Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  Sphrantzes shrugged. ‘Either, both or perhaps another entirely. Ask yourself, who is not here? Who fortuitously has lingered in the church and avoided the crush as if endowed with foresight?’

  ‘Of course, he means my father,’ Anna thought, taking a step back into the shadows of the atrium’s colonnade. Sphrantzes never missed a chance to blacken his rival’s name. She could see the immediate effect of his words. The eyes of the noble refugees had started to move about from face to face. Minds were pondering, names were being whispered.

  Anna was uninterested. Her mind had already assessed who was absent, but not to draw conclusions of guilt. ‘Where is the cardinal?’ she whispered under her breath. ‘Where is Isidore?’

  VIII.

  From the southern porch of the narthex, Grant watched the storm of people broiling in the square. He had still been shuffling from the nave when the screaming began. Even now, people were pushing their way outside, drawn by curiosity and the prospect of a spectacle. The cries to protect the emperor had only served to increase the panic in the square. The people, fearing the indiscriminance of the soldiers, tried to flee; the soldiers, fearing the size and crushing force of the people, began to push and shove. The one fed the other until there was nothing but a writhing, shouting mass of confused humanity. Already rumours were flying that Constantine was dead.

  Grant did not move beyond the porch. There were enough bodies in the square without adding his own. Instead he tried to steer people back into the safety of Hagia Sophia. The women at least would be leaving from the northern side and avoid this carnage.

  Then he noticed a figure at the edge of the square, clambering up a wooden scaffold. He looked at first like a shipwreck victim scrambling up wet rocks out of an angry sea.

  As the figure reached the top of the platform, Grant noticed the man’s kabadion was of the purest azure silk, finely decorated by a silver thread pattern of vine leaves. It was Loukas Notaras.

  The megas doux bellowed to the crowd in his deep baritone voice, ‘Are we Greeks or beasts of the field? Calm yourselves! A man lies dead, but it is not your emperor! Soldiers, look to the wounded, help the weak and elderly into the gardens.’ He gestured towards an unseen corpse. ‘Who will help me carry the body of this poor wretch to a better resting place?’

  The scrum lost its violence. The crowd sighed like beach pebbles as the wave pulls back to the ocean. The wild mare had heard its master’s whisper. For the first time, Grant saw the reflection of Anna in her father.

  A flash of red caught Grant’s attention as he was watching the megas doux. On the battlefield danger lurked in the corner of a man’s vision, and Grant’s eyes had long been honed to sense in all directions at once. He glanced towards the movement, but whatever he had half-seen had vanished to his left, within the narthex.

  He moved in that direction, but the doorway at that end of the narthex led only to the enclosed ramp up to the gallery. And not the northern gallery, from where Anna and the other women had watched the service, but the southern side, the gallery reserved for a non-existent empress and hence presently empty. Could the flash of colour he had seen have gone there? He had a memory of a brilliant red gown moving through the market crowd in the forum. Was it Anna again, and if so, did she mean for him to follow to the most private corner in all Constantinople? His blood began to pound.

  He slipped past the bodies still pouring out towards the Augustaion and hesitated at the foot of the stone ramp. To proceed was to trespass inordinately. He glanced back to check no one was watching him and then began to climb the steep stone slope.

  Six times the narrow tunnel turned about on itself as it coiled upwards. Halfway up he paused and held his breath. Not a sound came to him from either above or below.

  He began to feel foolish, but he had gone too far now not to continue. His curiosity at what lay in that forbidden gallery was overpowering. When the Latins had taken the city, it was here, legend said, that the aging Venetian Doge Dandolo had chosen for his burial place.

  As he reached the top of the ramp, he could make out the sound of a voice coming from the gallery beyond the doorway. His eye had not played tricks, someone had come this way.

  The empty gallery basked in the light flooding in shafts through the windows, shining from the marble floor like moon shadow cast across a lake.

  The northern gallery lay emptied of its women, and between here and there, through the columns of thick green marble, yawned the wide canyon of the nave.

  The voice he had heard came from beyond a partition that screened off the imperial gallery from the ramp entrance. Not a single voice but voices, he now perceived. Male voices.

  Whatever remaining fantasy of a secret assignation with Anna evaporated, but he did not slink away. It did not seem right for men to be up here.

  He crept across the marble, breath held tight, each footstep placed with infinite care. ‘Metanoia,’ the voices all seemed to be muttering, ‘metanoia.’ He was sure the links of his corselet would rattle and give him away, but once his view beyond the doorway of the screen widened, all thoughts of stealth fell away.

  They were in the middle of the gallery; four figures stood in a circle, identical in their monastic black robes and tall klobuk hats. Grant might have feared he had stumbled upon a private liturgy if not for the blade each monk gripped at his side and the figure in crimson, knelt penitently on the floor between them. It was Isidore.

  The ashen face of the cardinal and the tone of the jeers from the men surrounding him made it plain what was about to take place.

  Grant dared not draw blood in this holiest of sanctuaries, but there were five of them and they did not look amenable to debate. So, instead of drawing the arming sword on his hip, he snatched up the tall manoualia candlestick standing beside the partition door as he strode in to confront them.

  The brass manoualia was roughly of a length with his beloved longsword, although horribly balanced by comparison and utterly blunt.

  Grant set himself into the iron door guard, the candlestick held two handed, low between his legs.

  ‘This should fair shake the rust off,’ he thought as the black robes wheeled to turn their knives on him.

  The first of the monks darted forward, the only one of the group without a beard. He hacked the air crudely with his foot-long knife and Grant set the blow aside with a short, quick hit of the candlestick stem against the blade.

  Had this been a duel with longswords, Grant would have taken the strike on the flat of his blade and moved into the bind of two swords, then slid his hand up to the half-sword grip and used his strength to wrestle the point over the weaker man’s guard and strike with the top of his sword up into the throat. But this was not such a duel and much of his technique was unavailable here.

  A second monk lunged forward just as the first made another to slash at Grant again. Grant stepped into the second man’s thrust, letting the blade score down the flank of his padded aketon coat and trusting the layer of mail beneath.

  He made a half turn as the blade went by, his left hand locking onto the attacker’s throat, driving the monk across and into the path of the other attacker.

  Even as the bodies collided, Grant had already released his grip and continued his turn to set himself in the guard stance known as the boar’s tooth, left leg forward, weapon low on his right hip with the tip pointing up like a tusk.

  The next monk was already swinging a cut, which Grant blocked by lifting the candlestick shaft as he stepped in to close the distance and check the blow early. He rolled his wrists to disengage the blade, kicked the monk in the groin and danced back three paces. He felt the sweet kiss of adrenaline coursing through his veins.

  The demon of violence stirred inside him. It had been months since his last fight.

  The three monks eyed him warily after the exchange. The fourth stood over Isidore with his knife at the cardinal’s throat, but he seemed to prefer a hostage to a corpse.

  The beardless monk came at hi
m again and once more the man’s attack was clumsy. Grant had taken the stance of the ox, the manoualia held two handed at shoulder height, pointed forward like a horn.

  The monk took the bait and struck for his legs, thinking them unguarded. Grant slid his foot back and cut down, right to left. In striking so far below the knee, the monk left himself uncovered. He tried to cut upwards on the backhand to deflect the blow, but Grant was too fast. His blow cracked down onto the back of the skull beneath the klobuk rim, and the monk slumped to the floor and lay still. Now there were three.

  Once, Grant had been almost as crude a fighter as these men. As a youth in France he had swung his longsword like an axe, using brute strength to overpower men, but in Italy there were masters who knew the true art of the weapon.

  In Italy he had learned the importance of movement in the duel, the constant flow from guard to guard, the need to counter strength with weakness and weakness with strength.

  He had been shown ways to unbalance opponents, to use his feet to turn the point of attack this way or that, intercepting attacking blows and using this moment to counterstrike.

  He had learned the dirty art of fighting in the bind, when the blades are crossed and an opponent’s face is as close as a lover’s.

  He had discovered that the blade and point of a sword were just two of its killing pieces; that the pommel and hilt could also prove deadly. But most of all, he had mastered the great secret to this king of weapons – the seven strokes of the sword.

  The two strokes from above, fendente – the one from the right shoulder down and across to the left hip known as dritti and the backhand cut from left shoulder down to right hip, roverso; the strokes through the middle, mezani – weak from the left and strong from the right, dubbed the decapitation strokes; the upper-cut strokes from below, sottani – mirror images of the dritti and roverso; and the seventh stroke, ponte – the thrust, the stroke the Italians called serpente velenoso, the poisonous serpent.

  There were other blows of course, special attacks, combinations and tricks, but everything was built from one of these seven foundation strokes.

  ‘In the name of God, finish him off,’ the monk by Isidore cried in impatience.

  Spurred by this rebuke the others attacked as one. Grant caught the first thrust with a crooked hew, slapping the manoualia’s stem across the line of the oncoming blade, deflecting it harmlessly wide and stepping further away as he did so. His movement took him into the arc of the second man’s downward cut, closing the distance so the blow struck him up by the hilt. His quilted anketon’s padding cushioned the blow, but it still rang through his bones and made his teeth grind together in a wince of pain. He drove the candlestick up, backhanded, smashing the heavy clawfoot base into the bearded face, sending the monk’s head snapping back.

  Grant stepped away as the other man drove forward in an ungainly charge. He met this thrust with a fendente, slashing down left to right then immediately sliding the candlestick shaft off and back up in a sottani cut.

  The man’s momentum carried him onto the blow and Grant felt the stiff, sudden resistance as the rounded metal connected with his opponent’s unprotected neck. The force of the blow sent the monk stumbling to the ground, the nerves in his neck spasming with pain.

  The first monk began to advance on Grant again but hung back when the Scotsman looked his way. The beardless monk had not moved from the floor and the third attacker, having picked himself up, ran through the gallery screen towards the entrance ramp.

  Two monks remained. One standing over Isidore, the other, bruised and wary, edging towards him. Grant flashed a reaper’s grin at them both. ‘My thanks to you,’ he said. ‘I’ve sore missed this.’ Then, setting down the battered manoualia, he charged.

  The monk’s eyes widened. He raised his dagger, but the dropped shoulder was already under it and crashing into the exposed ribs with all the Scotsman’s considerable weight and power.

  The blade’s strike never fell.

  The wind, driven from the monk’s lungs came out in a hard grunt as he was knocked backwards over his own heels. The knife clattered onto the marble. Grant’s arms wrapped about the monk’s knees, tipping him and sending him, neck first, into the floor. A sound like a branch snapping rang around the gallery.

  ‘Keep back,’ the final monk warned. He had pulled Isidore up against him and backed up against the glowing mosaic of a buttress wall.

  The light from the gallery window fell across the figures towering on the wall. The sad-faced Virgin Mary and unkempt John the Baptist flanked a solemn-looking Christ Pantokrator, pleading with him for mankind as he sat in judgement.

  Grant drew the arming sword from his belt, although he still hoped not to draw blood in this holy place. ‘Let the cardinal go, lad,’ he said, keeping his voice calm and level. ‘You can still leave here alive, if you let the cardinal go unharmed.’ He was watching the monk very carefully. The line of the brow, the shape of the eye, the kink to the nose. It was not a remarkable face, but Grant would not forget it.

  Sliding his back across the smooth tesserae, an elbow locked around Isidore’s throat, the monk edged across the buttress wall and then back across the glassy marble towards the screen through which Grant had first come storming.

  Grant stood still until the monk was almost at the doorway, then very slowly he began to follow.

  The monk still had the knife to Isidore as he stopped just beyond the screen doorway. He gave one swift glance over his shoulder to check his path to the ramp entrance was clear, and then, shoving the cardinal into the screen’s narrow opening, he fled for the shadows.

  ‘Look out!’ Isidore shouted as he stumbled into the doorframe. Grant, who had begun to advance, saw the cardinal’s eyes were not fixed on him but beyond him. He spun around, instinctively thrusting his sword as he did so.

  The beardless monk came to a sudden halt and looked down, eyes wide with shock. He had run right onto the tip of Grant’s blade.

  IX.

  Barbo had been leaving his rented house and barely had time to secure his hat when the scruffy fixer hailed him from the busy street. ‘Kyr! kyr!’

  ‘Messer Abramius.’ Barbo gave a curt bob of the head. ‘What have you got for me today? Another drab altar piece? Another worthless podea? I am growing tired of the tatty bric-a-brac you try and peddle me. I am beginning to suspect you have no connection with the great families here at all.’

  ‘Oh kyr! You do me a terrible injury with these words! Tirelessly Abramius has worked for you. Endlessly I have visited these men with whom you doubt I am acquainted, but it is good that no word of these meetings has escaped, it is as it should be. To persuade these men to open their collections to the eyes of a foreigner, a Venetian even, it is no easy thing.’

  ‘Words, words, words. You give me words like the Marmara gives us wind.’ Barbo tugged his cloak about himself to ward off the biting chill and began to walk away from the one-eyed man.

  Abramius skipped back alongside him. ‘I can give you more than this. You berate poor Abramius, but he is still your tireless servant in the matter of the ikon of St Mark. I have good news for you.’

  ‘Yes?’ Barbo’s interest was immediately renewed by the mention of the ikon.

  Abramius leaned conspiratorially close. ‘I have found your ikon, kyr.’

  ‘You have? You are sure?’

  ‘This morning my eye fell directly upon it. It is not far from here and the news gets better, kyr. The ownership rests with a most noble family but alas, they have fallen on hard times. The head of the house is now a widowed contessa and she is willing to grant you a viewing of the ikon. She would not discuss sale of it, not with me in any case, but it is a start, no?’

  Barbo’s face flushed with excitement. The ikon, right here! He had hardly dreamed it could be real. This would be the making of him. This would bring him such fame and fortune back home that he would be catapulted from the shadow of his cardinal brother to the very pinnacle of Venetian society, t
o the doge’s palace itself! And all that stood between him was a widow, an ignorant old crone who doubtless had no concept of the piece’s provenance.

  He tried and failed to master his racing pulse and said, ‘When can I see it?’

  ‘Tonight, kyr. I have managed to secure a viewing tonight.’

  Utterly forgetting himself, Barbo embraced the fixer right in the middle of the street. ‘Oh, you wonderful, wonderful man!’

  ‘Please, it is only a small thing,’ said Abramius. ‘The hard work shall come in persuading the contessa to part with it.’

  ‘Yes, well leave that to me. You have done well Abramius. You have done really excellently.’ Barbo fumbled in his purse and drew out a silver stavraton. He tipped the man. ‘You said you saw the ikon, you definitely saw it?’

  ‘Yes, kyr. I gazed upon it and felt the Holy Ghost move within it. Truly this is the work of St Mark. I have seen enough in my time to tell a genuinely holy relic from a cheap trinket. This was the most beautiful thing I ever beheld, and let me tell you, I have seen the Hodgetria at the Easter procession.’

  Barbo could hardly contain his excitement. ‘Where do we go tonight? When do we see it? Can we not go now?’

  ‘Patience, kyr. The contessa should not be rushed. I will come here at dusk and we will go together to her house.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Barbo tried to control himself. He was almost shaking with excitement. He would need to spend the day arranging his affairs. He would need to raise funds for the purchase, enough to ensure he could buy the ikon at any price. In truth he did not care what it cost, the outlay would certainly be more than recovered from any resale in Venice, and the glory of its rediscovery was something on which no price could be placed.

  ***

  Barbo pulled back the curtain and caught a glimpse of long shadows and a high stone wall passing by. The sun was setting, showering the city in a deep purple hue. He had no concern for curfew – Abramius had passes with suitably impressive signatures – but before he could get any bearing on which district they were passing through Abramius pushed the curtain roughly back into place.