Porphyry and Ash

by Peter Sandham

  The crisis of the siege had reached its cusp and heroes were in short supply, so John Grant found himself back at the mesoteichion stockade on the day the fog rolled over the city, reunited with his longsword, his suit of plate armour and what remained of his men.

  Sat sharing a bowl of stew with Fieschi, while the sudden rainstorm clattered off the stonework above their heads, Grant thought of their first meal together in the podesta of Pera’s palazzo. Five back then, just two left now. Fieschi knew better than to ask much about Sambucuccio’s end.

  ‘Mantlets,’ Fieschi said through a mouthful of bread. ‘The carpenters of the Venetian quarter have been working on wooden mantlets to reinforce the stockade rampart. They called for townsfolk to cart the mantlets up here, and those ungrateful Greeks wanted payment for the task! Never mind it’s their city, never mind it’s their necks. Payment!’

  ‘This must be a first,’ said Grant. ‘Isnardo Fieschi taking up the cause of Venice. It really is the end of days.’

  Fieschi grinned. ‘Feels like it, don’t it? This fog. Not seen anything like it in all my years in Italy. Thick as Tuscan ham. Feels like the Holy Ghost seeping itself out of all their sacred places. Looks like God running from the fight, or so I’d reckon if I still believed such things.’

  ‘God might run, but we’re too far gone to follow. You, me and Sambucuccio. Mad, brave bastards.’ Grant raised his wineskin in toast.

  ‘And Leonello,’ Fieschi said. ‘Let’s not forget that lad. That boy proved mad enough and brave enough at the end.’

  ‘To Leo,’ Grant said, taking another swig.

  ‘I wish I’d been there to see you come crawling out of the ground,’ Fieschi said with a chuckle. ‘Looks like you earned the nickname Maruffo gave you after all. La Talpa, the mole. I always thought that bastard could see the future.’

  Grant laughed at the memory of his old mentor just as the blanket covering of the casemate entrance was wrenched aside.

  Zenobia lurched through the doorway, practically falling over Fieschi in her haste. She was drenched from the rain, her gown sodden, her veil smeared across her head amid a tangled mass of wet hair.

  ‘Taken!’ she panted. ‘She’s... she’s... she’s been taken!’

  Both men were on their feet. ‘Christ’s blood! Calm down, Zenobia. What are you talking about?’

  Fieschi helped Zenobia onto the stool. She bent double for a moment, coughing in lungfuls of air, the water pooling at her feet. ‘My mistress! Despoina Anna! They took her! Snatched her from the crowd while the Hodegetria was paraded. I couldn’t stop them!’

  ‘Couldn’t stop who?’

  ‘The angel cultists! It must be them. I saw it all happen before me, but the crowd was too alarmed by the ikon’s plight. No one listened to my cries. I followed them though. I knew if I saw where they took her then you might be able to come to her rescue.’

  ‘Him?’ Fieschi said in surprise. ‘She chose her bed. Go find the general.’ Grant, who had not heard all the camp rumours, gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘It’s you she loves!’ Zenobia snapped with the force of a hundred janissaries. ‘It’s you she’ll be praying for right now. One of the last things she said to me, this very morning on our walk to Chora, was her regret at not going with you that day. She thought you might have been sent as her guardian angel. Now is the time to prove it.’

  ***

  Under the procession of the storm clouds, the church waited. Four squat, brass domes sat about a central drum in roughly cruciform shape. A martyrium – a martyr’s grave. As he pounded down the Mese towards it, Grant prayed it had not already added to its stock.

  The fog still lingered, a thick grey blanket from which the land rose as a stark and lonely ridge to the left-hand side of the road. The Holy Apostles loomed on the upper slope, the dark silhouette towards which Zenobia had seen Anna dragged. He was glad of the fog – it would hide all sign of his approach.

  He slipped off the brick track and scrambled up the grassy bank, using his longsword like a walking staff. The sparsely inhabited streets leading towards the church grounds, the twisted oaks and crumbling stone walls and the knowledge of what must lurk within the fallen church, all served to unsettle him.

  He felt a chill run down his spine. To feel the dread of death on the brink of a fight was nothing new to him – he was utterly numb to it after all these years – but the panic in his guts at that moment was a novel terror. Fear of another’s death was a new sensation.

  Grant could imagine eyes upon him as he moved through the ivy-throttled gates and into the small, overgrown yard before the main doors of the church. He could not tell whether it was from the dense foliage that fringed the grounds or the cracked and broken windows that lined the church facade, but he felt those eyes and gripped the hilt of his sword as though it were a blue-bead talisman.

  He was standing in an imperial cemetery, the rotunda mausoleum of the first Constantine to one side, the equally large tomb of Justinian to another. The weeds were ankle deep and the roots of saplings had begun to pull up the paving slabs in several places.

  It was a pitiful, wretched place. All light and life had gone. The window sockets of the church gave back a hollow stare, not a pane of glass unbroken. From somewhere distant he thought he heard a faint animal cry.

  He searched the stone perimeter and found a door he could force open. Beyond it was the diakonnikon, a vestry off the church’s side colonnade. He wasted no time in kicking his way through and into the cruciform nave.

  The roof had collapsed in places, and the fog had descended through the missing tiles and broken windows to hang in ribbons like a ghostly Ascension Day procession. Shafts of light cast pools of unnatural luminescence down the great nave and left whole corners of the transept in dark shadow.

  The stones above his head echoed with the fidgeting of nesting birds in the rafters and nooks. He had to step over the rotting, moss-covered timbers of the fallen roof as he moved deeper inside then passed under the central dome towards the raised altar at the heart of the church, but there was still no sign of Anna or any of her abductors.

  He began to worry that Zenobia had been mistaken, but then the low muffled sound came again, a distant cry of pain.

  He thought it had come from the direction of a side chapel apse. Wading through the vines and dust he found a low doorway set into the wall on that side, and the faint flicker of candlelight reflected on the stone beyond.

  It was a stairway, descending to a crypt, he supposed. Sambucuccio had spoken of the treasure vaults reportedly hidden beneath the Holy Apostles. Skulls of saints, gemstones and golden crosses, even the column of Christ’s flagellation.

  But centuries past, Dandolo’s Latin crusaders had come through like bandits, shaking out purple burial shrouds, pulling jewelled rings off finger bones, turfing the skeletons of once-proud emperors from their sarcophagi and brushing the hairs of the regal dead from the rims of snatched coronets.

  In the footsteps of those blasphemous invaders, Grant began to step tentatively down the curving stone steps, into the bowels of the church.

  A sound came from below, much clearer than before; a slap, like wet linen beaten against rock by an eager laundress. It was followed immediately by a cry of anguish and pain. The voice, unmistakably, was female.

  With the sound still ringing up the stairway, Grant launched himself downwards, but the sight at the bottom checked his stride.

  A half-dozen figures were gathered in the octagonal crypt, traced in silver outline by the wavering glow of candle trees and thrown in shadow form, to stretch and shrink like claws, across the walls.

  The walls themselves were an endless coloured surface of glazed tesserae, glimmering in the half-light as if alive and moving.

  Grant took in none of these. His attention was all for the narrow column in the center and the figure, crowned with a twisted circlet of jujube and chained to the cold marble by the wrists.

  They had cut her dress away to the wai
st; he could see clearly where the skin across the shoulders bore the bloody tattoo; four Hebrew letters carved into her with a knife.

  Beneath this, the first three strokes of the whip had raised horrid angular welts into the soft, pale flesh. The knotted leather flail, on the point of delivering a fourth, was held aloft by the misshapen arm of Gennadios.

  The scourge cracked once more. Anna’s back shuddered beneath its lash, and a fine spray of blood twinkled like dust motes as it showered up through the candlelight. She cried out, almost mechanically; it was clear she was half-delirious from the ordeal.

  For a fleeting moment Grant was no longer there in the dark Apostles crypt but a bright churchyard in Rouen, twelve years old, before another tall post and another tortured girl.

  It was the same.

  It was not the same. This time he could stop it. This time he could save her.

  A wrath no battlefield foe had ever kindled exploded in his heart. He surged forward, already swinging the longsword blade at the nearest body. There was a madness in him, a possession that against any trained foe would have been his undoing, but this was unlike any other fight in his life.

  He almost cut the first man in two with the blow, then, kicking the body off the blade, he punched the crossguard into the ribs of the next man and thrust the point at a third.

  He was numb to the blows they threw back at him. He wanted to get at the priest and the whip; the others were merely in his way.

  They were trying to block his path, throwing themselves at him like wrestlers and knocking him to the floor in a mass of flapping cloth and scraping armour. His sword skidded from his grip and clattered across the marble floor.

  They swarmed onto him in a mass, trying to pin him to the tiles. A bearded face pressed close to his own and Grant registered it as the monk from Isidore’s abduction. He clawed at the habit, pulling the face down further and sank his teeth into the nose. He nearly bit it clean off.

  Howling, the man sprang back clasping both hands to his face and Grant felt the weight slacken on one arm. He reached that hand around the baselard hilt at his hip and slashed the dagger up at the press of bodies. A few more reeled back and he was able to roll free and scramble to his feet.

  The crypt was less full now than when he had first arrived. Several followers of the monk had bolted for the staircase rather than join those trying to restrain him.

  Grant glanced at the column. Anna’s body hung limply from it, the blood running in rivulets down her spine, but the ordeal of the scourge was over; Gennadios had scuttled away up a back staircase.

  One of the remaining monks had retrieved Grant’s longsword and came rushing at him with the heavy blade couched under his arm like a lance.

  It took no skill to step past the point, grab the robed figure with one hand and bury the baselard into the base of his throat. Grant left the dagger there and took back the sword from the suddenly limp grasp.

  Crowned by a nimbus of golden, cherubic curls and armed with four feet of steel, he might have resembled a military saint, stepped down from the wall’s mosaic, but his livid eyes held the merciless heat of an athanor and his face, contorted with cold malevolence, left no doubt his intentions were devilry.

  It was enough to send the last few figures haring for the staircase. Grant was suddenly alone with two bodies littering the flagstones and another hanging, spent, from the column.

  He set his boot on the chest of the body at his feet and yanked his dagger free, then with infinite care, he used the blade to cut Anna’s bindings and lifted her gently to the floor. She made no sound, but a pulse drummed against his fingers when he touched her throat.

  Gennadios had prepared the crypt altar for his perverted sacrament. An antimension lay folded upon it. Grant draped the white silk over Anna’s shoulders and back, dabbing gently at the mark of Michael.

  She moaned from the pain, but her eyes remained closed, even when the thorn crown was knocked to the floor. He could not tell if she recognised him or knew where she was.

  Picking her up, he carried her back above ground and through the silent nave without seeing a living soul.

  The early evening air was cool and fresh after the mustiness of the crypt. The change seemed to revive Anna a little. She opened her eyes, wrapped her arms about his neck and pressed her head against his shoulder.

  ‘They summoned the wrong angel,’ she said with a smile, her voice husky and faint. ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Then, touching the scratched line of marks where the thorns had pricked her forehead, she added, ‘I received my coronation in the end.’

  As he came down the slope of the hill, the dimming sun was low in the sky, and the fog, now just a thin film of grey, lay about his ankles. He stared out over salmon-washed marble and sparkling copper domes, wondering how many more sunsets remained.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Anna said in a whisper, and then, as if reading his thoughts, went on, ‘My head was so full of porphyry dreams; I missed what was there in front of me. I see it now. All too late I see it. My city is falling, John, my world is at its end and yet I find no room in my heart for sadness, no room for anger at an emperor’s rejection, no room for envy at what others possess. Room only for you. Only you.’

  He looked away, so she would not see the tears glistening in his eyes. Instead he gazed towards distant Hagia Sophia and was puzzled by the sight. A strange light seemed to come from the dome, glowing so brightly that the whole of Chalkoprateia must be illuminated by it.

  ‘Look!’ he said in astonishment. ‘What can that be?’

  ‘Christ Pantokrator, is it fire? Have they landed by sea to burn the city?’

  He stopped in his tracks. The clang of tocsin bells washed out across the air. He kept his eyes on the dome, where a large flame flickered on the roof, encircling the entire neck of the spire. There was something uncanny about that flame. It glowed green, not orange, and there was not a puff of smoke.

  The flame built upon itself, gathering atop the spire until there came an indescribable flash of light, there and gone in an instant; so brilliant and pure that it was painful to witness.

  Almost immediately, the flame leapt up into the heavens, leaving the dome completely, to ascend into the cloud. Darkness fell once more and felt all the more black for the absent flame.

  ‘Lord have mercy,’ said Anna.

  For a moment he could not even speak. At last he said, ‘I think we just looked upon the face of God himself.’

  ‘He has abandoned Constantinople! The light itself has fled to heaven,’ said Anna and fell faint in his arms.

  Anna was cold and had lost a quantity of blood, but they were by no means mortal wounds. Grant pushed the fears of God’s abandonment from his mind and set off once more, determined to make for the Rose Palace where she could be best attended to.

  He was not halfway there when two soldiers appeared. They were from the reserve, judging by their age and the way they slouched rather than marched, spears resting lazily on their shoulders. They smartened up when they saw him coming down the road.

  ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ said one. The other brandished his polearm nervously in Grant’s direction.

  Their eyes moved over what looked to be a body, half covered up in a white sheet. The tattoo of the wound across Anna’s shoulders had started to seep through in bloody speckles. Before Grant could speak, the first of the boy-soldiers recognised the body’s cascade of distinctive auburn hair.

  ‘Anna! What have you done to my sister, you monster!’

  ‘She’s alive,’ Grant said, taking a judicious step back from the polearm’s reach. ‘I rescued her from a grim end. Zenobia will vouch for me and Anna’ll be fine once we get her somewhere warm and clean her wounds.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ said the other lad.

  ‘One of your mad priests tried to play Pilate.’

  ‘You will come with us,’ Jacob Notaras said officiously. ‘The megas doux will want to see this.’ Grant was not too keen on that idea, b
ut without dropping the girl he could do little against those polearms and he had no wish to hurt the youths.

  ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘but he’d best be nearby, she’s growing cold.’

  Set against the seawall of the Golden Horn, a billowing white and orange canopy marked the command post of the megas doux. One lonely sentry stood watch outside, but otherwise there seemed hardly a soul around.

  Grant marched in without ceremony and laid Anna gently down on the camp bed. He heard someone exclaim in alarm behind him, and from the tail of his eye, he sensed a body rising from a chair. He placed a blanket over her and then turned to face the megas doux.

  The expression of Loukas Notaras, immaculate in white satin, was a mixture of concern and confusion. He remained silent, running an eye over his blood-smeared visitor and then cast a look of enquiry towards his son in the doorway.

  ‘We found them on the Mese,’ said Jacob Notaras. ‘He gave us a wild story about saving Anna from a priest.’

  ‘Fetch the surgeon,’ the megas doux snapped at him and crossed the tent in two paces to examine his daughter. He lifted her hair gently from her face and took in the graze of the thorns. Her eyes flicked open at his touch.

  ‘Gennadios,’ said Grant. ‘He was about to use her in an unholy sacrifice.’

  ‘Gennadios?’ the megas doux said and furrowed his brow. ‘I find that unlikely.’

  ‘It’s true, Father. The angel cult. They were real,’ Anna said in a dry, weak voice. She struggled to sit up. The megas doux tried to make her lie back again, but she batted his hand away. ‘I warned you about them, but you ignored me.’

  Loukas Notaras began to mutter excuses, but no one was listening. Anna had turned her back and let the white altar cloth slip from her shoulders onto the bed. The torn gown gaped open, exposing the flesh, pale as parchment, on which the priest had written his bloody signature.

  ‘Oh! My child!’ Notaras said and shrank back. ‘What has he done to you?’

  ‘He would have done far worse but for John,’ she said, then swayed unsteadily. Sitting down on the bed beside her, Anna’s father put an arm about her and stroked her hair. All the pride had been driven from his face.