Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  A voice howled in horror from a man to whom the flames clung like lovers and would not dampen, even as he rolled in the dirt.

  The cheirosiphon licked its tongue out once more to devour another, and after that it was over, at least temporarily.

  The nine miners had fallen but taken five with them, and one of that number was Laskaris, the man who had bravely led them in.

  He was still breathing when Grant checked him, but his stomach had been gashed wide by an axe and he knew he was spent. His breathing was slow and pained, like a hare sat beneath the claws of a hound, aware its running days are through.

  ‘I’m finished,’ he wheezed and clutched a hand at the simple wood crucifix about his neck.

  Knelt beside him, Grant tried to sound reassuring. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We can drag you back with us.’

  Tetaldi had other ideas.

  Perhaps he had always counted on there being at least one crippled man in the party – Grant never knew – but the engineer’s words seemed too well prepared when he appeared swiftly beside Laskaris and said, ‘The end is near, brother, but you can still take many of the bastards with you.’

  On the far side of the cavern, men were already putting holes in the kegs and running fuses of powder along the floor towards the tunnel they had arrived from.

  Tetaldi placed a spluttering torch into the cooling hands of Laskaris. ‘Take this, and when we leave, say the Jesus Prayer ten times before you light the powder and bring your tomb walls down.’

  He called over to the men setting the fuses and had them run the powder across the floor to within reach of Laskaris.

  In the flickering torchlight, Grant could see the colour in the man’s face dimming by the moment.

  They had little time to spare. Stood guard beside the rear tunnel mouth, Sambucuccio was already crying out in warning that he could hear men rushing down it. The cheirosiphon team sent a jet of fire back up that tunnel, hoping to give those coming something to ponder.

  Grant looked once more at the dying man who Tetaldi was trusting to detonate the mine. His lips were silently murmuring the prayer.

  Shouts could now be heard from the camp entrance passage and the rest of the raiding party were already scampering for the surface, back up the opposite tunnel. With a final glance at the cavern, Grant followed.

  The cauldron clanged loudly as it was abandoned just a few paces beyond the chamber entrance.

  In the desperate scramble along the tight passage, Grant, just behind Tetaldi, could hear the man muttering a prayer under his breath. After a few moments Tetaldi came to a sudden stop and was knocked flat by the rush of men from behind.

  There were four of them in a tangle on the tunnel floor as the scrape of the other boots disappeared into the darkness ahead.

  ‘It should have blown by now!’ Tetaldi said. ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘We can’t go back,’ a voiced moaned.

  ‘We’ve achieved nothing if that chamber doesn’t blow,’ said Tetaldi. He was already moving back along the passage; back towards the chamber. The other man who had spoken hared off in the opposite direction.

  ‘Holy Mother, what a mess!’ a third voice cursed. It was Sambucuccio.

  ‘We can’t let Tetaldi die alone,’ Grant said. ‘He’ll need someone to work that machine with him.’ He scrambled to his feet and began moving back up the passage.

  ‘He only needs one,’ Sambucuccio complained, but the Corsican was following Grant as he said it.

  They caught up with Tetaldi near the cavern entrance as the Chiot wrestled the copper cauldron back into the chamber. Sambucuccio took up the lance and Grant helped Tetaldi haul the heavy cheirosiphon into position.

  The first Turks were already inside; Grant could make out the tall white cones of janissary borks moving cautiously across the far side. They were checking the powder barrels, unsure if the raiding party had laid a trap.

  Tetaldi scrambled on all fours across the dirt towards the motionless body of Laskaris. The guttering torch lay agonisingly close to the fuse trail.

  Grant pumped the handle of the cauldron and danced on the bellows, while Sambucuccio examined the lock to make sure he knew how to release it.

  An arrow clattered into the rockface to their right, and the crack of an arqubus rang like thunder about the chamber – the janissary had spotted them.

  Tetaldi twitched. The lead ball had crashed into his shoulder, spinning him around.

  ‘Bastards,’ Sambucuccio hissed as he let fly an arc of flame across the room.

  ‘Mind those barrels!’ said Grant, pumping both arms vigorously to re-prime the cauldron.

  Tetaldi tried once more to scramble the last few paces to the fuse. He was struck again by a shot but already had the torch pressed into the black powder.

  The fire caught and began to move its way towards the barrel stack. The Chiot began to crawl back towards them, but even in the gloom, Grant could see he would not make it. An arrow glanced off his cuirass before another took him in the back of the neck.

  ‘Go!’ Sambucuccio shouted. ‘I’ll stop them snuffing the fuse.’ He glanced back at Grant to make sure the Scotsman wasted no time on heroics.

  Grant held his gaze for a heartbeat and saw the glory in him; saw Sambucuccio frozen in immortality, not afraid of the death to come, but serenely accepting the journey. I’ll wait for you, those eyes said, I’ll see you again.

  ‘God be with you,’ said Grant, giving a last pump on the handle. Then he turned back into the darkness.

  The brash Corsican voice echoed at his heels as he moved back up the tunnel, ‘Come on, you barbermongers!’

  He did not stop. A last bright glow of light cast Grant’s shadow out before him. His legs pumped, his thighs screamed with discomfort as he scrambled in an awkward squat through the darkness, but he did not stop.

  Both hands clawed through the dirt, shoulders scraping against the ceiling. Then the earth quaked with a terrible tremor and the air came, howling and roaring in a tempest of dust from behind, knocking him flat to the floor.

  His ears rang, his throat choked on thick, earthy dust and his eyes stung, but he scrambled on.

  The ringing in his ears receded, replaced by the awful groaning of wood struggling under its heavy burden. The support struts of the tunnel, weakened by the blast and the shockwave of the collapsed chamber, were starting to fail.

  He heard the first one give – a snapping sound like a man’s limb. The wooden supports all around began to howl from the effort of holding as he scrambled towards the pale light where the tunnel from the surface converged with this Serbian dug shaft.

  A series of struts cracked like fireworks behind him, and then the earth came in a thundering tidal wave, pouring down into the collapsing warren.

  In that moment, as his brain flashed its final thoughts, he saw Anna as she had been on the night of the masquerade. He saw her and knew his purpose was not to die in this grave. Even as the earth pushed like a giant’s palm upon his shoulders and his legs began to give way under the weight, he was falling into the narrower passageway of the intersecting entry tunnel, and the sound of the collapsing mine began to ebb away.

  XXX.

  It was no simple feat to scale iron railings in a pleated gamurra without coming horribly to grief, but it was not the first time Anna had risked laddering a pair of woollen calze or scandalising the neighbours by such a manouver. She managed to do neither on this occasion and slid awkwardly down the steep grass slope, a fugitive from her own home.

  Below, the houses of the district lay buried in a swirling bank of thick mist. She was glad of it. The weather had become her ally over the past days, frustrating her father’s attempts to put her on a boat to Venice. She knew the vessel still lay at anchor out in the Kontoskalion Harbour, but the fog that had – perhaps like a glimpse of the future – come invading over the seawall, made it impossible to put out through the dangerous silty channel.

  Before the fog it had been the sudden par
tial eclipse of the moon that halted the departure. The crew were too superstitious to weigh anchor under such a sign, regardless of the bonus the megas doux offered. So the vessel waited, and Anna remained trapped in her own home.

  But not that morning. She would not remain cooped up that day. Not when she knew the Hodegetria, the city’s most venerated ikon, was to be paraded.

  The churchmen were trying all they could to bring God’s favour back to their side.

  The Hodegetria, crafted it was said by the hands of St Luke himself, was a large portrait of the Virgin Mary and her infant child. It possessed great power and had been paraded only twice before in the city’s history, long ago during the sieges of the Arabs and Avars. Both times it had brought salvation.

  A figure moved on the road below, growing more lucid as Anna descended the grass slope.

  ‘Despoina, one misstep and you might have turned an ankle!’ said Zenobia as Anna reached the flatter ground of the path.

  Anna ignored the chiding, took the cloak she was offered and wrapped it around herself. It would be a long cool walk up the Mese to Chora, where the ikon was housed perilously close to the front line.

  ‘I have bad news,’ Anna said as they passed through the narrow streets. ‘The brigantine has returned. Father was speaking to Jacob about it. They searched most of the Aegean and found no sign of a rescue fleet. No one is coming for us, Zen. We have been written off by Venice.’

  ‘We have no need for the Venetians,’ Zenobia said. ‘Not while God and the Virgin shine their mercies upon us.’

  ‘I pray that is the case,’ said Anna. They both fell silent for a time, lost in their own troubled thoughts as they trudged along the Mese, joining a crowd of others on the pilgrimage to Chora.

  It was Anna who spoke at last. ‘Is there any news of John? Is he still alive do you know? I could get nothing out of Father.’

  ‘I know very little, Despoina. All I could discover is that he never returned to his post after his arrest. They say he was assigned to a countermining detail somewhere down towards the St Romanos Gate. Beyond that…’ Zenobia shrugged. She would not mention what else she had learned – the mortality rate of men working in a countermining unit.

  Anna plucked the puffball floret of a dandelion as they passed a clump of the golden-headed flowers. She blew on it, sending the seeds gliding on the breeze across the path.

  Watching them slowly fall, scattered in all directions to seed new clumps through her act of destruction, she prayed that her own people might prove as regenerative as the dandelion, should the power of the Hodegetria failed.

  ‘I keep thinking of that morning,’ she said. ‘When John came bounding up our hill with his gift from Plethon. We could have escaped; there was still so much time. What a fool I was! I thought I was so much better. I thought I might be empress, but in the end, I shall be just another corpse amid the ruins.’

  ‘Hush now,’ said Zenobia. ‘It never does to dwell on what-might-have-beens. You think you love him, but – forgive me for saying so Despoina – you are in so many ways still a child. If you had run away with him that day, would the fantasy have lasted beyond that first voyage? Would you be happy as a peasant tilling the soil on an island somewhere, or would the spring bloom fade on your romance and leave you lonely, pregnant and far from home? I think you made the hard choice that day, but the correct one.’

  ‘I fear you might be wrong,’ Anna murmured, looking away across the imbricated rooftops to where the banded column of Constantine disappeared into the lifting low cloud. ‘I think God sent me a guardian angel and I shooed him away in my arrogance.’

  Eventually they passed the military church of St George and made out the shape of Chora’s scalloped dome ahead. Already a throng of people lined the route along which the ikon was due to pass.

  The sound of the Turk guns rang up from the shallow valley, but by now, more than fifty days into the siege, they had lost much of their power to frighten.

  Looking around her, Anna could see that the crowd was a panoply of her whole city: soldiers, their posts briefly deserted, searching for divine inspiration against fear’s unceasing legions; children, happy in their ignorance, running barefoot between the legs of onlookers, past crones balanced precariously on walking sticks and women in their feast-day finery; craftsmen and farmhands, wealthy and poor; the populace clung to their faith with the desperation of shipwrecked sailors.

  A frisson of excitement rippled through the crowd – a sign that the procession was at hand. Anna slipped into the front rank by the roadside and peered up the Chora road.

  She could hear the chanting voices, lifted in penitent song, coming towards her down the cobbled road.

  At the front, raised on a wooden pallet and borne on the shoulders of six red-robed men, the ikon bobbed patiently forward.

  Anna gasped at its splendour; an impossibly sparkling mix of egg tempera in warm gold, rich blue and deep red. But amid the magnificence, the Virgin seemed sad. She gazed out from the wooden board with haunting eyes that made Anna feel stripped bare to the soul.

  The child in the Virgin’s arms held a face of innocence and offered hope that the slate with God might yet be cleaned. ‘Perhaps even John might be comforted by this,’ she thought.

  Behind the ikon came the procession: a crossbearer, as solemn and rigid as any carrier of military colours; two priests, their enormous grey beards standing out against jet-black robes, swinging censers of incense that put out great puffs of smoke as they carved the air before them. Each mewed the quarter-tone lamentation of prayer to the Theotokos, and their cries were echoed by the throng of laymen shuffling in their wake.

  ‘Save the city, as thou knowest and willest. We put thee forward as our arms, our ramparts, our shield, our general. Fight for thy people!’

  The hymn rose up through the crisp morning air as they passed Anna, head bowed, at the side of the road. She closed her eyes and made her own prayer that the Virgin would watch over John and bring him somehow back to her.

  Her plea was interrupted by a shriek of horror from a woman to her left. She heard Zenobia gasp and flicked open her eyes to see the crowd surging forward.

  Ahead of them, where the back of the ikon should still have been visible over their heads, she could see only the grey stony curtain of the city wall.

  She dashed forward, pulled by the force of alarm without knowing quite what had happened. Wailing began to echo around her as she pushed her way past dumbstruck figures to reach the head of the crowd.

  There lay the ikon, face down in the muddy road while the desperate bearers struggled in vain to move it.

  The priests danced from foot to foot like hopping jesters, insane with panic. She saw Constantine, not robed in purple but barefoot, in sackcloth shirt, down on his knees among the desperate hands, clasping the edge of the ikon and heaving, like the others, with all his might.

  ‘It will not move!’ screamed one of the bearers.

  ‘It had turned to lead!’ another cried.

  ‘There was no reason for it to fall so,’ said a panicked lady to Anna’s right. ‘It seemed to throw itself.’

  A cold shiver ran down her back. There was a growing atmosphere of unnatural force about the day. The morning mist had lifted and been replaced by dark, foreboding clouds and an unseasonably cold wind.

  Whatever force had possessed the ikon, it now gave way. The desperate crowd were able to remount it on the pallet, and after a brief consultation between Constantine and the priests, the procession began to reform.

  The hymn struck up and a dirty-faced Virgin moved off once again through the streets. But even as the worshipers hoisted the pallet, the first globules of rain began to splatter on the cobble stones.

  A low rumble of thunder growled like a disturbed leopard, and the air filled with a lashing torrent of hail and rain. It drummed on the rooftops and became so violent that the procession was stopped in its tracks once more.

  The cloudburst turned the narrow streets
of Chora into gushing cataracts, knocking smaller children to the floor and seeding panic among others that they would be drowned by the surging water. ‘The sign is clear!’ a voice wailed out.

  ‘Theotokos! Why do you abandon us!’

  People jostled into Anna as they tried to pick their way to shelter under the eaves of houses. Others stood dumbstruck, staring with expressions as blank as stone towards the sodden ikon. The wail of distraught worshipers competed with the howl of the gale and the thrum of the rain.

  In the pandemonium, a hand grabbed Anna by the wrist. At first, she thought it was Zenobia trying to drag her from the rain, but, looking down, she saw the hand was masculine.

  The grip tightened violently, and another hand grabbed her from behind then shook her off balance.

  She began to shout out in alarm. Her sodden veil fluttered into the road. The crowd heaved like an ocean all around her, giving her no sense of where Zenobia might be. She felt the lash of the hail’s sting in her eyes, and then the same brutal hand slapped her across the cheek, knocking her half dizzy from the blow.

  More hands took hold of her arms. Several pairs. She was dragged backwards across the roadway, her feet slipping and slithering across the cobbles, her screams of panic lost amid an ocean of lamentations.

  XXXI.

  When he clawed himself up out of the earth, the other men of the countermining detail had acclaimed Grant a hero on the spot. He saw the guilt in their eyes for having run off when the work had not been finished. He felt the guilt himself each time he thought of Tetaldi lying in his own blood or Sambucuccio sacrificing his chance of escape to see the job done. They were the real heroes of the day.

  There would be no more tunnels. With the chamber gone, the war underground was over, but while the threat from below might have passed, the battered walls still teetered on collapse. One concerted assault might be enough to crack them.