Pip Vaughan-Hughes - The Vault of bones

The sun streamed down on to burned beams, tumbled marble and the tossing, yellowing leaves of an elderberry thicket. The bushes were heavy with the burden of black fruit, and a great cloud of sparrows, which had been feasting, flew up around me. I beat at them in a panic, crashing through the brittle twigs, ripe berries popping in my face like black raindrops. I was almost caught, for there were brambles with wickedly long thorns tangled all through the thicket. Then my foot hit something hard and in another moment I was scrambling up a heap of tumbled stones. My eyes were screwed shut for fear of the brambles, but my hands guided me up. Suddenly my fingers sunk into crumbling dampness and then thin air, and I tumbled forward into nothing.

I fell for an awful, belly-cramping instant, then landed on more wood – or so it must have been, for the rotten, chimney-tar stench of it scoured my nose and mouth – before pitching downward again on to something hard and angular. Stone steps, pale in the deep shadows. I rolled and jounced down and down, clawing for a handhold and finding none, before I reached the bottom and came to rest on mossy flagstones. There I lay, panting and battered, eyes shut, watching lights weave and pop behind my lids. When at long last I opened them, I beheld the stairway down which I had fallen reaching far up to a small, ragged patch of leaf-fretted daylight. Finding my neck and back were as yet unbroken, I sat up and looked about me.

I was in a large cellar, although it was the grandest cellar I had ever seen. An undulation of brick arches made up the ceiling, and although I could only make out one wall, that was of fine ashlar. I had narrowly avoided cracking my head on a stone pillar carved with vines and goggle-eyed birds, and many more of them grew up all around, a petrified, sunken forest.

'Here! He came this way!' Shouting came from high above me, and drifted down, thin and hollow. I could make out a Catalan snarling angrily, and the softer accent of some northerner. Then a crisp Frankish voice silenced them.

'He's gone down here. After him, you boys – terriers after a rat. Go on!'

I sprang up, bruised limbs objecting, set my back against the pillar and pulled out my butchers knife. Much good it would do me. I swallowed, staring at the little square of daylight through which my killers would shortly come for me. I thought of the headless man I had seen, and my stomach lurched. Better to die now than to give such beasts their fun with me. I whimpered, and felt the blade's edge: sharp enough. Dear God. How best to do this? A thrust into my heart, or a slash across the throat? Not the throat, no! I would not drown in my own blood. The heart, then – it would be quick. I dropped down to my knees again and took the greasy old wooden handle in both my cold, damp hands. The blade quivered and I stilled the point against my chest. Do it now. Do it now! The little blue window of sky was so beautiful, blue as a jay's feather, as the summer sky over high Dartmoor. The tip of the blade jabbed my flesh and I flinched. I could not leave like this. The promise of that glorious blue was too strong. Let me at least sell my life dearly: let the last blood. I spilled be that of those barbarous huntsmen. I lowered the knife and backed away into the shadows, keeping my eyes fixed to the top of the stairway. Another pillar. I slipped behind it, into the darkness, and crouched.

From up amongst the elderberries came a tumult of snapping branches and curses. A few dead leaves drifted down into the cellar. Boot-studs scraped on stone. Then the Frank's sharp voice rang out: 'Here! No, pigs, here?

'Let him fuck his old mother,' said someone very loudly in Catalan. The man must be right by the cellar-hole. In the way that one's mind works in times of great danger or fear, I found myself wondering whether the Frankish lord understood the tongue of his mercenaries. It did not seem all that likely. I hunkered down: they were coming.

But they did not. The Frank's voice came again, further away now. When next the Catalans spoke, I could barely make out what they said: buggery, and sisters. They had not found the stairway. Of course: I had followed an alley, but the thicket had confused me and I must have strayed into a ruined house. My hunters had found where the alley continued on, and they would have assumed I had fled that way, and that I had a good lead on them by now. Hardly daring to hope, let alone to breathe, I leaned my forehead against the cold stone and watched the sky. One by one, then in twos and threes and finally in a swarm, the sparrows flew across the blue and soon the sound of their happily resumed feast told me that the ruin was once again abandoned by men. I breathed out, coughing, and put the knife away. There was a sharp pain under my left nipple where it had tickled my flesh. Would I really have killed myself? I wondered, feeling how shaky my legs were. My little wound stung me again, as if to remind me how thin was the border between being and not being. The hand thrusts the knife, the knife pierces the body and the soul flees. I rubbed at the cut and listened to the sparrows.

It would be folly to leave my hiding place in daylight, that was plain. Just because I was lost did not mean that my hunters were, and with so few people on the streets anyway, a marked man in nice Venetian clothes would stand out like a sore thumb. I settled down on the bottom step. Perhaps there was some food left in my purse. Rummaging, my fingers found, not the dry bread I had finished hours ago, but my tinderbox. I pulled it out, made a little torch from the litter of dead twigs that covered the stairway and struck a spark. The pithy elderberry twigs caught, but sullenly, and the pithy wood began to smoke. But as the flame grew hotter so the light grew. I held my torch up and looked about me.

Pillars stretched away out of sight, or at least beyond the reach of the weak flame. The flagstone floor was clear in places, but in others it was mounded with bat-droppings – only now did I hear the creatures cursing me from the roof – and piles of twigs and old rubbish that must have been dragged down here by rats. There was a wisp of red cloth sticking out from one of these rubbish nests, and, not having anything better to do, I went over and prodded at it with my foot. There was a dry rustle and the pile collapsed in on itself. Something large and pale rolled, clacking, at my shoe. Recoiling with an oath, thinking it was a cellar rat or monstrous, pale spider, for was I not sunk part-way into nightmare already, I drew back to kick it, but as I took aim I found myself staring at two great black eyes. Not eyes, though: shadows. It was a skull, a human skull, and what I had taken for a rat's nest was a huddled skeleton.

I yelped, then stifled it. Looking closer despite my growing horror, I saw that each bundle of rubbish was indeed a corpse. Feeling less bold with every step, but drawn on by that curiosity that forces men to stare, fascinated, at what repulses their every sense, I picked my way further into the shadows. Two skeletons, three, seven, a dozen… Christ! A score of them. And then I saw it.

The back wall of the cellar was not so far away, for the space was long but narrow. Piled there were the stores of whatever great house had stood above this pit: barrels, bales and bundles of fuel, stacks of those long clay vessels in which the Greeks store their wine and oil. All was caked in dust and soot, cobwebbed and blotched with bat-piss and mouse-dung. But amongst these things, and piled up against them like a frozen tide, lay bones. Hundreds upon hundreds of bones.

The close air of the cellar, foul as it was with thirty years of vermin and decay, became suddenly fouler still. Real or imagined, the stink of death stung my nostrils. I held up the torch to left and right: more skeletons stretching away into the shadows. The horror of it all descended upon my shoulders like a torturer's weight and I sank down, squatting on my heels. It was not simple horror that crushed me: each of those empty skulls exhaled sadness and desolation. The flame skipped over their yellowed domes, where patches of hair and tarry skin still clung. Near at hand, a ribcage held three little skulls and a puzzle of smaller bones. There were skulls of every size: families had died here, mothers sinking down across their children in a last, hopeless attempt to save them. Their bones were not charred or broken: I could see no shattered skulls. But, from the way they had huddled back here it was plain they had died in some single, appalling moment. I staggered back to the steps and looked up at the charred beams that framed the entrance. And then I understood what had happened. One of the Cormaran’s men – Dimitri, perhaps – had told me of a siege he had taken part in. A fortified town had held out for days until the besiegers had run out of patience and shot burning pitch over the walls. The town had burned like a pyre for a day and a half, and when the attackers marched in they took possession of a walled mound of ash. There were no people left: they found them when they dug out the foundations of the houses in search of loot. The townsfolk had taken to the cellars to escape the fire, but the raging storm of flames had sucked out the air and every last man, woman and child had suffocated. They had lain in twisted heaps, quite unhurt; but on every face – so remembered the storyteller – was the mark of agony and terror. To die down there in the dark…we had all cursed and spat, and thanked our fortunes that we lived out in the wind and the salty spray.