Thief's Tale

by Turney, S. J. A.

His wide eyes sought out the shape of the assassin drifting along the water's surface towards him, using the momentum he had previously built up, as he neared his original point of entry. The figure was standing now in the boat, heedless of the danger of capsizing. His bow was held taught in one hand and the other was busy nocking the next shot while several more arrows projected from the fingers of that hand where he held them ready.

  Skiouros, even in deadly danger, had to be impressed as he saw the man's arrow leave the bow, only to be replaced by the next, dropping from his finger-holds and into position just in time to draw back the string and fire again.

  The first arrow grazed his shoulder as he disappeared beneath the water's surface, but the man's curious technique allowed for the most astounding rate of fire. Even as Skiouros opened his eyes under the water, peering through a blossoming red cloud from his wounds, he saw the staccato shots bounce from the wall two heartbeats apart. Then, three shots later there was a gap. Skiouros wondered for a moment whether the man had run out of missiles, but then the water exploded as one of the Janissaries at the stair top hit the surface, an arrow through his neck.

  Skiouros waited. He waited with the patience of a man aware that drowning might not be the worst result of this dive. Finally, as his chest burned and his lungs screamed and his mind began to shake, producing black spots in his vision, he pushed up and broke the surface next to the bobbing corpse of the Turkish soldier. The water tasted faintly metallic with the blood diffusing in it.

  There was no sound of arrows. He turned, pedalling in the water, and almost suffered an involuntary loosening of the bowels as he saw the boat perhaps three feet from his head and closing. Desperately he pushed himself out of the way, holding up an arm to stop the boat striking him on the head, and peered up nervously.

  Rivulets of blood were running from the boat's side into the water and his gaze focused on the slumped form of the assassin, a second mouth opened beneath his chin and grinning evilly with a crimson smile. The blade that had inflicted the neat, professional wound was still in the man's hand.

  Of course he had killed himself.

  What else could a professional killer do with no way out and his supply of ammunition drained?

  Another wave of panic broke over him - the feeling was becoming so familiar it almost felt like the norm now. He struggled desperately as arms hooked under his shoulders and hauled him from the water. He was aware that he was punching and kicking with little actual success, until a hard, ringing slap across the face made him stop.

  The Janissary officer who had delivered the blow and who was one of the two men holding him up, grinned, revealing a wicked face with two missing teeth.

  "Calm, boy" he commanded in a deep voice, his Turkish stained with the provincial twang of a Balkan upbringing.

  "Sorry sir" he replied in his best Turkish, trying not to look the man in the eye.

  "You were the one who alerted us?" Despite the upward inflection, it was clearly a statement rather than a question, though Skiouros nodded regardless.

  "Well done, boy. Many's the man who'd have run in panic or turned his face from such a thing.

  Skiouros became slowly aware that two more Janissaries standing knee-deep in the water were hauling the dead assassin's corpse from the boat. The officer turned to them.

  "Is he?"

  "Yessir. Dead by his own hand, equipped as a professional assassin and as Mamluk as they come." The man plucked an arrow from the mortar of the wall and held it up in the feeble light. "This bastard was meant for the Sultan, I reckon, sir."

  "Indeed. There will have to be an investigation."

  Skiouros swallowed nervously. Any investigation could well unearth things that would damn him to a very painful and public death. Fortunately such a nervous reaction would have been entirely in-character for a poor Ottoman waif, and the officer gave him a sympathetic smile, marred by those ugly gaps left by his missing teeth.

  "But not for you lad. Go on. Get out of here and go with the blessing of Allah and his prophet."

  "Salaam alaykum" Skiouros replied with great relief, not feeling the slightest unease at invoking such heathen greetings. After all, peace was peace, whoever's God sent it.

  As he shuffled past the man and contemplated the staircase up to the dim light, through which he could hear the rain pounding the world, the officer said "wait."

  Turning, Skiouros' blood ran cold. What had the man suddenly realised? His fearful eyes fell upon the officer as he was running his hands across the held body of the killer, checking for anything useful. The Janissary turned back to Skiouros with something in his hand and tossed it across to him.

  Instinctively, the thief's hands shot out and grabbed it before it fell. For a moment he was worried that such speed and agility had betrayed him as more than a mere peasant, but the man was still smiling. Skiouros peered down at the parcel in his hands. A heavy purse. His eyes widened as he looked back up at the officer, a question in his gaze.

  "For your trouble. I wouldn't handle this filth's change, anyway."

  The officer had already turned back to his task and all four soldiers were paying him no further heed. With the sudden pulse-pounding elation of a man who has gone from nothing to everything in half a heartbeat, Skiouros climbed the stairs back to the real world.

  Chapter 11 – The source of all evil

  * Pazar (Sunday) evening *

  Skiouros hovered in the shallow arched recess that had once been an access gate through the Bucoleon palace walls, watching the dreadful evening flash, boom and pelt down with a mix of distaste, fear, and cold, diamond-hard resolution.

  The storm had, against all expectations, continued to worsen all afternoon. Though it had seemed like midnight even at the height of the day, beneath the dark purple sky and the constant crash and flash, what had appeared to be the most dreadful storm of Skiouros' young life had, in fact, proved to be merely the prelude to the main show.

  Now, torrents of water like rivers ran down every street carrying muck, slurry and debris with them in unpleasant waves. Miraculously, given the undulating terrain of the city, every road was a watercourse now, even at the crest of the hills. Some time just before what could laughably be termed 'nightfall', Skiouros had even seen a dead man, bloated and grey, float past, attached by torn clothing to half a fallen tree. The shattered remains of street-hawkers' carts washed past alongside the corpses of wild dogs and cats. Tiles crashed and smashed in every street, torn from the roofs of the ancient buildings by the sheer force of the eddying, whipping, roaring winds, and even heavy tiles and loosened bricks were being carried away by the swift currents of the street-rivers. The rain seemed to change direction every ten minutes, sometimes pounding down vertically and bouncing three feet back up from the cobbles, and at others driven by the awful gales to an almost horizontal gradient that felt like a sideways waterfall if you happened to be out in the street.

  No one was out in the streets now.

  People who had been had died; hit by flying debris, washed away into alleys where they were drowned, unable to fight the current and constant rush of water long enough to suck down a lungful of air. The sky that had looked like a sheet of black marble hovering over the city had expanded to reach each horizon, making it practically impossible to estimate the time of day.

  The thunder and lightning in a normal storm would approach and then pass, the sound and light coming ever closer together until they struck at once, and then gradually parting as the tempest moved on. Not so today. The thunder and lightning that had ravaged Anatolia seemed to be circling the great city, never moving more than a mile from the walls before returning. It was almost as though God had singled out Constantinople for punishment.

  Skiouros could imagine what was being shouted by the priests back in the Greek enclave, where they would be whipping themselves into a flagellative frenzy to abate the almighty's displeasure. Likely the Turkish Imams were up to similar insanity - Skiouros couldn't remember whether the faithf
ul of Allah whipped themselves, but they likely had their own version if not. Everyone with a deep-seated fear of their God would be currently looking at the sky and praying so hard they almost soiled themselves.

  It was a horrendous storm.

  But… it was a storm, plain and simple, for all its destructive powers. Skiouros had made the conscious decision to ignore it as far as possible.

  He had bigger issues to confront.

  He hadn't realised that initially, but then, following the death of the assassin in the cistern, he had been more concerned with his own apparently miraculous survival and the possibility that he might yet not be clear.

  Having left the cistern, the young Greek had clambered up into the 'light' of the city, scurried across the square and into the shelter of the crumbling tetrapylon that had once been the great 'Milion' monument at the heart of the Roman city. Within the refuge of the Milion, he had slumped against a pillar, his eyes roving the square, his mind racing. Few stragglers of the crowd that had thronged it earlier had remained to brave the storm and witness the excitement of Janissaries pursuing a villain; most had ignored all the fuss and scurried in out of the weather, into the Aya Sofya or one of the other new mosques nearby where they could grieve appropriately for the day of Ashura - though with one wary eye still on the almost Biblical storm.

  The first worry that had gripped Skiouros had been the likelihood of poison. There was no doubt in his mind that the assassin had poisoned his weapons, but both wounds he had taken - to shoulder and cheek - had been grazes, the shoulder a little deeper but still a flesh wound caused in passing. He had felt no ill effects so far but, regardless, had just decided that it might be an idea to visit one of the Turkish physicians when the second consequence of his subterranean encounter had made itself clear to him.

  As he had reached up to brush away the torrents of water from his brow, he had realised how pale and pasty his hands and wrists appeared. A quick check had confirmed that, although his cinnamon stain had survived the periodic exposure to rain, with the aid of his cloak, several minutes of ducking underwater had removed most of it, the latest pelting rain finishing the job. He was almost a pale Greek again now. Moreover, the rain running down his face had a filthy brown tint, confirming that the khave dye in his hair was fast clearing out too.

  He would not be welcome at a Turkish physician now, and Skiouros had long since lost any respect for their Greek counterparts who seemed to believe that freely-flowing blood solved everything from a headache to a venereal disease. In the end, with his options narrowed, he had muttered a short prayer and trusted to his luck that any poison had not had enough contact to take hold in his system.

  The lack of weakness or other symptoms arising over the past four hours seemed to have borne out that theory.

  And so he'd stood for a moment, wondering what to do next until he remembered the purse clutched in his soaked hand. With some trepidation, given the money's source, he'd unfastened it and examined the contents. A few silver akce rattled around amid golden coins of Mamluk denominations and even a few Ottoman sultani and Venetian ducats. The assassin had seemingly been prepared for payment in any currency. Skiouros had found it difficult to estimate the value of the purse, given its wide variety of coins, but it would be not far off the value of the hoard he had lost in the company of Judah Ben Isaac.

  It would certainly be enough for a cabin in the first ship that sailed.

  That had settled his mind: as soon as the storm passed, he would be on the first foreign ship out of Istanbul. Possibly even Captain Parmenio's vessel, though it would be troublesome explaining away the shift in his ethnic background since their last meeting.

  Still, there would be no point in even trying to book passage until this great tempest had moved on and left the battered city to pick itself back up.

  And in the meantime, that left one great task that Skiouros felt compelled to undertake.

  Over the past few days all three assassins had met their end. It would be nice to think that the Sultan was now safe, with his would-be killers gone, but such a thought was naïve indeed. The resources of the Mamluk empire were reputedly close to bottomless and their ranks of assassins would run to numbers far in excess of three. Within a few weeks of word of their failure reaching Cairo, three more could easily be on a ship bound for Istanbul. The great Sultan Bayezid the Second would not be safe yet; not as long as the Mamluks felt inclined to keep sending their hired killers.

  Which meant stamping out that inclination. Two men in the city had both the power and the will to repeat the attempt: Hamza Bin Murad of the Sultan's Janissaries, and Qaashiq, ambassador from the Mamluks. Other than they and their master Prince Cem, away in the Roman Pope's custody, Skiouros knew of no one involved.

  It had not taken a great deal of consideration to come up with a suitable and feasible way to deal with the spy and the traitor without having to involve the authorities.

  That afternoon had been spent preparing his plan and then beginning to put it into action. He had to find a way to draw out the two men, and it would have to happen simultaneously. If some accident befell one of them, the other would seal himself up tight and unreachable. So they had to fall together, else they might not fall at all.

  That part had been relatively easy to plan, assuming the aid of the urchins that inhabited the dangerous structure beside the Bucoleon and other parts of the city.

  Then the two men would have to die.

  It would have been nice if Skiouros could somehow let them know why it was they were dying or who it was that snuffed out their life, but he was under no illusion that both men were stronger, faster and better trained than him, and to reveal his presence to them was to risk failure and death. They would have to go to their paradise blinking in wonder and never knowing why. The fact that they would die would have to be enough.

  The afternoon had passed in preparation and, though Skiouros was now chilled to the bone and soaked to the skin, back to his original pale Greek look, he was as satisfied as he could be that everything was in place and ready.

  What happened next was in the hands of God.

  Taking a deep breath, Skiouros ducked out of the ruined arch and scurried down the street towards the dangerously unstable former palace where the homeless waifs hid from the elements.

  The street outside the Bucoleon, with the garden of statue bases and the Pharos tower, was one of the few in the city that was almost entirely level, and had consequently filled to ankle depth with filthy water that had run down from the hills, forming a sluggish, slow-moving lake that froze the feet and lapped the shins. Things that did not bear close investigation floated in the flood, some of them still thrashing in their rodential death throes. A lost shoe of surprisingly high quality floated past and Skiouros was relieved to note that it was empty. A sudden gust of wind threatened to hurl him from his feet and dump him back in the water and he had to lean forward into the gale, his arms wrapped around him, hood whipped back from his head as the rain battered his face.

  A glow of warm light emanated from a number of windows in the Bucoleon palace as he passed, but no one would be studying the streets through them in these conditions, and many had shutters across them or drapes drawn inside the glass. One of the interminable cracks of thunder split the sky as he passed, making his ears hurt, and he had the impression off to one side of a white flash as a jagged javelin of divine fire lunged down from the black sky and struck somewhere on the hilltop near the Aya Sofya.

  Skiouros turned his attention back to his destination.

  The sagging building beyond the currently-occupied palace had once been a glorious and decorative affair and Skiouros approached the open doorway noting the plinths upon which had once sat the same statues of lions as still graced its neighbour. Nervously glancing up at the dangerously bowing ceiling inside the door, Skiouros stepped in out of the rain, almost overbalancing as the constant pressure of the wind in his face disappeared.

  He cleared his throat.
Should he shout? Would he be heard over the storm outside if he did?

  "What d'you want, Greek?" snapped a young, unbroken voice in thick Turkish with an Anatolian accent.

  Skiouros spun around to see a boy of perhaps seven summers leaning against the frame of a side door, his arms folded in a pose of thorough confidence. The thief took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

  "I've a job for you" he replied in perfect Turkish with a local twang.

  "Fuck off."

  Silently, Skiouros reached into his new purse and selected three silver akce, holding them up between his fingers for the boy to see,

  "Be worth your while."

  "You looked outside, Greek? Ain't no one goin' out in that for a few coins."

  Skiouros smiled. The boy may ooze confidence and bravado, but Skiouros was a student of avarice and of the 'tells' of the human body, and he'd seen the flash of hunger in the boy's eyes as the coins appeared, however brief it might have been.

  "I think you will. Given the bad weather, I'll double it" he added, drawing out an extra three coins.

  "Ten."

  "No. Six. It's enough to eat for a week if you're careful."

  The boy put his fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. Skiouros felt eyes on him, the hair on his neck standing up in preternatural nervousness. In the next three heartbeats a dozen figures appeared in doorways and corridors around this main hall. The thief mentally kicked himself for his miscalculation. The urchins would be used to the Janissaries next door giving them commissions, and those men would be big and dangerous and well-armed. That the ragged inhabitants of this place might not react the same way to a young, reedy foreigner had not occurred to him.

  "I think we might just take that purse from you anyway" the boy said quietly. "Evhad and Bekir have acquired a taste for white flesh, but if you're lucky we might put you out of your misery first."

  Skiouros felt his pulse quicken and noted glinting knives appearing in a number of hands. His thoughts raced and he found himself wondering what the boy meant by a 'taste' for white flesh. Neither option that leapt to mind was encouraging or pleasant.