Knuckles looked faintly disgusted at this showmanship. Blew a soft raspberry.
A figure slowly emerged, blinking in the lamplight, shackled hand and foot. But for the heavy black beard, he might have been Knuckles’ younger brother.
‘Water,’ he rasped.
‘You’ll get some,’ said Arapovian. ‘You are?’
‘Barabbas,’ said the prisoner in a voice suggesting he hadn’t drunk water for a week. Arapovian stood back. The man’s breath was foul.
Knuckles stepped up. ‘Don’t take the piss.’
‘S’true,’ said the prisoner.
‘So what are you, the original Wandering Jew or something? ’
The prisoner shrugged. ‘My father’s son.’
‘What you in for?’
‘Theft from the granary.’
‘Tut tut. You haven’t got a clue what’s been going on, have you?’
The prisoner shook his shaggy head miserably. ‘I thought I could smell smoke. Fire?’
‘Some.’ Knuckles turned to Arapovian. ‘You got to laugh. Everyone else gets the chop. The one prisoner due for the chop walks out just fine.’
‘As wiser men than we have previously observed,’ said Arapovian, ‘the humour of Heaven is more often ironical than benevolent.’
‘You took the words right out me gob.’
Arapovian rested the tip of his dagger against the prisoner’s neck. ‘I do not understand why, but it seems that, like your gospel namesake, you are destined live in others’ stead. You go with us. But one moment of foolishness and I will kill you. You think you are hard, but I am harder.’
‘He is, too,’ confirmed Knuckles, jerking his head. ‘He looks like some Persian Royal who’s spent his life in baths of asses’ milk. But he’s not.’
‘Armenian,’ said Arapovian.
‘Whatever,’ said Knuckles. ‘East is east.’
Something thumped onto the trapdoor above their heads. A burning beam.
‘Shit,’ said Knuckles.
‘You have more oil?’ asked Arapovian.
A woman shook her head.
‘Then snuff the lamp for now. We must wait a long time.’
The people tried to sleep. Arapovian recited softly to himself the litanies of his religion in the ancient tongue. Knuckles snored, clutching his beloved club to his chest like a child clutching its doll. The fire roared dimly above them.
After what he thought must be many hours, Arapovian crawled through the darkness and up the narrow steps to the trapdoor. There was a pause and then he gasped.
Knuckles was awake and heard him. ‘Don’t tell me. It’s hot.’
Arapovian returned.
‘Never touch an iron-bound trapdoor that’s been in the floor of a blazing building all day,’ Knuckles said helpfully, ‘even if you are Parsee fire-worshipper. You’ll give yourself a nasty burn. Even my granny could have told you that, bless her whorish old heart.’
‘Hold your tongue, you ape,’ hissed Arapovian.
‘Don’t call me an ape.’
‘Don’t call me a Parsee and I’ll think about it.’
Knuckles sighed.
Arapovian squatted, nursing his burned fingertips, feeling like a fool. An unaccustomed feeling for him, and one he did not appreciate. He looked upwards in the pitch blackness. If those bands got any hotter they’d start to glow in the dark. The wood on the upside must surely be charring down. Then the door would fall in, and they’d be done for.
The terrified families stared around sightlessly in the darkness. The old man said, ‘Have the invaders gone?’
‘No,’ said Arapovian. ‘The legion has gone. We are all that is left.’
Shock, then slow sobs as the terrible news sank in. The cell was full of widows and orphans.
The old man reached out in the dark and clutched the Armenian’s arm. ‘Will we live? Our children?’
Arapovian gently loosed his grip. There was a long silence. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘If the trapdoor holds, then… maybe.’
The fire roared louder.
Soon, in the gloom there was a dull red glow. The iron bands of the trapdoor were growing red hot. Oozing through the gaps round the edge of the trapdoor, sizzling, came runnels of melted fat. The odour of roast pork. Arapovian hoped the women and the children would not understand what it was.
‘Pray,’ he said. ‘All of you.’
12
Silence, broken only by the occasional, low bludgeoning thunderclap. The Huns were still marauding, still about their work of destruction. And they themselves were still trapped. When would it be better to surrender themselves than die here? Perhaps not much longer.
No sense of time. They slept fitfully. The families remained for the most part speechless with terror and grief. Cramped, stained, exhausted by their own trembling. Tongues sore and swelling with thirst, nostrils sickened by the stench of their own bodies. The children’s throats painful and dry as sharkskin. They sucked the damp walls, the bitter green taste of algae on their lips, until Arapovian forbade it. ‘That will kill you sooner,’ he said.
The only consolation was that the fire had not sucked the air out of the dungeon. It was foul down here, but it was enough for them still to breathe.
His heart was heavy for them. These children now fatherless, these women husbandless, this old couple with their son perhaps lying slain just outside. This noisome, putrid latrine their whole world now.
Time passed. Above, all was silence again.
‘We got to get out,’ said Knuckles.
‘Another twelve hours.’
‘How will we know?’
‘Thirty more full litanies or so.’
‘You’re joking.’
Arapovian did not reply.
‘Tell you what. Tell us about Armenia instead.’
After a long silence, Arapovian began to tell them about his homeland. He told them about his friends Jahukunian, Arutyunian and Khorenatsian, dead and buried in the earth of a land no longer theirs. He told them about the heroine Queen Paranjem, who fought the Persians under Shapur the Great when he devastated the land, and King Arshak, who was captured and blinded and imprisoned in the Castle of Oblivion for thirty years. He told them about the pagan fire temples of the Zoroastrians erected over Christian shrines, and the broad plains of Erzinjan and Erzerum, and the egrets and the francolin in the marshes, and the great monastery of Echmiadzin, the oldest in the world, they said. At last the people slept.
Thirty muttered litanies later, he and Knuckles shook the people awake, and moved towards the steps in the inky darkness.
Knuckles held his club ready while Arapovian reached up and set his sword-hilt against the trapdoor overhead. He gave a gentle push. The door sighed and fell down around his shoulders in fluttering leaves of ash. The wood was no more than a blackened parchment, a tissue-thin veil of charcoal between them and the inferno. Only the iron bands remained. He levered them back and stepped up, sword ready. Immediately outside were some charred bones. He pushed them aside with his foot, concealed them beneath smoking timbers as best he could before the families emerged.
They came up shakily into the light of day. For it was dawn. Even Arapovian was unsure how long they had been down there. Perhaps three whole days. A very Christlike resurrection, he thought grimly.
They stood and surveyed the still-smoking desolation, like some ragged band of beggars after the apocalypse. There was nothing left.
‘Sweet Mother of God,’ whispered the old man.
The fort had gone. There were only acres of ash, and a few low stretches of broken wall like rotten teeth. Nothing else. The people moved like silent wraiths through this landscape of rubble and dust and the last thin plumes of smoke, forgetting for a moment even their abominable thirst. Where the great bastions and outer walls had stood, there was only more rubble, crooked forms, cascades of hardcore. Beyond where the west gate-tower had stood, they glimpsed the remains of the town, and further off, scattered over the fertile plains, the smouldering ruins of their homes and farmsteads.