Knights of the Cross (31 page)

She laughed – a soft, half-mocking laugh whose meaning I could not fathom. ‘You do not see because you walk in darkness. You must kindle a flame, a light to see by.’

‘How?’

She did not answer; instead, she vanished, and in her place I saw Rainauld and Odard standing a little way off. Their heads lifted in recognition and they began to approach. Panic flared down my spine; I began running across the shingle beach, my feet sliding and jarring on the rounded stones. Behind, I could hear them striding effortlessly after me.

I was dreaming.

I opened my eyes, and was back in darkness.

The cup was at my lips again, but this time when I drank the water was bitter. I spat it out, but immediately a soft hand was pressing against my forehead, tipping it back so that my mouth hung open. The liquid splashed down my throat, and I held my breath so that I would not taste it.

‘You must drink this. It will release you from your pain.’

‘I have no pain.’

‘Then it is working.’

I was laid out on a bed or a table, I realised. I could feel hard boards under my back, softened a little by a thin cloth. I tried to lift myself, but my arms were powerless.

‘Let me go.’

‘You are free to go, if you wish. It is only the bonds of sin which hold you.’

Something in the darkness rippled like woven silk, though it might have been my mind imagining it. My thoughts seemed to be ebbing away from me, and when I tried to grasp them they merely flowed through my hands like water.

Three candles had been lit in an alcove at the far end of a low room. They cast a feeble light, but after the hours of darkness I had endured they were bright as the sun to my aching eyes. Their orange glow shone on coarse walls, humped and gouged where chisels had carved the stone, and on ranks of bowed heads facing away from me, row upon row stretching back into the shadows. Before them, her face towards me, stood a woman in a white woollen robe. Her eyes were closed, her head tipped back in a rapture that was at once sublime and wholly sensual. She was chanting something, a liturgy perhaps, though it was in no language that I could comprehend.

Two men came forward from the congregation and knelt. One was older, and looked to be some sort of acolyte, for he wore the same kind of white robe as the priestess. The other was a youth, dressed as a peasant. I could see his shoulders trembling beneath his tunic. The woman took a jug and poured water over his hands, then over the acolyte’s, and then her own. The acolyte knelt and rose three times in front of her. Turning aside, he repeated the obeisance at a stone altar covered in a white cloth. There was a book sitting on the altar; the man lifted it, and with more bows passed it to the woman. She raised it above her, then held it flat over the youth’s head, declaiming her strange rite. The words were still foreign to me, but as I listened more closely patterns of repetition began to emerge. Despite the unknown sounds, there was something familiar in the voice as well. It sounded like the woman in my dreams – and somewhere else. I could not think where.

She passed the book back to the man, and laid her hands on the youth’s forehead. More phrases were repeated. Then she took him by the arm and lifted him to his feet, turning him to face her congregation.

‘Resolve in your heart that you will keep this holy baptism throughout your life, according to the usage of the Church of Purity, in chastity, in truth, and in all other virtues which the Lord ordains.’

I sank back on my harsh bed. For a few moments, my thoughts had run almost clear: now they were agitated beyond reason. A baptism? How could it be a baptism? There had been no chrism – nor any priest that I had seen. And the language had been neither Greek nor Latin, for I had heard the latter tongue often enough in the past months to know its sound.

Whatever unnatural service it had been, it was now finished. The worshippers who had knelt on the floor rose. The woman stepped away from the candles and steered the youth, the initiate, into the midst of the congregation. The older man who had assisted her turned to follow, and as he did so the candlelight illuminated his face. It was hard to see through the throng and by the unsteady light, but I had seen him recently enough, and the crooked nose and blistered face were quite distinctive. It was Peter Bartholomew.

I surrendered to confusion and lay back.

Later, after the cave had emptied, I heard the voice from my dream again. This time I was not at the lake in the mountains; I was in darkness. It had the same earthy smell as the cave, and I wondered if for once I was not asleep. There was little way of knowing.

‘How is your pain, Demetrios?’

‘Endurable.’ The ache at the back of my head was the least of my discomforts. For the rest of me, my arm throbbed where it had been cut by Odard’s knife and my back was stiff from lying still so long, but I could survive that. My stomach, I noticed, was pulled tight as a drumhead. How long had it been since I ate?

‘How long have I been here?’

‘A night and a day.’

No wonder I felt hungry. ‘Where am I?’

‘In the church of the pure.’

‘In Antioch?’

She hesitated. ‘Beneath it.’

‘How did I come here?’

‘We found you at the roadside. You had been robbed and beaten and left for dead. We saved you.’

‘Thank you.’

I thought back to the two men looming over me in the alley, and flinched.

‘I must go,’ I said. ‘My companions will fear for my life, if I have not returned in almost two days.’

Warm breath played over my cheek – she must have been mere inches away.

‘You have witnessed our service, Demetrios. You have seen our secrets. We cannot release you now to betray us.’

I jerked up, ignoring the agony racking my skull. I tried to leap off the bed, but though my arms and legs were free there was some cord around my waist binding me down. I fumbled at it, but I felt no knot, and in the darkness I could see nothing.

‘Do not struggle. You will suffer no harm here. In truth, you are probably safer. Kerbogha arrived yesterday. His army is on the mountain, trying to force the walls. They say the fighting is very terrible.’

‘All the more reason that I must find my companions.’ If Anna were left defenceless when the Turks broke in . . . ‘Let me go.’

‘It is for your own good. Once, you asked me to help you. I told you then that I could do nothing until you were willing to discard the deceptions worked on you by the priests. I can help you now, but again, only if you will receive it.’

At last I knew the voice. Sarah, the priestess who had ministered to Drogo and his friends. Had they been baptised in the same rite that I had just seen?

‘What deceptions? I am a Christian.’

She laughed. ‘Have you ever spoken of God to an Ishmaelite? They say that we worship the same god, but that they alone know the true way to venerate Him.’

I slumped back. ‘Are you an Ishmaelite?’ How could she be, when her followers carved their backs with crosses?

‘No.’ Her voice was sharp, insulted. ‘But they are right that one may name God truthfully and worship him in error. That is what you have done.’

‘How?’

‘Are you thirsty?’

I rolled my tongue around my mouth. ‘A little,’ I admitted.

‘Drink.’

Again the wooden cup tipped against my lips, spreading the bitter liquid within me. I gulped it eagerly, then suddenly stopped my throat in panic. ‘What is this – some foul communion of your heresy?’

‘It is water, and a little artemisia to ease your pain. You need have no fear.’

She paused. From somewhere on my left I heard the grate of a cup being placed on a table. I strained my ears, but there were no sounds beyond, no evidence of the congregation who had been there earlier. Were we alone?

‘You said I worshipped God falsely. How do you say it is right to worship Him?’

‘That is hidden knowledge.’

Frustration rose within me, rolling back the pain and confusion: the childish anger at being barred from secrets. Again I tried to rise from my bed, and again the bonds restrained me. ‘Why hidden? So you can lord it over your followers, tempt them in with curiosity?’

‘Hidden, because it is dangerous. It is not pride or selfish delight which hides these mysteries. They are open to all, but only if those who desire to know them have a pure and seeking heart. I can tell you these things, but you must wish to know them. Not for advantage, nor malice nor greed, but from the sincere yearning for salvation.’

‘Who does not desire salvation?’

‘Many. And even of those who do, the greater part lack the pure soul and true heart to persevere. They desire truth, but from ignorance. They do not understand what they seek. When they find it, it is beyond them. Their faith suffers; sometimes it is ruined altogether. Sometimes they themselves do not survive.’

Her words filled me with dread. A part of me – the part which had sought unpleasant truths from every pimp, thief, mercenary and noble in Constantinople – bridled at her overblown warnings. But in another, more profound part, I shivered at the awesome promise and threat entwined in her words.

‘The knowledge I have to give is not some scroll or book, to be filed away on a shelf once you have read it. My knowledge is the knowledge of life, of light. Once learned, it cannot be forgotten. It will consume you like a furnace, and if your soul is flawed you will be broken. It is not enough to know it – you must also believe it.’

I raised myself on my elbows, feeling the cord press against my waist. ‘I will hear it.’

All that followed, I heard as if in a dream. Afterwards, indeed, I wondered if I
had
dreamed it. Scenes and images passed through my head as she spoke – glowing angels with fiery wings, lush gardens of fruit, rearing serpents – but more as if I were walking through a church, peering at the icons each in turn. My soul seemed to swell in my head, pressing against my skull as it grappled with her story. One voice screamed that it was falsehood, a deception wrought of evil to damn all who heard it. But another voice counselled caution, testing her words and wondering in terror if they were true.

‘Much of what I have to tell will seem familiar. That is because the liars and demons who possess the church have twisted it, by the merest fraction, into error. The prince of darkness knows that the best lies sit closest to truth. Only when I have finished will you see how far from truth the church has turned.’

I nodded.

‘I will tell you from the beginning. Many ages ago, after Satan fell from Heaven, he divided the waters of his prison firmament, and raised up earth from beneath the waters to become land. He made himself a throne, and caused his rebel angels to bring forth life: plants and trees and herbs, animals, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea. But still it was not enough. He took clay from the earth and moulded man, and from that man he took more clay and made woman. Then he snared two angels from heaven and made them prisoners in the clay, so that their spirits were clothed in mortal form. In his depravity, he bade them sin, but they were pure and did not know how.

‘So Satan placed them in a garden. From a stream of his spittle he made a serpent; he took its form, and entered the garden. He slithered into the woman’s body and filled her with a longing for sin until her desire was like a glowing oven. He filled the man with a like desire for sin, so that both captive angels were consumed with lust. Together, they spawned the children of the Devil. The spark of the angels is divided and scattered among the people of the Earth, but it is not lost. A fragment of their being remains within us: that is why we must forswear the dark substance of this world, and seek to kindle a flame from the angelic fire within. Only thus will we free ourselves from the vessels which bind our souls, and escape this wicked Earth for the realms of light.’

Sweat had begun to pool on my skin in the close air of the cave, but I barely noticed it. Far hotter was the fire that raged within me, scalding and blistering my soul even to think on what she had said. Her warning had been honest: her words were pure fire. Even if I disbelieved them, even if I longed to tear them from my memory, I would not forget them. They would undermine the walls of my faith with doubt, perhaps to destruction. Even repeating them might be mortal sin. And I feared there was a part of me, an insistent part, which clamoured that she might speak truth.

‘You have opened the first door of our mysteries, Demetrios Askiates. What do you say? Are you afraid to cross the threshold?’

I did not have the strength to lie. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. Only the proud rush in where they do not see clearly. The humble tread fearfully, but journey farther. Yet, in your soul, the truth begins to stir. Have you never felt the empty weight of your sinful clay? Has it never seemed to you that your spirit is snared in a vessel from which it cannot escape? Surely – in the clarity of grief, perhaps – you have ached to shake off the trappings of the flesh and liberate the divine spark within?’

Caution and reason implored me to resist her, but I could not deny the simple accuracy of her words. I remembered running through the labyrinth of streets and alleys after Odard’s death, desperate to lose my guilt. I remembered lying next to Anna on the walls, our bodies touching but our souls sundered by the secret of what I had done. Was it all as Sarah said?

Her soft voice was like balm on my thoughts. ‘You begin to see clearly, Demetrios. All your life you have lived in sin and error – now at last the light of God begins to glow in your heart. Take it. Cup it in your hands and breathe on it, so that the flame grows and the fire takes hold. For now it is the merest ember, but in time it will burn away your sin like sun on a dawn mist.’

‘But how—’

She pressed a sweet finger to my lips. ‘Sleep now.’

I did not sleep. I lay on my bed while questions and arguments roared through my head like storms in the desert. Some whipped up into towering columns of confusion; others eddied and flowed in thick clouds of chaos. At times I thought they were gone, that the grains of thought had settled, but they always returned with renewed ferocity. Pain thumped against the back of my skull and hunger cramped my stomach: my body was failing. I no longer knew if that was a curse or a blessed relief.