Knights of the Cross (12 page)

‘What does that mean?’

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps a house which faces east. Or one with no roof.’

A sudden squawk tore away the stillness. With a ruffling of wings, a brown hen ran around the corner of the nearest house, stopped abruptly, and began pecking at the muddy ground.

‘Get her,’ Sigurd shouted. One of his men was already moving forward, his blade poised to chop away the bird’s head, but at that moment a new voice began screaming abuse. The door to the house had opened and a wizened woman stood on the doorstep, waving her fist and shouting every manner of curse. She ran forward under the Varangian’s axe, scooped up the hen in the folds of her skirt, and stared defiance at us.

‘Why do you do this?’ she spat. Though much corrupted, her language seemed to be Greek. ‘Why do you try to starve us? You have torn up our fields and slaughtered our animals – are you now taking my last hen? In the name of the Christ and his blessed mother, are you not ashamed?’

‘We do not want to steal from you,’ I assured her, though fourteen hungry faces belied my words. I had to repeat myself thrice before she could understand me. ‘We are looking for a house – the house of the sun.
Helios
,’ I emphasised, pointing to the sky.

‘In the valley.’ She threw out an arm, pointing further down the road. Her skin was almost black, and wrinkled beyond every vestige of youth, yet the strength of her voice made her seem little older than me – younger, even.

‘You will find it in the valley of the sinners. By the water. The road will take you.’

I wanted to ask for further description, to learn how I might know the house that I sought, but she would give us nothing more. Lifting her skirts, she turned and stamped back into the house, never loosing her grip on the hen.

‘That should have been our lunch,’ Sigurd complained.

‘We cannot steal from these people,’ I snapped. ‘They are Christians – Greeks. These are the people we fight to save.’

Sigurd looked at the desolate village, and laughed.

On the far side of the hilltop, the road descended into a steep ravine. It was as though the lips of the earth had been prised apart, opening a glimpse onto a world utterly removed from its terrestrial surrounds. The slopes were thick with pines, bay trees in blossom and fig trees budding with fruit. In a gully beside the path a multitude of streams tumbled down through moss-covered rocks, touching and parting until they at last united on the valley floor. Wood-birds sang, and the smell of laurel blossom was heavy in the air. It was a garden, as near to paradise as anything I had seen in my life.

‘It doesn’t look like the valley of sin,’ said Sigurd. He had snapped off a sprig of laurel and stuck it into his unruly hair, like a victorious charioteer at the hippodrome.

‘Does that disappoint you?’

Sigurd kicked a pebble from our path and watched it tumble down the slope into one of the brooks. ‘If there’s sin to be had, it’s best to know what I forsake.’

The road levelled out as we reached the bottom of the valley. The vegetation was as thick as ever: broad oaks overhung the stream, and vines trailed in the water. Every few hundred paces, though, there were gaps in the foliage where once the villas of our ancestors had stood. Their ruins were still there, gradually receding beneath the green tide. Some were now little more than rubble under the ferns and ivy; others had walls still standing, or columns poking out of the bushes. There were about ten in total, all shaken down over the centuries by war and time and the tremors of the earth.

I remembered the words of the woman in the village. ‘One of these must be the house of the sun.’

‘None of them has a roof,’ Sigurd observed.

We walked on, scanning the remains for anything that might suggest a sun. Above us the true sun arced in its course, slowly pushing back the shadows cast by the steep walls of the ravine. Different features drew our attentions – a yellow flower with radiate petals, a star carved into a fallen lintel, a fragment of golden mosaic tiles – and we began to drift apart. It was hard to feel danger in the sweetness of that place.

I had just scrambled back to the path, having been drawn away by a stone covered in pine blossom, when I saw her. She was standing on the far bank of the stream: a dark-haired woman, her head uncovered, in a dress which seemed much stained with mud and berries. There were leaves tangled in her hair, and had it not been for the hardness of her face I might have believed her a nymph or dryad.

‘What do you want?’ she called. Her dialect was Frankish, and her voice strangely harsh against the surroundings. ‘Do you want for pleasure, far from home? I can help you forget your suffering, for a little while.’

I closed my eyes. I knew why the villagers called this the valley of sin. Three months earlier, fearing that the impieties of the Army of God might be the reason why its campaign had faltered, Bishop Adhemar had expelled all women from the camp. As an attempt to stamp out sin, it had failed utterly; if anything, it had only spawned worse vices. After a few days the women had begun to drift back into the camp, their presence thenceforth ignored by Adhemar, but there was talk that some had made a new home in the glades of this valley, where the tempted of the army could indulge their lusts more privately.

‘I am looking for a house called the house of the sun,’ I said. ‘Do you know of it?’

She shook her head, her long hair swinging freely behind. ‘I need no houses for my affairs.’

‘May I ask – did four Norman knights come here once, perhaps a month ago?’

‘Many men come here: Normans, Provençals, Franks, Lotharingians. Even Greeks.’

‘These men did not come for such pleasures, I think. There were four of them,’ I said again.

As brazenly as if she were alone, the woman reached into the folds of her skirt and scratched herself between her legs. ‘I saw them.’

My hopes quickened. ‘Where did they go?’

‘They had a bullock with them. It screamed horribly.’ Deliberately ignoring me, she seated herself on a rock and dipped her naked toes into the stream. The water rippled around them. ‘None of us dared go near.’

‘Near where?’

She looked up, coiling a lock of hair about her finger. ‘How much would you value it?’

‘Half a bezant.’ It was the only coin in my purse, and I was loath to spend it on this harlot. But in the pursuit of secrets, even worthless ones, I have ever been spendthrift.

She smiled, though there was no joy in it. ‘For half a bezant, I could give you more than knowledge.’

As she spoke, there must have been a touch of a breeze, for the scents of pine and laurel were suddenly thick on my senses. They cloyed about me, sickly smells bespeaking all manner of sweet damnation. For a moment, even the harlot’s face seemed kinder.

I shook my head, as much to myself as to her, and held up the coin so that she could see it. ‘Where did they go?’

‘There.’ She pointed to a low-lying patch of ruins, further down the valley where the slopes became cliffs. ‘They went in there.’

I threw the coin across the stream. She caught it one-handed, the arm of her dress sliding back as she reached out. ‘They would not lie with me either.’

I called Sigurd and the others to join me, and walked slowly towards the ancient villa. High trees had grown around it, shading it with the canopy of their leaves, while shrubs and flowers flourished among the masonry. Two walls were all that remained standing: the rest, the detritus of atria, baths, colonnades and fountains were piled in broken heaps around me. A fluted column lay between the two posts of a door that had long since rotted to oblivion. I stepped over it, and looked for any sign that the whore had spoken truthfully.

‘Here.’ Moving more impatiently than I, Sigurd had already reached the back of the ruin. Its rear wall must have been built sheer against the cliff, though it had mostly collapsed now, for I could see square crevices cut in the rock where stones had once been fixed. Where Sigurd stood, a few blocks remained as the ancient masons had laid them, the surrounds of a long-disused fireplace. As I approached, I saw what he had seen: two suns, their rays like spikes, engraved into the wall on either side of the hearthstone.

‘Those carvings,’ I exclaimed. ‘Are there any other markings?’

To my surprise, Sigurd bellowed with laughter. It echoed off the high cliffs above and startled a flock of birds into flight. ‘Truly, Demetrios Askiates does discover what other men do not. Who else would see those scratchings, and miss what lay at his feet?’

I looked down. It had been hidden by the high weeds as I approached, and my stare had then been fixed on the wall, but now I could see what Sigurd meant. On a patch of ground before the hearth, curiously free of any growth or dirt, a broad mosaic of a burning sun gazed up at the sky. Its beams wriggled and twisted like snakes in yellow and orange, trimmed with gold, and from its centre the untamed face of Phoebus Apollo gazed on us. His wild hair branched and forked from his head, spraying out into the surrounding beams, while his plump nose and swollen eyes looked more like a satyr’s than a god’s.

‘This is miraculously preserved.’ I glanced involuntarily at the sky, fearful that I might blaspheme to speak of miracles in the works of the pagans.

‘More than miraculous.’ Sigurd swung an arm in a rough arc about us. A low rampart of earth and dying weeds circumscribed the border of the mosaic, as if it had recently been dug clear. Peering closer, I could see white scuffs and scratches in the tiles where a hoe or spade might have scraped them. And, ringing Apollo’s head, the dark nimbus of a circular crack.

I dropped to my knees and tried to prise my fingers into the gap. My nails were quickly as chipped and torn as the mosaic, but the fit was too snug: I could not work anything loose. Even the blade of my knife was too thick.

‘Look at the eye,’ said Sigurd, staring down from above me. ‘The pupil.’

I twisted about and looked in the god’s eye. It was formed from a dozen or so tiles in whites and blues, but the black circle at its centre was not so solid. In fact, it was a hole, just wide enough for a man’s finger. I poked my forefinger in, and pulled away a round fragment containing the eye and its socket. In the recess beneath, a heavily rusted iron ring lay set in mortar.

‘Help me,’ I called, tugging on it. The broader slab that held the now one-eyed god’s face was too heavy. Sigurd crouched beside me and pulled the ring, lifting the disc free of the ground. Eager Varangian hands slid it away, as a wide black void opened in front of us.

‘We’re not going in there without light.’ Sigurd pulled a dry branch from the undergrowth and wrapped its end in dry grass and leaves. Taking the steel from the pouch on his belt, he struck streams of sparks from the flinty rock until the makeshift torch flared alight.

‘I’ve rescued you from dark holes before,’ he warned me. ‘This time, I go first.’

Even with the added bulk of his armour, he fitted easily through the opening. It was not deep, for as his feet reached the bottom the crown of his head was still level with the ground and he had to crouch to press forward into the tunnel beyond. An isolated arm reached back into the well of sunlight to claim first his axe and then the torch. After a brief interval, and a muffled shout that all was safe, I followed him down.

It must have been a millennium or more since the passage was cut, yet its brick-vaulted roof still held up the weight of the ages. I could see little, for Sigurd had already advanced some way ahead, but I felt the floor sloping gradually down as it led me deeper into the rock, under the cliff. I moved hesitantly, keeping my hands pressed against the mossy walls and wondering what devilment might lurk in the darkness ahead of me. Once, during my childhood at the monastery in Isauria, one of the monks had taken the novices into the hills, to the ruins of a temple where our ancestors had worshipped their false gods and idols. The building had been a wreck, its roof staved in and its marble long since plundered to adorn churches, yet still I had felt the ageless evil lingering in the crumbling stones. As the moon rose, the monk had told us of the blood sacrifices our forebears had made to their gods of violence and vengeance, had spoken such vivid warnings against the long arm of the devil that eventually I became convinced that Satan’s dark fingers were poised behind me, waiting to snatch me away. Although I had since seen more of the works of Lucifer than I dared to remember, in the black confines of that tunnel I once again felt the pricking evil of his hand stretching towards me.

‘Look at this.’

I had at last caught up with Sigurd, some thirty paces down from the entrance, where the tunnel opened out into a square chamber. The bricks which had lined the walls before now gave way to solid rock, except on the far side where a doorway led on to a second chamber briefly visible in the light of Sigurd’s torch. The smoke stung my throat and eyes, but I could see where he pointed. In the middle of the floor at our feet, a heap of ash and half-burned branches.

‘This is recent,’ I murmured. ‘What is beyond?’

‘Come and see.’

I followed Sigurd through the far opening and into the room beyond. It was longer than the antechamber, some fifty feet in all, with a gently curving roof and a floor laid with mosaics. On either side, the rock had been carved into benches worn smooth with use, while the plastered walls were covered in faded paintings. At the back, a stone altar stood raised on a dais.

It was as well that Sigurd held the torch, for I might have dropped it in shock. As it was, even his stout arm wavered. The images on the wall were grotesque, fantastical: processions of men with the heads of beasts and fowl; insects crawling out of the earth; a hand reaching from a tomb. The fiendish iconography continued on the ground, where a simple progression of mosaic tiles showed the silhouettes of more creatures, and dark symbols that I did not recognise. Halfway along the cave they vanished under a dark wave which had evidently been spilled across the floor.