And you could not deny that a little humour could go a long way to alleviating the fear, to at least give temporary respite from it. That was the way to go; down with the ship, in style, flying the flag of defiance to the bitter end.
Nothing was more courageous than to laugh at adversity and certain death. I had no doubt that there would not have been any time to destroy the costumes. And I knew where to look.
I ran down the grand staircase, turned right, and, through a small door, I found the stairs leading down to the cellars and storage rooms. At the bottom of the stairs, in half-darkness, I stopped for a moment and felt my way around, attempting to smell the spice room.
My nostrils captured the aroma and I started to run in the direction my nose was pulling me, as if by a leash around my throat. I turned the corner and found the door I had been looking for.
I feared it would be locked, and I tried it cautiously. It did not resist to my push and gave way, which was surprising, but I had no time to stop and think about it. I would face whatever, if anything, was on the other side. But, thankfully, there was nobody there.
I found the chest with the costumes from the previous night’s play. I rummaged through it like a madman. My fingers touched what I had been looking for: the linen bag. I allowed my fingers to wander and feel inside it. It all seemed to be there.
I changed quickly and put my normal clothes into the linen bag, tied it and threw it over my shoulder. I knew I would also need to hold a weapon to carry off the disguise, and I took hold of the sword that was inside the bag. It was not real, but it looked the part and it had a shining blade that in the chaos and semidarkness outside should fool all but the most audacious man who dared to challenge me and threaten me with a death sentence.
I went out of the room and back the way I came. As I started climbing the stairs, I heard a distant noise. I stood and listened. I could hear gurgling water. I turned back down and followed the sound to a crumbling door breaking the seemingly solid wall.
I was not sure whether it was the Lycus stream, part of the city’s water system or sewer water, but I did not care. I kicked it in. The gap was wide enough to go through. I did not hesitate. I threw myself into the rushing torrent.
I rode the foaming water and suddenly found myself in a huge cavern. There was a ray of light coming from a gap in the ceiling. But it was too high and I could not reach it. I could not afford to wait for the water to rise. There should be another way out of here.
My feet touched something that felt like a step, and I cautiously planted my feet on it. I then felt further up and there was another step, and then slowly a staircase was revealed to me. I climbed it and came to a barred opening blocking my way, seemingly fixed and locked.
I could see a door behind it. The metal on the barred opening appeared rusted and the surrounding frame had started to chip away. I pulled the bar and easily wrenched it off. Now for the door. Luckily it was unlocked. I opened it slowly and took a peek outside.
Strangely, the street was totally deserted. I could see fires in the distance. I walked to the end of the street and looked around the corner. Ayia Sophia was only a short walk away. The distance was short, but the leap would feel long through the fire and the lion’s den.
I could now hear the sounds of battle, looting and rape. I could see the glow from the fires spreading across the city. I held my sword firmly in my left hand and plunged into the burning streets.
My destination was the gardens on the hills spreading North-East of the old Imperial Palace, the hills where the acropolis of ancient Byzantium used to be.
I hardly met with any resistance as I briskly made my way to my temporary refuge. I did not stop running until I had reached the deserted area of scrubland, magnificent ancient trees and caves.
This was one of the few pristine and untouched areas in the densely populated city, where buildings were for the most part packed close together, stubbornly jostling for space, vying to inhale the smallest breath of fresh air, their impatience rising, and then ebbing away, sliding down the blessed and cursed uneven gradient of the city all the way into the waters of the Bosphorus and its murky depths.
There, away from the hustle and bustle of the great city, it was difficult to accept that you were in the centre of the greatest city on earth.
Only when I stopped and let myself fall, exhausted, to the ground, did I realise that I was soaking wet, water mixed with sweat dripping from every surface and every pore, my clothes and my hair, and forming shining paddles at my feet.
I felt as if I had been dragged backwards through a hedge. I tried to recover from my close brush with death. I sat down under a great plane tree and tried to remember how to breathe normally again and find some semblance of calmness, before I did what I urgently had to do: talk to my mother.
She appeared before me, as impressive as ever, her larger-than-life presence filling every nook and cranny of the rocks and the motionless vegetation around me and invading every pore of my skin.
Her voice sliced through the air like a blade. Her voice was a booming echo filling my brain, with copious blood rushing to engage the intruder, and almost giving me a paralysing seizure.
‘Finally, our sick lady has succumbed to her fate. It was sad to see her at her sickbed fading away. But history will take its course and we cannot change that. We should not change it at any case. Michael, there is much to do, but we must move with extreme caution. The identities and secrets of the members of the Order may have been compromised and it will be difficult to know whom to trust. It is imperative to find that child and the fate of the real Emperor. Have you found the Likureian icon?’
‘No, I did not get the chance to even properly conduct a search for it. Mother, have you heard anything from Mark?’
‘Not yet. I will let you know when I do.’
And with those final words, she was gone.
* * *
Before I could be on my way I had a strange vision.
There was a castle and a beautiful garden next to an old harbour and a child was trying to climb an ancient olive tree and kept failing to get a grip, and kept falling down, but persisted and kept scratching the trunk and pulling the branches.
A short distance away, a woman, most likely the child’s mother, was smiling, full of pride at her child’s exploits and persistence, her eyes twinkling in amusement, a matching pair of two flawless emeralds, reflecting the sun’s rays and the surrounding landscape in a myriad colours.
Her mind was plotting her child’s future. I was surprised to be privy to her thoughts. The boy kept calling his mother to join him, to help him. From somewhere I heard a male voice calling the woman’s name and a blurred figure started to appear into this picture of blissful oblivion to the horrors of the world.
I was fully absorbed by the scene and smiling with them. But then I was forcibly dragged out of that dream when the landscape suddenly grew dark, and a ferocious wind ripped through the castle, the harbour, the child and the mother, turning everything into rubble, piles of ash, the entire scene stained with purple splashes falling from the sky, indistinguishable fragments of stone, soil, plant, flesh and bone, all swiftly turning to dust and scattered far away by a terrible twister, as if they had never existed.
Even though I was inside this vision I remembered myself feeling crashed by the scene of utter devastation; the air was blown out of my lungs. I collapsed to the ground and cried.
Soon after I was transported to a different scene. I saw figures, alternating between dressed in dark sinister hooded cloaks and then into dancing figures, magnificently dressed in vibrant attire and decked in glittering jewels, accompanied by a gloriously hypnotising hymn- singing, interspersed with images of what appeared like barbarian battle-dancing around a roaring fire, and an idol which I could not quite make out. I felt drawn in by this tune that was ringing in my mind, long after the vision ceased.
And then again I was abruptly and brutally taken into the middle of a furious battle with a
rrows and swords going right through me, as if I was not really there, but it, nevertheless, felt very real and the noises and battle cries were deafening and terrifying and I automatically brought my palms to my ears.
I tried to run to the sidelines of the chaos around me, but my feet were dragging ever so slowly, as if fighting through snow or sand or a bog, and then I caught someone’s eye and that person seemed to have momentarily ceased fighting, as if paralysed on the spot.
He stared right through me or at me, I wasn’t sure, but he seemed to have recognised me. And it started to trigger a memory in me, but I could not quite place it, a name …, just give me a name, that face … I tried again and again, but when I thought I had got it, it slipped away from me, and, at that moment, I saw that person being speared right through like a goat about to be roasted, and I let out a terrible cry which nobody could hear, as nobody present turned to me, a cry that changed nothing around me.
As suddenly as it appeared the vision disappeared and I was suddenly brought back to reality with a thud. I found myself drenched in sweat back in Constantinople. I felt confused by the riot of images that assaulted me.
I thought about that person I saw who seemed to be the only one to recognise me, but could not understand what happened, what it all meant. I tried to remember the woman’s name in the first scene, but it eluded me. After a while I gave up.
I strained my ears to hear the sounds of battle, but, strangely, could hear nothing. Had the Ottomans got bored of the looting and destroying and raping or was there simply nothing left to rape, loot or destroy? Whatever the case might be, I had to get out of there.
We had to find the child, which was as much ours and the Order’s as the Emperor’s and the mother’s that bore it, but whose identity and fate was unknown.
* * *
A piece of paper fell from the book that Elli was reading. She bent down and picked it up. It was three pages folded together. She unfolded them. It was a handwritten note with the date of 21st December 1922 A.D. written on the top right-hand corner. She had seen the handwriting before, but could not remember where. Her curiosity piqued, she began to read.
CHAPTER 10
Smyrna, Asia Minor
July 1921 A.D.
Smyrna was one of the wealthiest cities in the Mediterranean. Its port was a constant hive of activity with cargo travelling between East and West. Trading was the blood that ran through the city’s veins and was at the root of its success.
It was the Greeks that formed the majority of the city’s population and dominated its economic, cultural and political life.
Smyrna’s commercial and cultural life rivalled Alexandria’s, which also boasted a powerful and dominant Greek community amongst its many thriving foreign communities. Greek, Italian, Jewish, French diaspora; they were all there.
However, Smyrna’s residents were oblivious or chose to ignore the ever-increasing dark clouds for an impending doom. This would come a few months later in 1922; an event that would lead Smyrna to be burned to the ground by the troops of Kemal Ataturk.
All of that excitement, though, was still to come. Life continued to roll along its normal buzzing rhythms, with trade and business, glorious balls and performances by world-renowned sopranos, the most wonderful fairs and celebrations and religious festivals, all forming part of a charmed life; a life that would prove short lived. It would only amount to a few decades of flourishing culture; just like the Golden Age of Athens in the first half of the 5th century B.C.
On this day the sky was clear of clouds. The sun drenched the city in a stifling heat. Zozo was sitting on the edge of the waterfront gazing at the glorious riot of colours and flags of the world’s trading ships and fishing and military vessels dotted around the harbour.
Nearby, children were playing. Three of those were her brothers, Iakovos and Spyros and her sister Eleonora. Zozo was the eldest and her father’s favourite. Zozo’s father was Antonios Symitzis, one of the most prominent businessmen in the city.
The family originally hailed from Constantinople, what was throughout most of the Middle Ages the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, the Queen of Cities or as was known in Greek: Vasilevousa.
The family left the city amid the ensuing chaos, after it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 A.D. They found refuge in Smyrna, already a part of the Ottoman Empire, the first stop of the last ship that left Constantinople, the fallen city which was the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire that had been left standing until the fall that wiped it out.
It was there in Smyrna that the Symitzis ancestors settled and flourished with every subsequent generation adding to the family’s wealth, prestige and privilege. But Constantinople was their home and occupying a central place in their hearts, the vacuum left by its loss too big to fill.
They were part of a species that was becoming extinct in its native home due to the occasional persecutions by erstwhile mobs fired up by formerly unassuming but suddenly inspiring Ottoman figures proclaiming a hypocritically patriotic zeal mixed with a dose of religious fervour and intolerance.
Greeks were from time to time blamed for certain catastrophes, a convenient way for certain Ottoman rulers to direct the people’s anger away from themselves and their autocratic rule.
However, many Sultans were enlightened rulers who not only allowed their subjects, including the Greeks, to carry on with their lives as before, as long as they were paying their taxes, just as the Persians did two thousand years earlier, but bestowed certain commercial privileges on them.
As a result of this policy of benign rule, many of the occupied peoples, especially Greeks, came to dominate the commercial life of the Ottoman Empire. That domination was at the heart of the Greeks becoming targets in 1922 when the overstepping of the Greek King’s responsibility to his people, following his surrender to his very own selfish motives, brought the intervention of foreign powers on Kemal Ataturk’s side, thus condemning the Greeks for their arrogance and intransigence.
The prelude to the catastrophe of 1922 was the Greek King’s greed and misplaced ambitious vision. The end of the First World War brought territorial gains for Greece, which was on the side of the Allies, against the Ottoman Empire, which was on the side of Germany.
During the war the Greek King was at loggerheads with the Prime Minister over which of the sides to ally Greece to. The King was a Germanophile and, naturally, wished Greece to ally herself with Germany. But the Prime Minister was an anglophile and could not let that happen.
The two most powerful political leaders of Greece agreed to disagree and compromised by keeping Greece neutral and out of the war altogether. But the Allies needed Greece on their side for its strategic position.
They decided to take the Greeks’ decision for them. They landed troops in Thessaloniki in 1916 and their action forced Greece’s hand and sealed the issue once and for all. Greece exited the safety of neutrality for the hand of the Allies.
But for the Greek King those gains that came after the end of the war were not enough. He carried delusions of Byzantine glory and grandeur. Against the advice of his then Prime Minister Venizelos, the King took steps to make those deluded dreams a reality.
He landed troops in Smyrna to what would later prove a misguided hero’s and liberator’s welcome and started a campaign of further conquest on a march to Ankara and beyond.
The King was, by his own hand alone, fooled into believing that he would have the support of the foreign great powers. How wrong that assumption proved to be. What arrogant wishful thinking.
The result was defeat, the loss of everything that was gained from the First World War and about a million refugees bound for the welcoming embrace of the mother country, Greece. What shattered idea that hoped-for warm welcome proved to be. But that’s another story.
Kemal Ataturk was an inspirational figure and a very capable military mind. He used that anger against the Greeks that had been brewing for generations into firing up a potent force bent on punishment. There
would be no prisoners this time.
It was death or nothing. The Greeks knew it; they knew that they had no chance, because the foreign powers would not deign to help them even at this desperate hour and with Smyrna in flames.
The foreign ships in the harbour sat idle, turning a deaf ear to the calls for help. That was the indictment against the greed of the King. But all that was still months away.
Zozo was nineteen years old, a bright, generous and independent girl with big plans for herself, her family and her people. Zozo loved her father. Antonios had been a good father to her and her brothers and sister. He had done a good job out of very difficult circumstances. Their mother had died suddenly soon after the birth of her youngest child.
But Antonios was not alone in this task. He shared the burden of the children’s upbringing with Manto, his housekeeper, who became the mother the children had for only a short time. Manto was about the same age as their mother and she fell into the role naturally.
It was a pleasure to see them grow and to observe with amusement and interest their individual personalities coming out. Antonios had no doubt about their good character. He saw evidence of it every day and that gave him enormous satisfaction. But he had made sure of that good character from the beginning. He was certain in his heart that would not change with time, as they grew up and matured.
But Zozo was his favourite. He saw so much of himself in her. She was becoming very important to him. She certainly was a fast learner. She absorbed like a sponge.
Even as a little girl she would sneak into his office at work or his study at home, sometimes sitting under the desk, other times hiding behind a curtain or under a chair, and listen, hungry to witness everything revolving around her father’s life. She hung onto his and his guests’ every word.
Zozo had already shown her abilities to her father who was constantly testing her and grooming her to succeed him. Even at this early age she was being involved in many of his ventures and charities. She had shown creativity and brilliance and had been turning her hand to new commercial initiatives, be it in business or for charity.
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