Shaking out his boot to remove the worst of the invasive liquid, he shuddered. While the autumn had not yet given over to winter with its snow and ice, there was an uncharacteristic chill in the air, and the cold foot did nothing to improve matters.
A mark.
That’s what he needed: a mark. A good one. Preferably a merchant or a wealthy farmer come to sell his wares and returning with a fat purse and a lack of attention. Someone with money but no wits.
His gaze fell upon the man almost as if by providence. If ever there was a mark for a good thief, this man was it; he might as well be wearing a sign declaring his wealth. The man had a cloak around him, pulled tight against the biting breeze, but even the cloak was of rich, expensive wool, multihued with costly dyes and fringed with gilt tassels.
Without so much as twitching, Skiouros leaned against the wooden end-strut of a watermelon stall and crunched on his apple as though he hadn’t a care in the world, his eyes taking in every aspect of the mark. He would have an escort. It was a pipe-dream to believe that such a mark would wander into a crowded market place without guards. It took only a moment for Skiouros to spot the two men standing respectfully nearby, a few yards away, yet intent on their master. It was something of a surprise to realise that the two men were Janissaries, their curved swords sheathed but hands resting on the hilts, ready for anything. Perhaps the mark was too much trouble after all. Messing with the Janissaries was always dangerous.
His doubts evaporated as he saw the richly-wrapped man reach through a purpose-made slit in his cloak and withdraw the purse from his belt – a purse that bulged fat and was clearly heavy. As Skiouros watched, the man counted out a few small, silver coins, but the young thief saw the distinct glint of gold in that sudden movement before the coins were pushed back into the purse and the container disappeared into the cloak.
His mind filled with conflicting thoughts. There were problems to be associated with such a mark. Quite apart from the guards, there was always a risk with someone so clearly wealthy that they were important and might bring unwanted attention and trouble if anything went wrong. And there was something else that seemed odd about the man. It took a moment for Skiouros to realise how uncomfortable he was with the fact that the cloaked man had handed over a good sized pile of cash to a scruffy oik at a stall, but had received just a small bag of lemons in return. There was something very odd happening.
As Skiouros shifted his legs to relieve a growing ache in one, his foot squelched and his intent hardened. The mark was dangerous, but he’d seen worse, and that purse would keep him for months.
The Janissaries were now moving off behind the merchant – if that was what he was – and their attention wandered here and there as they surveyed the crowd for potential problems. Their job, after all, was to keep the peace and prevent fires and troubles, as well as to supply a mailed fist to the Sultan’s army.
To prevent fires.
Skiouros smiled to himself. Striding off to a nearby stall, he timed it carefully so that the owner was busy trying unsuccessfully to pile fruit on his trestle, lunging here and there to prevent them rolling off onto the street. As the merchant made a desperate and quite impressive catch of a pomegranate, Skiouros dipped and swiped one of the man’s empty baskets from the stall’s end. Moving at a tangent to the wealthy visitor and his two guards, he paused by a stall that was in the process of packing up for the day. Crouching, as the owner finished removing his wares to his cart and started to dissemble his table, Skiouros swept up the dry leaves and packing, avoiding that litter that was stained with the wet juice of fallen fruit. Nice and dry as tinder, he put the fibrous offcuts and leaves into the basket, waiting until he had it almost packed before standing again and moving off.
The merchant and his Janissary guards were moving through the market with surprising slowness and, despite the delay as he’d gathered his tinder, Skiouros found that he had to adjust his pace to keep his intercept course true. As he walked, his nimble feet dodging him this way and that among the thriving crowd, and affording him a regular if intermittent view of the mark, Skiouros reached to his belt with his free hand and withdrew his flint and steel. Hooking the basket over his arm, he made sure his course was still correct and then dropped his eyes to the fire making tools, which he took in both hands. A few strikes was all it took to start small sparks dropping into the dry leaves and fibres in the basket.
By the time the flint and steel were back in his belt pouch, a thin tendril of smoke was drifting up from the basket. Blinking in the tiny column of smoke, Skiouros returned his view to where the mark should be and was rewarded with a picture of the merchant bent over a stall not far away, the two guards off to one side yet close and alert, their eyes straying constantly across the crowd.
Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Skiouros found a stack of dry wooden crates at the end of another stall and, with barely a falter in his pace, dropped the basket among them. Even as he moved away, unnoticed in the mass of people, the thin tendril of smoke became a billowing torrent as the flames took.
By the time he was halfway to the merchant, sauntering slowly and casually, and occasionally pausing to examine a stall’s fruit, the owner of the pile of crates was shouting his alarm and stamping at the growing conflagration. A murmur of alarm began to grow among the crowd and in a beautiful moment of almost perfectly planned response, Skiouros saw the two Janissary guards’ heads flip round to the source of the shouts. It was unlikely that either man spoke Greek, but they would be familiar with a few choice words and phrases, and ‘fire’ would be high on the list.
The two men shared a quick look and then glanced only momentarily at their master before turning and running through the crowd, pushing the innocent citizens out of the way in a less than polite manner. Skiouros almost broke into a smile. With a wealthy man under their protection, the Janissaries would pay little attention to most incidents: petty thievery, assault or suchlike. But fire? Fire was a different matter. More than nine tenths of the city consisted of highly flammable wooden housing and each year saw a disastrous and costly conflagration hit some neighbourhood or other. Even with this being the Greek enclave, the Janissaries could hardly afford to risk a small market fire turning into something that wiped out a square mile of buildings and which might spread to a more important region.
Keeping his face locked in an expression of mild surprise, Skiouros hurled a half-hearted curse at the two men as they elbowed past him to the stall that was now producing a thick column of smoke. The merchant did not even appear to have noticed that they’d gone.
Standing with his back to Skiouros, the cloaked man was examining a table of bananas – a hideously expensive fruit imported from the old Persian east – and paying no heed at all to the growing chaos of the market behind him.
Carefully, as nonchalantly as a human being could manage and as inconspicuous as a rat beneath the stalls, Skiouros ducked between two trestles and appeared a few yards from the merchant, just in time for the man to turn, his attention finally drawn by a particularly piercing shout. Even in that split second as Skiouros turned and picked up a crate of fruit, placing it on the stallholder’s cart to blend into the background, the young thief was suddenly struck by how outlandish the mark was.
An Ottoman stood out in the Greek enclave, for sure, and the two Janissary guards were no exception. Their master, however, was clearly not cloaked against the chill, but against drawing too much attention. The man’s face was a dark chestnut colour, round and full with a thin, oiled moustache that protruded at the ends. He would stand out as much in the Ottoman neighbourhoods as he did here.
Skiouros rubbed his hands together to remove the muck from the crate of fruit and lowered his face to his ‘work’, peering up at a difficult angle to keep the man in sight. The dark skinned foreigner seemed to take in the fact that there had been some incident that was apparently coming quickly under control, and turned back to the banana stall.
Without further delay, kn
owing that his window of opportunity was short, Skiouros took six quick steps across the intervening space, nipping between the crowd members who drifted hither and thither, and walked with an air of hassled irritation past the foreigner. Mouthing a curse in Greek he stumbled and his fingers whipped into the large slit in the man’s cloak.
Once more he was grateful for his secret weapon, purchased from an Arab some years ago. The small razor sharp blade, only an inch and a half long, was guided by the two rings in its hilt that settled over his two smallest fingers, and in less than a heartbeat, the keen edge found the purse-string and severed it, the reassuringly heavy weight dropping into the remaining three fingers. His hand was back out of the slit and reaching into his own doublet in another thump of his heart, before he had even righted himself and moved on.
Success.
“Hirsiz!”
Skiouros’ heart skipped a beat and then made up for it by beginning to pound dangerously fast. The Turkish word for ‘Thief’ was well known to him, and the only people in this market that would use it were the two Janissaries.
Forcing himself to continue at a steady pace, on the very small chance that he was not the target of the shout, Skiouros turned his head with an expression of mild interest. The two Janissary guards were pushing their way through the throng, pointing at him, one of them waving an already-drawn blade.
Thanking God in a blind, almost automatic fashion that they were armed only with swords and not the guns now being wielded by some of their number, Skiouros turned his eyes from them to the merchant. The rich man had recognised the shout and his hand had immediately reached into his cloak. As the foreigner gave another shout in a distinctly Arabic tone, pointing at Skiouros, so the Janissaries had switched to stilted Greek.
“Thief! Stop the Thief!”
In another heartbeat, Skiouros was running, all thought of new boots and platters of food gone from his mind as he simply ran directly away from the foreigner and his guards.
His eyes lit upon the narrow street that led from here, up yet another slope towards the former Pammakaristos monastery. If he could get into that street, he could easily lose himself in the warren of narrow alleyways that he knew so well. No Turk would stand a chance of catching him there.
A big man thrust out an arm from his stall, grasping for Skiouros as he ran, and the nimble thief ducked and slid under the grip, his boot heels skidding across the flags before he came up running again. His heart fell as he saw three heavy-set middle-aged stallholders and customers move to block his exit up the street.
Now the foreigner had been lost to sight somewhere in the crowd, but the two Janissaries were on him like the Sultan’s greyhounds on a palace rabbit. As Skiouros changed direction, angling away from the outraged locals who blocked his path, he glanced over his shoulder to see the two Turks gaining on him with surprising speed, barging citizens out of the way as though they were mere sheep – which, to most of the Ottomans, the Greek Christians might as well be.
Swallowing and forcing himself to continue with deep breaths that calmed his system and facilitated an easy speed, Skiouros ducked beneath a stall and made his decision. Ahead, two carts, piled almost head high with fruit boxes, stood close together, waiting to be taken away from the market. Angling towards them, but slightly off to one side, Skiouros made for the main street leading from the square, which led past the great sunken wreck of the ‘Dry Garden’ cistern and the great mosque of the Conqueror, and off towards the heart of the Sultan’s great demesne. It was the obvious direction to take. The sheer numbers of people in the street would make pursuit troublesome. Even though it was a wide avenue, Skiouros would have a chance.
And that was what they would naturally assume.
As he pushed past a stack of boxes, raising a cry of anger from the stallholder, Skiouros ducked sharp right and disappeared between the two high carts of crates. Pausing long enough for a pursuer to assume he would have moved on, he edged out from behind the cart at the far side and strolled nonchalantly, holding an laden box, towards the edge of the square.
The shouts became more frantic but more distant as the two Janissaries, fooled by his sudden disappearance, searched ahead where he should have been, pushing towards the main street. Skiouros, all-but invisible to them now, staggered across the less busy side of the square under the weight of his box and made for the nearest door.
Like most of Constantinople, and certainly the Phanar district, the buildings that ringed the square were heavy, two-storey constructions of dry timber, precarious staircases leading up inside a courtyard, around which dozens of families made their home. The houses were so tightly packed together that the shoulder-wide alleys between them were almost pitch black and stank of dung and refuse, but no one entered them anyway, barring the stray dogs that roamed the streets or beggars with no place to stay.
As he passed from the bright, cold light of the square into the dim entranceway of the wooden housing he shivered, but sagged with relief. Continuing at the same steady pace in case of casual observers, he dropped the box of fruit in the hall and stepped into the narrow courtyard.
He was safe, for now. It would take a few minutes for the foreigner and his Janissaries to realise they had been deceived and turn their attention back from the main street to the other exits from the square. It was possible, however unlikely, that they might manage to summon other Janissaries or officials to their aid, let alone the bulk of the law-abiding populace of the market. The upshot was that his apparent security was a fleeting state. In five minutes, or ten, a stallholder would answer a question and remember someone of Skiouros’ description coming in here. And then he would be trapped somewhere even more confining.
Fortunately there were few folk in the whole of Phanar, or the city as a whole, who could navigate this neighbourhood like Skiouros. With only a moment’s pause for decision making, he crossed the courtyard, climbed a stair at the far side and entered the dusty wooden corridor. Four residences led off the long passage, their doors standing resolutely shut. To the inexperienced eye it was clearly a dead end.
And so it would appear to angry pursuit.
But Skiouros was a little more aware than the average citizen or Janissary. Glancing along the corridor, he settled on the last door to his right and made for it. The other three doors stood closed but clear, indicating regular access and therefore the possibility that they were currently occupied. The fourth, however, had a pile of old, unpleasant blankets bundled up near the door and the smell of faeces, suggesting that one of the city’s many vagrants was using the shelter of this corridor from the chilly autumn weather. It was a very common sight at night, but only happened outside the doors of those houses that stood unoccupied and had no owner to shoo the homeless on. In some cases the vagrants even moved into the houses, but the penalty for such an act was extremely harsh if they were discovered, and so few dared to try it.
Stepping carefully, so as not to disturb the various offending and offensive articles, Skiouros reached the door and pushed. As expected it opened slowly and stiffly, following some weeks or even months of disuse; few doors in Phanar had locks, barring the wealthier owners, and at least one member of the family would always be at home to keep their possessions secure.
Inside, the house was dim and smelled musty and disused. A number of unseen creatures scuttled away from this sudden intruder, and Skiouros paused for a long moment to let his eyes adjust before closing the door behind him, carefully enough to leave little or no sign of his passing.
Almost enough, but only a fool would consider himself safe yet.
With another steadying breath, the nimble thief stepped across the dimly lit room towards the far side, where two shuttered windows blocked out most of the light. His choice had been a good one; many of these buildings around the square would back onto another similar structure with just a dark stinking alley to separate them. Not so: this one, as the bright white light forcing its way through the cracks around the shutters confirmed.
Stepping up to a window, he leaned to the side, so as not to be seen clearly, and unlatched the shutters, pulling them inwards. Again, he paused to allow his eyes to adjust. Behind the house, as he’d anticipated from his excellent sense of position and geography, the ruins of an old Roman bath house stood among choking foliage, rotting slowly into oblivion. One day, some enterprising person would rebuild or demolish it and the open space with its derelict ruin would be no more, but for now…
Skiouros smiled to himself and checked quickly to be certain there were no observers, before slipping lightly out of the window, his feet finding minimal purchase on the wooden boards of the outer wall above the four foot drop to the undergrowth. Carefully and slowly, he pulled the shutters closed again, using agile fingers at the last moment to lift the latch-hook and rest it on the staple of the other shutter. With a dextrous motion, he jerked the shutters closed, the latch falling into place on the far side and hiding signs of his passage to all but the most observant of men.
Dropping lightly to the ground, he stepped through the undergrowth, avoiding the brambles and descending the slight slope towards the shattered ruin of the bathhouse. Disused for several centuries, the complex was little more now than a shell, with a few passageways open to the air and dangerous, uneven floors, scattered with tesserae from broken mosaics.
Pushing aside a springy branch, he scurried into the open doorway and navigated the ruin with the skill and surety of a man who had used this structure as a hideaway more than once. Along the corridors he moved, slipping through a huge break in a wall into a room next door, where half the floor had gone to reveal dozens of piles of bricks set in regular ordered rows, as well as the green, mossy half-cellar they filled. The figure of some heathen deity stared accusingly at him from a ruined wall, his features surprisingly distinct given the condition of the ageing painting.
Thief's Tale Page 4
