A Burning Sea by Theodore Brun (i am reading a book txt) 📕

first to a golden book, the magic of which Erlan still did not understand, and then to two priests, one dressed in white with a black hood, the other, older and more severe, garbed in gorgeous robes of gold and silver. This was the one they called the patriarch, Erlan guessed. The most powerful of their holy men who seemed to rank higher than almost everyone in the city, except for the emperor himself. Behind the old greybeard, the great rust-red stone facade loomed, a cascade of buttresses and pillars. Looking at it, of all that Erlan felt, the least he expected was a shiver of fear. Why should he be afraid of a building? He shook it off as silliness. Emperor and patriarch turned to enter, and behind them almost the whole city made ready to follow them inside.

They crossed one threshold, a second, a third – each bigger than the last, each increasing his anticipation. He tried to brace himself for what was to come, but how could he really? Who could be prepared for the extraordinary wonder that struck his eye when he followed the other guards under the massive stone lintel into that giant’s hall?

Valhalla, he thought, breathlessly. Surely I am in Valhalla. Here was a hall to house the gods if ever one had been built. He fixed his head straight ahead while his eyes roved and darted around the vast chasm of stone, all the while asking how. How could human hands build this monstrous mountain and then hollow it out with such delicacy, such deftness, that somehow a colossal weight of stone floated like a cloud far above his head? Such weightlessness, such beauty. How? If he had been allowed to speak, he would have uttered no sound; astonishment had stolen every word.

He told himself to pull his wits out of the stars and forced his attention back to his situation. There was some exchange between patriarch and Emperor at the screen of pillars near the eastern end of the church, set behind a little raised platform of white stone. The emperor carried forward a large golden bowl beyond the screen which, Erlan saw through the pillars, he laid upon some kind of table covered in golden cloth. An altar, Erlan supposed, though there was no blood upon it, as yet. The guard of honour, meanwhile, took up position to the right of this, behind the green and purple columns in the south-east corner of the great hall, where a small gilded throne – positively discreet by the standards of the palace – awaited the emperor.

Soon enough the emperor re-emerged from behind the screen and took his seat while the patriarch approached a far grander and more prominent throne, placed at the centre of a semicircle of tiered stone benches immediately behind the altar, which were slowly filling with the lesser priests.

Erlan glanced at Einar, standing two places further down their rank, trying to catch his eye.

‘Eyes front,’ a stern voice hissed to his left. He recognized Alexios’s clipped tone. Erlan obliged, feeling childishly self-conscious.

The great hall was nearly full now – the central area crowded with faces, with the highest-ranking citizens to the fore and the lower orders standing further back near the doors where all had entered. Above them, the galleries too were full of faces gazing down in expectation. Lilla was up there somewhere. Erlan couldn’t help wondering what she made of all this.

The patriarch’s voice suddenly rang out from his lofty throne. A high, brittle voice, yet powerful, carrying as far as any voice could in all this air and stone. He began with some commonplace greetings to the people.

It was the eve of a feast day of a great hero of the Christian people: an angel named St Michael, he announced. Half of what he said, Erlan could not understand; he had no context for the Christians’ stories. But he listened anyway, and soon the old patriarch was describing how this angel Michael was appointed captain of the armies of their god; how in a great war in the heavens, Michael had defeated the angel Lucifer, ‘the great dragon’, who had rebelled against the throne of God, casting this rebel pretender down to Earth with a great multitude of his followers, where ever since they had been leading humankind astray, causing discord and suffering.

It was strange. The story echoed something of Vassili’s talk and, still further back in Erlan’s past, the words of the Watcher. . . Although the demon had spoken of a tyrant, not a lord of hosts, not an almighty king who ruled over all. Erlan listened and something stirred in him, something like fear again, only a fear rooted far deeper than mere apprehension of danger, or even loss. Abruptly the patriarch finished his speaking, and another white-robed priest approached the little stone platform in front of the altar and climbed its steps. He opened a book. But before he began to read, from under the platform on which he stood men started singing, and their voices were joined by others out of sight around the upper galleries of the great hall. The song was like none Erlan had ever heard, its music a strange contradiction, full of a kind of mournful joy, or else an exultant lament. Deep, rich voices moved in perfect opposition to one another, weaving melodies and harmonies so intricate the Norns themselves could hardly have matched their complexity. It was a world away from the shamanic songs of any goði in the north. The goði’s song called to a man’s soul, its rhythms throbbed through his body as if drawn up through the earth on which he stood. This, though, was music of another kind. It seemed to fall from above, pouring into a man’s heart, filling his head.

The lone reader now joined in the chorus, his clear, high voice soaring over the top of the others, singing the words of his book rather than speaking them.

Erlan felt suddenly