This much was to be expected. The megas doux was a famously devout man and it was still Clean Week, a time of struct fasting. ‘I’ve not come to see the megas doux,’ said Grant with a smile. ‘It’s his daughter, Despoina Anna, I wish to speak with.’
‘They are not seeing anyone,’ the porter repeated with the cold conceit of one who feels his own stock elevated in doing his master’s bidding.
With growing agitation Grant said, ‘The megas doux, perhaps is not, but his daughter is sure to wish to see me.’
The porter arched his brow like a wool buyer offered cotton shoddy and told it was cashmere. ‘I have my instruction. No one goes in.’
Despite his mounting frustration, Grant kept his tone genial. ‘Very well, I wouldn’t see you to trouble. But perhaps – if you’ll not admit me – you might at least send word inside, and have the lady’s handmaiden, Zenobia, come out?’
The porter appeared to mellow a little. Here was a chance to pass an inconvenience on to another. He nodded and headed back up the path to the main house.
A tempest was building in Grant’s chest. The confidence he had felt as he climbed the hill had proven a paper tiger and already doubt’s shadow was falling across his heart.
He was made to wait for some time. Behind him the road ran away, curling up through the old forum on the hilltop to plunge down the far side through the fire-blackened slum and on to the silted-up harbour. All the wreckage of the riot was obscured from here, tucked from view to leave nothing but the panorama of the wave-flecked Golden Horn and the Bosporus beyond it. The sea stretched away like the future, a glassy, impenetrable pathway that might bear him along to so many possibilities.
He closed his eyes, breathed in the salt-speckled air, felt the sun on his face, and for a moment he was back on the bobbing carrack that had borne him to this city. He felt a different man to that hollow, damaged soul. He felt happy, and it was a dizzying sensation, which he was still getting accustomed to.
He studied the tiny quartet of musicians in the boat. On the surface they appeared independent, but by tilting the boat at an angle, the workings beneath that bound each to the other could be glimpsed. It was the motion of one that caused the next to respond; none could play his tune alone.
The sound of the heavy front door caused him to turn and look up. Zenobia was coming down the path, wrapped up in a heavy cloak and veil.
‘Zenobia!’ he called. ‘Saints be blessed! Come, let me in.’ He brandished the boat with a wide grin. ‘Look at this. You’ll not have seen its like before. A gift, for the despoina. I’ll wager even Anna finds it bogglesome.’
Zenobia had come to the railings of the gate but made no move to open it. Instead she slowly shook her head. ‘Such gifts are wasted here. You should go, kyr.’
His pulse juddered through his chest. ‘What’s happened?’ He looked into Zenobia’s eyes and the pity he saw in them made his heart turn to water. ‘Dear Lord, tell me, what’s happened Zenobia?’ He almost sank to his knees.
His fears broke loose like untamed stallions: there was plague in the house; her father, learning of their tryst had strangled her in rage; the emperor had renewed their betrothal. They were as fanciful as they were wild.
Then, as he placed the boat on the ground, Grant thought of Maruffo’s cold corpse in the alleyway, of the beaked mask of the Venetian, watching from the ruined palace shadows, and a new horror rose within him. Barbo had revenged himself a second time.
Both his fists curled around the bars of the gate. His knuckles blanched as pale as bone. He pressed his forehead against the gate and felt he would collapse without its support. ‘Is she dead?’ he said.
Zenobia shook her head. ‘She lives. She is in good health. You should go, kyr,’ she said again softly.
‘I don’t understand. Why would Anna not see me?’
He knew why. The answer lurked, as it always had, down the tenebrous staircase in the very pit of his being. A fear more terrible, in its own selfish manner, than any of those others that had afflicted him briefly before. A fate worse than her death. He knew, and yet he could not speak it. Outside the magic of carnival, she was far above his station and he far beneath her dignity.
He released the gate, bent his neck and waited for Zenobia to let the axe blow of it fall from her lips. ‘She is done with you, kyr.’
Grant shook his head. Mechanically his hands clenched, his fingernails dug themselves into each palm. He felt a sucking pain, like the lance of Parzival pulled from his stomach. His breath caught in his chest, then came harshly out through his nostrils in the gasp of a drowning man.
‘I am sorry, kyr,' said Zenobia. ‘It is how these people are.’
‘No.’ He shook his head once more and felt the earth swim about him. ‘I shall not take that from any tongue but her own. Go back inside and tell her if she means to toss me away with the carnival bunting, then she’d better come out and do the work herself.’
‘Please, kyr. Save yourself further pain.’ Her voice was filled with compassion.
He found anger and steadied himself. ‘I’ll not leave otherwise.’
‘Very well.’ A new voice clipped the air.
Zenobia shrank away as Anna came down the path from the house to the gate. The bright medallion of her face was cut by the firm line of her mouth, as if engraved by a goldsmith’s burin. The morning light caught the shades of her braided hair in brilliant, rippling tones.
Not for the first time he thought of Actaeon, torn to shreds by hounds for the profanation of a goddess’s virginal mystery. How he envied him, for what could claw and tooth do to flesh that compared to the exquisite tortures of a human heart.
‘I brought you this.’ He picked up the half-forgotten boat. ‘Do you recall telling me, among the ruins, how you wished that our time together would never end? I thought maybe it didn’t have to, but I see you changed your mind. Or perhaps not and I’ve just been a fool in a daydream.’ He shook his head and turned his eyes aside from her own steadfast scrutiny.
She touched the gate and the now familiar scent of aloeswood reached out to him through the bars. ‘You are a good man, John. As close to the troubadour’s knight as ever I shall meet. But do you not recall what else I said? Before, I told you I was a counter to be played by my father. We live not as we wish but as we must. We had the masquerade and yes, it was magical, it was a dream made real and I wished it would not end, but while one can think such things of a dream, when dawn breaks one must wake up and face reality.’
A poem, long forgotten, echoed in his heart; a bard’s song heard by his younger self and not fully understood until now: I dreamed of love and life was beauty, I woke to day and life was duty.
‘I thought my affections for you were a mirror of your own feelings,’ he said. ‘Was it not so? Did love for me ever trouble your heart?’
‘Love!’ She spoke the word with such surprise that no others were required.
He staggered back from the gate; all strength fled from his legs. He was trying to find within himself a stone core on which to rally but it was in vain, he had left all defences of feeling open to her.
He spoke quietly once more, as if in a stupor, and the words that came seemed distant and strange, as though uttered by another. ‘Once, in Lombardy, I was hit, here, by a crossbow bolt; at Anghiari, a four-inch blade was pulled from my shoulder. Another year, an axe bit so deep in this arm that the surgeons reckoned for a time it’d be lost. I bled from all of those, Anna, but nothing, nothing ever wounded me like your tongue.’
The hauteur did not slip. The eyes with their imperial, Byzantine gaze did not flinch or glisten or deviate from boring into his soul. Her voice when she spoke held its command, ‘I am sorry to be the one to inflict such pain upon you. Remember, I have stood where you stand now – the day they told me my emperor had made other plans. You at least are free. You can go away and choose another.’
He shook his head and set the tiny boat on the ground. ‘I chose you,’ he whispered.
‘I chose you.’
Turning from the gate, he walked away without looking back, but for what seemed like forever he could hear the boat’s tiny band responding to one another and playing out their tune in perfect pre-ordained harmony.
Part II: Athanor
XVIII.
Spring flowered on the Bosporus, painting the slopes of the city’s seven hills with an imperial cloak of purple Judas blossom. Likewise, as people hailed one another with Easter’s paschal greeting, the plain before the walls of Constantinople also began to bloom. But instead of flowers, the colour spreading ever wider across the muddy ground was the camp of an emormous army. The Turks had come; the siege had begun.
The walls were manned, the chain pulled across the Horn, the city held its breath for the first blow to fall, but when the Turks did sally forth, they were not bearing sword, bow or polearm; they were driving carts.
Unmolested by the puzzled archers on the ramparts, the first wagon reached the long outer ditch, the fosse, tipped over the lip and crashed to the bottom in a shower of earth and splintering wood.
The bowmen continued to hold their fire as the carters scuttled back to the camp, but then, all night, a procession of carts rolled and shattered into the ditch, and little by little, as the earth mound grew, the defenders understood. The vast baggage train, filled with a new cargo of soil, was being dumped by the Turks until the slowly rising detritus formed causeways for their army to stream across. The next night there had been Greeks waiting in the fosse for the carters.
‘It was a good night, Basileus. No losses on our part and perhaps sixty on theirs.’
Giovanni Giustiniani, newly appointed duke of Lemnos and protostrator of all imperial forces, found he was speaking to the man’s back. The emperor, the basileus, the autocrat of the Romans, was leaning perilously far out over the tower window’s ledge.
‘That mound of earth looks taller to me. Some carts still got through?’ The emperor straightened and moved a little from the ledge, and the gaggle of his ministers, huddled across the room, breathed again.
The magnificent ostrich plume on Giustiniani’s helmet nodded. ‘Yes, Basileus. Unfortunately, several reached the fosse before we could kill the carters.’
‘We will run out of fosse long before he runs out of bodies to sacrifice, I fear.’ The emperor shook his head. He could hardly lift his eyes from the tall heap of earth, wood and stones in the ditch below the tower. Each day it swelled and each day he came to this spot to gaze at it like a man examining a cancerous mole. He thought to himself, ‘Such a harmless little pile of soil but it shall kill us all the same.’
As always, the look on Giustiniani’s face was one of grim determination. ‘Tonight they will likely send an escort with the carts. Then we shall have a fight instead of a massacre, and we can ill afford to lose a single man.’
It was still merely a handful of weeks since the flamboyant Genoese condottiero had landed with his mercenaries and yet the emperor already had more confidence in his counsel than that of his native officers.
In part this was due to the air of extreme capability Giustiniani exuded, but it also stemmed from the troubling suspicions recently raised against the loyalty of Loukas Notaras, the megas doux, the former commander of the Byzantine navy.
‘Numbers,’ Emperor Constantine murmured. ‘Always the numbers are stacked against us.’
‘Time, Basileus,’ said Giustiniani. ‘That is the number on our side. As it lengthens, so our hopes improve, and the seeds of doubt begin to germinate in the minds of the Turks. Soon they will begin to ask themselves: how long before a Venetian fleet arrives? How long before there is revolt in a remote sanjak? How long before their neglected farms guarantee a perilously hungry winter?’
‘And what are the answers to those questions, eh Protostrator? How long must this wall hold them back before that comes to pass?’ The emperor’s brow lifted with the question. There was an almost pleading quality to his voice.
‘Only God knows, Basileus, and he isn’t telling.’
‘God and the Venetians,’ Constantine said. ‘Minotto informs us that their senate will vote on the matter of a relief fleet this week.’
‘He’s guessing, Basileus, or says whatever will please you. Take it from me, the Venetians wrote Constantinople off long ago. If they were going to send troops, the time to do so was before the Turks were at the walls.’
Constantine gave a pained smile. ‘Let us pray Sultan Mehmed is not so sure as you on that.’
‘Indeed, Basileus. To that end, when I have the men parade the banners along the wall each morning, I ensure the lion of Venice is prominent among them.’
Constantine cast a last glance over the Ottoman camp. From that height its myriad tents set out a whirling pattern of colour across the dull brown dust. Closest to the walls a jagged line of earthworks and ditches marked the camp tideline where labourers could be seen, busy as ants, clawing out the soil to fill that night’s carts and erecting wicker screens around canon entrenchments. Already it was many times larger and far better organized than anything Giustiniani had seen in his long career.
Lingering with the other imperial ministers, Sphrantzes gave a cough from the back of the room. Constantine acknowledged it with a nod of his head. ‘Yes, time we were moving on.’
He smiled at Giustiniani and patted his arm in a gesture somewhere between understanding and sympathy. ‘God be with you, Protostrator,’ he said, then swept from the tower room, down a sheltered staircase and onto the inner wall rampart, pursued by a dozen-strong entourage of his courtiers.
As he moved along the wall-walk, the emperor was afforded a very different view on his right: Constantinople, the prize the horde to his left had come to claim.
In truth it seemed scant reward. The distant, spreading dome of Hagia Sofia and the dozens of smaller bell towers and spires clustered about that great basilica were separated from his position on the Theodesian walls by acres of tangled woodland and abandoned settlements.
None the less, there was an eerie beauty to the belt of nature that had reclaimed what the citizenry had abandoned, and there was strength to be drawn from it too. He knew, better than most, of the deer and game to be found there; of the houses, sacked two centuries prior, still falling to pieces under the gloomy canopy, their doors and window frames girdled in wild berries. God, in His wisdom, had prepared a vast larder of supplies for His troops right at the front line of this holy war, to say nothing of the fish in the Golden Horn and fresh water in the ancient subterranean cisterns. His city would not fall from hunger.
‘Giustiniani is right,’ thought Constantine. ‘War is waiting. If we can hold on long enough, if we can husband our meager forces with the efficiency of a peasant wife, if this great stone cliff can give us shelter from their war machines, then maybe, maybe we can win.’
Hope was not unreasonable. The walls of Constantinople had seen invaders come and go for a thousand years, turning back Avars and Arabs, Bulgars and Rus, and in all those centuries not once had the land wall been breached.
In form, it was a double set, with the outer rampart lower than the inner to afford a clear field of fire to both.
A courtyard of near sixty foot spanned the gap between. Originally intended for the mustering of bright-armoured legionaries, it had been annointed with the grand title of peribolos, but the disheveled mercenaries who currently slept, ate and pissed in it simply called it ‘the yard.’
A raceme of towers sprouted, interspersed, along the two lines of limestone from the Marmara shore right to the palace complex at Blachernae.
Halfway along those lines the land sagged, exhausted, into the shallow dip of a river valley. Here, at the heart of the defences known as the mesoteichion, could be found the St Romanus Gate, Giustiniani’s contingent of Genoese, and one embittered Scotsman.
A vaulted casemate beneath the parapet of the outer wall was Grant’s home now, a grimy blanket pegged limply across its front to give it the pathetic affectation of
a campaign tent.
Through the gap left by the too-small blanket, he watched the men sat about the dusty yard. A few had managed to sleep in the pleasant morning sun but most fidgeted with empty stares, still haunted by the night’s memories.
It did not take much to make a killer. The threat to homes and families had quickened the sword arms of these ordinary townspeople. They had followed Grant and the other veterans in the darkness, falling upon the unarmed carters, hacking and stabbing in holy, blessed homicide; but now, in the light of morning, the full horror of their deeds came seeping into their minds. The images and sounds, branded upon their souls, reappeared each time they closed their tired eyes: the bleating echo of a victim’s pleas, the reflection of their own mortality glimpsed in panic-widened eyes; a confused maelstrom of guilt and fear. It was easy to kill; harder to live with the killing.
Without ceremony, the blanket was roughly pulled aside, and Grant looked up from his thoughts into the scarred face of his second, Isnardo Fieschi. ‘The women are here again,’ said the Genoese veteran.
‘Go away!’
‘Wouldn’t hurt to show your face. They’re handing out bread. I’ll have your share if you’ll not eat it.’
‘I’m busy,’ Grant said with a warning glare. Fieschi just grinned and gave a theatrical glance around the small, empty space.
‘Yes, clearly you’re half way through building us a flying machine. She’s wearing blue, by the way. Stands out from the drab fishwives like a ruby in a midden trench.’
‘Rubies are red, you ignorant whoreson, sapphires are blue,’ Grant snapped.
‘Ah, so it’s poetry you’re composing in here!’ Fieschi gave a merciless laugh and ducked back out past the blanket.
Grant turned to the rear wall and snatched the wineskin from where it dangled from a bent nail head. The mixture inside was a fetid brew, but it served a purpose. Behind him the blanket flapped open again.
‘Look, I don’t know if it’s possible to mess up your ugly face any more, but I’m prepared to give it a fair go!’ He turned around, but it was not Fieschi standing in his doorway.
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