

“Let me alone. I want to get out.”

“The fighting’s spreading through the building; it’s not safe anywhere.”

“I’ll take the risk.” The sergeant grinned.

“You were chosen, soldier,” the monk replied, still holding on.

“Chance stepped in on your behalf. The innocent boy at your side died, but you survived. Don’t you see? Ask yourself why.”

He tried to push the shaveling away; the mixture of incense and stale sweat was vile. But the man held fast, speaking hurriedly: “There are secret tunnels beneath the cells. We can slip away without being slaughtered.”

“Yes?”

“Certainly. If you’ll help me.”

“How?”

“I’ve got writings to salvage; a life’s work. I need your muscle, soldier. Don’t fret yourself, you’ll get something in return.”

“What have you got that I’d want?” the sergeant said. What could this wild-eyed flagellant possibly possess?

“I need an acolyte,” the monk said. “Someone to give my learning to.”

“Spare me your spiritual guidance.”

“I can teach you so much. How to live forever, if that’s what you want.” Mamoulian had started to laugh, but the monk went on with his dream-talk. “How to take life from other people, and have it for yourself. Or if you like, give it to the dead to resurrect them.”

“Never. “

“It’s old wisdom,” the monk said. “But I’ve found it again, written out in plain Greek. Secrets that were ancient when the hills were young. Such secrets.”

“If you can do all that, why aren’t you tsar of all the Russians?” Mamoulian replied.

The monk let go of his shirt, and looked at the soldier with contempt freshly squeezed from his eyes. “What man,” he said slowly, “what man with true ambition in his soul would want to be merely tsar?”

The reply wiped the soldier’s smile away. Strange words, whose significance—had he been asked—he would have had difficulty explaining. But there was a promise in them that his confusion couldn’t rob them of.
Well
, he thought,
maybe this is the way wisdom comes; and the sword didn’t fall on me, did it?

“Show me the way,” he said.

C
arys smiled: a small but radiant smile. In the space of a wing-beat winter melted away. Spring blossomed, the ground was green everywhere, especially over the burial pits.

“Where are you going?” Marty asked her. It was clear from her delighted expression that circumstances had changed. For several minutes she had spat out clues to the life she was sharing in the European’s head. Marty had barely grasped the gist of what was going on. He hoped she would be able to furnish the details later. What country this was; what war.

Suddenly, she said: “I’m finished.” Her voice was light; almost playful.

“Carys?”

“Who’s Carys? Never heard of him. Probably dead. They’re all dead but me.”

“What have you finished?”

“Learning, of course. All he can teach me. And it was true. Everything he promised: all true. Old wisdom.”

“What have you learned?”

She raised her hand, the burned one, and spread it. “I can steal life,” she said. “Easily. Just find the place, and drink. Easy to take; easy to give.”

“Give?”

“For a while. As long as it suits me.” She extended a finger: God to Adam. “Let there be life.”

He began to laugh in her again.

“And the monk?”

“What about him?”

“Is he still with you?”

The sergeant shook Carys’ head.

“I killed him, when he’d taught me everything he could.” Her hands reached out and strangled the air. “I just throttled him one night, when he was sleeping. Of course he woke when he felt my grip around his throat. But he didn’t struggle; he didn’t make the slightest attempt to save himself.” The sergeant was leering as he described the act. “He just let me murder him. I could scarcely believe my luck; I’d been planning the thing for weeks, terrified that he’d read my thoughts. When he went so easily, I was ecstatic—” The leer suddenly vanished. “Stupid,” he murmured in her throat. “So, so
stupid
.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t see the trap he’d set. Didn’t see how he’d planned it all along, nurtured me like a son knowing that I’d be his executioner when the time came. I never realized—not once—that I was just his tool. He wanted to die. He wanted to pass his wisdom” —the word was pronounced derisively—“along to me, and then have me put an end to him.”

“Why did he want to die?”

“Don’t you see how terrible it is to live when everything around you perishes? And the more the years pass the more the thought of death freezes your bowels, because the longer you avoid it the worse you imagine it must be? And you start to long—oh, how you long—for someone to take pity on you, someone to embrace you and share your terrors. And, at the end, someone to go into the dark with you.”

“And you chose Whitehead,” Marty said, almost beneath his breath, “the way you were chosen; by chance.”

“Everything is chance; and so nothing is,” the sleeping man pronounced; then laughed again, at his own expense, bitterly. “Yes, I chose him, with a game of cards. And then I made a bargain with him.”

“But he cheated you.”

Carys nodded her head, very slowly, her hand inscribing a circle on the air.

“Round and round,” she said. “Round and round.”

“What will you do now?”

“Find the pilgrim. Wherever he is, find him! Take him with me. I swear I won’t let him escape me. I’ll take him, and show him.”

“Show him what?”

No answer came. In its place, she sighed, stretching a little, and moving her head from left to right and back again. With a shock of recognition Marty realized that he was still watching her repeat Mamoulian’s movements: that all the time the European had been asleep, and now, his energies repleted, he was preparing to wake. He snapped his previous question out again, determined to have an answer to his last, vital inquiry.

“Show him what?”

“Hell,” Mamoulian said. “He cheated me! He squandered all my teachings, all my knowledge, threw it away for greed’s sake, for power’s sake, for the life of the body. Appetite! All gone for appetite. All my precious love, wasted!” Marty could hear, in his litany, the voice of the puritan-monk’s voice, perhaps? —the rage of a creature who wanted the world purer than it was and lived in torment because it saw only filth and flesh sweating to make more flesh, more filth. What hope of sanity in such a place? Except to find a soul to share the torment, a lover to hate the world with. Whitehead had been such a partner. And now Mamoulian was being true to his lover’s soul: wanting, at the end, to go into death with the only other creature he had ever trusted. “We’ll go to nothing …” he breathed, and the breath was a promise. “All of us, go to nothing. Down! Down!”

He was waking. There was no time left for further questions, however curious Marty was.

“Carys.”

“Down! Down!”

“Carys! Can you hear me? Come out of him! Quickly!”

Her head rolled on her neck.

“Carys!”

She grunted.

“Quickly!”

In Mamoulian’s head the patterns had begun again, as enchanting as ever. Spurts of light that would become pictures in a while, she knew. What would they be this time? Birds, flowers, trees in blossom. What a wonderland it was.

“Carys.”

The voice of someone she had once known was calling her from some very distant place. But so were the lights. They were resolving themselves even now. She waited, expectantly, but this time they weren’t memories that burst into view—

“Carys! Quickly!”

—they were the real world, appearing as the European opened his lids. Her body tensed. Marty reached for her hand, and seized it. She exhaled, slowly, the breath coming out as a thin whine between her teeth, and suddenly she was awake to her imminent danger. She flung her thought out of the European’s head and back across the miles to Kilburn. For an agonized instant she felt her will falter, and she was falling backward, back into his waiting head. Terrified, she gasped like a stranded fish while her mind fought for propulsion.

Marty dragged her to a standing position, but her legs buckled. He held her up with his arms wrapped around her.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered into her hair. “Gentle God, don’t leave me.”

Suddenly, her eyes flickered open.

“Marty,” she mumbled. “Marty.”

It was her: he knew her look too well for the European to deceive him.

“You came back,” he said.

They didn’t speak for several minutes, simply held on to each other. When they did talk, she had no taste for retelling what she’d experienced. Marty held his curiosity in check. It was enough to know they had no Devil on their backs.

Just old humanity, cheated of love, and ready to pull down the world on its head.

Chapter 63

S
o perhaps they had a chance of life after all. Mamoulian was a man, for all his unnatural faculties. He was two hundred years old, perhaps, but what were a few years between friends?