Extract from Patrick Chance’s Diary
Tashkara, 1888
If Fenris and the lepers had not stayed with me and with Theodore after they rescued us from Tamerlane’s savages we should probably have died from our wounds. God knows, there were times when I wished that I had died.
It’s difficult, at this distance, to recollect the exact sequence of events after they unchained me from that appalling wooden scaffold; it’s difficult, as well, to separate nightmare from reality.
The reality was what Tamerlane’s butchers did to me – and to Theodore – in that fire-drenched square inside the forbidden city; the nightmare’s now.
The memories are blurred and fragmented, and trying to set down a record is like lifting the lid of a grisly Pandora’s box. Several times since sitting down to complete these diaries, I’ve been attacked by doubt. Isn’t it better to leave the lid tightly closed, and seal the memories up for ever?
But the trouble with memories is that you never do quite seal them, not completely. They have a way of suddenly forcing up the lid – generally when you’re least expecting it as well – and spilling out into the light, as fresh and as hurting as when they were made. No matter how much you think you’ve pushed them into a dark cobwebby corner of your mind they don’t die; they stay in a dry embalmed state like something caught in amber. Like pressing a flower between the leaves of an old book and going back to it years later, and still being able to smell the fragrance. Only my pressed memories don’t smell of flowers: they’re blood-soaked and gore-crusted and they’re gibbering, bleached-bone corpses that won’t die, and that come gibbering and clawing at you in the night watches . . .
I think I feel better for that outburst, which may prove my point: drag the wretched things out, Patrick. Draw their teeth and lay the ghosts once and for all. Here I go, then.
The journey out of the forbidden city and into the leper colony was somehow achieved with makeshift litters, and with the endless patience of Fenris’s people. I was still swimming in and out of consciousness, but I remember the amazing gentleness of Sridevi, whom I thought then, and still think, is one of the most truly beautiful human beings I ever met. It was Sridevi who taught me that the outer covering doesn’t matter: it’s what’s within that counts.
I remember Theo’s appalling agonies as well, and his struggle to come to terms with his mutilation, first by writing on a slate, and later with sign language. It was only afterwards, when we were in England again, that I heard how Sridevi and two of the other women had fed him thin soup and goats’ milk and melted honey: spoonful by patient spoonful because his mouth was so dreadfully wounded that for several weeks he could barely swallow.
And through it all was my own agony: jagged shards of clawing torment splintering my mind. I lay in the small stone room on the outskirts of the leper colony, staring up at the low ceiling and although at the start there was no thought beyond that of the pain, eventually the pain receded, and there was space for bitter despair.
Emasculate. A gelding. A half-man. I thought: I can’t bear it, and knew in the same heartbeat that it had to be borne. I could not begin to imagine how I should feel, once out in the world again. Did the desire die along with the ability? What about all the drivelling old men who married girls a quarter their age and spent their days fumbling and fondling and very little else, regret in their eyes for the whole world to see? And what about the real castrati, what the Ancient Romans had called the spadone? I had seen them as well – the silver-voiced singers. They became coarsened, thickened. Their voices became eternally soprano – Unbearable. Oh God, why didn’t I die in that hell-ridden palace!
For a long time, the stone room was my whole world. I drifted in and out of awareness – occasionally rousing sufficiently to eat and drink. Between times Fenris and Sridevi talked to me. Sridevi had the kind of eyes that made me think of all those lyric poems about wine-dark seas (Homer?) and black and brilliant stars, and tranquillity filling up the wine-cup of the universe. The disease had ravaged her, but she had a gentle irony and the deep unshakeable faith and trust of the true mystic. I think the lepers regarded her as what the East call a twice-born. An old soul in the truest and most exact sense.
‘We spend as little time with you as possible,’ said Fenris on one occasion.
‘But not,’ put in Sridevi, ‘because we would not like to,’ and when I said if it was because of the infection they need not bother because I didn’t give a damn any longer, she said, very severely, ‘Do you think we risked all we did only to see you die? How ungrateful of you. You will not die, Patrick; you will live. I – I order you to live.’ And then she said, ‘What was done to you was truly terrible, but there is no need for anyone in your world to ever know about it.’
‘Who would tell them?’ added Fenris, rather sadly.
‘Become an illusionist,’ said Sridevi, and for a second a grin lit her face.
I stared at them.
‘Listen to me,’ said Fenris. ‘You do not think it now, but one day you will take pleasure from living again.’
‘I can’t begin to imagine how it will be—’
‘But you will do it,’ said Fenris.
And at his side Sridevi said, ‘Patrick, you should remember that we are here to help you, as you tried to help us. You should lean on us until you are strong.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Among my own people we have very wonderful writings of a philosopher and a visionary who lived in Persia many centuries ago. His name has long since been lost, but fragments of his teachings live on. And when he wrote about friendship and love, he wrote these words.’ She paused, and then said, very softly, ‘“Throw me your nightmares, beloved, and watch me spin them like a juggler, and one by one exorcise them of their devils and return them to you with their fangs drawn and their red poison sucked out.’” She paused again, and then went on in her soft voice that the disease had not yet marred, ‘“And then you will see how the nightmares will depart; they will slide back across the silent black waters of the oceans and usher in the light.”’ She smiled at me. ‘Love and friendship drive back all the nightmares, Patrick.’
‘And the world feasts on illusions,’ I said, my own eyes never leaving hers. ‘We have a poet as well, Sridevi, an Englishman who lived nearly a thousand years ago, and who said that life is a thoroughfare full of woe, and we are but pilgrims passing to and fro.’
‘That is also good,’ said Sridevi, listening absorbedly. She made one of her rare gestures of taking my hand. The lepers tried never to touch anyone, but her hand lay cool and strong in mine for a brief moment. ‘You will do it, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You will survive and you will drive away the nightmares and you will fool the world and there will be some happiness for you.’
In the face of their patient acceptance of their own lot it’s difficult to argue the point.
We left the colony, Theo and I, after a space of time that might have been several weeks or months, or several worlds.
Sridevi’s words about fooling the world stuck in my mind and lodged there, and I returned to them over and over, using them like a touchstone. No one need ever know. The only other person who knew the truth was Theo, and if I could not trust Theo, I could not trust anyone.
I would become an illusionist, I would wear false colours to the world. Sliding back the nightmares . . . I would even doctor my travel journal to fool people. Edit, wasn’t that the word?
‘Back into the world,’ I said to Theo, and he made the sign that meant Yes, followed by Good. It occurred to me for the first time that I was better placed than he was to throw up an illusion. Let’s face it, even if you’ve been castrated you can still pretend you’re as rampantly capable as the next man (unless, of course, the next man actually demands proof, in which case you’re lost), but you’ve either got a tongue to speak with or you haven’t.
As we neared Lhasa and the first outposts of civilisation again, Theo scribbled the question: ‘Would you have preferred your sentence to be carried out the other way round?’
Blinded and saved before the castration? Yes, but you don’t need your sight to make love. I said, ‘I don’t know.’
It was in Lhasa, in the hotel that had seemed spartan on the way out but now seemed luxurious, that I recalled the prophecy made by Touaris. It’s true that at the time I hadn’t been in any case to appreciate the finer points, even if Tamerlane’s translation could be trusted which was debatable. It’s also true that that hippo-faced old goddess had probably only been trying to steal my thunder, but all the same—
All the same, prophecies sometimes have an unpleasant way of turning into threats, and threats have more than once erupted into full-blown quarrels.
After we dined in the hotel’s sparse dining room that first night, and sat sipping Lhasa’s idea of brandy, I suddenly said, ‘Theo, I’ve reached a decision.’
He looked up, and I smiled for the first time for what seemed a very long time. ‘There’s something we’ve got to do. And we’ve got to do it quickly.’
He waited, and I said, ‘We’re going to Rome.’ And, as Theo looked startled, I said, ‘We’re going to see the Pope.’
We didn’t get to the Pope, of course, but we got pretty close.
We were received by some kind of aide, who treated us with exquisite courtesy, although for all I know he might simply have been a lowly priest with nice manners, kept on tap to deal with freakish people who turn up insisting they’ve had a vision of the Risen Christ, or attention-seekers announcing that the world’s going to end next Tuesday. Theo and I probably came outside both these categories – neither freak nor fowl nor good red herring.
Father Karyl listened politely to the story of the Tashkara expedition and I gave him a severely pruned version of the events in the palace square, because it seemed a bit tasteless, not to say discourteous, to talk about castration and enforced celibacy in the presence of one who was celibate from choice. So I merely said that Theo had suffered the greater burden of punishment, and that the lepers’ rescue had been timely. Karyl probably knew there was more to it: real religeux have a disconcerting way of looking at you very directly as if they can strip away the verbiage and hear the truth, but his good manners forbade prying. Also it was nothing to do with the Vatican whether I was Casanova and Rabelais and Aretino rolled into one, or whether I was as impotent as a mule. Which I was.
But when I related, as accurately as I could, the odd prediction that Touaris had made, Father Karyl leaned forward, his face alight with much more than politeness.
‘She actually said that, Mr Chance? That one day in the future the Tashkaran Decalogue would speak against Western civilisation?’
‘Well, as near as I can remember, she did. It wasn’t exactly a situation where you record every word.’
‘No, quite.’ He sat back, frowning, and then said abruptly, ‘I wonder if it would disrupt your plans to stay in Rome for a few days? You see, although it is almost certain that there is nothing in what the lady said, one is inclined to remember the parable of the wheat and the chaff.’
‘So one is.’ I gave him the address of our hotel. (Theo indicated afterwards that it would not have been out of place to have suggested that the Vatican footed the bill for the extra few days’ sojourn, but this was only Theo getting back on form, the old miser.)
‘I shall report this to the appropriate section of the Curia,’ said Father Karyl, and I waited for him to say, ‘But of course, these things take a very long time to consider.’
‘Of course,’ said Father Karyl, ‘A thing like this will be looked at very quickly indeed.’
It would probably be three months at the most optimistic calculation. Six would be nearer the mark and a year the likeliest.
Father Karyl said, ‘You will hear from us within two days,’ and ushered us out.
I spent the next two evenings getting thoroughly drunk on several very palatable bottles of Chianti, and falling into conversation with the mandatory lady-travelling-alone in the hotel (there’s always at least one), who on this occasion was on the shady side of thirty-five, spoke not a word of English, but had polished the art of predatory flirtatiousness to a diamond-hard brilliance. It was a grim reminder of Tamerlane’s butchers, but it gave me a chance to try out my own skills as an illusionist.
I think they passed muster. I think she believed my excuse of a vow (unspecified) that precluded my accepting her skilfully veiled suggestion. The excuse wouldn’t have done for an Englishwoman (will have to think up something more suitable when I reach London), but they’re very down-to-earth about vows in Rome; it’s the proximity of the Vatican.
I think, also, that if anyone ever reads my entirely fictional account of our activities in her bedroom, they will find it credible, although on reflection I may have overdone the part with the lighted candles.
In these very private pages, however, I can admit that when her bedroom door closed it closed with me outside it, and the sound had such a chilling ring of finality that bitter despair closed over my head afresh. This was what it would always be like from now on. There was as yet no indication that the nightmares might be starting to slide back across Sridevi’s silent black waters.
Of the ushering in of the light there was no sign at all.
Cardinal Gregory was most apologetic at having detained us on our travels, which he appeared to see as the outside of discourtesy, and seemed to think it necessary to make up for the solecism by giving us a kind of potted tour of some of the private sections of the Vatican before repairing to his own apartments.
It stretches for miles, of course, this seat of Roman Catholicism, and we only saw a minute part. But it was a remarkable experience. It’s a curious and not-always-pleasant blend: sumptuous grandeur and ancient history, and achingly beautiful statuary and objets d’art, which they refer to in the most casual way imaginable. Gregory didn’t quite say things like, ‘Don’t trip over the Michelangelo,’ or, ‘Those Botticelli frescoes blot out the light a bit,’ but I had the feeling he might.
There are unexpected little tucked-away chapels and oratories and tabernacles so that you keep falling into sudden pockets of extreme calm where the very walls are soaked with goodness and prayer, and then descending abruptly down odd dark passages where anything might have happened (and probably did). It’s disconcertingly impossible to forget all those frequently greedy and sometimes bloody battles that went on for power, and if the shades of any of the unscrupulous, power-seeking cardinals do walk in the Vatican, I’ll swear they walk in a particular stretch of corridor near the old Borgia apartments. Workmen had just started to restore the marvellous frescoes which Pinturicchio painted for Alexander Borgia and which later generations primly covered up, but even with dust sheets and bottles of linseed oil, and trestle tables tripping you up every few yards, the place had a dark sinister aura.
But beneath all that there’s an innate and very orderly tranquillity, and more than once during that brief tour I felt as if a huge calming hand had laid itself across my mind (sliding back the nightmares at last, Sridevi . . .?). For some reason I could never explain, I didn’t ask Theo for his reactions; for myself I kept remembering the part in the New Testament where Christ commanded Peter the Fisherman to build a church on a rock and never to permit the gates of hell to prevail against it. They’d struggled to keep the gates locked and at times they’d struggled to keep them merely closed – physically as well as metaphorically – but the rock was still holding firm. So far, anyway.
We crossed a small, sun-drenched quadrangle, leaving the ghosts behind with the turpentine and irreverently whistling workmen, and Cardinal Gregory led us into a low, ivy-covered wing with small heavily latticed windows. There was the good scent of old leather and even older timbers and a feeling of quiet unassuming scholarship. Our host seated himself at a desk, explained that we were in a small wing of one of the libraries, and invited me to tell my story again. Theo passed me the notes we had compiled in the hotel the previous evening (before the wine-drinking, you understand, although after the apocryphal episode with the Italian signora), and I plunged in.
Gregory listened absorbedly, making a few notes, and apparently taking it at face value – presumably the Old Testament had familiarised him with much more bizarre tales of visions and fiery prophecies – although he posed a number of very searching questions afterwards, which I struggled to answer.
‘I truly can’t be more specific, Your Eminence,’ I said, at last. ‘And I’m sorry that I can’t remember Touaris’s exact words. But for one thing they were in an unknown tongue, and for another we both thought we were facing death.’ At my side Theo nodded to indicate he should be identified with this.
‘Yes, it would concentrate the mind, to be facing execution,’ said the cardinal, without batting an eyelid, and I remembered that the Roman Church was as familiar with violent death and bloody martyrdom as it was with prophets. Gregory said, ‘But Father Karyl who reported to me, thought you had the spirit of the prophecy, if not the letter.’
‘I think we have.’
‘Then if I have understood correctly, the prophecy was both general and specific. The generality was that the Decalogue was an instrument of ancient vengeance, and that one day it would be revealed to the world.’
‘Yes.’
‘The specific was that the hands of those who have power over their inferiors would one day wield the knowledge of the Stone Tablets of Tashkara.’
‘Yes,’ I said again. ‘I interpreted that to mean that some power-hungry despot might seize on it as a bargaining tool.’
‘It is a risky business to interpret prophecies, Mr Chance,’ said Gregory, but he smiled and at my side, Theo scribbled a question: ‘Does the Vatican take prophecies seriously these days?’
‘Well, we usually try,’ said Gregory. ‘It’s always tempting to write certain people off as hysterics, of course, but it’s as well to approach these things with an open mind. Neither of you seems to be at all hysterical, by the way.’
‘Thank you.’
‘On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that your extremely unpleasant experience warped your judgement,’ said His Eminence, showing that even the Church liked to hedge its bets. ‘I’m assuming you know the legend of the Decalogue, do you?’
‘About Satan casting it down to earth to rival Moses?’ It sounded entirely natural to say this in Gregory’s quiet room; although I wouldn’t want to put such a sentence to the test in Simpson’s or even – heaven forfend! – somewhere like St Stephen’s Music Hall! ‘The lepers knew something about it,’ I said. ‘And Father Karyl gave us more detail. It’s a – remarkable legend.’
Theo scribbled a second question: ‘How much credence does the Vatican give the story?’ and for the first time Gregory hesitated.
‘You didn’t see them?’ he said. ‘The Stones of Vengeance?’
‘No.’
‘Ah. Well, we have never known how much was legend and how much was truth,’ he said. ‘But it is quite true that in our vaults is a certain extremely ancient document purporting to describe the ancient Stone Tablets brought out of Egypt by the Bubasti tribe nearly three thousand years ago.’
‘That part’s true?’
‘Oh yes, I should think so,’ said Gregory. ‘There are some unexplained things in the world, of course – I wouldn’t be in God’s service if I didn’t believe that. But there are also a great many explained but extremely ancient and valuable artefacts in the world, and I believe that the Tashkara Decalogue is simply one of them. But,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘that would not stop someone making use of the legend and in the process damaging Western religions.’ He looked at me. ‘I think we have to treat this very carefully, Mr Chance.’
I leaned forward. ‘What are you going to do?’
It’s an odd feeling to know that you’ve contributed to what the Vatican calls the Secret Apocrypha Writings, but that was what we appeared to have done.
Gregory was of the opinion that the prophecy made by Touaris must be recorded in what he referred to as the Codex Vaticanus Maleficarum, and that his successors should be made aware of its existence.
‘We have our own spy network, Mr Chance,’ he said, as he bade us farewell. ‘It is gentle but efficient. We shall watch Tamerlane’s people, quite unobtrusively, of course, and we shall ensure that the knowledge of the Decalogue does not get out.’
‘Well – I’m glad,’ I said.
Gregory’s eyes rested on me thoughtfully. ‘I will pray for you both,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘I – thank you.’
‘Whatever was done to you, Mr Chance – to both of you –’ he included Theo in his look – ‘you will finally come to terms with it.’
‘Will we?’
‘Certainly. God never sends more suffering than His children can bear.’
‘It’s sometimes – very difficult to bear it, however.’
‘I am sure it is,’ said His Eminence. ‘But who told you that life was intended to be easy?’ He shook hands, and then sketched a minute gesture over us both, which I took to be the Sign of the Cross.
Allowing for the difference in religion and nationality, it’s the same sentiment that Sridevi and Fenris expressed. I find it remarkable that the only things helping me to cling to life at the moment are the philosophies of a Tibetan leper and a Roman Catholic prelate.
I suppose I should be hard-bitten and cynical and say I don’t give a damn what happens to a few bits of ancient stone, and that it doesn’t matter to me if Western religion is dealt a deathblow in some unimaginable future.
But I find I do care. I find myself hoping that Gregory’s successors will take Touaris’s prophecy seriously and that if necessary they’ll take steps to prevent the knowledge getting out – even if it means destroying the Decalogue itself. As I drifted into sleep that night, for the first time I was thinking not of my own miserable mutilations, or Theo’s, but of the Stone Tablets of Tashkara: Satan’s Ten Commandments.
I wish I’d seen them.