Tom Harper - The mosaic of shadows

‘Tell us how you attempted to kill the Emperor,’ I insisted, renewed urgency in my voice. ‘Tell us what the monk wanted, why he bought you to do this terrible thing.’

The Bulgar’s head had sagged while Krysaphios and I argued, but now he lifted it again. He opened his mouth and swallowed; I thought he would speak, and was about to call for water when — with a convulsive jerk of his body — he spat. There was little strength in the effort, and near as I was it still landed short of me.

I stepped backwards, and gave a tired sigh of frustration. This would take many hours, and they would feel all the longer for having Krysaphios at my shoulder.

Too long, it seemed, for one man: as the Bulgar’s spittle struck the floor, I heard a growl from behind me. With a single stride Sigurd had crossed to the prisoner and kicked his feet from under him; the Bulgar swung back like a pendulum, and screamed as the manacles bit deeper into his wrists. The cloth was ripped from his waist so that he hung naked and exposed, while Sigurd pressed his face very close to the man’s throbbing cheek. The axe glinted in his hands.

‘My friend Demetrios appeals to your sense and reason,’ he hissed angrily, not waiting for the interpreter to follow his words, ‘but I appeal to something to which you might actually pay heed. You tried to kill the Emperor, you Bulgarian piece of filth. You would have lifted a usurper onto the throne. Do you know what we do to usurpers in this kingdom?’ He let the axe slide like a razor over the man’s face. ‘We pull out their eyes and slice open their noses, so they are too deformed for any man to acclaim them Emperor.’ He stepped back thoughtfully, then almost casually drove a fist into the man’s taut stomach. He howled again and rattled in his chains. ‘Did you tell him that, priest?’

The interpreter nodded violently, trembling under Sigurd’s savage gaze.

‘Then tell him also,’ he continued, ‘that if we really want to be sure that the usurper will never trouble us again, we don’t stop with his face. Oh no.’ He laughed malevolently. ‘We take away his manhood, make sure that he’ll be forever barred from becoming Emperor, and barred from inflicting any vengeful bastards on us either.’ He took his axe in both hands and looked at it thoughtfully. ‘Of course you could never have sat on the throne, Bulgar, but perhaps I should practice for when I catch the man who would. Shall I do that? Shall I turn you into a eunuch? Condemn you to playing the bitch if ever you want the least pleasure again in your miserable life?’

He glanced down below the prisoner’s waist, and allowed derision to enter his face; I shot a quick glance at Krysaphios, but his smooth face remained wholly opaque. ‘I could make you quite valuable,’ Sigurd said with a leer. ‘Not like some Armenian boy whose parents have simply squeezed his balls back where they came from. I can turn you into a carzimasian , as pure as a girl with not a shred of your flesh remaining. You’d fetch a higher price then than you ever did as a mercenary.’

He affected to tire of his monologue and fell silent. Even the priest, who had translated every word, seemed to be shivering: I think Krysaphios was the only one of us who did not cower at Sigurd’s threats. Certainly the Bulgar was paying attention, his eyes fixed in terror on the evil curve of Sigurd’s axe which jerked and twitched bewitchingly as he spoke. The axe which was now raised as high in the air as the dungeon would allow, hovering over Sigurd’s shoulder like a vengeful angel waiting to strike.

‘No,’ I protested, but my mouth was dry and the words barely scraped forth. And too late: the axe swung down in a flashing arc and struck thick sparks from the stone floor; the prisoner screamed like an animal and thrashed about in his chains. Fresh blood ran down his wrists and the priest yelped in horror. But no blood fountained from the Bulgar’s groin, and no gruesome lump of flesh was lying limp on the floor. The axe must have passed inches before his body.

Sigurd lifted his blade from the stone and eyed it curiously. ‘I missed,’ he said, surprised. ‘Shall I try again?’

He had to kick the priest to translate this, but even before he had spoken a torrent of words began to spew out of our prisoner. The shock of his near emasculation had shaken something loose within him: he sobbed and ranted as though a demon possessed him, and I was glad of the chains which restrained him. Only after much soothing talk, and after Sigurd had retreated well into a corner, did he slow his speech enough that the translator could make sense of it.

His name, he said, was Kaloyan. Yes, he had worked for the pimp Vassos, mostly collecting debts and beating girls who no longer wished to work for him, sometimes protecting them from men who became angry or refused to pay. Occasionally he would do something else, something more dangerous, for Vassos was a man with ambitions and he enjoyed the thought of having a private army. Mostly, though, they were a ragged bunch of former soldiers and strongmen, who drank and brawled with each other when not called upon to fight professionally. Until, that was, the monk arrived.

‘Describe him,’ I said tersely, my fingers clutching the hem of my tunic in anticipation.

‘He cannot,’ answered the translator after a brief exchange. ‘He says the monk always wore a hood, always, even in the forest.’

‘In the forest?’ I realised I was disrupting the story. ‘Never mind. What did the monk want?’

‘The monk wanted five men. The pimp provided them, Kaloyan was one. He took them to a house in the forest, where for two weeks he trained one of them in the use of a strange weapon, a barbarian weapon the like of which Kaloyan had never seen.’

‘Was it a tzangra ?’ I asked, describing it as best I could.

‘Yes,’ said the interpreter. ‘Just so. It could shoot through steel. Kaloyan wanted to try it, but the monk guarded it jealously and let no-one but his apprentice use it. Once one of Kaloyan’s companions tried to steal it while the monk was sleeping. He did not leave the forest alive.’

‘So Kaloyan was not the assassin.’ I could not know whether to be elated or confused by how close I had come. ‘Does he know the one who was?’

I saw the Bulgar shake his head weakly. ‘He never knew him before,’ the priest confirmed. ‘Vassos found him somewhere in the slums.’

‘Did the monk say what he purposed with the weapon? Why he went to so much trouble to train another man in its use?’ My questions were coming faster now, for every word the Bulgar spoke demanded explanation, and the frustration of the long pauses while the interpreter spoke first with the prisoner and then formed his phrases was beginning to wear on me.

‘The monk never told them his purpose, and he did not welcome questions. All he said was that he had a powerful enemy whom he wanted removed, and he could not do so himself.’

Another thought struck me. ‘So if he trained only one of them in the use of the tzangra , what were Kaloyan and the others for? Did he fear for his safety?’ Did the monk have other enemies of whom we knew nothing?

‘Not for his own safety.’ The interpreter puzzled at something the Bulgar had said. ‘He was afraid that the apprentice would flee away if he had the chance.’

‘Why would he do that?’ Surely the monk paid well enough, if he could afford a quartet of bodyguards.

An even longer pause. ‘Because of his age. He was little more than a boy, the Bulgar says, and wild, untameable.’

I heard the ringing thud of metal on stone as an axe-head fell to the ground. The interpreter flinched; the Bulgar screamed, though it was only Sigurd dropping his weapon. It was some moments before there was calm again, and all that time I strained with a burning impatience to ask my final question.