‘Calm, sister!’ he said. ‘I’ll not even tell him you were here. Just give your brother a kiss and tell him how dashing he looks in his armour.’ He gave his cloak a theatrical twirl.
He was a handsome youth and Anna was sure more than one of her party of ladies held a candle for him, but humility was not among his strengths.
‘It will look a mite less dashing if the Janissaries part your head from it.’ She gave him a sisterly clip around the side of the head. ‘Promise me you won’t be rash. It takes more than a cloak and a sword to make a soldier.’
‘I’m no fool, Anna. I shall leave all the real fighting to your savage and keep watch over the ladies left lonely in their homes.’ He gave a lascivious glance towards the women waiting with Zenobia under one of the pines. His attention was all for them and his voice was full of disinterest as he said, ‘With luck the worst thing I will see is a suicide like today.’
‘A suicide?’ said Anna.
‘That’s where Father and Iagaris are now. A body was found this morning at the baths. Someone must have cracked when the guns began to fire or when the fleet appeared. Did you know the Turk ships rowed into the Marmara this morning?’
‘No.’
‘They say the fleet is so numerous you could walk from Anatolia to Christendom across their decks.’ He was back to being a child – fighting imaginary campaigns on his chamber floor.
‘The sultan can sail all the galleys he cares to up the Marmara,’ Anna said. ‘They still cannot pass into the Horn while the chain blocks that passage.’
‘You sound like Father,’ said Jacob. He was right, she realised. She had spent so much time around the megas doux that she knew more about the city’s defences than most of his own troops.
‘Which baths?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The suicide, in which loutros was it discovered?’
‘Arcadius! Can you believe it, our local baths!’ he grinned. ‘Just think, the loutros we’ve been in so many times is now probably caked in blood!’
When Anna and Zenobia reached the loutros, they discovered a crowd had gathered at the heavy double entrance doors, held back from indulging morbid curiosity by a worried-looking soldier.
He wore the same lamella cuirass and crimson cloak as Anna’s brother, and it was equally out of place on him, she thought. John Grant had become her yardstick for a warrior and few among the Greeks could physically measure up to it.
Anna glided through the onlookers, trailed as always by her comet tail, Zenobia.
‘Is my father inside?’ Anna demanded of the sentry. He gave her a sheepish look, a ghost of a nod and stood aside.
Reluctantly, Zenobia stepped after the vanishing silks of her mistress, through the narrow footway from the street and into the covered portico of the main atrium.
The bathhouse felt eerily dark and silent. The air hung musty and stale. A disturbed set of insect wings quivered past Zenobia’s nose. Warding her face with one hand she said, ‘Despoina, I think it would be wise to await His Grace outside.’ She spoke in vain. Anna had disappeared into the gloom.
Beyond the atrium, a narrow stone passage led to the inner baths: the hot plunge pool of the caldarium, the cold swimming bath of the frigidarium and the warm tepidarium chamber in between.
The walls of the tepidarium were patterned by a hunting fresco, one Anna had seen on many previous visits throughout her childhood, the faces and forms as familiar as relatives. Despite the darkness of the chamber as she passed through it, the scene remained bright and vivid in her mind’s eye, right down to the head of one unfortunate hound, chipped long ago by a careless porter and never repaired.
It was not yet noon. The sun should be pouring in from the high windows on the left side of the chamber and playing across the fresco, but the shutters were bolted firmly in place.
‘The baths were closed,’ Anna murmured as they crossed the dark tepidarium towards the frigidarium’s archway, where the dull glow of lamp light flickered.
Zenobia, close enough to hear, said, ‘Of course, Despoina. The men are all at the wall. The furnaces cannot stoke themselves.’
Black as a pupil, a silhouetted figure filled the glowing iris of the portal ahead, as if their trespassing voices had drawn the gaze of the room beyond.
Zenobia gasped in fright. Anna laughed. ‘It is Iagaris, Zen, not a ghoul – although the difference is subtle, I grant you.’
She had hoped to avoid her father’s stratopedarch. There had been a time when, still early in her womanhood and novice to male flattery, the obsequious attentions of Iagaris had held a charm. Unrequited, they had swiftly become oppressive, and his infatuation had curdled into thinly disguised hatred.
‘I thought I heard voices,’ Iagaris said. ‘You should not be in here.’ Anna felt the prickle of sudden alarm. What if her father had gone and left Iagaris to tie up loose ends? If he grabbed her and dragged her into the darkness would Zenobia be able to do a thing?
Her father’s voice called from the chamber beyond, ‘Who is it, Manuel?’
For a few heartbeats Iagaris remained silent. Anna could almost see his blunt mind considering the possibilities, so before he could act, she sang out, ‘It is Anna, Father.’
‘Anna? Stay outside! Do not come in here!’ the megas doux said, his voice full of alarm. If he had given even a moment’s thought to his words, he would have realised the inevitability of what his wilful daughter would do next.
In a single, fluid step, Anna had ducked under the bar of Iagaris’s arm and slipped into the tiled chamber of the frigidarium.
Three sentries from the reserve stood around her father, each bearing a lantern. The body lay beside the watery circle of the deep plunge bath from which it had been recovered; a cloak, thrown over in a gesture of modesty, failed to hide a pair of pale limbs, limply sprawling across the tiles from beneath.
A heavy blacksmith’s whetstone lay incongruously next to the pallid feet; a cord of damp rope trailed from its hollow centre and disappeared back into the water.
The megas doux, stepping across her view of the corpse, said, ‘There is no need for you to see this.’
‘Who is it?’ she said. She sensed it was someone of significance – why else would her father attend in person.
The megas doux sighed. ‘It is Baltus,’ he said gently.
A groan heaved into echo from behind Anna’s shoulder. Zenobia covered her mouth and bolted from the doorway.
A numbness flooded Anna’s core. Baltus. Baltus was her father’s seneschal; a fixture in their household since before her birth.
‘This is not a sight fit for a lady,’ Loukas Notaras said and gently placed a hand around her shoulder. She wanted to cling to him at that moment, a childhood reflex she shook off with some difficulty.
‘There will be worse sights to come,’ she said. ‘The better I should grow accustomed to them now.’
‘Go home, my child,’ said the megas doux. ‘Tell your mother what has happened here. We shall say prayers for Baltus as a family later.’
This time she obeyed him. She walked slowly from the room, back through the dark chambers to ashen-faced Zenobia and the questions of the curious crowd.
Had the light in the tepidarium been stronger, she would not have missed the fact that the faces of all the people on the mural were now as chipped and marred as the unfortunate hound.
XX.
Shaded from the heat of the day in a bower of tall cedars, the vista of the Horn’s watery carpet lay eerily quiet before her. There should have been a dozen small boats scattered like seeds across the mirror surface, hauling in nets of fish for the evening market, but instead the shimmering waters lay undisturbed and the fishing boats moored, sad and abandoned, inside the harbour wall.
Now, instead of skiffs ferrying passengers to Pera, only a metal chain crossed the mouth of the Horn; its heavy links, thick as oxen, strung low above the water, completely cutting off the little inlet from the passing Bosporus where the da
rk shadows of Turk galleys lurked in the churning waters.
It had been Anna’s choice to meet on the acropolis headland. These trees had shaded her childhood lessons with Plethon, and now, with so much in peril, that connection to calmer times seemed a balm for her nerves.
As with those past lessons, it was Plethon, the old philosopher, who hoarded most of the conversation.
‘Ah! The sea breeze is good for these old lungs,’ he said and leaned back against the cedar trunk. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, pulled down to shade his face; she might have thought him napping, except he had hardly stopped talking from the moment they sat down. ‘Shall I tell you how I have been passing my time these past days, Anna? I have been learning about boats.’
He thrust out a hand and pointed towards the small flotilla of Italian vessels that floated on guard beyond the chain.
‘Do you see the largest, with the flag of Genoa? That is the Gataloxa, under the captain Zorzi Doria, and based on their fascinating system of measures it is classed as two-and-a-half-thousand botte.’
‘Fascinating,’ Anna repeated, in a tone that left no doubt she found it anything but.
Speaking with Plethon was often this way. Like catching a big fish, someone had once joked: you let him take the bait on whichever subject he wished to show off, then let him run on until the breath was out of him and he was on your line, drained of other thoughts, for you to do with as you wished.
‘That one there is the Filomati, from Candia and her sister ship, the Guro, is about here somewhere too. Ah, there, on the far end of the chain. Six-hundred botte each.’
‘And the heathen boats?’ said Anna, giving a metaphorical tug on the line to see if he was ready to flounder.
‘Ah, well, the Turk ships are rather less impressive. I cannot say I have given them much thought.’
Like Plethon, she had also meant to ignore the Ottoman fleet, but Anna’s eyes were inevitably drawn in that direction time after time. They were smaller vessels than the high-sided Genoese cogs and Venetian galleons, but what they lacked in size they made up for in number. An insect swarm, bristling with oars that could propel them across the surface at alarming speed.
Their hive was the promontory known as the Triple Columns, hidden from Anna’s sight beyond the Pera headland.
All morning she had seen them buzz into view, sculling towards the defending fleet in feigned attacks and drawing the occasional warning shot from a small cannon near the seawall. The shots had all fallen short, with the impotence of a watchdog’s yap towards a cat poised smugly beyond the reach of its chain.
‘You may be pleased to hear that I have been rereading the Illiad. It seemed appropriate,’ said Anna, turning towards Plethon with a smile that begged approval.
From under the hat, the reply came typically tart. ‘A rather obvious parallel, my dear, but I recall the Greeks were on the other side of the walls in that one. If our outcome is to be the same, then perhaps Euripides would have been better preparation than Homer. Do you see yourself as Cassandra or have you the arrogance to ape at Helen? I rather think you do.’
From another it might have come as bitter insult, but the fact that neither prince nor pauper was spared Plethon’s verbal barbs drew their sting. If you required nothing but compliments, you did not invite Plethon to your picnic.
Anna, weather-sealed to his salt, said playfully, ‘I had Andromache in my mind.’
Plethon barked with laughter. ‘Then I think I was wasting my time when I taught that work to you.’
‘Surely there is a message in it for us,’ said Anna. ‘Here we sit, in a Greek city, practically on the ashes of Troy, with a modern Agamemnon at our walls. How like the sea does fortune ebb and run! The current flowed with us for centuries. We spread, we covered lands and washed away rivals, but a tide always turns; Manzikert, Nicopolis, Varna. The waves began beating against us long ago. The tide now flows firmly for Asia.’
The old philosopher chuckled. ‘Nothing like oblivion’s cusp to put a mind into a reflective mood.’
‘And you think this is to be our oblivion?’ she said.
He pushed the brim of his hat up and gave a kindly smile. ‘Life persists, Anna. It changes, shrinks and grows, but life always persists. Regardless whether it is Constantine or Mehmed who prevails, there will be change. After decades of stagnation, that cannot be altogether bad.’
‘I fail to see either outcome deserving of much celebration,’ said Anna. ‘Constantine has already tossed our spiritual sanctity away, and for what? Where is the promised Papal fleet?’ She waved a contemptuous hand towards the Bosporus. ‘All the key points of the city are under Genoese guard. What could be simpler for them than to grab power as soon as the Turk banners disappear?’
‘Your thoughts contradict themselves,’ said Plethon. ‘Are you asking for more or fewer mercenaries? You scorn the Latins and yet you give your heart to one.’
She recoiled hotly at the suggestion. ‘I do not!’
Plethon had a way of making a smile spread ever so slowly across his lips. She had always found it infuriating but never more so than now.
Before either of them chose to speak again, the sound of a hubbub drifted from higher up the headland’s grass slope, and the raised, excited voices drew their attention.
Looking up, Anna could see Zenobia and the other court ladies on their feet, pointing to sea and calling out to one another. She followed their gaze, straining her eyes across the boundless, solemn surface of the Marmara towards the hazy border of sea and sky. It was a moment before she made out the shape that had stirred such excitement higher up the slope, but when it did reveal itself to her, it provoked no less delight.
A sail, no more than a tiny square of white at first, brilliant against the fuzzy blue esturary of sea and sky.
She dared not breathe for fear it would somehow blow away the sail as it slowly swelled and grew.
No one spoke. No one moved. After a time, she could make out the high-sided wooden hull plunging and rising with such violence as it raced up the straight.
A squall of wind off a headland caught in the sails, sending them billowing, and for the first time she registered the great cross of red splashed serenely across the canvas; the mark of St George. A crusader cross to strike fear into any heathen heart.
And now, beyond the first, Anna made out the blurred shapes of other ships. Her eyes widened as she felt the surge of an unconfined joy known only to the stricken as they lay sight on rescue. ‘Genoa!’ she cried with all her lungs, ‘Genoa!’
All her paranoia at Giustiniani’s intentions, all fear of a Latin coup dissolved, momentarily, amid the flood of elation stirred in her heart by an ivory and crimson sail.
They had come, they had really come! After all the politics and posturing, after the protestations of neutrality and playing the larger picture with the sultan; they had honoured their word, they had placed Christian brotherhood before profit and sent out the fleet to relieve beset Constantinople.
Her mind played out the scene for itself: a hundred more sails cleaving the horizon then swiftly decimating the blockade; a host of glittering knights disembarking to sweep, triumphant, from the St Romanus Gate; the Turks, fleeing for the mountains like mice before a broom.
The elation was repeated all around. Men and women danced about with wild, childish excitement and, joyous as wedding bells, the Marmara-facing carillions began to ring out.
Yet something was not quite right. After the initial surge of delight, Anna began to detect a sobered tone descending from the slope above.
The blurred sails on the horizon ceased their multiplication. There were a mere three in the wake of the first – hardly the relieving fleet of her dreams. Four ships. Just four. And the Turks did not sit idly by.
The leading Genoese ship held a course for the gap just before the acropolis headland, where the coastal gun’s coverage left a chink in the blockade, but already the repeated cry of orders could be heard, passing across the waters from
the Turk flagship, and the first oared galley was maneuvering to seal that space.
The ring of bells had brought a crowd out to grandstand on the point. Now the dark brown hull of the ship was clear beneath its great white and red sail and someone named it as the Friuli, a regular on the Caffa run and captained by Francesco Leconella.
‘Come on,’ Anna quietly implored to the boats. ‘Faster!’
But even as the Friuli and the three other cogs came steadily towards them, more and more insect-limbed galleys began to narrow the opening, stroke by bristling stroke.
The cannon boomed again, pluming the waters before the nearest of the galleys with a stern reminder.
All the while the Friuli closed in, ignoring the perfunctory command from the phalanx of Turk vessels to heave to.
From Anna’s position it seemed as if Leconella was holding a course directly for their cedar tree. It was clear he planned to skirt close to the rocky foreshore and then jibe sharply into the Golden Horn.
All four ships were running the gauntlet now, peppered by fire from the galleys, but holding steady towards the safety of the Christian flotilla, which waited impotently at the boom. They had the double advantage of a southern wind and the protection of their higher-sided hulls.
There could hardly have been more contrast in design than between the long, sleek, oared Turk galleys, which, fully loaded with men, cleared the waterline by only two feet, and the rounder Italian carracks, built to weather heavy seas and pirate attack.
Slaves would be manning the oars of the Turk vessels, and Anna prayed they might contrive to wash out enough of their strokes to check the pursuit and allow their Christian breathren onboard the carracks to escape.
There was no such hesitation up on the galley foredecks, where the Turk marines keened like greyhounds for a chance to board the oncoming boats.
The tiny convoy desperately followed in Leconella’s wake, but Anna could see it was too late. The straight was closed off and the coastal battery dared not fire again for fear of hitting a Genoese boat. Leconella had little option but to hold his course and ram the blockade.
Porphyry and Ash Page 19
