Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  ‘Father is indulging my fascination for soldiery,’ she replied without a glance his way.

  ‘Indeed, your weakness for men in armour is renowned,’ Sphrantzes said. ‘It is the big blond one usually, is it not? On more than one occasion you have been seen unchaperoned with him. It seems strangely louche behaviour for a member of the family who profess to be the moral guardians of this city.’ Sphrantzes quivered with delight at the way the megas doux bristled. Anna did not even blush.

  ‘Should you not be somewhere else, Logothete?’ she said. ‘Perhaps at a foreign court, looking to win us a strong alley through the emperor’s betrothal? Oh, now I remember, you have already failed at that venture... twice.’

  The corners of the logothete’s mouth spread into a truculent smile. ‘No marriage is better than a bad marriage,’ he said. ‘So perhaps I did not fail completely.’

  Anna, despite her best efforts, felt herself redden with anger.

  ‘Just ignore him,’ Jacob whispered.

  A blare of trumpets pulled their attention back to the dock. The gangplank had been lowered from the first boat and armoured men were beginning to fountain down it in a double line: the archers in their blue and red gambesons with shouldered crossbows; the halberdiers with half-armour and pretty tassels on their shafts; the men-at-arms in full harnesses of plate, faces hidden behind the pig snouts of their bascinets. To the drumbeat tramp of their feet, they danced into ranks along the harbour side.

  Anna watched the numbers swell and felt increasingly like a lamb that had invited a lion into its pen to defend it from a wolf.

  A silk standard came down the gangway, rippling in the breeze – a triple-towered castle in gold on a red field with a black eagle rising from its battlements. It was the banner of the Giustiniani family. Already the cheers of the crowd had begun to roll from the hillside. They had tasted intoxicating fresh hope for the first time in months.

  It took ten minutes for the full complement of troopers to disembark. When they had done so, a man stepped onto the deck of the first ship and, to the fanfare of the trumpets, marched slowly down the gangway to inspect the formation.

  He wore a splendid suit of armour and an open-faced bascinet with a billowing plume of ostrich feathers on its crown. His cloak of dark claret caught the sea breeze and fluttered out behind him while a gloved hand rested casually on the pommel of the arming sword hanging from his belt.

  With the swagger of a Levantine pirate, he marched back and forth before his men, ensuring the whole crowd had a good view of him.

  ‘He prances like a peacock well enough, but can he fight?’ said Loukas Notaras.

  Satisfied, Giustiniani raised his arm and his second barked an order. The ranks turned as one and began to march in a double column up the quayside towards the harbour gate. Giustiniani strode beside them, waving up at the crowded hillside.

  As he passed below the balcony and looked up, his eyes seemed to arrest as they picked her out among the row of men. He touched the brow of his helm with a smile, and she felt a sudden warmth about her throat. The famed beauty of his youth had given way to distinguished middle age.

  His beard was a perfectly kempt salt-and-pepper pelt across his square jaw, and between the crow’s feet of his sun-browned handsome face the eyes were vivid with childish mischief.

  ‘I see he meets your daughter’s approval.’ said Sphrantzes with a sly smile towards the megas doux.

  The rear of the column disappeared up the harbour road, a rippling stream of silver scales; a steel fighting-carp swimming upriver to make camp at the top of the city’s promontory.

  The multi-coloured silk banners billowed; the cheering crowd serenaded every step, tossing garlands before the tramping feet; the troops of youths scuttled in the wake of the armoured column, eager to sign up with Giustiniani.

  ‘Perhaps we had better go and make kyr Giustiniani welcome,’ said Sphrantzes as he made to follow.

  ‘Not too welcome,’ said Loukas Notaras, ‘or he may never leave.’

  ***

  It had taken weeks to get the funds together, but finally Paolo Barbo had done it. ‘I am going to take the ikon of St Mark home with me,’ he thought triumphantly. ‘Today is the day I write myself into Venetian legend. Today I secure my election as doge.’

  He had thrashed out the price over the course of several meetings with the contessa. He had revisited the villa on two further occasions, always arriving, blindfolded, by carriage.

  This obsession for secrecy he had come to accept and indeed admire. The lady was taking precautions, which meant she was serious about selling.

  The final agreed price had been steep – almost double what Barbo had expected to pay – but he had viewed the ikon on every visit and each time it seemed more special than the last.

  He was haunted by it, dreaming of it every night and spending all his waking hours coordinating the means to acquire it.

  He had cultivated the Garzoni banker, Giacomo Badoer, in the Venetian quarter and arranged for a bill of exchange that would enable the purchase.

  At a time when the impending crisis had destroyed serious commerce in the city, Badoer had been delighted to strike such a deal. Barbo would receive the equivalent of seventy-two thousand stavraton in silver ingot from Badoer and would repay twelve thousand two hundred Venetian ducats to Badoer’s brother at their Venice office within six months. For Badoer this had the serendipitous outcome of transferring almost all his Constantinople-based capital back to Venice with another man bearing the risk on it.

  As a man who always ensured his clients felt they had received good service – even if that service came at a usury rate of over ten percent – Badoer had also supplied to Barbo two porters who were burly enough to be considered minders. These men would handle the heavy ingot bars and Badoer would pay their costs of ten copper coins a day. He had also booked Barbo and his bride-to-be passage on a ship to Venice in two weeks’ time rather than have him wait for the spring muda fleet. It was now very much in the interest of the Garzoni bank to see their client return to Venice swiftly and in one piece.

  To secure such a large bill of exchange, Barbo had pledged his family’s casa as security, the rest of the collateral effectively stemming from his familial credentials as brother of the cardinal-bishop of Vicenza, nephew of the late Pope Eugenius and soon-to-be son-in-law of the megas doux.

  The megas doux, a man of international commerce both in the Morea and Italian republics, had excellent lines of credit with the Garzoni in Venice.

  It was a precarious financial position to place oneself in, but as Barbo liked to say, greatness was the footprint of bold action. He would secure the ikon, take it and his fiancéd wife away from this doomed city, and, back in Venice, he would hold a magnificent auction, breaking all records and netting him both financial and reputational riches beyond imagination. It was all so close, so tantalisingly close, and it began today.

  The porters had not been keen on the blindfolds, but Barbo had reassured them. Now, as they unloaded the heavy wooden crates from the carriage, one of them sniffed the air and smiled. ‘We are near the old Forum of the Ox,’ he said.

  ‘How can you tell?’ asked Barbo. He had never been able to get a feel for where those mystery rides had led.

  ‘Can’t you smell the tanneries?’ said the porter. ‘All the city tanneries are to be found south of the ruined forum.’

  Abramius had been pacing the yard like an expectant father when the carriage arrived. Beside him was an enormous set of balances. ‘To weigh the crates,’ he explained. ‘I hope you do not take this as an affront to your honour, kyr. One must beware of vultures in this town, and while I have no qualms about your honesty, I am afraid the Garzoni bankers are less scrupulous. These men are in their pay, no? They would not tell you if the silver felt a little light.’

  Barbo nodded and waved the porters towards the balances.

  Badoer was an honest man, it transpired, and Abramius was satisfied by the tale the balance
s told. ‘The contessa is upstairs with your ikon, kyr.’ Abramius gestured towards the front door. Your ikon. Barbo liked the way that sounded. He thought of the doge’s residence and tried out in his mind the phrase your palace as he bounded up the dusty old staircase.

  The contessa was not in the sala where she normally received him. Instead, candlelight gave out from a doorway further along the hall. This was a sparse chamber, shutters closed and bolted.

  The contessa stood before a table, gazing down at an object resting on a velvet cushion. His ikon.

  ‘I was just saying goodbye,’ she said without turning around.

  ‘It will be well cared for, Madonna.’

  ‘You should get it out of the city quickly.’

  ‘Indeed I shall. I have a ship already booked for Venice.’ He paused for a moment as a thought struck him. ‘I could take you with me. With the fortune you are receiving for that bit of old wood and paint, you could own a magnificent palazzo on the Grand Canal.’

  She turned around and fixed him with a coquettish smile. ‘And what would your wife say about another woman travelling west with you both?’ He could see there was more for sale here than merely an ikon.

  ‘I am sure she is wise enough to understand how the world works,’ he said, moving forward and sliding his arms around the slender waist.

  XII.

  A dank, phantom fog had eerily materialised over the Horn and scaled the seawall to engulf every street. The sallow, ghost-grey blanket of mist lent the city the appearance of a drowned kingdom, leaving only the tallest of spires and Hagia Sophia’s high dome to penetrate above the peculiar cloud. There was nothing but bad omens to be drawn from the fog’s capture of the city.

  The burning torch lights along the streets of the Mangana district were no more than pale amber glows, underwater flames in the dark gloom as Grant made his way, alone, back to the monastery. The old man, Kallinikos, had extended an invitation to supper, and Grant was anxious for a good meal.

  He stepped along quickly, cloak pulled tight about him to keep off the chill air. There was a terrible melancholy to this district. Down along the shore of the Gold Horn, where the boats came and went across to Pera, there was still busy merchant trade, but here, on the acropolis point, life had almost vanished. Like a body wracked by the slow death of leprosy, here among the ruins and echoing empty streets of the old citadel, Constantinople had lost all feeling.

  The dark outline of Hagia Sophia lay behind him, dissolving by inches into the fog; the last pulse of life in the area. A pulse that would be stilled, perhaps forever, now that the Latin consecration had taken place. The city had no brightness left: black voids floated where windows once glowed with life; broken roof tiles served as the gateways of bat roosts; a red-brick convent hunched like a weeping widow, faded, abandoned and overcome by the streaming tears of creeper vines. The Turks would be attacking not a city but a grave.

  There was a sadness to the place as heavy as midwinter snow, a sense of time lost that could never be recovered. ‘This is how a nation dies,’ Grant thought. Not by external assault but from within, a slow, rotting, hopeless death that took many generations to complete; a gradual darkening into the black silence of extinction. The coming siege was nothing more than the death rattle of Byzantium’s corpse.

  But there was still life in Mangana. Ahead, the light of a burning cresset grew from a faint flicker to a solid radiance that illuminated the frontage of the monastery and a figure haunting the top of the steps. ‘I thought you might be lost in this fog,’ said Kallinikos. He looked pointedly at the bandage around Grant’s hand and then, smiling to himself, led Grant inside.

  His footfalls rang out as he followed the old man down a spider-webbed passageway. To judge by the dust, no monks had lived there for decades. Deeper inside, the candlelit nave of an old chapel had been transformed into a dining hall; beneath a soaring rotunda, a round oak table awaited them, set with crockery and graced by two guests already.

  The first was already familiar to Grant – Demetrios, the old man’s son. The other, spruce and effete in the robes of a scholar, was introduced as Ioannis Argyropoulos.

  A servant brought in a large copper pot and set it down between them on the table. Argyropoulos clapped his hands in delight. ‘Monokythron, my favourite!’

  ‘They say this dish is as complicated as a woman’s heart,’ Kallinikos said to Grant. ‘Five different kinds of fish, fourteen eggs, three varieties of cheese, Phrygian cabbage, pepper, olive oil, sweet wine and garlic, all saturated with fat. It takes half a day to prepare. If only a woman’s affection were so straight forward.’

  ‘Why all this talk of girls?’ said Argyropoulos. ‘Have you been left broken hearted by some love affair?’

  ‘Sadly, that manner of carry-on is beyond these old bones now,’ said Kallinikos with a wink. ‘But it appears I misread a woman’s heart this past week. It is most troubling. All these years and still I cannot begin to fathom fully the mechanics of the female mind.’

  ‘You must tell us all the gory details!’ Argyropoulos urged.

  ‘Yes, I am struggling to think of anyone - besides those at this table - who would consider you a friend,’ Demetrios said with a tart purse of his lips.

  ‘Well, if you insist. Our young Scottish guest may not know the full tale, so you two must forgive me if I start at the beginning. Now, John, have you ever heard of a philosopher by the name of Gemistus Plethon?’ asked Kallinikos. The other men exchanged looks with one another.

  ‘No,’ Grant said. ‘I’m not much of a one for philosophising.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Plethon,’ said Argyropoulos with a grin. ‘He’s not all that important.’

  ‘Do be quiet,’ Kallinikos said with a flap of a hand at Argyropoulos. He turned back to Grant. ‘Like all the great philosophers, Plethon had a circle of pupils that I am sure would be familiar to you, John. Cardinal Isidore, your grateful rescuee for example, Georgios Scholarios, Basilios Bessarion…’

  ‘Ioannis Argyropoulos,’ said Argyropoulos.

  ‘Oh, you immodest sophist!’ Kallinikos said with a chuckle. ‘Now, I could go on about Plethon for many hours but then our monokythron would go cold and there is nothing quite as sad as cold monokythron.’

  ‘Well then, be quiet and let us eat!’ said Argyropoulos.

  Kallinikos ignored his guest. ‘Let me just say that he was respected enough a debater that when the previous emperor traveled to Italy to discus possible church reunification, he took Plethon among his delegation.’

  ‘I might point out that I was also part of that delegation,’ Argyropoulos said.

  ‘You might,’ said Kallinikos. ‘But having ecclesiastical rings run around you by the Latin priesthood is hardly something to go about proclaiming.

  ‘They were certainly not run around me,’ said Argyropoulos archly. ‘I was far too junior to bear any blame. It was those others you mentioned earlier: Isidore, Bessarion and Scholarios.

  ‘And Isidore and Bessarion were well rewarded for it,’ said Demetrios. ‘Both made rich as Latin cardinals; damned apostates.’

  ‘Let’s not be uncharitable,’ said Kallinikos. ‘Even Plethon and Scholarios were in favour of the union at the time. Of course, Scholarios came to deeply regret his earlier stance, as you saw for yourself, John.’

  ‘I did?’ said Grant, who had no notion who Scholarios could be.

  ‘He changed his name when he became a monk,’ said Demetrios. ‘You will know him as Gennadios.’

  ‘Gennadios!’ Grant nearly fell off his chair. ‘He was a unionist?’

  ‘Like many converts to an idea, he was extreme in the way he embraced his new dogma, although Plethon was slow to see it,’ Argyropoulos said with a glance towards Kallinikos.

  ‘Plethon was preoccupied with composing his life’s work,’ explained the old man. ‘A philosophical masterpiece entitled the Book of Laws. He made two copies, one I had for safe keeping and the other was entrusted to Scholarios.’

 
; Argyropoulos shook his head. ‘That was a mistake.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Kallinikos. ‘The Book of Laws was a political prescription for returning Greece to a golden age. Feudalism would be overtuned and land owned in common. The army would be a permanent, professional order. It was Platonism brought into the modern age, and much of it would have suited Scholarios’s palate.’

  ‘But not all,’ said Demetrios. ‘Some of it was henbane.’

  ‘Yes,’ said his father. He leant across to Grant. ‘Scholarios, as you have seen, is now a man of deep Christian fervour. Plethon, you must understand, was a pagan.’

  ‘Forgive my impatience,’ Argyropoulos said, ‘but what has any of this got to do with your misreading of a woman?’

  ‘Have a care! I shall come to all that presently,’ said Kallinikos. ‘You do not build a house from the roof down, and you do not tell a tale without laying out the foundations of context.’

  ‘Then I wish it were a house-sized tale and not a mighty cathedral,’ Argyropoulos complained.

  Kallinikos shook his head. ‘Paganism. Of course, we had all known, right from the days in Mistra, but such things are easily forgiven when they remain a blur on the edge of a man’s character. Now suddenly there it was, written down in black ink like a declaration of war on the Church. Plethon was calling, explicitly, for a new state religion, a return of the ancient pantheon; a rejection of Christ.’

  ‘I imagine Gennadios didn’t take kindly to that idea,’ said Grant, thinking of the dark, malevolent face and the fiery sermon outside Hagia Sophia.

  Kallinikos nodded. ‘He did not. He burned the book, publicly, and reported Plethon to the emperor as a heretic. Had it been another, I’ve little doubt that a swift execution would have followed, but Plethon had a name, and the people of Constantinople are rightly fond of their philosophers, are they not, Ioannis?’ said Kallinikos with a raised eyebrow in the direction of Argyropoulos.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Argyropoulos. ‘But I would not stake my life on it like that.’

  ‘No, well fortunately Emperor Constantine could not countenance the idea of executing his old tutor, no matter what was in the book. Instead, he exiled Plethon to the Morea and the unburned copy of the manuscript remained with me; a fact I kept well hidden from Gennadios.’