Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  But now the early silence was gone, replaced by a black litany of screams and shouts and the occasional bellowed password as Greek confronted Greek.

  Already, startled Turks were appearing from shelters dug into the mud bank, breaking the line of death up into pockets of attackers.

  The raid’s impetus began to slip away as resistance grew, and the slaughter became a full-blown skirmish. The push towards the basilica, their target, became increasingly desperate.

  ‘The gun!’ Grant shouted, ‘Make for the gun!’

  More and more artillerists were left alive and bleeding or ignored altogether, but every swing of a blade at a body, every check of a step, was a distraction from the only victim that mattered – the fat, bronze-bodied monster slumbering in the darkness ahead – and too many of the raiders, drunk of the moment, were becoming hopelessly distracted.

  In the planning, it had been reckoned they could expect no longer than six minutes between the initial contact at the gate and the first organised response, but in the event it happened that things went awry long before the first-white capped janissary appeared.

  Somewhere behind Grant, back along the muddy trench, a dying gunner used the last of his strength to drag a log from the cook fire embers and feed it in among the black powder kegs stacked against the gun pit’s rear.

  The explosion ripped along the narrow channel like a giant’s hand, knocking Grant flat on his face and tossing those close to the blast into the air like rag dolls.

  A hailstorm of earth, twisted metal and shattered bodies showered down on Grant as he lifted himself up from the dirt.

  He looked back and saw a crater gouged into the bank where the explosion had centred and small fires of burning powder all around it. Embers came drifting in the night breeze towards him like amber snowflakes, together with the howl of dying men.

  The Basilica still lay some way beyond where the attackers had reached, but even before his head ceased to ring, he knew it was time to retreat to the fosse. Others around him knew it also, to judge by their eyes.

  A little way back, a section of the wicker screen topping the outer parapet of the trench had collapsed from the force of the blast. Climbing out there seemed his best hope of escape.

  Now the Turks resisted with the vigour of men for whom fortune had suddenly turned her grace. Nor were they just shirtless engineers and labourers armed with whatever lay to hand. There were real soldiers pouring into the fight.

  The trench became a melee and the attack dissolved into a desperate, individual scrap to escape. The first arquebus shot cracked the night like a thunder clap.

  The air above his head buzzed with an indiscriminant volley of shot. A group of janissaries had set up their fork rests along the camp-side lip of the trench and began to pepper anything that moved. Given the disparity of numbers and the confusion, they hit more of their own than the raiders.

  Grant hastened towards the smouldering gun pit crater, glanced back towards the sound of another volley and slammed into a figure rushing in the other direction, sending them both sprawling to the floor.

  ‘Daphne!’ said Grant, spitting out the password at the body lying close as a lover beside him. A look of puzzlement flickered briefly over the other man’s face, condemning him.

  He seemed to realise as much in that instant, but Grant’s reflexes were swifter.

  The Turk gasped out an undignified moan as Grant’s blade went in. The air stank briefly of his victim’s last meal as he pressed the man into the trench’s muddy floor. He shivered from the sudden release of adrenaline.

  He scrambled to his feet and dashed for the burning palisade. Around him bodies still wrestled and panted, cursed and screamed, and through the billowing smoke he spotted a figure on all fours, clawing at the dirt.

  It was the archer captain, Theodoros Karystinos, Grant knew him by the stud he wore in one ear and his scarlet and gold patterened brigandine, but his face was unrecognisable behind a blood-and-soot mask of burns. He had taken the explosion head on.

  Karystinos was mad with agony as Grant knelt beside him. ‘Theodoros! Christ! Theo, can you hear me?’

  No sign of recognition came back, only a low mewling sound. Up close, Grant could see more clearly the extent of the damage to Karystinos’s skull. The wound above the ear on one side was wide and weeping.

  Grant thought to himself, ‘He’ll die anyway, what’s the use,’ but even as he did, his hand grabbed Karystinos by the scruff of his brigandine and heaved him backwards along the muddy floor in the direction of the gap.

  Karystinos’s legs thrashed and he gave a bellow in pain. Grant tried to get a better hold under the armpits, but he was still barely dragging them both along.

  Shapes flew past, seemingly not even registering their existence among the pandemonium. Grant heard a trumpet’s shrill call then felt the hot breath of another volley of shot from the tent lines. The muddy bank of the trench puckered behind him from the impact of the arquebus balls.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw the gap was almost as far away as ever.

  Karystinos’s cries had ceased but he was still breathing noisily. ‘Just die, can’t you?’ Grant thought. He considered cutting the man’s throat to quicken his end but knew he could not bring himself to do it.

  Something clanged off the side of Grant’s barbute. A clump of arrows decorated the ground about his feet.

  The surviving artillerists were scrambling away from the gun pit, making way for the azap and janissary counterattack as it surged down into the trench line.

  The air fizzed about his ears and the body of Karystinos jerked in his grasp. The eyes that had writhed within their bloodied mask stared frozen back at him. A ball aimed for Grant had fallen short and become an unintended act of mercy.

  Grant’s own gaze sprang from the empty eyes and fell upon the marksman across the pit, and as they did, something broke within him.

  With great discipline, the janissary’s arquebus had been removed from its fork rest and new powder and ball were being fed swiftly down the muzzle, when the fog of the previous discharge parted, and the bellowing figure rushed through.

  The marksman dropped gun and powder horn and reached for his sabre, but it was far too late.

  Fluid as a two-headed viper, Grant’s left-hand bit about the janissary’s wrist and pinned it against the smaller man’s body, while the fang-sharp dagger in his right sang in vengeance for Karystinos.

  There was a blood rage on him now, an utter loss of self-control the like of which he had not suffered since his earliest days of combat. He had prided himself on becoming a swordsman of poised dexterity, a technician, a cool professional. He had learned to bottle his anger, but the stopper had come loose this time.

  He stripped the kilij sabre from the belt of the corpse at his feet and set upon his next victim – there were increasing numbers from whom to choose.

  As the last of the raiding party - among them Fieschi and Sambucuccio - scuttled through the gap in the palisade, several turned back to see how thick the pursuit would be.

  The trench resembled a bear pit. The Turks, like a pack of Molosser dogs, hung back from the barbute-capped bear in the centre, looking for an opening but fearful of the deadly swipe of his arm.

  The ground about his feet was littered with five who had proven too slow, but it would not be long before another team of marksmen appeared. Then the bear would quickly fall.

  ‘Well,’ Fieschi thought as he slipped through the fence and ran full speed for the fosse, ‘he looks to be making a good end of it all right. Die well, Scotsman.’

  But Fieschi was wrong. Grant had not set his heart on death, and even as the last Genoese backplate vanished through the gap, he was back-stepping, carefully, in retreat. No one wants to be the last to die in a skirmish, and the individual Turks, seeing the raiding party all driven off and this nightmare in armour making to follow, were content to let him go.

  Despite the lack of pursuit, Grant did not stop running
until he reached the long grass at the edge of the fosse.

  As he neared the abandoned wagon, he almost tripped over a body crouched in the grasses.

  ‘Daphne!’ Grant hissed out in shock. The figure seemed oblivious to him. The man was crying and tearing the ground up in clumps. After his initial surprise waned, Grant recognised Boccanegra.

  ‘I lacked the courage!’ Boccanegra sobbed. ‘I lacked the courage to face them! I wanted to. You must believe me! I thought I could but… Oh Mother! I lacked the courage!’

  A sudden and powerful feeling of disgust washed over Grant. ‘You mean to say you’ve been here this whole bloody time? You hid while we were dying in that ditch! What kind of soldier are you!’

  He grabbed Boccanegra by the throat and wanted to slash the kilij into the Latin, but just as quickly as it came upon him, the storm of anger subsided. He released Boccanegra and slumped down beside him.

  ‘I’m not a soldier. Just a liar,’ said Boccanegra, rubbing at his neck. ‘I thought I could be. My family were all soldiers. My mother always said it was in our blood. I really believed I could be one too, but my body betrayed me. I just froze. When you all left me, I could not move. I lacked the courage, God forgive me!’

  Grant’s eyes were full of tears. He was suddenly flooded with sympathy for Boccanegra. It was often like this after a fight, the release of feelings came in an uncontrollable torrent, the more so, it seemed, having lost his head completely to the berserker lust.

  He took Boccanegra by the forearm and pulled him to his feet. ‘Come on, you can’t stay here all night. We must get back in before they seal the postern. I’ll say you were with me. We’ll speak no more of this cowardice.’

  But although it remained unspoken, it was impossible not to mark the contrast between the two figures who came last through the postern and into the yard. The one, painted in blood, dripping in sweat, eyes shining with the ghost of murder still upon them; the other, pristine in comparison, neck bent in shame, unable to meet another pair of eyes with his own.

  Grant’s right fist still coiled firmly about the handle of the gore-besmirched kilij. They had to warm a bucket of water over the fire and soak the hand before the muscles would relax and release their grip on the sword.

  XXII.

  ‘This is robbery!’ Zenobia complained once again to her mistress’s back.

  ‘This is salvage. Imperial procurement. The emperor would command it, if he only had the wit to think of it himself.’

  ‘Despoina!’

  Anna raised a hand to acknowledge the wrong. ‘Sorry, I know I promised to reign in my tongue as regards the imperial person. I shall try harder,’ she said. ‘And you, Zen, must try harder to see the world in more shades than black and white. There is no sin in the harvesting of fruit from abandoned gardens, especially when it is to feed the hungry. The monks, I am sure, would give it gladly, were they not themselves presently at the walls, safe in exile, or dead.’

  ‘Sweeten it all you like, Despoina, but theft is theft. Pretending otherwise merely exacerbates the sin.’

  They were passing down one of the narrow paths that latticed the vineyards and walled gardens of the monastery of the Virgin Peribleptos.

  The appellation meant ‘easy to see’ and it was certainly appropriate that day. Strewn across the southern slope of the city’s otherwise isolated seventh hill, the domed church shone in the April sunshine as the light caught the brecciated jasper of its columns and twinkled off the polychrome-frescoed outer walls.

  Zenobia’s mistress held a metal bar, scavenged from an outbuilding after the first gate had taken them a frustratingly long time to negotiate.

  Anna had squealed with glee when the lock on the next door cracked under a hail of wild blows. It had been a most unedifying sight to behold, but thankfully Zenobia was confident she had been the sole witness.

  In the pleasantly warm sunshine one could almost begin to forget there was a siege on, if not for the occasional low crump of a cannon in the distance.

  Zenobia had certainly not forgotten. She had taken food that morning up to the mesoteichion and seen first hand the purgatory that lay between the hell of the ramparts and the normality carrying on in the populated quarters by the Horn.

  Those distant grumbles from the guns had rung much louder in the lee of the wall, and reminders of their reach had lain here and there all along her path: a smashed house, a deep furrow ploughed through a field, the scattered blossom of a tree splintered in two.

  The closer to the mesoteichion she had gone, the worse the destruction grew, and the faces of the men she had passed showed the strain. Even hardened veterans wore startled, haggard expressions. All their years of service counted for little now, for nowhere and no one had ever experienced anything like this before.

  ‘There was a raid carried out against the Turk cannons the other night, Despoina,’ Zenobia said to Anna as their feet crunched along the path towards the next orchard door. ‘They told me it failed to destroy that horrid Basilica gun, but all the men spoke in glowing terms about John Grant.’

  Anna’s eyes flicked up and stared pointedly back at Zenobia. It was a look the handmaiden interpreted as simultaneously asking why, of all names, she should bring that beknighted one up and begging her to continue.

  ‘The phrase most used, I think, was suicidal bravery,’ said Zenobia.

  The basket of scavenged sour plums and artichokes seemed to grow suddenly heavy. Suicidal bravery. ‘Yes,’ Anna thought. ‘It was a suicidal bravery of sorts that day when he came with the little boat. How like the story of his father and Darnley – not much generalship beyond a bellow and a charge for his goal.’

  The colour had drained so swiftly from Anna’s face that it was apparent she thought him dead. Zenobia, who loved her mistress like a daughter, considered leaving the matter uncorrected for Anna’s own good, but scorned to sin by a deceit of omission. ‘He is alive and in good health,’ she said at last.

  ‘Really?’ said Anna, falsely nonchalant. ‘Good. We need every man.’

  ‘Oh child,’ thought Zenobia. ‘You can lie to your father, you can lie to the priest, you can even lie to yourself, but I see right through you.’

  A silence settled between them as Anna withdrew into her thoughts. Her mind, over the previous weeks, was repeatedly drawn back to that Clean Week morning and the unexpected intrusion, on the household’s lenten routine, of Grant at the gate with his ridiculous toy gift and the word on his lips that had shocked her then and shocked her still.

  Love.

  Of course, she could not have failed but notice, right from the first encounter at Hagia Euphemia, the physical effect she had on him; indeed, she had delighted in it. Yet it had not occurred to her at any previous point – even after all that had passed at the masquerade – that his feelings for her should run so deep.

  Thinking the matter over, as she had done throughout that hallowed period of fasting and reflection, she had come to privately acknowledge her mistake. Unconsciously, she had assumed him to be devoid of a capacity beyond base desires, as if such malady did not afflict men of his kind; as if they wore a second suit of steel around their hearts.

  She had thought him perfect for her requirements. An outsider, a foreigner, a man whose loyalty was anyone’s for an agreed fee.

  Her plot against Barbo had needed a physical tool, a weapon for her act of matrimonal vandalism, and she had anticipated him to fulfill that and be satisfied enough with what he received in return. She had expected to dismiss her varangian in the same manner that Sforza or Alfonso of Naples disbanded their condottieri when the battle was won.

  Now, on reflection, she was shamed by her behaviour. Not, of itself, the act of defiance – even though, thanks be to God, the marriage had been avoided anyway – but the callousness of her own heart in regard to his, which she saw with new clarity, as if it had been the conduct of a third person.

  These unpleasant thoughts had grown into a scab on her conscience, to be picked a
t whenever she slackened the reins on her mind and allowed it to wander. She feared that, made idle by the siege, she would go insane from them and sought any means of distraction. So here they were, for want of other distractions, pillaging the monastery orchards for whatever they could harvest.

  ‘I am worried about Father,’ said Anna, breaking the silence just as the next distant puff of cannon fire echoed in the heavens. ‘I worry what it must do to him, to be sidelined completely while the city he has done so much for is in such peril.’

  ‘You cannot think he would commit such a sin as Baltus?’ said Zenobia. ‘Kyr Notaras is too strong a soul. He would never be so cowardly as to take his own life.’

  ‘Well, that is another matter troubling me,’ Anna said in a lowered voice, despite the emptiness of their surroundings. ‘I am not certain Baltus did take his own life.’

  Zenobia pursed her lips. ‘Despoina?’

  ‘Come now, Zen, you knew Baltus even better than I. Would you credit it possible he would kill himself?’

  ‘Such troubled souls do not always show their torment outwardly.’

  ‘Well, my soul is troubled,’ said Anna. ‘My soul is troubled by the manner of his death. Why would Baltus kill himself at the bathhouse? How did he carry that whetstone? How did he even get in there? The place had been locked up for weeks.’

  ‘Are you saying you think someone killed Baltus? Murdered him?’ said Zenobia.

  ‘It sounds silly, I know. Who could possibly want to harm that sweet old man?’ Now it became Anna’s turn to watch the blood drain from Zenobia’s face. ‘What is it, Zen? Did someone have a grudge against him?’

  ‘I would rather not say, Despoina. Baltus is dead, poor wretch. Raking over matters won’t bring him back. We’d be best served to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Anna’s voice became firm. ‘Tell me, Zenobia. Who could possibly wish Baltus harm?’

  Zenobia struggled for a moment, her eyes darted about, avoiding Anna’s stare, but it was hopeless. She knew her mistress would not let the matter rest now. Finally, she sighed and said, ‘Your father.’