Assassins of Kantara

by James Boschert

  “We surprised them, Sir Talon. They thought they were safe because they were so far away from the castle. Reza and his archers finished most of them off before they could even reach their weapons.” Palladius sounded impressed. His men forced the prisoner to his knees in front of Talon; his arms were bound behind him, and he looked frightened and exhausted.

  Talon stood in front of the man. “Why did you and your companions come up the mountain?” he demanded in Greek.

  The prisoner shook his head. “We were just hunting,” he said. His tone was defiant.

  Talon nodded. “Hunting can be a dangerous sport in this mountain. I’ll ask you again, why were you here?”

  “My arm hurts! I told—” the prisoner didn’t finish. Palladius back-handed him across the face, snapping his head back. “You will speak respectfully to his Lordship and you will tell him the truth,” he snarled.

  The prisoner groaned and fell forward onto his face.

  “Bind up his wound and take him down to the cells,” Talon ordered. “Reza, I think I know how to make him talk.”

  Later that evening, he and Reza walked down the narrow stairs to the dungeons. At the far end was the place where Talon made his infernal devices, but near the entrance were two cells that he had decided to use when necessary for such an occasion as this.

  “What are you planning, Talon?” Reza asked, as they descended into the cold, dark area carrying only one torch.

  “Firstly, I am going to hold the torch on high and you are going to toss one of those Chinese crackers at him. Then we shall see. Make it as dramatic as you can.”

  Reza laughed out loud.

  The prisoner was crouched in a corner nursing his bandaged arm when the door of his cell opened with the rattle of bolts and a loud creak. Standing in the doorway were two of the masked people he had come to fear. He flinched.

  “Last chance. Who sent you, and for what purpose?” one of them demanded.

  He shook his head; he was dead anyway. “Go to hell and burn,” he croaked. He hadn’t eaten nor drunk water for half the day.

  “Defiant, eh? I like that, but it’s no use,” the taller of the two said. “This is how I punish people like you for being stupid.”

  The prisoner heard a loud hissing sound. The second man stepped forward and, with a great shout, pointed a long stick at the prisoner. At the same time, a hissing object appeared at the bewildered man’s feet. Before he knew it, the door was slammed shut with a crash and he was plunged into a darkness that was lit by this hissing and sparking creature that seemed to dance at his feet, coming ever closer. He spun around with a scream of utter terror and tried to claw his way up the stone walls, anything to get away from this hideous creature that he was sure was about to eat him or sting him to death.

  There was a flash that lit up the cell briefly, a deafening bang that blasted his ear drums, then a nasty stink, followed by complete silence except for the patter of falling pieces of some matter on the floor.

  “God help me! Mercy save me! I will tell you anything! Please, I beg of you!” the prisoner wailed and gibbered into the darkness.

  The door reopened and the two hooded men were once again standing there with the torch held high. The prisoner’s eyes darted around, looking for the deadly creature, but there was nothing in the cell with him.

  “This time you will tell the truth, or the next thunder bolt will kill you—and most painfully; it prefers go eat people from the feet up, so it is very slow,” the taller one said in an icily calm voice.

  The prisoner began to talk. His comrades had decided quite separately of their command to see what they could find out by raiding one of the villages. They had not told the emperor; their former leader was dead, so they had followed the impetuous plan of the next highest ranker among them. All they had wanted was some plunder and perhaps a few hostages with which to bargain. This was as Talon had suspected; he did not think Isaac would so foolishly imperil a source of tribute.

  In the early hours of the next morning, a single man banged on the gates of the city of Famagusta and demanded entrance. The guards were not helpful, leaning over the parapet to peer down into the dark and demanding who was there. They could barely make out someone in ragged clothes who stood swaying with fatigue below them holding his left arm, which had been bandaged.

  “Let me in,” he begged. “It’s Radenos. I’m wounded.”

  “Who? So it is, it’s Radenos!” one of the brighter sentries exclaimed. “Where’s the rest of you?”

  “Dead!” he answered shortly, leaning his head agains the gates.

  The gates creaked open and the guards peered at him as he staggered inside, minus his horse and armor.

  Someone gave him a cup of water to slake his parched throat, and then they began to ask questions. “What in God’s name happened? They can’t be all dead!”

  “The wizard found us! He knew exactly where we were and sent his devils to kill us. We had no chance at all. He hurled a deadly hissing snake at me, then made it disappear. Oh God, I was so scared I would have shat myself if I’d had anything inside,” he confessed. His terror communicated itself to the wide-eyed and superstitious men gathered around him.

  They crossed themselves as they stared at his disheveled and bruised face, some of them making signs to ward off a great evil. “You cannot kill demons. No amount of gold will get me back up on that cursed mountain, ever again,” Radenos declared, his hand shaking. “Give me something stronger than this piss!” he yelled. “I need a real drink.”

  Reza walked into Talon’s working chamber. His brother was working late again.

  “How did it go?” Talon poured him a cup of wine.

  Reza sipped it appreciatively.“Hmm, this isn’t as bad as it used to be,” he stated. Talon rolled his eyes.

  “It isn’t the gut rot we were given to begin with. The villagers took me to the hidden rows where this particular wine is made.”

  “The cunning dogs!” Reza exclaimed with a laugh, then continued with his report.

  “We salvaged what was useful from the mercenaries. In the morning we will place the heads on stakes all along the ridge as a warning to others. We told the prisoner to walk back to the city once we had taken him down the mountain. I think he might have run all the way home,” he chuckled.

  “I suspect that it will be some time before they are bold enough to try again,” Talon said. They toasted on another. “Give it a chance; it will be very good one day,” he said, referring to the wine. “Who knows, one day we might even be selling it to the emperor himself!”

  Constantinople

  The Kings of the world are growing old,

  and they shall have no inheritors.

  —Rainer Rilke

  Part III

  Chapter 19

  Andronicus Komnenos, Emperor. 1183 - 1185

  Theodora Kalothesos

  The city of Constantinople was gripped by a great fear. In the two and a half years since he had been welcomed by joyous crowds into the city, Emperor Andronicus Komnenos had made welcome changes to the glacial bureaucracy and had attacked corruption wherever he suspected it to lurk. However, he had also transformed the city and the country into a region of intrigue, treachery, and murder. Now citizens cowered in terror. The emperor had shown the other side of himself, a dark and sadistic side that had hunted the senatorial class to near extinction.

  Although it was only late August, an early autumn was creeping in from the north, sending chill winds of both the natural kind and of bad news—word of the hereditary enemies of Byzantium, Bulgarians and Serbs, gathering like wolves on its northern borders, and now they had appeared its south-western borders also. A sense of impending doom pervaded the city and muted the normal sounds of a once great and thriving trading center. William the Norman of Sicily had invaded Byzantium and his army was besieging Thessalonica. He had already sacked the city of Durazzo.

  Theodora half-ran the last few hundred paces to reach the gates of her father’s vill
a, clutching her cloak about her as the cold wind threw dust spirals into the air and played with dried leaves. It was August of the year 1185 of Our Lord and unseasonably cold.

  Much had changed since she was a student at the city university. Now she was an Assistant Physician and practiced at the same school where she had earned her diplomas; but, she wondered as she arrived at the gates, for how much longer?. No one appeared to be safe from the endless denunciations and killings that went unchecked. Their chill evil had reached its long fingers into the academy, and all were afraid.

  She nodded to the old man, Angelos, who served as a guard at the entrance and petted his huge, equally old watch dog with its droopy, mournful eyes, then continued walking along the leaf-strewn pathway towards her home. She could see all the signs of neglect that went with an estate that had been unattended for a long time and was in steep decline. The gardens, once the pride of both her parents, were falling into ruin under the assault of invasive weeds and untrimmed vines. Glancing over to her left, she could see the remains of her father’s once rich vineyard, the poles broken and the vines gone wild. They no longer produced grapes that could make a wine worth boasting about.

  Walking up to the main entrance, she saw without really noticing the unswept steps leading up to the door and the fallen vase, blown over in a recent storm to shatter on the marble steps; the dark earth strewn about had not been swept away. The stables to her right were silent. The family no longer owned any horses; they had been sold to pay for food and fuel. Neither were there any slaves to work on the extensive grounds.

  Theodora swiped a loose strand of auburn hair back over her ear, lifted the latch of the door and pushed hard to make it open. It creaked and groaned as she pushed, for the hinges were old and rusted. Then the wind seized it and would have slammed the door shut had she not held onto it and eased it closed, although she could not stop it from making some noise.

  “Who is it?” called a tremulous voice from inside.

  “It’s only me, Mama,” Theodora called back. “Is Damian with you?”

  “Ah,” said Joannina, her mother, “I was worried. Damian is in his bedroom playing, I imagine.”

  Theodora walked into the living room and tossed her satchel onto the table near the door, then kissed her mother, who was seated by one of the windows overlooking the junction of the Golden Horn and the Bosporus sea. She was wrapped up, with blankets over her shoulders and legs, but she still looked cold.

  “Why has the maid let the fire go out?” Theodora demanded irritably, as she poked at the ashes with a metal rod. “I shall have to get some more wood.”

  “Irene is mean,” said Joannina in a low tone. “I ask her to do something, she says yes, then goes off and does what she pleases.”

  “Then we should throw her out, Mama,” Theodora said with exasperation in her voice.

  Joannina took her hand and held it hard. “I neither trust her nor like her, but you know exactly what she will do, should we follow that course of action.”

  “Yes, Mama I know,” said Theodora tiredly. “We can still be denounced to the street guards. God help us, I know!”

  Joannina looked around furtively, “With your father gone and your brother in prison, we must do all we can to hold onto the land and pray for better times. Theo, I pray to God every day. We must think of your son, my grandson. I fear for us all.” Her formerly beautiful features were lined with grief and worry. A tear slid down her cheek, which she wiped away with a thin hand.

  So that her mother would not notice her own tear-filled eyes, Theodora busied herself with the fire. When she had some cheerful flames going she went off to find Damian, her son. She was a mother of four years, but tragedy had not been confined to her father and brother. Her husband, a former army officer, had been tried and executed along with many others in one of the infamous purges that the emperor had instigated the year before.

  The ferocity of these purges had shocked and terrified the entire city. The army and the navy had all but collapsed, imperiling the very fabric of the military system. Few officers or families had escaped the horrors of the purges. The enemies of the empire were not unaware of this and had become bolder.

  She was interrupted from her despondent reverie by her son, who barged out of his bedroom to rush into her arms and embrace her. “Mama, you are back early,” he said, looking up at her with bright, adoring eyes.

  “I am indeed, my little warrior. They sent us all home early for some reason. I have no idea why, but it is becoming a regular thing these days.” She didn’t mention that the principal of the university had recently disappeared—no sign of him. His wife had come to the university in tears. Wringing her hands and wailing that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, she had begged for any news of him. The senior physicians, themselves ignorant of his fate and terrified of informers, had tried to persuade her to go home and wait for news, but she had refused. Finally some stone-face guards had ejected her onto the street. Theodora sighed and squeezed her son till he gasped, “Mama, you are hurting me!”

  “I’m sorry, Dami, I wasn’t thinking. Come, we’ll go and see if Ariadne is up to preparing supper; it’s getting dark and I don’t want to waste our candles.”

  They ate their scanty meal, a soup of vegetables gleaned from the garden, holding the bowls on their laps in the living room. The little meat or fish that they could afford was used sparingly. Theodora watched with concern as Joannina took tiny sips from her bowl and picked at the crumbs of bread on her plate. Her mother was ailing from grief, and there was no medicine her daughter could prescribe for that.

  The view from the villa, located on the second hill over looking Neorian Harbor, should have been spectacular, but it was ruined by the charred remains of the area in the vicinity of the Neorian and Prosphorion harbors, both of which opened onto the Bosporus on the North side of the city. Hardly any buildings remained of the formerly bustling corner of Constantinople, where many thousands of the Latins, as the Greeks collectively called the Genoans, Venetians, and Franks, had lived and traded.

  Theodora stared down at the ruins, her expression bleak. She could not get over the horror of that awful day, almost two years ago, when she had returned in a panic to her house to find her mother and father mute with horror, standing in the sloped garden watching the entire area burning furiously. They could even faintly hear the screams of the victims as the community of Latins was massacred, every man, woman, and child. They had stood in appalled silence as the looting and butchery went on throughout the night. The Varangian Guard, the palace guard, the one group of soldiers who could have prevented it or at least stopped it before it got out of hand, had done nothing while the citizens of Constantinople vented their rage and hate upon people they had come to envy and loathe. The dead emperor Manuel had favored the Venetians, the Genoans, and especially the Franks so often over his own people that it was not surprising, she’d reflected, that they would take some kind of revenge, but this was so barbaric that she was ashamed to be called a Roman. Her father, the senator, had wept with shame. He had never been the same after that.

  At the other end of the city, in the northwest corner of Constantinople, stood the palace of Blachernae, the primary residence of the Emperor of Byzantium. It was one of many palaces, but this one had been favored by several emperors, including the present one. It stood on the northern slopes of the Sixth Hill, hard up against the first walls of the Western side of the city overlooking the Golden Horn.

  This evening within the palace there was an eerie silence. The stone-faced Verangian guards stood rigidly at their posts at the gates, the main doorways, and the entrances to all the larger rooms. The servants were either hiding or waiting apprehensively to be called, for none dared to go to their beds as long as the emperor was awake.

  A single sound penetrated the darkness of the empty corridors and echoing chambers. A long continuous scream of agony came welling up from deep within the labyrinth of chambers and cells beneath the palace. Work in
the dungeons was continuing apace.

  Unlike the rest of the palace, the large torture chamber was a blaze of light. Candles and torches in sconces burned and flickered uneasily, as though even they were disturbed to witness the demonic figures who performed their hideous work upon their victims. The Emperor Andronicus Komnenos looked on and encouraged his demons at their task; he was enjoying his evening’s entertainment.

  The unfortunate wretch who was stretched out and chained onto a stone table had just passed out. Even while unconscious, his disfigured body twitched and writhed and bled. His victim’s screams stilled for a time, Andronicus turned to another man who stood beside him, a tall, athletic man with wide shoulders like his own, but this man had a hideously scarred face. The right side had been burned horribly from his temple to his jaw.

  He wore a wig, which amused the emperor; he couldn’t care less if his grotesque servant was vain. His man in all things, Exazenos had a pathological hatred of the upper crust that matched his own, and he appeared to enjoy watching torture as much as his master. There was a smile on Exazenos’ face that Andronicus could only think of as sexual ecstasy.

  “You do enjoy this, don’t you, my Exaz?”

  “Oh ye...ss my Lord! You know I do. But I fear that we have lost this one. He is bleeding to death. Do you want me to revive him and keep him alive?” Exazenos asked. His voice had a curious sibilance. He pointed at the right leg of the victim, which was minus a foot and pulsing blood, despite applications of hot iron.

  Andronicus stared at the wreckage on the table. “No, I don’t think he can tell us anything more. Let him die, then toss him in the water. The fish can enjoy what’s left.”