Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  Sambucuccio roared with laughter. ‘Hark at this one, it’s clear as day all his encounters with women before came at the end of a haggle or a sword.’

  ‘He means,’ Fieschi said, ‘that you’d better win more than a suit of armour from us because a woman like your Anna is going to expect a gift when you pay her a visit, and she’s used to such visits from emperors and papal nephews.’

  ‘Oh Christ, I didn’t think of that,’ said Grant throwing down his inadequate cards.

  He had not, although he had thought of little else but Anna in the days since the carnival. She was inside his head. Her memory seemed to haunt everything his eye fell upon: the spires of churches, the sails of ships, the rosy glow of sunlight’s touch on passing clouds. His mind returned to the thought of her with the inevitability of iron drawn to a lodestone, repeatedly conjuring her face and the memory of her soft skin moving beneath his touch. Far more preferable than the usual visions of a pyre.

  That was something else he had realised: he had not suffered a nightmare or intrusive memory since the burning of the carnival effigy. He had not woken drenched in sweat or hearing howls of agony. He had felt a previously unknown serenity ever since she had appeared on that boardwalk and thrown her arms about him. ‘I need a gift,’ he said looking suddenly glum.

  ‘Yes, you do, and a damned good one,’ said Fieschi.

  ‘Jewels are no good,’ Grant reasoned. ‘Even if I could afford them, she must be swimming in gemstones. It’d be better to bring her something that would stir her mind.’

  ‘Where are you going to get something like that from?’ said Boccanegra.

  The answer hit Grant immediately. ‘Kallinikos! He’s a whole workshop of ferlies.’

  ‘And does he owe you a favour?’ asked Boccanegra.

  ‘No,’ said Grant as the smile returned to his lips. ‘Not yet, but he might in time.’ A memory had stirred. A dish of monokythron and the old man’s fulmination against Theodosia Notaras for betraying his copy of a forbidden book.

  Kallinikos must desire that book’s return more than anything in the world. If he, Grant, could find it, if Gennadios has not yet destroyed it, then the old sage would move heaven and earth in his aid.

  The first copy had been publically burned but Grant knew of no such bonfires since the second manuscript had been taken. Was it possible the monk had not destroyed it?

  ‘What happened to that monk who started the riot?’ Grant asked as the next round of cards was dealt and Boccanegra happily tucked away his newly won sword.

  ‘They locked him up in the Noumera,’ said Fieschi. ‘A few weeks without daylight should teach him respect for the emperor’s authority.’

  Grant stood up. ‘If you’ll excuse me then, lads.’

  ‘What? We’ve not finished playing for all this,’ said Bocanegra with a gesture to the remainder of Maruffo’s possessions.

  ‘I only really wanted the armour,’ said Grant as he left the table and headed for the palazzo door.

  Outside, Pera fishermen gathered on the quayside mending nets, sharing a stew of mackerel and cursing the paucity of the morning’s catch. Grant paid the boatman and settled into the shallow ferry. The oars bit, and the boat shot out and creamed a bow wave towards the Neorion harbour on the Constantinople shore.

  ***

  He did not know what official seals or documents were expected from those visiting prisoners, but whatever they were, Grant knew he did not possess them. Still, he trusted that his rescue of the cardinal, the imperial scabbard and his exotic appearance lent him a degree of celebrity among the soldiery. He also knew that a generous sharing of rations was often more effective a means of attaining cooperation from a man on post than any coldly written order.

  In the event, the sentry on the prison gate barely glanced at him as he strolled past. Grant made his way to the duty officer and began making small talk while he opened his bag and took out a strip of cured meat.

  He hoped the Greek was not too devout. It was Clean Week, the first of Great Lent when fasting was strictest.

  The eyes of the portarios widened at the sight of the meat. The smell must have driven him half mad. Grant shredded it into pieces and offered one to the man with a smile. ‘It’d be a sin to let it spoil,’ he said.

  ‘Kind of you,’ said the officer as he chewed with one guilty eye on the door.

  ‘Oh, I’m a dunderhead! I fairly forgot,’ said Grant. ‘I was to speak with a prisoner. The monk, Gennadios.’

  ‘Good job you came today then,’ said the portarios. ‘He’s being released tomorrow. They’re all being released. The enitre prison is being abandoned to add a dozen more of us to the wall. You’ll get nothing out of that one though. Been raving since he got here. Thinks he’s St Michael.’

  ‘Has he been racked?’ said Grant.

  ‘Course he has,’ said the portarios. ‘He’s proven a tough one. Most monks break at the sight of it, most men for that matter, but that one would have stuck it out till we killed him, I could tell right away.’

  ‘Well, I’ll have a try.’ Grant put the bag on the table between them. ‘Would you mind looking after this while I do?’

  The portarios placed a hand on the bag and felt the soft curve of the sausage within. ‘No trouble at all,’ he said. ‘Let me show you to his cell.’

  The smell began to irritate Grant’s nose as soon as they entered the dank lower corridor. The floor rushes of each cell must have seen several occupants come and go. There were three to each side of the corridor - little more than alcoves cordoned off by tightly spaced bars from floor to ceiling.

  The corridor ended in a widened cul-de-sac where the rack stood, its agonies easily observable by all six prisoners.

  Gennadios was in the end cell, a half-starved scarecrow in sackcloth, his arms hanging unnaturally from where they had been popped free of their sockets. His face had already been ascetic on that autumn day when Grant had witnessed his sermon before Hagia Sophia, but the ordeals of this dungeon had scoured away what humanity there had been. Now you could see every detail of the skull around the sockets of his brimstone eyes.

  Gennadios sat on the floor, his back to the far wall, beneath a set of four letters, which, it appeared from the colour and smell, he had smeared from his own effluence. Grant wondered what the word he had written could be, but he was not about to ask.

  ‘You’ve been painting,’ he said from the other side of the bars. Gennadios didn’t answer but his eyes, which had been focused on the distance, set themselves like claws upon his visitor.

  ‘I’m told you were once a great debater,’ said Grant. ‘I wan...’

  ‘You are a pestilence!’ The words came from Gennadios like a clap of thunder. The tight prison corridor rang with the shock of them. Despite the bars and the dislocated arms and the fact Grant was a much larger and more dangerous man, he had flinched in shock.

  ‘Will you talk to me about a book?’ said Grant. ‘I could maybe help you get out of here if you can help me.’

  ‘You are a symptom of our city’s disease!’ Gennadios hissed. Flecks of spittle dappled the rushes between them.

  ‘Plethon,’ said Grant, hoping the name would jolt the madness out of the priest.

  ‘To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted,’ Gennadios said, quoting Paul the Apostle.

  ‘You kept Plethon’s book, didn’t you. You never burned it.’

  The eyes of Gennadios turned their gaze from him and his voice reduced in violence by a tone. ‘At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.’

  ‘Book? What book? Plethon’s?’ said Grant.

  Gennadios looked back up from the floor at him and began to laugh. He put the full force of his pr
eacher’s voice into it and the mocking cackle reverberated around Grant’s head all the way back to the portarios.

  ***

  ‘This is intolerable persecution!’ wailed one of the monks from the doorway. They had tried to stop the foreign soldier at the Pantocrator’s gate, but the rule of the sword was already taking hold in the city.

  The barbarian had brushed them aside and ignored all protests as he marched deep within the monastery. He had the red scabbard of authority, and the monastery, already blackened by association to Gennadios, could not risk further antagonism of the palace.

  Reluctantly, they had shown the brute to Gennadios’s cell and watched with mounting horror as he began his invasive search.

  Grant turned and glared back at the gaggle of tonsures in the doorway. ‘I can show you persecution if you’d like,’ he growled. He gestured to the wreckage in the monastic cell around him. ‘This is me being all reverent.’

  ‘What could Brother Gennadios possibly have that would be of interest to you?’ said the monk.

  Grant ignored him and looked about for other potential hiding places. It was hard to find a manuscript among so many – the cell fairly bristled with parchment – but the task was near impossible for an illiterate, unable to decipher a word.

  He had taken some of his frustration out on the furniture, slashing the mattress, upending the writing table, scattering the manuscripts. It was petulant, he could not deny that, but it also felt immensely satisfying.

  In a final act of resignation, he swept the ewer of water from window with his hand. It shattered on the cell’s stone flagging, sending its liquid in a dark rill across the dust-choked floor.

  ‘Beast!’ snapped one of the monks from the doorway, but Grant barely heard him; his focus was firmly on the course of the water. He gave a sudden cry, crouched down and ran a finger across the flagstone edge where the damp stain vanished.

  ‘Even beasties might obtain enlightenment given time,’ he said and drew his side arm.

  ‘He has gone mad!’

  Grant dug the point of his blade into the floor and levered it up under the stone’s edge. The square of hard brick yielded easily, lacking a mortar seal.

  Beneath was a dark hole, a hand’s breadth wide. Grant slid an arm down, felt the dampness where the water had soaked into the ancient earth and crept his fingers out to search the hollow space.

  He snaked his hand blindly forward, praying it was the monk’s secret hiding place and not a scorpion’s nest.

  Fingers groped through the grit and filth, touched something different, and a smile broke across his face. Grant ran his thumb along the side of the object, felt the sheets flutter against his nail and then, with some difficulty, he began to wrestle the book from its lair.

  With a final tug he drew his hand out from the floor space bringing with it the wedge of papers and a cloud of dust. He stood up, shook the detritus from the surface of the top page and thrust it under the nose of the nearest monk.

  ‘What does it say?’ Grant demanded. The monk did not reply, he just stared in shock at the papers. ‘What does it say?’ Grant repeated, with enough added menace that the frightened monk obediently began to read.

  ‘Nomon singrafi... book of laws. Here is the mark of the author... but this cannot be right, it says...’

  ‘Plethon, it says Georgius Gemistus Plethon, doesn’t it!’ Grant almost shouted the name out in triumph.

  ‘Yes, but this is... why would… Brother Gennadios...’

  It was enough. He pulled the manuscript away from the confused monk and made to leave. ‘Wait!’ a voice cried out from behind him as he marched down the passageway, but it was too late – Grant was already gone.

  ***

  Warm afternoon sunshine bathed the inner courtyard, casting dappled shadows through the branches of a gnarled cherry tree. A bench was set in the shade and on it the old man snored beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat, occasionally hailing long dead acquaintances in his slumber. Grant watched Kallinikos from the courtyard door alongside the old man’s son.

  Demetrios looked on with doting eyes and clutched the precious manuscript close to his chest. ‘Thank you for returning this. You have no idea how much it means to him.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve an inkling,’ said Grant. ‘Does he remember?’

  ‘Remember?’ said Demetrios.

  ‘That he wrote this book,’ Grant said. ‘He’s always called himself Kallinikos to me, but that isn’t really his name, is it. Has he forgot it? Does he not know he’s Plethon?’

  Demetrios gave a sad smile. ‘Some days. Some days he remembers it all, but these are growing rarer. Sometimes he calls me Andronikos and my brother Demetrios. Some days he forgets who we are altogether. On a really bad day he cannot recall the purpose he had for entering a room. Mostly though he seems to exist in this fantasy of Kallinikos.’

  ‘Who was Kallinikos?’

  ‘An author of one of those texts in his library, but our Kallinikos was born of a joke. When my father came back from the Morea he was still officially banished. The emperor suggested he take a false name and keep a low profile. That is why we live out here in this ghostly district. His friends and his sons, we all played along at first. The building of machines was my passion and it was I who dubbed him Kallinikos when he began to help me in the workshop. We all began to call him by this false name, even when we went about the city. A tremendous joke, but it seems a seed was planted in his head. Now as his mind weakens it germinates and, like mistletoe, strangles his true self beneath. All things die, John. They must, I suppose, to make room for new things to bloom, but it is a terrible fate to witness great minds and empires fading away.’

  Their conversation had disturbed the old man’s sleep. He brushed off the hat and turned towards them with eyes full of clarity.

  ‘Look Father, John has brought you a gift,’ said Demetrios offering the book forward. It took a moment for the dusty pages to register with him, but then a broad smile broke like dawn across the old man’s face.

  ‘Well, well, well. I never thought to see this again, not outside a heresy trial at least. Thank you, John, I owe you a great deal.’ His eyes read Grant’s expression and the smile twisted a little. ‘Ah, I see. That is what this is about. You need me for something and now I am your debtor. Well, kyr Grant, you have soon picked up the local customs, have you not!’

  Grant felt suddenly ashamed at the transparency of his action. ‘I was merely returning stolen property to its owner. Now if you should happen to feel a need to repay my kindness...’

  ‘What do you ask in return?’ Plethon said.

  Grant gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I’m looking for a gift. An ingenious creation. Something fit to dazzle the eye and stir the mind of the noblest lady.’

  Plethon hooted with laughter. ‘How cheaply you sell it!’ he said. ‘Can you really value a life’s work at the cost of a bauble? Well, then I will pay your price and think it a bargain! That girl has worked quite a spell over you. Very well, we shall give her a trinket so marvellous that people will believe the sultan courts her and not some dust-covered vagabond. Come this way.’

  He shuffled from the courtyard garden, leading Grant and Demetrios back into the monastery and through to the workshop. The fruits of their inquiry stood all around: siphons that drew water from one bucket to another without any human hand, devices that used the force of water on a wheel to move a chain and pull heavy weights from the floor. To Grant it all seemed like the work of a magician in command of the elements, but nothing prepared him for the gift Plethon had in mind.

  On a bench at the back of the room sat a model boat, a beautiful piece with a crew of four miniature wooden dolls. Each of the figurines held tiny instruments: one a harp, another two cymbals, a third a flute and the last a drum. Then, as Grant bent close to admire the craftsmanship, Plethon pressed a peg in the side of the model and the musical quartet jerked into life and began to play.

  Grant leapt back in shock. The dolls seemed rea
l; their arms twitched, their heads bobbed, and their instruments were not just producing noise but a melodic tune. ‘This isn’t possible,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ha! It is in fact quite simple,’ said Plethon. ‘You are just too sawdust brained to understand it. No doubt you think a genie is trapped inside. Well, what if I told you that its design is two hundred and fifty years old? How sad that something first created so long ago can make men of today slack-jawed in wonder. Look how we have stood still these past centuries, Demetrios!’

  ‘Do not tell him where it was invented, Father, or he will really think it black magic.’

  ‘Where did it come from then?’ asked Grant.

  ‘A Moslem scholar named Al-Jazari. He wrote that book,’ Plethon gestured to a large manuscript lying on a workbench.

  ‘A Turk designed this?’ said Grant.

  ‘No, an Arab. You see, John, God has not given a monopoly of knowledge to Christian brains. There are many things to be learned from our brethren to the east. They have not been so preoccupied with minor liturgical matters these past centuries. They have not stagnated as we have. The war to come will open a few eyes to how far the Turks have moved beyond us.’

  He picked up the boat and placed it into the Scotsman’s hands and shuffled back to his chair in the warm, sunlit courtyard to sleep away the afternoon like a man for whom the future held no mystery.

  XVII.

  Two swifts soared through a washed-out cerulean sky as Grant made his way up the hill to the Rose Palace. They twisted and turned in their playful chase, banking around and buzzing at one another like tournament knights. There was such freedom to their flight paths and a thrilling, devil-may-care contempt towards the clustered rooftops below. What concern was it to these two if sultan or emperor sat on the porphyry throne? They went where they pleased.

  He clutched the little boat under one arm and strode confidently up to the gatehouse. A porter eyed the boat with curiosity through the decorative wrought iron roses of the gate. Picking his nose, the porter said, ‘They are seeing none today.’