David Pilling - The Red Death

“Life is all about compromise,” she said, as I squirmed and arched my back against the intensifying heat, “honour and loyalty are outdated concepts. To prosper, one must learn to bend like the willow. To stand upright is to risk being snapped in half.”

She stood up, drew Caledfwlch and tossed away the sheath. I drew a morsel of strength and courage from the blade, which shone like a glimpse of Heaven in that shadowy vault.

“You value this, don’t you?” she said, turning the blade this way and that as she studied it, “what fools men are, to revere such objects. It’s just an old sword.”

“Caledflwch was forged by the gods, and wielded by some of the noblest men who ever lived,” I panted, “your hand is unfit to hold it.”

Theodora gave a little laugh. “Another insult. You might as well save your breath. Very soon from now, your skin shall start to blister and burn. You will scream and beg to be released.”

She stood up and walked closer to the oven. “There shall be no release. I promise you that. No release, until you crack under the pain and go mad. I have seen it happen before. It is fascinating to look into a man’s eyes, just as his mind reaches the limits of endurance.”

More charcoal was shovelled into the vent. I felt a gust of searing heat and tried unsuccessfully to stifle another scream. The iron griddle was hot now, not unbearably so, but would only get worse. My bowels churned, and I almost vomited at the thought of what was going to happen to me.

“Belisarius will notice I have gone!” I yelled desperately. “He will ask questions, and want to know what has happened to me!”

“We shall feed him lies,” was her response, “if the day comes that I cannot fool General Belisarius, then I shall open my veins in the bath. That man believes what his wife tells him, and she tells him what I want her to.”

She stood a few inches from the oven, Caledfwlch naked in her hand. If I could just slip one of my bonds, I might have been able to snatch it from her.

Theodora smiled in pure delight as she watched me suffer. Her bullies wore the blank, dispassionate expressions of men doing a job. A dirty and unpleasant job, perhaps, but one they were being well paid for.

The heat was now almost intolerable. I could only bear it by screaming, and felt my strength and will leeching away. My last hope was that I would pass out with the pain.

Theodora disabused me of that hope. “There is a bucket of cold water ready,” she whispered, her face so close to mine I could smell her perfumed breath, “to wake you when you fall unconscious. My men are skilled at keeping their subjects awake until the end. I have a mind to cut your heart out and hold it up before your living eyes. It is possible, you know.”

She pressed the tip of Caledfwlch against my sweat-soaked chest. Her eyes gleamed like the Devil’s when Christ had his moment of weakness.

“Grandfather!” I shouted. Through a haze of pain, I saw Theodora purse her lips in distaste.

“Ancestor worship,” she muttered, “and I thought you were a Christian. Feed the fire again. It’s hungry.”

One of her men bent to retrieve the shovel, and hesitated. There was a jangle of iron keys in a lock, the whine and scrape of a door being pushed back on rusted hinges, and the clatter of heavy footsteps.

The eunuch Narses appeared at the top of the steps. He wore a bowl helmet and a short sword strapped to his hip. Otherwise he was unarmed, but a cluster of enormous guardsmen loomed in the shadows behind him.

Theodora whipped around at this intrusion. “Why are you here?” she shrieked, pale and trembling with fury, “get out, eunuch! This is no affair of yours!”

Narses ignored her and pattered lightly down the steps, followed by his guardsmen. There were six of them, tall Armenian brutes wearing helmets and mail corslets and armed with axes and daggers.

“This is very much my affair, Majesty,” he said lightly in that comical high-pitched voice I remembered so well, “I must ask you to release that poor devil before he is cooked to a turn.”

Theodora went rigid, and for a hopeful moment I thought she might have a seizure.

“Do you dare to give me orders, Narses? I am the Empress. No-one commands me save God and my husband.”

“Such is usually the case,” the eunuch replied blandly, “but the circumstances here are exceptional. I have six armed men to your three. Who knows? Perhaps your men will be lucky.”

I had done my part to reduce the odds, by incapacitating two of Theodora’s men when they abducted me. Silence rolled over the cellar, while Theodora and Narses locked wills and I bit my lip until it bled against the roasting agony in my back.

“I will not forget, Narses,” Theodora said softly. She stepped away from the oven and ordered her men to stand down.

“You will remember and learn, Majesty,” Narses replied, “no-one may act outside of the law, not even an Empress. We in the civilised world in general must cling to that premise, or descend into barbarism.”

Her fragile composure broke. She spat at him, and called him a viper and a neutered dog and other names I shall not repeat. But she was outnumbered, and unprepared to risk a brawl that might go badly for her and certainly come to the attention of her husband.

Narses ordered two of his men to release me. They cut through my bonds, all the while keeping a wary eye on Theodora’s hirelings, and lifted me carefully onto the floor. I lay there, gasping and retching and unable to prevent tears of pain rolling down my face. My back was badly burned, and I was unable to smother a yell as one of the Armenians dashed the bucket of cold water over me.

“Gently, for God’s sake,” Narses said reprovingly, “get him on his feet. Coel, can you hear me?”

I mumbled my thanks as his men lifted me up. One of them draped a cloak over me, and I gasped at the touch of rough-woven cloth on my scalded flesh.

“My sword,” I managed, “I must have my sword. She cannot have it.”

“Ah yes, the famous sword,” he said. “We will take Crocea Mors as well, Majesty, if you please.”

He held out his hand to Theodora, who looked at it as though she meant to bite it off. Slowly, and with pure hatred radiating from every inch of her, she raised Caledfwlch and dropped the hilt into his palm.

Narses gave a little bow from the waist and snapped his fingers, which was the signal for two of his Armenians to carry me up the steps between them. The rest followed, with the eunuch at their heels.

“Hurry, hurry,” I heard him mutter. “We must be gone before the spell breaks. The Empress in a rage is capable of anything.”

I was carried out into a darkened corridor, and had to be lifted over the prone figure of another of Theodora’s hirelings – presumably he had been guarding the door when Narses and his men came upon him. One of my bare feet slipped on a pool of warm, sticky blood that flowed from the fatal knife-wound in his gut.

Narses heaved the door shut with a bang and contemplated the bunch of heavy iron keys in his hand.

“It’s tempting to lock her in and throw these away,” he mused, “but it wouldn’t do. The Emperor would not thank me for starving his wife to death in a cellar.”

He dropped the keys on the floor and padded away with my sword in his hand. I stumbled in his wake, leaning heavily on the stout shoulders of the Armenians.

I was taken to the eunuch’s suite of private rooms, even more opulent than those of the Empress and Belisarius. The central chamber was a beautifully decorated and pillared hall, furnished by couches draped with zebra and tiger skins. Narses had me laid out on one of them and sent for a physician while he sat behind a desk and poured wine from a gilded silver jug.