Mary Reed - Five for Silver

The young man awoke in the embrace of a suffocating nightmare.

To darkness.

A monstrous heaviness bore in on him from above and all sides.

He tried to move. His foot came down on a surface which resisted for an instant, then gave way. Wetness trickled into his boot. The invisible mass pinning him shifted with a soughing noise and the weight of the world settled onto his chest. What felt like an elbow or knee dug into the small of his back.

His eyes were open, but he could see only those ghostly lights that drift beneath closed eyelids.

He couldn’t breathe. He struggled to turn his head, to find air. His cheek was brushed by cold, stiff fingers.

Then he understood.

He was buried with the dead.

The miasma of death filled his nostrils, flooded his lungs. He tried to cry out for help, but could only manage to spit up a choking sob. In the blackness, his flailing hand encountered the rounded shape of a skull.

More than once as he had walked through the city he had stepped into the street, fastidiously distancing himself from a corpse sprawled beneath a colonnade or crumpled in a doorway. Here the dead pressed themselves against him with obscene intimacy, as if he were already one of them.

Perhaps he was.

From above, from the world of the living, came a muffled shout.

“Lies! More lies!”

A cascade of liquid trickled across his back. Blood?

No. Rivulets of fire, burning like hot coals. He must be alive. An incorporeal shade could never feel such blistering agony.

“Lye. More lye,” the shouter somewhere beyond the darkness repeated.

The young man clenched his fists, arched his back, and began to fight his way up toward air. He scrabbled higher, pushing with his feet wherever he could find purchase on a head or shoulder blade, pulling himself up through the nightmare of tangled limbs.

His hands slid against liquescent flesh, boiled off bones by lye poured endlessly into the heaped corpses. Was he at the bottom of a pit, or in one of the towers that Justinian had ordered be filled with Constantinople’s dead? Clutching at the darkness his hand fastened unexpectedly on a face.

He gagged convulsively.

For a heartbeat he lay still. The blazing fire inside his chest was as intense as that outside. Had he swallowed lye?

Ignoring the pain, he snaked one hand upwards and grabbed a cold, rigid arm. Once it might have been part of a prosperous merchant, a starving beggar, a Christian, a pagan.

To the young man, it was just another rung on the ladder back to life.

He forced himself on, pulling, slithering, pushing with feet and elbows.

A lifetime passed. Then, abruptly, he could see the vaguest wash of light, the merest suggestion of shapes.

He lunged upwards. A hand reached down. He grasped it.

Decayed flesh slid off the bone.

A final spasm propelled him into light. He saw then that he held a ragged strip of skin entangled with a silver ring, the gift of the pit.

“I’m alive!” he screamed as he looked up, just in time to receive a bucket of lye in the face.

John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian, followed the physician Gaius through the crowded corridors of Samsun’s Hospice.

John was there because his elderly servant Peter had experienced a vision.

Gaius, a stout, balding man, plowed ahead, more than once treading on outstretched limbs and sprawled bodies. John picked his way more carefully, but could not prevent the gold-embroidered hem of his heavy blue robe from brushing against the sick who overflowed from crowded rooms into the hallways.

It made him uneasy because it seemed disrespectful. Many of Gaius’ patients were in their final hours; their surroundings were insult enough. For lack of sufficient pallets, the hospice corridors had simply been strewn with straw. The sooty plastered walls displayed crosses at frequent intervals.

John remarked on this to Gaius.

“Many take comfort from them,” he replied. “Why anyone should find comfort in a depiction of suffering is beyond my learning. Perhaps it reminds them their ills could be even worse? Then too, some rely on charms and amulets for protection against the plague.”

Such beliefs puzzled John as well. Like Gaius, he was a Mithran, among the few who clung to an ancient, pagan religion. It was an allegiance which could never be spoken aloud in the court of the Christian emperor.

“Tell me about this vision, John,” Gaius continued. “Why did Peter suppose it was anything more than a dream?”

“Because he was wide awake when the angel appeared.”

“But an angel? Surely that proves it was a dream? And how did he know it was an angel? What does an angel look like?”

“A man, apparently, with a glowing visage and surrounded by radiance. Peter said he had already put out the lamp and shuttered the window, and yet, when the angel appeared at the foot of his bed, he could clearly see the night soil pot in the far corner.”

“I’d be interested in a close look at an angel, but then I doubt a specimen will ever turn up in our mortuary.” Gaius sounded wistful.

They turned down another corridor more congested with patients than the last. Most of the sufferers displayed the grotesque swellings and black, gangrenous carbuncles characteristic of plague.

John avoided staring at the sick, but he could not shut out the sounds of suffering that came from every direction. Soft whimpers and moans, wracking sobs and screams filled the air. Occasionally he could make out muttered prayers, hoarse curses. If one did not listen too attentively, the cacophony merged into an almost soothing susurration akin to waves breaking against a rocky shore.

“In what language do angels converse, John? Greek? Or are they Latin speakers like the emperor? Not to say that an angel might speak any language we would know. How many is it you command? Four? Or perhaps is it more a matter of which tongue they choose to use?”

“You’d be an excellent theologian, Gaius. However, according to Peter the angel did not use any particular language. Peter was so amazed, he mentioned that specifically more than once. As he described it, the words formed in his head without his strange visitor making a sound.”

“And what words are sufficient to bring the Lord Chamberlain into a place full of the pestilence?”

“‘Gregory. Murder. Justice.’”

“It sounds as if you believe this strange tale.”

“What matters is that Peter believes it. I’ve rarely seen him so agitated.”

Gaius’ broad forehead wrinkled. He began to speak, then paused. “Do you know this Gregory?”

“Only by sight. Occasionally he came to meet Peter at my house, but he’s never entered it so far as I know. They’ve been meeting every week since Peter’s been in my employ and perhaps before then too. A few days ago, Gregory failed to appear at the Forum Constantine as they’d arranged.”

“So he is an old friend of Peter’s. Do you know anything else about the man?”

“I gather he and Peter served in the army together years ago. It’s my belief that Gregory hasn’t fared well since those days. I’ve noticed the evening before these visits, Peter always seems to find stale honey cakes or moldy bread unfit for a Lord Chamberlain to consume, as he puts it.” A brief smile illuminated John’s lean face. “He asks my permission to take these scraps with him to give to Gregory, rather than just throw them away. Naturally I always say yes.”

Gaius laughed. “I wouldn’t want your job, John, serving both an emperor and an elderly cook.” He stopped at an half-open door at the end of the hallway. “We’ve turned the old cistern beneath the hospice into a mortuary.”