Finally the stage cleared again and Abelas appeared alone. He reached up towards the spinning lights and began to describe the city of New Jerusalem. His arms and hands seemed to weave a tapestry-like image of the pearl gates and streets of translucent gold; the crowd gasped as if his hands were indeed building this marvellous city before their eyes. Haraldr saw only Abelas’s flashing rings. Then Abelas intoned, ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ and Haraldr could no longer blink away the fire in Abelas’s cupped hands; the flame grew, expanding into a great, golden, shimmering globe that seemed to engulf the courtyard; the voices around him exclaimed in a chorus and Haraldr knew that they all shared this vision. The light within the globe became brilliant, almost blinding, and Haraldr remembered what Abelas had whispered to him, not the thing that he had heard but the thing that had been whispered when he was unaware he was hearing. ‘Look for the dragon,’ the voice had said. A point of darkness, like a black star against a golden sky, grew until its huge wings spread over the globe of light like an obsidian dome, and he felt the cold gust of doom, and the brilliant light vanished.
Haraldr shook his head. The vision faded into the reality of candlelit tables and silken dignitaries. Where had he been? Had Abelas entranced him from the moment their eyes met? The stage was completely dark, and Abelas was gone. The crowd was in a frenzy of speculation about, and recapitulation of, the wonders the illusionist had shown to them. Husbands attended women who had fainted, two men were almost to blows over something, and many simply sat in drunken, bemused awe. Then Haraldr realized that Maria was crying.
Constantine rubbed his eyes. The oil-lamp cast spooky shadows over the rock walls of the scriptorium; were he the timid type, he probably should have begun to see demons crawling about the place. As it was, the demons were the doubts crawling about his mind. He closed the volume of archives he had just finished with; a poof of dust rose from between the wooden covers like a small djinn spiriting forth. He looked over the shelves, hoping against hope that he had missed something. No, he had been through all of them and found nothing. He wondered how late the hour was, and where he would go in the morning. This had seemed so promising: the looks in the monks’ eyes this afternoon. That was what was wrong. They had certainly heard of the man, and yet there was no record here. No, this was the place. He could hire soldiers in Caesarea and return and demand the monks’ cooperation. He could arrange a loan there, certainly, to pay the mercenaries. Suddenly the shadows did bother him. If the brothers had lied, it was not safe here. He remembered with a start that he had left his mule tethered to the ladder all this time.
Constantine picked his way nervously through the darkened galleries. At one point he reached a cul-de-sac and for a moment thought he would panic. Tombs. He hated being inside these rocks. He reached the chapel and was startled by the growl. No, snoring. The monks did slumber before the Lord’s sanctuary was complete, but they slept beside their work. Constantine crept outside and set the lamp on the ledge and gingerly descended the ladder into what seemed a well of darkness. When he reached the base of the spire, he looked up at the light on the rock balcony above him and decided he should go back up and risk climbing down with it; otherwise he was blind in this strange and now pitch-dark otherworld. Then he glanced around the base of the ladder and realized that his mule was gone.
Constantine climbed arduously back up the ladder and retrieved his lamp. But as he set out on foot he quickly regretted having gone back for it. The shadows that danced around him, in and out among the spires, were more terrifying than any stumbling in the dark could possibly be. Where was he going? Surely there was an inn somewhere, or some cenobites who remained awake; he would pay them to lodge him. If only he could see a light.
Cold water seemed to drain through Constantine’s bowels. Who was there? The same thieves who had stolen his mule? Constantine parried with the lamp as if it were a sword, thrusting it towards the craggy folds at the base of a cone. He saw red, feral eyes vanish into the night. Wild dogs, possibly more vicious even than thieves. He would have to get a loan in Caesarea now, simply to pay for his passage home, once he had reimbursed the mule’s owner.
The scraping again. Constantine looked about the ground for some good stones to throw at the dogs; why hadn’t he at least brought a staff? The black blur flashed from the shadows and punched the breath from him. His lamp spilled and burning oil washed over the rocks. Hands clutched at his cloak and probed for his purse. He rolled into the dust, gasping for air, the hands now pummelling his head. He forced himself to his knees and pounded back with his chubby fists, eliciting muffled groans from his assailant. The two men, entirely unknown and virtually unseen by each other, traded blows in the fading light of the spilled oil. Constantine’s chest and arms seared with fatigue but he still flailed with unexpected force. The assailant fled, a clattering shadow disappearing into the night.
Constantine remained on his knees, gulping the dry, dusty air. His head ached and his temples thumped with raging blood. Even in his distress he could hear the footsteps behind him and he whipped his head around. The figure was over him and he looked at the face in the last flickering light of the spilled oil and screamed.
‘He induces a trance, like a soothsayer,’ said Maria. ‘That is commonly done. His skill is that he can make hundreds of people see it at once. He has learned the ways of the mind, and how to make the mind see what it wants to see. He leads your mind to its own fantasies. But most of what you saw were tricks, to make you susceptible to the final illusion.’ Maria stretched her arms across the little dessert table and grasped Haraldr’s hands. Zoe had set up the tables all across the porch of her villa, as well as on the terraces descending to the Bosporus. The entire hillside twinkled with candlelight like a miniature city; the stairs, marked with glowing silk lanterns, were brilliant boulevards. There was no moon and the sea was sable-black.
‘Nevertheless, you cried at what you saw.’ Haraldr wondered if she had seen some new vision of his fate. Or perhaps her own.
‘At what I let myself see. I saw the fire and the raven because I dreamed these things. Because I am afraid for you. Not because they will happen but because I care for you. Because I . . .’ She trailed off, the missing words obvious. ‘You saw the dragon at the end, because that is your Norseman’s myth. But you are the only one who saw it. We all saw the light of New Jerusalem because we have all been in the Mother Church, and Abelas persuaded our minds to see it again. Abelas is very gifted, some say dangerously so. Do you know that he was escorted to his ship by his own Allemanian guards and has already sailed off in the dark? He worries that people who saw terrible things will try to kill him. The church would like to see him out of the way because he casts doubt on the veracity of miracles. And he will probably be mad within a year. I would say his art will soon be lost, and even the chronologists will be too frightened to record all of what we have seen.’
Haraldr clutched Maria’s hands. What she had said about Abelas had, as she would say, ‘the resonance of truth’. But if Abelas had the gifts of a soothsayer or seer, he could without question see into time. And he had known Haraldr, had seen him born, had seen him die, had seen the last dragon fly at the end of time. And perhaps, Haraldr thought, Abelas saw my soul unmasked.