The Assassin’s Tale
The Ottoman Cycle, book 3)
by S.J.A. Turney
For Robin, Jane & Mia
I would like to thank everyone who has been instrumental in this book seeing the light of day in its final form, as well as all those people who have continually supported me during its creation: Robin, Alun, Barry, Nick, Miriam, Rosie, Prue and of course Jenny and Tracey and once again my little imps Marcus and Callie who interrupted me at the most opportune moments, driving me to wonderful distraction. Also, the fabulous members of the Historical Writers' Association, who are supportive and helpful as ever.
Cover image by Lucy Sangster of Use or Ornament.
Cover design by Dave Slaney.
Many thanks to both.
All internal images are from the public domain with the exception of the map, which is copyright the author of this work.
Published in this format 2014 by Victrix Books
Copyright - S.J.A.Turney
Smashwords Edition
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Also by S. J. A. Turney:
The Marius' Mules Series
Marius’ Mules I: The Invasion of Gaul (2009)
Marius’ Mules II: The Belgae (2010)
Marius’ Mules III: Gallia Invicta (2011)
Marius’ Mules IV: Conspiracy of Eagles (2012)
Marius’ Mules V: Hades Gate (2013)
Marius’ Mules VI: Caesar’s Vow (2014)
Marius’ Mules: Prelude to War (2014)
Tales of the Empire
Interregnum (2009)
Ironroot (2010)
Dark Empress (2011)
The Ottoman Cycle
The Thief's Tale (2013)
The Priest’s Tale (2013)
Short story compilations & contributions:
Tales of Ancient Rome vol. 1 - S.J.A. Turney (2011)
Tortured Hearts vol 1 - Various (2012)
Tortured Hearts vol 2 - Various (2012)
Temporal Tales - Various (2013)
Historical Tales – Various (2013)
For more information visit http://www.sjaturney.co.uk/
or http://www.facebook.com/SJATurney
or follow Simon on Twitter @SJATurney
Dragi leaned back against the top strake of the ship’s side, listening to the water lap against the timbers as he threaded stray wisps of his hair into a braid. The silence of the moored vessel was broken only by the sounds of the night sea and the squeak of bats.
‘My people have many tales,’ he smiled.
‘I know little of your people.’
‘Have you heard the tale of the day of the cock? It is an old tale. Older than the empire of the Greeks. Older than the city of Constantine. But it is a tale that has yet to come to pass - whatever some gadjo say - and is one among several that mark you in some way. In fact, I have three tales for you this night, and each is significant.’
‘I am not in the mood for stories, no matter how old or… significant.’
Dragi shuffled into a cross-legged position, his eyes glittering in the moonlight. He wagged a bony, narrow finger at his listeners. ‘Our tales are not mere stories for amusement.’
‘You have a captive audience, Dragi. Can you not sing instead? Your people are known for their lively music.’
‘I sing at funerals,’ Dragi replied in a flat tone. ‘Tonight I tell tales, and you would be advised to heed them. Some tales are more than entertainment, as I said. Some are warnings from God. Some are cautionary lessons. Some are prophecy.’
‘Some are too long. Go on, then. Tell me of your cock.’
Ignoring the crude jest, Dragi took a swig from the flask that sat beside him on the deck, wetting his throat, and rolled his head, issuing clicks from his neck.
‘The Emperor took a dislike to our people,’ Dragi said, chewing on his lip for a moment.
‘What emperor?’
‘As I said, this tale is older than Rome, but has yet to come to pass. Our ancestors thought it would be the Emperor of Byzantium, driven by his church to suppress our ‘wicked’ ways, but the Byzantine world is gone and I for one believe it is a Turkish emperor - a sultan.’
‘Go on.’
‘The Emperor took a dislike to our people, and decided that we should be no more. He sent an order to his soldiers to kill all the children of our people, so that there would be no more generations to disgust him.’
‘This does not sound like Bayezid the Just.’
Dragi gave his audience a hard look. ‘That day, the Emperor’s army went out among the streets and found any door where our people had been foolish enough to settle, and they ripped open the doors, barging inside.’
‘I suspect I have heard this tale told before, though about a little Jewish boy…’
‘In each house, the soldiers searched thoroughly, and wherever they found a child, they put a sword through it. Thousands were murdered and with no warning, for the Emperor’s soldiers were many and everywhere in the city all at once.’
‘Why didn’t he just kill them all? Why only the children? Evil, he may be, but efficient he is not.’
‘One woman, a woman called Sarah, saw the soldiers in the street, and she knew that she was next, for her son was a boy of three summers. She hurried to her house and pushed the frightened boy to the floor and told him to lie still and quiet. Then she went back into her kitchen, and she brought out a cock bird, squawking and kicking, and held it over the boy as she slaughtered it, the blood drenching the frightened child.’
‘Smart woman.’
‘Yes. She returned the dead bird and the knife to the kitchen and, reminding the boy to be quiet and still, she threw her front door wide again and crouched by her son, clutching the blood-soaked shape and crying. The soldiers came along the street and looked inside, surprised that someone had got to this place ahead of them. But seeing the job done, they shrugged and moved on.’
He took another pull from his flask.
‘And that is what my people have been doing ever since the story was first told: moving on. Some settle for a time, but the fear always returns, for the tale will one day be a true one, and so we move on, and we celebrate the day of the cock.’
‘So your own Herod will one day kill your children. Not a joyful tale, Dragi.’
‘No. But it informs everything at the heart of your future. And it is the first of my three tales because it is one of the reasons I must tell the other two.’
His audience nodded their understanding and shuffled into more comfortable positions.
‘Go on, then.’
‘Very well. Settle in for this one, for it is not brief. Let me tell you the tale of the vengeful priest…’
PROLOGOS - A return
March, the year of our Lord fourteen hundred and ninety three.
The stranger stood in the rowing boat, his legs planted firmly apart to allow for better balance despite the rocking of the vessel in the swell. The man at the oars expertly guided the small craft up against the timbers of the jetty with a deep wooden ‘clonk’ and grabbed hold of one of the mooring rings. The rope remained coiled in the bottom of the boat. He would not be here that long, and the port officials in this
bustling city were notoriously stringent. Roped or not, if the oarsman lingered overlong, his purse would lighten and the crown’s vaults would tinkle that little bit more.
‘You been here before?’ he asked as the stranger picked up his kit bag and slung it over his shoulder, causing further lurching and wobbling of the boat.
‘No. Not here.’
‘Be careful. It was a dangerous enough city under the Moors. Under that pair of mismatched lunatics everything’s either a crime or a sin. Breathing’s probably ungodly by now.’
The stranger smiled and something about the expression sent a shiver up the rower’s spine. ‘Rabid Catholics hold no fear for me.’
‘Then you’re an idiot.’
‘I’ll be fine. Enjoy your triumphant return, Alonso. I suspect you’ll be heading west again in short order.’
As the stranger heaved his bag up to the jetty and vaulted nimbly up onto the slippery timbers, the oarsman shrugged. ‘‘Tis a sailor’s lot, mate. You go careful.’
The stranger straightened and stretched, shading his eyes with one hand to peer at the port before him. His dark grey doublet was worn and frayed, but clean and tidy for all its condition. His breeks and hose of matching grey showed signs of hard wear and his boots were almost beyond hope. Yet despite his dishevelled and impoverished appearance, there was about his manner something that warned of strength, resolve and a depth far beyond that which was visible. At his side, hanging from a sword belt of Spanish leather hung a long, curved Arab blade with an ivory hilt. His skin was a healthy, sea-beaten bronze and his hair, bleached by the sun, was naturally salt-curled and somewhere just short of shoulder length. His chin was covered with several weeks’ growth, and a golden ring twinkled in his ear.
If anyone observing the stranger had a level of acuity they would notice other oddities about the man. The tip of colourful inked designs poked out of the neck of his doublet as though they climbed his arm and back, reaching for his face. And opposite the sword, at the far side of his belt, hung not the parrying blade or knife one might expect of a swordsman, but a wooden club an inch thick and almost three feet long from the ornately-carved handle to the polished, stone-hard tip.
‘Malaga,’ Skiouros said with a long exhale that seemed to contain half a world of anticipation, tension and resignation. Picking up the bag and slinging it over his shoulder once more, causing several heavy clunks within, he strode off down the jetty with the rolling gait of a man far more used to the buck and wallow of a ship.
This city had been staunchly Muslim only six years previously, and the architecture even from here was achingly familiar to Skiouros. He had seen so many variants in a few short years, from the delicate tracery and decorative brick of the Byzantine-influenced Ottoman cities, through the Graeco-Turkish starkness of Crete, the ancient functionality of Tunisia and the brown, desert-tinted structures of the African Maghreb. If he could weep, he might do so at the sight of the minarets standing proud of the mosques that were even now being demolished or just reassigned to ‘good Christian purpose’.
One of the most important things the past year or two had taught him was that God lived in the heart and not in a building, no matter how elegant, and that God listened to the quality of a man’s soul, not to the words he uttered by rote from a prayer of any set faith. Simply: God was greater than that. The Taino people had opened his eyes to the meaning of belief, and his confusion and conflicts had fallen into meaningful place.
His tread changed tone from the timbers of the jetty to the hard flags of the dock, and he realised he was standing on familiar land for the first time in over half a year. It had felt like a lifetime, of course, but in the real world of Europe it had only been seven months. Little would have changed here. Hopefully…
On the dock, teamsters and workmen sweated and cursed, heaving boxes, sacks and crates everywhere, piling goods together, shuffling carts and their snorting, stinking beasts out of the way, calling to their counterparts on the ships at berth. It was such a far cry from the almost-solitude of a ship journey into the unknown with a crew who spoke no language he could understand.
Of course, learning Spanish from a couple of the more helpful crewmates had been his first priority, though the fact that one of them had later turned out to be Portuguese and that he had been simultaneously learning two similar yet distinct tongues had been something of a setback.
Among the chaos of the port, he could see a small group of Catholic monks in their black cassocks, with tonsured heads boiled pink by the Iberian sun. Leading them through the bedlam was an old man with straggly white locks and a beard of which Moses would have been proud, holding aloft a gleaming silver cross. Their dirge-like chanting as they wound a snake-path between the goods was unpleasant to Skiouros, who had grown up with lively Greek music and more recently become attuned to the rough and often coarse sea-shanties of the Iberian sailors.
Remembering the ferryman’s words and not wanting to get too close to them, Skiouros ducked around a pile of boxes, only to find himself face to face and only a few yards from a fat, sweating official in maroon and gold with a jaunty hat and an expression of fierce avarice, accompanied by two guards, both armed and alert. Torn between the twin discomforts of bureaucracy and religion, Skiouros backtracked for a moment and then headed off towards the town in a dogleg.
A huge, sprawling brick fortress loomed on the mountain to the right, its rock and scree slopes dotted with cacti, juniper and pine trees. To the left the minarets and the new golden-stone towers of the Christian regime cast their shadow on the ancient roofs.
With a nod to the seething area in the middle, Skiouros aimed for there, where the streets were narrowest and the buildings poorest. That morass would be the best place for him… where the poor and disaffected lived and the lesser mercantile types traded. An area soldiers would ignore and the rich and bureaucratic would avoid; which the fanatical touch of Ferdinand and Isabella’s new Spanish church would shun as a pit of filth and indolence. His kind of place.
In a matter of minutes he was away from the port and its bustle, noise and endless gulls in search of an easy meal, and in among the maze of streets that made up the ancient city. Here most of the houses were still the low, whitewashed buildings that had been built and lived-in by many generations of Moors before their ejection from the country. Even here, in the underbelly of the place, the new Christian stamp was being slammed down on the city, white buildings half-demolished and grand stone residences with the new leaded windows and painted signs rising in their place.
Metalworkers, coopers, spice merchants and every other kind of shop lined the streets, interspersed with poor housing. There was a distinct lack of taverns, but then the place had only been Christian for six years, prior to which they had been absent by Shari’a law. He decided that he would settle for a good Muslim khave house, but it occurred to him that if the rabid Catholic conquerors had driven the Moors back across the sea, the chances of finding one of those was small, too. It was hard to know what to expect in a city in such flux. No taverns under the Moors and no coffee houses under the Christians and he in the middle, parched for a drink of some kind.
As he moved through the streets in the shade, the sun’s blinding rays unable to penetrate these narrow alleys and streets, it struck him as odd symmetry: perhaps the world turned in the most curious of ways? In his homeland in the east, the followers of Mohammed had driven north and conquered the mighty Christian strongholds, securing their grip on that world. Here in the west, the Christians with equal fervour had swept down from the north, driving the Muslims from the land and securing that region. Would they both keep going? Would the rulers of Spain soon be driving the Muslim world back across Africa towards Persia while the great Sultan Bayezid marched across the Carpathians and the Alps with his kapikulu, forcing the Christians back into France?
Who would be a priest or a theologist in these complex days?
His eyes played around the narrow street he found himself in and he sp
otted an old man with grey bristles and rheumy eyes supping from a jug that contained something he seemed to be enjoying. Skiouros’ heart fluttered in anticipation.
‘Ho fellow,’ he smiled in an easy manner, his Spanish accent probably distressingly cacophonic for the man, given his half-Portuguese teaching by sailors with all their colloquialisms and peculiarities. The old man looked up from his drink without slowing his pace of consumption. One of his eyes remained pointing into the jug while the other settled on Skiouros.
‘Whatcher want?’
‘You seem to have found a tavern? Or at least a wine shop? I wondered if you could direct me?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Tavern’s round the corner to the right. Can’t miss it. Sign outside for the neckings.’
Skiouros frowned at the unfamiliar phrase but the old man had already forgotten about him and moved on. With a sigh, he turned and was about to follow the directions when a figure stepped out from a tiny stairway that ran up between buildings. His intentions were immediately apparent, given the glinting, pitted sword-breaker in his dirty, shaking hand. Barely had Skiouros registered him before his eyes picked out the second man stepping slowly from a side alley on the far side of the road. The two men stalked forward to converge at the centre of the street.
‘Evening, my pretty young sailor boy,’ grinned the first man, a single metal tooth glinting among the blackened stumps of the others. He swished his short blade back and forth in preparation. His companion across the street drew a heavy dagger with a serrated blade.
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