Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  The female figure wore a dull green gown (not blue, thank all heaven’s angels) and clutched a basket of loaves. The expression of shock was etched across a familiar, veil-encircled face. Grant winced and said, ‘Christ’s arse! I’m sorry Zenobia, I thought you were somebody else.’

  ‘Would you like me to pass the message on then?’ Zenobia said tartly. Her eyes had fallen immediately upon the dirty wineskin clutched between his meaty fingers.

  Grant sighed and shook his head. ‘No... my sergeant… oh, never mind. What brings you to my castle?’ He wafted a hand towards the decrepit brickwork. The space was barely large enough for them both to stand with any sense of decorum; he became suddenly aware how rancid his breath must smell.

  ‘She wants to know how you fair,’ said Zenobia. ‘The despoina does have a care for you.’

  ‘She’d a funny way of showing that when last we spoke,’ Grant muttered.

  He did not want to go over this ground. He could feel a sweat gathering beneath the surface of his skin at the prospect. It would be more comfortable to face the Turks beyond the wall, but Zenobia appeared determined to engage, and unlike a Turk she could not be driven off with a sword.

  ‘Can you not understand?’ said Zenobia with a sigh. ‘Are you too thick skulled? We are not free to choose our station in life. You and her – it could never be in that way – but that does not prevent her holding you kindly in her thoughts.’

  Through all his years of combat he had come to know agony, but this was a new torment and one he found impossible to stand. She had him trapped in the dark, stony corner with no way to elude the sting of her tongue. He did not want to relive the despair of cold truth crushing the mirage of dream. He did not want to consider any of it. He wanted Zenobia – and all the memories that clung about her like furies – gone.

  Desperation barbed his tongue. ‘Must you twist the knife? Am I to be punished for trying to steal Olympian fire and you’re the eagle charged with tearing my heart out each morning? Will you pick over the corpses with the crows until there’s news for her? You can see I live for now, I’m well enough, so be off with you!’

  Zenobia did not flinch. She opened her mouth to speak and then checked herself. For a moment she remained rooted as a statue, her eyes never dropping their quiet challenge.

  The silence in the casemate lingered, and then at last the handmaiden calmly took a knot of bread from her basket and placed it on a nearby stool. Her delicate hand moved to draw back the blanket. Zenobia began to pass through, to leave him to his brooding, and then paused.

  With the dignity of Sheba, she said, ‘I am grateful to you, still. I’m not sure I ever got to tell you that. You did not need to fight for Constantinople, but you have chosen to. We need true knights to defend us and here you are, of your own free will. To my mind that ranks you higher than any titled archon. Now those boys outside will need a true knight to follow, once their friends start dying like flies. They’ve little use for a drunk, bitter wreck.’

  ‘Is that your report for Anna? A drunk, bitter wreck?’

  Zenobia shook her head. ‘I’m not in the habit of needlessly shattering illusions. Perhaps you consider it a feat of courage, to be on that wall when the attacks begin but you should try waiting back in the city, ignorant as to how the battle progresses, powerless to do anything but sit and pray and worry. Every footstep, every shout eats at your nerves until you would gladly throw open the gates and have done with it. I’ve lived through a siege. I know what’s in store. Now, that sweet girl is about to learn it soon enough, and when she does, it will be the thought of you on the wall that she clings to. It will be the small comfort that you are standing between her and the devils who’d misuse her body and destroy her world that keeps her from taking an unholy escape. So no, I shall not rob her of her ideal. Be sure you start living up to it.’

  She did not wait for a reply. The blanket flapped back over the casemate entrance and Grant was alone once more in his gloomy cave.

  Later, when he did emerge into the daylight, the women were gone. He stood in the warm sunshine and felt the cold gaze of his men upon him and shame welled up inside. In all his years of fighting, cowardice was not a charge that could ever have been laid at the feet of John Grant. Yet here he was, reduced to hiding from a woman behind a blanket. Did they know? Did they judge him?

  ‘They’re all looking daggers at you,’ Fieschi said, appearing at his heels like a faithful hound. For a moment Grant credited him with mind reading, then he saw the Genoese sergeant had indicated the trio of ragged figures squatting in the dust at the rear of the yard. They were Turks, taken prisoner in the prior night’s sortie against the carts.

  The anger Grant felt towards himself crept into the edge of his voice unintentionally. ‘Why are they still here?’ he snapped. ‘Kantakouzenos oversees prisoners. Get one of his blasted Greeks to come and collect them.’

  His next words were lost in the booming roar that broke the morning air. The men in the yard, who moments before had been slumbering or telling tales, were now grabbing at helmets and weapons in panic.

  Grant had heard cannon fire before but even those who had not seemed by instinct to recognise the sound. Bodies scurried up the battlement steps, while a few stood frozen in fear.

  A second, more distant boom echoed across the sky, sounding more like the grumble of thunder. They never heard the impact.

  Grant looked down the line and saw the plume of dust rising from the wall where the first shot had struck. He had the strange sensation of being witness to something he was not a part of, an almost out-of-body detachment.

  Another boom rang out. This time Grant heard the whistle of the gunstone before it smashed into a tower two down from their position. The brickwork around them shivered. Dust and small fragments of stone began to fall like a gentle rain.

  ‘It takes the gun crews a long time to reload,’ Fieschi said in reassurance. ‘The barrels must cool, or they might misfire and explode.’

  A voice, thick with disdain, rang out at them from among the prisoners hunched in the dirt. ‘Each shot is a prayer to Allah, so each cannon shall fire five times a day.’

  ‘Five shots a day? Then it’ll take them forever to breach these walls,’ said Grant turning towards the wretch with a cocky smile. The dust pall had cleared from the nearby tower strike and he could see the stonework was scorched and chipped but otherwise unbroken. Several direct hits would be required, all in the same place, to open a breach, and in all the sieges he had known, he had never come across a cannon that accurate.

  The Turk gave an unnerving laugh at this hubris. ‘You’ll see, dog. Go stand on your wall and count the cannons facing you. They number more than ever went to war before. And something else you should know; The padishah’s cannon master claims to be the finest of his craft. To prove this, he has created a monster gun, larger than anything your nightmare can conjure. They call it the Basilica, and when it fires, you shall know the sound of hell’s gates opening.’

  XIX.

  The gaggle of ladies hurried along the road from Chora, quickening their steps now that the gunfire had commenced. Earlier, when they had come this way in the dawn’s early light, there had been an empty tranquility to the landscape. The fields and abandoned houses of the city’s hinterland seemed untouched by the concerns of mankind. The gentle serenade of birdsong, the low chirp of insects and the delicate sigh of the wind through the long grass were the only sounds. The road, a livid brown scar across the green, had lain empty before them as the laughing girls skipped along it, dressing their hair with flowers, careless to the burden of their fruit-filled baskets. The imminent threat beyond the looming walls made everything within seem the more precious.

  Now, as the growing heat of the day burned off the morning’s cooling mist, they scampered away from the white cliff, chased by phantom fears.

  The cannon fire had scuffed the top off an ant nest of defenders. Trumpet calls had replaced the birdsong, messenger riders galloped pas
t down the roadway and the breeze carried the faint whiff of smoke.

  ‘We must take food to them again tomorrow,’ Anna resolved aloud as she marched at the head of the group bedside her faithful handmaiden Zenobia. ‘No matter the cannon fire, we must bring them something to keep their spirits up.’

  ‘Despoina,' said Zenobia, ‘I will happily take them something again, but you must promise me this was your last journey to the wall.’

  Set in the smooth kaolin clay of the younger woman’s face, the hazel eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘Don’t be foolish, Zenobia. You are not going to keep me hidden away like that.’

  Zenobia knew her mistress well enough to see when a course had been mentally set from which nothing would divert her. Stubbornness was a Notaras family trait, but it had taken root most firmly in the youngest daughter.

  Nonetheless, it was her duty to keep Anna safe, and so she said, ‘Perhaps then it would be wiser for us to take food as far as Chora next time. Then the soldiers could send some of their number to fetch it from the monastery as they see fit.’

  ‘That would rob them of men on the wall,’ Anna pointed out.

  ‘We will only get in their way or prove a distraction if we go strolling about like we did today.’ Zenobia paused, unsure whether to say anything more. ‘He won’t see you,’ she wanted to say. ‘He is a sulking child who does not accept the world for the disappointment it brings, and so he won’t face you.’ Instead she bit her tongue, as she so often did.

  ‘I shall go and see Giustiniani about it,’ said Anna after a moment’s thought. ‘I will ask him what arrangements he would prefer. We are all in his hands now.’

  That of course was a sore point with the Notaras household. To see the city’s care placed into the hands of a Latin foreigner and Loukas Notaras reduced to guarding the baggage was quite intolerable.

  If Zenobia knew anything of her mistress, it was not a situation she could leave uncontested. ‘And what about your father?’ she asked. ‘Will you be petitioning the protostrator in that regard?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Anna. ‘It breaks my heart to see Father so abused. Demoted on the strength of malicious hearsay. He of all men should be prominent at the wall, not skulking at the rear. What a petty man Constantine can be!’

  ‘Despoina, please! I beg you, choose your words more carefully as regards the emperor.’

  Anna laughed. ‘Oh Zen, why change now the heathen are here to cut all our pretty heads off!’

  An enormous crack of thunder rang out behind them, causing every one of the group to jump.

  The sky was clear. The only cloud, newly appeared, rose from the wall; a blooming, billowing tower of dust that built upon itself like an unbottled genie. Some of the other ladies began to run to panic.

  ‘Sacred Theotokos! Do you think they just broke through?’ quailed the youngest of the group.

  ‘That was much louder than any of the other shots,’ said another.

  ‘It sounded like the whole wall was brought down!’

  Although she was the least well born of the party, Zenobia felt her station elevated somewhat by association to her mistress and by the seniority of her age, being as she was at least two decades older than the others, none of whom would be able to recall the last siege.

  She considered it her duty to steady their anxiety, so said, with an authority she hardly felt, ‘No. You can see the towers, they all still stand. We must put our faith in God and in our brave men. The wall will hold even against the most monstrous of machines.’

  ‘Yes, that is correct,’ said Anna. ‘The bells would ring if the wall had been breached. It was just another blow turned aside. Now, let us prove our faith by walking on without looking back. We are Byzantines, let us show heaven we have not forgotten what that means.’

  With gritted teeth, Anna was herself fighting down the urge to run, but she knew the others were looking to her for example; she knew the burden of the family name. A Notaras did not panic, a Notaras did not flee in terror or flinch at the sound of war. Although her palms were clammy and her legs robbed of strength, she willed herself on down the road ahead of the others.

  Another boom rang out, smaller than the last, which only served to amplify the size of the previous explosion in the memory.

  Each of their anguished minds conjured up hoards of wild-eyed, bearded ghazi bearing down on them with every passing moment.

  ‘We should go to the nearest church and pray,’ someone said. ‘If they do break through, perhaps they will spare those they found in a holy sanctuary.’

  ‘They will not!’ Anna snapped in a colder tone than she had intended. She touched the girl on the arm and forced herself to smile as warmly as she could manage. ‘Their religious law is firm on this matter,’ she explained. ‘When the Moslems take a city, their warriors must be given three days of pillage. Even if their sultan wanted to show mercy, his hands would be tied before the fourth dawn.’

  As she spoke, she heard the dull thud of hoof beats on the road behind. A couple of the girls wailed in fright.

  ‘It is one of ours,’ she told herself. She wanted desperately to turn around and check but controlled that urge. ‘I am not Lot’s wife, I am Anna Notaras. I will not be ruled by fear.’

  The four-beat drum on the earth was echoed by her pulse, both seemingly increasing in intensity with every hoof strike. She drew her back straight, extended her neck and waited for fate’s arrival. Then, enveloped in a whiff of dung and horseflesh, the rider flew past at the gallop; she did not even register what colours he wore.

  Ahead, a mile and more behind the wall, borne up by the city’s fourth hill, the Church of the Holy Apostles marked the island of her father’s exile.

  By rights, as megas doux, Loukas Notaras should have been in command of the small flotilla of ships holding the Horn waters, but a month before, during the second week of lent, a rumour had swept the court. The city’s cloisters and wharfs, the chanceries and brothels, the wall-walks and forums and taverns were soon all thick with the story that, unbenknownst to the emperor, the megas doux had been in negotiation with the Turks.

  Had the evidence been stronger, Loukas Notaras might even have lost his head for it, but there was no evidence, only an anonymous tongue, which, like a careless flame, had ignited the forest fire of rumour and was now untraceable among the blaze.

  Still, there was enough in the rumour to rattle the emperor’s confidence. Notaras remained titularly megas doux, but his military responsiblilities were reduced to a brief of maintaining civil order among the remaining population of women, children and the infirm. It was, Anna felt, a devastatingly callous blow to his civic pride.

  When Anna and her party arrived at the dilapidated church, she found most of the men of her father’s reserve sitting idly around their camp but no sign of the megas doux.

  She had always admired Holy Apostles, with its soaring arches and floating central dome. She had always felt an excitement there, close to the mausoleums of the very greatest of emperors.

  Once, it had been a splendid monument to imperial greatness, mimicked by the Venetians when they sought a template for their own ducal palace. Now it lay dilapidated and abandoned; ‘A fitting reflection,’ she thought bitterly, ‘of a broader decline.’

  Well clear of the range of the cannon, the reserve was the safest military posting, and so it was little wonder to discover its ranks made up entirely of the sons of influential courtiers. Anna knew every one of them. Two were married to her sisters and one was her brother, Jacob, who accosted her as she crossed the churchyard.

  ‘Did you hear it? You must have heard it!’ he said with a puppy-dog grin.

  ‘Heard what?’ said Anna, looking over Jacob’s head in search of the megas doux. ‘Where is Father?’

  ‘The great gun! We heard it even here. You must have been much closer.’

  ‘I heard it,’ she said and felt herself almost burst with anger at his glib enthusiasm. ‘Are you not ashamed that your sister has seen more
of the front line than you?’

  She looked at him then and even though he wore the garb of battle, he had never looked more like a fragile child in her eyes.

  It was all still a game to him. Sitting with his friends in the sunshine among the scent of stone pines and freshly baked psomi it was easy for them to talk of the Turk war machine as something distant and detached from their lives. He did not wear the same look as those men she had served food to not an hour past. Their hollow expressions and distant stares, their ghostly smiles, those she understood to be the true raiment of the warrior.

  ‘No one forced you to take that risk,’ Jacob said, his pride bleeding out in his wounded tone. ‘If Father knew you went there, he would lock you up in the Holy Apostles crypt. Be thankful I have not told him.’ He paused and then out of pure spite added, ‘Did you see your foreign lover?’

  The colour in Anna’s face pooled and heightened. ‘Faith! For the last time, he is not my lover!’ she said before she could control her tone.

  ‘Oh no? Then why did you walk all that way and almost get blown to pieces?’

  He was baiting her now for the benefit of an audience. She could see the grins among his comrades at the corner of her vision. They would all have a good laugh together about this later.

  ‘We all need to play our part in this war,’ she replied. ‘I may not be allowed to ride a horse and pretend to be a soldier like you, but I can still help.’ She looked around pointedly at the others. ‘I can take food to real soldiers.’

  A few of the young men avoided her stare, but Jacob just broke into a mocking laugh. ‘You always were a terrible liar, Anna. This angel of mercy act doesn’t fool me, and it won’t fool Father either.’

  ‘If you breathe a word to Father, I will make you beg them to open the gates and give you over to the Turks!’ She put enough venom into her voice that the grin briefly faded from Jacob’s face, and when it returned it lacked conviction.