The Walls of Byzantium tmc-1

by James Heneage

  They walked on and caught up with Zoe and were soon turning into the street where the Laskaris house lay.

  Approaching the door, she saw a small woman standing alone beneath a street lamp, bent with waiting. The light from it turned the woman’s hair into a long, disordered veil of mourning white, ribboned by scissors. Not the colour of her mother’s hair.

  When she got closer, when she realized that it was Maria standing there, she let out a cry and brought her balled fist to her mouth. Then she was running, running as fast as her tired legs would allow to reach this woman who had suffered two deaths and then a third: her very will to live.

  Moments later Maria was in Anna’s arms, and in her raised face, wet with tears, Anna could see the deep scars of her pain. She held her mother’s head between her hands, the white strands of hair spilling through her fingers, and whispered the four words she knew might bring her back from the dead.

  ‘I am in love.’

  That night was the last that Omar and Luke would spend together before reaching the tribe.

  They had arrived at an old Byzantine monastery perched on a hill above a small village called Seyit Gazi. It now held a mosque with outbuildings gathered within stout walls. They had ridden up the path to its gate in the rain and dark on horses whose heads hung low with fatigue.

  Omar was both well known and loved by the men of this place. As soon as they’d ridden through the gate, they were surrounded by torches held high above faces shining with relief that they’d arrived late but safe.

  One came up to Omar and embraced him as soon as his feet touched the ground. He seemed to be of similar age. ‘Welcome, old friend!’

  Omar kissed both of his cheeks. ‘There are men following us, Abraham.’

  ‘Then we will bar the gates and post guards,’ said the monk. He gestured to another, who hurried away. ‘This monastery is difficult to break into.’

  While Omar went into the mosque to pray, Luke was led across the courtyard by Abraham and down some steps into a large vaulted room with cells on either side. In the middle of the room was a long table with plates neatly laid out and a cup by each place. There were candles in wooden holders and baskets of bread and earthenware jugs in between.

  Abraham sat and gestured for Luke to sit beside him. ‘We were worried for you. The steppe is not a place to spend the night if you are not a nomad.’ He lifted one of the jugs. ‘And there is more rain coming. Much rain.’

  Luke looked around him. Some of the cell doors were shut.

  ‘Each door leads to a cilehane,’ said Abraham, ‘“a place of suffering”, in your language. Men come from far away to live in them and, while here, they will fast, talk to no one and read only the Koran.’

  ‘As I did,’ said Omar, who’d arrived to take the seat next to Luke, ‘for five years; with Abraham, who chose to stay.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Luke. ‘Why here?’

  Omar leant over and took a basket filled with bread. He offered it to Luke. ‘Because it has special significance. It is the shrine of one of our saints, Battal Gazi. He was a giant Arab who fought the Greeks many centuries ago and ran off with the Emperor of Byzantium’s daughter. Theirs was a great love. Her tomb lies next to his in a vault below.’

  He looked around at the cells, then he turned to Abraham. ‘The cells are taken?’

  ‘Many already. People come early.’

  Omar turned to Luke. ‘It is the saint’s birthday tomorrow and there will be a vigil in the crypt tomorrow night. Many pilgrims have come already. More will come tomorrow.’

  Much later, when they had eaten hot food and the last of the monks had gone to bed, Luke and Omar walked across the rain-splashed courtyard to the room they would sleep in. There were two beds in the room and a fire in the grate and a stone canopy above it shaped like a holy hat. Chairs had been placed before the fire and a jug of wine sat on a low table between them.

  ‘I don’t usually drink wine,’ said Omar as he sat, ‘but tonight I’ll make an exception. I’m sure Allah will overlook it.’

  Luke shook the rain from his cloak and laid it next to the hearth. Then he poured wine for them both. It was hot and strong and tinctured with cinnamon and Luke felt warmth flood through him. He stretched out his legs and closed his eyes.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ chided Omar gently. ‘I have much to tell you and this will be my last chance to do so.’

  Then Omar began to talk and his deep voice rose above the wind and the rain outside and Luke sat forward and stared into the fire and listened to every word.

  Omar spoke of Battal Gazi, who had loved a Byzantine princess with a passion that had transcended creed; then he talked of other things. And, as he spoke, Luke began to know this wise and funny man who’d forced his gentle way into his existence and why he’d cared to do so.

  At last he said, ‘That is why we’ve come to this place, Luke. Because its beauty lies in the love that is buried deep within it.’ Omar prodded the embers with the tip of his shoe. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you, Luke. You know love without question. That is rare.’

  The fire was bright in Omar’s eyes, casting miniature dancers in his pupils. His beard had been touched by the alchemist’s hand and ran in silver to his waist.

  Luke said, ‘But many people love.’

  ‘Yes, but not like you. There is great power in such a love. Power that can be used for good.’

  Luke leant back in his chair and stared into the fire as if it might hold answers amongst the embers. He suddenly felt tired and perhaps a little drunk. The jug was almost empty and Omar hadn’t touched the cup beside him. The walls around him were now almost lost to darkness, and he heard the noise of the wind and rain beating against their ancient stone. There was one question still that needed answering.

  He said, ‘Why are you helping me, Omar? You’re a Muslim like Bayezid. Why are you helping a Christian?’

  ‘Religion is not the point, Luke. Reason is the point. There is a new flame of reason that’s been lit in the West among the city states of Italy. People there are beginning to think in new ways and show it through their art, their writing, their systems of government.’ Omar sighed. ‘But there is also a darkness coming in from the East, two monsters who would extinguish that flame, who would drag us back into another dark age. Bayezid and Tamerlane must be made to destroy each other. It’s the only way.’

  ‘Which is what you and Plethon want to bring about. But I am confused as to my part. Is it to find a treasure or to meet a madman?’

  Omar turned to the fire. His eyes had taken its embers. ‘Which would you like it to be, Luke?’

  Luke shook his head. ‘I was left a sword,’ he said. ‘A sword to take me to a treasure.’

  ‘Or to remind you that you are a Varangian? A Varangian prince?’

  Omar rose and went over to his bed. His back was to Luke. He turned.

  ‘I have your sword here,’ he said, lifting it so that the fire made a river of its blade. He lowered it and walked over to Luke. ‘Here, it’s yours. Yakub brought it from Suleyman’s tent. He thought you might need it.’

  Luke took the sword. He looked down at the dragon head, at its open maw.

  A Varangian sword. For a Varangian quest.

  ‘Well, I can’t go back anyway,’ he said. ‘I am a traitor in the west.’

  Omar shook his head. ‘I could pretend so, but I won’t. Sigismund of Hungary has told Emperor Manuel the truth about Nicopolis. You may not be welcome in Burgundy, but you can return to Mistra.’ He paused. ‘Anna is there now. With Plethon.’

  Luke stared at the old man. ‘In Mistra? Why?’

  ‘Because her father is dead. She will attend his funeral. She will be there for some weeks.’

  Luke felt a wave of happiness break over him. He could walk out of the monastery that very moment, ride to Mistra and find a future with Anna. Somewhere. Somehow.

  He took a deep breath. ‘Why have you told me this? You could have
kept silent and I’d have done what I had to do.’

  ‘No, Luke.’ Omar shook his head. ‘That is the old way; not the way of reason. You must make this choice for yourself.’

  Luke looked further into the fire, into its endlessly shifting centre. So many questions.

  Much later, when Omar had gone to bed and the wine jug was empty, Luke sat with the sword in his lap and stared at it.

  He’d looked again at what was scratched into its hilt. He’d read the word ‘seputus’ and seen the date below it.

  Except that it wasn’t a date. It was a name.

  Mistra.

  Outside the walls of the monastery, on a low hill to the west, twelve men were preparing for sleep.

  They had ridden all day and kept the two men they were following always in their sight. Now, as they spread their bedding out on the ground, they looked up at the sky and swore beneath their breaths. The rain was closing in and it would be a hard one. Most were men of the steppe, of the Karamanid tribe, and they could feel its rhythm in the earth beneath them.

  Two of their number were not of the steppe. They lay apart and looked not at the sky but at the black hulk of the monastery that broke the darkening horizon. One of them smiled. He’d watched the two men enter earlier and had seen the gates bolted behind them.

  The men were exactly where he wanted them to be.

  He yawned and drew his cloak around him. Tomorrow would be busy. For now, he would sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ANATOLIA, OCTOBER 1396

  Luke pulled up his horse. The thunderclap had been endless, rolling back and forth to reach a crescendo of deafening percussion. The animal had stopped suddenly, its body rigid with terror. Luke whispered into its ear, his hand massaging the wet down around it. At last it calmed and Luke felt the tension seep through his legs.

  It was a good horse, intelligent and strong. It had understood perfectly the need for silence as Luke had saddled it at dawn and led it out of the still-sleeping monastery. That had been eight hours ago.

  Before the rain had come again.

  Now it fell in torrents, hitting the dry steppe around like a drum-roll, making Luke’s cloak a thing of weight rather than warmth. He was wet to the bone.

  He hadn’t slept at all in the night. He’d gone to bed with two words jostling each other in his mind.

  Mistra.

  He would leave at dawn, ride back to Mistra, tell Plethon of what he’d found written on the sword. He would see Anna and tell her that he’d come back to her from wherever it was he had to go, tell her to wait for him. Then he would return to Omar. His note explained it all. He’d be back at the monastery in ten days, maybe less. Omar must have faith in him. He’d even left his bag as hostage.

  But now, as the landscape around him became less certain through the rain, as the warnings crashed out from the heavens, as the varied smells of the steppe combined into a single stench of wet leather and horse fear, he was not so sure.

  Have I done the right thing?

  He looked around him. It was as if he was separated from the world by this curtain of grey. He felt water course its way down his spine and thought of the spiced wine of the night before. He looked down at the sword by his side, saw the rain hitting the dragon head pommel in tiny explosions. He shivered.

  Then he heard something beyond the curtain, something faint that wanted to get through: a shout.

  Immediately he thought of the group that they’d seen following them on the previous day. It must be them. But where to hide? There were no hiding places on the steppe.

  He stopped and listened.

  The shout came again, this time closer — in front. Luke strained his eyes, wiping the drips from his eyelashes and nose.

  There. A rider. Just one. Approaching fast.

  A rider in a hurry.

  Luke waited for the man to draw up to him. He was cloaked against the rain and had large saddlebags strapped to the horse’s flanks. Luke couldn’t see his face.

  ‘Friend,’ the man said. He spoke in Turkic but it was not his tongue. ‘Is there a monastery ahead?’

  Luke uncovered his head. ‘Benedo Barbi,’ he said, smiling. ‘You followed me?’

  Just then the sky delivered another bone-jarring crash and Barbi’s horse reared. The Italian swore and grabbed hold of its mane. For a moment, Luke thought he might fall.

  When he’d come back to earth and settled his horse, Barbi said, ‘I followed you from Bursa. It wasn’t difficult. You and the old man make strange companions. I came when I remembered where I’d seen the man before.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘One of the men following you.’

  Luke frowned. Unease had settled on him like another cloak.

  ‘His name is di Vetriano,’ said Barbi. ‘He’s Venetian. I saw him watching you in Bursa.’

  Di Vetriano.

  ‘You know him?’ asked Luke.

  ‘He’s an assassin. I met him in Cairo. He tried to kidnap one of the Mameluke chemists I was working with. He’d been sent to get what we knew about Greek fire.’

  ‘By the Doge?’

  Barbi shrugged. ‘Probably. Anyway, he’s following you and that can’t be good. You’ve not seen him?’

  Luke nodded slowly. ‘Yesterday. We saw him yesterday. With others. I must have passed them when I left this morning.’

  A sudden gust of wind blew the cowl up over Barbi’s mouth. He pulled it down. The rain was harder now, almost blinding.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  But Luke was already turning his horse. ‘Later, Benedo. For now, we have to ride fast. There’s a good man in danger.’

  In Mistra, the Despot was wiping away a tear. The tear was of happiness, of grief, of guilt. Anna, whom he’d last seen two years past at Serres, who’d probably saved his life then and whom he’d not expected to see again, was sitting across from him.

  With her was Plethon. Zoe had been left at the Laskaris house with Maria, who was still sleeping. She and Anna had talked quietly through much of the night of the one thing that mattered most, that gave hope.

  I am in love.

  Maria’s mind had been more fragile than Murano glass and anything that might shatter it — Alexis, her father — had been put to one side to be looked at later when the time was right. Instead they’d talked of Luke, and Anna had woven a tapestry richer than any the Laskaris house possessed. She’d created a fair Varangian, a prince of England as Plethon had told her, taller than most, who rode a horse named Eskalon and wielded a sword with a secret. She created a man who could speak languages and dream labyrinths into life. She talked of how he’d saved her life once and then nearly brought her across the sea to Mistra. Her threads were of the real and unreal until they joined in a single weave, as Anna had intended, and her mother fell into the first sleep she’d had in weeks.

  Finally, when she’d gently kissed her mother’s forehead and put a blanket over her, Anna had sat and listened to the air around her still ringing with her song of Luke, played to a distant, eastern drum.

  Now she sat with Theodore and Plethon at the end of a long table in the Despot’s palace. The windows beyond them were canvasses on which an autumn sky was painted. A fire burned noisily in the grate and warm wine was laid before them.

  The Despot spoke. ‘So the Emperor’s given up on negotiation?’

  ‘There’s no point, Majesty,’ said Plethon. ‘The Sultan laughed at me when I saw him in Edirne. Bayezid has resumed the siege and means to take Constantinople. Then it will be Mistra.’

  Theodore sighed. He’d been feeling much older lately, as if the season’s decay had entered his bones. He missed Simon Laskaris with an intensity that had surprised him. He cried a lot these days.

  ‘How long will it be, do you think?’

  ‘No time soon,’ said Plethon. He’d not met this man before but had heard much to recommend him, especially from Anna. ‘They need cannon of a size as yet uncreated to bring down the walls.�
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  ‘Which the Venetians are building for them?’

  Plethon nodded. ‘Yes, but not always successfully. The casts are too big. They blow apart.’

  ‘And you encourage this … combustion?’

  Plethon smiled. ‘I do what I can. I have a little money.’

  Theodore rose and walked to one of the windows. On one side of the mullion, a pattern of leaves had arranged themselves across the glass. He breathed and rubbed his sleeve across its surface.

  ‘I’m told you do wonders,’ he murmured. He turned. ‘I’ve long wanted to meet you, Plethon I hope you will do me the honour of staying at the palace tonight? I would talk with you further, alone.’

  The philosopher dipped his head. ‘The honour would be mine, Majesty.’ He paused. ‘The Emperor wishes me to go to Methoni. There is a bishop there.’

  Theodore nodded. ‘The Bishop Adolfo. He is a Venier, cousin to the Doge of Venice.’

  ‘He is sympathetic to the cause of union,’ said Plethon. ‘He has the Pope’s ear, and his cousin’s. May soon be made cardinal.’

  ‘But you cannot believe that another crusade is possible? Not after Nicopolis?’

  ‘The Christian princes are competitive, lord. Where one fails, another may succeed. It is possible with the Pope’s blessing.’

  ‘And the price?’

  ‘The union of the Churches of West and East. As you would expect.’

  ‘Which,’ said the Despot, ‘I am told you support. But it is not popular with the people. They would see it as another conquest. This time the Pope’s.’

  Plethon nodded. He had placed his palms side by side on the table and seemed to be studying nails that needed some attention. ‘The talking may be enough,’ he said at last. ‘If the Venetians see another crusade as a possibility, then they may be persuaded to blow up more cannon. We need time.’

  ‘Time? Time for what?’ asked Theodore.

  There was silence then. It was Anna that broke it.

  ‘Tamerlane.’

  She had hardly moved during the conversation. Now she rose from the table and went over to stand next to the Despot. ‘Tamerlane to come to our rescue. One tyrant set against another. We are all pawns, aren’t we?’